Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

A Figure, Seen from the Back, Forever Approaching

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

We will be leaving Las Vegas on June 1 — headed first for the Grand Canyon, and then for a Grand Tour of California: Joshua Tree, and then over to San Diego and on up the coast to see the redwoods in the north. (We’ll do a little jog east for Yosemite and Tahoe, somewhere in the middle.) Neither of us has spent much time in the state before — no time at all since we’ve been together (pushing 30 years now)… so we’re looking forward to making its acquaintance, even for just the month we’re there. I wonder if we’ll recognize each of the sights we’ve always imagined, separately and as one?

Of course, with less than two weeks left before we hit the road again, this time for 100% unknown territory, I approached whiskey river this week not with trepidation, but with a certain, well, mindset — my mind’s eye turned to horizons never before seen. And found:

Imaginary Paintings

1. How I Would Paint the Future

A strip of horizon and a figure,
seen from the back, forever approaching.

2. How I Would Paint Happiness

Something sudden, a windfall,
a meteor shower. No—
a flowering tree releasing
all its blossoms at once,
and the one standing beneath it
unexpectedly robed in bloom,
transformed into a stranger
too beautiful to touch.

3. How I Would Paint Death

White on white or black on black.
No ground, no figure. An immense canvas,
which I will never finish.

4. How I Would Paint Love

I would not paint love.

5. How I Would Paint the Leap of Faith

A black cat jumping up three feet
to reach a three-inch shelf.

Smooth, and deceptively small
so that it can be swallowed
like something we take for a cold.
An elongated capsule,
an elegant cylinder,
sweet and glossy,
that pleases the tongue
and goes down easy,
never mind
the poison inside.

6. How I Would Paint the Big Lie

7. How I Would Paint Nostalgia

An old-fashioned painting, a genre piece.
People in bright and dark clothing.
A radiant bride in white
standing above a waterfall,
watching the water rush
away, away, away.

(Lisel Mueller [source])

Closer to home, such as it is, I spent the last week forcing myself to read a book by an author with whom I was completely unfamiliar. Now, I am typically a generous reader — inclined to give every author the benefit of even many doubts. This particular author — let’s call them X — has apparently had a very successful career so far: numerous novels, a Pushcart Prize for short stories, many loyal readers. The book I read was the first of a new series with an intriguing premise: a young true-crime reporter, a woman at that, in 1880s New York City. All of which hinted at the prospect of a quick, light read, very much what I was looking for after Richard Powers’s The Overstory…

Obviously I’m being a little coy about not identifying X or even X’s book. That I caught up with it, took it by the shoulders and turned it around — only to wince at what I’d committed to — well, yes, I was very, very disappointed. But disappointment isn’t an objective perception; it has more to do with the expectations brought to an experience than it has to do with the experience itself, and to this extent it reveals a flaw between one’s own ears — not necessarily (in this case) a flaw between an author’s.

All that level-headedness and high-minded professionalism aside, I can’t resist wrapping up this post something as follows:

Imaginary Paintings (cont’d)

8. How I Would Paint X’s Book

Gray corseted prose,
draping shirt-cardboard figures.
Statements of the obvious
cribbed from Wikipedia
and offered to the reader
in colored-cellophane drapery,
as though transparent giftwrap
could transfigure misshapen contents.
A finish line staggered across,
breathlessly, panting for refreshment.

(JES)

Strange, Demented Conviction

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[Slideshow: “Desert Overstory,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) It represents something of an homage to Richard Powers’s novel, The Overstory, from which I quote below. Taken together, the two images ask: what are trees trying to tell us? and does the message change with context? can we help them to say it, by changing the context?]

Circumstances* require me for my Friday post to return, temporarily, to the call-and-response format of some years ago: a couple of recent whiskey river clips, followed by something(s) I’ve come across which — for me — chime in synchrony with what I’ve pulled from over there. So, let’s begin — from whiskey river:

On the Strength of All Conviction and the Stamina of Love

Sometimes I think
we could have gone on.
All of us. Trying. Forever.

But they didn’t fill
the desert with pyramids.
They just built some. Some.

They’re not still out there,
building them now. Everyone,
everywhere, gets up, and goes home.

Yet we must not
Diabolize time. Right?
We must not curse the passage of time.

(Jennifer Michael Hecht, The Next Ancient World [source])

…and:

What a strange demented feeling it gives me when I realize that I have spent whole days before this inkstone, with nothing better to do, jotting down at random whatever nonsensical thoughts have entered my head.

(Yoshida Kenko, Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenk? [source])

And now, not from whiskey river:

Powerful molecules in bark, pith, and leaves whose effects have yet to be discovered. One family of distress hormones used by her trees—jasmonate—supplies the punch to all those feminine perfumes that play on mystery and intrigue. Sniff me, love me, I’m in trouble. And they are in trouble, all these trees. All the forests of the world, even the quaintly named set-aside lands. More trouble than she has the heart to tell readers of her little book. Trouble, like the atmosphere, flows everywhere, in currents beyond the power of humans to predict or control…

Trees know when we’re close by. The chemistry of their roots and the perfumes their leaves pump out change when we’re near… When you feel good after a walk in the woods, it may be that certain species are bribing you. So many wonder drugs have come from trees, and we haven’t yet scratched the surface of the offerings. Trees have long been trying to reach us. But they speak on frequencies too low for people to hear.

