Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

RAMH@15: The Search for Stasis Continues!

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[Image: “Lost Hat,” by Janko Luin. Found it on Flickr, and use it here under a Creative Commons license. Thank you very much!]

I don’t have much to add at the moment; just wanted to mark the milestone for now… It’s a measure of how scrambled things have been, post-road trip, that I completely forgot the day’s significance until Facebook — of all things — reminded me about it. Perhaps something more substantive (i.e., more than a whiskey river Friday post tomorrow) will appear in the next few days, perhaps not.

In the meantime, you can get a pretty good idea of the current state of the blog by scrolling through the whole series of prior “anniversaries” posts.

Thank you so much for visiting Running After My Hat!

Big Things in Tiny Packages

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[Image: “Elephant Topography,” by John E. Simpson — chosen almost automatically to head this post, as soon as I saw the Mary Oliver quotation below. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) ]

Thinking this week about the abundant wonders of (relatively) small bits of (relatively) large contexts… thanks, in no small part, to whiskey river:

Make the Ordinary Come Alive

Do not ask your children
to strive for extraordinary lives.
Such striving may seem admirable,
but it is the way of foolishness.
Help them instead to find the wonder
and the marvel of an ordinary life.
Show them the joy of tasting
tomatoes, apples and pears.
Show them how to cry
when pets and people die.
Show them the infinite pleasure
in the touch of a hand.
And make the ordinary come alive for them.
The extraordinary will take care of itself.

(William Martin [source])

…and:

Now it’s April, and the whales have come home. The finbacks and the humpbacks and the rare right whales, arriving along the coast, coming into the bay, sometimes into the harbor, their massive length and weight churning and breaching as though they, like us, know playfulness. He maketh the deep to boil like a pot, he maketh a path to shine after him, said Job, who, I fear, could not know that there is also a reasoning and a gentleness in these mountains of flesh. Once a whale tangled in line came into the harbor with another swimming just alongside, a companion that would not leave the roped animal but lingered, while brave men went out in little boats and were able to cut the entangling line away. The eye of the humpback is like all the darkness and hope and pain one sees in the eye of the elephant, in whose brain, it is avowed by those who know, nothing is ever forgotten. It is an eye deeper than the deepest well.

(Mary Oliver [source])

Meanwhile, not from whiskey river:

The biography of the actor Anthony Hopkins contains a striking example of a serendipitous coincidence. When he first heard he’d been cast to play a part in the film The Girl from Petrovka (1974), Hopkins went in search of a copy of the book on which it was based, a novel by George Feifer. He combed the bookshops of London in vain and, somewhat dejected, gave up and headed home. Then, to his amazement, he spotted a copy of The Girl from Petrovka lying on a bench at Leicester Square station. He recounted the story to Feifer when they met on location, and it transpired that the book Hopkins had stumbled upon was the very one that the author had mislaid in another part of London — an advance copy full of red-ink amendments and marginal notes he’d made in preparation for a US edition.

…You’re thinking of someone and, in the next breath they call you. You read an unusual word in a magazine and, simultaneously, someone on the radio utters the same word. Such occurrences might elicit a wry smile, but the weirder ones can induce a strong sense of the uncanny. The world momentarily seems full of strange forces.

It’s a state of mind resembling apophenia — a tendency to perceive meaningful, and usually sinister, links between unrelated events — which is a common prelude to the emergence of psychotic delusions. Individual differences may play a part in the experience of such coincidences. Schizotypy is a dimension of personality characterised by experiences that in some ways echo, in muted form, the symptoms of psychosis, including magical ideation and paranormal belief. There is evidence to suggest that people who score high on measures of schizotypy may also be more prone to experiencing meaningful coincidences and magical thinking. Perhaps schizotypal individuals are also more powerfully affected by coincidence. Someone scoring high on measures of schizotypy would perhaps be more spooked by a death dream than I (a low scorer) was. [1]

(Paul Broks [source])

…and:

I merely think that words, words, words and the Creation of the world are two different things, two incompatible things. I do not see how the Creation can be turned into words, let alone letters, hardly even a fiction. History is always entirely different to what has happened. The facts are all fled from you before you start the story. History is simply a fact on its own. And the closer you try to approach the facts through history, the deeper you sink into fiction. The greater the care with which you explain a fact, the more nonsensical a fable you fish out of chaos. The same applies to the history of the world. The difference between a novelist and a historian is this: that the former tells lies deliberately and for the fun of it; the historian tells lies in his simplicity and imagines he is telling the truth.

