Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Already Elsewhere

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From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Echoing Light

When I was beginning to read I imagined
that bridges had something to do with birds
and with what seemed to be cages but I knew
that they were not cages it must have been autumn
with the dusty light flashing from the streetcar wires
and those orange places on fire in the pictures
and now indeed it is autumn the clear
days not far from the sea with a small wind nosing
over dry grass that yesterday was green
the empty corn standing trembling and a down
of ghost flowers veiling the ignored fields
and everywhere the colors I cannot take
my eyes from all of them red even the wide streams
red it is the season of migrants
flying at night feeling the turning earth
beneath them and I woke in the city hearing
the call notes of the plover then again and
again before I slept and here far downriver
flocking together echoing close to the shore
the longest bridges have opened their slender wings

(W. S. Merwin [source])

…and:

After yesterday’s storm I had expected to find the landscape a desert of sodden heathery bogs and swollen reedy lochans; and so it mostly was, but over all its vast extent the light was so radiant that I felt I could see not just for great distances but into time itself. The ruins of crofts, a mile away, seemed so close in that enchanted air that I saw not only the nettles of ragwort round the doors, but the people coming out for the last time: I could even see the grief on their faces. No wonder, I thought, this was the land of second sight. If I stayed here I would be a seer as well as a poet.

((John) Robin Jenkins, Fergus Lamont)

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Across

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[Image: “Waiting for the Ferryman,” by Jack R. Johanson (click for original). The photographer describes the location, along the Norwegian river Glomma, as “a fine place to wait for the ferryman to take you to the other side.”]

Oddly, whiskey river was very prose-y in the last week. Think I’ll duck down into the archives there, a/k/a whiskey river’s commonplace book, for a poetry selection…

Letter Written on a Ferry
While Crossing Long Island Sound

I am surprised to see
that the ocean is still going on.
Now I am going back
and I have ripped my hand
from your hand as I said I would
and I have made it this far
as I said I would
and I am on the top deck now
holding my wallet, my cigarettes
and my car keys
at 2 o’clock on a Tuesday
in August of 1960.

Dearest,
although everything has happened,
nothing has happened.
The sea is very old.
The sea is the face of Mary,
without miracles or rage
or unusual hope,
grown rough and wrinkled
with incurable age.

Still,
I have eyes.
These are my eyes:
the orange letters that spell
ORIENT on the life preserver
that hangs by my knees;
the cement lifeboat that wears
its dirty canvas coat;
the faded sign that sits on its shelf
saying KEEP OFF.
Oh, all right, I say,
I’ll save myself.

Over my right shoulder
I see four nuns
who sit like a bridge club,
their faces poked out
from under their habits,
as good as good babies who
have sunk into their carriages.
Without discrimination
the wind pulls the skirts
of their arms.
Almost undressed,
I see what remains:
that holy wrist,
that ankle,
that chain.

(Anne Sexton; whiskey river includes only the first four stanzas, above, but I think you’ll want to read the whole thing, which you can do here and elsewhere.)

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Trouble Hearing

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[Image: Toothpaste for Dinner, June 3, 2007]

From whiskey river:

People write letters
to me from heaven, but I’m not listening.
The hermit said: “Because the world is mad,
the only way through the world is to learn
the arts and double the madness.” Are you listening?

(Robert Bly, “Listening”1)

…and (italicized portion):

We like to think that we are finely evolved creatures, in suit-and-tie or pantyhose-and-chemise, who live many millennia and mental detours away from the cave, but that’s not something our bodies are convinced of. We may have the luxury of being at the top of the food chain, but our adrenaline still rushes when we encounter real or imaginary predators. We even restage that primal fright by going to monster movies. We still stake out or mark our territories, though sometimes now it is with the sound of radios. We still jockey for position and power. We still create works of art to enhance our senses and add even more sensations to the brimming world, so that we can utterly luxuriate in the spectacles of life. We still ache fiercely with love, lust, loyalty, and passion. And we still perceive the world, in all its gushing beauty and terror, right on our pulses. There is no other way. To begin to understand the gorgeous fever that is consciousness, we must try to understand the senses — how they evolved, how they can be extended, what their limits are, to which ones we have attached taboos, and what they can tell us about the ravishing world we have the privilege to inhabit.

(Diane Ackerman, from A Natural History of the Senses)

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What’s in a Song: Fever (2)

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[This is the second of two posts about the popular song “Fever.” Part 1 was a couple days ago, here.]

As I mentioned in Part 1 of this “Fever” mini-series, the song’s lyrics and pulsing rhythm (and reputation!) seem to lead immature and/or lazy performers down sexual pathways they haven’t really earned the privilege  of traveling. When a singer purrs the words “Never know how much I love you/Never know how much I care” while humping a microphone stand — well, it’s hard to imagine wanting to jump that performer’s bones. I just want to laugh.

