whiskey river Fridays

Infinitely More Than Meets the Eye

December 6, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Infinity Mirror Room,” by user ®DS on Flickr. If you’ve got a fast Internet connection, you’ll want to click on it to see the full-scale panorama — it’s 4.6MB in size. (Right-click and open it in a new window for best results.) For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river (answer to #4):

The universe—some information to help you live in it.

AREA: Infinite.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy offers this definition of the word “Infinite.”
Infinite: Bigger than the biggest thing ever and then some. Much bigger than that in fact, really amazingly immense, a totally stunning size, real “wow, that’s big,” time. Infinity is just so big that by comparison, bigness itself looks really titchy. Gigantic multiplied by colossal multiplied by staggeringly huge is the sort of concept we’re trying to get across here.

IMPORTS: None.
It is impossible to import things into an infinite area, there being no outside to import things in from.

EXPORTS: None.
See Imports.

POPULATION: None.
It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.

MONETARY UNITS: None.
In fact, there are three freely convertible currencies in the universe, but the Altairian Dollar has recently collapsed, the Flainian Pobble Bead is only exchangeable for other Flainian Pobble Beads, and the Triganic Pu has its own special problems. Its exchange rate of eight Ningis to one Pu is simple enough, but since a Ningi is a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side, no one has ever collected enough to own one Pu. Niginis are not negotiable currency, because the Galactibanks refuse to deal in fiddling small change. From this basic premise it is very simple to prove that the Galactibanks are also the products of a deranged imagination.

(Douglas Adams [source])

…and:

Snow

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes —
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one’s hands —
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

(Louis MacNeice [source])

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“After the Ecstasy, the Laundry”

November 29, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

[Video: “Behind the scenes” look at the making of a pop-up “art book,” Everyday Wonders, which was created to advertise the features of a new Samsung smartphone. (The advertisement itself is here.)]

From whiskey river:

Pastoral

There are so many messages I can’t interpret.
The hundred maples at the edge of my street shout orange, orange,
orange, in silent voices. And may say more if I could decipher.

How I want to understand the many calls of the birds migrating through
on their long journey. And what is the message of the shaggy
wave-curled sea quarreling around the black rocks out at the far point?

Perhaps words themselves wander off into other fields, like sheep lost
in the depths of the hills beyond the local hills so the shepherd has to
go climbing up and down, his legs aching, his breath heavy
in his chest until he spies them off there under

that far evergreen, and wrestles them down and brings them home.

(Patricia Fargnoli [source])

…and:

Anyone can see that if grasping and aversion were with us all day and night without ceasing, who could ever stand them? Under that condition, living things would either die or become insane. Instead, we survive because there are natural periods of coolness, of wholeness, and ease. In fact, they last longer than the fires of our grasping and fear. It is this that sustains us. We have periods of rest making us refreshed, alive, well. Why don’t we feel thankful for this everyday Nirvana?

We already know how to let go — we do it every night when we go to sleep, and that letting go, like a good night’s sleep, is delicious. Opening in this way, we can live in the reality of our wholeness. A little letting go brings us a little peace, a greater letting go brings us a greater peace. Entering the gateless gate, we begin to treasure the moments of wholeness. We begin to trust the natural rhythm of the world, just as we trust our own sleep and how our own breath breathes itself.

(Jack Kornfield [source])

…and:

Use what you have, use what the world gives you. Use the first day of fall: bright flame before winter’s deadness; harvest; orange, gold, amber; cool nights and the smell of fire. Our tree-lined streets are set ablaze, our kitchens filled with the smells of nostalgia: apples bubbling into sauce, roasting squash, cinnamon, nutmeg, cider, warmth itself. The leaves as they spark into wild color just before they die are the world’s oldest performance art, and everything we see is celebrating one last violently hued hurrah before the black and white silence of winter.

