Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Sparking Along at This Point in Time

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[Image: “Seed,” by Nicola?s Paris. (Photo by Pedro Ribeiro Simões; found on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!)]

In recent weeks, time for me has sometimes seemed at a standstill. Or maybe, differently and more accurately expressed, I’ve felt like I’ve been in motion forever, on a treadmill, without actually getting anywhere (even though The Missus and I have of course been physically roaming about the western and central US).

It’s true: we have this summer seen some absolutely marvelous, well, marvels — both natural and human-made. (Gods, I would not have traded our couple hours among the redwoods for anything!) But the marvels have been bursts of exceptionality among rhythms of tedium and inactivity: packing and unpacking, driving for hours, deciding on meals prepared for us, worrying over finances and route planning…

But now, this week, things have changed:

At the moment, we’re in our last hotel of the entire, 400+-day road trip. When we check out Saturday morning, tomorrow, we’re heading for a few nights’ stay with some friends in Georgia, and then for a few whole weeks with family in Florida. Finally, we’re headed a couple/three states north to find a place to live, so that we may again say the words “our home” without metaphor or irony…

You’d almost think that this, from whiskey river a few days ago, must be more than a coincidental — a prescient — selection just for the benefit of the two of us:

We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience.

We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas.

(Alan Watts [source])

Likewise, or at least similarly:

Midsummer, Tobago

Broad sun-stoned beaches.

White heat.
A green river.

A bridge,
scorched yellow palms

from the summer-sleeping house
drowsing through August.

Days I have held,
days I have lost,

days that outgrow, like daughters,
my harbouring arms.

(Derek Walcott [source])

The thing about coincidences (like this week’s apparent whiskey-river-to-JES one), though, is that they, too, are illusions of time: of simultaneity or, well, continuity anyhow — continuity of effect or intention. They draw our attention, distract us, flirt with our fascination with the connectedness of things, which in turn comes from our determination to Make It All Mean Something…

Assuming no last-minute changes in our itinerary: today, we are in Tennessee; tomorrow, we will be in Georgia; next week, we will be in Florida. There is nothing co-incidental about this. That we recently visited, say, Badlands National Park is not a coincidence of our staying in Rapid City, South Dakota; that we unpacked our bags in Rapid City is not a coincidence of our having packed them in Buffalo, Wyoming. No: those actions and events were all just standalones. We could appreciate them (or not!) in their own terms, with no need to connect the dots.

That said, I am really looking forward to some timelines to replace the discrete points that have defined our life for so long.

On Poking Into the Existential Mysteries Around You (There’s More Than One!)

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

Soooooo many essays about the state of the world in 2022 dwell on what seems obvious: we, all of us collectively, are in pretty bad shape (thanks to our active choices and to our passive acceptance of conditions we’d never consciously have chosen). Even good news — like the startling success of what’s currently called the James Webb Space Telescope — is shaded with awfulness. (In JWST’s case, there’s the controversy about commemorating its deeply flawed namesake. And at the other extreme — really deep, deep, awfulness — there’s just the absolute, undeniable realization that anything ALL humans can or will do, have ever done (let alone an individual human) really doesn’t amount to much when put in context with the vastness of the universe.) One of whiskey river‘s readings for the week seems to follow this trend:

So much of what we dream flickers out before we can
name it. Even the sun has been frozen on the next street.
Every word only reveals a past that never seems real.
Sometimes we just stare at the ground as if it were
a grave we could rent for a while. Sometimes we don’t
understand how all that grief fits beside us on the stoop.
There should be some sort of metaphor that lifts us away.
We should see the sky open up or the stars descend.
There are birds migrating, but we don’t hear them, cars
on their way to futures made of a throw of the dice.
The pigeons here bring no messages. A few flies
stitch the air. Sometimes a poem knows no way out
unless truth becomes just a homeless character in it.

(Richard Jackson [source])

Another recent reading (not from whiskey river) approaches all of this from a slightly different perspective — the asking of unanswerable questions:

Who Says Words with My Mouth?

All day I think about it, then at night I say it.
Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?
I have no idea.
My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that,
and I intend to end up there.

This drunkenness began in some other tavern.
When I get back around to that place,
I’ll be completely sober. Meanwhile,
I’m like a bird from another continent, sitting in this aviary.
The day is coming when I fly off,
but who is it now in my ear who hears my voice?
Who says words with my mouth?

Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul?
I cannot stop asking.
If I could taste one sip of an answer,
I could break out of this prison for drunks.
I didn’t come here of my own accord, and I can’t leave that way.
Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.

