Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Asking the Hardest Question, and Not Reaching for the Easy Answer

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[Image: “A Hallway of Unopened Doors,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) I can’t possibly need to hammer the metaphor in, can I?]

This week, whiskey river offers us a quote pulled from their commonplace book (something like a blog archive). They’ve used the same quotation in the past, and — as it happens — so have I (about five years ago), thanks to their trustworthy influence:

In all the aeons we have lost nothing, we have gained nothing — not a speck, not a grain, not a breath. The universe is simply a sealed, twisting kaleidoscope that has reordered itself a trillion trillion trillion times over.

Each baby, then, is a unique collision — a cocktail, a remix — of all that has come before: made from molecules of Napoleon and stardust and comets and whale tooth; colloidal mercury and Cleopatra’s breath: and with the same darkness that is between the stars between, and inside, our own atoms.

When you know this, you suddenly see the crowded top deck of the bus, in the rain, as a miracle: this collection of people is by way of a starburst constellation. Families are bright, irregular-shaped nebulae. Finding a person you love is like galaxies colliding. We are all peculiar, unrepeatable, perambulating micro-universes — we have never been before and we will never be again. Oh God, the sheer exuberant, unlikely face of our existences. The honour of being alive. They will never be able to make you again. Don’t you dare waste a second of it thinking something better will happen when it ends. Don’t you dare.

(Caitlin Moran [source — subscription probably required])

When I used the quotation before, I didn’t know where it originally came from (book, blog post, etc.). This time around, I found the source (thanks to a generous subscription offer): an essay from The Times (i.e., of London) back in 2014. This offered me the opportunity to place it in context with the text preceding and after the quoted passage…

It turns out, see, that Caitlin Moran wasn’t really speaking of what she believed then, at the time she wrote the essay; she was thinking back to her younger self. The paragraphs preceding the excerpt above reads:

In my teens and twenties, I took after [my mother], and became a passionate advocate against any notion of an afterlife. Ninety per cent of the problems of humanity, it seemed, stemmed from a simple cognitive dissonance: refusing to acknowledge that this is it. That we are alive now, and there will be nothing else later — no second chances, no higher levels. No Heaven. No Nirvana. That if there is joy, or progress, or enlightenment, or love to be had, it must be had now: between your birth and your death; as fast and fiercely as you can. All we have is the breath in our bodies and a finite share of seconds, and each one must be spent with the same joyous reverence as a gold coin.

This is because, at 19, I’d read a sentence that had re-terraformed my head: “The level of matter in the universe has been constant since the Big Bang.”

So she had that one sentence’s revelation, as she describes. But then, in 2014 and not years before, after the ringing “Don’t you dare” conclusion she added:

But that, as I say, was in my twenties. Ten years later, things have changed. I want there to be an afterlife, now. I wish it devoutly — not from any unhappy desire for an afterlife to be better than this one, but from sheer curiosity.

At 38, I think when I die, I need desperately to be handed a stiff drink and be allowed to ask, “What the hell was going on all that time? Come on — why did they build Stonehenge? Where did my first passport disappear to? What were Neanderthals really like? Where did my second passport disappear to? What would the third Amy Winehouse album have sounded like? Where did I lose my wedding ring? Can I have a map of the world, in fact — with each thing I’ve lost marked with a luminous pin?”

I don’t want swan’s wings. I don’t want my own planet. I don’t want eternity. I just want to know everything, ever — then be reordered across the universe, again.

I myself have nothing I could honestly call “a belief in the afterlife.” But I love the idea of a brief but ambitious interlude of revelation which precedes the ultimate atomization of whatever the hell my self is: a chance to “know everything, ever”… or at least, maybe, the answers to twenty or a hundred questions. The last one of which would simply go something like this:

And now the very last, final thing I want to know: after I get the answer to this last question, well… what happens next?

A Worldview Shaped by Others’ Eyes and Ears

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[Image: “The Curse of Milhaven,” by Elias Ruiz Monserrat. (Found on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license; thank you very much!)]

