Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

How to Set Aside the Unwanted: Foreground the Diversions

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[Photograph, more or less untitled, by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) These yellow rubberized mats are visible at many street corners and elsewhere on curbs around the United States, and make curbs less of an obstacle for, e.g., users of wheelchairs. Those little nubs or bumps protruding from the surface? They’re called truncated domes. That term, as well as the color (see below), suggests that the photo’s title should incorporate the words “aureolin,” or perhaps “gamboge,” and “truncation”… and, maybe the concept of, uh, domeness.]

I’ve been trying, with mixed success, to cultivate a frame of mind with which to face my diminishing allotment of years with something like equanimity. The phrase I keep returning to: “No regrets; no resentments.” I have to fight the urge to sample both of those bitter fruits of earlier years, and suspect I’m not alone (although many people seem to linger in the produce aisle over one or the other, squeezing them, sniffing them, and putting them back — over and over). One of the most useful tools for distracting me from these temptations is indulging in my curiosity. As whiskey river offered a few days ago:

I have a friend who speaks of knowledge as an island in a sea of mystery… We dredge up soil from the bed of mystery and build ourselves room to grow. And still the mystery surrounds us. It laps at our shores. It permeates the land. Scratch the surface of knowledge and mystery bubbles up like a spring.

(Chet Raymo [source])

Having caught this at one of the river‘s posts, I glanced at the next day’s, too — to whit:

The day, with all its pain ahead, is yours.
The ceaseless creasing of the morning sea,
the fluttering gamboge cedar leaves allegro,
the rods of the yawning branches trolling the breeze,
the rusted meadows, the wind-whitened grass,
the coos of the stone-colored ground doves on the road,
the echo of benediction on a house—
its rooms of pain, its verandah of remorse
when joy lanced through its open-hearted doors
like a hummingbird out to the garden and pool
in which the sky has fallen. These are all yours,
and pain has made them brighter as absence does
after a death, as the light heals the grass.
And the twig-brown lizard scuttles up its branch
like fingers on the struts of a guitar.

(Derek Walcott [source])

What the hell, I wondered, was “gamboge”? It looked like a typo. It wasn’t italicized — so, all things being equal, I guessed it to be a legitimate English-language word…

And so it is. Gamboge, Wikipedia tells me, is the name of a pigment — “partially transparent deep saffron to mustard yellow… It is the traditional colour used to dye Buddhist monks’ robes.” (The same source, on the word’s etymology: “[it] derives from Gambogia, the Latin word for Cambodia.” Color (haha) me skeptical, but I have a hard time imagining the Romans knew enough of that land to give it a name.) The hue (also called “cobalt yellow”) is popular among artists in either oil or watercolor paints. The problem with the substance traditionally used to produce this color is that it’s not particularly durable; it fades over time. (It’s also somewhat toxic.) So in more recent decades, artists instead turned to an artificial substitute, with a more melodious name: aureolin. Alas, it too is far from perfect — a “defective” paint.

…which led me to a whole string of books by the artist and author named Hilary Page, at whose site I encountered that defective-paint assertion — and further jargon like “PY175, a lemon Benzimidazolone,” and so on. See for example this “web update” of a page in one of her books, including the image shown at right. (Caption: “I had boards of these paint samples in every sunny window in my house to test each paint for lightfastness.”)

And having encountered Ms. Page’s particular expertise, I inadvertently found myself reading about the precursor of Lego building blocks. Some of these are of course a sort of golden color… and — at least in their Lego form, especially the so-called baseplates — also rather suggestive of truncated domes:

Funny how that all works out, eh?

Not really funny, but also worthy of comment: any regrets and resentments I might’ve been harboring when I woke up today are, well, gone.

Reminders to Believe in Always Moving Forward

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[Image: a panel from Linda Ciccarello‘s interactive digital story called “Everything Makes a Noise When It Reveals Itself.” As you move your mouse over the screen at that site — or your fingertip, if using a mouse-less, touch-sensitive device — something like the light of a flashlight appears to reveal each succeeding bit of the story (if “story” even comes close to describing the thing revealed).]

