whiskey river Fridays

The Unmaking

September 20, 2013 by John 2 Comments

[Image: interior walls of the former Youth Study Center juvenile-detention facility in Philadelphia during its demolition in 2009. (Click to enlarge.) I believe the blue floors — perhaps like the one behind the upper doors here? — were for boys, and pink for girls. Photo by Andrew Evans (user werdsnave) on Flickr. As of 2012, the site is now the new location of the Barnes Foundation art museum.]

From whiskey river:

The very mind that wants to control things is the mind that’s caught up to begin with. When you’re caught up, you have fewer possibilities. Your mind can manifest in more ways if you keep it from taking form. Do you understand what it means to not let your mind take form? When you allow the mind to harden itself into a shape, a feeling, an intensity, technique, or strategies rather than allowing that clear, mirror like perception to arise, that is allowing the mind to take form.

If you let your mind take form, it becomes localized. When you feel that happen, return to a formless state. The more that you can do that, the more you’ll be your own person. The less you can do that, the more circumstances will dictate to you who you are at every moment.

(Takuan Soho [source unknown, although it’s quoted many places online])

…and:

Crossroads

The second half of my life will be black
to the white rind of the old and fading moon.
The second half of my life will be water
over the cracked floor of these desert years.
I will land on my feet this time,
knowing at least two languages and who
my friends are. I will dress for the
occasion, and my hair shall be
whatever color I please.
Everyone will go on celebrating the old
birthday, counting the years as usual,
but I will count myself new from this
inception, this imprint of my own desire.

The second half of my life will be swift,
past leaning fenceposts, a gravel shoulder,
asphalt tickets, the beckon of open road.
The second half of my life will be wide-eyed,
fingers shifting through fine sands,
arms loose at my sides, wandering feet.
There will be new dreams every night,
and the drapes will never be closed.
I will toss my string of keys into a deep
well and old letters into the grate.

The second half of my life will be ice
breaking up on the river, rain
soaking the fields, a hand
held out, a fire,
and smoke going
upward, always up.

(Joyce Sutphen [source])

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When Words Would Just Get in the Way

September 13, 2013 by John 3 Comments

[Video: a little about the Silbo Gomero whistled language of the Canary Islands *.]

From whiskey river (somewhat continuing last week’s theme):

When you stop talking to yourself and you are simply aware of what is — that is to say, of what you feel and what you sense — even that is saying too much. You suddenly find that the past and the future have completely disappeared. So also has disappeared the so-called differentiation between the knower and the known, the subject and the object, the feeler and the feeling, the thinker and the thought. They just aren’t there because you have to talk to yourself to maintain those things. They are purely conceptual. They are ideas, phantoms, and ghosts. So, when you allow thinking to stop, all that goes away, and you find you’re in an eternal here and now. There is no way you are supposed to be, and there is nothing you are supposed to do. There is no where you are supposed to go, because in order to think that you’re supposed to do something you have to think.

It is incredibly important to un-think at least once a day for the very preservation of the intellectual life, because if you do nothing but think, as you’re advised by IBM and by most of the academic teachers and gurus, you have nothing to think about except thoughts. You become like a university library that grows by itself through a process that in biology is called mitosis. Mitosis is the progressive division of cells into sub-cells, into sub-cells; so a great university library is very often a place where people bury themselves and write books about the books that are in there. They write books about books about books and the library swells, and it is like an enormous mass of yeast rising and rising, and that is all that is going on. It is a very amusing game. I love to bury my nose in ancient Oriental texts — it is fun, like playing poker or chess or doing pure mathematics. The trouble is that it gets increasingly unrelated to life, because the thinking is all words about words.

(Alan Watts [source])

…and:

Naming the Stars

This present tragedy will eventually
turn into myth, and in the mist
of that later telling the bell tolling
now will be a symbol, or, at least,
a sign of something long since lost.

This will be another one of those
loose changes, the rearrangement of
hearts, just parts of old lives
patched together, gathered into
a dim constellation, small consolation.

