Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Sleepers in an Elementary World

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[Image: “The Scripture of the Landscape,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Dark Pines Under Water

This land like a mirror turns you inward
And you become a forest in a furtive lake;
The dark pines of your mind reach downward,
You dream in the green of your time,
Your memory is a row of sinking pines.

Explorer, you tell yourself this is not what you came for
Although it is good here, and green;
You had meant to move with a kind of largeness,
You had planned a heavy grace, an anguished dream.

But the dark pines of your mind dip deeper
And you are sinking, sinking, sleeper
In an elementary world;
There is something down there and you want it told.

(Gwendolyn MacEwen [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Erosion. Gnarled roots. The carcass of a dead deer. A flight of swallows. The high spirals of hawks. Bladed reflections of rushing water. Just budding bare branches. Gray rock, cracked, shattered, and worn. A fallen tree. A lone cloud. The laughter of plum branches. Even a little circle of rocks beside the trail—who put them there, or did any hand arrange them, and no matter which, what are the secrets of that circle?

There are a thousand meanings in every view, if only we open ourselves to see the scripture of the landscape.

(Deng Ming-Dao [source])

Seeing (and Treasuring) the Progress in the Standing Still

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  • Foliage creates the impression of a boiling, billowing cloud emerging from high up in Redwood National Forest

[Slideshow: “An Ecstasy of Redwoods,” by John E. Simpson. (Swipe left/right to alternate between desaturated and full-color versions of the photograph.)]

Turns out that our anonymous whiskey river friend has actually had pneumonia, not flu and certainly not the suspected “ordinary, everyday, common” flu. But this week they’ve managed, even so, to offer us one tidbit “oddly relevant” to that context (it helps that the original source is tagged as a journal entry from the “End of November”):

Whenever I get ready again to write really sincere notes in this notebook, I shall have to undertake such a disentangling in my cluttered brain that, to stir up all that dust, I am waiting for a series of vast empty hours, a long cold, a convalescence, during which my constantly reawakened curiosities will lie at rest; during which my sole care will be to rediscover myself.

(André Gide [source])

This resonates nicely with a passage I first read yesterday — a meditation on, and repudiation of, the notion that productivity requires motivation, drive:

What might change if we understood meaningful action to be something we could let happen, simply by standing out of the way? On such an account, actions are always flowing through you anyway, unless you actively impede them. Your only job is to direct the flow a bit, so that you end up focusing more on the things that matter to you.

The Zen teacher Kosho Uchiyama once wrote: “Life completely unhindered by anything manifests as pure activity.” Orient yourself to the world in this way, and the question is no longer “How can I get myself to do things?”, with its implicit and unwelcome answer: “By putting in more effort, you lazy jerk!” Instead, the question is something a bit more like “What’s seeking to be done through me, right now?” And then, whatever the response, all you really have to do is to allow it to happen.

(Oliver Burkeman [source])

In these terms, I welcome whiskey river‘s unsolicited break in routine — and very much look forward to seeing whatever emerges from this fallow spot in their calendar!

At the moment, not really by choice — but nor by necessity — I’m kinda wallowing fallow myself.

It’s not unusual of course for me to go a week or two without a photo session somewhere or other; my rhythm, generally, calls for a photo shoot of a day or maybe two, followed by a week-plus of “clearing the deck.” (This involves transferring photos to a computer, which I then cull and organize — eliminating (near-)dups, categorizing one way or another, and touching up with software for what passes for “publication.”)

As for writing, well, outwardly the years-long stasis on that front remains in place. Emphasis on “outwardly,” though — and this represents progress. There’s no major writing project in the offing, but I’m toying with a few ideas — especially now that The Missus and I are “planted” for a few months and minding our own schedule. Last week I submitted a haiku (“come out of nowhere,” much???) to a contest, and am reworking a short story slightly to meet the requirements of another, due next week. Downstream, once we’re really settled, and once I again have a real honest-to-gods computer at my disposal, I have a short-story anthology project I’d like to tackle…

So real progress, I think, lurks behind the scrim of everyday life. Premature still to announce a Grand Opening. But the crew behind my eyes seems very busy, and I hope you’ll excuse me if I seem distracted — it’s just hard to pay attention with all the hammering and sawing in there!

Finding the Divine in the Commonplace

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[Image: “Divine Commonplace (Railroad at Twilight, 2022),” by John E. Simpson]

We’re so inured these days to public self-disclosure of private lives; when we “know” someone online who zealously, and rightly, hides themselves online for the sake of the unfiltered virtues of what they do post there, it seems not just an anomaly, but a sacred one — a privacy we come to treasure just as much as the privacy of any real friend who keeps themselves to themselves. I hadn’t seen anything from whiskey river in days, which was very, very unusual… so was relieved when they simply mentioned, in an off-handed post early this week, that they’ve been sick: “…caught a virus. Not the famous one. Just an ordinary, everyday, common influenza virus.”