Over the past week, the anonymous curator of thought- and soul-provoking quotations who blogs as whiskey river seems to have been preoccupied (as one can be, at the end of October) with matters of mortality. For example:

It is sad, is it not, that no one today displays an interest in the art of shrunken heads. Men, women, and children walk on the streets, they cross fields and enter forests, they run along the edges of oceans, but none of them, to the best of my knowledge, are thinking about shrunken heads.

(Mary Ruefle [source])

…and:

Where the text says song, see ghost.
Where the text says ghost, see further.

(Brenda Steczkowski [no authoritative source that I could locate, although it’s quoted in a handful of places online])

…and:

You lock the door. You lock the window. You dream of the dead. You salt the sills from the inside. You are going to dream. You check the window. You burn a piece of paper. You burn a piece of hair. You check the door. You put a root beneath your pillow. You put the candle out. You bite the root before you put it beneath your pillow. You dream of the dead. You keep a candle burning. You bite the root. The dead put their fingers in your mouth. You are dreaming. You draw the dead & burn the paper. The dead have no doors. They have no salt. Each one takes a grain of salt. There are more dead than salt. You bolt the door. You are dreaming. When the salt is gone the dead touch your mouth. When the salt is gone you buy more salt. When the salt is gone the root does nothing. The salt does nothing.

(Lisa Ciccarello [source, apparently])

While researching the source of the Ciccarello quote, I found this description of it, per Google Books:

Told in an age we can’t quite put our finger on, the poems in Lisa Ciccarello’s debut collection twist up from tales of witchcraft and the punishing morals of the Newgate Calendar. Vulnerable in the darkness as the dead watch behind salt-lined windows, we are led to explore a world of simple objects through a complex fog of cruelty and longing, strength and feebleness, folklore and familial traditions. Violence, love, death, jealousy, sex, and shadows fill the pages of At Night. If you seek comfort, you will find none here.

[source]

And then, as sometimes happens, I fell into an even deeper rabbit hole… I won’t even try to recreate for you the chain of links — graphically, it’d probably resemble a map of our ongoing road trip (haha) — but here’s one of the treats I encountered along the way:

After Stephen Dunn

If you are sleeping when the axe buries itself
in the stump outside your home, wake and walk
softly through your halls. Walk softly through
this house that is like your heart, built in the solace
of these woods from things you claimed as your own.
Touch everything. Touch it roughly, and
think of the heartbeats of the trees giving
their lives, each swaying wood grain a
skipped beat of gasping titans beneath
your hands, your careful eyes, your gentle
push, the settling of these quiet things.
But your hands are not in this house. Your
heart is not in this house. Your love is not in
this house. This house was not built from tall,
certain things, but from the surest things
you could find: roots, nests, not clocks
but the parts hidden behind their faces,
reminders of belief in always moving forward.
One morning you will wake in this home that
is like your heart to find that the axe, the certain
and the strong, has buried itself in the wet stump
outside, you will touch everything roughly, this
house will sound no longer like your heart but
your heart will sound like this house, built tall
from imagined things, high ceilings, echoes,
stopped clock pieces, empty nests, gasping
roots. Your heart will feel like this house. You
will burn it to the ground.

(Lewis Mundt [source])

A real haunted house of the heart, eh?

How to Discombobulate a Demon

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[Image: “Demons,” by a Flickr user who identifies themselves only as “Ken.” (Used here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!)]

