Running After My Hat

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

April 8, 2022 by John Leave a Comment

[Photos: “Life Story in Wood, #2 (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

April 1, 2022 by John Leave a Comment

[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

March 25, 2022 by John Leave a Comment

[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

March 18, 2022 by John Leave a Comment

[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.

Trapped, Wriggling, Pinned (Like an Insect) to a Board…

March 11, 2022 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “impossible decisions,” by a Flickr user who identifies themselves as “danna § curious tangles.” (Used here under a Creative Commons license — thank you for that option!)]

This week, whiskey river offered us some road-trip advice — in which the road trip in question is not literally a road trip, although the metaphor sure works in this case. The river gave us just the one italicized stanza, but the whole thing feels relevant:

Before We Leave
Just so it’s clear—
no whining on the journey.
If you whine, you’ll get stuck
somewhere with people
like yourself. It’s an unwritten law.
Wear hiking boots. Pack food
and a change of clothes.
We go slowly. Endurance won’t
be enough, though without it
you can’t get to the place
where more of you is asked.
Expect there will be times
when you’ll be afraid.
Hold hands and tremble together
if you must but remember
each of you is alone.
Where are we going?
It’s not an issue of here or there.
And if you ever feel you can’t
take another step imagine
how you might feel to arrive,
if not wiser, a little more aware
how to inhabit the middle ground
between misery and joy.
Trudge on. In the higher regions,
where the footing is unsure,
to trudge is to survive.
Happiness is another journey,
almost over before it starts,
guaranteed to disappoint.
If you’ve come for it, say so,
you’ll get your money back.
I hope you all realize that anytime
is a fine time to laugh. Fake it,
however, and false laughter
will accompany you like a cowbell
for the rest of your days.
You’ll forever lack the seriousness
of a clown. At some point
the rocks will be jagged,
the precipice sheer. That won’t be
the abyss you’ll see looking down.
The abyss, you’ll discover
(if you’ve made it this far),
is usually nearer than that—
at the bottom of something
you’ve yet to resolve,
or posing as your confidante.
Follow me. Don’t follow me. I will
say such things, and mean both.

(Stephen Dunn [source])

We’re at a point now (still in the Las Vegas area) at which our own road trip has been at a standstill for three months. We so needed a break from the three-nights-here-five-nights-there-a-single-night-at-the-other-place pace, y’know? Just finally being able to empty the car of all luggage and travel bags — instead of selecting the one bag or two to tide us over to the next stop — well, it felt like a heavenly indulgence. And we could have done a lot worse than to stay with The Stepson!

…But now, of course and maybe inevitably, we’re hemmed in by the pinch of various realities: the end of the wintertime snuggle-in evenings; a dwindling reservoir of cash set aside for the trip; an ongoing pandemic (despite the kinda unconvincing official reassurances, which feel to me more like a series of exhausted collective “Oh, the hell with it!” pronouncements); inflation and war; the fact of not yet knowing where we’ll even live when the trip is “done”… We daily fight the good fight of not turning on each other simply as a substitute for not being able to fight all the large-scale battles.

This feels like a good time to open up the little book of, well, let’s call them homilies for lack of a better word: the little book we used to refer to here at least once a month for many years, but haven’t since August. Therein, on a well-thumbed page we find a fable of sorts:

#90: On foot, dog-tired, the man approached a busy intersection. He’d never been there before, but as he drew nearer he’d been eyeing it, seemingly larger and busier, with every step: cars, buses, motorcycles, trucks and delivery vans, even bicycle lane, a river of vehicles — any one of which could kill him, and all of which together would certainly obliterate him completely…
Now he was here at the corner.
Now he could see, as he could not from farther away, that the intersection was well marked with traffic signals (not, alas, with “Pedestrian Crossing” ones). This might have given him courage, given him simple hope. Except… except that the traffic never let up, not in any of the four directions, no matter the signals’ red-yellow-green status. Somehow, all the wheeled menaces were managing to thread through the gaps in oncoming and cross-traffic, without stopping or even slowing down.
The man could not understand this. In an infinite universe, he had often told himself, all things must be possible. But surely that didn’t apply to a system as chaotically random as this, driven as it was not merely by physical forces, quantum mechanics, the unpredictable quirky cross-purposed nature of human mood and decision-making…
Then it occurred to him that, well, he too was an animate object. In an infinite universe, he thought… and so he swallowed once, and stepped off the curb.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)

______

Note: I am very much aware how lucky I am — we are — to be able to whinge about such dilemmas, vs. the truly excruciating, life-threatening, and/or literally maddening ones pounding at the doors of people around the world right now. See Stephen Dunn’s first stanza, above.