(Richard Powers [source 1; source 2])

______________________________

* Don’t worry, nothing wrong. Just a very active couple of days. At the moment, in fact, I’m “stuck” in our room on the 27th floor of a very nice hotel on the Las Vegas Strip. Did someone say strange and demented?!?

Doing Justice to What’s “Real” — by Way of What’s “Not”

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[Video: Skylar Tang — 15 years old at the time she posted this video — was recently named the winner of a big-band composing/arranging contest sponsored by the Jazz at Lincoln Center’s “Essentially Ellington” Festival. (Read more about that here.) In the video here, she is not performing her own composition: it’s a brief instrumental cover of a song by “soul-pop” band Lawrence… with her performing all the parts, beautifully split-screened together. (You can see Lawrence’s own video of the song here — imaginative in its own right, sure, but c’mon: every one of their instruments is played by a different musician.)]

As someone who has written fiction — and continues, wistfully, to aspire to write more — I hope you’ll forgive me for elevating the imagined to a plane possibly loftier than the real. Oh, trust me, I don’t mean there’s no difference between them. Get enough people together in some real setting, ask them to notice what’s around them, and forbid them to express their observations aloud, and — well, whatever they’d notice in common if they could communicate: that’s reality. Anything else would just be analyses, judgments, speculations, and opinions tame or wild about reality.

[Aside: this isn’t speaking about fiction vs. non-fiction, by the way. I regard my favorite writers in both those broad categories with equal esteem. And then there are those wizards who manage to pull off both types of magic at once: novelists of the “realist” sort, who educate the reader about the objective world on every page… via wholly imaginary characters, settings, and stories.]

All I’m really pointing at with this comparison, really, is the truism: what people call “reality” exists in their heads just as much as what they call “imagination.” Only when they take it OUT of their heads and share it with other people — and at least informally poll those others to establish a common vision of What Is Outside — only then can they classify an experience as real (shared) or imagined (idiosyncratic or minority opinion).

Over the past week, our anonymous friend at whiskey river has offered a couple of meditations about this. First, and most directly (including the last sentence, omitted at the river):

The unreal is more powerful than the real.

Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it.

Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die.

But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.

If you can change the way people think […]. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. And that’s the only lasting thing you can create.

(Chuck Palahniuk [source])

On the other hand, what about metaphor? Is what’s being expressed or described (the so-called tenor) more “real” than its characterization in the figure of speech (i.e., the vehicle)? Consider, for example:

Instructions on Not Giving Up

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

(Ada Limón [source])

That second reading hit me especially hard this week because I’m on the brink of finishing Richard Powers’s big (612 pages! (well, except of course, those are — ha!) real pages, not the metaphorical ones of my e-book reader)) novel The Overstory. To say that this is a fictional work about trees — and about both humanity’s understanding and its ignorance of them — really is not to say much at all about it. But try this passage on for size; it’s the complete opening chapter, called “Roots”:

First there was nothing. Then there was everything.

Then, in a park above a western city after dusk, the air is raining messages. A woman sits on the ground, leaning against a pine. Its bark presses hard against her back, as hard as life. Its needles scent the air and a force hums in the heart of the wood. Her ears tune down to the lowest frequencies. The tree is saying things, in words before words.

It says: Sun and water are questions endlessly worth answering.

It says: A good answer must be reinvented many times, from scratch.

It says: Every piece of earth needs a new way to grip it. There are more ways to branch than any cedar pencil will ever find. A thing can travel everywhere, just by holding still.

The woman does exactly that. Signals rain down around her like seeds.

Talk runs far afield tonight. The bends in the alders speak of long-ago disasters. Spikes of pale chinquapin flowers shake down their pollen; soon they will turn into spiny fruits. Poplars repeat the wind’s gossip. Persimmons and walnuts set out their bribes and rowans their blood-red clusters. Ancient oaks wave prophecies of future weather. The several hundred kinds of hawthorn laugh at the single name they’re forced to share. Laurels insist that even death is nothing to lose sleep over.

Something in the air’s scent commands the woman: Close your eyes and think of willow. The weeping you see will be wrong. Picture an acacia thorn. Nothing in your thought will be sharp enough. What hovers right above you? What floats over your head right now—now?

Trees even farther away join in: All the ways you imagine us—bewitched mangroves up on stilts, a nutmeg’s inverted spade, gnarled baja elephant trunks, the straight-up missile of a sal—are always amputations. Your kind never sees us whole. You miss the half of it, and more. There’s always as much belowground as above.

That’s the trouble with people, their root problem. Life runs alongside them, unseen. Right here, right next. Creating the soil. Cycling water. Trading in nutrients. Making weather. Building atmosphere. Feeding and curing and sheltering more kinds of creatures than people know how to count.

A chorus of living wood sings to the woman: If your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we’d drown you in meaning.

