Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

To Journey… But, Well, No: To Remain Still

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[Image: “Front Door Key,” by John E. Simpson.]

From whiskey river:

Littlefoot
(excerpt)

We’ve all led raucous lives,
some of them inside, some of them out.
But only the poem you leave behind is what’s important.
Everyone knows this.
The voyage into the interior is all that matters,
Whatever your ride.
Sometimes I can’t sit still for all the asininities I read.
Give me the hummingbird, who has to eat sixty times
His own weight a day just to stay alive.
Now that’s a life on the edge.

(Charles Wright [source])

…and:

When the ego invests itself in its knowing, it is convinced that it has the whole picture. At that point, growth stops. The journey stops. Nothing new is going to happen to us after that point. The term we’re using here, “beginner’s mind,” comes from Buddhism. For Buddhists, it seems to refer to an urgent need to remain open, forever a student. A beginner’s mind always says, “I’m a learner. I’ve got more to learn.” It has to do with humility before reality, and never assuming that I understand. If there are fifty thousand levels of the mystery, maybe I’m at level forty-five. Maybe there’s more that needs to show itself to me. Can you imagine what a different world it would be if we all lived with that kind of humility?

(Center for Action and Contemplation [source])

Over the last couple of very distracting weeks, I’ve been reading — in bursts of 15 to 30 minutes or so — a book called Wolfish, by Erica Berry: an extended meditation on wolves, and their not insubstantial place in our (especially Berry’s!) world and subconscious. The book swings back and forth between information about and contemplation of wolves as such, and Berry’s personal history — especially, her history of fear.

At one point in the latter, she spends a year in Sicily as an assistant at a cooking school with two colleagues, Paul and Kiley. The three of them share a meal one evening of greens and other foodstuffs recently foraged from the countryside, moments before a hair-raising episode of (for all three of them) food poisoning:

I couldn’t help swinging the conversation to mortality.

“Okay, a question. Would you rather know in advance the exact day you were going to die, or would you rather just, you know, drop?”

“What a question, Berry,” said Paul. “Some nerve.” But he was grinning, pouring the lamb broth over the greens and forking a wad of it onto a tear of bread, eyes narrowing with thought.

“Are we talking, like, knowing years in advance, or weeks, or days?” Kiley took a swig of wine, folding her arms over her plate in that let’s-get-down-to-business gesture.

“Either way,” I said. “For the sake of argument: say you have at least a year’s warning.”

We circled the question and heaped our plates, the sky blackening as a breeze rolled in, bringing the eucalyptus trees and orange grove right to our noses, the candle in the center of the table spasming with light. We talked; we ate. Somewhere inside our bellies, unknown for another hour or so, the toxins from the first bites of the greens were working their way into our bloodstreams. Doughing our minds, our eyes, our walk. But that comes later. The poison, at first, was nearly pleasant. Like wine on an empty stomach. The room made silky around the edges.

“I’ll say it: I’d rather just drop dead,” said Kiley eventually, and we all laughed because by that point, it seemed so obvious. Torture was knowing an unwanted change was coming over one’s body and being unable to stop it.

(Erica Berry [source])

Aside from the drama of the moment, one reason I think this passage stood out for me is a recent awareness of unwanted changes in my own body… I was never and certainly am not now someone anyone would call athletic; on the other hand, my body never gave me — in my sedentary lifestyle — much reason to think about its efficiency, about its ability to perform Everyday Tasks X, Y, and Z.

Lately, though… well, it’s hard to say with any precision (probably exactly because I’ve never much thought about let alone discussed my health). Let’s just leave it for now at: wow, I’m getting old.

______

P.S. Careful observers will note something odd about this weekly “whiskey river Fridays” post: it didn’t appear until Saturday. Yesterday, see, was our move-in day: we’ve finally come to a landing, in the so-called “Research Triangle” area of North Carolina… and I just couldn’t grab enough time to wrap up the post. But I can make it appear that I did, thanks to the digital magic of back-dating! (laughing)

Life Among the (Wriggling) Living

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[Image: “Greenway Trail Abstraction,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) Said the caption when I posted this on Instagram: “Wooden bridge. Algae covered. Yellow ‘Don’t fall off!’-type warning stripe. What appear to be tread marks from a thousand different bicycles. And then the final touch (courtesy of time and gravity) which somehow ties the whole thing off: simple pine needles.”]

From a single day’s post at whiskey river:

Out there people are working and arguing and laughing, living their beautiful, terrible lives, falling in love and having babies and being bored out of their skulls and feeling depressed, then being consoled by some little thing like watching the patterns the light makes through the leaves of trees, casting shadows on the sidewalks.

I remember the line from that poem now.

Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

(Kim Addonizio [source])

…and (italicized lines):

VIII

She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, “The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.”
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

(Wallace Stevens [source])

Not from whiskey river:

The box is our great symbol of classification. What box are you in? All words are boxes: animal, vegetable, mineral, solid, gas, liquid, Republican, Democrat, capitalist, communist, Christian, heathen, male, female, and so on. All boxes. And because we think in boxes, we live in boxes — poorly made, identical boxes. Instead, consider the types of fish who make homes in beautiful shells with glorious spirally wiggles on them and lovely colors. But we want everything straightened out, and that rigidity is always in contrast with the fluidity that surrounds us. We are landlubbers, as opposed to people of the waves, although we Brits have always made a great deal of associating freedom with the ocean.