(Haldor Laxness [source])

______

[back]

Amphibians of Reality, Breathing Truth and Fiction

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[Image: “CROATOAN,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) For details about this photo, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

Adrift

Let my dreams while I’m wide-awake
loose. Let me be drowned, baptized,
in the light given me. Day comes around,
night, fall, winter, spring,
summer. Leaves overhead, underfoot.
Waves arrive, buffets from friends
offended, enemies. Let it all come:
this is my way, this is the canoe I’m in.

(William Stafford [source])

…and:

Human beings from the moment of entry into language are ready to become dreamers and fiction-makers, not to mention liars, fetishists, and perverters of the real. Our fiction-making capacity may be foundational of our search for truth in our selves and in the world, but it does not guarantee it, nor assure our mental stability. The vehicles of truth and untruth are the same. But fiction-making does seem to be crucial to the ability to carve out a space within reality for attempts at understanding and reflection.

(Peter Brooks [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Kaldren lived alone in the old abstract summer house on the north shore of the lake. This was a seven-storey folly originally built by an eccentric millionaire mathematician in the form of a spiralling concrete ribbon that wound around itself like an insane serpent, serving walls, floors, and ceilings. Only Kaldren had solved the building—a geometric model of ?-1—and consequently he had been able to take it off the agents’ hands at a comparatively low rent. In the evenings Powers had often watched him from the laboratory, striding restlessly from one level to the next, swinging through the labyrinth of inclines and terraces to the rooftop, where his lean angular figure stood out like a gallows against the sky, his lonely eyes sifting out radio lanes for the next day’s trapping.

(J.G. Ballard [source])

…and:

If you do not know precisely where impossibility begins and ends, then of course it cannot constrain you.

(Olivie Blake [source])

…and:

A Photograph of a Face Half Lit, Half in Darkness

Even 3 + 2 is like this.

A photograph of a face half lit, half in darkness.

A train station where one train is stopped
and another passes behind it,
heard, but not seen.

A person proud of five good senses
lives without echolocation.

Dogs pity our noses
as we pity the bee that blunders the glass.

Take out every other word of the world,
what is left?

A half half darkness.

A station one is and passes.

We live our lives in one place
and look in every moment into another.

As on a child’s map,
where X
marks both riddle and treasure.

It is near, but not here.

(Jane Hirshfield [source])

#8: You may be surprised: my favorite fond reminiscences aren’t my own, but those shared by people who claim they don’t read fiction — because, they say, they prefer facts and “the real world.” I’m sorry if this sounds patronizing, but these people are almost cute; I want to hug them.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)

_____

About the photo: This is one of several hundred photos I’ve posted on Instagram and tagged #jesstorypix. Here’s the complete text accompanying this one:

The little group of a half-dozen friends had set out on a two-week camping trip in April: hiking deep into the North Woods after being dropped off, following an entire day’s drive, at the end of a long, twisting logging road. The smiling adventure-tours operator said, just before driving away, “See you right here at this spot, two weeks from today. Right?” As one, they all shouted, “RIGHT!”

One thing followed another… Over five months later — two of their party lost in the disaster on the riverbank, another now feverish and malarial and fading fast — the survivors finally made it back to the spot at the end of the logging road. There they found a note in a zip-lock plastic bag, nailed to a tree; they could see the letterhead of the tour company, but most of the handwritten text was obscured by some kind of fungus which filled the bag. (They didn’t dare open it.) Only one word remained visible: “CROATOAN.”

After another two days’ limping travel down the road, and a third day to bury their now-dead companion, the final three came upon a sign: “Ranger Station Ahead.” Any hopes for salvation were quickly dashed, though…

Like most installments in the storypix series, I like about this one that it ends inconclusively, in an ellipsis: challenging (I hope) the reader — even (especially) subconsciously — to plug the hole in the narrative, which is to say in their own experience.

[back to top]

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])

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