Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Visualizing the Soul of the Night

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[Image: “Termination Shock: The Ends of Everythings,” by artist Andy Gracie. Found it on Flickr, where it was posted in the Ars Electronica photostream, and use it here under a Creative Commons license. (Thank you!) This is one panel of a “triptych” depicting the gradual disintegration, over billions of years, of matter, light, gravity, and time; you can also view the triptych as a single, animated, eleven-minute video at Gracie’s Web site or on YouTube. I’m pretty sure both plural nouns in the work’s title are plural by intention.]

For no particular reason as far as I know, I’ve been reading a lot of nonfiction about astronomy and related matters recently. Some of it is personal (astronomers’ bios and memoirs), some more technical (the history of telescopic observation), some more lyrical. So when I came across this passage, courtesy of whiskey river, I sat right up:

I am a child of the Milky Way. The night is my mother. I am made of the dust of stars. Every atom in my body was forged in a star. When the universe exploded into being, already the bird longed for the wood and the fish for the pool. When the first galaxies fell into luminous clumps, already matter was struggling toward consciousness. The star clouds of Sagittarius are a burning bush. If there is a voice in Sagittarius, I’d be a fool not to listen. If God’s voice in the night is a scrawny cry, then I’ll prick up my ears. If night’s faint lights fail to knock me off my feet, then I’ll sit back on a dark hillside and wait and watch. A hint here and a trait there. Listening and watching. Waiting, always waiting, for the tingle in the spine.

(Chet Raymo [source])

Now, as so often when I come across something unfamiliar but eye-catching at whiskey river, I immediately seek out its source — the surrounding context, if prose; if poetry, other poems by the same poet or in an anthology with poems by others. (I’ve acquired a lot of books that way!) So it was with the above passage, which, as it happens, appears way down almost at the end of the book. But here’s the opening of The Soul of the Night: An Astronomical Pilgrimage:

Yesterday on Boston Common I saw a young man on a skateboard collide with a child. The skateboarder was racing down the promenade and smashed into the child with full force. I saw this happen from a considerable distance. It happened without a sound. It happened in dead silence. The cry of the terrified child as she darted to avoid the skateboard and the scream of the child’s mother at the moment of impact were absorbed by the grey wool of the November day. The child’s body simply lifted up into the air and, in slow motion, as if in a dream, floated above the promenade, bounced twice like a rubber ball, and lay still.

All of this happened in perfect silence. It was as if I were watching the tragedy through a telescope. It was as if the tragedy was happening on another planet. I have seen stars exploding in space, colossal, planet-shattering, distanced by light years, framed in the cold glass of a telescope, utterly silent. It was like that.

During the time the child was in the air, the spinning Earth carried her a half mile to the east. The motion of the Earth about the sun carried her back again forty miles westward. The drift of the solar system among the stars of the Milky Way bore her silently twenty miles toward the star Vega. The turning pinwheel of the Milky Way Galaxy carried her 300 miles in a great circle about the galactic center. After that huge flight through space she hit the ground and bounced like a rubber ball. She lifted up into the air and flew across the Galaxy and bounced on the pavement.

It is a thin membrane that separates us from chaos. The child sent flying by the skateboarder bounced in slow motion and lay still. There was a long pause. Pigeons froze against the gray sky. Promenaders turned to stone. Traffic stopped on Beacon Street. The child’s body lay inert on the asphalt like a piece of crumpled newspaper. The mother’s cry was lost in the space between the stars.

How are we to understand the silence of the universe? They say that certain meteorites, upon entering the Earth’s atmosphere, disintegrate with noticeable sound, but beyond the Earth’s skin of air the sky is silent. There are no voices in the burning bush of the Galaxy. The Milky Way flows across the dark shoals of the summer sky without an audible ripple. Stars blow themselves to smithereens, we hear nothing. Millions of solar systems are sucked into black holes at the centers of the galaxies, they fall like feathers. The universe fattens and swells in a Big Bang, a fireball of Creation exploding from a pinprick of infinite energy, the ultimate firecracker; there is no soundtrack. The membrane is ruptured, a child flies through the air, and the universe is silent…

Yesterday on Boston Common a child flew through the air, and there was no protest from the sky. I listened. I turned the volume of my indignation all the way up, and I heard nothing.