{ The art of faith is not in taking a stand but in learning how to swim. }

We think of the sea as fluid and the land as solid, but nothing could be further from the truth. Where I live, in Sausalito, a lot of land was reclaimed along the waterfront, and they dredged out mud to make the marina, not realizing that land, too, is liquid. So the land adjoining the water is sinking because it’s filling up the hole made by the excavation. People don’t think of things like this, because they conceive of land as purely solid…

Learning to wiggle is fundamental to pleasure. We should let go and relax. But that doesn’t mean that we become droopy — relaxing means becoming supple. It means learning your weight, how to use it, and how to flow with gravity. Water always takes the course of least resistance — it flows and wiggles with gravity — and yet it possesses tremendous strength. For most of us, especially white Anglo-Saxon Protestants and Irish Catholics, taking the path of least resistance is somehow considered cowardly and despicable. You’ve got to get there the fastest way possible, which is again in a straight line, the supposed shortest distance between two points.

That’s why jogging isn’t the right way to run. The right way to run is by dancing.

(Alan Watts [source])

…and:

: We have been trained by motion-picture and related technologies to imagine that life — our memories, in particular — can be effectively captured as a series of unmoving images which merely simulate movement. We say, “I have a picture in my head of a time when [fill in the blank].” To say instead that we remember a week, a day, a moment as a wriggling, multicolored caterpillar would just sound, well, weird… although that’s exactly how life unfolds.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)

If You’re Gonna Smudge the Borders, Consider Smudging Hard

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[Image: “Category Mistake: Cell Towers à la Palm Trees, Las Vegas, Nevada” by John E. Simpson.]

Probably a chaotic few days ahead, as The Missus and I transition from our extended state of “staying someplace” to one of “living someplace.” The distinction of staying vs. living somewhere, like a lot of distinctions, requires the drawing of rather arbitrary lines; in fact, we’ll probably be spending any given moment, post-move, more or less as we’ve been spending them for months now… with one difference. To wit: our minds will not be whirring like tops with all the things we must address to get through the next week or month. We’ll finally banish to the recycling bin all the stacks of used Post-It notes, all the scraps of notepaper covered with frantically brainstormed lists and reminders to ourselves. Gods willing, we’ll feel retired, finally — not feel that we’ve simply moved from one workplace to another (however mobile the latter may have been).

The awkward blurring of lines between one thing and another has cropped up a few times since last week. First, from whiskey river:

The world, every day, is New. Only for those born in, say, 1870 or so, can there be a meaningful use of the term postmodernism, because for the rest of us we are born and we see and from what we see and digest we remake our world. And to understand it we do not need to label it, categorize it. These labels are slothful and dismissive, and so contradict what we already know about the world, and our daily lives. We know that in each day, we laugh, and we are serious. We do both, in the same day, every day. But in our art we expect clear distinction between the two. We expect a movie to be a comedy or a drama. We expect writing to be serious writing or humorous writing. But imagine if the same thing were done to describe one’s hours or one’s days: Every day, when we buy a lollipop at the corner store, we hear a joke; someone banters with us; at we see something ha-ha in the newspaper; we watch something funny on TV; a friend tells a good story that makes us laugh. And all these thing happen even on the days when other, horrible things happen. But we don’t label our days Serious Days or Humorous Days. We know that each day contains endless nuances—if written would contain dozens of disparate passages, funny ones, sad ones, poignant ones, brutal ones, the terrifying and the cuddly. But we are often loathe to allow this in our art. And that is too bad.

(Dave Eggers [source])

And then, not from whiskey river:

What, it seems worth asking, is a wolf? The Oglala believe all animals are members of their own nations, with wolves thus deserving of “recognition as nations with full rights to live and move,” beings who are “relatives” and “equals” to humans. To the Cherokee, a wolf is a watchdog and hunter for Kana’ti, the power spirit of game animals and insects. To the Pueblo, a wolf is a gift sent by their creator, a magical spirit often represented as female with an ability to heal and instill courage, to know the night around her as easily as she knows her own bones. “In our astronomy / the Great Wolf / lived in sky, / It was… the mother of all women, / and howled her daughters’ names / into the winds of night,” writes Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan in her poem “The Fallen.”

To Swedish botanist and zoologist Carl Linnaeus, in 1758, the wolf was a creature to classify beside coyotes and jackals under the Latin genus Canis, for “dog.” While Canis lupus were wolves, Canis familiaris were our pets. Linnaeus’s main distinction was that the wolf was the one with the tail turned up at its end, like a comma flipped on its back. In recent years, after finding genetic differences between dogs and wolves to be negligible, scientists renamed dogs Canis lupus familiaris. The wolf in our family.

(Erica Berry [source])

All of which, maybe inevitably, led me to the ur-source:

The phrase [“category-mistake”] is introduced in the first chapter [of Gilbert Ryle’s 1946 book, The Concept of Mind]. The first example is of a visitor to Oxford. The visitor, upon viewing the colleges and library, reportedly inquired “But where is the University?” The visitor’s mistake is presuming that a University is part of the category “units of physical infrastructure” rather than that of an “institution”. Ryle’s second example is of a child witnessing the march-past of a division of soldiers. After having had battalions, batteries, squadrons, etc. pointed out, the child asks when is the division going to appear. “The march-past was not a parade of battalions, batteries, squadrons and a division; it was a parade of the battalions, batteries and squadrons of a division.” (Ryle’s italics) His third example is of a foreigner being shown a cricket match. After being pointed out batsmen, bowlers and fielders, the foreigner asks: “who is left to contribute the famous element of team-spirit?”

