Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

The Watches of the Night

by Leave a Comment

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

From whiskey river (italicized lines):

Night Walk

The all-night convenience store’s empty
and no one is behind the counter.
You open and shut the glass door a few times
causing a bell to go off,
but no one appears. You only came
to buy a pack of cigarettes, maybe
a copy of yesterday’s newspaper—
finally you take one and leave
thirty-five cents in its place.
It is freezing, but it is a good thing
to step outside again:
you can feel less alone in the night,
with lights on here and there
between the dark buildings and trees.
Your own among them, somewhere.
There must be thousands of people
in this city who are dying
to welcome you into their small bolted rooms,
to sit you down and tell you
what has happened to their lives.
And the night smells like snow.
Walking home for a moment
you almost believe you could start again.
And an intense love rushes to your heart,
and hope. It’s unendurable, unendurable.

(Franz Wright [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Why is it that so many ghosts prefer to travel the halls of night? Ask the living and they will tell you that these spirits either have some unquenched desire or an unaddressed grievance that stirs them from their sleep and sends them out into the world in search of solace.

But the living are so self-centered.

Of course they would judge a spirit’s nocturnal wanderings as the product of earthly memories. When, in fact, if these restless souls wanted to harrow the bustling avenues of noon, there is nothing to stop them from doing so.

No. If they wander the halls of night, it is not from a grievance with or envy of the living. Rather, it is because they have no desire to see the living at all. Any more than snakes hope to see gardeners, or foxes the hounds. They wander about at midnight because at that hour they can generally do so without being harried by the sound and fury of earthly emotions. After all those years of striving and struggling, of hoping and praying, of shouldering expectations, stomaching opinions, navigating decorum, and making conversation, what they seek, quite simply, is a little peace and quiet.

(Amore Towles [source])

…and:

The moment we find the true reason for some feeling that has an irrationally powerful hold on us, whether it has to do with body image or anything else, the spell is broken.

(Gloria Steinem [source])

The Prospect of the Remembered Impossible

by Leave a Comment

[Image: “Y Ffordd Hon Ar Gau (Abergavenny, Wales),” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river:

Remembering

When there was air, when you could
breathe any day if you liked, and if you
wanted to you could run. I used to
climb those hills back of town and
follow a gully so my eyes were at ground
level and could look out through grass as the stems
bent in their tensile way, and see snow
mountains follow along, the way distance goes.

Now I carry those days in a tiny box
wherever I go, I open the lid like this
and let the light glimpse and then glance away.
There is a sigh like my breath when I do this.
Some days I do this again and again.

(William Stafford [source])

Not from whiskey river:

It Was Like This: You Were Happy

It was like this:
you were happy, then you were sad,
then happy again, then not.

It went on.
You were innocent or you were guilty.
Actions were taken, or not.

At times you spoke, at other times you were silent.
Mostly, it seems you were silent—what could you say?

Now it is almost over.

Like a lover, your life bends down and kisses your life.

It does this not in forgiveness—
between you, there is nothing to forgive—
but with the simple nod of a baker at the moment
he sees the bread is finished with transformation.

Eating, too, is a thing now only for others.

It doesn’t matter what they will make of you
or your days: they will be wrong,
they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man,
all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.

Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad,
you slept, you awakened.
Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons.

(Jane Hirshfield [source])

…and:

#25: As a young man, I once visited a sage at his home atop a Pennsylvania mountain. He had lived a long life and, he said, was just very, very tired. He requested a favor. Of course, I said. He handed me a small box, black-lacquered but not freshly so — in fact it was quite worn along the edges and corners.

“In this box,” he said, “are the collected truths of the ages. I have never opened it. But I want you to hold onto it for me. Return it to me the next time you visit. If I have already gone, you can return it to whoever lives here then, and they will thank you for it.”

I wondered for decades about that box: why the old man had it in the first place, how he’d come by it, why he’d never opened it — and if he’d never opened it, how did he know it contained anything at all, let alone the “collected truths of the ages.” And what must such truths even be? Were they rendered in a language I could read? Perhaps in a tiny 4-point pictographic script? During those years I spent quite a lot of time in libraries, never passing up an opportunity to possibly learn more about the box — its provenance as an antique, whether other sages might have referred to such a box, and so on. And yes, I’ve still got it. I have not opened it, because if its owner had not cracked that seal, how could I justify doing so?

And yes, I did once tried to return it to the old man. But there was no one at the sage’s residence, and no sign that anyone at all had been living there. The furniture and countertops were dusty, the windows papered over on the inside with twenty-year-old newspapers. I had to cut through the newspaper just to let in enough light to see my way around… I’ve now been here for years — I don’t know how many, exactly.

I received a letter in the mail four days ago from a young man who said he’d heard that a guru of some kind lives on this mountain. He would be visiting the nearby town, he said, and he hoped at least to shake my hand because he’d once read something I’d written, and been deeply moved.

I can’t imagine what he might have read to have that effect, but nevertheless how could I turn him away? He’ll be arriving today, sometime, and frankly I’ve got no talent for hospitality — and no supplies for delivering hospitality if I had the talent… It’s a nice enough day. I’ll be sitting outside on the stone wall when he gets here, perhaps. And now that I think about it, I think after we’ve shaken hands and exchanged a few verbal niceties, I’ll just send him on his way…

…with the worn, lacquered box, and all its truths of the ages. Just to hold onto for me. I’d hate for anything to happen to it.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)

How Is It We Are Here, Not There — and for How Long?

by Leave a Comment

[Image: “Work in Progress,” by John E. Simpson.]