That time of year again, as whiskey river reminds us:

Scary Movies

Today the cloud shapes are terrifying,
and I keep expecting some enormous
black-and-white B-movie Cyclops
to appear at the edge of the horizon,

to come striding over the ocean
and drag me from my kitchen
to the deep cave that flickered
into my young brain one Saturday

at the Baronet Theater where I sat helpless
between my older brothers, pumped up
on candy and horror — that cave,
the litter of human bones

gnawed on and flung toward the entrance,
I can smell their stench as clearly
as the bacon fat from breakfast. This
is how it feels to lose it —

not sanity, I mean, but whatever it is
that helps you get up in the morning
and actually leave the house
on those days when it seems like death

in his brown uniform
is cruising his panel truck
of packages through your neighborhood.
I think of a friend’s voice

on her answering machine —
Hi, I’m not here —
the morning of her funeral,
the calls filling up the tape

and the mail still arriving,
and I feel as afraid as I was
after all those vampire movies
when I’d come home and lie awake

all night, rigid in my bed,
unable to get up
even to pee because the undead
were waiting underneath it;

if I so much as stuck a bare
foot out there in the unprotected air
they’d grab me by the ankle and pull me
under. And my parents said there was

nothing there, when I was older
I would know better, and now
they’re dead, and I’m older,
and I know better.

(Kim Addonizio [source])

A newsletter I subscribe to also offered this, in perhaps (and perhaps not) coincidental manner:

One day Milarepa left his cave to gather firewood, and when he returned he found that his cave had been taken over by demons. There were demons everywhere! His first thought upon seeing them was, “I have got to get rid of them!” He lunges toward them, chasing after them, trying forcefully to get them out of his cave. But the demons are completely unfazed. In fact, the more he chases them, the more comfortable and settled-in they seem to be. Realizing that his efforts to run them out have failed miserably, Milarepa opts for a new approach and decides to teach them the dharma. If chasing them out won’t work, then maybe hearing the teachings will change their minds and get them to go. So he takes his seat and begins teaching about existence and nonexistence, compassion and kindness, the nature of impermanence. After a while he looks around and realizes all the demons are still there. They simply stare at him with their huge bulging eyes; not a single one is leaving.

At this point Milarepa lets out a deep breath of surrender, knowing now that these demons will not be manipulated into leaving and that maybe he has something to learn from them. He looks deeply into the eyes of each demon and bows, saying, “It looks like we’re going to be here together. I open myself to whatever you have to teach me.” In that moment all the demons but one disappear. One huge and especially fierce demon, with flaring nostrils and dripping fangs, is still there. So Milarepa lets go even further. Stepping over to the largest demon, he offers himself completely, holding nothing back. “Eat me if you wish.” He places his head in the demon’s mouth, and at that moment the largest demon bows low and dissolves into space.

(Aura Glaser [source])

We’re in central Ohio at the time I’m posting this, having stopped for just a single night en route to Kentucky, Tennessee, and points beyond. Hope you’re all staying safe, and keeping the monsters at bay… as with a frustratingly tenacious bout of hiccups, sometimes it can help just to distract yourself enough: they get bored and move on. Heh.

Finding Color: Looking for It, and Then Looking Harder

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[This, pretty much. The only difference: I took the photo on our arrival a couple days ago. But since yesterday afternoon, the sky has been white-clouded, sunless, and rainy, the light weak: what color you see out the window above is, right now, genuinely drained.]

This week, The Missus and I have been wrapping up the northeastern leg of our Road Trip 2021. We spent at least a few days — beginning in mid-August — in every New England state, over a week in New Jersey, and all the rest here and there in New York State, including Long Island. (Pennsylvania: our apologies, but we’re pretty much just passing through!) At the moment, I’m looking out the windows of a 19th-century farmhouse in the westernmost corner of New York; brushing up against the glass is a spray of pokeberry, almost — almost, but not really — reminding me of its cousins down in North Florida, in the wooded area behind our house. Beyond, the wooded back yard is predominantly pale green and yellow, with some splotches of unenthusiastic orange. (The only orange in sight: incandescent light on wood surfaces. And not a bit of red.)