The pine she leans against says: Listen. There’s something you need to hear.

(Richard Powers [source])

See? What’s the “reality” of the trees enumerated in just this one page — alder, chinquapin, poplar, persimmon, walnut, rowan, oak, hawthorn, laurel, willow, acacia, mangrove, nutmeg, baja elephant, sal? Do they have just a single reality? Will what follows in the book capture it — and if so, what makes it “fiction” more than anything else?

Finding the End in the Middle

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[Image: “Lemme Out!,” by Alan Levine. Found it on Flickr, of course; there, the photographer explains that he released the wasp unharmed after taking the photo — and pleads, jokingly, for a bit of karmic payback for his good deed. But in the context of this week’s post, I couldn’t help thinking of the wasp’s own experience of karma, before and after release…]

Let’s talk about karma — that mysterious force of revenge or redemption, that Thing Out There which either comes back to bite us or secures our place among the angels (depending on the sort of life we’ve led). Curse or comfort: you pick (because if you don’t, it will happily pick for you!).

I’ve always been suspicious of karma, at least as the term is casually and most often used; if it were actually “true” then the universe must suddenly — instantly — have become much more automated than I’d ever imagined it could be — a condition which seemed at odds with the chaotic jumble of non-cause-and-unlikely-effect I could see just by looking around at a given moment.

(Not of course that I was worried about karma — that dire consequences might lurk around the corner for me, or, for that matter, that fame and fortune lurk there. I haven’t led anywhere near a blameless life, the gods (and far too many humans!) know, but I haven’t been a horrible person, either. I just figure what happens, happens.)

But karma turns out to be a useful concept if you stop thinking about it as a scorekeeping — an accounting — tool. Suppose you imagine the ideal-to-you you, using whatever yardstick you’d like. How would you set out to make that happen? I mean, I don’t know anything about “you” out there, but I bet just going through this mental exercise will move you in the direction of what you’ve imagined. That turns karma not into a force imposed on you from the outside, but into a force sprung from you yourself…

A couple of readings this week along these lines. First, per usual, here’s one from whiskey river (italicized lines) a few days ago:

A Color of the Sky

Windy today and I feel less than brilliant,
driving over the hills from work.
There are the dark parts on the road
when you pass through clumps of wood
and the bright spots where you have a view of the ocean,
but that doesn’t make the road an allegory.

I should call Marie and apologize
for being so boring at dinner last night,
but can I really promise not to be that way again?
And anyway, I’d rather watch the trees, tossing
in what certainly looks like sexual arousal.

Otherwise it’s spring, and everything looks frail;
the sky is baby blue, and the just-unfurling leaves
are full of infant chlorophyll,
the very tint of inexperience.

Last summer’s song is making a comeback on the radio,
and on the highway overpass,
the only metaphysical vandal in America has written
MEMORY LOVES TIME
in big black spraypaint letters,

which makes us wonder if Time loves Memory back.

Last night I dreamed of X again.
She’s like a stain on my subconscious sheets.
Years ago she penetrated me
but though I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed,
I never got her out,
but now I’m glad.

What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle.
What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel.
What I thought was an injustice
turned out to be a color of the sky.

Outside the youth center, between the liquor store
and the police station,
a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;

overflowing with blossomfoam,
like a sudsy mug of beer;
like a bride ripping off her clothes,

dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds,

so Nature’s wastefulness seems quietly obscene.
It’s been doing that all week:
making beauty,
and throwing it away,
and making more.

(Tony Hoagland [source])

…and then, not from whiskey river but from a newsletter I subscribe to (an issue in my inbox this week):

Many often mistake karma for the notion of a fixed destiny. It is more like an accumulation of tendencies that can lock us into particular behavior patterns, which themselves result in further accumulations of tendencies of a similar nature. So, it is easy to become imprisoned by our karma and to think that the cause always lies elsewhere—with other people and conditions beyond our control, never within ourselves. But it is not necessary to be a prisoner of old karma. It is always possible to change your karma. You can make new karma. But there is only one time that you ever have to do it. Can you guess when that might be?

[…]

The very act of stopping, of nurturing moments of non-doing, of simply watching, puts you on an entirely different footing vis-à-vis the future. How? Because it is only by being fully in this moment that any future moment might be one of greater understanding, clarity, and kindness, one less dominated by fear or hurt and more by dignity and acceptance. Only what happens now happens later. If there is no mindfulness or equanimity or compassion now, in the only time we ever have to contact it and nourish ourselves, how likely is it that it will magically appear later, under stress or duress?

