whiskey river Fridays

Anima

April 22, 2011 by John 5 Comments

[Image: Isle of the Dead (third version), by Arnold Böcklin]

Life is a garden,
not a road
we enter and exit
through the same gate
wandering,
where we go matters less
than what we notice

(Bokonon [source: see note below])

…and:

Walking to Oak-Head Pond, and Thinking of
the Ponds I Will Visit in the Next Days and Weeks

What is so utterly invisible
as tomorrow?
Not love,
not the wind,

not the inside of a stone.
Not anything.
And yet, how often I’m fooled —
I’m wading along

in the sunlight —
and I’m sure I can see the fields and the ponds shining
days ahead —
I can see the light spilling

like a shower of meteors
into next week’s trees,
and I plan to be there soon —
and, so far, I am

just that lucky,
my legs splashing
over the edge of darkness,
my heart on fire.

I don’t know where
such certainty comes from —
the brave flesh
or the theater of the mind —

but if I had to guess
I would say that only
what the soul is supposed to be
could send us forth

with such cheer
as even the leaf must wear
as it unfurls
its fragrant body, and shines

against the hard possibility of stoppage —
which, day after day,
before such brisk, corpuscular belief,
shudders, and gives way.

(Mary Oliver, from What Do We Know [source])

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Spark of Interest

April 15, 2011 by John 5 Comments

[Video: “Musical Tesla Coils: Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies.” For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

What is it that you contain? The dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia opening in your gut. Every minute, in each of you, a few million potassium atoms succumb to radioactive decay. The energy that powers these tiny atomic events has been locked inside potassium atoms ever since a star-sized bomb exploded nothing into being. Potassium, like uranium and radium, is a long-lived radioactive nuclear waste of the supernova bang that accounts for you.

Your first parent was a star.

(Jeanette Winterson)

…and:

I won’t get any poems written during these weeks either. It’s not the first time this has happened. And I won’t go on about it. There isn’t much to say. Victor Hugo once summed it up as follows (Karol Berger told me about this as we strolled through Paris, the sixteenth arrondissement). When someone asked him if writing poetry was easy, he said, “When I can write it, it’s easy; when I can’t, it’s impossible.”

(Adam Zagajewski)

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Not Trying Quite So Hard, But It Feels Right

April 8, 2011 by John 7 Comments

[Image: “Comb of Retrospection,” by Michael Leunig]

From whiskey river:

How I Would Paint Happiness

Something sudden, a windfall,
a meteor shower. No —
a flowering tree releasing
all its blossoms at once,
and the one standing beneath it
unexpectedly robed in bloom,
transformed into a stranger
too beautiful to touch.

(Lisel Mueller, from Alive Together: New And Selected Poems [source])

…and:

suggestion

maybe we try too hard to be
remembered, waking to the
glowing yellow disc in ignorance,
swearing that today will be
the day, today we will make
something of our lives. what

if we are so busy searching
for worth that we miss the
sapphire sky and cackling
blackbird. what else is missing?

maybe our steps are too straight
and our paths too narrow and
not overlapping. maybe when
they overlap someone in another
country lights a candle, a couple

resolves their argument, a young
man puts down his silver gun
and walks away.

(Naomi Shihab Nye [source])

…and (which reminds me of my commenters):

Not just any talk is conversation; not any talk raises consciousness. Good conversation has an edge: it opens your eyes to something, quickens your ears. And good conversation reverberates: it keeps on talking in your mind later in the day; the next day, you find yourself still conversing with what was said. That reverberation afterward is the very raising of consciousness; your mind’s been moved. You are at another level with your reflections.

(James Hillman, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse [source])

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Ineffable

April 1, 2011 by John 10 Comments

[For information about this image, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

There it is; the light across the water. Your story. Mine. His. It has to be seen to be believed. And it has to be heard. In the endless babble of narrative, in spite of the daily noise, the story waits to be heard.

Some people say that the best stories have no words. It is true that words drop away, and that the important things are often left unsaid. The important things are learned in faces, in gestures, not in our locked tongues. The true things are too big or too small, or in any case always the wrong size to fit in the template called language.

