Dreaming Real: The Empty Shelves
On Things Made
[Image: “Patssi Nilsstrom,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) You can read Patssi’s #storypix saga here at SmugMug.]
From whiskey river…
Art is the means by which we communicate what it feels like to be alive — in the past that was mixed up with other illustrative duties but that was still its central function that has been liberated in the art called modern. Art is not necessarily good for you or about communicating “good things”…
Making beautiful things for everyday use is a wonderful thing to do — making life flow more easily — but art confronts life, allowing it to stop and perhaps change direction — they are completely different.
(Antony Gormley [source])
…and:
My theory is that the purpose of art is to transmit universal truths of a sort, but of a particular sort, that in art, whether it’s poetry, fiction or painting, you are telling the reader or listener or viewer something he already knows but which he doesn’t quite know that he knows, so that in the action of communication he experiences a recognition, a feeling that he has been there before, a shock of recognition. And so, what the artist does, or tries to do, is simply to validate the human experience and to tell people the deep human truths which they already unconsciously know.
(Walker Percy [source])
…and:
I Am Learning to Abandon the World: for M
I am learning to abandon the world
before it can abandon me.
Already I have given up the moon
and snow, closing my shades
against the claims of white.
And the world has taken
my father, my friends.
I have given up melodic lines of hills,
moving to a flat, tuneless landscape.
And every night I give my body up
limb by limb, working upwards
across bone, towards the heart.
But morning comes with small
reprieves of coffee and birdsong.
A tree outside the window
which was simply shadow moments ago
takes back its branches twig
by leafy twig.
And as I take my body back
the sun lays its warm muzzle on my lap
as if to make amends.
(Linda Pastan [source])
[Read more…]Wait on the Wind, Catch a Whiff of Salt
[Image: “Ready 4,” by Kevin Dooley. (Found at Flickr, of course, and used here under a Creative Commons license. Thank you!) The Wonderland Cinema at 402 Front Street in Niles, Michigan, seems to be still in operation — but doesn’t have the same gritty exterior. When I checked the address via Google Street View, I found a building with one blank brick wall facing a side street — and some kind of what appeared to be corrugated-metal cladding on the other three sides. The funky sign has been replaced by a neon and/or LED thing mounted on a pole on the corner.]
From whiskey river (stanzas 2-3):
Our Valley
We don’t see the ocean, not ever, but in July and August
when the worst heat seems to rise from the hard clay
of this valley, you could be walking through a fig orchard
when suddenly the wind cools and for a moment
you get a whiff of salt, and in that moment you can almost
believe something is waiting beyond the Pacheco Pass,
something massive, irrational, and so powerful even
the mountains that rise east of here have no word for it.You probably think I’m nuts saying the mountains
have no word for ocean, but if you live here
you begin to believe they know everything.
They maintain that huge silence we think of as divine,
a silence that grows in autumn when snow falls
slowly between the pines and the wind dies
to less than a whisper and you can barely catch
your breath because you’re thrilled and terrified.You have to remember this isn’t your land.
It belongs to no one, like the sea you once lived beside
and thought was yours. Remember the small boats
that bobbed out as the waves rode in, and the men
who carved a living from it only to find themselves
carved down to nothing. Now you say this is home,
so go ahead, worship the mountains as they dissolve in dust,
wait on the wind, catch a scent of salt, call it our life.
(Philip Levine [source])
…and:
And then a man of forty or so, with a French accent, asked, “How do you achieve the presence of mind to initiate the writing of a poem?” And something cracked open in me, and I finally stopped hoarding and told them my most useful secret. The only secret that has helped me consistently over all the years that I’ve written. I said, “Well, I’ll tell you how. I ask a simple question. I ask myself: What was the very best moment of your day?” The wonder of it was, I told them, that this one question could lift out from my life exactly what I will want to write a poem about. Something I hadn’t known was important will leap out and hover there in front of me, saying I am—I am the best moment of the day. “Often,” I went on, “it’s a moment when you’re waiting for someone, or you’re driving somewhere, or maybe you’re just walking across a parking lot and admiring the oil stains and the dribbled tar patterns. One time it was when I was driving past a certain house that was screaming with sunlitness on its white clapboards, and then I plunged through tree shadows that splashed and splayed across the windshield. I thought, Ah, of course—I’d forgotten. You, windshield shadows, you are the best moment of the day.