Our timing, to the extent we’d planned it at all, was more or less intentional. We’d thought, y’know, we’ll get up to the Northeast at summer’s peak, and stay there into autumn: avoiding the oppressive heat of the South and Midwest, lingering for the changing woodland colors a month or two later. 2021, as it happens, was not the year to meet those objectives, and I wonder if — never mind when — we might again see such a year…

Next on the itinerary, starting in a few days: probably heading down through Ohio, into Kentucky and Tennessee, maybe getting as far as Arkansas before temporarily changing course for a Thanksgiving back in South Florida — which by then should be more or less in its own version of autumn. (Read: green, unexciting, more or less just like summer — unless the hurricane season lingers…)

But, y’know, at least I’m experiencing all this in good company. And just a few days ago, whiskey river, as is its wont, had something to say about a reality of my life — this reality:

Fall Song

It is a dark fall day.
The earth is slightly damp with rain.
I hear a jay.
The cry is blue.
I have found you in the story again.
Is there another word for “divine”?
I need a song that will keep sky open in my mind.
If I think behind me, I might break.
If I think forward, I lose now.
Forever will be a day like this
Strung perfectly on the necklace of days.
Slightly overcast
Yellow leaves
Your jacket hanging in the hallway
Next to mine.

(Joy Harjo [source])

P.S. It’s not especially relevant to today’s theme, but whenever I think of autumn leaves, I think of the memories encapsulated in this post, from not quite 13 years ago.

How (Not) to Worry… Even (Especially) About Worrying

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[Image: an entry, from August, in my #jesstorypix series on Instagram. The caption reads: “It was the last day he’d remember marveling at anything — anything at all. But on this day, this morning by the banks of the Savannah River, yes: he marveled. He marveled at the smoke in the sky, the height of the flames in far-off Jacksonville, casting their eerie light on the clouds, the absence of any other people… and yet, the frighteningly normal pall that underlay it all…”]

Among the several weekly newsletters I subscribe to in the hope they’ll make me smarter, gentler, cleverer, and/or simply more me is one called Aeon. (It’s a nonprofit publication with offices in Australia, Great Britain, and the US. Subscriptions are free; contributors include philosophers, psychologists, scientists, numerous other authorities, artists, and so on. It sums up its mission: “We are committed to big ideas, serious enquiry and a humane worldview. That’s it.”) However, I don’t read every weekly edition of the site’s offerings (which probably indicates my wishy-washy commitment to becoming smarter, gentler, etc.).

This week, whiskey river drew my attention to “The usefulness of dread,” an essay first published at Aeon in 2018, with this excerpt:

An anxiety is a lens through which to view the world, a colouration that grants the sufferer’s experiences their distinctive hue. The Buddha alerted us to a fundamental metaphysical feature of this world, the ‘co-dependent arising’ of all that we experience and know. That is, nothing possesses existence independent of all else that makes it so: an anxious person inhabits a world coloured and contoured by their own, highly individual anxieties; it is a world co-constructed by the sufferer and his or her anxieties. Anxiety is therefore a perspective, a hermeneutical relationship with the world, whose text now gets read in a very peculiar way by this anxiety-laden vision. Things and persons and events fall into focus depending on their interactions with our anxieties: that man in the corner becomes threatening, this chair becomes unstable and unbalanced, that food becomes the agent of a fatal illness, my family — my wife, my daughter — appear as targets for cruel twists of fate. I live in a distinctive world shaded and illuminated by an idiosyncratic anxiety.

(Samir Chopra [source])

Now, if you remember this RAMH post from a couple of weeks ago, you’ll recognize why this passage so spoke to me. Naturally enough, I think, I at once hied me hence to read the rest of Chopra’s essay. It may be worth a read for anyone similarly afflicted (at least, if one is not put off by intellectual responses to something as visceral as dread). For instance:

We are rational animals, but implicit in that rationality is an anxiety. The rational animal remembers and has learned from its past; it anticipates and plans for its future; it modifies its present, anxiously, in response to these memories and anticipations; it is anxious to avoid mistakes, even those it cannot remember and has consigned to the unconscious forgotten… I propose a ‘self-as-bundled-anxieties’ theory: we are a bundle of anxieties; by examining them, to see what vexes us, what makes us anxious, we come to know who we are. Anxiety is a reminder that our selves are rather more diffuse and disorderly than we might imagine, that there are more bits to be seized as they swirl ‘about’ and ‘inside’ us…

