Ruminations – Page 71

Less Surprising Than It Should Be

November 20, 2011 by John 7 Comments

Lullaby for a certain blind little imp, coveter (from a cave deep within the soul) of miracles: squandering its days in greedy longing for something, anything, of which it knows nothing at all…

Miracle Fair

Commonplace miracle:
that so many commonplace miracles happen.

An ordinary miracle:
in the dead of night
the barking of invisible dogs.

One miracle out of many:
a small, airy cloud
yet it can block a large and heavy moon.

Several miracles in one:
an alder tree reflected in the water,
and that it’s backwards left to right
and that it grows there, crown down
and never reaches the bottom,
even though the water is shallow.

An everyday miracle:
winds weak to moderate
turning gusty in storms.

First among equal miracles:
cows are cows.

Second to none:
just this orchard
from just that seed.

A miracle without a cape and top hat:
scattering white doves.

A miracle, for what else could you call it:
today the sun rose at three-fourteen
and will set at eight-o-one.

A miracle, less surprising than it should be:
even though the hand has fewer than six fingers,
it still has more than four.

A miracle, just take a look around:
the world is everywhere.

An additional miracle, as everything is additional:
the unthinkable
is thinkable.

(by Wislawa Szymborska; translated by Joanna Trzeciak [source])

Reluctant Words

November 18, 2011 by John 6 Comments

[Image found someplace or other on the Web, while searching on this post’s title. It suggests a battleground on which a writer went head-to-head with his words — with neither emerging the clear victor.]

From whiskey river:

I demanded a realm in which I should be both master and slave at the same time: the world of art is the only such realm. I entered it without any apparent talent, a thorough novice, incapable, awkward, tongue-tied, almost paralyzed by fear and apprehensiveness. I had to lay one brick on another, set millions of words to paper before writing one real, authentic word dragged up from my own guts. The facility of speech which I possessed was a handicap; I had all the vices of the educated man. I had to learn to think, feel and see in a totally new fashion, in an uneducated way, in my own way, which is the hardest thing in the world. I had to throw myself into the current, knowing that I would probably sink. The great majority of artists are throwing themselves in with life-preservers around their necks, and more often than not it is the life-preserver which sinks them.

(Henry Miller, “Reflections on Writing” [source])

…and (italicized portion):

Spelling

My daughter plays on the floor
with plastic letters,
red, blue & hard yellow,
learning how to spell,
spelling,
how to make spells.

I wonder how many women
denied themselves daughters,
closed themselves in rooms,
drew the curtains
so they could mainline words.

A child is not a poem,
a poem is not a child.
there is no either/or.
However.

I return to the story
of the woman caught in the war
& in labour, her thighs tied
together by the enemy
so she could not give birth.

Ancestress: the burning witch,
her mouth covered by leather
to strangle words.

A word after a word
after a word is power.

At the point where language falls away
from the hot bones, at the point
where the rock breaks open and darkness
flows out of it like blood, at
the melting point of granite
when the bones know
they are hollow & the word
splits & doubles & speaks
the truth & the body
itself becomes a mouth.

This is a metaphor.

How do you learn to spell?
Blood, sky & the sun,
your own name first,
your first naming, your first name,
your first word.

(Margaret Atwood [source])

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“The Logic of Irrationality”

November 15, 2011 by John 12 Comments

[Original image found at the MathWorks site (slogan: “Accelerating the pace of engineering and science”). It seemed too good not to use.]

I haven’t read the book in question (Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman), but this book review got it a spot in the queueueueue. Especially this bit:

Kahneman’s approach to psychology spurns heart-sinking tables and formulae in favour of short, intriguing questions that elegantly illustrate the ways our intuitions mislead us.

Take the famous “Linda question”: Linda is a single 31-year-old, who is very bright and deeply concerned with issues of social justice. Which of the following statements is more probable: a) that Linda works in a bank, or b) that Linda works in a bank and is active in the feminist movement? The overwhelming majority of respondents go for b), even though that’s logically impossible. (It can’t be more likely that both things are true than that just one of them is.) This is the “conjunctive fallacy”, whereby our judgment is warped by the persuasive combination of plausible details. We are much better storytellers than we are logicians.

We are much better storytellers than we are logicians. Reassuring news, if true, for anyone aspiring to write fiction!