Coming from Elsewhere, and Now Headed That Way

March 4, 2022 by John 3 Comments

[Image: “05a.WMATA.MetroCenter.WDC.8April2016,” by Elvert Barnes. (Found on Flickr, using it here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!)]

From whiskey river, just a few days ago:

At any particular moment in a man’s life, he can say that everything he has done and has not done, that has been done and not been done to him, has brought him to this moment. If he’s being installed as Chieftain or receiving a Nobel Prize, that’s a fulfilling notion. But if he’s in a sleeping bag at ten thousand feet in a snowstorm, parked in the middle of a highway and waiting to freeze to death, the idea can make him feel calamitously stupid.

(William Least Heat-Moon [source])

Well, yes. I guess that’s true — the gods know, How could I have been so stupid? is a question I’ve put to myself a thousand times. The problem with the question, in those words or others, is two-fold: (1) it’s always retrospective, as though one could have anticipated and prepared for every possible mishap or misstep over the course of decades of life; and (2) from a certain perspective, the Nobel Prize winners and great Chiefs themselves surely experienced “How could I be such a dope?” moments. To pluck one arbitrary bad moment from one life and set it alongside an arbitrary moment of glory from another really doesn’t make for a fair comparison — nothing to beat oneself up about or, for that matter, nothing to swell one’s head…

Coincidentally, this comes during a week when I cracked open a book I’ve had for a long time — its acquisition probably triggered, now that I think about it, by a whiskey river-inspired Friday blog post. Early on in the book, back to back, we find a couple of germane passages. The first is a story of an old friend, Nasruddin (the name spelled variously with one or two d’s):

It’s 4 A.M. Nasruddin leaves the tavern and walks the town aimlessly. A policeman stops him. “Why are you out wandering the streets in the middle of the night?” “Sir,” replies Nasruddin, “if I knew the answer to that question, I would have been home hours ago!”

(Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks [source])

…almost immediately after which, we read:

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, ibid.)

Facing The Other, Pretending Not to See Oneself

February 25, 2022 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Ukraine, Day 1,” by John E. Simpson.]

This week has certainly delivered to the world a big, heaping wallop of unease, hasn’t it? I’ve found it difficult to be really philosophical about “it all”; mostly, like many people it seems, I am baffled and rather irrationally angry that “it all” has come to pass… and I say irrationally, because after all, what do I know, and who am I to be having opinions about it?

A few days ago, before the invasion, the onscreen chyron beneath a couple of CNN talking heads said something like, How will a Russian invasion of Ukraine affect your pocketbook? I have no idea what the commentators were saying — the sound was off, and there were no closed captions displaying — but those big boldfaced words really hit me wrong. All I could think was, My pocketbook?!? Jeezus, think about what it would mean for the Ukrainians…!

Explicit references to politics and world affairs seldom bob to the surface over at whiskey river, where the current is always gentle. But the anonymous blogger there is human, after all, and in especially fraught times a given week’s selection may be hard to separate in one’s mind from the real-world context. Or maybe it’s just one’s own imagination that fits an interpretation around something like this (italicized portion):

At the risk of telling you
what you already know, Mrs. Cavendish, here’s
something merely true: the insufficiency of the moon
has been replaced by the lantern, the lantern by
the light bulb, but what won’t go away is the promise
of salvation out there in the bright beyond.
There will always be people who think suffering
leads to enlightenment, who place themselves
on the verge of what’s about to break, or go
dangerously wrong. Let’s resist them
and their thinking, you and I. Let’s not rush
toward that sure thing that awaits us,
which can dumb us into nonsense and pain.
My dog keeps one eye open when he sleeps.
My cat prefers your house where the mice are.
Stare ahead, my friend. The whole world is on alert.
Mrs. Cavendish, every day is old news.

(Stephen Dunn [source])

I read of people who place themselves on the verge of what’s about to break, and think to myself: Yeah. Like Putin, that fool, that dupe of his own aspirations.

