Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Is It Love? (Local Edition)

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Among the valued newcomers to RAMH‘s roll of occasional commenters, you may have encountered one “Ashleigh Burrows.”

(I use the quotation marks there because that name, as I understand it, is a nom de plume. Which makes it interesting that she calls her blog The Burrow: it’s an eponym for a pseudonym, and how many times can one claim to have seen one of those before?)

a/b, as she styles herself in her comments here, there, and elsewhere, is (like many of us) a writer still unconvinced that simply writing well is enough. When not actively fretting along those lines, she fills in the blog with, well, good writing on a wide variety of topics — provocative questions, political commentary, accounts of daily life with a cast of bizarrely nicknamed characters (The Big Guy and G’ma, sure, got them, and the Big and Little Cuter I pretty much understand to be her kids — but Amster? Aged Parm?)…

Anyway, I direct your attention to a recent post at The Burrow, “Is It Love?” It’s full of the sort of nagging, not-quite-rhetorical questions which some of us (yes) love to chew on:

  • Can one look at another with devotion and desire, knowing that the feelings are not returned, and still call it love?
  • Is there a cognitive component that is necessary for love to exist?
  • Can you love someone you do not need? If the loved one were to vanish and you felt no pain, did you really love at all?

And so on. She sums up:

Many, many questions. I’m not sure the answers are available. I’m not sure that your answers would be mine (or [jilted lover of Aeneas] Dido’s). I just know that love is strange.

Aye. That it is… strange, and troublesome as hell. Even more than “the sex talk,” I wonder how parents manage “the love talk” for their blossoming charges. I don’t have any kids myself, of course. But if I did, what follows would be how I might try to explain it to them — in hopes of arming them before the first thunderbolt hit.*

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When It’s Not Quite (Yet, Still) Light

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[Image: “Zodiacal Light vs. Milky Way,” by Daniel López;
featured at Astronomy Picture of the Day on March 20, 2010]

From whiskey river:

Incandescence at Dusk

(Homage to Dionysius the Areopagite)

There is fire in everything,
shining and hidden —
Or so the saint believed. And I believe the saint:
Nothing stays the same
in the shimmering heat
Of dusk during Indian summer in the country.

Out here it is possible to perceive
That those brilliant red welts
slashed into the horizon
Are like a drunken whip
whistling across a horse’s back,
And that round ball flaring in the trees
Is like a coal sizzling
in the mouth of a desert prophet.

Be careful.
Someone has called the orange leaves
sweeping off the branches
The colorful palmprints of God
brushing against our faces.
Someone has called the banked piles
of twigs and twisted veins
The handprints of the underworld
Gathering at our ankles and burning
through the soles of our feet.
We have to bear the sunset deep inside us.
I don’t believe in ultimate things.
I don’t believe in the inextinguishable light
of the other world.
I don’t believe that we will be lifted up
and transfixed by radiance.
One incandescent dusky world is all there is.

But I like this vigilant saint
Who stood by the river at nightfall
And saw the angels descending
as burnished mirrors and fiery wheels,
As living creatures of fire,
as streams of white flame….

1500 years in his wake,
I can almost imagine
his disappointment and joy
When the first cool wind
starts to rise on the prairie,
When the soothing blue rain begins
to fall out of the cerulean night.

(Edward Hirsch [source]; here‘s a good place to start learning about the mysterious figure whose name appears in the epigraph)

…and:

Do you wake up as I do, having forgotten what it is that hurts or where, until you move? There is a second of consciousness that is clean again. A second that is you, without memory or experience, the animal warm and waking into a brand new world. There is the sun dissolving the dark, and light as clear as music, filling the room where you sleep and the other rooms behind your eyes.

(Jeanette Winterson, from Gut Symmetries [source])

…and:

I have this strange feeling that I’m not myself anymore. It’s hard to put into words, but I guess it’s like I was fast asleep, and someone came, disassembled me, and hurriedly put me back together again. That sort of feeling.

(Haruki Murakami, from The Sputnik Sweetheart (translated by J. Philip Gabriel) [source])

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Marching in Place After My Own Hat

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Would I like to report that I’ve been so busy and preoccupied with my writing recently that I’ve skimped on blog posts — and comments on your blogs — for the last couple weeks or so?