In the meantime, I went rummaging about in their archive, referred to as whiskey river’s commonplace book. When you visit the “commonplace book’s” home page, you’ll find a sort of topical index; it’s not organized chronologically, or by the name of the quotations’ authors, or in any other conventional way. A good way to browse this list is not to worry too much about what the chapter headings “mean”; instead, just look away from the screen and randomly, blindly tap on one of them.

That’s how I found myself in the chapter called “ordinary life” — which includes the following (in slightly different form):

For [Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav], the way of the heart was the surest path to exalted states of consciousness. “Always be joyful, no matter what you are,” he taught. “With happiness, you can give a person life.” Every day, he further stressed, we must deliberately induce in ourselves a buoyant, exuberant attitude toward life; in this manner, we will gradually become receptive to the subtle mysteries around us. And, if no inspired moments seem to come, we should act as though we have them anyway, he advised. “If you have no enthusiasm, put on a front. Act enthusiastic and the feeling will become genuine.”

(Edward Hoffman [source])

…and also this:

When we go to a medicine person or a healer because we are feeling disheartened, dispirited, or depressed, he or she might ask questions like,

“When did you stop singing?”

“When did you stop dancing?”

“When did you stop being enchanted by stories?”

“When did you begin finding discomfort in the sweet territory of silence?”

(Angeles Arrien [source])

…and also this:

Life is this simple: We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and [the Divine] is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or fable. It is true.

(Thomas Merton [source])

This was a week during which it helped to be reminded of everyday divinity. It started with the cacaphonic final clatter of US midterm-election news and panic notes, eased into the midweek “How come it wasn’t a disaster?” second thoughts, and wrapping up today with the always somber annual lookback at the consequences of war, called Veterans’ Day.

My dad — whom I did not then know, of course — apparently faced the prospect of going overseas in 1943-44 with a grin. (That’s him over at the right, in khakis as he wrapped up his basic training on the campus of Texas A&M University. (He was a mechanic in the armored corps — responsible for repairing tanks and halftracks and such.)

I always wondered about that grin in this and other photos from the time. I mean, I saw it often enough over the decades after I finally did make an appearance in the early 1950s. It came so easily to him. There’s other evidence that he didn’t sweat the prospect of overseas battle; maybe it wasn’t anything remotely like excitement, just simple relief not to be — as his brother Bob was — bound to play a role in the infantry.

He wrote occasional letters home, like the one whose opening is shown below — “A Young Draftee;s Lament about his first hair-cut”:

Nearly always, these letters had this sort of jocular tone… I recognize the tone because I see it in my own email reports to my family, say, about our recent months on the cross-country road. It’s a tone which discloses nothing beyond the good-natured superficial, the equivalent of his grin in the photo (traces of which I also see in the mirror) — making, as I imagine, deeper jitters about what lies ahead…

…and then I think about how often I saw it when I was growing up, how usual that attitude seemed. Perhaps (and perhaps not!) it masked a commonplace darkness, something Dad just preferred to keep to himself. But maybe it also doesn’t matter — because now, looking back on such photos and memories, I can in fact see the divine revealing itself in the cocky grin. I may have to attend to it out of the corner of my eye, so to speak, but it’s there, damn it.

And if the divine is so obviously, insistently real, then what does that say to me about the incorporeality — the inconsequentiality — of the commonplace?

[Best wishes to whiskey river for a speedy recovery!]

Forget the “Light at the End.” What Happens in the Meantime?

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[Image: “ESA (East Side Access) 6988,” posted to the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s Flickr account (photographer: Patrick Cashin) and modified, by me, in accord with the Creative Commons license they offer — thank you!]

From whiskey river, late last week — an uncharacteristically lengthy quotation, from a favorite author (of mine as well as whiskey river itself):

The real problem here is that we’re all dying. All of us. Every day the cells weaken and the fibres stretch and the heart gets closer to its last beat. The real cost of living is dying, and we’re spending days like millionaires: a week here, a month there, casually spunked until all you have left are the two pennies on your eyes.

Personally, I like the fact we’re going to die. There’s nothing more exhilarating than waking up every morning and going “WOW! THIS IS IT! THIS IS REALLY IT!” It focuses the mind wonderfully. It makes you love vividly, work intensely, and realize that, in the scheme of things, you really don’t have time to sit on the sofa in your pants watching Homes Under the Hammer.

Death is not a release, but an incentive. The more focused you are on your death, the more righteously you live your life. My traditional closing-time rant—after the one where I cry that they closed that amazing chippy on Tollington Road; the one that did the pickled eggs—is that humans still believe in an afterlife. I genuinely think it’s the biggest philosophical problem the earth faces. Even avowedly non-religious people think they’ll be meeting up with nana and their dead dog, Crackers, when they finally keel over. Everyone thinks they’re getting a harp.