(Wikipedia [source])

One more Friday RAMH post from the road, then!

Consider What We Mean When We Say “Even-Keeled”…

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[Equanimity found on the wall of a parking lot: ready for anything. Mural (in Downtown Durham, North Carolina): words by Kate Bowler, design by Gwen Heginbotham, art by Loren Pease; photo by John E. Simpson. I liked the sentiment very much, as well as the mural itself; on the other hand, the mural’s look seems to illustrate only the “beautiful” part. So I duplicated the photo in black-and-white (slide right) to try to mute or balance out the overall message a little.]

This week, from whiskey river:

The canoe is incredibly wobbly, even when you sit on your heels. A balancing act. If you have the heart on the left side you have to lean a bit to the right, nothing in the pockets, no big arm movements, please, all rhetoric has to be left behind. Precisely: rhetoric is impossible here. The canoe glides out over the water.

(Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Robert Bly [source])

…and:

Curriculum Vitae

1) I was born in a Free City, near the North Sea.

2) In the year of my birth, money was shredded into
confetti. A loaf of bread cost a million marks. Of
course I do not remember this.

3) Parents and grandparents hovered around me. The
world I lived in had a soft voice and no claws.

4) A cornucopia filled with treats took me into a building
with bells. A wide-bosomed teacher took me in.

5) At home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth.

6) On Sundays the city child waded through pinecones
and primrose marshes, a short train ride away.

7) My country was struck by history more deadly than
earthquakes or hurricanes.

8) My father was busy eluding the monsters. My mother
told me the walls had ears. I learned the burden of secrets.

9) I moved into the too bright days, the too dark nights
of adolescence.

10) Two parents, two daughters, we followed the sun
and the moon across the ocean. My grandparents stayed
behind in darkness.

11) In the new language everyone spoke too fast. Eventually
I caught up with them.

12) When I met you, the new language became the language
of love.

13) The death of the mother hurt the daughter into poetry.
The daughter became a mother of daughters.

14) Ordinary life: the plenty and thick of it. Knots tying
threads to everywhere. The past pushed away, the future left
unimagined for the sake of the glorious, difficult, passionate
present.

15) Years and years of this.

16) The children no longer children. An old man’s pain, an
old man’s loneliness.

17) And then my father too disappeared.

18) I tried to go home again. I stood at the door to my
childhood, but it was closed to the public.

19) One day, on a crowded elevator, everyone’s face was younger
than mine.

20) So far, so good. The brilliant days and nights are
breathless in their hurry. We follow, you and I.

(Lisel Mueller [source])

Not from whiskey river — indeed, from Lake Wobegon, Minnesota — an object lesson in not wanting what you can’t have:

J.P. was a deer hunter. He did it out of ignorance, because his dad had done it, and like his dad, he wrapped a deer hide around himself and wore a pair of antlers and sat in a blind with his back to a tree and watched the stump where he had set a bowl of raspberry Jell-O covered with Miracle Whip for bait. Deer love Miracle Whip especially with chopped walnuts and raisins. He attached a brown string to the bowl and tied the other end around his ankle, in case he fell asleep. Which he did.

He slept peacefully until he felt a slight tug on his ankle and jumped up, gun cocked, and saw a skunk with its nose in the Miracle Whip crunching on walnuts. For this skunk, the sight of a man with antlers was too much excitement for one day. The skunk raised his tail and cut loose. He was a teenage skunk full of hormones, and the aroma almost knocked J.P. off his feet. He dropped his gun and staggered out of the clearing, tearing clothing off him as he stumbled blindly ahead through the underbrush, and that was what the family in the Winnebago saw as they drove up the highway, a naked man with a shotgun who smelled bad, towing a bowl of Jell-O.

They didn’t stop to help him. They couldn’t imagine what help would be helpful. They called the sheriff and a couple of deputies responded and found him in the ditch. They tossed him a blanket to wrap himself in and they sprayed him with Hi-lex, which they keep in the squad car for just this sort of thing, and he recovered to where he could point in the direction of his car. They drove across the field, J.P. walking fifty feet ahead, and they saw his pants, which had his car keys in them, and they got a quart of sparkling water and threw it in his face to wash out his eyes, and asked him if he was okay. In Lake Wobegon, we are brought up to say yes to this question.

So the deputies were glad to leave him there and eventually he found the car and made his way home. He soaked himself for a couple days and then resumed his life, but you never completely recover after an experience like that. He went to Bill the barber who shaved his head but his hair grew back smelling skunky so he had it done again. When his friends ran into him in town, they didn’t ask, “How’s it going?” because they could see for themselves. The people in the Winnebago posted a picture of him on Instagram, naked, armed, somewhat crazed, with the caption, “Somewhere someone is having a worse day than you,” which someone saw in a book of trending memes and showed to J.P.—he’d become a joke to media managers and content specialists—and it broke his heart and he took up residence in the Upper Peninsula. It happened three years ago but, standing near me in the Sidetrack, he still smelled faintly acrid and looked unwell.

[J.P.] told me the whole story, except for the Instagram part, and said, “One good thing about getting skunked is that deerflies never bother you again. Up on the U.P. they got deerflies the size of hummingbirds. Bug repellent only irritates them. But they smell skunk and they leave you alone.”