(Nicholson Baker [source])
[Read more…]On the Road from Impossible to Done
[Image: “Afloat and awaiting,” by Emilie Cotterill. (Found on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!) You can find many photos of this sculpture (“Afloat,” by Hamish Black) on the Web, but this may be my favorite (probably because of the ghostly effects applied to the so-called “donut” itself and to the man on the left). You can read more about the work — how it was created, details of its appearance — again, at many places, including the art.uk site.]
From whiskey river:
Do Not Expect
Do not expect that if your book falls open
to a certain page, that any phrase
you read will make a difference today,
or that the voices you might overhear
when the wind moves through the yellow-green
and golden tent of autumn, speak to you.Things ripen or go dry. Light plays on the
dark surface of the lake. Each afternoon
your shadow walks beside you on the wall,
and the days stay long and heavy underneath
the distant rumor of the harvest. One
more summer gone,
and one way or another you survive,
dull or regretful, never learning that
nothing is hidden in the obvious
changes of the world, that even the dim
reflection of the sun on tall, dry grass
is more than you will ever understand.And only briefly then
you touch, you see, you press against
the surface of impenetrable things.
(Dana Gioia [source])
…and:
Sometimes it was hard to say things. Things were so complicated. People might resent what you said. They might use your remarks against you. They might take you seriously and act upon your words, actually do something. They might not even hear you, which perhaps was the only thing worth hoping for. But it was more complicated than that. The sheer effort of speaking. Easier to stay apart, leave things as they are, avoid responsibility for reflecting the world and all its grave weight. Things that should be simple are always hard. But hard things are never easy.
(Don DeLillo [source])
Seeing It All, Unblinking
[Image: “Shattered: Corbière’s Affair,” by user “slrjester” on Flickr.com. (Used here under a Creative Commons license; thank you!) Other than the explicit, er, shatteredness of the glass shown here, it’s not obvious (to me!) how the image, or its title, relates to the extensive caption which accompanies it. That caption is, or purports to be, a portion of a play called An Excerpt From The Teenage Opera — in particular, a monologue by a character known as “The Lecturer.”]
From whiskey river:
We are fast moving into something, we are fast flung into something like asteroids cast into space by the death of a planet, we the people of earth are cast into space like burning asteroids and if we wish not to disintegrate into nothingness we must begin to now hold onto only the things that matter while letting go of all that doesn’t. For when all of our dust and ice deteriorates into the cosmos we will be left only with ourselves and nothing else. So if you want to be there in the end, today is the day to start holding onto your children, holding onto your loved ones; onto those who share your soul. Harbor and anchor into your heart justice, truth, courage, bravery, belief, a firm vision, a steadfast and sound mind. Be the person of meaningful and valuable thoughts. Don’t look to the left, don’t look to the right; we simply don’t have the time. Never be afraid of fear.
(C. JoyBell C. [source])
…and:
Long Afternoons
Those were the long afternoons when poetry left me.
The river flowed patiently, nudging lazy boats to sea.
Long afternoons, the coast of ivory.
Shadows lounged in the streets, haughty manikins in shopfronts
stared at me with bold and hostile eyes.Professors left their schools with vacant faces,
as if the Iliad had finally done them in.
Evening papers brought disturbing news,
but nothing happened, no one hurried.
There was no one in the windows, you weren’t there;
even nuns seemed ashamed of their lives.Those were the long afternoons when poetry vanished
and I was left with the city’s opaque demon,
like a poor traveler stranded outside the Gare du Nord
with his bulging suitcase wrapped in twine
and September’s black rain falling.Oh, tell me how to cure myself of irony, the gaze
that sees but doesn’t penetrate; tell me how to cure myself
of silence.
(Adam Zagajewski [source])
…and:
When you feel connected to everything, you also feel responsible for everything. And you cannot turn away. Your destiny is bound with the destinies of others. You must either learn to carry the Universe or be crushed by it. You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors.
(Andrew Boyd [source[)
In the End the Mystery Is All There Is
[Image: “the SMILES MYSTERIOUSLY in DA VINCI GALLERY,” by user “RANT 73” on Flickr.com. (Used here under a Creative Commons license; thank you!) The caption, in Dutch, alludes to a computer-based analysis of the painting — described here and elsewhere — which determined that “she is 83 per cent happy, 9 per cent disgusted, 6 per cent fearful and 2 per cent angry.” I leave it to your judgment whether such an analysis is useful as an exercise in art appreciation.]