But believing in an afterlife totally negates your current existence. It’s like an insidious and destabilizing mental illness. Underneath every day—every action, every word—you think it doesn’t really matter if you screw up this time around because you can just sort it all out in paradise. You make it up with your parents, and become a better person and lose that final stone in heaven. And learn how to speak French. You’ll have time, after all! It’s eternity! And you’ll have wings, and it’ll be sunny! So, really, who cares what you do now? This is really just some lacklustre waiting room you’re only going to be in for 20 minutes, during which you will have no wings at all, and are forced to walk around, on your feet, like pigs do.

If we wonder why people are so apathetic and casual about every eminently avoidable horror in the world—famine, war, disease, the seas gradually turning piss-yellow and filling with ringpulls and shattered fax machines—it’s right there. Heaven. The biggest waste of our time we ever invented, outside of jigsaws.

Only when the majority of the people on this planet believe—absolutely—that they are dying, minute by minute, will we actually start behaving like fully sentient, rational and compassionate beings. For whilst the appeal of ‘being good’ is strong, the terror of hurtling, unstoppably, into unending nullity is a lot more effective. I’m really holding out for us all to get The Fear. The Fear is my Second Coming. When everyone in the world admits they’re going to die, we’ll really start getting some stuff done.

(Caitlin Moran [source])

I love that Moran turns the standard premise on its head. She doesn’t admonish us to rage against the dying of the light, nor does she urge us to eat-drink-and-be-merry. She doesn’t accept the “…for tomorrow we may die” epilogue to such sentiments. Yet she doesn’t say, y’know, to embrace death, either. She encourages us to be grateful for the implicit incentives death offers us, unbidden — the incentives to live, fully, in the meantime. She says, in effect: Assume you’ll die tomorrow, or if you’re lucky maybe next week or in a year or two. The time grows ever shorter. So what matters to you? And what are you doing about it?

Let’s see what someone else has to say about it:

Aubade

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
—The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

(Philip Larkin [source])

“This is what we fear—no sight, no sound,/No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,/Nothing to love or link with,/The anaesthetic from which none come round”: yes, just so. The point being that it’s coming, oh it’s coming all right — inexorably, undeniably — but for now: we have sight, sound, touch, taste, smell, a brain to think with, a hear and soul with which to love or link, a blessed every-waking-hour gift. Can we use it? If not for our own sake, for the sake of everyone else?

The Landscape of the Spirit World, in the Shape of Autumn

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[Image: “Footbridge: The Shape of Autumn,” by John E. Simpson.]

A few days ago, whiskey river shared a fragment of a poem (the italicized lines below) ostensibly about autumn — but, like many, many descriptions of the seasons, actually speaking of deeper mysteries, and deeper rhythms:

Spirit Birds

The spirit world the negative of this one,
soft outlines of soft whites against soft darks,
someone crossing Broadway at Cathedral, walking
toward the god taking the picture, but now,
inside the camera, suddenly still. Or the spirit
world the detail through the window, manifest
if stared at long enough, the shapes of this
or that, the lights left on, the lights turned off,
the spirits under arcs of sycamores the gray-gold
mists of migratory birds and spotted leaves recognize.

Autumnal evening chill, knife-edges of the avenues,
wind kicking up newspaper off the street,
those ghost peripheral moments you catch yourself
beside yourself going down a stair or through
a door—the spirit world surprising: those birds,
for instance, bursting from the trees and turning
into shadow, then nothing, like spirit birds
called back to life from memory or a book,
those shadows in my hands I held, surprised.
I found them interspersed among the posthumous pages

of a friend, some hundreds of saved poems: dun
sparrows and a few lyrical wrens in photocopied
profile perched in air, focused on an abstract
abrupt edge. Blurred, their natural color bled,
they’d passed from one world to another: the poems,
too, sung in the twilit middle of the night, loved,
half-typed, half-written-over, flawed, images
of images. He’d kept them to forget them.
And every twenty pages, in xerox ash-and-frost,
Gray Eastern, Gold Western, ranging across borders.

(Stanley Plumly [source])

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’ve been reading a fantasy series called Edinburgh Nights, by T.L. Huchu; it recounts, in a lively first-person voice, the adventures of a teenage “ghostalker” in an alternate-timeline Edinburgh. Ropa Moyo helps the dead resolve their unfinished life’s business by bearing messages — for a fee! — between them and their loved ones back in the real world. She recounts her understanding of all this as follows (this excerpt, course, not come from whiskey river):

…back when I was still learning kitchen table magic from Gran, I used to believe that there was this invisible thread that tied the soul to the body so it could always be reeled back in like a trout on a line. Now I know that’s old fishwives’ bollocks. Scientifically, the soul and the body are “entangled” in a manner analogous to the quantum entanglement of subatomic particles. As such, no matter how far apart they may be, there’s an instantaneous communication going. If the body dies, the soul’s stuck out there drifting with no way back, but if the soul dies, well, it’s kaput for the body too.