(Rumi [source])

So which is it? Shall we assert our despair, over and over? Shall we torture ourselves — and one another — by hammering at profound questions which cease to make sense almost the instance we utter them? We sense — we know (or so we tell ourselves) — that we’re all swirling down the drain. Isn’t there a way out? Let’s stampede toward the exit…!

Well, I don’t know. (Of course.) But I think of a couple of things:

First, I am reminded daily — often within a span of moments — of the value of grace notes: points of individual light which seem to fly in the face of what the world and the universe at large seem to insist is true. Vast, ungraspable “things” and institutions (politics, the natural environment, democracy, “the economy”) dominate the news, and they’re all concurrently exploding — going to hell, as the saying goes. And yet…

We stand in line in a restaurant and glimpse the look on a parent’s face as they dab with a napkin at the corner of a child’s face. We fumble with a handful of change, losing a quarter, which rolls away across the floor and out of sight, and just as we chalk it up as One More Damned Thing Going Wrong, a stranger approaches, thumb and forefinger pinched together, and asks, “Excuse me — did you drop this?” Even something as simple as scrolling through social media (all the ads and self-promotions, the noisy “stories” and “reels” overloading our senses): even that offers up moments of sheer innocent pleasure and delight — images of utter stillness and beauty, light-hearted stories of everyday human interaction, amazing tales of journeys taken (actual adventures or figurative voyages of the mind) and obstacles overcome…

Which do you look at? Or no, let me put it to you more pointedly: Which do you choose to look at?

This reminds me of another favorite passage, from James Stephens’s The Crock of Gold:

“I would like to dance, indeed,” returned the Philosopher, “for I do believe that dancing is the first and last duty of man. If we cannot be gay what can we be? Life is not any use at all unless we find a laugh here and there.”

[source]

Second: I have come to think that maybe, just maybe, the main (only?) problem with human existence is simply human awareness of human existence. We know some things; we don’t know much else; we tell ourselves we should do this or that, and/or that we should or must not do these two other things; we craft careful ideologies — institutions of belief — which admit of no inherent weaknesses and will fight competing ideologies to the death, if need be…

…all of which doesn’t make a lot of sense, in the grand scheme of things, because human beings are just, well, dots: infinitesimal microcosms of Everything Out There. The chain of being doesn’t ascend to human beings — and human creations — on Earth. It ascends from protons, atoms, molecules, proteins, ultimately DNA and evolution, through human beings — not to whatever comes next (sorry, science fiction!) but to whatever already is. Existence isn’t like a timeline of This and then That; it’s a myriad of concentric circles from tiny dot on up to cosmos.

I think if we could just lose our self-consciousness and -absorption, and just do What We Do, I think that we — like our atoms and our molecules, like the molecules of everything else (including molecules making up the JWST and those of the meteorite that dinged its lower rightmost mirror) — we could get through each moment of each and every day with much less anguish, with much less fear of (and/or hope for) whatever happens next.

Easier said than done, to be sure. (Above all else, Homo sapiens is the creature which frets.) But I think it’s worth trying.

Choose Your Reassurance, But Above All: Be Reassured

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

My family — my birth family — is going through some difficult times at the moment. Oh, not to worry: compared to what so many must deal with, have been dealing with, we’re fabulously fortunate. We love one another. We miss one another when we’re apart. When we’re together, it’s like we were never apart in the first place. But it’s one of those periods of darkness during which people who love one another exchange glances, real or virtual, and — in these words, in other words, in no words at all — simply ask, What now?

Of course, we’re all adults now, and that comes with its own problems. We bear our burdens separately as well as together, letting them (or not letting them) spill over into our private lives as we will. We draw our own conclusions as we will. We speak to one another frankly, and we hold our tongues — as we will…

I love that whiskey river chose this week, then, to feature the following little meditation on recognizing what we can always fall back on, when the ground beneath our feet trembles:

Maybe love, too, is beautiful because it has a wildness that cannot be tamed. I don’t know. All I know is that passion can take you up like a house of cards in a tornado, leaving destruction in its wake. Or it can let you alone because you’ve built a stone wall against it, set out the armed guards to keep it from touching you. The real trick is to let it in, but to hold on. To understand that the heart is as wide and vast as the universe, but that we come to know it best from here, this place of gravity and stability, where our feet can still touch ground.

(Deb Caletti [source])

It’s a time, really, when reassurance — especially sustained reassurance, reassurance we can draw on for years, for decades — seems to have become the world’s rarest and most valuable commodity. We find ourselves yearning for reassurance beyond time, beyond the real world:

The library director nodded, her eyes wandering. She clearly didn’t want to talk about pandemics. “Let me tell you something magnificent about this place,” she said.