From whiskey river:
Wait for an Autumn Day
(from Ekelöf)Wait for an autumn day, for a slightly
weary sun, for dusty air,
a pale day’s weather.Wait for the maple’s rough, brown leaves,
etched like an old man’s hands,
for chestnuts and acorns,for an evening when you sit in the garden
with a notebook and the bonfire’s smoke contains
the heady taste of ungettable wisdom.Wait for afternoons shorter than an athlete’s breath,
for a truce among the clouds,
for the silence of trees,for the moment when you reach absolute peace
and accept the thought that what you’ve lost
is gone for good.Wait for the moment when you might not
even miss those you loved
who are no more.Wait for a bright, high day,
for an hour without doubt or pain.
Wait for an autumn day.
(Adam Zagajewski [source])
…and:
If it happens that the human race doesn’t make it, then the fact that we were here once will not be altered, that once upon a time we peopled this astonishing blue planet, and wondered intelligently at everything about it and the other things who lived here with us on it, and that we celebrated the beauty of it in music and art, architecture, literature, and dance, and that there were times when we approached something godlike in our abilities and aspirations. We emerged out of depthless mystery, and back into mystery we returned, and in the end the mystery is all there is.
(James Howard Kunstler [source])
…and:
Catchpenny Road
Summer ends tonight.
Air cuts into our lungs
as frost cuts the field
into flowers. Stars catch
in the pond’s dark water
drawing us farther
from the lighted houses.
We catch our arms
in circles round our chests
as if this were protection
against darkness.Spiked firs border the road.
Behind each one are ghosts
whose names we don’t know,
who watch us, who
withhold themselves,
who’d never hurt us.
They come to you in your sleep,
sit in a circle round your bed,
saying the things the living
want to say and can’t.
You try to move your head, try
to move into their world of light
where the lace on the child’s
white dress burns your skin
like a kiss. But no,
touching their lips to yours,
they go, wordlessly and without cause,
as only the dead might.Mist spills from the trees
as you talk and we walk
from valley to hill, hill to valley,
till we come to the place
where we left off, unmarked road
crossing itself in the dark.
Blackened by frost, leaves
blow over the pond,
absorbing the water’s stain,
sinking towards the stars’ reflections.
You kneel, smooth the water
with your hands, and say nothing.
Perfect in their pain,
the dead surround us, holding
stones in their hands like coins.
Money they would lend us.
(Elizabeth Spires [source])
Dotting Your ‘I’
[Image: “Causeway Bay Last Day – Hong Kong Umbrella Revolution,” by Studio Incendo (found on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license; thank you!). See here for more information about the stirring context.]
From whiskey river’s commonplace book (“the psychic theater”):
We have curious ideas of ourselves. We think of ourselves as a body with a spirit in it, or a body with a soul in it, or a body with a mind in it. Mens sana in corpore sano. The years drink up the wine, and at last throw the bottle away: the body, of course, being the bottle.
It is a funny sort of superstition. Why should I look at my hand, as it so cleverly writes these words, and decide that it is a mere nothing compared to the mind that directs it? Is there really any huge difference between my hand and my brain? — or my mind? My hand is alive, it flickers with a life of its own. It meets all the strange universe, in touch, and learns a vast number of things, and knows a vast number of things. My hand, as it writes these words, slips gaily along, jumps like a grasshopper to dot an i, feels the table rather cold, gets a little bored if I write too long, has its own rudiments of thought, and is just as much me as is my brain, my mind, or my soul. Why should I imagine that there is a me which is more me than my hand is? Since my hand is absolutely alive, me alive.
(D.H. Lawrence [source])
…and (“the pursuits of fantasy”):
Writing in the Dark
It’s not difficult.
Anyway, it’s necessary.Wait till morning, and you’ll forget.
And who knows if morning will come.Fumble for the light, and you’ll be
stark awake, but the vision
will be fading, slipping
out of reach.You must have paper at hand,
a felt-tip pen, ballpoints don’t always flow,
pencil points tend to break. There’s nothing
shameful in that much prudence: those are our tools.Never mind about crossing your t’s, dotting your i’s—
but take care not to cover
one word with the next. Practice will reveal
how one hand instinctively comes to the aid of the other
to keep each line
clear of the next.Keep writing in the dark:
a record of the night, or
words that pulled you from depths of unknowing,
words that flew through your mind, strange birds
crying their urgency with human voices,or opened
as flowers of a tree that blooms
only once in a lifetime:words that may have the power
to make the sun rise again.