(T.L. Huchu [source])

Three years ago, for The Missus and me, autumn had assumed the shape of a vague but promising precursor to our grand European tour in the following spring: EuroTour2020, I called it. Only a few months later, but certainly by two autumns ago, well — duh — Things Had Changed: we felt blessed to escape, even for just a long weekend, to the mountains of western North Carolina. By this time last year, we could see how the end of our RoadTrip2021 (on the way to RoadTrip2022) was shaping up: as a cascade of destinations (New York, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, with brief detours to New Jersey and Florida) across the country.

…and now here we are back in North Carolina, in one place for at least a few months, trying to fashion from the clay of geography and personal economics something like a future.

I’ll offer you this observation, gratuitously, about autumn in your 70s: it’s shaped nothing at all like the autumns of your youth.

What It Means to Say, I’m Home (and Add, Now)

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  • Autumn Sonata (1): Exposition
  • Autumn Sonata (2): Development
  • Autumn Sonata (3): Recapitulation

[Slideshow: “Autumn Sonata,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

This week, whiskey river reminded me of Jane Hirshfield — a wonderful poet, a favorite in fact, whose work I’ve gone too mysteriously long without reading:

An Hour Is Not a House

An hour is not a house,
a life is not a house,
you do not go through them as if
they were doors to another.

Yet an hour can have shape and proportion,
four walls, a ceiling.
An hour can be dropped like a glass.

Some want quiet as others want bread.
Some want sleep.

My eyes went
to the window, as a cat or dog left alone does.

(Jane Hirshfield [source])

Hirshfield has often acknowledged her attraction to Zen Buddhism and related spiritual traditions — an attraction which I think is evident in her work even (or especially) when it doesn’t point directly at those traditions. The sense-shape of the poem above, to me, precisely captures the spirit and sense-shape of a koan: simple language bearing riddles in every handful of words, climaxing in a wallop out of nowhere to deliver a “lesson” to you. You can almost picture a master collapsing a fan, swatting you on your puzzled brow, and shouting, “There y’go! Consider yourself enlightened!”… and bursting out laughing.

I think many of my posts here over the years have evidenced the same affection for those traditions, although never — to my knowledge — have they delivered that sort of clout. I’m timid about even using words like “Zen,” “the Tao,” “meditation,” and so on, feeling that they’d bring an unearned didactic tone to the (mostly one-way) conversation here at Running After My Hat. (I say “unearned” because I’m about as far from a teacher of spiritual traditions as I can imagine.) But, well, sometimes a quotation itself makes the link, explicitly… and wholly justifiably.

67:
Returning

Angles against lavender sky
Flung far across heaven’s vault.
Unfettered, swallows
Circle back to the nest.

Swallows are famous for their daring speed and the unpredictable paths that they take in flight. Yet no matter how far they fly, they circle back to their nests.

The idea of returning is significant for all of us. We must work, explore, travel, and make our achievements in life. No matter how much we strain and how wide we wander, we all need some lodestone, some center from which to operate. For some of us, this is a place, a home. For others, it is merely withdrawal into our own hearts.

Followers of Tao believe that there is a core spirit to which each of us should return. This core spirit is increasingly obscured by our own thoughts and the complexity of civilization. All education, while a necessary evil, is a stain upon the primal soul. Therefore, returning is a process of simplification that throws off the unnecessary problems of socialization. One gradually peels back the layers and makes one’s way back to the unsullied, pure inner person. The time to do this is long, and one needs a great deal of guidance and self-cultivation to achieve it, but until one returns to the natural state, one cannot truly hope to be one with Tao.

(Deng Ming-Dao [source])

By this time next week, The Missus and I should be “residing” in North Carolina. The quotation marks denote the obvious: we’ll be in a house, yes, but only temporarily rented, and furnished with someone else’s belongings. I myself lived in NC for only a year, fresh out of high school, and The Missus has never lived there, so in no way will this constitute a “return” for us…

And yet it will be a return, after a fashion: within just a couple of months, I know we’ll stop thinking of it as the landlord’s house. We’re not going to speak of going out somewhere and returning to the address where we started; we’ll simply say We were out, but we’re home now. We’re returning, in short, not to a place we’ve been absent from — but to the idea of a place where we belong: a place that holds us.

That, I think, is the home I’ve been missing.

Recognizing What Matters — What Happens in the Night

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[Image: “Boardwalk Diptych,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) Diptyches and triptyches, for me, always pose an interesting question: no matter how artfully the several scenes combine to form one scene, what is happening in the interstices? There always seems to be something, y’know, going on in that blank space — some story, some scene, some whole thing to which we have no conscious access. Even more interestingly, the artists themselves seem completely unaware of the possibilities in this hidden world…]

This week, from whiskey river (and as always, just one gem among the handful):

How many moons have I been too busy to notice? Full moons, half moons, quarter moons facing those thousands of suns, watching them bringing the years up, one piece at a time. Even the dark phases of moon after moon, gray stoppers plugged into a starry sky, letting a little light leak out around the edges. By my reckoning, almost a thousand full moons have passed above me now, and I have been too busy and self-absorbed to be thankful for more than a few, though month after month they have patiently laid out my shadow, that velvety cloak that in the moonlit evenings waits for me.