(Shauna Niequist [source])

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Reimagining the World

November 22, 2013 by John 8 Comments

[Image: “Imagination,” one of a series posted on Flickr by Inara Pey. (Click image for full-size original.) The images in this set are all digital creations — scenes from the Second Life alternate-universe “game”/virtual world. See Pey’s blog post about it for more information. Image used under a Creative Commons license.]

From whiskey river:

Imagination can so easily be trapped by the wish to escape painful facts and unbearable conclusions. The New Age idea that one can wish oneself out of any circumstance, disease, or bad fortune is not only sadly disrespectful toward suffering, it is also, in the end, dangerous if escape replaces awareness.

At the same time, the act of seeing changes those who see. This is perhaps most clear with self-perception. By my perceptions of who I am or what I feel, not only do I re-create my idea of who I am but I also change myself. Perception is not simply a reflection of reality but a powerful element of reality. Anyone who meditates has had this experience: Observing the activities of the mind changes the mind until, bit by bit, observation creates great changes in the soul. And the effect is the same when the act of perception is collective. A change in public perception will change the public. This is why acts of imagination are so important.

Like artistic and literary movements, social movements are driven by imagination. I am not speaking here only of the songs and poems and paintings that have always been part of movements for political and social change, but of the movements themselves, their political ideas and forms of protest. Every important social movement reconfigures the world in the imagination. What was obscure comes forward, lies are revealed, memory shaken, new delineations drawn over the old maps: it is from this new way of seeing the present that hope for the future emerges.

(Susan Griffin [source])

…and:

Love brings something inside you to life. Perhaps it is just the full dimensionality of your own capacity to feel that returns. In this state you think no impediment can be large enough to interrupt your passion. The feeling spills beyond the object of your love to color the whole world. The mood is not unlike the mood of revolutionaries in the first blush of victory, at the dawn of hope. Anything seems possible.

(Susan Griffin [source])

…and:

Uley, Glos

The moonlight is suddenly large:
a brightness on the fields that only shows
when this house dims
and something clearer rises
through the parish I know by heart, bricks and glass, the dead
immersed in stone,
subtle erasures, siftings of blood and bone,
as if this was the story of a place
that I could tell without impediment:
first thought, then form, a drift of native souls
scattered across the land like seed or snow,
ordered and lost; a sieve of consciousness
the making of this commonplace domain:
respected borders, marriages and births,
the giving up and taking on of names.

(John Burnside [source])

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Leavings

November 15, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: one of the photos in photographer Amy Regalia’s 2007 exhibit, Leavings.
For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable and finally has come to look and not to buy. So shoes are worn and hassocks are sat upon and finally everything is left where it was and the spirit passes on, just as the wind in the orchard picks up the leaves from the ground as if there were no other pleasure in the world but brown leaves, as if it would deck, clothe, flesh itself in flourishes of dusty brown apple leaves and then drops them all in a heap at the side of the house and goes on.

(Marilynne Robinson [source])

…and:

Early Morning in Your Room

It’s morning. The brown scoops of coffee, the wasp-like
Coffee grinder, the neighbors still asleep.
The gray light as you pour gleaming water —
It seems you’ve traveled years to get here.

Finally you deserve a house. If not deserve
It, have it; no one can get you out. Misery
Had its way, poverty, no money at least.
Or maybe it was confusion. But that’s over.

Now you have a room. Those lighthearted books:
The Anatomy of Melancholy, Kafka’s Letter
to His Father, are all here. You can dance
With only one leg, and see the snowflake falling

With only one eye. Even the blind man
Can see. That’s what they say. If you had
A sad childhood, so what? When Robert Burton
Said he was melancholy, he meant he was home.

(Robert Bly [source])

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Whist. Peace. Easy: No Fear, No Regret (But Maybe an Apology or Two)

November 8, 2013 by John 1 Comment

[Image: “Wangerooge Island / noise,” by user hom26 on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons license.]

From whiskey river:

Zwijgen

I slept before a wall of books and they
calmed everything in the room, even
their contents, even me, woken
by the cold and thrill, and still
they said, like the Dutch verb for falling
silent that English has no accommodation for
in the attics and rafters of its intimacies.