And then I cast around for more, not at whiskey river, and come across first this:

Malignant aggression does not reflect true human nature; it is connected with a domain of unconscious, perinatal dynamics that separates us from our deeper identity. Those who initiate war activities and violence in general are typically substituting external targets for elements in their own psyches, which should properly be faced in personal self-exploration.

(Stanislav Grof [source, but original text unconfirmed])

Yes, I exult, yes: that’s it, exactly!

But no, that’s not “it” after all… or rather, that’s not “it” unless I skip conveniently past that last clause: one’s own psyche, subject to self-exploration. And this, I think, is it — as expressed below, with my emphasis added to the original:

You have to want to lose your appetite for violence or aggression. And to do that, you have to lose your self-righteousness. You have to realize that you cannot continue to have your habitual reaction to something, especially if your reaction ends with violence-physical or verbal-against yourself or somebody else, or even against the government of your country or the terrorists or whomever. You have to accept in your gut that the habitual reaction is poisonous not only to you but to the rest of the world.

(Pema Chödrön [source])

When I was young, I knew a man just a few years older, man who suffered violent mood swings. Medication “helped,” after a fashion: as I recall, it rendered him impassive — functioning, as they say, but also strangely not-human. Yet when unmedicated, he tended to destroy the lives of people around him, principally his family. He seemed alternately obsessed and focused on the strangest ideas, and violently angry about injustices he imagined the world and those people had inflicted upon him. Eventually, with the help of improved medications and other therapies, he came to have something of a normal life — but the memories of those past episodes forever seared themselves in the minds of those (including me) who’d known him back then.

I think back to those young men now: him, going through the inner hell he went through and acted out; and me, watching in horror as he figuratively staggered from one violent encounter to another, lapsing only temporarily into dull-eyed “normalcy.” And I think of my helplessness then, and my helplessness now, and my hope that somehow — somehow — the right balance of remedies can be found, or forged. Maybe then madness can finally be laid to rest: an awful memory, but no more than that.

And then maybe we can return to life as it should be — never again “normal” (because it never was), but at least stabilized by fellow-feeling for strangers and an absence of national envies and judgments. (“National” the key word there: I doubt that we’ll ever, as a species, be free of personal envies and judgments.)

To Be as Aware and Alone as Can Be — Naturally

February 18, 2022 by John 7 Comments

[Image: “Sedona: Leaf and Shoe,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) I’d titled the image before realizing it actually depicts two leaves — the obvious one, and the ageing, deteriorated thing up there in the northwest quadrant — which maybe makes the whole thing more poignant, I dunno. I certainly didn’t mean it as a comment on the shoe-wearer’s age and deterioration!]

One of whiskey river’s offerings in the last week was a poem whose ostensible subject might have been familiar to romanticized-nature poets like Wordsworth: the multi-sensory beauties of the natural world. Yet there’s also something distinctly modern about it — something about the natural world as it could be regarded particularly “nowadays,” immersed in a global pandemic and buffeted by techno-socio-political turmoil:

The End of The World
“We’re going,” they said, “to the end of the world.”
So they stopped the car where the river curled,
And we scrambled down beneath the bridge
On the gravel track of a narrow ridge.
We tramped for miles on a wooded walk
Where dog-hobble grew on its twisted stalk.
Then we stopped to rest on the pine-needle floor
While two ospreys watched from an oak by the shore.
We came to a bend, where the river grew wide
And green mountains rose on the opposite side.
My guides moved back. I stood alone,
As the current streaked over smooth flat stone.
Shelf by stone shelf the river fell.
The white water goosetailed with eddying swell.
Faster and louder the current dropped
Till it reached a cliff, and the trail stopped.
I stood at the edge where the mist ascended,
My journey done where the world ended.
I looked downstream. There was nothing but sky,
The sound of the water, and the water’s reply.

(Dana Gioia [source])

Oh, sure, there’s a mention of a car. But that’s not the modern touch I’m thinking of. I’m thinking more of the sensibility: a progression — from being with others to being by oneself, from a shared to a personal experience. But notice, too, the touch of an ancient tradition: if it were truly modern, that focus on the personal would force an observation on the self. (Y’know, like, “What does this all say about me?”) Instead, Gioia’s poem regards — very obliquely — a self only in a context of nature… as an elementary particle within a molecule, perhaps.