(Ted Kooser [source — scroll down and click on the Read an Excerpt link])

Over the last week, I read Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes — a biography of the author by his long-time personal assistant. It pays, I think, extraordinarily well-balanced attention to Pratchett’s life and work, but also to the illness, posterior cortical atrophy (PCA — a rare type of early-onset Alzheimer’s), which would eventually terminate both. Here’s a key passage, which brings all of that together:

…nothing would top for Terry the recollection of driving back to Rowberrow on the night of [his daughter’s] birth, with the baby safely delivered and all well, and with, inside him, the deep satisfaction known to new fathers of a job well done, albeit completely by someone else. And all those years later, after his diagnosis, confronting the bewildering thought that the disease which had decided to lodge itself in his brain might one day empty his mind of its contents, this, very specifically, was the memory that Terry said he lived in fear of losing — the memory whose possible erasure he could not bear to contemplate. Because the way he saw it, who, really, would Terry Pratchett even be if he could no longer recall heading home in the dark and the snow that December night, with the Morris van sliding as it pulled up the hills but pushing on? Who would he really be if he didn’t remember parking by the house and walking gingerly up the slippery path and yet still going down flat on his face in the ice, and finding it only hilarious in the circumstances because all of a sudden he was a father and at that point what else mattered?

(Rob Wilkins [source])

It’s funny how the mind does its own thing, independently of our intentions — offering up scraps of memory or random trivia at moments not just when our guard is down, but when our guard is fully engaged: when we’re focused on a task, when we’re determined to do the one thing (whatever it is) which we must do, suddenly there’s this little barricade thrown in our way. It reminds me of driving on a suburban street on which you haven’t driven for a while, and suddenly you realize you’ve just seen a speed hump ahead sign in the split-second before the car’s underbody makes the point more forcefully…

Nighttime, falling-asleep time, is fertile ground for these attention-grabbing moments. I think it’s one reason why consciousness so fascinates us: it seems like an independent entity living a separate life in our heads. When we relax our grip on waking life, it grasps the reins, looks behind to satisfy itself we’re all right, and then finally canters off into the next several hours’ adventures.

Life Should Be More Than the Body’s Weight

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[Image: “Rushing (New Jersey, September 2022)” by John E. Simpson.]

From whiskey river (part I):

The Next Time

I

Nobody sees it happening, but the architecture of our time
Is becoming the architecture of the next time. And the dazzle

Of light upon the waters is as nothing beside the changes
Wrought therein, just as our waywardness means

Nothing against the steady pull of things over the edge.
Nobody can stop the flow, but nobody can start it either.

Time slips by; our sorrows do not turn into poems,
And what is invisible stays that way. Desire has fled,

Leaving only a trace of perfume in its wake,
And so many people we loved have gone,

And no voice comes from outer space, from the folds
Of dust and carpets of wind to tell us that this

Is the way it was meant to happen, that if only we knew
How long the ruins would last we would never complain.

II

Perfection is out of the question for people like us,
So why plug away at the same old self when the landscape

Has opened its arms and given us marvelous shrines
To flock towards? The great motels to the west are waiting,

In somebody’s yard a pristine dog is hoping that we’ll drive by,
And on the rubber surface of a lake people bobbing up and down

Will wave. The highway comes right to the door, so let’s
Take off before the world out there burns up. Life should be more

Than the body’s weight working itself from room to room.
A turn through the forest will do us good, so will a spin

Among the farms. Just think of the chickens strutting,
The cows swinging their udders, and flicking their tails at flies.

And one can imagine prisms of summer light breaking against
The silent, haze-filled sleep of the farmer and his wife.

III

It could have been another story, the one that was meant
Instead of the one that happened. Living like this,

Hoping to revise what has been false or rendered unreadable
Is not what we wanted. Believing that the intended story

Would have been like a day in the west when everything
Is tirelessly present—the mountains casting their long shadow

Over the valley where the wind sings its circular tune
And trees respond with a dry clapping of leaves—was overly

Simple no doubt, and short-sighted. For soon the leaves,
Having gone black, would fall, and the annulling snow

Would pillow the walk, and we, with shovels in hand, would meet,
Bow, and scrape the sidewalk clean. What else would there be

This late in the day for us but desire to make amends
And start again, the sun’s compassion as it disappears.

(Mark Strand [source])

As I write this, I’m in Durham, NC, on a two-week scouting mission. The Missus remains down in Florida; I’ll pick her up down there and then we’ll return here, to this rental home, where we expect to spend a few months… until we finally find a space to hunker down for real. Inertia is defined both as the tendency of a moving object to remain in motion, and as the tendency for an object at rest to remain that way. Guess which definition we’re hoping to experience more of?