My anxieties tell me I’m still capable of feeling. They provide an acute reminder that I’m alive and responsive, and yes, anxious. My anxieties about my family inform me that I have let myself become wrapped up in their selves; they inform me of the boundaries I have formed around and about myself; they inform me of what my self is. They inform me of the risibility of the claim that we are isolated beings whose boundaries terminate at our fingertips, at the surface of our skins. Thus does anxiety inform me of who I am.

(Chopra, ibid.)

I’m not sure what to make of all this. Like a superhero, I have donned a cloak pretty much every day of my thinking life (the Cloak of Apprehension and Second Thoughts); by now, a good part of me wonders why I bother to take it off before going to bed. Still, as they say, it’s always possible to have too much of a thing. Maybe I should have a go at Chopra’s approach — this “Good morning, Anxiety! Up already? Good to see you again!” sort of thinking.

Or maybe I’m misstating his case, oversimplifying it. I probably should worry about that before working out anything like a new Life Goal, eh?

Looking for the Light, in Whichever Direction You Need To

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[Untitled image (but I think “Looking for the Light” works as well as anything) by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) See the post on Instagram for some background on the photo.]

In a couple of entries over the last week, whiskey river (as in the italicized lines below, from Jack Gilbert’s poem) seems to have taken special note of the need for a 360-degree perspective: to sense the reality of, yes, lots of ugliness in front of us (thank you, online world and mass media of all kinds!) — but also of the delight and happiness which lie behind (or within), waiting patiently and quietly for our attention.

A Brief For The Defense

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

(Jack Gilbert [source])

…all of which echoes this — not from whiskey river, and much more oblique in effect:

Lingering in Happiness

After rain after many days without rain,
it stays cool, private and cleansed, under the trees,
and the dampness there, married now to gravity,
falls branch to branch, leaf to leaf, down to the ground

where it will disappear—but not, of course, vanish
except to our eyes. The roots of the oaks will have their share,
and the white threads of the grasses, and the cushion of moss;
a few drops, round as pearls, will enter the mole’s tunnel;

and soon so many small stones, buried for a thousand years,
will feel themselves being touched.

(Mary Oliver [source])

Now that I’m thinking about it, and speaking perhaps only for myself… Maybe the easy characterization of emotional states as a one-dimensional continuum — from misery to ecstasy — is glib and short-sighted. Maybe it’s really two- or three-dimensional, forming a circle or sphere around the tiny little nub of a me at the center. Very seldom (never?) do I switch from one emotional state to another; more often (always?), I’m in transition — drifting. Misery fades into anger, which fades into rue and hurt, which in turn yield to a sort of gallows humor, which becomes, a moment later, actual outright laughter…

Being the Bearer of One’s Own Bad News

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[Image: “Riverside Detritus,” by on Willrad Von Doomenstein (a pseudonym???). Photo found on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license: thank you!]

Over the past few days, whiskey river shared a portion of a talk (italicized portion) by a Zen Buddhist teacher. In this apparently verbatim transcription of the talk, the teacher is speaking of the human mind’s awkward and ultimately self-defeating tendency to cling to — and to be clung to in return — by any problem it encounters. He recites a Buddhist koan offered by another, more ancient teacher, named Chao-chou:

As you’re sitting on your cushion [during meditation], if you grab onto anything, if you push anything away, suddenly everything you touch sticks to you. It’s like Br’er Rabbit and the the tar-baby. If you start hanging onto your thoughts, you can’t let go of them. If you try to push them away, you can’t let go of them. So there you are stuck holding onto the tar-baby. We see, too, the emptiness of the things that we’re attached to. How a thousand things fill the mind, but none of them is substantial or real. A thousand passions arise, but if we don’t act on them, they fall away, too. Amazing that something that seemed so important suddenly is not so important. Our weariness that seems as if it will overwhelm us suddenly is gone and we are full of energy.