“Oh, please do,” Olive said. “It’s been a while since anyone’s told me anything magnificent.”

“So we don’t own the building,” the director said, “but we hold a ten-thousand-year lease on the space.”

“You’re right. That’s magnificent.”

“Nineteenth-century hubris. Imagine thinking civilization would still exist in ten thousand years. But there’s more.” She leaned forward, paused for effect. “The lease is renewable.”

(Emily St. John Mandel [source])

Should we find no such magnificence out in the world, we turn to the person next to us — and find there both reasons for needing reassurance, and the hint of solutions close at hand… and even closer than that:

It suits us to pretend that we all belong to the one world, but we are more alone than we realize. This aloneness is not simply the result of our being different from each other; it derives more from the fact that each of us is housed in a different body. The idea of human life being housed in a body is fascinating. For instance, when people come to visit your home, they come bodily. They bring all of their inner worlds, experiences, and memories into your house through the vehicle of their bodies. While they are visiting you, their lives are not elsewhere; they are totally there with you, before you, reaching out toward you. When the visit is over, their bodies stand up, walk out, and carry this hidden world away. This recognition also illuminates the mystery of making love. It is not just two bodies that are close, but rather two worlds; they circle each other and flow into each other. We are capable of such beauty, delight, and terror because of this infinite and unknown world within us.

(John O’Donohue [source])

We’ll be okay — me, my family, you, the people next to us. We “just” have to… choose. I think sometimes we choose unhappy helplessness rather than any of the real alternatives, just because we remember so poignantly the times when someone else had to make all the decisions for us. It’s just our turn now!

At the Blurry Margin Between Two Natures

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[Images: “Heart Tree” (in color and — with a tiny exception — black-and-white), by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) I came across this tree in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, during a morning walk; I don’t know that the dab of red paint was indeed meant to be a heart, but I haven’t been able to think of it otherwise.]

One of the weird things about being out in nature — if you’re not being hedonistic about it all, frolicking mindlessly in the surf, so to speak — is how it can focus you on the experience of being human. I don’t mean “human” in the sense of two-legged, opposable-thumbed, neurotic, confident, selfish or aspirational. I mean “human” in the sense of, well, vis-à-vis those beings which lie on the far side of some indefinable border — the far side, that is, of the line between human and not-human.

You stand on an ocean shore, by yourself, as the sun rises or sets over the horizon. You lie on your back beneath a jet-black sky dotted and smeared with stars, galaxies, aurorae. You stand in a grove of thousand-year-old trees, hearing the creak of timber untouched by human limb, hearing the rustle and squeak of unseen creatures (beetles, birds, rodents), feeling (without exactly sensing) the whisper of ferns and fungi and trees-sprouting-from-other-trees. You do that sort of thing once, twice, three times in the span of a few weeks — and you start to wonder how much, really, separates you from all that. Is a barnacle part of the rock it adheres to, or is it something… else?

Humans like to think of themselves as things apart from nature: encrustations. Yes, yes, they grant: there are similarities, there is shared DNA, chemistry in common. And yet, they insist: the differences are too great. We are other — i.e., more — than that, they say…

This week, courtesy of whiskey river (last stanza), we encounter Billy Collins meditating on the line ostensibly separating his civilized human existence from the unseen oceanic swell beneath the ground:

Water Table

It is on dry sunny days like this one that I find myself
thinking about the enormous body of water
that lies under this house,
cool, unseen reservoir,
silent except for the sounds of dripping
and the incalculable shifting
of all the heavy darkness that it holds.

This is the water that our well was dug to sip
and lift to where we live,
water drawn up and falling on our bare shoulders,
water filling the inlets of our mouths,
water in a pot on the stove.

The house is nothing now but a blueprint of pipes,
a network of faucets, nozzles, and spigots,
and even outdoors where light pierces the air
and clouds fly over the canopies of trees,
my thoughts flow underground
trying to imagine the cavernous scene.

Surely it is no pool with a colored ball
floating on the blue surface.
No grotto where a king would have
his guests rowed around in swan-shaped boats.
Between the dark lakes where the dark rivers flow
there is no ferry waiting on the shore of rock
and no man holding a long oar,
ready to take your last coin.
This is the real earth and the real water it contains.

But some nights, I must tell you,
I go down there after everyone has fallen asleep.
I swim back and forth in the echoing blackness.
I sing a love song as well as I can,
lost for a while in the home of the rain.

(Billy Collins [source])

And then there’s this, not from whiskey river, but brushing up against it, so to speak, in recognition — in affirmation:

You and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor. A billion and a half years ago, the two of you parted ways. But even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes….