Look, we will say, you can almost see
the outline there: her fingertips
touching his, the faint fusion
of two bodies breaking into light.

(Joyce Sutphen [source])

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So Little to Say, So Many Ways to Say It

September 6, 2013 by John 1 Comment

[Image: “IM,” graphic by user “L.e.e.” on Flickr. The descriptive text below the work there says, FYI, I actually know 3 languages. This is the 3rd one =).]

From whiskey river:

We can set up a certain environment in which we have an agreement to suspend the rules — that is to say to meditate, to stop thinking for a while, to stop making formulations.

This means, essentially, to stop talking to yourself. That is the meaning of the word in Japanese — munen — that is ordinarily translated as “no thought.” To meditate is to stop talking to yourself!

We say, “Talking to yourself is the first sign of madness,” but we don’t follow our own advice. We’re talking to ourselves most of the time — and if you talk all the time you’ve got nothing else to talk about but your own talking! You never listen to what anybody else has to say, without a running commentary of your own talking. And if all you ever listen to is talking — be it your own or other people’s — you have nothing to talk about but talk.

You have to stop talking in order to have something to talk about!

(Alan Watts, What Is Zen? [source])

…and:

The average human, on the other hand, thinks about all sorts of things around the clock, on all sorts of levels, with interruptions from dozens of biological calendars and timepieces. There’s thoughts about to be said, and private thoughts, and real thoughts, and thoughts about thoughts, and a whole gamut of subconscious thoughts. To a telepath the human head is a din. It is a railway terminus with all the Tannoys talking at once. It is a complete FM waveband — and some of those stations aren’t reputable, they’re outlawed pirates on forbidden seas who play late-night records with limbic lyrics.

(Terry Pratchett [source])

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Mark This Moment

August 30, 2013 by John 4 Comments

[Image: partial screen capture of a page at Google Books. The worker scanning the pages of The Coquette has allowed his or her gloved finger to be recorded for posterity.]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

You will lose everything. Your money, your power, your fame, your success, perhaps even your memories. Your looks will go. Loved ones will die. Your body will fall apart. Everything that seems permanent is impermanent and will be smashed. Experience will gradually, or not so gradually, strip away everything that it can strip away. Waking up means facing this reality with open eyes and no longer turning away.

But right now, we stand on sacred and holy ground, for that which will be lost has not yet been lost, and realising this is the key to unspeakable joy. Whoever or whatever is in your life right now has not yet been taken away from you. This may sound trivial, obvious, like nothing, but really it is the key to everything, the why and how and wherefore of existence. Impermanence has already rendered everything and everyone around you so deeply holy and significant and worthy of your heartbreaking gratitude.

Loss has already transfigured your life into an altar.

(Jeff Foster [source])

…and:

The Good Life

You stand at the window.
There is a glass cloud in the shape of a heart.
The wind’s sighs are like caves in your speech.
You are the ghost in the tree outside.

The street is quiet.
The weather, like tomorrow, like your life,
is partially here, partially up in the air.
There is nothing you can do.

The good life gives no warning.
It weathers the climates of despair
and appears, on foot, unrecognized, offering nothing,
and you are there.

(Mark Strand [source])

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A Skin of Mirror

August 23, 2013 by John 8 Comments

[Video: “Eulerian Video Magnification,” by a team of researchers at MIT. For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

Keiji, a long-time Zen student, approached his master and said: “I don’t see how there can be any enlightenment that sets you free once and for all. I think we just get ever greater glimpses of Buddha-nature, the vastness that is our true Reality. It’s an ever-expanding process.”

The master replied, “That may be what you think. But what is your experience, your experience right now?”

Keiji was confused, “My experience right now, Master?”

“Yes. Do you know yourself as Keiji, having ever-expanding experiences of Buddha-nature? Or do you know yourself as Buddha-nature, having the experience of Keiji?”

(unsourced)

…and:

No one has ever seen fish.
Fish secrete highly reflective compounds
That act as a skin of mirror.
It is thought the fishes’ sides
are painted in landscapes,
mountainous.