“The Great way is not difficult. It just avoids picking and choosing.” There is a Taoist flavor to this saying. The sense of following the water path through life: the water if it runs into a stone, it just makes its way around. The water is clear and has no attachments which is why we have a little bowl of water on the altar.

Chao-chou has brought up this saying which he was very fond of and he often liked to bring it up. And then he said that as soon as we speak, that is picking and choosing. If we are clear, we hang onto the clarity. This old student doesn’t even hang onto that. Do you still hang onto anything, or not? So we could say that the greatest method of meditation is that whatever comes up, just don’t cling to it. Whatever comes up, let it go. If you can do this, you’ll find the way home very quickly. But it’s hard. Things stick to you.

(John Tarrant [source])

As you probably know if you’ve hung around here at RAMH for the last few months, The Missus and I have been on a road trip. The travels — so far — have taken us up the eastern coast of the United States: from Florida, through Georgia and South Carolina, and then on up to destinations in North Carolina, Maryland, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New York, Vermont, and Connecticut. By definition, these days anyhow, a “road trip” necessarily involves a car. But the car, like the travelers, is subject to the forces of chaos. And so it was, in early August, that we found ourselves suddenly and unpleasantly, well, carless.

Without getting into the details, of which there are many, imagine the complications:

  • a driver, licensed by the state where the driver lives;
  • a car which is “owned” by that driver…
  • …even though the record of ownership — the title — is held by a bank which loaned the “owner” the money to purchase the car…
  • …and even though the car is insured by yet another company in the case of an accident…
  • …and even though the driver’s state of residence still connects the vehicle, uniquely identified, to the driver, by way of yet another document: the registration

To be sure, none of these by itself is necessarily a complication… unless the car and driver are involved in a wreck which crosses state lines. Like, say, in our case: our insurance company totaled the car in North Carolina; we purchased a replacement car in North Carolina; and we financed the new car’s purchase through a different bank than the one which had financed the wrecked car. And all of the required paperwork was nailed down by the dealership — in North Carolina — who sold us the replacement.

…until the day, this week, when we found out that no, there had been no nailing-down. Somehow, although we were already making payments to the bank and the insurance company, we had no legal claim to the vehicle in which we were traveling around.

The nailing-down has begun. In the meantime, we’re still in motion, just praying (to the extent we ever do) that every other driver on the road then will be even more cautious than we are. And in the same meantime, I’m waking up almost every night, with little tar-baby scraps and smudges clinging to my mind through all the sleep cycles, imagining dreadful scenarios — scenarios in which the tenuous paper trail we’re building (across hundreds of miles, among a half-dozen institutional landmines), suddenly collapses and renders us not only homeless, but without transportation… in our seventies, with nothing like a social or family net to catch us.

No, it’s not helpful to be so bedeviled. It’s probably not healthy, losing so much sleep. But I am not like water (yet?) about such stuff. I bump into an obstacle and I come to a standstill; I circle it, examining all its jagged edges, feeling my way around the crevices and hollows of its shape, trying to imagine how each possible thread of reedy disaster can be skirted or even woven into gold.

It occurred to me this morning, in fact, that the metaphor I’m seeking is not a solid object like rock or a tar-baby. Even if I have (as I have not) “mastered” myself to be like the water, there’s still the detritus problem: even, say, just a cup of flowing water carries along in its course countless bits of trash. Each little broken twig, each seed and leaf, every drinking straw and scrap of torn candy wrapper, they’re all just flowing around the damned rock with me. How do I shake my hyper-awareness of this?

Sigh. Like the Magic 8-Ball says: Answer hazy. Try again later.