By the way, the piling on of specific details also tends to make jokes funnier. A loaf of day-old Wonder Bread mistakenly shelved with the canned hams might be the starting point for a stand-up comic’s routine; a loaf of bread on the wrong shelf is just… dull.

For more information about the “conjunctive fallacy,” see this Wikipedia entry. There you’ll also learn about an opposing point of view, under the heading Gigerenzer (which is, alas, merely a person’s name and not a Clausewitzian military tactic).

Of course, as the image at the top of this post suggests, greater specificity doesn’t necessarily make a given utterance matter more. Ha.

Bringing Worlds Out from Within

November 11, 2011 by John 5 Comments

[Video: Lista (The List), a short film by Paweł Łyczkowski. It won the 2010 “Best Film” Suzanne Award, for users of the Blender open-source animation and visual-effects software.]

From whiskey river:

Lao Tzu exhorts us to listen to the world “not with ears but with mind, not with mind but with spirit.” Some days I hear what sounds like breathing: quick inhalations from the grass, from burnt trees, from streaming clouds, as if desire were finally being answered, and at night in my sleep I can feel black tree branches pressing against me, their long needles combing my hair.

(Gretel Ehrlich [source])

…and:

There is a twilight zone in our hearts that we ourselves cannot see. Even when we know quite a lot about ourselves — our gifts and weaknesses, our ambitions and aspirations, our motives and our drives — large parts of ourselves remain in the shadow of consciousness. This is a very good thing. We will always remain partially hidden to ourselves. Other people, especially those who love us, can often see our twilight zones better than we ourselves can. The way we are seen and understood by others is different from the way we see and understand ourselves. We will never fully know the significance of our presence in the lives of our friends. That’s a grace, a grace that calls us not only to humility, but to a deep trust in those who love us. It is the twilight zones of our hearts where true friendships are born.

(Henri Nouwen [source])

…and:

It is a delicious thing to write, whether well or badly — to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people spoke, even the red sun that made them half-shut their love-drowned eyes.

(Gustave Flaubert [source])

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Waking Up to the Unreal

November 4, 2011 by John 4 Comments

[Image: promotional still from The Troll Hunter, a 2010 “mockumentary” from
Norway about — well, perhaps you can guess.]

From whiskey river:

Fairy tales were maps formed of blood and hair and bones; they were the knots of the sub-conscious unwound. Every word in every tale was real and as true as apples and stones. They all led to the story inside the story.

(Alice Hoffman [source])

…and:

Sky Burial

This is the way they dispose of the dead
in Tibet. Letting nothing go to waste.
The loose bodies, with their blood still,
are lifted to high roofs, offered to the sky.
In this way everything becomes a temple
and bells ring to catch the carrion birds
in flight. Glorious bells! Unsettling circlers!
They alight like balding mathematicians,
like ancient men huddled over maps.

Their steepled wings flap now and again
like a preacher searching a hymnal;
their beaks could be penning red sermons
as the umbral body is unsewn, consumed—
concealed through all avenues of heaven,
borne again aloft in a scream of grace
echoing down the mausoleum of dark.

(Michael Titus [source])

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Catless

October 31, 2011 by John 21 Comments

Yeah. That, alas — for the first time in twenty years.

We’d known the day was coming, known it for months now. A sad realization, to be sure. But not the same sort of sadness as to find it suddenly so…

Katie lived longer than the other two indoor cats we had — somewhere around 16, maybe 17 years. We can’t be sure because she came to us fully-formed, as a stray. This was when we lived at our previous place, the rented house on the west side of town: deep in the heart of college-student apartments, but on a very large block at whose center was an old, heavily treed forest which butted up against our back yard. Like other strays who visited us over the years there, she (and/or her mother) possibly had belonged to a student who left for a summer and just “released” her into the wild.

In any case, one day I came home from work one day to find The Not-Yet Missus eager to tell me of the epic animal-kingdom moment I’d missed: this mottled tortoisheshell cat had appeared from nowhere and simply leapt, in a single fluid movement, to the top of the wooden fence surrounding the artificial pond in the back yard. Striking enough, just that much. But what elevated it to the level of a National Geographic feature was this: the four-foot-long blacksnake trapped, writhing and whipping about, caught in the cat’s jaws.

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Ruminating in Place (with Company)

October 28, 2011 by John 12 Comments

[Image: cartoon from Bizarro, by Dan Piraro. Original (in color!) here.]