(Garrison Keillor [source])

Nurturing a Sense of Place, Remembering How You Got There

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[Image: “Ever Onward (Helen Putnam Regional Park, Petaluma, California),” by John E. Simpson.]

Big news (well, big as “news” from this quarter ever gets): The Missus and I have found a new home, after nearly two years of a road trip spent in temporary accommodations (and nearly four years since our last real house). No real details to share here, but in general, the new place is in a small town in North Carolina, just a little west-southwest of Raleigh.

Honestly, we stayed in several areas we could’ve both happily called “home,” given different circumstances: upstate New York; the Green Mountains of Vermont; Nashville; Sedona, Arizona; northern California… In a way, I think, we may have been using our time on the road exactly to help us coalesce around a mutually satisfying type of place to settle in.

I think we’ve found such a place. Which brings me to a handful of readings from the past week…

First, from whiskey river:

We came on the wind of the carnival. A wind of change, of promises. The merry wind, the magical wind, making March hares of everyone, tumbling blossoms and coattails and hats; rushing towards summer in a frenzy of exuberance.

(Joanne Harris [source])

…and:

Compassing

limitless is a faraway place
way beyond the rock-strewn ridge named possibility

it’s over there
through a tangle-thick forest the old ones call maybe
it is a fortnight’s trudge through what could be
and at least as far as a strong man can chunk a stone
—straight as the crow flies
a hard tough row across the mind’s breadth
a frog’s hair from probably and head high from unreachable
you can’t get there from here
but you can get here from there

unfurl the map
aim the compass well
cause true north does lie
dead reckon instead on reality
find yourself there

(J. Drew Lanham [source])

Some years ago, on the Quora question-and-answer site, someone asked me to answer this riddle: “What does the expression ‘you can never go home again’ mean? Have you experienced this in your life?” In answering it, I drew mostly on memories of the small New Jersey town I’d grown up in. But I concluded more generally, distinguishing the notion of home as a physical, geographical location from the notion of home as something virtual, something shaped in our minds… and asserting that it’s the latter which is more “real”:

You can almost always return to Home, The Place. But — eventually — you can never return to Home, The Actuality. It’s as gone as gone can be. Those big maples along Third Street used to drop all their leaves in autumn over about the same month-long period, and you could smell the aroma of curbside leaf fires (which were still legal, until they weren’t) that whole time. I used to think about that aroma, those glowing and brown particles of smoke drifting up and through the air, eventually settling on neighbors’ lawns and out onto the surface of the river. Those particles are still there, in some form — I was right about that. But eventually they stopped being added to, and eventually the trees themselves were gone, and now few people in the town remember or think of any of that. They’ve all got their own homes, homes they’ll eventually never be able to return to.

We’ll all just have to carry Home, The Actuality, around with us, until our own blood stops pumping. And then Home, The Actuality, will have some new and just as unrecoverable shape: whatever Home is, it’s not something “out there” to return to. It’s something inside, to which we can all return (or not) as we want, as often as we want.

(JES [source])

We won’t actually move in for a couple of weeks, but yes: we’ve got a new Home, The Place. I have no idea under what conditions we’ll eventually leave it; I know we will, though, and eventually of course not return to it, for “real,” ever again. In the meantime, it’s up to us to fit it into the loose-fitting form of Home, The Actuality — to fit it into our hearts.

Knowing What One Knows, and Sharing It with No One

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[Image: “Clarity Piercing / Thom McAn,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) I’m surely not the only photographer who’s resisted the temptation to undercut an image with a smug or too-clever title or other commentary — but this is one of those pictures for which the temptation almost won.]

Consider those moments familiar, I think, to pretty much all of us: any moment in which we observe something which tickles us, or moves or angers us, or just brings fleeting satisfaction in and of itself, to no one but ourselves. (Sometimes, but mercifully not always, such moments abruptly collapse when pricked with a question from someone else, on the order of “What are you thinking about?” or just plain, “What?”) These little sparkles of Something Happening bespeckle our days like the dozen seasonings of a stew, and I believe they’re what make the stew remotely palatable — even more than do the major ingredients (conversations, events, “experiences”) which we’re more likely to recall as chunky milestones of a day, a week, a life.

Such unspoken secrets underpin friendships and loves, whole societies and subcultures. They’re not — needn’t be, at any rate — guilty secrets; they’re just ones we hold within ourselves, like tiny jewels in a black-velvet bag tied with a drawstring: in our consciousness, individual or collective. And they’re at the core of a couple of readings this week.

First, from whiskey river:

Here in these circuses and carnivals we all love each other with our oddities and queernesses. People leave us alone because we mesmerize them with tricks, tickle them with feathers, tie them up in wonder and hope. We never let them know that we read books, that we love everyone and accept everything, that our bodies are free, that we travel, resist, and fight and that we give refuge to convicts and revolutionaries, that we have saved gypsies and Jews. We never let them know that we untie ropes, that we train horses to dance without the weight of armor or swords, and we keep it a secret that the strongman loves the cannon man, that they cook dinner for one another, that they share the same bed, and that every time the cannon man is up in the air with smoke trailing from his feet, the strongman waits on the other side to catch him if he falls. And, my little child, do not tell a soul that we are knowers and non-believers. We know that after this grand act of life nothing is left but the dust beneath the elephants’ feet and the sound of the monkeys’ clapping. When they come to you with prophets and promises of heavens of honey and milk, remember that we are no more than flowers having our last glance at the world before we die, with grace and with gratitude for the wonders we witnessed, for the magic box we built, the animals we loved, the carpets we flew, the stars that we encountered after the spectacle ended and the spectators were left to lament and wait for the coming of their phantom trains to take them to their imaginary heavens…

(Rawi Hage [source])

…and, not from whiskey river:

Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov stirred at half past eight to the sound of rain on the eaves. With a half-opened eye, he pulled back his covers and climbed from bed. He donned his robe and slipped on his slippers. He took up the tin from the bureau, spooned a spoonful of beans into the Apparatus, and began to crank the crank.