Seeing the Opaque and Pronouncing It Transparent

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[Image: “Autumn Reflections on Lake Taneycomo,” by Moose Winans. (Stumbled upon it on Flickr, and use it here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!) The photographer explains, sorta: “I was walking along Lake Taneycomo late in the day breathing in crisp cool air, when the sun kissed a nearby hillside. The trees seemingly lit on fire with an abundance of yellows, oranges and reds. The sky was a rather bland, so I opted to focus on the reflections of the colorful trees. I found a little ripple in the water that created a nice leading line and added a deep shade of blue to the surface of the lake.” I’m not sure I understand this, exactly, but the effect is undeniably… zen.]

A new(ish) pop-philosophy meme has made its way into American discourse — maybe worldwide, I don’t know. It boils down to a single word, by nature a noun but repurposed as an adjective: “I’m feeling very zen these days,” says the celebrity on a talk show; “So zen, y’know?” says the flirtatious drunk at the bar.

I don’t know who first popularized this construction, and — honestly — I don’t know enough about Zen Buddhism itself to rigorously, intellectually rebut the casual association of lowercase “zen” with a phrase like “chillin’ out.” It doesn’t feel right to me, but as another common saying goes, “Whadda I know?!?”

On the other hand, I’m confident that “still and impassive” does not equate to “cold and unfeeling.” The former describes a demeanor, a shell; the latter, a state of inner emotion. The old metaphor about wearing one’s heart on one’s sleeve used to describe individuals who departed from the societal norm in that way — nowadays, it seems, not to wave one’s heart about, openly, is regarded practically as antisocial behavior.

This week, whiskey river reminds us of the difference, from someone who certainly knew whereof he spoke when the subject turned to Zen:

The unspoiled colors of a late summer night,
The wind howling through lofty pines —
The feel of autumn approaching;
Swaying bamboos keep resonating,
Shedding tears of dew at dawn;
Only those who exert themselves fully
Will attain the Way.
But even if you abandon all for the ancient path of meditation,
You can never forget the meaning of sadness.

(Dogen [source])

Nor is it (again from whiskey river) only sadness and other “negative” feelings which the Zen exterior may mask when one declines to separate Self from Other:

Moon

Open the book of evening to the page
where the moon, always the moon, appears

between two clouds, moving so slowly that hours
will seem to have passed before you reach the next page

where the moon, now brighter, lowers a path
to lead you away from what you have known

into those places where what you had wished for happens,
its lone syllable like a sentence poised

at the edge of sense, waiting for you to say its name
once more as you lift your eyes from the page

and close the book, still feeling what it was like
to dwell in that light, that sudden paradise of sound.

(Mark Strand [source])

I’m put in mind of a film of a towering but slender waterfall — a film taken from some distance away. And unthinking observer might say, “What a peaceful scene! The water flows so gracefully!” Had the photographer situated the camera at the foot of the falls, though, looking straight up, the noisy, chaotic reality would have pretty much silenced all commentary.

On Aging: The Doing of It, and the Having Done It

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[Image: “The Sign Guys Were Feeling Larky,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) This is just the latest in a series of photos I’ve posted on Instagram tagged #jesstorypix, each photo accompanied by a caption telling a sort of microfiction about what the photo might (in my imagination) show. This one’s caption reads: “Once every year, the fellas down in the municipal sign shop followed a tradition: they made up one sign which made no sense, and placed it on a random sign pole somewhere in town. By consensus, their favorite was the one in the middle of the bridge over North Creek. It’d been there since 1987 and still confused the bejeezus out of people who’d never noticed it before.”]

Our anonymous friend over at whiskey river seems to have aging on their mind:

Aging is peculiar, I don’t think you should be lied to about it. You have a moment of relevancy — when the books, clothes, bars, technology – when everything is speaking directly to you, expressing you exactly. You move toward the edge of the circle and then you’re abruptly outside the circle. Now what to do with that? Do you stay, peering backward? Or do you walk away?

(Stephanie Danler [source])

…which post predated the following by just a few days:

“There will come a time,” I said, “when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this”—I gestured encompassingly—“will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was a time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be a time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.”