(Jon Kabat-Zinn [source])

RAMH@14.005479: In Search of Stasis

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[Image: Cover of Off Flew the Hat, a 2017 children’s book by Nili Ariely about — apparently — the pleasures of writing a blog over the course of many years. Says the description at that Amazon page, it’s about “about the wonders of discovery and friendship.” But even absent the latter — fresh friendships and shared discoveries — there’s always the thrill of a new discovery for oneself…]

In a typical week, whiskey river offers me at least one solid tie-in to something I’ve been thinking about. This week, a bonus: it floated two selections my way appropriate to the post’s theme. First:

The Mountain

My students look at me expectantly.
I explain to them that the life of art is a life
of endless labor. Their expressions
hardly change; they need to know
a little more about endless labor.
So I tell them the story of Sisyphus,
how he was doomed to push
a rock up a mountain, knowing nothing
would come of this effort
but that he would repeat it
indefinitely. I tell them
there is joy in this, in the artist’s life,
that one eludes
judgment, and as I speak
I am secretly pushing a rock myself,
slyly pushing it up the steep
face of a mountain.
Why do I lie
to these children? They aren’t listening,
they aren’t deceived, their fingers
tapping at the wooden desks—
So I retract
the myth; I tell them it occurs
in hell, and that the artist lies
because he is obsessed with attainment,
that he perceives the summit
as that place where he will live forever,
a place about to be
transformed by his burden: with every breath,
I am standing at the top of the mountain.
Both my hands are free. And the rock has added
height to the mountain.

(Louise Glück [source])

… and then there’s this:

Rising in Perilous Hope

What can I hold in my hands this morning
that will not flow through my fingers?
What words can I say that will catch
in your mind like burrs, chiggers that burrow?
If my touch could heal, I would lay my hands
on your bent head and bellow prayers.
If my words could change the weather
or the government or the way the world
twists and guts us, fast or slow,
what could I do but what I do now?
I fit words together and say them;
it is a given like the color of my eyes.
I hope it makes a small difference, as
I hope the drought will break and the morning
come rising out of the ocean wearing
a cloak of clean sweet mist and swirling terns.

(Marge Piercy [source])

Aside from the fact of, well, duh, Friday, today’s post has one other raison d’être, as I hinted a week ago: today is the 14th anniversary (plus a couple days, hence the nerd-jokey post title) of my first post at Running After My Hat.

Some statistics, since then:

  • 1,667 posts, or about 119 posts a year (1,805 total, counting those I haven’t actually published for one reason or another)
  • 104 pages (120 total)
  • 7,176 comments (2,645 of which have been mine; plus 12 “in moderation”)

…and some thoughts about those statistics:

119 posts a year — two to three every week — sounds weirdly inflated even to me. But that’s only because I, and almost certainly you, have gotten used to the Fridays-only tempo around here. There was a time (he said, propping up his feet on a cracker barrel and lifting a harmonica to his lips to maximize the nostalgic moment) when I was determined to write a post every single day — and for a brief while actually did so. What happened? Just the usual: the world moves on, and we move on with it… especially online, when today’s Hot Tech (e.g., blogging) becomes tomorrow’s Quaint Handicraft. Maybe we need an Etsy just for blogs.

The “pages” count is probably about right, although I’ve never tried to verify it. A page is WordPress’s version of an undated diary entry. The top menu here shows you, apart from the “Home” link, links to four such pages:

The fact that you can see only four there points out a distinguishing feature of pages vs. posts: the former can be “found” pretty much only if the blogger has chosen to link to them. The pages themselves may lead you to other pages and/or to actual posts — you can see examples of both by clicking on that About Running After My Hat link at the top of the blog.

So what about the other 116 “pages”? What’s on them?

Some are private — scratchpad-type things, notes to myself (especially about the blog) and so on; you can’t find them by searching the Web, say. Some are password-protected, meaning I’ve shared them with other parties for particular reason(s) — you might be able to find links/references to one in a Web search, but without the proper password you couldn’t actually read the contents. (A good example: a series of pages I used while participating in an online writer’s workshop about six years ago — taking apart and reassembling a novel in which I’ve invested a lot of time and energy. Other workshop participants could read those pages because I’d shared the password with them.) Back in 2012, I wrote The Propagational Library, a science-fiction novella (sort of) by posting one chapter a week, in “real time” (meaning, the chapters as posted were first drafts, posted the day I wrote them) — and indexed them all, with some general commentary, on a single “table of contents” sort of page.

The rest? I’m not sure how to characterize them… You’ll just have to find them the same way I did a moment ago: by poking around to see where the hyperlinks lead you. (The links to actual posts here look like this: https://johnesimpson.com/blog/[yyyy]/[mm]/[title, in compact form] — if a link directs you to a RAMH resource which has no [yyyy] or [mm] component, you can bet it’s a page and not a post; the posts are always dated.)

Anyway, about today’s post’s title: yes, I’m getting a bit restless. But it’s a peculiar sort of restlessness — I’m wanting to, well, be parked somewhere for a while — somewhere I can think of as “home,” physically, really, geographically. (We’ve been parked with The Stepson since mid-December, but that’s only a borrowed, temporary resting spot, good only until we hit the road again in a few weeks; I’m restless, that is, to really come to rest.)