So when you set out to post a handful of covers of “Fever,” from among the gazillion available, you’ve got to exercise some judgment, some restraint:

Say you’re sort of squinting as you run your thumb over the corner of the flip-card animation. Say you stop at random. And say you’ve landed on an MP3 of, I don’t know… say you’ve stopped at the Pussycat Dolls‘ cover. If you just state the obvious — Oooh, pretty girls! — you’re headed for disappointment to then conclude: “I bet they’ll do it justice!”

So anyway, those covers don’t count for me. What’s left ranges from the overly respectful — almost note-for-note, beat-by-beat respectful — to the out-there: covers which take the basic melody and bass line and flip them inside-out, making the song almost (almost) unrecognizable in the process.

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Uncomfortable Numbers

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From whiskey river:

A Word on Statistics

Out of every hundred people,

those who always know better:
fifty-two.

Unsure of every step:
almost all the rest.

Ready to help,
if it doesn’t take long:
forty-nine.

Always good,
because they cannot be otherwise:
four — well, maybe five.

Able to admire without envy:
eighteen.

Led to error
by youth (which passes):
sixty, plus or minus.

Those not to be messed with:
four-and-forty.

Living in constant fear
of someone or something:
seventy-seven.

Capable of happiness:
twenty-some-odd at most.

Harmless alone,
turning savage in crowds:
more than half, for sure.

Cruel
when forced by circumstances:
it’s better not to know,
not even approximately.

Wise in hindsight:
not many more
than wise in foresight.

Getting nothing out of life except things:
thirty
(though I would like to be wrong).

Balled up in pain
and without a flashlight in the dark:
eighty-three, sooner or later.

Those who are just:
quite a few, thirty-five.

But if it takes effort to understand:
three.

Worthy of empathy:
ninety-nine.

Mortal:
one hundred out of one hundred —
a figure that has never varied yet.

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

…and:

One Hundred and Eighty Degrees

Have you considered the possibility
that everything you believe is wrong,
not merely off a bit, but totally wrong,
nothing like things as they really are?

If you’ve done this, you know how durably fragile
those phantoms we hold in our heads are,
those wisps of thought that people die and kill for,
betray lovers for, give up lifelong friendships for.

If you’ve not done this, you probably don’t understand this poem,
or think it’s not even a poem, but a bit of opaque nonsense,
occupying too much of your day’s time,
so you probably should stop reading it here, now.

But if you’ve arrived at this line,
maybe, just maybe, you’re open to that possibility,
the possibility of being absolutely completely wrong,
about everything that matters.

How different the world seems then:
everyone who was your enemy is your friend,
everything you hated, you now love,
and everything you love slips through your fingers like sand.

(Federico Moramarco)

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What’s in a Song: Fever (1)

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[This is another in an occasional series on popular songs with appeal across the generations. This post will be broken into two parts; Part 2 will appear in a few days is here.]

As a kid, I once read a “funny” comic-book episode in which aliens landed in mid-20th-century America and reported back to their home planet about all the strange things the natives did. The one which struck me the most was this: the lunatic creatures leave the comfort of their homes; climb into sheet-metal boxes each weighing several tons; move the metal boxes out amongst hundreds, thousands of others; and play a game whose object is to accelerate your metal box to screaming speed, aim it at all the others, and come as close as possible to all of them without actually hitting a single one — all without dying in the process.

Ha ha, I know: comic books. Can’t take ’em seriously. For in the real world, of course, the aliens are reporting back about the truly strange Earthling behavior: our fascination with sex.

We construct elaborate religious frameworks of abstention and lifelong celibacy, and equally elaborate ones of fetishism and promiscuity — and everything between. Both as societies and as individuals, we underwrite costly technological improvements to its experience. We try to cure ourselves of the obsession; we throw ourselves into it. We have ecstatic dreams about it and hair-raising nightmares. We write about it, and we write about everything but (in the process, creating a gigantic sex-shaped vacuum that’s awfully damned hard to ignore). We celebrate the level-headed old-timers who seem to do just fine without it… and cheer the friskier ones still nuts about it.

And oh boy, do we ever compose music about it — music explicit and implicit. (Some of this music doesn’t even have words.) We pay performers to entertain us with this music, to mime their having sex with us — even to mime the act with their voices, while their bodies barely move onstage.

Somewhere out there, a civilization of little green men and women is scratching their little green noggins about all this. Procreation, they concede: yes, very important. But truly civilized creatures of the universe, they will insist, focus their creative energies on the practice of xormling. You know, where you get either five or fourteen— Oh, never mind.