Even as he turned the little handle round and round, the room remained under the tenuous authority of sleep. As yet unchallenged, somnolence continued to cast its shadow over sights and sensations, over forms and formulations, over what has been said and what must be done, lending each the insubstantiality of its domain. But when the Count opened the small wooden drawer of the grinder, the world and all it contained were transformed by that envy of the alchemists–the aroma of freshly ground coffee.

In that instant, darkness was separated from light, the waters from the lands, and the heavens from the earth. The trees bore fruit and the woods rustled with the movement of birds and beasts and all manner of creeping things. While closer at hand, a patient pigeon scuffed its feet on the flashing.

(Amor Towles [source])

Well, Hello There: Touching Base With the Creature Within You

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[Image: “Something Caught My Eye (and My Eye Caught It Back),” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

Like many people, I think — at least, many people of a certain age — a lot of what I have always believed came to me through books and other reading. (My computer’s been carrying around a scanned copy of an old Smokey Stover cartoon for months now, just waiting for me to recognize the right occasion to spring it on the world.) Many of those beliefs were simply absorbed, without question, and in many cases I can even remember (i.e., think I remember) where or when or in what source I first encountered their expression.

So it is with “Namaste” — rather, with what “namaste” quote-unquote “means.”

I’m pretty sure I know which book told me that Namaste, especially when spoken with hands raised prayerfully before the speaker, translates to English as “I salute the light within you.” (I won’t share the title or author with you here, because I’m not positive I got it from that book.) It seems, though, that Namaste means nothing of the sort — that it means nothing more than “Hello.”

For what it’s worth, I just plugged the word into Google Translate, which offers Greetings! — including the exclamation point — as the literal meaning.

Now, from a certain hippy-dippy perspective, we could say that any greeting, in acknowledging the presence of someone else, salutes the light within them — salutes something within them, anyhow. A heartfelt Hello!, Howdy, ‘Morning!, etc., especially with the right facial expression and maybe a hug, says much more than I see and recognize you. It says I know some things about your inner self and they’re things which please me. So, yeah, I guess they’re all “saluting the light within [someone].” Even so, it’s a stretch to go from that hippy-dippy perspective to assert a literal translation.

Literal translations aside, there’s value in sometimes peeking beneath the surface even of strangers — even, especially, beneath the surface of the strangest of strangers: the surface of ourselves. We’re always in the process of remaking our “selves,” papering over unpleasant memories, inflating perfectly pleasant little balloons of flattery into the unsustainable blimp we call “praise,” retrofitting past sins in the camouflage of virtue, reworking limp verbal banter into dialogue worthy of Elmore Leonard or the Mark Brothers. But there’s other stuff buried deep inside — whether buried by the sheer weight of multiple self-delusions, or by simple forgetfulness… It’s a wonder we recognize ourselves at all.

And so we come to a couple of readings from the week, which touch on rediscovering or re-acknowledging something — light or otherwise — within us. We start, as usual, with a post from whiskey river‘s recent stream of consciousness:

I want to avoid preaching at you but I do want to convince you that the true and durable path into and through experience involves being true to the actual givens of your lives. True to your own solitude, true to your own secret knowledge. Because oddly enough, it is that intimate, deeply personal knowledge that links us most vitally and keeps us most reliably connected to one another.

And you will be sure to keep going in life on a far steadier keel and with far more radiant individuality if you navigate by that principle.

(Seamus Heaney [source])

And then, not from whiskey river but in the same spirit of lifting up the corner to peek below:

Raft

At the said-to-be bottomless pond
at the sand pit, the raft we discovered
was a heavy barn door, maybe ten feet
by twelve, halfway in, halfway out
of the water where others had left it,
probably older boys, always the first
to find something good, use it a while,
then leave it for us, Billy and Larry,
Danny and me, floating it out onto
the water, wading in after it, holding
onto its edge as we slid down the slope
up to our shoulders, then one by one
helped each other climb on, soaked
and shivering, standing to balance,
arms spread, each to a corner, facing
each other, frightened but laughing,
not a forethought among us for a pole
to push out with, nor a plank for an oar,
as we trusted that door as it floated
not on but just under the surface,
one corner sinking, then slowly lifting
as another went down, ankle deep
over the cold, bottomless darkness.
Seventy years later, I still feel that door
sinking under my weight, can still see
the white faces of Larry and Billy
and Danny looking across into mine
as we held our arms wide, as if to keep
some wild, free, invisible creature
there at the center from running away,
and at eighty I know what it was.

(Ted Kooser [source])

…and/or, in a lighter vein:

Chris has always fantasized about being the sort of man who might buy the red, yellow, and green peppers. The sort of man who would buy broccoli or ginger or beetroot out of choice. To Chris, the fruit and veg aisle at the supermarket was where he bought bananas and occasionally a bag of spinach to put at the top of his basket in case he bumped into anyone he knew. People always look into your basket, don’t they? Chris wanted to pretend he shopped and ate like a grown man. Slip the Kit-Kats under the spinach and no one’s any the wiser.