(Jeanette Winterson)

…and:

The Magic Mountain

A book opens. People come out, bend
this way and talk, ponder, love, wander around
while pages turn. Where did the plot go?
Why did someone sing just as the train
went by? Here come chapters with landscape all over
whatever happens when people meet. Now
a quiet part: a hospital glows in the dark.
I don’t think that woman with the sad gray eyes
will ever come back. And what does it mean when
the Italian has so many ideas? Maybe
a war is coming. The book is ending. Everyone
has a little tremolo in them; all
are going to die and it’s cold and the snow, and the
clear air. They took someone away. It’s ending,
the book is ending. But I thought — never mind. It
closes.

(William Stafford, The Way It Is)

…and:

The invisible and imponderable is the sole fact.

(Ralph Waldo Emerson)

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Awake, Really Awake… for Good or Ill

March 25, 2011 by John 8 Comments

[Image: “Insomnia, or Nocturnal Awakening,” by “neosurrealist” artist George Grie; I found it here. Click the image for a larger view. More, in the footnote to this post.]

From whiskey river:

The Whale

It is 1970
and the summer of love is over.

I am three years old, barefoot,
running along the surf
near Florence, Oregon,

where an eight-ton sperm whale
beached itself and died, the carcass
rotting now,
an entrance carved into its massive flank
for cases of dynamite, 500 pounds of explosives
necessary to rend open the interior
so scavengers can pick the skeleton clean —

but for me, it is the doorway to another world,
the body of the sacred I might enter into,
its eyes drained of all but a giant benevolence,
flukes wide as the tailfins of bombers
overhead, my mother

hoisting me to her hip as engineers argue
blasting caps and stand-off distance,
equations to undo the intricate puzzle
of muscle and bone —

the way life waits for us all
with great patience, the electrons orbiting
in their shells like distant planets we never see,
the constellations which bind the universe
undone this day, at least for this one body
beached on the sand as we witness the blast
from the sawgrass dunes,

the sudden
jolt of nerves as the body absorbs
the shockwave, beach-sand shot upward
in jets of tissue and meat,
the local news reporter dropping to his knees
to cover his head with a clipboard
while the cameraman does the same,
my mother shielding me with her torso
turned away from the blast

and I remember everyone smiling
afterward, laughing, each of us amazed
the day a god was blown to pieces on the beach
and we all walked away from it, unscathed.

(Brian Turner, from Phantom Noise [source])

…and (including extra highlighted text):

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. To put it the other way round, isn’t it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be a part of it?

(Richard Dawkins, from Unweaving the Rainbow [source])

…and:

We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?

(Ray Bradbury, from Fahrenheit 451 [source])

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It Calls Me On and On

March 18, 2011 by John 10 Comments

[Image: audio-animatronic scene at the 1960s-era Disneyland “Carousel of Progress” display. See yesterland.com for more information and a larger version of this image.]

From whiskey river:

The Bones
(excerpt)

…Shells were to shut out the sea,
The bones of birds were built for floating
On air and water, and those of fish were devised
For their feeding depths, while a man’s bones were framed
For what? For knowing the sands are here,
And coming to hear them a long time; for giving
Shapes to the sprawled sea, weight to its winds,
And wrecks to plead for its sands. These things are not
Limitless: we know there is somewhere
An end to them, though every way you look
They extend farther than a man can see.

(W. S. Merwin [read the whole thing here])

…and:

We clutter the earth with our inventions, never dreaming that possibly they are unnecessary — or disadvantageous. We devise astounding means of communication, but do we communicate with one another? We move our bodies to and fro at incredible speeds, but do we really leave the spot we started from? Mentally, morally, spiritually, we are fettered. What have we achieved in mowing down mountain ranges, harnessing the energy of mighty rivers, or moving whole populations about like chess pieces, if we ourselves remain the same restless, miserable, frustrated creatures we were before? To call such activity progress is utter delusion. We may succeed in altering the face of the earth until it is unrecognizable even to the Creator, but if we are unaffected wherein lies the meaning?