(Saskia Hamilton [source])

…and:

People are frightened of themselves. It’s like Freud saying that the best thing is to have no sensation at all, as if we’re supposed to live painlessly and unconsciously in the world. I have a much different view. The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of this, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.

(Marilynne Robinson [source])

…and:

When I Am Among the Trees

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”

(Mary Oliver [source])

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…Who from Their Labours Rest

November 1, 2013 by John 1 Comment

[About the image: apparently in June of every year, the English village of Fornham All Saints* holds a Scarecrow Festival, for which residents and businesses create scarecrows — such as the entries above — which they place all around town. The theme this year was “Characters from Cartoons or Adverts.” (For more, see Dave Catchpole’s album on Flickr.) I don’t recognize the cartoons or adverts from which these were drawn, but I do like the scarecrows!]

From whiskey river, in fine holiday form this week:

At no other time does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more honeysweet where you feel it touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost.

(Rainer Maria Rilke)

…and:

There was a time when the coming of this night meant something. A dark Europe, groaning in superstitious fear, dedicated this Eve to the grinning Unknown. A million doors had once been barred against the evil visitants, a million prayers mumbled, a million candles lit. There was something majestic about the idea.

(Robert Bloch)

…and:

It is not our job to remain whole.
We came to lose our leaves
Like the trees, and be born again,
Drawing up from the great roots.

(Robert Bly)

[Read more…]

Bedeviled

October 25, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

[Video: Trailer from Demon in My View, allegedly an “Edgar Allen Poe BioPic” from the apparently fictional (or at least moribund) Singularity Pictures. I could not find any reference to this film (vs. a student film by the same name) other than on YouTube — and of course, on sites (now like this one) which link to it. The title comes from Poe’s poem (not often quoted), “Alone” (q.v., here). That is — and perhaps I should add allegedly — Vincent Price in the voiceover.]

From whiskey river:

I’ll tell you another secret, this one for your own good. You may think the past has something to tell you. You may think that you should listen, should strain to make out its whispers, should bend over backward, stoop down low to hear its voice breathed up from the ground, from the dead places. You may think there’s something in it for you, something to understand or make sense of.

But I know the truth: I know from the nights of Coldness. I know the past will drag you backward and down, have you snatching at whispers of wind and the gibberish of trees rubbing together, trying to decipher some code, trying to piece together what was broken. It’s hopeless. The past is nothing but a weight. It will build inside of you like a stone.

Take it from me: If you hear the past speaking to you, feel it tugging at your back and running its fingers up your spine, the best thing to do — the only thing — is run.

(Lauren Oliver [source])

…and:

The Exam

It is mid-October. The trees are in
their autumnal glory (red, yellow-green,

orange) outside the classroom where students
take the mid-term, sniffling softly as if

identifying lines from Blake or Keats
was such sweet sorrow, summoned up in words

they never saw before. I am thinking
of my parents, of the six decades they’ve

been together, of the thirty thousand
meals they’ve eaten in the kitchen, of the

more than twenty thousand nights they’ve slept
under the same roof. I am wondering

who could have fashioned the test that would have
predicted this success? Who could have known?

(Joyce Sutphen [source])

…and:

The catalogue of the Musée Guimet of Paris describes a Mandara, in which the highest Buddha in the center of the group is surrounded by a number of his incarnations of various degrees and dignities. These are the Bodhisattvas, prophets and sages of the world, who have either taught mankind or set them good examples by their virtuous lives. On the right we see a group of personified abstracts, piety, charity, science, religion, the aspiration for progress. On the left is a third class, consisting of the ugly figures of demons, whose appearance is destined to frighten people away from sensuality, egotism, and evil desires.

The devils of Buddhism, accordingly, are not the enemies of Buddha, and not even his antagonists, but his ministers and co-workers. They partake of Buddha’s nature, for they, too, are teachers. They are the rods of punishment, representing the curse of sin, and as such have also been fitly conceived as incarnations of the Bodhi. In this interpretation, the Buddhist devils cease to be torturers and become instruments of education who contribute their share to the general system of working out the final salvation of man.