Chris thinks back to the day a cashier in Tesco’s was scanning his shopping. As she swiped through the chocolate, the crisps, the Diet Coke, the sausage rolls, she had looked up with a kind smile and said, “What is it, dear, a child’s birthday party?” Chris has used self-service checkouts ever since.

(Richard Osman [source])

Summoning a Phoenix, Seeing Your Self in the Flames

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[Image: “Untitled (History Painting)” (2013), by Korakrit Arunanondchai. For his “History Painting” series, says the Nasher Museum of Art’s Web site, “Arunanondchai bleached scraps of denim and set them on fire. The flames were then photographed, printed and placed behind the burnt areas of the fabric, giving the illusion of a continuous, live burn. As documentation of the flames, the photographs function to capture a moment in the denim’s history. They also serve to mend the very holes caused by the fire.” The image shown here — a photograph of a photographic (etc.) mixed-media work — doesn’t begin to capture the impact of the work itself… which really does appear to be burning.]

There’s a trick to genuinely knowing yourself, I think — a trick of balancing: balancing on a knife edge between seeing yourself (and your effects, your influence) everywhere, and seeing yourself (and your effects, your influence) not at all. I don’t know that I’ll ever master the trick (I stand, wobbling, on that blade, certain that only with very great luck will I never slip and fall astraddle it (yeesh)). But, yeah, I’m aware of the trick. And I sometimes have to remind myself of it, especially when I encounter philosophical statements which seem to encourage me to disappear, to let myself be absorbed into the cosmos, carrying or expressing no self at all.

All of which came to mind as I read this selection from whiskey river (which quoted the last stanza alone):

Another Night in the Ruins

1

In the evening
haze darkening on the hills,
purple of the eternal,
a last bird crosses over,
‘flop flop,’ adoring
only the instant.

2

Nine years ago,
in a plane that rumbled all night
above the Atlantic,
I could see, lit up
by lightning bolts jumping out of it,
a thunderhead formed like the face
of my brother, looking down
on blue,
lightning-flashed moments of the Atlantic.

3

He used to tell me,
“What good is the day?
On some hill of despair
the bonfire
you kindle can light the great sky—
though it’s true, of course, to make it burn
you have to throw yourself in…”

4

Wind tears itself hollow
in the eaves of these ruins, ghost-flute
of snowdrifts
that build out there in the dark:
upside-down ravines
into which night sweeps
our cast wings, our ink-spattered feathers.

5

I listen.
I hear nothing. Only
the cow, the cow of such
hollowness, mooing
down the bones.

6

Is that a
rooster? He
thrashes in the snow
for a grain. Finds
it. Rips
it into
flames. Flaps. Crows.
Flames
bursting out of his brow.

7

How many nights must it take
one such as me to learn
that we aren’t, after all, made
from that bird that flies out of its ashes,
that for us
as we go up in flames, our one work
is
to open ourselves, to be
the flames?

(Galway Kinnell [source])

And then I read this passage in Diane Ackerman’s Deep Play (not, of course, from whiskey river):

Once, at an artists’ colony on a Florida estuary, thirty of us gathered to celebrate the summer solstice with song and ritual. In stilted-up cottages connected by raised walkways, we lived along the estuary like a troupe of wild macaques nestled among the green bosoms of the trees, high above a dense forest floor that leprosy-prone armadillos shared with wild pigs, raccoons, foxes, and pine snakes. Spanish moss hung everywhere like scribbles of DNA. Gathering outside my house to celebrate summer solstice, we each wrote a wish on a small pennant of paper, and tossed the chits into the fire, where they burst into flames and danced on hot vapors into the night. Like fireflies, our unspoken hopes flashed toward heaven. Seated at that solstice campfire, I watched each paper wish tremble into flame for a moment and kite higher and higher until it joined the others in a bouquet of sparks, then mingled with the constellations and vanished into night.

(Diane Ackerman [source])

Fire carries such powerful metaphorical weight: safety (in the form of light and warmth) from the outside world, danger, power, the flickering transience of life… Maybe we need to give fire a rest, instead of requiring it to carry our selves as well as a symbol of so much else.

Singing in the Second Month, Voices in the Cold

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[Image: a dust devil waltzing across the surface of Mars, as captured by the HIRISE camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. You can listen to the sound of a dust devil sweeping over the Perseverance surface rover and read more details about it here; you can read more about sound in the Martian atmosphere, in general, here, at the source.]

I’ve pulled a couple of quotations from whiskey river (italicized lines) this week:

Cold Poem

A cold has put me on the fritz, said Eugene O’Neill,
how can I forget certain things?
Now I have thirteen bottles of red wine
where once I had over a thousand.
I know where they went but why should I tell?
Every day I feed the dogs and birds.
The yard is littered with bones and seed husks.
Hearts spend their entire lives in the dark,
but the dogs and birds are fond of me.
I take a shower frequently but still
women are not drawn to me in large numbers.
Perhaps they know I’m happily married
and why exhaust themselves vainly to seduce me?
I loaned hundreds of thousands of dollars
and was paid back only by two Indians.
If I had known history it was never otherwise.
This is the song of the cold when people
are themselves but less so, people
who haven’t listened to my unworded advice.
I was once described as “immortal”
but this didn’t include my mother who recently died.
And why go to New York after the asteroid
and the floods of polar waters, the crumbling
buildings, when you’re the only one there
in 2050? Come back to earth.
Blow your nose and dwell on the shortness of life.
Lift up your dark heart and sing a song about
how time drifts past you like the gentlest, almost
imperceptible breeze.