(Annie Dillard [source])

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The Awakening

August 16, 2013 by John 2 Comments

[Video: magician Rob Zabrecky helps The 88 make a point about opening your eyes. Which is to say,
I assume The 88 is making that point… ’cause I have no idea what the lyrics of this song are. People,
people — is it really that hard or copyright-threatening to make lyrics available when you release a
new song/video?]

From whiskey river:

The physical reinvention of the world is endless, relentless, fascinating, exhaustive; nothing that seems solid is. If you could stand at just a little distance in time, how fluid and shape-shifting physical reality would be, everything hurrying into some other form, even concrete, even stone.

(Mark Doty [source])

…and (italicized paragraphs):

“The sense of justice is an enemy to prayer.”

I remember coming across this — what would you call it? — an assertion, an observation, a statement, thinking out loud, whatever it is that it should take up a whole page in Unattainable Earth, another later-career book by Milosz…

I have heard this line now so many times in my head that it has become something like a mantra. It turns me inside out and back into the world as it is and might be, and it does not cancel either justice or prayer but calmly evokes both. That is how I hear it now, today, at the moment I am writing this. As something I wish to hear. As something, in order to hear, I must say out loud in a way. Science now tells us that reading literally activates many of the same facial muscles that speaking does. Speaking and listening at once, each the same and ever the other — poetry can call both into being.

My favorite line of Whitman is from his long song of the earth “The Compost”:

Now I am terrified of the earth, it is that calm and patient.

As one ages, perhaps there is happiness only if, as Lowell puts it, there is a “terror in happiness…”

I now imagine I can hear some of that calm and patience, and even perhaps the terror, in the little bit of Milosz that takes up an entire page.

(William Olsen [source])

…and (from whiskey river’s commonplace book):

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked — as I am surprisingly often — why I bother to get up in the mornings.

(Richard Dawkins [source])

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Lacking Focus

August 9, 2013 by John 1 Comment

[Image: cover from the catalogue of the “Focus on Imaging” exhibit of 2010. Photo by artist Nick Veasey, who specializes in X-ray photography; found it on Flickr, uploaded by user Karen Roe. The image seems straightforward at first, but the more you look at it the less plausible it seems. For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

People don’t do what we want, things don’t happen quickly enough, the weather doesn’t cooperate, our bodies don’t cooperate. Why are these moments so painful? Because our minds are focused on a static, unchanging, me-centric picture while the dynamic unfolding of a broader life continues around us. There is nothing wrong with expectations per se, as it’s appropriate to set goals and work, properly, towards their fruition. But the instant we feel pain over life not going “my way,” our expectations have clearly taken an improper turn. Any moment you feel resistance or pain, look for the hidden expectation. Practice giving yourself over to what “you” don’t want. Let the line at the store be long. Let the other person interrupt you. Let the nervousness make you shake. Be where your body is, not where your mind is trying to take you.

(Guy Finley [quoted everywhere, but unsourced anywhere that I can find!])

…and:

To the Happy Few

Do you know who you are

O you forever listed
under some other heading
when you are listed at all

You whose addresses
when you have them
are never sold except
for another reason
something else that is
supposed to identify you

who carry no card
stating that you are—
what would it say you were
to someone turning it over
looking perhaps for
a date or for
anything to go by

you with no secret handshake
no proof of membership
no way to prove such a thing
even to yourselves

you without a word
of explanation
and only yourselves
as evidence

(W. S. Merwin [source])

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Take a Good Look

July 26, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: Publicity still featuring Edie Adams and Ernie Kovacs for the latter’s comedy game show, Take a Good Look. (Adams was a regular panelist.) For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

The moon shines on the river,
the wind blows through the pines —
whose providence is this long beautiful evening?

(Yongjia Xuanjue)

…and:

Speak, memory, that I may not forget the taste of roses, nor the sound of ashes in the wind; That I may once more taste the green cup of the sea.