In a bloggish sense, though, I’m equally restless. I can’t recapture the “feel” of blogging in the early 2000s, when loose groups of a few dozen people who didn’t even know one another in real life would chance to gather (not in so many words) and “listen to” one another, round-robin style, and then to “talk” for a little while about the monologue they’d just read. These days, the choices seem to be:

  • Quick one- or two-paragraph (if that) pronouncements of one kind or another, which may or may not draw anyone else into a conversation;
  • “influencer”-focused long-form writings, via the likes of Substack, Medium, etc., in which Big Names craft professional essays upon which their audiences may comment but not really in the form of conversation (it’s like the sotto-voce muttering during a theatrical intermission); and
  • maybe — maybe — podcasts, to which I will never adapt because, y’know, hearing (and also because these are really just audio versions of the long-form Substack/Medium essays, with the additional option of including more than one “influencer” at a time, in conversation).

But I don’t despair. I think I can find value in writing regularly again, even if no one ever reads it — just because, by posting it in the open, I’ve exposed myself to the danger opportunity mere chance that someone might drop in…

In the meantime, I thank you — whoever you are, however (in)frequent a visitor you might be — for visiting Running After My Hat. I appreciate knowing you might be out there!

There’ll Be New Dreams, Maybe Better Dreams and Plenty…

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[Image: “Outliers (Hiding in the Crowd),” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

The Missus and I have been more or less parked here in Las Vegas since mid-December. It’s been nice — at least from our perspective, haha — to share some extended time with The Stepson, and our stereotypically-Vegas activities (casinos, shows, fine dining) have been practically nonexistent… so it’s been good to just, y’know, depressurize after the fits-and-starts dash across the country that took up our last four or five months of 2021. Now it’s April, solidly into springtime, and a certain restlessness is setting in: time to hit the road again, aimed — however indirectly — back at the East Coast.

But first, well, it’s April. We have a clutch of medical/dental appointments lined up next week — just regular checkups — back in the last place we called home, in North Florida. So we’ll fly back for that, and while we’re in the state we’ll also spend a couple weeks with family and friends before heading back here.

But, ahem, as I was saying: It’s April. And whiskey river has taken the opportunity to remind me of the month’s mixed signals:

April

How the light is sad.
How it will not leave us alone.
How we are tugged up staircases
by the way it angles across landings.
Or just our faces—tipped
to the clear, depleted sky.
How because of sunset, the imagination
headquarters in the west.

Spring in the north: all that
tawny grass and gravel and nothing
green to sop up the excessive honesty.

Outside our windows,
something like youth or promises.
How the wind blows right through them,
blossoming. Fleet.

(Jan Zwicky [source])

Whenever and wherever we finally settle down, sometime in a few months (“few” even more loosely defined than usual), the two of us agree that a chief motivator for us will be the priority to the household of a dog. It’s been four-and-a-half years since The Pooch died, and we just can’t stand being dogless anymore.

Happily, then, and happily along several dimensions, as I sought to come up with something to complement — and perhaps answer — Jan Zwicky’s poem, I came across this:

April

The optimists among us
taking heart because it is spring
skip along
attending their meetings
signing their e-mail petitions
marching with their satiric signs
singing their we shall overcome songs
posting their pungent twitters and blogs
believing in a better world
for no good reason
I envy them
said the old woman

The seasons go round they
go round and around
said the tulip
dancing among her friends
in their brown bed in the sun
in the April breeze
under a maple canopy
that was also dancing
only with greater motions
casting greater shadows
and the grass
hardly stirring

What a concerto
of good stinks said the dog
trotting along Riverside Drive
in the early spring afternoon
sniffing this way and that
how gratifying the cellos of the river
the tubas of the traffic
the trombones
of the leafing elms with the legato
of my rivals’ piss at their feet
and the leftover meat and grease
singing along in all the wastebaskets

(Alicia Ostriker [source])

…and then again, this:

April Is a Dog’s Dream

april is a dog’s dream
the soft grass is growing
the sweet breeze is blowing
the air all full of singing feels just right
so no excuses now
we’re going to the park
to chase and charge and chew
and I will make you see
what spring is all about

(Marilyn Singer [source])

Woof!, eh?

______________

Note: This week’s whiskey river Fridays post comes to you courtesy of, well, Thursday: Friday is our day to fly back to Florida (translation: chaos). As for the next couple of weeks, well, let’s just take them as they come. (For one thing, Running After My Hat turns 14 the middle of next week…) Thanks in any case, and as ever, for visiting RAMH!

Note 2: By the way, this post’s title alludes — as I believe Alicia Ostriker’s “April” may allude — to Joni Mitchell’s “The Circle Game.”

Rarest of Moments: Neither Apart from Nor Together With Anything Else

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[Photos: “Life Story in Wood, (Color and Black-and-White),” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

This week, whiskey river tossed me a lovely poem which engendered a cascade of thought. And because cascades of almost anything — especially thought — are better when shared with (off-loaded onto?) others, I thought I’d give it some air here today:

Rare Moment

A clear choice
is so sweet. Not
reluctant complicity but
real resistance
to spring.
Joy-to-bursting,
or none. Grief,
not gradients.
Someone essential.
Someone not.
A good, dark
strike-through
versus
weighing everything
at the end of each day.
Look, a cat killed a cardinal
on an emerald lawn.
For so many reasons
it shouldn’t have been
beautiful.
But that’s also the kind of book
I like best.

