[See original at toothpastefordinner.com]
From whiskey river:
Report From A Far Place
Making these word things to
step on across the world, I
could call them snowshoes.They creak, sag, bend, but
hold, over the great deep cold,
and they turn up at the toes.In war or city or camp
they could save your life;
you can muse them by the fire.Be careful, though: they
burn, or don’t burn, in their own
strange way, when you say them.
(William Stafford)
[Photo above taken by the Hubble Wide-Field Camera 3 and released a few days ago by NASA. Several thousand galaxies are visible in the original, “a peek at the universe as it looked about 600 million years after the Big Bang.” More info here and here.]
From whiskey river (which excerpted from this poem, in different words, via translation):
The startling reality of things
The startling reality of things
Is my discovery every single day.
Every thing is what it is,
And it’s hard to explain to anyone how much this delights me
And suffices me.To be whole, it is enough simply to exist.
I’ve written a good many poems.
I shall write many more, naturally.
Each of my poems speaks of this,
And yet all my poems are different,
Because each thing that exists is one way of saying this.Sometimes I start looking at a stone.
I don’t start thinking, Does it have feeling?
I don’t fuss about calling it my sister.
But I get pleasure out of its being a stone,
Enjoying it because it feels nothing,
Enjoying it because it’s not at all related to me.Occasionally I hear the wind blow,
And I find that just hearing the wind blow makes it worth having been born.I don’t know what others reading this will think;
But I find it must be good since it’s what I think without effort,
With no idea that other people are listening to me think;
Because I think it without thoughts,
Because I say it as my words say it.I was once called a materialist poet
And was surprised, because I didn’t imagine
I could be called anything at all.
I’m not even a poet: I see.
If what I write has any merit, it’s not in me;
The merit is there, in my verses.
All this is absolutely independent of my will.
(Fernando Pessoa [source])
…and:
Your beloved and your friends were once strangers. Somehow at a particular time, they came from the distance toward your life. Their arrival seemed so accidental and contingent. Now your life is unimaginable without them. Similarly, your identity and vision are composed of a certain constellation of ideas and feelings that surfaced from the depths of the distance within you. To lose these now would be to lose yourself.
(John O’Donohue [source])
Regular whiskey river Friday post coming up shortly. In the meantime, in case you haven’t seen it already, another of those going-/gone-viral instant Web sensation videos to put a Friday grin on your face:
To begin, if you don’t already know of the songwriter/performer Jason Mraz and his song “I’m Yours,” you might want to watch this:
With or without watching that one, though, you need to watch this one:
[This is Part 2 of a two-part series about the song “Cry Me a River,” made popular, originally, in a recording released in 1955. Part 1, about the song’s history, appeared a few days ago. As I indicated there, if you hope to learn anything from this about the Justin Timberlake song of the same title, you should proceed down the street and rattle the next doorknob.]
You hear the expression every now and then: Party A is complaining bitterly about the course his life has taken, or about the weather, or about the cancellation of a favorite TV show… whatever. The complaint falls upon the ears of Party B, an especially unsympathetic listener, who often has what B believes to be even sorrier woes. B sneers and says something like: Yeah, yeah — all right. Cry me a river, why dontcha.
One measure of the phrase’s popularity: the Urban Dictionary offers no fewer than three user-supplied definitions and colorful examples (not counting references to any songs by that title; the following is copied and pasted unchanged from the UD, so brace yourself for offenses to the Mother Tongue and good taste):
to tell a moaning person to shut up and that you dont care.
your cat got ran over and your giro is late, Cry me a river love!
…an expression that means i’ve been through worse, you’re being a drama queen
person: omg my chihuahua is sick
you: cry me a river loser both of my dogs are dead.
Said in response to some ones sob story. Shortened from the full statement of “Cry me a river, build a bridge and GET THE FUCK OVER IT!”
Very old saying predating any Justin Timberflake warbles or other pop culture references. Interestingly still in common use today.
Whinger: My cars broken down and Im poor and I lost my job and my wife left me and when she left, she ran over my dog.
Cold Hard Bastard: Cry me a river buddy, cry me a river.
Whatever the specifics: Isn’t that a great metaphor?
At the Yahoo! Answers UK site, one poster provided my favorite creative explanation (an example, btw, of a mondegreen) for the phrase’s origin:
It’s actually ‘Crimea River’. An English soldier was writing home during the Crimean war and wrote “It’s terrible being away from home. I miss you all. I hate this Crimea River, it’s so dirty and depressing, but it’s the only water we have”. When his wife read it out loud to his children, they mistook the words for Cry Me A River and not Crimea River.
Source(s):
My very own Great Grandpa.
As for covers of the song, other than Julie London’s, since its official publication in 1953…
From whiskey river:
The Story, Around the Corner
is not turning the way you thought
it would turn, gently, in a little spiral loop,
the way a child draws the tail of a pig.