Boy, wouldn’t I. But no. I’ve been so busy and preoccupied with everything else that I’ve been cutting corners online. Still, I thought you might appreciate a couple of items in the meantime, not that you need me to entertain you:

First, I’d never have guessed that enough “backwards music videos” have been made that someone reflecting on the matter could actually come up with a list of the top ten of “all time.” (By the way, the backwards here refers to the direction of motion — people running in reverse, fruit falling up into trees, and so on.) So I was surprised that Jason Newman, at the Urlesque site (“Exposing bits of the web”), could post just such a list. His number one selection interested me, all right: a “champion eater… unstuffs his face,” over a song called “From Your Mouth” by a group called God Lives Underwater. But my favorite — the only one I wanted to watch more than once — placed only third in his estimation:

Cibo Matto’s “Sugar Water”

One of Michel Gondry’s best videos involves split-screening Cibo Matto members Yuka Honda and Miho Hatori, running one member forward and the other backward before they meet and switch positions halfway through. Yeah, it’s complicated. Just watch.

What they said.


Alternatively, if you’ve got a little more time available, I highly recommend this hilarious (and ultimately sobering) account by Jo Walton of an entity she calls the Suck Fairy:

The Suck Fairy is an artefact of re-reading. If you read a book for the first time and it sucks, it’s nothing to do with her. It just sucks. Some books do. The Suck Fairy comes in when you come back to a book that you liked when you read it before, and on re-reading — well, it sucks. You can say that you have changed, you can hit your forehead dramatically and ask yourself how you could possibly have missed the suckiness the first time — or you can say that the Suck Fairy has been through while the book was sitting on the shelf and inserted the suck. The longer the book has been on the shelf unread, the more time she’s had to get into it.

For those of you who are writers, I don’t have to point out that your personal Suck Fairy especially loves exsanguinating your own work.

One, and One, and One…

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From whiskey river:

Dogs

Many times loneliness
is someone else
an absence
then when loneliness is no longer
someone else many times
it is someone else’s dog
that you’re keeping
then when the dog disappears
and the dog’s absence
you are alone at last
and loneliness many times
is yourself
that absence
but at last it may be
that you are your own dog
hungry on the way
the one sound climbing a mountain
higher than time

(W. S. Merwin, from Writings To An Unfinished Accompaniment)

…and:

I have figured for you the distance between the horns of a dilemma, night and day, and A to Z. I have computed how far is Up, how long it takes to get Away, and what becomes of Gone. I have discovered the length of the sea serpent, the price of priceless, and the square of the hippopotamus. I know where you are when you are at Sixes and Sevens, how much Is you have to have to make an Are, and how many birds you can catch with the salt in the ocean – 187,796,132, if it would interest you.

(James Thurber, Many Moons [source])

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So — A Dream Lover, Are You?

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[Video: Dream of the Wild Horses, an experimental short film by Denys Colomb Daunant, initially released in 1960. I first saw this in a film class in the 1970s and never forgot it, although “nothing happens.” I’ve always liked to think that the title doesn’t say this is a dream of someone — some human — about wild horses; rather, it says this is a dream which wild horses themselves have. The wild horses in the film apparently were among the Camargue.]

A subtle but complicated cloud of tension surrounds the topic of sleep at our house. The tension stems from two related facts: (a) The Missus has trouble sleeping, and (b) I myself have no trouble at all.

Confession: I love to sleep. I’d talk about sleep every day if I could do it without upsetting The Missus. (She’s not the only person I know with a sleep problem, which means I almost never bring the topic up because I never want to upset anybody. Which perhaps is your cue to tell me that you, too, don’t want to hear someone warbling a hymn to the infinite pleasures of sleeping. It also hints that I’m not really a good sleeper, but a sleep vampire. But that would be a different post, and a very different confession.)

One of the best things about sleep: dreams.