(Lia Purpura [source])

This poem reminds me of a passage I’ve cited here before:

God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside of God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. This is his way of hiding from himself. He pretends that he is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way he has strange and wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening. But these are just like bad dreams, for when he wakes up they will disappear…

You may ask why God sometimes hides in the form of horrible people, or pretends to be people who suffer great disease and pain. Remember, first, that he isn’t really doing this to anyone but himself. Remember, too, that in almost all the stories you enjoy there have to be bad people as well as good people, for the thrill of the tale is to find out how the good people will get the better of the bad. It’s the same as when we play cards. At the beginning of the game we shuffle them all into a mess, which is like the bad things in the world, but the point of the game is to put the mess into good order, and the one who does it best is the winner. Then we shuffle the cards once more and play again, and so it goes with the world.

(Alan Watts [source])

The desire for extremes — for definitive answers instead of bet-hedging throat clearings, for a black-and-white world to relieve us of the shades-of-gray (or worse: full-color) panorama of the real world — well, it’s understandable. “Sometimes, Dr. Freud,” so goes an old joke, “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” Nuance is exhausting.

But the secret to real peace, for me anyhow, lies in accepting that one thing is seldom if ever just one thing — not even that one thing. When our attention snags on a cat, a cardinal, or a lawn (and pace Lia Purpura, whose work I dearly love), to the exclusion of anything else, we’re agreeing to let ourselves be conned by the way the world hides parts of itself within itself. We agree to favor the macro over the micro.

A convention, it is — a convenience — because who can possibly make sense of, even live in a universe of hissing subatomic particles and invisible forces?

A conversation between The Missus and me sometimes starts like this: she’ll be sitting alongside of me, or at the other end of a sofa; she’ll be reading, or working a puzzle, or something similarly absorbing. As for me, I may also have a book or laptop at hand, but I’m not looking down at it: I’m just kinda staring, at nothing at all — into a corner of the room, out a window, at a blank TV screen…

Suddenly I’ll hear The Missus’s voice: What? she says. Huh? I reply. She clarifies:What are you doing?

There’s almost never anything going on between my ears at the moment. I can’t presume to say I’m “in tune with the cosmos,” let alone approaching nirvana, or even simply “meditating” as such. But when the spell is suddenly broken, I suddenly become aware that — for a moment, at least — I didn’t exist apart from everything else. I wasn’t attending to anything. I wasn’t preferring Thing A over Thing B, was making no decisions or plans, wasn’t thinking or imagining. Not at all… And during that time, there were no shades of gray, no colors, no blacks-and-whites.

Of course, now I’m of an age when — for all I know — I’ve actually just experienced and been rescued from the consequences of a mini-stroke, or maybe a mini-fugue state (if there is such a thing). (Haha. Sort of.)

But in terms of its impact on me, such a moment always gives me a sort of peace — by reminding me, not in so many words or in any words at all, that there is no “me” apart from The Missus or the sofa we’re on or a tree dying out on the lawn or a cat stalking a cardinal (or the cardinal so stalked). In such a state — which is to say, in reality — I have no reasons to be angry or envious, proud or ashamed, friendly or reserved. I’m not wanting anything, I’m not even lacking anything. All of which says: I’m doing just fine, despite doing absolutely nothing.

Which brings me to one more literary offering, without comment:

Neither Out Far Nor In Deep

The people along the sand
All turn and look one way.
They turn their back on the land.
They look at the sea all day.

As long as it takes to pass
A ship keeps raising its hull;
The wetter ground like glass
Reflects a standing gull.

The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be—
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.

They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?

(Robert Frost [source])

May We Stay Forever Young

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[Video: Bob Dylan’s “Forever Young,” covered by Johnny Cash. This song may be to Dylan’s entire oeuvre what “O Holy Night” or “Ave Maria” is to Christmas music: over-interpreted, -emoted, and -performed by dozens of artists, each seeming determined to show proper reverence to the songwriter rather than to the song itself. Cash’s offering seemed best for my frame of mind today, and I hope it sits well with you, too. I also considered using Lee Ann Womack’s “I Hope You Dance,” especially for the line, “when you get the choice to sit it out or dance/I hope you dance,” which feels perfectly in tune with today’s theme. But the rest of the song is a bit too… syrupy? Or am I now overthinking things…?]

One of the things I like most about whiskey river: if you just drop in there once in a blue moon you can convince yourself that its sources are all scraps of, y’know, woo-woo philosophy, poetry, idle dreamings and speculation… but if you visit regularly, you get, well, poked pretty regularly. There’ll be a joke, a fiercely political exhortation, an overturned worldview. It’s never “news,” but the pot keeps stirring, and you can never know in advance what might turn up in your soup spoon. This week I’ve found two gems there, by way of illustration. First:

Big Brother isn’t watching. He’s singing and dancing. He’s pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother’s busy holding your attention every moment you’re awake. He’s making sure you’re always distracted. He’s making sure you’re fully absorbed.

He’s making sure your imagination withers. Until it’s as useful as your appendix. He’s making sure your attention is always filled.

And this being fed, it’s worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what’s in your mind. With everyone’s imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world.