Now that it is — as they say — That Time of Year, I am looking for, and (even better) easily finding, reasons to smile even as I look out of this second-floor window to a forest of orange- and rusty-red-colored treetops, with the bare-barked finger bones of winter practically trembling, eager for a chance to shake off the hues of autumn.

I’m very glad to see that our friend over at whiskey river, whoever they may be, seems to have shaken off the bug which has bedeviled their posting schedule and, surely, their real life as well — like with this:

If you’re reading this, if there’s air in your lungs on this November day, then there is still hope for you. Your story is still going. And maybe some things are true for all of us. Perhaps we all relate to pain. Perhaps we all relate to fear and loss and questions. And perhaps we all deserve to be honest, all deserve whatever help we need. Our stories are all so many things: Heavy and light. Beautiful and difficult. Hopeful and uncertain. But our stories aren’t finished yet. There is still time, for things to heal and change and grow. There is still time to be surprised. We are still going, you and I. We are stories still going.

(Jamie Tworkowski [source])

…and, even better, adds (last stanza):

Linear Illusions

Some days seem significant.
Premature lacewings hatch in the house.
Crawling over vast wastes of plastic
they fly toward light.
Outside, snow is crusted. Inside,
insects programmed in perfection—
on the wrong side of the window.

This evening Cabernet Sauvignon,
mushroom omelet.
Outside, rain has brought up worms.
They lie exhausted in straight lines.
Some are drowned.
Narrow and pink at either end,
they cannot decide which direction.

I have decided on blank pages.
In them you can travel forever;
white flying toward your eyes;
as when driving through falling snow
you see only those snowflakes
you are cutting across;
relentlessly horizontal.

(Ruth Stone [source])

Over the last week I myself have encountered in my reading one grace note after another — clicking past like milestones unsought but glimpsed from a train car through the countryside. Like:

You can’t plant a forest, only a forest makes a forest, because a forest is not just a few trees. It’s a huge ecosystem of many related things that we can’t even begin to understand. It changes. Thoreau was writing about that on his deathbed. The life in the soil and everything begins to come back. There’s a point where it begins to take over and do it itself. That’s so moving when you begin to see that. Most people don’t even recognize that is what is happening, but that’s what’s happening. It’s there, the earth has it.

What I mean by our human arrogance is that we think the universe somehow owes us eternal life right here on earth, and that’s not so. The universe doesn’t owe us a damn thing; the universe doesn’t even notice us. This can sound like a depressing viewpoint, but I think it’s an exhilarating viewpoint. Accept your place in this incredible, incomprehensible richness of life, but also accept the unknown in the universe. We’re part of it and it’s miraculous. How did it ever happen that we should be here?

(William S. Merwin [source])

…and then, just yesterday, I read excerpts of an interview published under the title “Life Is Hard. And That’s Good.” This sample comes from a discussion about how the COVID-19 pandemic has distorted our sense of what’s important in day-to-day living:

There’s a distinction I make between telic and atelic activities. The jargon is from linguistics, but it comes from the Greek word telos, for end, where a telic activity is one that has a final end state, something you’re aiming to achieve, like getting a promotion at work or getting married or getting a job. The kind of things we’d think of as projects, and they have this structure where the thing that you want is always at a distance in the future, or the moment you achieve it, it’s in the past and it’s over…

Atelic activities are ones that don’t have a terminal endpoint. So, just as there is walking home, there’s just going for a walk. Or, just as there is having kids or making dinner for your kids, there’s the ongoing activity of parenting. When you’re engaged in an atelic activity that doesn’t aim at some end point in the future, you don’t have this problem that satisfaction is always in the future, or then immediately in the past. You don’t have the problem that what you’re doing is extinguishing or undermining your engagement with the activity, because there’s nothing inherent in your engagement with it that’s trying to extinguish it. A shift that it’s very helpful to make in relation to activities in our lives is to become less focused on telic activities, or projects, and redirect ourselves to the value of atelic activities, the value of the process.

(Kieran Setiya [source (note: site permits two free articles per month)]

…and finally, this:

It is part of the human experience that we are constantly gripping a good fellow by the shoulders and wishing him well, taking comfort from the notion that we will hear word of him soon enough. But experience is less likely to teach us how to bid our dearest possessions adieu. And if it were to? We wouldn’t welcome the education. For eventually, we come to hold our dearest possessions more closely than we hold our friends. We carry them from place to place, often at considerable expense and inconvenience; we dust and polish their surfaces and reprimand children for playing too roughly in their vicinity—all the while, allowing memories to invest them with greater and greater importance. This armoire, we are prone to recall, is the very one in which we hid as a boy; and it was these silver candelabra that lined our table on Christmas Eve; and it was with this handkerchief that she once dried her tears, et cetera, et cetera. Until we imagine that these carefully preserved possessions might give us genuine solace in the face of a lost companion.

But, of course, a thing is just a thing.

And so, slipping his sister’s scissors into his pocket, the Count looked once more at what heirlooms remained and then expunged them from his heartache forever

(Amor Towles [source])

Sleepers in an Elementary World

by Leave a Comment

[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

by 3 Comments

  • 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

by Leave a Comment

[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?

by Leave a Comment

[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

by 1 Comment

[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)

by Leave a Comment

  • 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

by 2 Comments

[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.

Verified by MonsterInsights