So we come to the song. Nearly every pop singer tries her hand with it at some point. You can pretty much count on at least one American Idol contestant each season, using it to establish his credentials as a bona-fide heartthrob. (God help us all if Robert Pattinson ever records it: the thud of all those bodies simultaneously swooning to the floor could set off shock waves around the world.)

Enter “Fever.”

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Head Waters

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From whiskey river:

Have you been to the source of a river? It’s a very mystic place. You get dizzy when you stay for a while. An especially big river has several sources, and the real source, the farthest point which turns to the major stream, is moist and misty, with some kind of ancient smell, and you feel cold.

You feel, “This isn’t the place to go in.” There is no springing water, so you don’t know where the source is. Actually, such a place exists in everyone; the center of us is like that. From such a place, the ancient call appears, “Why don’t you know me? Living so many years with me, why can’t you call my real name?”

The more your understanding of life becomes clearer and more exact and painfully joyful, the more you feel, “I’m so bad.” The one that appears and says, “No, you are not bad at all,” that is the way to go, that is your teacher.

Don’t misunderstand, this teacher is not always a person. It can embrace you like morning dew in a field, and you get a strange feeling, “Oh, this is it, my teacher is this field.”

(Kobun Chino)

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When Staying Put Just Won’t Do

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[Photo above, “Standing Still,” is by Beth Dickman. Click to see the larger original.]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

Moment

In the Romanesque church round stones
that ground down so many prayers and generations
kept humble silence and shadows slept in the apse
like bats in winter furs.

We went out. The pale sun shone,
tinny music tinkled softly
from a car, two jays
studied us, humans,
threads of longing dangled in the air.

The present moment is shameless,
taking its foolish liberties
beside the wall of this tired old shrine,

awaiting the millions of years to come,
future wars, geologic eras,
cease-fires, treaties, changes in climate —
this moment — what is it — just

a mosquito, a fly, a speck, a scrap of breath,
and yet it’s taken over everywhere,
entering the timid grass,
inhabiting stems and genes,
the pupils of our eyes.

This moment, mortal as you or I,
was full of boundless, senseless,
silly joy, as if it knew
something we didn’t.

(Adam Zagajewski, from Mysticism for Beginners [source])

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The Gods Beside Us (and in Our Mirrors)

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[Image above depicts a representation of The Parthenon as it appears at a location in the Second Life virtual world/alternative universe/simulation/etc. Click the image for more information, including a link to the location itself.]

From whiskey river:

We find comfort only in
another beauty, in others’
music, in the poetry of others.
Salvation lies with others,
though solitude may taste like
opium. Other people aren’t hell
if you glimpse them at dawn, when
their brows are clean, rinsed by dreams.

(Adam Zagajewski, from Another Beauty)

…and:

This is what I believe: That I am I. That my soul is a dark forest. That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest. That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back. That I must have the courage to let them come and go. That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women.

There is my creed.

(D.H. Lawrence)

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Enchanté

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From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

The whale moves in a sea of sound:
shrimps snap, plankton seethes,
fish croak, gulp, drum their air-bladders,
and are scrutinized by echo-location,
a light massage of sound touching the skin.
The small, toothed whales use high frequencies:
Finely tuned and focused sound-beams,
intense salvoes of bouncing
clicks, a thousand a second,
with which a hair, as thin as
half a millimeter, can be detected;
penetrating probes,
with which they can scan
the contents of a colleague’s stomach,
follow the flow of their blood
take the full measure of
an approaching brain.
From two cerebral cavities
in their melon-shaped heads,
they can transmit two sonic probes,
as if talking in stereo,
and send them in any direction
at the same time:
One ahead, one behind, one above, one below…
lengthening the sound-waves,
shortening them, heightening them,
until their acoustic switchboard
receives the intelligence required.
Spoken to in English,
the smallest cetacean, the dolphin,
will rise to the surface,
alter its vocal frequencies
to suit the measures of human speech,
pitch its voice to the same level
as that of human sounds
when traveling through air —
an unfamiliar medium —
adjust the elastic lips of its blow-hole,
and then, after courteously waiting
for silence,
produce a vibrato imitation
of human language:
Words, phrases, sentences…

(Heathcote Williams, Whale Nation)

…and:

The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring. It is the sensation of a stunt pilot’s turning barrel rolls, or an inchworm’s blind rearing from a stem in search of a route. At its [absurd] worst… it feels like alligator wrestling, at the level of the sentence.

At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your fists, your back, your brain, and then — and only then — it is handed to you. From the corner of your eye you see motion. Something is moving through the air and headed your way. It is a parcel bound in ribbons and bows; it has two white wings. It flies directly at you; you can read your name on it. If it were a baseball, you would hit it out of the park. It is that one pitch in a thousand you see in slow motion; its wings beat slowly as a hawk’s.

(Annie Dillard, from The Writing Life [source])

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