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Pocketing the Key to Your Own Cage (or Not)

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(Yes, I know: a day late…)

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

[Skeptics, on why they dislike dogma] mean that the universe is itself a universal prison; that existence itself is a limitation and a control; and it is not for nothing that they call causation a chain. In a word, they mean quite simply that they cannot believe these things; not in the least that they are unworthy of belief. We say, not lightly but very literally, that the truth has made us free. They say that it makes us so free that it cannot be the truth. It is like believing in fairyland to believe in such freedom as we enjoy. It is like believing in men with wings to entertain the fancy of men with wills. It is like accepting a fable about a squirrel in conversation with a mountain to believe in a man who is free to ask or a God who is free to answer. This is a manly and a rational negation, for which I for one shall always show respect. But I decline to show any respect for those who first of all clip the bird and cage the squirrel, rivet the chains and refuse the freedom, close all the doors of the cosmic prison on us with a clang of eternal iron, tell us that our emancipation is a dream and our dungeon a necessity; and then calmly turn round and tell us they have a freer thought and a more liberal theology.

(G.K. Chesterton, from The Everlasting Man [source])

…and:

Three-fourths of philosophy and literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were tricked into entering.

(Gary Snyder [source])

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Book Review: Tender Morsels, by Margo Lanagan

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Here’s how I imagine it must have gone:

The woman went about her work calmly but with determination. Cupped in her hands before her, on the table, was a mysterious jewel; depending on the light in which and the angle from which viewed, sometimes the jewel glittered with color and sometimes seemed black enough to suck the air as well as the light from the room. The woman bent, and put her face over the jewel, and she breathed on it. As we watched, the jewel changed form, became a living, a visibly breathing creature.

It both made us clap, and scared the hell out of us…

The woman was Margo Lanagan; the jewel, the fairy tale of “Snow-White and Rose-Red.” And the creature? Oh my, the creature: Lanagan’s 2008 young-adult novel, Tender Morsels.

My review of this book is now online at The Book Book blog.

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In Absentia

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It has been one hell of a week. Not a bad one, but an extremely busy one.

And it’s not over yet. As it happens, I’ve been summoned to jury duty tomorrow. As these things go, most likely I will spend a good part of the day in an uncomfortable chair, actually waiting to be called upon — or not — as a real live jury member. But it threatens to jeopardize my regular Friday whiskey river-inspired post. I’ve worked on it some, but it’s not ready; I might but probably can’t wrap it up tonight or tomorrow morning. We’ll see.

In the meantime, please enjoy the music haunting me from the playlist of the moment: Patty Larkin, “Anyway the Main Thing Is” (lyrics below).

(It’s a shame that this is a static video: if you’ve never witnessed Larkin actually play the guitar, you’re missing the great pleasure of witnessing someone do effortlessly, yet perfectly, something she doesn’t even have to stop and think about.)

Lyrics:

Anyway the Main Thing Is
(by Patty Larkin)

I took the train
Just for the view
I took my boyfriend’s last name
For something to do
I took advice
Now I regret it
I took my time
Cause I could get it

I shook my head
And it woke me up
I shook a strange hand in my bed
And that was enough
I shook the truth
Out of the tree
It shook my faith up good
But it satisfied me

Anyway the main thing is
Regrooving the dream
Regrooving the…

Love doesn’t think
Love doesn’t look
Love takes a flying leap off the brink
Love swallows the hook
Love doesn’t sleep
Love is out of control
Love is only human it can swallow you whole

Paying Attention to the Momentous

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With apologies to Mr. Thoreau, I don’t honestly believe that the great mass of humanity lead lives of quiet desperation. Most people, I have come to think, live lives of simple routine, blended with dollops of making-it-up-as-you-go-along. They come to crossroads in their lives and turn one way or the other not because they’re desperate and not because they’re dazzled by a sunbeam highlighting a particular path. They choose a direction based on whatever information and other resources they’ve got available right then. Only in hindsight does it become “obvious” that they had to go straight, or left, or in sudden reverse, or whatever.

But fictional characters: ah, yes, things are a bit different with them. They plod along, unaware they’ve been ascending a ramp rather than a simple road, and suddenly they realize they’re at a fulcrum. The course of their lives hasn’t been up a mountainside to a peak. It’s been up a see-saw: to take one step further will throw them off-balance, if not dump them entirely (as Dad used to say) ass-over-teakettle.

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