(Denise Levertov [source])
…and (“359° blind”):
Consider this: in our everyday state of consciousness, we regard our body to be extremely limited. What’s more, we feel that this body is the major source of all our sufferings — the feelings of pain arise in the body, the fear of illnesses and death are intimately connected to the body, etc. On the other hand, we think bright, encouraging thoughts about our minds, and our imaginative capabilities. Whilst the body is weak, limited and prone to breaking down easily, the mind is sovereign, it is our sanctuary and can give us a glimpse of the victory over our humiliating conditions. Our conscious thoughts seemingly know no bounds — we can fantasize to our hearts content about ideal conditions, distant lands, nice, heartwarming events and circumstances. We can easily imagine pigs with wings — something that’s impossible for nature itself to accomplish. What can possibly stop our imagination? And look, it’s not only idle daydreaming — all the achievements that the science, technology, art and philosophy can boast of, all have their origin in our imagination.
Well, the experience of enlightenment changes all that. Strictly speaking, it turns things on their heads. Upon opening our mind’s eye, we see that it is our conscious mind that is extremely limited, feeble, and prone to easily break down. Our body, which we have despised so much, turns out to be the wondrous limitless reality — we can go anywhere, climb any mountain and hill. Our body enables us to truly live.
(Alex Bunard [source])
Mistaking the Tool for the Material
[Image: “The Day the World Went Away,” by Sabbian Paine. (Found on Flickr; used here under a Creative Commons license: thank you!) The title refers to a song by Nine Inch Nails, and the Flickr writeup quotes from the song’s lyrics and directs us explicitly to a video of the song’s “Quiet” version, assembled from outtakes of the music video for the “original” version. The image itself is one of many created by Sabbian Paine using tools originally built for the Second Life virtual-world social network.]
From whiskey river:
Words tend to last a bit longer than things, but eventually they fade too, along with the pictures they once evoked. Entire categories of objects disappear—flowerpots, for example, or cigarette filters, or rubber bands—and for a time you will be able to recognize those words, even if you cannot recall what they mean. But then, little by little, the words become only sounds, a random collection of glottals and fricatives, a storm of whirling phonemes, and finally the whole thing just collapses into gibberish.
(Paul Auster [source])
…and:
The Goddess Who Created This Passing World
The Goddess who created this passing world
Said Let there be lightbulbs & liquefaction
Life spilled out onto the street, colors whirled
Cars & the variously shod feet were born
And the past & future & I born too
Light as airmail paper away she flew
To Annapurna or Mt. McKinley
Or both but instantly
Clarified, composed, forever was I
Meant by her to recognize a painting
As beautiful or a movie stunning
And to adore the finitude of words
And understand as surfaces my dreams
Know the eye the organ of affection
And depths to be inflections
Of her voice & wrist & smile
(Alice Notley [source])
…and:
Art is an engagement of the senses; art sharpens the acuity with which emotions, and the other senses, are felt or imagined (and again, here, it challenges reality: What is the difference between feeling happy and really being happy? What is the difference between imagining you can taste something and really tasting it? A hair’s breadth; a measurement less than the thickness of a dried work-skein of ink on paper).
And then the kicker is this: in passing from the real to the imagined, in following that trail, you learn that both sides have a little of the other in each, that there are elements of the imagined inside your experience of the ‘real’ world – rock, bone, wood, ice – and elements of the real – not the metaphorical, but the actual thing itself – inside stories and tales and dreams.
(Rick Bass [source: can’t cite any other source at all for this (which drives me crazy… what’s the Internet for if not to answer every question?!? (laughing))])
Oh, Grow Up — or, Well… Don’t
[Image: “Dionisio (You’re Almost There),” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) For the full-size version and the #jesstorypix-tagged story behind the photo, see the caption here at SmugMug.]
From whiskey river:
Self-Portrait
Between the computer, a pencil, and a typewriter
half my day passes. One day it will be half a century.
I live in strange cities and sometimes talk
with strangers about matters strange to me.
I listen to music a lot: Bach, Mahler, Chopin, Shostakovich.
I see three elements in music: weakness, power, and pain.
The fourth has no name.
I read poets, living and dead, who teach me
tenacity, faith, and pride. I try to understand
the great philosophers—but usually catch just
scraps of their precious thoughts.
I like to take long walks on Paris streets
and watch my fellow creatures, quickened by envy,
anger, desire; to trace a silver coin
passing from hand to hand as it slowly
loses its round shape (the emperor’s profile is erased).