(It’s crazy how much of our “stuff” we no longer even remember owning — it’s all still in storage in Florida, half of it unseen for three-and-a-half years… and yet how many of those things, weirdly, we miss with an intensity bordering on passion, or maybe even mania. I told her a few weeks ago that I really miss my desktop computer, with the full clacking keyboard and the widescreen monitor and the giant external hard drive. Sick, or what?)

We don’t expect to live in Durham indefinitely; it’s just a convenient locale on which to center our home search. But for now, I’m taking pleasure in seeing yellowing leaves outside the windows, and knowing there are too many things just beyond eyesight than I will ever be able to see or to photograph.

Garrison Keillor’s recent novel Boom Town, like much of his fiction, centers on the town of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota — a thinly veiled version of his real hometown of Anoka. In it, he — the narrator — returns there from New York City for the funeral of a boyhood friend; he finds the town both very much changed, and very much the same:

A company, Tomorrow Tomato, [now] made an inclusive tomato sauce from diverse varieties raised on family farms in a variety of eco-societies. Norm and Nancy’s granddaughter Normandy invented a very soft facial tissue with 8 percent lamb’s wool and 5 percent spiderweb woven into the paper. Her husband, Max, created a nameless ginger ale aged in oak barrels: very successful. People asked him, “Why no name? You need a name.” And he said, “Whatever,” and so that became the name and he put out a Whatever mug, an earthy clay mug that became a Thing and went viral for a while, like Totality Tote Bags, which became wildly popular after the price was doubled. “These kids understand the New Economy,” said Norm. “Plenty of people have way too much money and that’s your market. Don’t bother selling stuff to paupers.” Normandy married Max when they were eighteen. He had hair down to his shoulders and it was an alternative ceremony, with an epic Walt Whitman poem (“O comrade and aficionado, come, take my hand, you are comely and possessed of secret longings, come travel the open road under a banner of affection, shameless, glistening with wordless desires.”) and the soloist sang “Purple Rain,” which is odd for a wedding—“I never wanted to be your lover, I only wanted to be your friend” and Nancy’s mouth was bleeding from biting her tongue. Norm said, “We thought it’d last six months but it’s been a year and a half.” He admired their enterprise. Normandy was 20 and drove a green Jaguar and had Zoom meetings with executives at Chanel and Dior and Pankake. Elon Musk called her once. She knew Sandy Frazier. She was hot stuff.

Lake Wobegon had been a farm town of two thousand, an exporter of its young people, and now it was booming. Two brothers, Jake and John, created Woke alarm clocks that sound like crickets and a woman says, “Rise and shine, renew your spirit, resume the struggle, resist the system” and a carillon plays “We Are Strong Together” and you hear marching feet, a bass drum, and a gong. They were made in a factory in Mumbai for $1.75 apiece and retailed for $68. Jake’s girlfriend Ashley came up with a dance video that teaches math, Let’s All Go Rithm. Nobody learned from it but the concept was fantastic. Her business partner, Hailey, created a detoxifying spread made from honey and locusts and then developed an app called Constant Companion that traces your daily routine and if you forget why you’ve walked into the kitchen, a voice in your earpiece says, “You probably came to warm up your coffee.” Then it lists other options.

(Garrison Keillor [source])

And then there’s this, from an article entitled “Are You the Same Person You Used to Be?”:

If we could see our childish selves more clearly, we might have a better sense of the course and the character of our lives. Are we the same people at four that we will be at twenty-four, forty-four, or seventy-four? Or will we change substantially through time? Is the fix already in, or will our stories have surprising twists and turns?…

Does the self you remember feel like you, or like a stranger? Do you seem to be remembering yesterday, or reading a novel about a fictional character?

If you have the former feelings, you’re probably a continuer; if the latter, you’re probably a divider.

(Joshua Rothman [source])

A continuer here, I think. I picture myself as something of a human Lake Wobegon: suffering bouts of self-inflicted change, rarely even radical change, but somehow always oscillating around the same center. As always, I guess we’ll just have to see.

That Particle of the Dove

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(Aside, before getting into the gist of today’s post: You’re welcome, whiskey river.)

[Image: “City Utilities Cabinet, San Luis Obispo, California (June, 2022),” by John E. Simpson.]

How the minds and everyday interactions of latter-day college students work is unknown to me. But in the late 1960s and early ’70s, a sort of breezy cynicism was everywhere in the air I breathed, an infusion wrought by pop-culture trends like young, irreverent standup comedians and literary parodies like the Harvard Lampoon‘s Bored of the Rings. We laughed at everything, or so it seemed — and sometimes we laughed too heartily, or too long, or both.

Back then, I had a friend who ultimately broke me of that habit— well, not so much broke me of the habit, as demonstrated the hollowness of the attitude, the pose which lay behind it. Billy, I’ll call him. He was cynical about everything, to the point of scorn, even about those things which carried genuine emotional weight for one or the other of us. Talking to Billy was exhausting, because you could never surface to breathe the clean air of actual friendship: you couldn’t discuss a class you found really stimulating, you couldn’t talk about how to approach a girl you were interested in, you could never broach a subject like homesickness or worry about your future. It was, as I said, exhausting.