Like many (most? all?) people, at least those influenced by Western culture and values, I go back and forth in my general outlook: Things are so bad, as opposed to Things aren’t as bad as they seem. I’ve been kept awake at night both by crippling, flailing despair and by excited anticipation. But also like many people, I tend to occupy one end of the continuum vs. the other. And for me, the world is generally happier than not.

Many times over the years, I’ve thought about why this might (or might not) be so: why do we favor one vs. the other? The thought experiment that finally nudged me towards an answer was to imagine myself born into a world with no other people at all. (Yes, yes, I know: if there’d never been any other people, I couldn’t have been born at all. Repeat after me: thought experiment.) In such a world, would I — or anyone — tend to be more one than the other?

Last week, as though reading my mind on the subject, whiskey river offered me this:

For when cynicism becomes the default language, playfulness and invention become impossible. Cynicism scours through a culture like bleach, wiping out millions of small, seedling ideas. Cynicism means your automatic answer becomes “No.” Cynicism means you presume everything will end in disappointment. And this is, ultimately, why anyone becomes cynical. Because they are scared of disappointment. Because they are scared someone will take advantage of them. Because they are fearful their innocence will be used against them — that when they run around gleefully trying to cram the whole world in their mouth, someone will try to poison them.

(Caitlin Moran [source])

Suppose I pose to myself a question: what is this passage about? The answer might unfold like this:

Oh, surely it’s about cynicism… No, wait, it’s actually about cynics — people afflicted with cynicism… and it’s about innocence, and fear, and…

But that doesn’t seem right. Or not complete, anyhow…

And then I got to thinking about Charles Foster’s Being a Beast, the book which I mentioned in last week’s Friday post. In particular, I thought about the chapter in which Foster tries his damnedest to “be” a badger; here, he’s writing about his eventual comfort — his deep satisfaction — with finding himself lying in a Charles Foster-shaped hollow in the earth, about his no longer feeling hemmed in and claustrophobic in such a setting:

…all that swirling atavistic panic slowly cleared. I didn’t hyperventilate if I wasn’t on my actual and metaphorical hind legs, manfully scanning distant vistas and making sense of and plans for the big picture. It was okay to lie in the dark, surrounded by the scratching and humming and thrashing of animals that would one day eat me. From there it was a small enough step not to mind being eaten, and not to mind being in, or getting toward, the state in which one is eaten. And once you’re there, you’re at last a proper ecologist, knowing your place, all ecocolonialism gone. Only then, at the end of a weary and distressing metaphysical road, can you really begin the business of being a badger…

What does the individual badger “hear” as a result of the changing pressures on its tympanum that we choose to call a sound? Strictly speaking, I have no idea. I have no idea what Mozart sounds like to anyone apart from me (and even that sound changes massively with my state of digestion). This isn’t a problem of physiology; it’s the problem of otherness, which we inadequately physiologize as a difficulty in inquiring into the nature of complex central processing. We can’t know that we’re not alone. It is an act of pure faith for me to declare that there are some things I share with my children and my best friends.

(Charles Foster [source et seq.])

Back to my thought experiment: had I been the only human ever on the planet, I would never have known cynicism. Fear, sure; desperation even, of course. (Never having known another person, I doubt that bitterness would have ever occurred to me.) But cynicism (like envy, jealousy, and so on) — that requires an Other. It’s a response not to the way the world is, but to the way people are in the world.

And yet it’s not the only response possible to a world shared with others, as Foster seems to be saying. Once we get to know the others, we can choose to like them, to not like them, to be indifferent to them. If we try hard enough, we can even become them, to a limited extent. But to be cynical about them is no more than a glib prediction of their behavior and its effects on oneself. It’s a vow, furthermore, never again to be surprised.

I think I’ll choose surprise, thanks all the same!

To Know the Unknowable Other

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[Untitled image by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) The photo’s caption on Instagram read: “The end-of-year holidays are a time for families to draw together and, as families will, poke one another to the point of discomfort”… Now I’m thinking I should entitle it, “Poking the Unknowable.”]