(Henry Miller [source])

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Unexpectedly Needed, or Not Needed At All

March 11, 2011 by John 15 Comments

[Video: classic moment from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre]

From whiskey river:

We may be only one of millions of advanced civilizations. Unfortunately, space being spacious, the average distance between any two of these civilizations is reckoned to be at least two hundred light-years, which is a great deal more than merely saying it makes it sound. It means for a start that even if these beings know we are here and are somehow able to see us in their telescopes, they’re watching light that left Earth two hundred years ago. So, they’re not seeing you and me. They’re watching the French Revolution and Thomas Jefferson and people in silk stockings and powdered wigs — people who don’t know what an atom is, or a gene, and who make their electricity by rubbing a rod of amber with a piece of fur and think that’s quite a trick. Any message we receive from them is likely to begin “Dear Sire,” and congratulate us on the handsomeness of our horses and our mastery of whale oil. Two hundred light-years is a distance so far beyond us as to be, well, just beyond us.

(Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything [source])

…and:

Chang Tzu tells us of a persevering man who after three laborious years mastered the art of dragon slaying. For the rest of his days, he had not a single opportunity to test his skills.

(Jorge Luis Borges [source])

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The Usefulness of Bad Things

March 4, 2011 by John 18 Comments

[Cartoon found at the site of the Anxiety and Stress Disorders Institute of Maryland.]

From whiskey river:

Bad People

A man told me once that all the bad people
Were needed. Maybe not all, but your fingernails
You need; they are really claws, and we know
Claws. The sharks — what about them?
They make other fish swim faster. The hard-faced men
In black coats who chase you for hours
In dreams — that’s the only way to get you
To the shore. Sometimes those hard women
Who abandon you get you to say, “You.”
A lazy part of us is like a tumbleweed.
It doesn’t move on its own. Sometimes it takes
A lot of Depression to get tumbleweeds moving.
Then they blow across three or four States.
This man told me that things work together.
Bad handwriting sometimes leads to new ideas;
And a careless god — who refuses to let people
Eat from the Tree of Knowledge — can lead
To books, and eventually to us. We write
Poems with lies in them, but they help a little.

(Robert Bly, Morning Poems [source])

…and:

We think hitting the ground, knocking over the barrier is a mistake, but the ground we hit, the failure we experience is not a mistake. The world is endlessly mysterious, experience is profound to a degree that will always surprise us. But it is never a mistake. To foster even a meager appreciation of that (and when we’re in the midst of a fall, meager is pretty big) is to begin to practice, to raise the bodhi-mind. It is the decision to stop complaining and to start paying attention. Contained in the fall is exactly what we need to stand. Everything we need is available, but we have to invite it.

(Bonnie Myotai Treace [source])

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Notice What This Post Is Not Doing

February 25, 2011 by John 4 Comments

From whiskey river:

The range of what we think and do
is limited by what we fail to notice.
And because we fail to notice
that we fail to notice
there is little we can do
to change
until we notice
how failing to notice
shapes our thoughts and deeds

(Daniel Goleman, quoting R.D. Laing [source])

…and:

You know, all mystics — Catholic, Christian, non-Christian, no matter what their theology, no matter what their religion — are unanimous on one thing: that all is well, all is well. Though everything is a mess, all is well. Strange paradox, to be sure. But, tragically, most people never get to see that all is well because they are asleep. They are having a nightmare.

(Anthony de Mello [source])

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Perspective, Proportion, Sweet Spot

February 18, 2011 by John 8 Comments

[Image: “Perspective,” a portion of Engineered Biotopes; this was an entry in a 2010 Greek architectural competition called “Piraeus Tower 2010 — Changing the Face/Façades Reformation.” For more on the competition, and this entry in particular, see this page at the Bustler architecture/design site.]

From whiskey river:

To My Doppelganger

You were always the careful one,
who’d tiptoe into passion
and cut it in half with your mind.
I allowed you that, and went
happier, wilder ways. Now
every thought I’ve ever had
seems a rope knotted
to another rope, going back
in time. We’re intertwined.
I’ve learned to hesitate
before even the most open door.
I don’t know what you’ve learned.
But to go forward, I feel,
is to go together now. There’s a place
I’d like to arrive by nightfall.

(Stephen Dunn [source])

…and:

It is easy to overlook this thought that life just is. As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of the intoxicating existence we’ve been endowed with. But what’s life to a lichen? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours — arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on. Lichens don’t. Like virtually all living things, they will suffer any hardship, endure any insult, for a moment’s additional existence. Life, in short just wants to be.

(Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything [source])

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