This is not our world with trees in it. It’s a world of trees, where humans have just arrived. […] 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 [source1; source2])

We spent the month of June more or less — and very much non-literally — sprinting up and down and across the state of California, and are now tentatively heading east: across the Rockies and Great Plains, down to (as they say) the heartland and then, eventually, Atlantic-ward and something like “home life.” The American West is a heck of a place to find nature, of course — nature which has nothing to do with human existence: nature in the form of things other than pets, livestock, vermin, cultivated or farmed plants — just raw, bare, nature. I don’t know that I’ll ever get over the experience — the experience, that is, not of feeling out of place, but spotting kindred souls in things and environments which, science often confidently asserts, have no souls at all…

When we’re in a hotel, and I go out into the hall or step out of the elevator and cross paths with another guest, they and I smile, nod, and say, “Good morning” — to all outward evidence, like two people who recognize and know one another, who acknowledge that they have something in common. And when I have lately stepped into a meadow, or a forest, or a mountain valley, without another “soul” around, I have the same experience: that boulder, that tree, that spring and I have stopped for a split-second, smiled at each other, nodded in fellow-feeling, and then gotten on with our lives.

Pick a Point, Any Point, and Call It the Point

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[Image at right: the so-called “Big Tree” in Redwood National and State Park, California. My camera has a Panorama mode, which normally requires you to swing the camera from left to right, keeping the shutter open, to give you about a 180° field of view; I thought I’d experiment with doing a “vertical panorama,” swinging the camera — turned on its side — from treetop to base. (My phone’s camera has a Panorama mode, too, but it’s much harder to get it right with the phone.) Of course, with a subject this tall, what we call the “top” is a pretty arbitrary point in space… The tree, by the way, around 286 feet in height, is only the sixteenth tallest in the park. The tallest, at around 380 feet, is a tree named Hyperion — at a secret location somewhere within the huge park. Hyperion is actually in fact the tallest tree in the world.]

We’re in Reno, Nevada, today, the California leg of Road Trip 2021-22 behind us, and a couple thousand miles of eastward continent ahead. With luck, we’ll be able to unload the car — for at least a few months, anyhow — by September, somewhere in one of the East Coast states. The prospect makes me happy, which is slightly absurd: we’ve seen so many extraordinary things — shouldn’t I be sad to be imminently leaving all that behind?

Well, I don’t know… My Instagram account, such as it is, celebrates something I’ve been calling “the extraordinary commonplace.” (I don’t know where I picked up that phrase but I’m certain it can’t be original.) And I think that phrase may point to the source of my elation: if every day delivers to me remarkable, unfamiliar experiences, maybe it’s simply that I miss the unremarkable — the experience of opening my eyes and seeing the same things, at the same times, that I’ve been seeing them for years.

This all plays into the same general theme of my Friday posts here in recent week: how to be happy in a world which, well, seems to discourage happiness (to put it mildly). I found echoes of it in whiskey river entries of the past week, unsurprisingly. Echoes like this:

There Are Mornings

Even now, when the plot
calls for me to turn to stone,
the sun intervenes. Some mornings
in summer I step outside
and the sky opens
and pours itself into me
as if I were a saint
about to die. But the plot
calls for me to live,
be ordinary, say nothing
to anyone. Inside the house
the mirrors burn when I pass.

(Lisel Mueller [source])

…and this:

Sometimes when I meet old friends, it reminds me how quickly time passes. And it makes me wonder if we’ve utilized our time properly or not. Proper utilization of time is so important. While we have this body, and especially this amazing human brain, I think every minute is something precious. Our day-to-day existence is very much alive with hope, although there is no guarantee of our future. There is no guarantee that tomorrow at this time we will be here. But we are working for that purely on the basis of hope. So, we need to make the best use of our time. I believe that the proper utilization of time is this: if you can, serve other people, other sentient beings. If not, at least refrain from harming them. I think that is the whole basis of my philosophy.

So, let us reflect what is truly of value in life, what gives meaning to our lives, and set our priorities on the basis of that. The purpose of our life needs to be positive. We weren’t born with the purpose of causing trouble, harming others. For our life to be of value, I think we must develop basic good human qualities—warmth, kindness, compassion. Then our life becomes meaningful and more peaceful–happier.