This week, whiskey river reminded us (via its characteristically impeccable curatorship of others’ words) that (a) this is a very weird time to be traveling, but also that (b) aside from current travels, just the memory of past ones feels a little alien — even to those who haven’t been on the road:

But time has got very slippery these days. Days, weeks, months and years merge into one another. Images will pop up of work trips to the US, or Australia in the Photos widget on my phone and not only will I struggle to remember when the trip happened, the very fact that it did is becoming increasingly unreal.

All I know with any certainty is that I get up, stuff happens, and I go to sleep, over and over again. The past is a dream that I have here and now, the future a fantasy that likewise is a figment of my imagination that I experience here and now.

(Euan Semple [source])

The book I’m reading now, too, feels rather alien, exactly because it records an itinerary — several of them — formerly unimaginable to me. The author, Charles Foster, is a British naturalist; the book itself, Being a Beast, is predictably therefore about the natural world. But it’s “about” the natural world in the sense (as the title suggests) of inhabiting the natural world — not as a human, striding about on two legs and occasionally crouching down to observe wildlife, patronizingly, as though doing the creatures a favor. No: Foster set out to live the daily lives of the animals he discusses — badgers, otters, foxes, red deer, and swifts.

Like most journeys, Foster’s — into the heads of the creatures he’s curious about — mix aspirations satisfied with intentions foiled, plans (always for good outcomes) with surprises (disappointing mixed with good). (I’m only about halfway through the book so far, but have not yet encountered any disasters or tragedies. Foster’s a gifted writer, an entertaining eccentric, so perhaps he simply avoids reporting of great and genuine unhappiness.) As a badger, he manages to adjust his sleep cycle — creeping out of his Welsh hillside burrow for nocturnal foraging — and learns to eat worms, to recognize their varieties by their textures and unique slipperiness. As a fox in East End London, he’s awakened by a policeman from his daytime snooze by “under the rhododendrons.” The policeman says:

“Why do you have to sleep here, may I ask?”

“You may indeed ask, but I don’t suppose you’ll like the answer. I’m trying to be a fox, and” (I rushed on, trying to avert my eyes from the torrential hemorrhage of the officer’s residual goodwill) “I want to know what it’s like to listen all day to traffic and to look at ankles and calves rather than at whole people.”

This last observation was a bad, bad mistake. I knew it as soon as it was out…

Uncertainty and workload trumped his instincts, and he told me to “bugger off home, sir” (the italics were powerful on his lips) “and get a life.”

“That,” I said, “is exactly what I’m trying to get.”

Comedy aside, note about this passage that it presents a Janus of alienness — an animal’s face gazing at the human, a human’s at the animal, across a barrier which neither of them can ever actually climb or penetrate. The same barrier, indeed, exists between you and me, or between you and anyone else you have ever encountered — will ever encounter. Foster himself acknowledges this, in a sort of side jaunt into the nature (!) of animal/human consciousness:

The universe I occupy is a creature of my head. It is wholly unique to me. The process of intimacy is the process of becoming better at inviting others in to have a look around. The sensation of loneliness is the crushing acknowledgment that however good you get at giving such invitations no one will be able to see very much at all….

What might it mean for an unconscious creature to dream? Indeed to sleep at all? What’s being lost when “consciousness” is lost? What accompanies the creature into the world beyond the veil? If badgers aren’t conscious in a sense comparable to us, their sleeping smiles and winces are more inscrutable than consciousness itself. I prefer the lesser mystery…

When I experience a pleasurable stimulus, my facial muscles contract in a particular way. When a dog experiences a stimulus that indicates a benefit to the dog that is comparable to the benefit of which my pleasure is an index, its facial muscles contract in a more or less identical way.

And so on.

