whiskey river Fridays

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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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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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.

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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])

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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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You Think You Know the World

October 7, 2011 by John 5 Comments

[Image: Supper at Emmaus (1601-02), by Michelangelo da Caravaggio]

From whiskey river:

October

1
There’s this shape, black as the entrance to a cave.
A longing wells up in its throat
like a blossom
as it breathes slowly.

What does the world
mean to you if you can’t trust it
to go on shining when you’re

not there? and there’s
a tree, long-fallen; once
the bees flew to it, like a procession
of messengers, and filled it
with honey.

2
I said to the chickadee, singing his heart out in the
green pine tree:

little dazzler
little song,
little mouthful.

3
The shape climbs up out of the curled grass. It
grunts into view. There is no measure
for the confidence at the bottom of its eyes—
there is no telling
the suppleness of its shoulders as it turns
and yawns.
Near the fallen tree
something — a leaf snapped loose
from the branch and fluttering down — tries to pull me
into its trap of attention.

4
It pulls me
into its trap of attention.

And when I turn again, the bear is gone.

5
Look, hasn’t my body already felt
like the body of a flower?

6
Look, I want to love this world
as though it’s the last chance I’m ever going to get
to be alive
and know it.

7
Sometimes in late summer I won’t touch anything, not
the flowers, not the blackberries
brimming in the thickets; I won’t drink
from the pond; I won’t name the birds or the trees;
I won’t whisper my own name.

One morning
the fox came down the hill, glittering and confident,
and didn’t see me — and I thought:

so this is the world.
I’m not in it.
It is beautiful.

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

When

When it’s over, it’s over, and we don’t know
any of us, what happens then.
So I try not to miss anything.
I think, in my whole life, I have never missed
the full moon
Or the slipper of its coming back.
Or, a kiss,
Well, yes, especially a kiss.

(Mary Oliver [source])

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Go Right Ahead

September 30, 2011 by John 14 Comments

[Image: note dropped by South Vietnamese Air Force Major Buang-Ly onto the deck of the USS Midway on April 30, 1975. It says, “Can you move the Helicopter to the other side, I can land on your runway, I can fly 1 hour more, we have enough time to mouve. Please rescue me. Major Buang, wife and 5 child.” See the marvelous Letters of Note site for the complete story.]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

Our Valley

We don’t see the ocean, not ever, but in July and August
when the worst heat seems to rise from the hard clay
of this valley, you could be walking through a fig orchard
when suddenly the wind cools and for a moment
you get a whiff of salt, and in that moment you can almost
believe something is waiting beyond the Pacheco Pass,
something massive, irrational, and so powerful even
the mountains that rise east of here have no word for it.

You probably think I’m nuts saying the mountains
have no word for ocean, but if you live here
you begin to believe they know everything.
They maintain that huge silence we think of as divine,
a silence that grows in autumn when snow falls
slowly between the pines and the wind dies
to less than a whisper and you can barely catch
your breath because you’re thrilled and terrified.

You have to remember this isn’t your land.
It belongs to no one, like the sea you once lived beside
and thought was yours. Remember the small boats
that bobbed out as the waves rode in, and the men
who carved a living from it only to find themselves
carved down to nothing. Now you say this is home,
so go ahead, worship the mountains as they dissolve in dust,
wait on the wind, catch a scent of salt, call it our life.

(Philip Levine [source])

…and:

The truth is you already know what it’s like. You already know the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let anyone know. As though inside you is this enormous room full of what seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another and yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors. As if we are all trying to see each other through these tiny keyholes.

But it does have a knob, the door can open. But not in the way you think… The truth is you’ve already heard this. That this is what it’s like. That it’s what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless inbent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul. And you think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you’re a fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know this, and of course you try to manage what part they see if you know it’s only a part. Who wouldn’t? It’s called free will, Sherlock. But at the same time it’s why it feels so good to break down and cry in front of others, or to laugh, or speak in tongues, or chant in Bengali — it’s not English anymore, it’s not getting squeezed through any hole.

So cry all you want, I won’t tell anybody.

(David Foster Wallace, from Oblivion: Stories [source])

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A Crowded Vacuum

September 23, 2011 by John 10 Comments

[Image: Giorgio de Chirico, Melancholy and Mystery of a Street]

From whiskey river:

The River

This is my formula for the fall of things:
we come to a river we always knew we’d have to cross.
It ferries the twilight down through fieldworks

of corn and half-blown sunflowers.
The only sounds, one lost cicada calling to itself
and the piping of a bird that will never have a name.

Now tell me there is a pause
where we know there should be an end;
then tell me you too imagined it this way

with our shadows never quite touching the river
and the river never quite reaching the sea.

(John Glenday, from Grain [source])

…and:

The logic of emptiness is wonderfully air-tight. Like all simple truths, its clarity is immediately self evident. We are. And there is no moment in which we are separate and apart: we are always connected — to past, to future, to others, to objects, to air, earth, sky. Every thought, every emotion, every action, every moment of time, has multiple causes and reverberations, tendrils of culture, history, hurt and joy that stretch out mysteriously and endlessly.

(Norman Fischer [source])

…and:

An autumn night
don’t think your life
didn’t matter.

(Bashō)

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Alien You

September 16, 2011 by John 12 Comments

From whiskey river:

One Source of Bad Information

There’s a boy in you about three
Years old who hasn’t learned a thing for thirty
Thousand years. Sometimes it’s a girl.

This child has to make up its mind
How to save you from death. He said things like:
“Stay home. Avoid elevators. Eat only elk.”

You live with this child, but you don’t know it.
You’re in the office, yes, but live with this boy
At night. He’s uninformed, but he does want

To save your life. And he has. Because of this boy
You survived a lot. He’s got six big ideas.
Five don’t work. Right now he’s repeating them to you.

(Robert Bly [source])

…and:

When you think about it, it’s not easy to keep from just wandering out of life. It’s like someone’s always leaving the door open to the next world, and if you aren’t paying attention you could just walk through it, and then you’ve died. That’s why in your dreams it’s like you’re standing in that doorway, and the dying people and the newborn people pass by you, and brush up against you as they come in and out of the world during the night. You get spun around, and in the morning, it takes a while to find your way back into the world.

(Rick Moody, from The Ice Storm (film version) [source])

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