Beside me trees expressing nothing
but a green, indifferent perfection.
Black birds pace the fields,
waiting patiently like Spanish widows.
I’m no longer young, but someone else is always older.
I like deep sleep, when I cease to exist,
and fast bike rides on country roads when poplars and houses
dissolve like cumuli on sunny days.
Sometimes in museums the paintings speak to me
and irony suddenly vanishes.
I love gazing at my wife’s face.
Every Sunday I call my father.
Every other week I meet with friends,
thus proving my fidelity.
My country freed itself from one evil. I wish
another liberation would follow.
Could I help in this? I don’t know.
I’m truly not a child of the ocean,
as Antonio Machado wrote about himself,
but a child of air, mint and cello
and not all the ways of the high world
cross paths with the life that—so far—
belongs to me.
(Adam Zagajewski (translated by Clare Cavanagh) [source])
…and (italicized sentences):
I have a limited stock of furniture which constitutes the materiel of my pictures. My pictorial vocabulary is limited to one tree, one house, one flower, one sky, one face; with these I render the infinite variety of trees, houses, flowers, skies and faces which exist in nature. You see, I know nothing about drawing. I couldn’t even copy a drawing until the year 1926 or ’27. Then, by accident one day, I discovered that I was able to make a likeness of George Grosz, whose self-portrait I had found on the cover of one of his albums. From that day I took pleasure in using pencil and brush. On good days I can draw with a cleaver. I don’t go in for likenesses any more; I am satisfied with reality. Everyone has their own reality in which, if one is not too cautious, timid, or frightened, one swims. This is the only reality there is. If you can get it down on paper, in words, notes, or color, so much the better. The great artists don’t even bother to put it down on paper: they live with it silently, they become it.
(Henry Miller [source])
Mortal Satisfactions
[Image: “Itinerantes #4: Satisfaction,” by Jon Díez Supat; found on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license (thank you!). I wanted to know what product/service/event the poster advertised, and in what language, but Google Translate wasn’t much help: it said the caption in the center translates from Basque as “Bring your payroll now and bring this exclusive Lotus watch.” (Actually, eraman seems to translate more accurately — especially in context — as “take away” or “get,” rather than a second “bring.”)]
From whiskey river:
beasts bounding through time —
Van Gogh writing his brother for paints
Hemingway testing his shotgun
Celine going broke as a doctor of medicine
the impossibility of being human
Villon expelled from Paris for being a thief
Faulkner drunk in the gutters of his town
the impossibility of being human
Burroughs killing his wife with a gun
Mailer stabbing his
the impossibility of being human
Maupassant going mad in a rowboat
Dostoevsky lined up against a wall to be shot
Crane off the back of a boat into the propeller
the impossibility
Sylvia with her head in the oven like a baked potato
Harry Crosby leaping into that Black Sun
Lorca murdered in the road by the Spanish troops
the impossibility
Artaud sitting on a madhouse bench
Chatterton drinking rat poison
Shakespeare a plagiarist
Beethoven with a horn stuck into his head against deafness
the impossibility the impossibility
Nietzsche gone totally mad
the impossibility of being human
all too human
this breathing
in and out
out and in
these punks
these cowards
these champions
these mad dogs of glorymoving this little bit of light toward
us
impossibly
(Charles Bukowski [source])
…and:
The universe is a great unknown wonderful place, and we know nothing, really, to speak of about it. I think that either depresses and frightens one or is exhilarating. We are very important, and we’re not important in quite the way we think we are. Each one of us is unique, and we can find out a whole lot just by examining ourselves. I think that’s the essential thing. Not paying attention to how you’re going to make money, just paying attention to whatever is around you. Each one of those seconds is your only chance. It’s your life. And it’s wonderful. The more attention that we pay to our ordinary lives leads to a real elation that we’re here at all.
(W. S. Merwin [source])
…and:
Cherries
Fireweed loves the yard
and the fire that conjured it
into the light.And the scarlet elderberry
loves the old junkpile
it leans against.The morning glory smothers everything
in an embrace: the fence,
the wood workbench,
the rusted steel.Here’s a summer day that’s so slow
even the light
moves like honey;Daisies jump fences
and then just mill around.Here’s a cherry tree that’s so rich
when it offers its heart to the birds,every cherry
is a year of cherries.
(Barbara LaMorticella [source: nothing canonical, but found it here and elsewhere])
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