(Jim Harrison [source])

…and:

Color and sound are not only the language in which one communicates with the life without, but also the language in which one communicates with the life within. One might ask how it is done. We can see the answer in certain scientific experiments. Special plates are made, and by speaking near such a plate marks are made upon the plate with sound and vibrations. Those marks make either harmonious or inharmonious forms. If that is true, then every person, from morning till evening, is making invisible forms in space by what he says. He is creating invisible vibrations around him, and so he is producing an atmosphere. Therefore it is that one person may come into the house, and before he speaks you are tired of him, you wish to get rid of him. Before he has said or done anything you are finished with him, you would like him to go away, for in his atmosphere he is creating a sound; a sound is going on which is disagreeable. There is another person with whom you feel sympathy, to whom you feel drawn, whose friendship you value, whose presence you long for; harmony is continually created through him. That is sound too.

If that is true then it is not only the external signs, but also the inner condition which is audible and visible. Though not visible to the eyes and not audible to the ears, yet it is audible and visible in the soul. We say: “I feel his vibrations. I feel the person’s presence. I feel sympathy, or antipathy towards that person.” There is a feeling, and a person creates a feeling without having said anything or done anything. Therefore a person who is in a wrong vibration, without doing or saying anything wrong, creates the wrong atmosphere, and you find fault with him. It is most amusing and very funny to see how people may come to you with a complaint: “I have said nothing, I have done nothing, and yet people dislike me and are against me.” That person does not know that it is not because of his saying or doing anything: it is because of his being. “What you are speaks louder than what you say.” It is life itself which has its tone, its color, its vibration. it speaks aloud.

(Hazrat Inayat Khan [source])

Sound — in the form of voices, in the form of noise and music, in no form at all — continues to be a subject of interest for me, and increasingly a subject of concern. My hearing impairment was first noticed and formally diagnosed over 60 years ago, when I was in first grade; I got my first hearing aid at age 12; and then I generally pretended (thank you, vanity and self-consciousness) to be “okay” for the next twenty years, often (usually) not wearing a hearing aid at all. I’ve since then worn not one but two ever more powerful, ever “smarter” hearing aids, more or less constantly except when sleeping and in the shower…

Having written that paragraph, and since the subject obviously matters greatly to me, I wondered when was the last time I wrote explicitly about it. I’ve got a category of posts here which indicates that I’ve at least alluded to it many times… but not directly and head-on, apparently, since the first few months of Running After My Hat‘s existence (in a three-part series: this post, and this one, and this one).

Well, one of these days. Sooner rather than later, I think. But in the meantime…

At the moment I’m reading a curious book, about a curious topic, written by a very curious writer named Lawrence Wechsler. Its curious title: Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet Of Wonder (subtitle: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology). The topic is an actual, well, I guess you could call it an institution: a “museum,” in quotes: the Museum of Jurassic Technology, in Los Angeles.

I’ll leave you to explore the museum (virtually or in-person) for yourself. But among the exhibits at the MJT which Wechsler documents is one called “No One May Ever Have the Same Knowledge Again: Letters to the Mount Wilson Observatory, 1915-1935.” It consists of not quite a couple dozen framed reproductions of letters sent, unsolicited, to the staff of the observatory. (The whole file of such letters, at the time of Wechsler’s writing, supposedly included 43 of them.) When the letters came (continued to come???) in, the staff would simply file them way. On the wall of the exhibition is a caption — a legend — which explains this background. Says Wechsler (and these excerpts are decidedly not from whiskey river):

“The information contained in this class of letter,” the legend goes on, “was typically of astronomical or cosmological concern. These individuals had gleaned the information they wished to communicate either by experimentation, observation, or intuition and invariably felt a strong sense of urgency in their need to communicate their observations to the observers at Mount Wilson.” Such was certainly the case with one Mrs. Alice May Williams, of Auckland, New Zealand, lines from one of whose letters provide this exhibit with its title: “I am not after money & I am not a fraud,” she assures the astronomers, going on to explain how

I believe I have some knowledge which you gentlemen should have. If I die my knowledge may die with me, & no one may ever have the same knowledge again. Because if people hear talking they want stick, they go & do away with their selves. I have gone through frightful things still I go through it & I am beginning to get knowledge…

Bobbie Merlino of Atlantic City, New Jersey, in a note dated December 4, 1932, offers his (her?) services for an eventual flight to Mars: “I readily understand that is a very dangerous expedition that we may never return but as long as I just take one glimpse at it I am satisfy if I die on the Planet I’ve always planned to visit. I am not out of my mind. I am as sane as anyone and I am very serious about this matter.…” In 1920 an unknown person who simply signed his meticulously calligraphed note “Historian, Boston, Mass.” offered an elaborate proof to the effect that “THE EARTH is FLAT and STANDS FAST.” John Rounds of Boscobel, Wisconsin, a few years later offered an even more convoluted—indeed, positively loopy—proof that “the Earth is not flat” and that, in fact, “it turns around the sun,” as if he were the first person ever to have hazarded such a daring hypothesis.