It reminds me of this (not from whiskey river, although it possibly could have been):

Let us change our way of thinking and our way of looking. We have to realize that silence comes from our heart and not from the absence of talk. Sitting down to eat your lunch may be an opportunity for you to enjoy silence; though others may be speaking, it’s possible for you to be very silent inside… Being alone does not mean there is no one around you.
Being alone means you are established firmly in the here and the now and you become aware of what is happening in the present moment. You use your mindfulness to become aware of every feeling, every perception you have. You’re aware of what’s happening around you in the sangha, but you’re always with yourself, you don’t lose yourself. That’s the Buddha’s definition of the ideal practice of solitude: not to be caught in the past or carried away by the future, but always to be here, body and mind united, aware of what is happening in the present moment. That is real solitude.

(Thich Nhat Hanh [source])

Always with yourself, aware of what is happening but not really aware of your self as such. Real solitude. And a real comfort.

By the way, for anyone who might be wondering: the cataract removal surgery in my right eye went just fine. The only real hitch (aside from — surprise! — my elevated blood pressure): the doctor could not use his beloved femtosecond laser, and had to resort, after all, to the good old manually wielded scalpel. But the eye is fine — presumably all but healed. (Next week I meet with him for the last time about the surgery, and also probably to discuss a follow-up surgery in the left eye, sometime in the next few weeks.)

As you may know, I was quite nervous about how or even whether I’d be able to understand the voices of any of the attending medicos. As it happens, they were all very good about either wearing clear plastic shields or simply tugging their masks out of the way, so I could see their mouths as they talked. But… Well, I’m not sure how to explain this… Picture me lying on my back on a gurney or surgical bed-type thing, looking up. Positioned at the top of my head is the surgeon; to the right and left, nurses or other aides. So from my perspective, none of their mouths were right-side-up. It turns out that I can’t lip-read a mouth that’s turned sideways, and can do so for an upside-down mouth only with great difficulty.

There’s always something, as they say. (Only I can’t hear them when they say it sideways.)

Straddling the Margin Between Art and Life

February 11, 2022 by John 1 Comment

[Image: “Khamir,” by John E. Simpson — one of my #jes_storypix series on Instagram, in which generally heavily edited photos of “real life” are used to illustrate imagined narratives. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) The caption: “Khamir had been staring at his phone for what felt like an hour. He couldn’t believe she hadn’t called yet, couldn’t believe she’d stoop to such a… a betrayal. A lazy betrayal at that! She knew how much he depended on her, needed her. Now the whole thing had fallen apart… Blinking back bitter tears, he finally punched in their private number, held the phone to his ear. When her voicemail picked up, he spoke rapidly: ‘Never mind,’ he said, ‘I’ll call off the air strike. Happy now?’”]

This week, whiskey river points us (in the case of this quotation) in the direction of an old, real-world debate:

Poetry as Insurgent Art [I am signaling you through the flames]
I am signaling you through the flames.
The North Pole is not where it used to be.
Manifest Destiny is no longer manifest.
Civilization self-destructs.
Nemesis is knocking at the door.
What are poets for, in such an age?
What is the use of poetry?
The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.
If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this meaning sounds apocalyptic.
You are Whitman, you are Poe, you are Mark Twain, you are Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, you are Neruda and Mayakovsky and Pasolini, you are an American or a non-American, you can conquer the conquerors with words…

(Lawrence Ferlinghetti [source])

Maybe it’s not so much a debate as an assertion, or maybe even just a forceful suggestion: that in order to accomplish sweeping societal change, the poets must lead the charge. (References to poetry really may mean art in general, but I’ll stick to Ferlinghetti’s script for now.) Well, no — maybe “must lead the charge” overstates the case; perhaps the point is more like “Even poets can and should contribute to the revolution.” In those terms, I can buy it — I strongly doubt that anyone but poets themselves looks to the poets for political, social, cultural guidance.