Being a Beast was published in 2016, well before the coronavirus tide flooded the world. But — in that context, and taken together with Euan Semple’s words above — it’s interesting to note: even when we’re sharing life only with other humans (and some animals, if we’re lucky), those we already “know” intimately, even after a seemingly interminable period of adopting one another’s rhythms as our own, the barriers of consciousness remain. We still live in our separate heads. We may think — fool ourselves into thinking — we know the minds on the other side of the impermeable membrane, because we know the behaviors which (surely?) highlight those minds’ motivations, decisions, and, well, essences. But no: as always, the operative word there is impermeable.

There is no challenge, no mystery at all, in thinking “I know X.” No, what makes each “same” day different, and differently worth living, is always trying to know X: trying, failing, trying again. There’s an inexhaustible source of surprise, delight — and sure, occasional disappointment — to be found on that journey. Maybe, in this small way, we can regard the pandemic as an opportunity we’d never have been offered otherwise, as — gasp — as a blessing?

The Finding — and Making — of Relevant Time

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[Image: “Future Past + Presence,” by a photographer and digital artist who goes by the handle “Hartwig HKD.” Found on Flickr, of course, and posted here under a Creative Commons license (thank you!), having trimmed only a black top and bottom border from the original.]

It’s been one of those weeks — you know, the ones in which time lays a hand on your wrist and, with restless taps and nudges from its bony fingers, keeps reminding you… reminding you that while you may have forgotten it, it has been keeping careful tabs on you. (Lucky you!)

While we were both working, The Missus and I shared a sort of mental fountain which burbled with the waters of our everyday life for years, with only minor adjustments. Then came 2020, a year which (for pretty much everyone) sneered at the notion of everyday life — or rather, mandated that we rethink it. What does it mean to have a “schedule”? How many layers of fallback schedules are required to keep us feeling “on track”? And so on.

Particularly, for me, this past week reminded me of the tyranny of small-scale, immovable schedules, those bound up with the schedules of other people — of whole institutions, particularly bureaucracies. I’ve had to deal with some of that while on the road, of course, but the first week of 2022 has brought a bunch of them into close jigsaw-puzzle proximity. Medical appointments and re-appointments, car maintenance, summons to answer civic duties back in Florida, missed video calls requiring recalendaring…

Ironically, early this week, whiskey river offered up a question which seemed to speak to this:

Perhaps we don’t love unreasonably because we think we have time, or have to reckon with time. But what if we don’t have time? Or what if time, as we know it, is irrelevant?

(Franz Kafka [quasi-canonical source])

A couple of days later, the whiskey river blogger even seemed to present an answer to their own question:

We respond to this question through our deeds, through the action of writing. We know that to answer it directly would be impertinent, not necessary, but we also recognize that imagination has to struggle with the dragon of time afresh each day. Time brings about new things, good and bad; we must ascertain them. Time kills people and civilizations; we must save them, to remember them in poetry. We understand that the ongoing war between imagination and time (alas, a war that will never be won) cannot end, that we cannot turn, all of us, into historians of poetry and content ourselves with reading old poets. Poetry must be written, continued, risked, tried, revised, erased, and tried again as long as we breathe and love, doubt and believe. We always remember, of course, that we write our poems in the gigantic shadow of the dead and that we should be humble, at least in those long hours when we do not compose. (Being too humble in the very moment of creation would not be very wise.)

We need to go on, paying the price, sometimes, of being not only imperfect but even, who knows, arrogant and ridiculous.

(Adam Zagajewski [source])

Zagajewski, an internationally famous poet, was no doubt speaking literally of poetry at the time. (He was reflecting on having received the Neustadt Prize in Literature.) But his words have value as metaphor, too, even for those of us who don’t write poetry — or those of us who go through similar motions with prose, but only when prodded hard by circumstance…

…which reminds me of a passage I remember from an early 20th-century “fantasy” I read back in college. Here, a character identified only as “the Philosopher” has been through a certain number of trials and revelations in old Ireland; as he returns home to his wife, pursued by police, he is joined by a group of leprechauns who accompany him the rest of the way. They offer him sanctuary, and this conversation ensues:

One of the Leprechauns here interposed.