(Daubmir Nadir)

…and:

Start with a blank surface. It doesn’t have to be paper or canvas, but I feel it should be white. We call it white because we need a word, but its true name is nothing. Black is the absence of light, but white is the absence of memory, the color of can’t remember.

(Stephen King [source])

…and:

You think when you wake up in the morning yesterday don’t count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothing else. You might think you could run away and change your name and I don’t know what all. Start over. And then one morning you wake up and look at the ceiling and guess who’s laying there?

(Cormac McCarthy)

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Not So Very Empty

July 19, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

[Video: “Empty Space Is NOT Empty,” from Veritasium (Derek Muller’s “science video blog from atoms to astrophysics!”). To my knowledge there’s no plain-old Web page to point you to, but here’s the YouTube channel, and here’s the Facebook page for those of you who are all Facebooked up.]

From whiskey river:

The Moth, the Mountains, the Rivers

Who can guess the luna’s sadness who lives so
briefly? Who can guess the impatience of stone
longing to be ground down, to be part again of
something livelier? Who can imagine in what
heaviness the rivers remember their original
clarity?

Strange questions, yet I have spent worthwhile
time with them. And I suggest them to you also,
that your spirit grow in curiosity, that your life
be richer than it is, that we — so clever, and
ambitious, and selfish, and unrestrained — are only
one design of the moving, the vivacious many.

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

Many people are afraid to empty their own minds lest they plunge into the Void. Ha! What they don’t realize is that their own Mind is the Void.

(Huang-po [source])

…and:

When Tesshu, the famous Japanese samurai master, was young and headstrong, he visited Master Dokuon and triumphantly announced to him the classic Buddhist teaching that all that exists is empty, and how there is really no you or me. The master listened to this in silence. Suddenly he snatched up his pipe and struck Tesshu’s head with it. This infuriated the young swordsman, and then Dokuon said calmly, “Emptiness is sure quick to show anger, is it not?”

(unattributed [but see here, among many other sources, in more or less these words])

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What to Do (with, for, in) Just One World

July 12, 2013 by John 2 Comments

[Video from the Slashdot “News for nerds, stuff that matters” discussion forum: Sarah Campagna
discusses her CyberCraft robot-rescue project: building new robots from scraps of old ones. The finished
works are statues — immobile, fine-art sculpture — rather than machines, but they do arrest the
attention. The company slogan: “Robots, Rayguns, and Spaceships You Will Covet.”]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

Long Point Light

Long Point’s apparitional
this warm spring morning,
the strand a blur of sandy light,

and the square white
of the lighthouse—separated from us
by the bay’s ultramarine

as if it were nowhere
we could ever go—gleams
like a tower’s ghost, hazing

into the rinsed blue of March,
our last outpost in the huge
indetermination of sea.

It seems cheerful enough,
in the strengthening sunlight,
fixed point accompanying our walk

along the shore. Sometimes I think
it’s the where-we-will-be,
only not yet, like some visible outcropping

of the afterlife. In the dark
its deeper invitations emerge:
green witness at night’s end,

flickering margin of horizon,
marker of safety and limit.
But limitless, the way it calls us,

and where it seems to want us
to come. And so I invite it
into the poem, to speak,

and the lighthouse says:
Here is the world you asked for,
gorgeous and opportune,

here is nine o’clock, harbor-wide,
and a glinting code: promise and warning.
The morning’s the size of heaven.

What will you do with it?

(Mark Doty [source])

…and (in slightly different words):

As a working hypothesis to explain the riddle of our existence, I propose that our universe is the most interesting of all possible universes, and our fate as human beings is to make it so.

(Freeman Dyson [source])

…and:

Today

Today I’m flying low and I’m
not saying a word.
I’m letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep.

The world goes on as it must,
the bees in the garden rumbling a little,
the fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten.
And so forth.

But I’m taking the day off.
Quiet as a feather.
I hardly move though really I’m traveling
a terrific distance.

Stillness. One of the doors
into the temple.

(Mary Oliver [source])

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