On the other hand, poetry — again, art in general — certainly can and sometimes does help shift the Zeitgeist in one direction or another, especially in concert with other cultural influences. Poetry — especially recent poetry — may suffer a bad rap (it’s too dreamy, too moody, too confessional, too abstract or weird), but it’s difficult to separate what we know of a given age’s general nature from the poetic (etc.) movements it engendered — the Romantics pushing back against the Enlightenment, the Beats excavating the hollows under the postwar-US bourgeois civilization, and I guess even the Zen poets’ and artists’ fascination with nature at a time when Japan was ruled by warlords…

Calling the 2020s something like The Pandemic Age — I don’t know, a bit premature, yes? (Together with everything else — climate change, political upheaval, economic crises, and so on — in my worst moods I sometimes fear we’re seeing The Last Age.) But I wonder what the art of now will look like in the rearview mirror, decades hence. What — of early 21st-century neuroses, preconceptions, perspectives, emotional states — what will linger in human consciousness of what, at this point in history, it means to be human? What will poetry and the other arts have, y’know, wrought in the meantime?

The past year has rewarded me with, among other things, a burst of reading, both fiction and non-fiction. When I was young, as I remember those years anyhow, I read constantly. But over time it became a habit experienced in hindsight rather than in a given moment: a book, even a short one, might take me two or three weeks to finish. My reading took place only in a blurry sort of half-hour or so each night as I descended into sleep, and that was it.

One book I read last summer was a 2014 novella called Sleep Donation, by Karen Russell. It posits a world in which the United States suffers a plague (!) — one of insomnia. The ailment becomes so widespread that an entrepreneur has developed a means to transfer excess sleep from those who get through the night without difficulty to those who lie awake staring into the dark. The most highly valued donors, of course, are those who sleep without interruption… and without nightmares.

The system works pretty well, except — well, how do you know if someone has awful nightmares? (You ask them.) And if insomnia, and nightmares, can be passed around like a virus, what happens when a donor with a godawful recurring and communicable nightmare either doesn’t know it, or chooses for whatever reason to disguise the fact?

Meet Donor Y:

“Donor Y” walked into a sleep bank in San Diego and asked to register. It was his first time donating sleep. According to his file, he is a forty-two-year-old white male, five feet seven, 189 pounds, 128/67 blood pressure, no sexual partners sharing the bed with him, no children. He checked no on all the disqualifying boxes: Sleep apnea: no. Sleepwalking: no. He was next handed the CDC alphabetized list of all three hundred known contagious nightmares —

Abomination, horned

Ambulance, frozen yellow siren

Anthill, no queen

Ants, flesh-eating

Aorta, burst

Asteroid, green

Attic, grandmother’s ghost

Attic, padlocked toy chest

Avalanche, death of self

Avalanche, death of spouse

Avalanche, live burial

Et cetera. Donor Y did not check a single box.

(Karen Russell [source])

Donor Y’s sleep donation has terrible consequences both foreseeable and surprising. (For instance, people who “catch” his nightmare often choose to give up sleep entirely rather than endure it again, becoming amphetamine-dependent… and, of course, they eventually go mad and die.)

By posting this excerpt along with whiskey river‘s, I don’t mean to suggest that Lawrence Ferlinghetti had science fiction anywhere on his radar when composing “I am signaling you through the flames.” But yeah: good science fiction always says at least as much about the author’s time as it does about the future or the past. When Sleep Donation came out, nobody had ye heard of COVID-19, but even a casual reading of the book could’ve told an extraterrestrial being some valuable lessons about human behavior in such an event.

Putting an Eye Under the Knife (Part 2)

February 6, 2022 by John 2 Comments

[Image (from Las Vegas Review-Journal, 2008-05-14): kinda self-explanatory, no? Nevada, it seems, is the US’s third most seismically active area, after Alaska and California. Also probably self-explanatory: why I’d have been researching earthquake data for the Las Vegas area. My cataract will be removed right about where the Valley View Fault crosses West Charleston Boulevard.]

Yesterday I gave you a more or less (for me) straightforward account of some facts about tomorrow’s cataract-removal surgery — facts about the procedure itself and about the related prescriptions (drugs and eyeglasses), facts which have been instrumental in disturbing my OCD sleep in recent nights. Today’s post veers off the path of objectivity — arguably into surrealism.

The personal issues

I have had my body slit open — intentionally — on only one prior occasion: the simple removal of a cyst, a couple years ago. In the present instance, though, I’m opting to functionally alter myself. It’s not a just matter of excising a flaw (although it is, in part, exactly that). It’s an alteration of something central to my self: my eyesight.