Sigh. After an unexpected and almost complete Internet blackout Monday through Wednesday, I couldn’t get to it from home at all this morning.

So… In lieu of a regular Friday post, then, I thought I might just share with you — anyone who’s reading this — the whiskey river selections I culled from this past week. And then I’ll turn the comments over to you, to share any quotations (from any source, but please provide it!) which these items put you in mind of. If you don’t feel comfortable copying’n’pasting, and/or don’t want to key something in, a link to the item will do nicely.

(If you offer up a YouTube link, I’ll come back to embed the video itself for you. Audio is trickier, but we can work something out.)

Got it?

Okay. Let’s try it, this once: a Friday whiskey river interactive group meditation.

[Read more…]

The Garden, Neglected

October 21, 2011 by John 3 Comments

[Video: scene from 12 Monkeys, in which the protagonists learn
the true intentions of a shadowy revolutionary movement]

From whiskey river:

The wind, one brilliant day, called
to my soul with an odor of jasmine.

“In return for this jasmine odor,
I’d like all the odor of your roses.”

“I have no roses; I have no flowers left now
in my garden… all are dead.”

“Then, I’ll take the waters of the fountains,
and the yellow leaves and the dried-up petals.”

The wind left… I wept. I said to myself:
“What have you done with the garden entrusted to you?”

(Antonio Machado, translated by Robert Bly [source])

…and:

I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wandering awed about on a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty beats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them, under the wind-rent clouds, upstream and down.

(Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek [source])

[Read more…]

Too Little Then, Too Much Now

October 14, 2011 by John 8 Comments

[Video: introduction to The Present, a Kickstarter project to produce a clock which takes a whole year to complete a cycle. The clock will mark the passage of time by subtle changes in the background hue to which the clock’s single hand — a “season hand”? — points.]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Do you really believe that the sciences would ever have originated and grown if the way had not been prepared by magicians, alchemists, astrologers and witches whose promises and pretensions first had to create a thirst, a hunger, a taste for hidden and forbidden powers? Indeed, infinitely more had to be promised than could ever be fulfilled in order that anything at all might be fulfilled in the realms of knowledge.

(Friedrich Nietzsche)

…and:

Now there is present in the world at the moment, or at least I like to think so, an impulse which I have named the archaic revival. What happens is that whenever a society really gets in trouble, and you can use this in your own life — when you really get in trouble — what you should do is say “what did I believe in the last sane moments that I experienced” and then go back to that moment and act from it even if you no longer believe it.

(Terence McKenna)

…and:

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

(Philip K. Dick)

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Perfect Moments: Two Beautiful Women, a Certain Amount of Booze, and Maybe I’ve Got a Story…!

October 8, 2011 by John 13 Comments

In the mid-1990s, boy, was I ever confused, perplexed, and probably (by many measures) in need of adjustment. Especially about my writing.

Here’s what my quote-unquote oeuvre consisted of then:

A non-fiction Op Ed memoir(ish) piece in a regional edition of the New York Times.
A published mystery. (Depending on who I was talking to at the time, I sometimes called it a published novel, with an exquisite inner — and yes, entirely maladjusted — sense that this actually made a difference.)
Opening chunks of a sequel to the mystery, for which my publisher made an offer I could refuse.
A short story, published in a literary magazine in Massachusetts.
A handful of “completed” short stories.
A larger handful of incomplete short stories.
Several completed non-fiction pieces, of the essay/”creative non-fiction” sort.
Some software reviews and how-to articles in a few computer/Internet-related techie magazines.

Oh, and I’d also done one complete draft — one — of a, well, a novel I couldn’t otherwise categorize. I’d gotten feedback from several advance readers of that draft: difficult, disturbing feedback, for the most part (or so it seemed to me). Feedback which praised the writing as writing but left the readers dissatisfied, wanting more. Wanting to understand what it was they had just read. Wanting me to decide what sort of book I meant to write. Did I think of it as a “literary” book? Then perhaps I didn’t need to work on it much more. Or did I want people to read it and recommend it — did I want people to enjoy it? Ummmmm, well… (Followed by a certain amount of uncomfortable silence, throat-clearing, and scuffing of feet.)

With that feedback in hand, I’d begun a second draft. And then stopped, about halfway through.

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