(Dalai Lama XIV [source])

I encountered an echo, too, in a non-whiskey river source. This comes from a book which I’ve been reading, intermittently and a bit at a time, for probably the last four or five years — as I’ve puzzled over what it means (to me, to anybody) to be living now:

My dog, fully in possession of the Buddha nature, has some lessons for me about the sacred in the secular. He wants to go out twice a day, and I live in New Hampshire, where the winters are usually snowy and bitterly cold. I walk out on a clear, dark night. My dog shoves his snout deep into the snow, apparently catching the scent of a deer or a neighboring dog. I look up and see Orion brilliant against the dark blue-black of the sky. Coming out on a cold night I’m well aware of my earthly existence and yet I’m pulled out of myself into wonder, once again, at the brilliant stars. Who am I in this tremendous context, and what is my fate and what do I mean in the huge expanse of galaxies and multiple universes? My mind can’t hold the vast openness and complexity, and I can’t twist my imagination to fit myself into such a place. And yet, here I am with my dog, waiting for him to do his business in the snow that mirrors the Milky Way, one of the great mysteries of my existence. Orion’s two dogs, Major and Minor, are up there, too, probably taking similar advantage of the milky-white galaxy.

(Thomas Moore [source])

On a Ship to the Outer Solar System

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[Image: “At the Hinge of Daylight (Carmel-by-the-Sea, California),” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

I’m going to start this Friday post, uncharacteristically, with a quotation from a source other than whiskey river — and not remotely a source I’d usually cite. (Fear not; the river‘s turn is coming.) It’s this:

The World Is Too Much With Us

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. —Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

(William Wordsworth [source])

In the face of so much wrongness in mid-2022 — I won’t bore you (or raise your blood pressure) with a catalog of specifics — who doesn’t sometimes dream, like ol’ Bill, of frolicking with the gods of antiquity? especially if the alternative is (as it seems to be) more bad news from every quarter?

Now let’s consider this, from whiskey river:

Obviously there is some risk in making affection the pivot of an argument about economy. The charge will be made that affection is an emotion, merely “subjective,” and therefore that all affections are more or less equal: people may have affection for their children and their automobiles, their neighbors and their weapons. But the risk, I think, is only that affection is personal. If it is not personal, it is nothing; we don’t, at least, have to worry about governmental or corporate affection. And one of the endeavors of human cultures, from the beginning, has been to qualify and direct the influence of emotion. The word “affection” and the terms of value that cluster around it—love, care, sympathy, mercy, forbearance, respect, reverence—have histories and meanings that raise the issue of worth. We should, as our culture has warned us over and over again, give our affection to things that are true, just, and beautiful. When we give affection to things that are destructive, we are wrong.

(Wendell Berry [source])

…and this, not from whiskey river (and a pretty fair distance from William Wordsworth, for that matter):

I spent most of my [young] life angry, a chip on my shoulder, afraid. At some moment I simply changed my mind. I decided to be happy more or less, no matter the circumstance. Whatever I have to work with, and that’s not a lot really, I tell myself: imagine you are on a ship to the outer solar system—every single experience on this earth would be welcome, good or bad. Be on that ship, for one day this will all be over. Treasure it all. Be a joyful noise.

(Rickie Lee Jones [source])

Wordsworth wasn’t wrong to feel angry and frustrated with current events. (Haha, right: like I’m sure his ghost looks down upon my approval and sighs with relief.)

But really, at any given time in recorded history, you can find many, many smart, good people who believed that the world had gone to sh!t in their lifetimes. What’s hard for anyone to bear in mind is that those lifetimes (let alone the sh!t years) are mere blips in the universe’s — or the planet’s, or their neighborhood’s — history. Over centuries and millennia, the quality of “things” smooths out. And if anything, things — the arc of human history — tend to get better over long spans of time.

The difference for our age, I think, is climate change. I don’t know that I’ll live to see how it all plays out, but I mean, come on: we collectively as well as individually simply will not live forever. And all the angry storms, floods, droughts, fires, widespread extinctions of other species — all that, I believe, is pretty much just the world expressing its distaste for us. We’ve pushed it to the limits of its patience: we are too much with the world. I doubt that we’ll “win” in the contest of wills, nature vs. humanity.

But even if my fear is right, or even if everyone else’s — that war, indecent human politics, rampant capitalism, racism, transphobia, etc., are going to destroy us or ours — is right, well… it doesn’t matter. In the meantime, we can live our lives as we maybe should have been living them all along: just paying attention to what and who are in front of us at the time. We can have happiness. We just have to choose it.

Sorting Out the Truly Mysterious from the Merely Anomalous

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

This week, whiskey river offered me one quotation which especially intrigued me — sending me on an extended read of the source material:

Can you explain why it is that there are, at last count, sixteen schools of psychotherapy with sixteen theories of the personality and its disorders and that patients treated in one school seem to do as well or as badly as patients treated in any other—while there is only one generally accepted theory of the cause and cure of pneumococcal pneumonia and only one generally accepted theory of the orbits of the planets and the gravitational attraction of our galaxy and the galaxy M31 in Andromeda? (Hint: If you answer that the human psyche is more complicated than the pneumococcus and the human white-cell response or the galaxies or Einstein’s general theory of relativity, keep in mind that the burden of proof is on you. Or if you answer that the study of the human psyche is in its infancy, remember then this infancy has lasted 2,500 years and, unlike physics, we don’t seem to know much more about the psyche than Plato did.)