I don’t know what Billy would make nowadays of these Friday posts of mine, but I’m pretty sure how he would have responded to them back then. The ones more philosophical — airy — than others would have induced laughter; the ones grounded in real life, dismissed as mopery and nonsense…

Anyway, when I read the following over at whiskey river this week, I thought, oddly, of Billy:

(…) what surely, without the greatest absurdity cannot be disputed, that there is some benevolence, however small, infused into our bosom; some spark of friendship for human kind; some particle of the dove kneaded into our frame, along with the elements of the wolf and serpent. Let these generous sentiments be supposed ever so weak; let them be insufficient to move even a hand or finger of our body; they must still direct the determinations of our mind, and where every thing else is equal, produce a cool preference of what is useful and serviceable to mankind, above what is pernicious and dangerous.

(David Hume [source])

Billy, I think, was something of a purist: a, well, a priss. If a thing — an experience, an aspiration, a strategy, a practice — was not “good enough,” then it deserved no consideration at all. The attitude has been adopted by cultural cynics of our own time who counsel folding our tents in the face of human-wrought disasters and evil. It’s not good enough, they say, to soften the blow; if we can’t block or divert the blow, if it’s too late to escape entirely, well, then, we should just wait for it to come. Why not give up? Maybe we should even accelerate the end: we should kill ourselves, or go full-bore hedonism and dance ourselves into our graves…

But like the saying goes: the perfect is the enemy of the good. If a course of action can save ten thousand lives, despite an inescapable loss of billions, then I say let’s make saving those ten thousand lives possible. And on a much smaller everyday scale, let’s maybe ease off on the angry-warrior attitude, remembering Lincoln’s timeless juxtaposition: malice toward none, charity for all.

Over the last couple of weeks, I read the first two books of a planned trilogy by author T.L. Huchu. (Book won’t be published until next year.) The series’ overall title is Edinburgh Nights, and the action indeed takes place in a near-future, dark, but not quite post-apocalyptic version of that city. The 14-year-old narrator and protagonist, Ropa Moyo, is a professional ghostalker and aspiring magician: she is hired by the souls of the dead to bear messages back and forth to their survivors — this enables them to tidy up loose ends, and get on with their journey to the next place (wherever and whatever that might be). A typical bit of dialogue goes like this, as an inarticulate dead soul approaches Ropa with a message:

‘Okay, I can deliver a message from you to anyone you want within the city limits, although at the moment I’m not doing the town centre, sorry. Terms and conditions — there’s a three-tier charge for this service, banded in a low flat fee, a middle flat fee, and a high flat fee, plus twenty percent VAT. The band you fall into depends on the length, complexity and content of the message. If you cannot pay the bill, the fee will be reverse-charged to the recipient with a small surcharge. Please note: this service does not transmit vulgar, obscene, criminal or otherwise objectionable messages, but a fee may still be incurred if we decide to pass on a redacted version of the message. Do you understand?’

‘Booga.’

‘I’ll take that as a yes.’

The voice is flippant and engaging, convincingly mid-teenaged, but at the same time no-nonsense about things that matter. That’s pretty much Ropa throughout the book, whether dealing with the dead, the living, or for that matter with the reader: she’s a smartass, with genuinely serious things on her mind.

The climactic action towards the end of Book 2, Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments, takes place in an Edinburgh graveyard several centuries old. The souls of the dead here are especially restless, and — because anyone with whom they have unfinished business is also long dead — have not been able to complete their passage to the afterlife. Having dispensed with an immediate danger, Ropa confronts these spirits (in a passage, of course, not from whiskey river):

All around me, the grey shadows of men in shackles wearing hideous dress. These are the Covenanters, men who were persecuted for their faith. I realize they’ve carried the sort of pain that won’t allow them to move on.

I recall the words my grandmother once used and tell them, ‘Go now, my friends. You have no business in this realm anymore. I set you free from your pain and just rage. I bestow on you warmth and love to take to the halls of your ancestors. When you reach their vast lands, where the grass is tall and the cattle are fat, where the sun rises twice a day, once from the east and once from the west, they will weigh your hearts against a feather and find them lighter. Be on your way now. All is well.’

(T.L. Huchu [source])

I don’t know with what words someone will address my spirit, at the last; as final blessings go, this one is not perfect. But it would be quite good enough for me: Weigh my heart against a feather, and find it lighter. Yes, please.