(John Green [source])

I guess someone, somewhere in what we (sometimes laughably) call The Civilized World, someone must not be thinking at all about aging… Monologuist, erstwhile radio host, practically professional nostalgist Garrison Keillor turns 80 later this year, and the gods know he’s been all but obsessing about the experience recently. E.g.:

I was having a hard time falling asleep the other night because I’d thought of something that I was afraid of forgetting if I fell asleep, which was keeping me awake, not that it was the sort of timeless thing you see printed on coffee cups sold in bookstores, like “Hope is the thing with feathers” or the one Thoreau said about confidently pursuing your dreams, which now I forget the rest of…

In retirement, as I say, my nocturnal life has blossomed into extensive dreams, pastoral epics in which I am a great sailor, an artist, a standup comic, a race car driver, a ballet dancer — dreams of competence and authority — and the other night (I am now getting back to what I started to say in the first paragraph) I dreamed that I had written a perfect limerick and in my dream I was afraid that if I fell asleep I’d forget it, but in my dream I was arguing with myself and thinking, “You’re awake” and the conflict, knowing that my sleep self was wrong, that I was sleeping, woke me up, and I sat down and wrote the limerick, about the famous podcaster Phoebe Judge, host of “Criminal,” which everyone except me (I?) has heard, but I refuse to hear podcasts because earbuds look funny on me, and the challenge was to not use the rhyme “heebie-jeebie.”

A girl who loves radio, Phoebe,
Has AM and FM and CB,
And plays them proudly,
Constantly, loudly,
At 370 dB,
And when she was caught
She fired a shot
At the cops with her personal BB,
And when she turned deaf
She shouted the F-
Word that’s not found in Mister White, E.B.

It is a perfect limerick, not that this is the solution to our national dilemmas, but the limerick is one enterprise in which perfection is possible, and that is why I keep returning to it. I look back at my life and I see a series of sinking ships and gunshot wounds in my feet, but “A girl who loves radio, Phoebe” is right up there with the five or six perfect ones I’ve written. This column is not perfect. It strikes me as somewhat disorganized and scattered, but, as I say so often, it is what it is. Someday I’ll write about that.

(Garrison Keillor [source])

Keep Your Eyes Open, and Wonder

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

From whiskey river (italicized passage)… In the full portion of the essay from which this excerpt is taken, Mary Ruefle is musing about forms of communication — letters, smoke signals, the phone messages left by people trapped in the World Trade Center on September 11, 20 years ago (I don’t know if our whiskey river blogger friend made that last connection, but it chimed right with me, this week):

Once I witnessed a windstorm so severe two 100-year-old trees were uprooted on the spot. The next day, walking among the wreckage, I found the friable nests of birds, completely intact and unharmed on the ground. That the featherweight survive the massive, that this reversal of fortune takes place among us – that is what haunts me. I don’t know what it means.

I took one of those nests and pinned it to a wall in my study. Then I pinned a folded handwritten letter inside the nest. I did this years ago. I don’t know why I did it. I just did it.

Nothing I understand haunts me. Only the things I do not understand have that power over me.

(Mary Ruefle [source])

In these terms, it occurs to me, a raging curiosity about, well, everything can be understood as a a desperate drive to be haunted by nothing: never again to lose sleep over matters mundane or cosmic, never to obsess about the substance behind a question mark… I’m not going to think too hard about this, because if I start to wonder — i.e., to act on my curiosity — about curiosity itself, well, that way lies madness. But I’ll let some others do my thinking for me, e.g.:

…and:

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead —his eyes are closed. The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.

(Albert Einstein [source])

…and:

Our instinct may be to see the impossibility of tracking everything down as frustrating, dispiriting, perhaps even appalling, but it can just as well be viewed as almost unbearably exciting. We live on a planet that has a more or less infinite capacity to surprise. What reasoning person could possibly want it any other way?

(Bill Bryson [source])

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