“Noble Sir,” said he, “there isn’t much room in our house but there’s no stint of welcome in it. You would have a good time with us travelling on moonlit nights and seeing strange things, for we often go to visit the Shee of the Hills and they come to see us; there is always something to talk about, and we have dances in the caves and on the tops of the hills. Don’t be imagining now that we have a poor life for there is fun and plenty with us…”

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

(James Stephens [source])

I never knew James Stephens, obviously, so have no way of knowing for sure what he really wanted us to see and hear in this passage. Still, if anyone who reads his words wants to insist that he here speaks literally and only of dancing… well, perhaps I should gently escort such folks to the emergency exit.

Maybe Not the Wrong(est) Man, But…

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[Image: a so-called “Bergonic chair” in use. The device, according to Wikipedia (where I found the photo), was used during the World War I era “for giving general electric treatment for psychological effect, in psycho-neurotic cases.” Particularly noteworthy: there’s no sign of its application to the patient’s, y’know, cranium. Alas, I have not yet uncovered the source of the device’s name, presumably from someone named, uh, Bergon? The photo is reproduced at numerous sites; of these, one of the most informative — while adding nothing specific about the Bergonic chair itself — provides some good context.]

James Thurber’s story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” tells of a very ordinary man possessed of an extravagant imagination. As he interacts with everyday life, each little twist in its events fuels high-flown fantasies of what might be happening instead. For instance, at his wife’s insistence, he stops by a shoe store to pick up a pair of overshoes; when he forgets what else she asked him to bring home, the simple task balloons. It culminates, in Mitty’s mind as he stands on the city sidewalk, in a riotous courtroom scene — in which he remembers everything:

…he was always getting something wrong. Kleenex, he thought, Squibb’s, razor blades? No. Toothpaste, toothbrush, bicarbonate, carborundum, initiative and referendum? He gave it up. But [his wife] would remember it. “Where’s the what’s-its-name?” she would ask. “Don’t tell me you forgot the what’s-its-name.” A newsboy went by shouting something about the Waterbury trial.

…”Perhaps this will refresh your memory.” The District Attorney suddenly thrust a heavy automatic at the quiet figure on the witness stand. “Have you ever seen this before?” Walter Mitty took the gun and examined it expertly. “This is my Webley-Vickers 50.80,” he said calmly. An excited buzz ran around the courtroom. The Judge rapped for order. “You are a crack shot with any sort of firearms, I believe?” said the District Attorney, insinuatingly. “Objection!” shouted Mitty’s attorney. “We have shown that the defendant could not have fired the shot. We have shown that he wore his right arm in a sling on the night of the fourteenth of July.” Walter Mitty raised his hand briefly and the bickering attorneys were stilled. “With any known make of gun,” he said evenly, “I could have killed Gregory Fitzhurst at three hundred feet with my left hand.” Pandemonium broke loose in the courtroom. A woman’s scream rose above the bedlam and suddenly a lovely, dark-haired girl was in Walter Mitty’s arms…

(James Thurber [source])

During our Road Trip 2021 adventure, I harbored my own fantasies of an exciting life. Unlike Mitty, though, I became not the triumphant hero, but the Charlie-Brown goat, in contests not against monstrous evil, but against faceless bureaucrats. For instance, our car was totaled about a week after we left Florida; for weeks — months! — afterward, I’d wake up in a cold sweat, or not fall asleep in the first place, worrying that our car insurance and/or registration had gotten bollixed up in the transfer to the replacement car… and that my driving privileges were thus also in jeopardy. (As it happened, yes, at one time or another the car insurance had gotten bollixed up, the registration similarly tangled, and my driving privileges indeed in jeopardy. It was all straightened out by late November, but it was a hell of a way to “enjoy the road” in the meantime!)

My usual Friday-blogging inspiration, whiskey river, offered me one single tidbit this week — an excerpt from a Stephen Dunn poem, “Traveling.” (See the full thing here.) While meditating on the full poem and the excerpt, I flipped back and forth in the source material to see if anything else triggered an association. And that’s how I came across this gem:

On Hearing the Airlines Will Use a Psychological Profile to Catch Potential Skyjackers

They will catch me
as sure as the checkout girls
in every Woolworth’s have caught me, the badge
of my imagined theft shining in their eyes.