(Walker Percy [source])

That Percy quotation, as it happens, follows a brief discussion of the mystery of astrology — the mystery that, and why, astrology is so easily attended to, by so many, on a daily basis. Before and after it all, in the original source, I found these passages (among others):

Imagine that you are reading a book about the Cosmos. You find it so interesting that you go out and buy a telescope. One fine clear moonless night you set up your telescope and focus on the brightest star in the sky. It is a planet, not a star, with a reddish spot and several moons. Excited, you look up the planets in your book about the Cosmos. You read a description of the planets. You read a sentence about a large yellowish planet with a red spot and several moons. You recognize both the description and the picture. Clearly, you have been looking at Jupiter.

You have no difficulty at all in saying that it is Jupiter, not Mars or Saturn, even though the object you are looking at is something you have never seen before and is hundreds of millions of miles distant.

…

You have seen yourself a thousand times in the mirror, face to face. No sight is more familiar. Yet why is it that the first time you see yourself in a clothier’s triple mirror—from the side, so to speak—it comes as a shock? Or the first time you saw yourself in a home movie: were you embarrassed? What about the first time you heard your recorded voice—did you recognize it? Clearly, you should, since you’ve been hearing it all your life.

Why is it that, when you are shown a group photograph in which you are present, you always (and probably covertly) seek yourself out? To see what you look like? Don’t you know what you look like?

Has this ever happened to you? You are walking along a street of stores. There are other people walking. You catch a glimpse in a store window of a reflection of a person. For a second or so you do not recognize the person. He, she, seems a total stranger. Then you realize it is your own reflection. Then in a kind of transformation, the reflection does in fact become your familiar self.

One of the peculiar ironies of being a human self in the Cosmos: A stranger approaching you in the street will in a second’s glance see you whole, size you up, place you in a way in which you cannot and never will, even though you have spent a lifetime with yourself, live in the Century of the Self, and therefore ought to know yourself best of all.

The question is: Why is it that in your entire lifetime you will never be able to size yourself up as you can size up somebody else—or size up Saturn—in a ten-second look?

Why is it that the look of another person looking at you is different from everything else in the Cosmos? That is to say, looking at lions or tigers or Saturn or the Ring Nebula or at an owl or at another person from the side is one thing, but finding yourself looking into the eyes of another person looking at you is something else. And why is it that one can look at a lion or a planet or an owl or at someone’s finger as long as one pleases, but looking into the eyes of another person is, if prolonged past a second, a perilous affair?

(Walker Percy [source: ibid.])

Finally, from among some other things I read this week which addressed the inherent weirdness of being human:

It’s OK to be in this body… it seems to me the basic experience of being human is pleasant. One’s body is basically happy to be here. Of course, there can be all kinds of difficulties, illness, and injury and all other kinds of things that get in the way of that. As I get older, and certainly through the year of having COVID, I’ve plenty of pretty strong and ongoing unpleasantness going on in bodily life. And yet still, it’s sort of like one’s soul is happy to be alive. We were made to be alive, at least for a decade or few. Underneath our neuroses and all our pushing and pulling, most deeply, we’re glad to be here. Connecting to that—in fact, just the retreat I gave last week, the first day or two of the instructions, I talked about pleasure more than I might usually, just connecting to the pleasure of relaxation, the pleasure of the fact that you’re able to breathe. People really remarked on it, during the retreat, how much of a resource it was. Whatever else is going on, you can actually, as you settle down to meditation before your legs start to hurt and everything else, just to find some way you can connect with a sense that it’s good to be here, some sense you’re glad to be here, some way in which your belly is glad to relax or your your breath is pleasurable to come in and out. It’s a really helpful resource, especially as people end up making meditation into this kind of chore or this thing they’re supposed to do that’s good for them rather than this moment, I get to sit down in myself.

(Martin Aylward [source])

Potpourri: June 17-18 (2022 Edition)

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

Technically, it’s still the evening of June 17 — a day early for my annual June 18th post, and (because it’s a Friday) technically requiring of me a whiskey river Friday post. On the other hand, because (a) I will on June 18 be driving from Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, to Yosemite National Park, and (b) I give myself blanket permission every June 18 to blog about whatever I want… well, you, dear reader, get this mishmash.