(Chuck Palahniuk [source])

…and here’s the other:

A child’s instinct is almost perfect in the matter of fighting; a child always stands for the good militarism as against the bad. The child’s hero is always the man or boy who defends himself suddenly and splendidly against aggression. The child’s hero is never the man or boy who attempts by his mere personal force to extend his mere personal influence…

But really to talk of this small human creature, who never picks up an umbrella without trying to use it as a sword, who will hardly read a book in which there is no fighting—to take this human creature and talk about the wickedness of teaching him to be military, seems rather a wild piece of humour. He has already not only the tradition of fighting, but a far manlier and more genial tradition of fighting than our own. No; I am not in favour of the child being taught militarism. I am in favour of the child teaching it.

(G. K. Chesterton [source])

Notice the unstated, perhaps unintentional interplay between the two very different passages: the first, angry and assertive in its warning against the traps of the modern world — its ceaseless distraction from What’s Really Going On; and the second, gently pointing out an approach to fighting the world, by modeling our own behaviors on those of children.

Omitted, though: what, well, to do at one critical moment or another? It’s one thing to acknowledge evil when you encounter it, perhaps point it out to others. And it’s one thing to act on your recognition of evil, to fight it, actively, with a child’s sense of right and wrong. But of what should that action consist? Should we take to the streets? Should we donate money? Should we join the [insert nationality here] Foreign Legion to do battle with evil on other shores? Should we meditate, do yoga, learn calligraphy, write a satirical novel or inflammatory op-ed article?

There’s a response to these questions popular among those of a Christian bent: What would Jesus do? (You may have seen this sentiment expressed as WWJD? on bracelets, tattoos, and so on.) The thing is, no one possibly has any idea what Jesus — or anyone else from then to now — “would” do at this moment, in our shoes. Furthemore at root, we don’t need to turn to religion (the gods know, a source of plenty of evil in its name) for answers. I think all we really need to ask ourselves as we confront evil in our world, in our age, is: What would a child do?

No matter the evil of the moment (there’s always evil of the moment): put yourself in a kid’s “the battle between good and evil” frame of reference. Don’t try to predict what specific course of action they’d recommend, and for gods’ sake don’t ASK them for advice. Just, well, adopt that state of mind.

And then… then act, or not. And don’t second-guess yourself, or the hypothetical kid. Take the next step, and the one after that, and so on. And don’t look back.

The Simple Decency, the Common-Sense Relief, of Just Remembering to Smile

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[Image: “Gym Dandy,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) This was a recent entry in my “#jesstorypix” series on Instagram. The caption there reads: “What Hari disliked most about going to the gym wasn’t the tedium of the workouts or the questionable hygienic practices evident in the shower room. No, it was the balletic precision of the bodybuilders at the free-weights rack, who sometimes fell unconsciously into synchrony with one another — reminding Hari, with each identically flexed bicep, that he shared synchrony with no one at all, in or out of the gym…”]

My default email sig, years ago, was a sorta-popular quotation from George Bernard Shaw: Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh. Eventually I stopped using it because, as was almost bound to happen, it ended up at the bottom of a message of condolence to somebody or other (I forget whom). I was mortified, but the horse — as they say — was already out of the barn, past recall.

Obviously, I no longer use that sig. But I still cling to the sentiment behind it to get me through the day, any day. It’s the sentiment which a whiskey river quotation echoed in recent days, less epigrammatically maybe but also — and maybe therefore — much more gently:

To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand Utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

(Howard Zinn, A Power Governments Cannot Suppress [source])

Yeah. I can live happily with that thought. It’s not denial, it’s the opposite of denial; it’s open-mindedness, open-eyedness, consciousness that the world (animal, vegetable, mineral) has never been and never will be binary. When I’m tempted to think otherwise, I’ve fallen into a trap which Garrison Keillor recently alluded to:

Some morning I’ll get out of bed with an awful aching in my head and can’t find my shoes and I’ll say, “Good morning, blues,” but not this morning, I made coffee, it tasted fine, not at all like turpentine, and my good woman hasn’t left me, she’s right here, and as Solomon said, “The race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong,” so do your best to be lucky. Say what you will, life is good. Newspapers don’t report this, just as they don’t report that the sun comes up in the east and H and C stand for Hot and Cold — you’re supposed to know these things. And you do. I know you do.

(Garrison Keillor [source])

That. You get that, right? I’ve often said — in real life, not just online or in my mind: It’s called “news” because it’s not the norm. On the contrary, it’s the exception. And when you turn away from the “news” now offered you 24×7, then you can finally see at least the outlines of the real world:

  • people undeniably dying horrible deaths, but also many many more people dying in their sleep or while watching TV or reading;
  • grandstanding politicians, but also patient, hardworking bureaucrats who routinely solve citizens’ hardest problems;
  • the dark face of technology — password managers which fail to manage, Wi-Fi weak or nonexistent, trolls and scammers, hard-drive crashes and cracked screens, incompatible plugs and jacks — but also (routinely, smoothly) functioning communication and virtual storage beyond imagining even 25-20 years ago;
  • etc., etc., etc.