I will be approaching the ticket counter
and knowing myself, my selves,
will effect the nonchalance of a baron.
That is what they’ll be looking for.

I’ll say “Certainly is nice that the
airlines are taking these precautions,”
and the man behind the counter
will press a secret button,

there’ll be a hand on my shoulder
(this will have happened before in a dream),
and in a back room they’ll ask me
“Why were you going to do it?”

I’ll say “You wouldn’t believe
I just wanted to get to Cleveland?”
“No,” they’ll say.
So I’ll tell them everything,

the plot to get the Pulitzer Prize
in exchange for the airplane,
the bomb in my pencil,
heroin in the heel of my boot.

Inevitably, it’ll be downtown for booking,
newsmen pumping me for deprivation
during childhood,
the essential cause.

“There is no one cause for any human act,”
I’ll tell them, thinking finally,
a chance to let the public in
on the themes of great literature.

And on and on, celebrating myself, offering
no resistance, assuming what they assume,
knowing, in a sense, there is no such thing
as the wrong man.

(Stephen Dunn [source])

Now, that spoke to my traveling self, all right!

Addendum: Just before hitting the “Publish” button on this post, I came across the following… which I really had to include here:

Reality seemed so paltry next to castles—dungeons—in the air

(Pico Iyer [source])

A Vision of Future Sugar Plums

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[Image: partial screen capture from a photo of Michael Heizer’s monumental artwork, City, as found via Google Maps.]

Even reliably non-sectarian whiskey river finds itself in a holiday spirit today… although, since it is whiskey river, after all, it carries a bit of a knowing twist:

The Christmas Letter

Wherever you are when you receive this letter
I write to say we are still ourselves
In the same place
And hope you are the same.

The dead have died as you know
And will never get better,
And the children are boys and girls
of their several ages and names.

So in closing I send you our love
And hope to hear from you soon.
There is never a time
Like the present. It lasts forever
Wherever you are. As ever I remain.

(John N. Morris [source])

The Missus and I have followed an annual tradition, every December 23rd for the almost 30 years we’ve been together: we go out for a nice dinner. It’s a tradition with twists of its own, of course; in our case, The Missus never knows where we’re going — I selected the venue, make the reservation, and drive us to the place. (When we lived in North Florida, as we did until this year, I generally took a roundabout route as well, just to keep her guessing as long as possible.)

This year, as I’ve mentioned, we’re in Las Vegas to spend some time with The Stepson. So this year, he generously offered to drive us to the restaurant and back. As we made our way from his home in the northern fringes of the city to the Las Vegas Strip (the restaurant is actually in a casino), I was struck by a sudden image of the place in, say, 500 years or so… something like the climactic conclusion of Planet of the Apes, say, or like Michael Heizer’s monumental sculpture, City, not far from here in the Nevada desert.

I imagined, see, not just how the landscape might be different, nearly buried. I imagined as well the remnants of human culture after some colossal catastrophe, probably climatic or geological. In the terms offered by John N. Morris’s poem, for instance: what might be the very last Christmas letter composed and distributed by a Las Vegas resident? Will its author know of the onrushing finality? What on earth might such a letter say, as Christmas letters are traditionally practically required to say, about the preceding year? To whom would the letter even be addressed? And so on.

Not exactly the sort of stuff one would expect to have in one’s head on a December 23rd Christmas date, eh? And yet Christmastime in Vegas worked the magic that could be expected of it: covering up the dark thoughts not in sand, but glitter and noise…

A Quirky Eclectic Christmas Mix (2021(ish) Ed.)

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[Video: Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings, “Please Come Home for Christmas” — lyrics here — in a performance recorded six years ago.]

Greetings, RAMH visitors! If you’ve been here in previous Decembers, you probably know the drill — or think you do, anyhow. While there’s still a playlist featured below, it is unchanged from the 2020 edition… thanks to Road Trip 2021 and its abundant distractions, challenges, and schedule-related stresses.