(Lawrence Weschler [source])

Even without full hearing — perhaps especially without it — one can’t help wondering what it must be like to have such inner lives, especially those so convincing that their sufferers experience them as outer lives: presences lurking behind closed doors and behind one’s very back; straightforward words and sentences masquerading as hieroglyphics demanding translation; whispered voices tickling their auditory nerves, ceaselessly…

The prospect of living in full silence — I won’t lie — kinda scares me. But if the alternative is revealed in the words of these letters, I’ll choose silence… and thank you for the opportunity!

Way Up There, Swinging in Your Seat and Laughing

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[Image: “Hell Courtesan,” painted by Kawanabe Kyosai (1831–1889). After reading the whiskey river posts which I share below, I tried mightily to find one of the paintings described by John Tarrant. I could not — at least, not before finding this one, first… which delighted me too much not to share! (For more about the painting, see the portion of this post which follows the whiskey river excerpts).]

From whiskey river:

I have always loved Buddhist paintings in the esoteric tradition that show the sufferings of the hell realms, they are rather like medieval Christian paintings, with flames and pitchforks and horns and so on. But there is always a little Buddha sitting in the hell realm, looking exactly like all the other demons, with horns and a big smile… So if you are in hell, perhaps you can be one of those demons, a Buddha demon.

(John Tarrant, “That Great Sleeping Dragon of Joy” [source])

…and:

Hiding in a Drop of Water

It is early morning, and death has forgotten us for
A while. Darkness owns the house, but I am alive.
I am ready to praise all the great musicians.

Whatever happens to me will also happen to you.
Surely you must have realized this from hearing
The way the strings cry out no matter who hits them.

From the great oak trees in the yard in October,
Leaves fall for hours each day. Every night
A thousand wrinkled faces look up at the stars.

Still we know that at any second the soul can stand
Up and start across the desert, as when Rabia ended up
Riding on a resurrected donkey toward the Meeting.

It is this reaching toward the Kaaba that keeps us glad.
It is this way of hiding inside a drop of water
That lets the hidden face become visible to everyone.

Gautama said that when the Great Ferris Wheel
Stops turning, you will still be way up
There, swinging in your seat and laughing.

(Robert Bly [source])

I’d never heard of the “Hell Courtesan” before working on today’s post. For full details, especially about the things it depicts (vs. how they’re depicted), I refer you to this writeup about it at the site for the Art Institute of Chicago. Here’s an excerpt of that text:

The story goes that the woman at the center of this painting was a 15th-century prostitute who possessed a legendary kind of beauty. She named herself Hell Courtesan after receiving enlightenment from a venerated Buddhist monk…

This monk, named lkkyu Sojun, happened to have a taste for sake, prostitutes, and music. (That’s him dancing on top of a skull.) According to a story in a popular book from 1809 whose title translates as All Records of Drunken Enlightenment of Our Country, the Hell Courtesan encountered Ikkyu in a room in a brothel and found him dancing with a bunch of skeletons instead of being entertained by dancers and geisha. It occurred to her that he may not be an ordinary human being.

(Credited only to “The Communications Staff” of the Art Institute of Chicago)

The “Japanese Hell” to which both John Tarrant and Robert Bly direct our attention lies decidedly elsewhere, “down there,” maybe, but is in any case vastly different from our everyday world. The Hell of the Hell Courtesan, though, exists simply on the other side of a door or painted screen. She has merely stepped across a threshold — and at that, not because doing so represents a punishment, but presumably just because she’s been summoned by a customer on the other side. (“What,” we can almost hear her murmuring to herself, “what the absolute f*ck?!?”) To return to her real world of — yes — sake, prostitutes, and music, she needs only to take a step backwards.

But she doesn’t. She’s mesmerized by what she finds inside the “room.” And what fixes her attention is not really the ridiculously animated chorus line of skeletons — one playing the shamisen (maybe while humming the Japanese version of “Oh, Susannah”). Instead, she’s captivated by the laughing, dancing monk…

The “religion” of this monk seems unrelated to the stereotypical lotus-position, wu-wei lifestyle of a Buddhist monk. But it also seems unrelated to the laughing Buddhas of Tarrant and Bly; those Buddhas, positioned as they are in Hell, apparently, to welcome newcomers… well, given the torments suffered by everyone except the Buddhas, seem awfully, um, sadistic? is that too harsh, too 21st-century-moralistic a term?

I’ve been thinking about the lesson — the enlightenment, the awakening — which the Hell Courtesan of legend might have acquired from the koan presented to her by the laughing demon. I’ve been thinking in particular of how it fits in with what I — what I think — I understand about classical Buddhism…

The real world to which the Hell Courtesan has freedom to return, I think, resembles the “torments” by which her laughing demon is surrounded. They’re not identical, they’re analogues — both of these things are not like the other, yet both of them are the same. Classic representations of Buddhism emphasize the “sufferings” of the real world, but deeper readings of those texts clarify that these sufferings are not physical tortures, tortures inflicted on us by the outside world, but spiritual or psychological sufferings: indecision, slights real or imagined, resentment, worry about the future, guilt about the past, teenage angst as well as mid- or end-of-life crises or simple doubts… These sufferings bring us pain (and later, scars), just as real as the sufferings from our skin wounds and bruises visible to anyone who simply looks at our exteriors surface. They’re the frolicking skeletons of everyday life.

The Hell Courtesan has two choices: she can simply return, unchanged, to life as she’s always known it. Or she can linger, and learn from the laughing demon how best to coexist with what she suffers from.

Which will it be?

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