So let’s give whiskey river the floor, and see where our anonymous friend leads us. Like, here:

To be is to have mortal shape, mortal conditions, to struggle, to evolve. Paradise is, like the dream of the Buddhists, a Nirvana where there is no more personality and hence no conflict. It is the expression of man’s wish to triumph over reality, over becoming. The artist’s dream of the impossible, the miraculous, is simply the resultant of his inability to adapt himself to reality. He creates, therefore, a reality of his own—in the poem—a reality which is suitable to him, a reality in which he can live out his unconscious desires, wishes, dreams. The poem is the dream made flesh, in a two-fold sense: as work of art, and as life, which is a work of art. When man becomes fully conscious of his powers, his role, his destiny, he is an artist and he ceases his struggle with reality.

(Henry Miller [source])

…and here:

The Elephant in The Room

The room is
almost all
elephant.
Almost none
of it isn’t.
Pretty much
solid elephant.
So there’s no
room to talk
about it.

(Kay Ryan [source])

Kay Ryan’s poem is one of numerous poems, by numerous poets, in a collection regarding (as the title says) “Resistance, Rebellion, Life.” Like the other poems in the book, “The Elephant in the Room” is manifestly political in nature. But it also says something to me, on the occasion of turning one more than my allotted three score and ten — specifically, it says something to me in the context of Henry Miller’s quotation above:

I’ve thought a lot, in the last year, about the fact that my verbal self — at least, the storytelling facet of that self — seems to have moved somewhere offshore, out of reach. It’s absconded, gone…

Part of me imagines that bringing my “big book” to fruition still lies ahead. When I started to tell that story of four old guys — retirees — and a nephew (and niece-in-law) of one of them, thirty years ago, what the hell did I know about old guys’ minds, motivations, disappointments, fears? (Haha — I barely knew anything about my own.) So maybe, I tell myself, maybe now at last I’ll be able to bring that story fully into the light, with some firsthand knowledge of those characters’ inner lives…

But then there’s another, less sanguine voice in my head. I know that I don’t have another three decades to continue to mess around with it all. I’m not even sure it’s worth messing around with, y’know?

And, well, let’s face it: as long as The Missus and I remain rootless, as a practical matter there’s just no way I’ll ever be able to sit down, day after day, to do the spadework required even of a story in which I had 100% confidence.

It’s a hell of a thing, I’ll tell you.

On yet another hand, I’ve got my photography to keep me humming along on at least a couple of cylinders in the meantime. While we’re at Yosemite, I’ll be taking a half-day course called “In the Footsteps of Ansel Adams” (whose exquisite black-and-white photographs engraved that National Park in the national imagination). I don’t think I’d find fulfillment in recreating or replicating Adams’s work (as though such a goal would be possible), but I’m looking forward to entering into something like a mystical, posthumous conversation with him — kind of like the Reddit “Ask Me Anything” dialogues, which illuminate unknown or forgotten aspects of a pop-culture figure’s life and work for the benefit of anyone paying attention.

It won’t be the same thing as storytelling, I know — it won’t be a narrative which results. But maybe, just maybe, it’ll help me say something enduring.

We’ll see (as we generally do, heh).

Taking Books Personally, So Personally…

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[Image: “Elliott Erwitt, Personal Exposures,” by Thomas Hawk. Found this photo of the book cover over on Flickr, and now I think I’ll have to find the book itself somewhere… although it’ll probably have to wait until we stop moving, since there’s no Kindleized edition of it.]

Prepping for departure from San Diego, at the end of a four-night stay…

During this whole year-long road trip, of course, The Missus and I have plenty of opportunities to talk to each other (occasionally — as happens — not always when our beloved is prepared to be talked to). But as lifelong readers, we’re also spending plenty of time with our noses hovering over our books (well, our Kindles). The implicit conversations we have with these authors’ works have, I think, helped to keep us focused, patient, and civil during those times when we aren’t reading. All of which found an echo this week over at whiskey river:

Canto Nine

It must have been raining a hundred days,
and the water that saturated
the roots of all the plants
Reached the library and soaked all the holy words
which were closed up in the convent.

When the good weather came,
Sajat-Novà, who was the youngest monk,
got a ladder and took all the books up to the roof,
out in the sun. Then he waited for the warm air
to dry the wet paper.

There was a month of good weather
and the monk kneeled down in the courtyard
waiting for the books to give some sign of life.
And finally one morning the pages started
to rustle slightly in the breeze.
It sounded like a swarm of bees had arrived on the roof
and he started to cry because the books were talking.