So please, enjoy the 130 songs here, with my apologies for there not being 140 (heh). Remember that my favorite way to listen is to click the little “Popout” button at top left — the resulting mix will be randomized, and if you don’t like the order it offers just refresh the popout window until you get a satisfactory sequence.

With luck, in December 2022 I’ll return to the routine: ten new songs added to the end of the list each year. Until then, please stay safe and happy this season… and also (the 2020s version of the wish) healthy!

Turmoil in the Thing Observed, Serenity in the Observer

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[Image: “Work Glove and Woodpile (Livingston, NY; October 2021),” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

The Missus and I have made it to Las Vegas for several weeks’ year-end downtime, here at the end of Roadtrip 2021. We’ve little idea what’s ahead for us in ’22 (aside from threading our cautious — and a bit nervous — way among more coronavirus mutations). We’ve considered a few further destinations, but thanks to winter weather they are by and large inaccessible to us… for a few months, anyhow.

And really, the big question remains: wither, ultimately, goeth we? Where are we gonna live?

Came across this item yesterday, posted earlier in the week on whiskey river:

I occasionally experience myself as a cluster of flowing currents. I prefer this to the idea of a solid self, the identity to which so many attach so much significance. These currents, like the themes of one’s life, are borne along during the waking hours, and at their best they require no reconciling, no harmonizing. They may be not quite right, but at least they are always in motion, in time, in place, in the form of strange combinations moving about, not necessarily forward, against each other, contrapuntally yet without one central theme. A form of freedom, I’d like to think, even if I am far from being totally convinced that it is. That skepticism, too, is something I particularly want to hold onto. With so many dissonances in my life I have learned to prefer being not quite right, out of place.

(Edward Said [source])

Hmm, I thought. He preferred a dissonant life? One of my pet terms for The Missus is, “my personal disruptor” — it sums up her (to me) charming habit of overturning my own best-laid but generally trivial plans with her more impulsive, grand-and-sweeping ones. So yes, I know the pleasures of occasional dissonance. Even so, I find them pleasing in contrast — against a more neutral, conventional backdrop: colorful accents placed on a tweed fabric, say…

Las Vegas (or anyplace like it) will not become our hometown. I know many people live here in stability — in quite-rightness and in-placeness — despite the conventional view of the city as a place where anything can and often does happen, at any time. But I also know myself: freeing the elephant, right?

I couldn’t possibly regard Edward Said’s view of his life as “wrong.” On the contrary, I think he was right in a way: his self seen as “a cluster of flowing currents,” for example. But I don’t think he had to stop there and say, in effect, I choose a dissonant self over a static one. All that noise and clatter and all those free-flowing forms needn’t be participated in to be appreciated. Regardez, s’il vous plait, this morning’s whiskey river meditation — a sort of “on the other hand…” response to the week’s earlier one:

Time for Serenity, Anyone?

I like to live in the sound of water,
in the feel of mountain air. A sharp
reminder hits me: this world is still alive,
it stretches out there shivering toward its own
creation, and I’m part of it. Even my breathing
enters into this elaborate give-and-take,
this bowing to sun and moon. day or night.
winter, summer, storm, still—this tranquil
chaos that seems to be going somewhere.
This wilderness with a great peacefulness in it.
This motionless turmoil, this everything dance.

(William Stafford [source])

On the Road to What Lies Within, by Way of What Lies Without

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[Image: “Eclipse Crescents,” by Jon D. Anderson. (Found it on Flickr, and use it here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!) The photo was taken during an eclipse, obviously; the photographer had the camera pointed at the ground, in a filbert orchard — where he caught all the little pinhole-camera-style images of sunlight created by the leaves overhead. My favorite thing about this photo, though, is the scattered greens of fallen leaves and blades of grass: beautiful reality superimposed on the monotone dreamlike nominal subject, as though to remind you where you are.]