How to Separate a Day from the Days Before and After It

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[Image: “Elko Feather,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) Most days have at least some little thing that distinguishes from the general calendrical background noise, but every now and then something genuinely big comes along…]

Blogging one day a week, even for 14-1/2 years as I’ve done, requires no great powers of concentration or persistence — especially if the once-a-week routine rests on the shoulders (as mine does) of someone with genuine staying power. Often over the course of three or four posts a week, going back to at least the early 2000s, the anonymous whiskey river blogger has continued to surprise, delight, and inspire me with the things the gems of quoted wisdom they’ve unearthed: sometimes of a mystical bent, sometimes suffused with fiery rage, sometimes a-dance with whimsy…

(When I’m searching for the original source of one of these quotations, it often happens, unsurprisingly, that whiskey river itself turns up among the results. Furthermore, I’ve gotten used to the slightly weird phenomenon of finding one of my own Friday posts returned by the search, too; this happen when whiskey river extracts from its own deep archive a quotation it already used in the past — at which time I cited it in a Friday post here at RAMH.)

This past week, whiskey river has offered up the following poem, from one of its favorite poets; the quotation is one of those pulled out of the attic steamer trunk called whiskey river’s commonplace book — specifically, this page. No idea if I myself might’ve have used the poem before, but I wouldn’t be surprised. What I present below includes the poem’s last couple stanzas, omitted (for whatever reason) by whiskey river:

Wait for an Autumn Day
(From Ekelöf)

Wait for an autumn day, for a slightly
weary sun, for dusty air,
a pale day’s weather.

Wait for the maple’s rough, brown leaves,
etched like an old man’s hands,
for chestnuts and acorns,

for an evening when you sit in the garden
with a notebook and the bonfire’s smoke contains
the heady taste of ungettable wisdom.

Wait for afternoons shorter than an athlete’s breath,
for a truce among the clouds,
for the silence of trees,

for the moment when you reach absolute peace
and accept the thought that what you’ve lost
is gone for good.

Wait for the moment when you might not
even miss those you loved
who are no more.

Wait for a bright, high day,
for an hour without doubt or pain.
Wait for an autumn day.

(Adam Zagajewski [source])

Over the last few weeks, as The Missus and I have been turning our attention to questions like Now what?, I’ve been thinking, off and on, of the writing I’ve done over the decades. Oh, not the published writing (which truthfully doesn’t amount to much anyhow: one novel, around a half-dozen technical books which never sold very well). No, I’ve been thinking of the writing I’ve completed, rather listlessly submitted here and there and now and then, and then just… stopped.

Specifically, I’m thinking of preparing a short-fiction collection, and bringing it to something like life in an e-book edition (with the option of getting a printed copy). It seems it would be a silly shame to just let it all go, without ever letting anyone (beyond writing-workshop participants) having ever read it…

Anyhow, whether that project comes to fruition or not, I’ve been re-reading some of this stuff. The largest portion of the “anthology” would be a section — maybe a wholly separate volume — called Webster, Unabridged, featuring a main character who goes by that name. (You can read a bit about the Webster stories here, in a post from back in 2008.)

I workshopped a couple of Webster’s stories, and the participants seemed to appreciate them; but when I actually did a Webster novella, one of them dubbed it “the Moby Dick of Webster stories.” (That still makes me laugh.)

I’ll share here an excerpt from The Dark — the last couple of paragraphs. In general, as background:

  • The time is the late 1980s: no cellphones, no online world to speak of, and a car — the Ford Galaxie — which existed both in sedan and station-wagon form.
  • Over the course of the story, Webster becomes entangled, apparently inextricably, with a woman named Mary. (One episode of this entanglement involves, among other things, a tire iron thrown through the windshield of a Jaguar.)
  • His life is therefore about to change in ways he cannot predict, except that he knows there’s no turning back.

So, then — here’s the very ending of The Dark:

He drove slowly, carefully; despite the night’s earlier frenzy and later coffee he had, after all, had an awful lot to drink, on top of which his eyes were still jagged with burrs of near-sleep. Setting the radio to the first clear station he landed on, a country-western station — he normally never listened to the stuff but it felt somehow right, at this time, to be twined-about by jangling guitar chords and voices yodeling in heartbreak. Mary’s scent everywhere, all of her scent, the vanilla and the clover and all the rest of it, everywhere, he could not not sense it: in his hair, in his chin and brow, pressed into the backs of his hands and wrists, rubbed like liniment into his pores; indeed, while he wasn’t literally inhaling it anymore, now he seemed to be exhaling it. Scent of desire.

He rolled down his window. The twilit morning cold came roaring in at him and he hung his head out the window and into the wind; it roared around and over and into the pores of his face and scalp, blurring his vision and scrubbing scrubbing his skin but leaving untouched the scent at his core. A thousand questions glittered down at him from the sky, one question per star, only the least consequential of which were sure to be forthcoming from the Jaguar owner’s insurance company but for the most part unanswerable questions about what he was — well, thought he was — and what he wanted (or, well, all right: thought he wanted) to be, and what he had done and would have to do now, what he could do now and what he would never be able to do again. Lined up behind a tractor trailer which was mysteriously obeying the speed limit, on a wild impulse Webster reached forward and shut off the Galaxie’s headlights. Bobbing like a cork, borne on desire, face to the wind. Heart racing, alone in the dark.

(JES)

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