Naturally, the jokes about bionic eyes and such have occurred to me. And I wonder: when someone shines a flashlight into my right eye at night, will the eye still glow, and if so, in what color? When I visit my optometrist in April, will she still be able to use the various instruments which photograph the back of my eyeball to check for retinal issues of one kind or another? Will simply blinking feel different between the two eyes?

A lot of these kinds of questions are triggered by dwelling on the disclaimer and consent forms I had to sign, which list numerous possibilities for What Can Go Wrong both during and after the surgery. And then when I dwelt on the nature of the laser-assisted surgery as described yesterday, I also started to think about those fleeting moments when the thing is zizzing and swishing across my eye: a technician jostling the instrument’s housing, a sudden sneeze or cough…

Finally, yes, I wondered even about earth tremors — heck, about the passing of a heavy truck on a nearby pavement. If this computer-guided laser is so finely tuned that its incisions are measured in quadrillionths of anything, won’t a simple incorrect quadrillionth of the same anything be enough to throw off everything that follows?

I’m kidding, kinda, about all the above. (Not to say that I didn’t think and re-think about it all long enough to lose sleep.) But one thing still not quite alarms me, but has almost made me want to just drop the whole idea and go forth into semi-blindness…

I’ve never made a secret of my hearing issues, or of the fact that I wear two hearing aids just to get along in a society — a world — where sound is important. Here at RAMH, when I first fired up the blog about 19 years ago, I even set up a whole “Hearing” category because I was so sure I’d be blabbing about it regularly. But it hasn’t worked out that way, for whatever reason.

In short, my hearing (including the parts of my consciousness devoted to understanding speech) has continued to decline with time. I pretty much can no longer carry on “normal” conversations with people unless I can see their faces, in particular their mouths, to boost their intelligibility to me.

And, as you can maybe imagine, the pandemic’s mask practices have played absolute hell with my comfort level whenever conversation is required.

Aside: I am by no means the only person this applies to; you can find lots of references in news and feature reports about the pandemic’s unexpected social consequences for the hearing-impaired. In what follows, I’ll try to keep the focus on how it applies specifically to me, this week.

So here’s the scenario I have imagined:

I’m lying on my back on a table at the time of the procedure. My head is secured in place with a strap or similar means. My right eyelid has been anesthetized, and is being held open by one of those eyelid-clamp things. The doctor, nurse, or other attending professional says something — I can hear the sounds, but cannot make out the word(s)… because, of course, I probably cannot see the words being said — and even if I could look in their direction, they’re probably masked. What did they just say? Was it in fact something addressed to me? Or are they talking among themselves? Which one of them said it? Was it an instruction of some kind, requiring me to respond somehow? Am I supposed to focus on… something? Move my eyes… somehow? Or keep them absolutely still? Is it okay for my left eye to blink right now?

And so on.

Now, the seeing-their-mouths thing I’ve already tried to be proactive about. They know (although they still need reminding) that I have to see their lower faces. I actually emailed the head of the clinic to describe the problem; in response, she purchased several clear plastic face shields which they have (mostly) remembered to have handy when I’m scheduled to meet with them. (When they’ve forgotten, at my insistence they and I have been okay with tugging their masks away from their mouths.)

I’ve also picked up, on my own, a case of a product called ClearMask (shown in photo at the left); it’s been FDA-approved for use as a surgical mask. Primarily, I did this to reduce The Missus’s and my own frustration when the two of us are out and about somewhere and need to talk, but I’ll also take along a couple of them with me tomorrow, and maybe they’ll at least serve to “spread the word” a little. (It’s also insurance for me: the surgical procedure is taking place at a completely different building than the one I go to for exams and so on, so they may not have their face shields handy.)

Finally, I figure I’ll just lay it out as plainly as I can before I even lie down, something like this:

I’m going to turn off my hearing aids now. Please understand: I won’t be able to hear you at all once I’ve done that. If I need to do something other than just lie here during the surgery, you need to come up with some way to communicate that to me, NOW, while I’m listening to you. Maybe you can touch my left arm if you need me to look to the left, say, or tap my forehead if you need me to look straight ahead. But for all intents and purposes, during the procedure, please consider me stone-deaf.

It’ll be interesting to see what they come up with. (For all I know, maybe they’ve already been discussing this, and they can just stop me before I get started.)

I expect not to update you here on how it went for a few days after tomorrow — maybe next weekend. Mostly, though, I’m just looking forward to not having to obsessively anticipate anything for a while!