On our Roadtrip 2021 mini-adventure, I’ve probably taken thousands of photographs just with my “real” camera (i.e., not counting the — hundreds? thousands? — taken with my phone’s camera). I haven’t done any kind of statistical analysis, but I bet well over 95% of them will never see the light of day, so to speak: “public” exposure here on RAMH, or over on Instagram or (rarely) Facebook. I doubt that I myself will ever go back to look at the unused ones.

About a month ago, the absurdity finally hit me: by far, most of the photos I was setting aside or discarding depicted subjects already publicly available — generally, depicted them better. Consider, for instance, the hundreds I’d taken while touring the interiors of a couple of the Gilded-Age mansions of Newport, Rhode Island. Oh, I’d shot a handful which turned out satisfactorily as photographs, and I’d kept and “promoted” them, so to speak. The rest, though? Why did I take these half-dozen shots of a grand entry hall in The Breakers — you know, the same entry hall depicted in all the postcards and coffee-table books in the gift shop, or even at The Breakers Web site? (Especially considering that flash photography of the interiors is forbidden to the public, but professionals engaged by the governing body may use soft but artificial lighting under controlled circumstances.)

Dumb, dumb, dumb.

So I’ve worked at no longer photographing subjects easily available, in better form, from other sources. Which begs the question: why take photos otherwise? (Note the similarity of this question to the one, “Why write?,” which has obsessed me in the past. For instance, scroll down on this page to the section headed “Background, for Interested Parties.”)

With such thoughts in mind, earlier this week I read the following, on whiskey river of course:

To restore you and myself, I return to my state of garden and shade, cool reality, I hardly exist and if I do exist it’s with delicate care. Surrounding the shade is a teeming, sweaty heat. I’m alive. But I feel I’ve not yet reached my limits, bordering on what? Without limits, the adventure of a dangerous freedom. But I take the risk, I live taking it. I’m full of acacias swaying yellow, and I, who have barely begun my journey, begin it with a sense of tragedy, guessed what lost ocean my life steps will take me to. And crazily I latch onto the corners of myself, my hallucinations suffocate me with their beauty. I am before, I am almost, I am never.

(Clarice Lispector [source])

And a day later, not on whiskey river, I read this:

Song of Ryokan: III
(excerpt)

True, all the seasons have moonlit nights,
But here’s the best night to see the moon.
The hills never so aloft, the streams never so clear,
In the infinite blue of autumn sky flies a disk of light,
Neither light nor gloom is graced with a life of its own.
The moon and the earth are one, and myself one with them.
The boundless sky above, and autumn chill on my skin,
I stroll about low hills, leaning upon my priceless cane.
Quiet night has held firm the flitting dust of the world.
The bright moon alone pours streams of rays all about me.
I mind it not if another like-minded is also admiring it,
Or if the moon deigns to look on others as well as on me.
Each year as autumn comes, the moon will shine as before,
And the world will watch it, will face it, till eternity.
Sermons at Mount Ryozen, lectures in the Vale of Sokei,
Were teachings so precious, the audience needed the moon.
My meditation under the moon lasts till the ripest night.
The stream has hushed its cry, dew lies thick everywhere.
Who, among the moon-viewers tonight, will have the prize?
Who will reflect the purest moon in the lake of his mind?

(Ryokan, translated by Noboyuki Yuasa [source])

I’m still working my way through the answer(s) to the “Why photograph (or write) at all?” questions. But I sense the presence, in these two passages, of something verging on understanding.

In a State of Grace, Where We Can Find It

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[Image: “The Missus in the Temple of Athena (Nashville Parthenon; November, 2021),” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) I’ll let my anonymous friend from over the way do the verbal honors solo today; nodding in agreement, I’ll just, well… just point, so to speak.]

From whiskey river:

In a state of grace, one sometimes perceives the deep beauty, hitherto unattainable, of another person. And everything acquires a kind of halo which is not imaginary: it comes from the splendor of the almost mathematical light emanating from people and things. One starts to feel that everything in existence — whether people or things — breathes and exhales the subtle light of energy. The world’s truth is impalpable.

(Clarice Lispector [source])

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