(Paul Carus [source])

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Momentary Pastures

October 18, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

[Video: if anyone’s having a moment right now, it’s Welsh folk singer/songwriter/harpist Georgia Ruth,
who just won the Welsh Music Prize for her debut album — which, like this opening track, is also
called Week of Pines. Regular readers of RAMH will understand that one of the things which appealed to
me about the album was its mix of English- and Welsh-language songs.]

From whiskey river:

Sometimes I feel like if you just watch things, just sit still and let the world exist in front of you — sometimes I swear that just for a second time freezes and the world pauses in its tilt. Just for a second. And if you somehow found a way to live in that second, then you would live forever.

(Lauren Oliver [source])

…and:

Fall Song

Another year gone, leaving everywhere
its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,

the uneaten fruits crumbling damply
in the shadows, unmattering back

from the particular island
of this summer, this NOW, that now is nowhere

except underfoot, moldering
in that black subterranean castle

of unobservable mysteries — roots and sealed seeds
and the wanderings of water. This

I try to remember when time’s measure
painfully chafes, for instance when autumn

flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing
to stay — how everything lives, shifting

from one bright vision to another, forever
in these momentary pastures.

(Mary Oliver [source (and elsewhere)])

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Seen in the Proper Light

October 11, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Night Visions,” by user lacomj on Flickr. Interestingly, this is not a black-and-white photo; says the caption on that page: “There is a lot to see up in the sky at night in infrared!”]

From whiskey river:

Scattered Reflections
(excerpt)

I had no idea what my real life was,
but I knew I had to look for it.
So one day I packed my car and took off.
I drove the whole country, examining
houses, stores, businesses, streets,
people … when all I was looking for was me.
I concluded that there was no me,
just flutterings, shudderings and shadows.
I think most people feel the same way,
and it isn’t bad, floating under the stars
at night like fireflies sending signals.

(James Tate [source])

…and:

The genius of a composer is found in the notes of his music; but analyzing the notes will not reveal his genius. The poet’s greatness is contained in his words; yet the study of his words will not disclose his inspiration. God reveals himself in creation; but scrutinize creation as minutely as you wish, you will not find God, any more than you will find the soul through careful examination of your body.

(Anthony de Mello [source])

…and:

The Buzzard and Reversal
(excerpt)

II.

In the dream, there are rabbits. Quiet as ever,
but crowded and jostling round the fallen buzzard.

They ignore the clover where the bird fell, dipping instead
into the dark thatch of feathers with their busy nibblings,
with their tiny snipping teeth. The impossible
softness of their fur is caked with blood. The bird is

broken: a collapsed umbrella. Its naked head emerges
and turns to watch itself drawn shining into the light.

(Michael Bazzett [source])

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To Emerge

October 4, 2013 by John 1 Comment

[Video: Grinder & Coola Come Out of Hibernation. The two grizzlies were adopted in 2001 by Grouse Mountain Wildlife Refuge in Vancouver; the video was shot in 2011, on their tenth anniversary there.]

From whiskey river:

From Out the Cave

When you have been
at war with yourself
for so many years that
you have forgotten why,
when you have been driving
for hours and only
gradually begin to realize
that you have lost the way,
when you have cut
hastily into the fabric,
when you have signed
papers in distraction,
when it has been centuries
since you watched the sun set
or the rain fall, and the clouds,
drifting overhead, pass as flat
as anything on a postcard;
when, in the midst of these
everyday nightmares, you
understand that you could
wake up,
you could turn
and go back
to the last thing you
remember doing
with your whole heart:
that passionate kiss,
the brilliant drop of love
rolling along the tongue of a green leaf,
then you wake,
you stumble from your cave,
blinking in the sun,
naming every shadow
as it slips.

(Joyce Sutphen [source])

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