(Tonino Guerra, translated by Adria Bernardi [source])

…and in an echo not from whiskey river:

Kindred souls — indeed, my selves otherwise costumed — turn up in books in the most unexpected places. Discovering them is one of the great rewards of a liberal education. If I quote liberally, it is not to show off book learning, which at my age can only invite ridicule, but rather to bathe in this kinship of strangers.

(Yi-Fu Tuan [source])

“Kinship of strangers”: yes — mostly. As with social-media friends, I tend to selectivity with books — choosing those most likely to remain friends over the long haul. Granted, every now and then I’ve guessed wrong: a favorite author of fiction turns out to be an utter bore when writing at length about their own life; the protagonist of a beloved series starts behaving like an unpredictable drunk at the utterly civil soiree in my head; a nonfiction title on an important subject suddenly throws a tantrum. But for the most part, the company I keep within the front and back covers of a book is like the company I keep in the front seats of our car: we know and love each other, and behave (and speak, and listen) accordingly.

Talking Ourselves into Disaster

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

Thanks to the vagaries of our travel schedule this week, today’s post may seem — seem (?) — sketchy and amorphous. But that’s only because I lack the time to fill in the gaps; I’m sure you, whoever you are, can supply the necessary spackling yourself — especially if you’ve seen how this works over the years, especially recently! So let’s lay it out there — first, from whiskey river (italicized lines):

Little Epiphanies

The difference between what’s required
and what’s desired is the difference

between the chocolate and the cake,
the car and the new car smell, the nightie

and the night. There’s so much I want
to twist round my fingers, to stroke

and stir, sketch and stretch, but so much
I should sweep and scrub, strip

and sterilize. But I’d rather wring dirt
from my pores, turn it to ink instead,

rather scurry to my driveway to study
the moon’s abrupt phrases than kneel

with bucket and mop to banish shadows
that have sprung up on my kitchen

floor, darkening my soles as if I were
anointed, a kind of low-rent henna

for the lazy and uninhibited.
I should keep the unmentionables

unmentioned, nudity prohibited,
purses to a minimum, but I thrive

on clutter—my gaudy bras and bags
of yarn, my malfunctioning pens,

last chance reams of slightly damaged
paper. The difference between what’s whole

and what’s held, what’s withheld
or revealed, what’s real and what’s

revelation—that’s what I seek,
rest of my life spent in search

of little epiphanies, tiny sparks surging
out of the brain during the clumsiest speech.

(Allison Joseph [source])

…and then a couple of bits not from whiskey river:

…a record-high gap has opened up between Americans’ personal attitudes and their evaluations of the country. In early 2022, Gallup found that Americans’ satisfaction with “the way things are going in personal life” neared a 40-year high, even as their satisfaction with “the way things are going in the U.S.” neared a 40-year low. On top of the old and global tendency to assume most people are doing worse than they say they are is a growing American tendency to be catastrophically gloomy about the direction of this country, even as we’re resiliently sunny about our own household’s future.

…Sure, voters like to hate things at the national and abstract levels, which seems to open the door for bold change. But because most Americans say they’re personally fine, they might resist too much experimentation. This creates a confusing voting bloc, which is constantly angry about the state of things, but also fundamentally conservative about any change that overturns their “rather happy” life and “at least okay” finances.

I have a final theory of what’s going on here. With greater access to news on social media and the internet, Americans are more deluged than they used to be by depressing stories. (And the news cycle really can be pretty depressing!) This is leading to a kind of perma-gloom about the state of the world, even as we maintain a certain resilience about the things that we have the most control over. Beyond the diverse array of daily challenges that Americans face, many of us seem to be suffering from something related to the German concept of weltschmerz, or world-sadness. It’s mediaschmerz—a sadness about the news cycle and news media, which is distinct from the experience of our everyday life. I’m not entirely sure if I think this is good or bad. It simply is. Individual hope and national despair are not contradictions. For now, they form the double helix of the American spirit.

(Derek Thompson [source])

…and:

Lilies

I have been thinking
about living
like the lilies
that blow in the fields.

They rise and fall
in the wedge of the wind,
and have no shelter
from the tongues of the cattle,

and have no closets or cupboards,
and have no legs.
Still I would like to be
as wonderful

as that old idea.
But if I were a lily
I think I would wait all day
for the green face

of the hummingbird
to touch me.
What I mean is,
could I forget myself

even in those feathery fields?
When van Gogh
preached to the poor
of course he wanted to save someone—

most of all himself.
He wasn’t a lily,
and wandering through the fields
only gave him more ideas

it would take his life to solve.
I think I will always be lonely
in this world, where the cattle
graze like a black and white river,

where the ravishing lilies
melt, without protest, on their tongues—
where the hummingbird, whenever there is a fuss,
just rises and floats away.

(Mary Oliver [source])

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