What came out of your mouth,
a riff of common talk.
As a sudden weather shift on a beach,
sky looming mountains of cloud
in a way you cannot predict
or guide, the story shuffles elements, darkens,
takes its own side. And it is strange.
Far more complicated than a few phrases
pieced together around a kitchen table
on a July morning in Dallas, say,
a city you don’t live in, where people
might shop forever or throw a thousand stories
away. You who carried or told a tiny bit of it
aren’t sure. Is this what we wanted?
Stories wandering out,
having their own free lives?
Maybe they are planning something bad.
A scrap or cell of talk you barely remember
is growing into a weird body with many demands.
One day soon it will stumble up the walk and knock,
knock hard, and you will have to answer the door.
(Naomi Shihab Nye [source])
…and (italicized portion):
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be “interesting” to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest’s clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. Or at least we do for a while.
(Joan Didion, The White Album [source])
[Another in a series of occasional posts about popular American songs with long histories. And if you are seeking information on the Justin Timberlake song by the same name, believe me, you are 100% in the wrong place.]
On paper, it doesn’t appear to be a “big” song. Nearly always, the arrangement features a single vocalist and one or two background instruments. The lyrics aren’t even all that special, in one respect: very simple words (with one exception), in a more or less conventional order. At that, the title itself appears six times over the course of the three stanzas, and a slight variation of it thrice more.
But given the right singer, oh, how loudly this song speaks…
(Who’s “the right singer”? Hard to say. Wikipedia lists a sample of about 150 of them. Amazon’s MP3 download store includes over 600 hits — many duplicates, of course, but still… And if you go rummaging around on iTunes and elsewhere on the Web, you can quickly fill your hard drive with unique versions.)
Here’s the story:
A somewhat slapdash whiskey river Friday post this week, its author having been pretty much laid low by the stupidest of ailments — a cold — since Tuesday night.
From whiskey river’s commonplace book (a thematic archive):
Can You Imagine?
For example, what the trees do
not only in lightning storms
or the watery dark of a summer’s night
or under the white nets of winter
but now, and now, and now — whenever
we’re not looking. Surely you can’t imagine
they don’t dance, from the root up, wishing
to travel a little, not cramped so much as wanting
a better view, or more sun, or just as avidly
more shade — surely you can’t imagine they just
stand there loving every
minute of it, the birds or the emptiness, the dark rings
of the years slowly and without a sound
thickening, and nothing different unless the wind,
and then only in its own mood, comes
to visit, surely you can’t imagine
patience, and happiness, like that.
(Mary Oliver [source])
From whiskey river:
The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts. We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need — not all the time, surely, but from time to time — to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember — the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.
(Frederick Buechner [source: quoted many places online])
From whiskey river:
Morning
Why do we bother with the rest of the day,
the swale of the afternoon,
the sudden dip into evening,then night with his notorious perfumes,
his many-pointed stars?This is the best–
throwing off the light covers,
feet on the cold floor,
and buzzing around the house on espresso–maybe a splash of water on the face,
a palmful of vitamins–
but mostly buzzing around the house on espresso,dictionary and atlas open on the rug,
the typewriter waiting for the key of the head,
a cello on the radio,and, if necessary, the windows–
trees fifty, a hundred years old
out there,
heavy clouds on the way
and the lawn steaming like a horse
in the early morning.
(Billy Collins [source])
…and:
Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough.
(Jeanette Winterson [source])
From whiskey river:
Let me make this perfectly clear.
I have never written anything because it is a Poem.
This is a mistake you always make about me,
A dangerous mistake. I promise you
I am not writing this because it is a Poem.You suspect this is a posture or an act
I am sorry to tell you it is not an act.You actually think I care if this
Poem gets off the ground or not. Well
I don’t care if this poem gets off the ground or not
And neither should you.
All I have ever cared about
And all you should ever care about
Is what happens when you lift your eyes from this page.Do not think for one minute it is the Poem that matters.
It is not the Poem that matters.
You can shove the Poem.
What matters is what is out there in the large dark
and in the long light,
Breathing.
(Gwendolyn MacEwen, “Let Me Make This Perfectly Clear,” Afterworlds)
…and:
Then there is the BIG PROBLEM — who are you? There is an endemic human tendency for self-deception. We all think we’re one kind of person when we’re somewhat different (especially viewed by others) than we imagine we are. You — the reader — no doubt feel you’re an exception.
(Alan Fletcher)
…and:
Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Can’t you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front—
(G.K. Chesterton, from The Man Who Was Thursday [source])
…but first art, damn it:
[As with the previous post, another hat tip to Janet Reid. What can I say? When the woman’s on a roll, she’s on a roll.]