On the other hand, balance is important. I draw the line, say, here (although I love the poem!):

Happy Endings

I like the story where the cowboy lives
because the bullet struck the whiskey flask

instead of his thin-walled heart. Or the one
where the boy is thrown from the wrecked car

and lands perfectly on a pillow of grass
instead of the awful road. I’m to the point

where if someone has to get killed, please
deliver a clear lesson along with that death.

No random, Godless acts. No mad dogs, no
hatchets being wielded at good girls slumbering

in the folds of their warm beds. After reading Cinderella,
after observing the fat and happy cartoon mouse

weekly escaping the ravenous cat, after watching
my fellow earthlings pull together and pound

the Martians into the rock-hard desert using sarcasm
and sticks, I’ve come to appreciate the happy ending,

no matter how tacky or unearned. It’s today. And death tolls
continue to climb. You think I want the truth?

(Kristen Tracy [source])

Watching Yourself Stumble Through a Crowded Labyrinth

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Dragon*con 2010

[Image: “Dragon*con 2010,” by Ethan Trewhitt. (This is just a static frame from a video a little over a minute in length; you can click on the image to see the video itself, over on Flickr. In any case, of course, I use it here under a Creative Commons license.) Says the caption, in part: “The Marriott lobby, crowded with the costumed and uncostumed, brims with disorder as people move in every direction at once. I think that it would be fascinating to track each individual person in this video and view their course as they navigate the maze and simultaneously create it by simply existing.” Implicit in the caption: that Trewitt himself added to the tumult… by simply existing. Heh.]

The French philosopher Henri Bergson has had a rather muddled, on-again/off-again reputation over the decades since he lived and died (1941). Philosophical controversy, of course, does not at all resemble pop-culture controversy — no one, to my knowledge, has accused him of scandalous personal behavior. But jeez, philosophers can sure fight zealously among themselves; this seems especially so when their philosophies depend, as Bergson’s apparently did, on deep understanding of other fields, particularly science and mathematics.

Anyway, I’ve never read a complete work of his, only excerpts quoted by others. It no doubt reflects my own lack of intellectual rigor that such excerpts have struck me as completely reasonable. Take, for example, the following from a recent whiskey river post:

Fortunately, some are born with spiritual immune systems that sooner or later give rejection to the illusory worldview grafted upon them from birth through social conditioning. They begin sensing that something is amiss, and start looking for answers. Inner knowledge and anomalous outer experiences show them a side of reality others are oblivious to, and so begins their journey of awakening.

Each step of the journey is made by following the heart instead of following the crowd and by choosing knowledge over the veils of ignorance.

(Henri Bergson [source])

I read through that essay (from 2015, and not by Bergson himself) at the link provided by whiskey river. Therein I found a nice metaphor — certainly for contemporary “civilized” life:

Picture yourself in a giant labyrinth. Billions of other people are also in the labyrinth, but it is so large and wild that you only see a minuscule fraction of them. At the end of the labyrinth is a nebulous It, a prize with no concrete existence, that means something slightly different to each of the maze’s travelers. You sometimes worry as you wander through the maze if you’ll ever reach It, or if there even is an It. You see some people running through the maze, knocking others over in the process, thirsty to finally discover It. Some people aren’t even moving at all, just hanging out, sitting against one of the tall hedges within the maze.

You can choose to judge the people who are unlike you in how they approach the maze’s challenge. Or, you can talk to them, show them respect and try to learn something from them as you work your way through the maze. You may find yourself in a standstill at times, or in a sprint.

What must be remembered over all else is that you’re in a maze. You’re part of the game, and it’s not just your game — it’s everyone’s.

(Charlie Ambler [source])

Sometime back in the 1980s, I worked as a computer programmer for a giant international telecommunications firm. Because our management was enlightened, we occasionally had chances to attend presentations and seminars outside our specific area of expertise, especially if they were clearly business-oriented somehow. One of these I remember was a small group session, led by guy who’d developed his own desk-calendar system of logging upcoming appointments, noting their results, and annotating those results in some structured way. (This was just at the very dawn of the personal-computer era, so it was all done via paper, held in a special leather-covered binder for which — naturally — he would be happy to supply the custom pages to support the whole system.)

I don’t think any of us present followed his system for more than a month. But the guy was an entertaining, self-deprecatory speaker, and it was hard not to like him. I never forgot one of his points:

He was talking about rush-hour traffic jams, especially in the summer. You’d be sitting there fuming, sometimes glancing nervously at the dashboard temperature gauge, and you might spend 10-15-20 minutes at a time without moving more than a few feet. Eventually your frustration would boil over and you’d start to project outwards. You’d glance around to the side, in your rear-view mirror, and you’d think: Look at all these idiots. All this traffic. Where are all these idiots going at the same time? What do they think they’re doing? Why are they in my way, and why the hell aren’t they moving?!?

And then, they guy said, sometimes if you were lucky, it would suddenly hit you: You’re out there too — the guy laughed at this point, as he pointed at each of us in the small room — you’re the traffic!

I always loved that story.

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