Needless to say, I now have another book about astronomy (laughing (silently)).

The Comforts to Be Found in Staying Put (for Now)

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[Image: “Inertia,” by user cuzco07 on the Deviant Art site. I have never forgotten a formal definition of “inertia” I picked up somewhere, maybe in a physics class; it summarized the force in two ways, the more commonly understood being: the tendency of a body in motion to remain in motion — like a fast-moving vehicle approaching a brick wall. Less commonly referenced is the second half of the definition: the tendency of a body at rest to remain at rest.]

Those of you who know of our extended US road trip may be wondering, well, just what the heck is going on. (I have’t mentioned it here at RAMH in weeks, I haven’t called, I haven’t written, I must not love you, etc. etc.) Fact is, we’re still mired in South Florida. We arrived here at The Stepdaughter’s House o’ Canines just in time to intersect with Hurricane Elsa’s path, and since then… well, let’s just say for now that Other Things Happened. We still have a couple other Florida family visits to make; with luck, though, we’ll finally make it out of the state — gasping in desperation — within another week or two. (And then comes the considerably accelerated scramble of the first leg of our trip…)

With very little to do in the meantime, and (haha) a limited wardrobe to wear while doing it, we’ve been able to caaaaaalm down, relax, and contemplate how best to confront what’s before us at a given moment. Inevitably comes the realization: the comforting prominence of the first-person plural in that sentence. We and us versus the alternative, I and me — well, yes, we’re in pretty good shape, all things considered. I don’t speak much of matters of the heart, but now that I’m in this situation, oddly, I suddenly think of this…

The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.

And we will sit upon the Rocks,
Seeing the Shepherds feed their flocks,
By shallow Rivers to whose falls
Melodious birds sing Madrigals.

And I will make thee beds of Roses
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroidered all with leaves of Myrtle;

A gown made of the finest wool
Which from our pretty Lambs we pull;
Fair lined slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold;

A belt of straw and Ivy buds,
With Coral clasps and Amber studs:
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me, and be my love.

The Shepherds’ Swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May-morning:
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me, and be my love.

(Christopher Marlowe [source])

Of course, Marlowe was inspired not just by a pleasant companion but by roses, posies, and other pleasures of May in the English countryside. But we are still in bloody Florida, in bloody July, bloody 2021. How are we supposed to contemplate anything — even each other — with anything like pleasure? Along comes Raymond Carver, courtesy of whiskey river:

The Best Time of the Day

Cool summer nights.
Windows open.
Lamps burning.
Fruit in the bowl.
And your head on my shoulder.
These the happiest moments in the day.

Next to the early morning hours,
of course.
And the time
just before lunch.
And the afternoon, and
early evening hours.
But I do love

these summer nights.
Even more, I think,
than those other times.
The work finished for the day.
And no one who can reach us now.
Or ever.

(Raymond Carver [source])

_____________

Aside: what’s the adjective form of “Marlowe” (a la “Shakespearean”)? “Marlovian”? [Answer, in short order: yes. See the title of this Wikipedia article.]

Flywheel of the Heart

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[Image: “Drive!,” by a photographer — or a collective, or something — who’s chosen to self-identify only as Listenwave Photography. (Found it on Flickr, and use it here under a Creative Commons license.)

High summer, 2021, in Florida: so many people walking around with bombs of one kind or another in their chests (fitted with timers of sickness, anxiety, anger, fear)… I don’t think these folks suffer from defective hearts, so much as from hearts without a regulator, a flywheel…

Heart

The heart shifts shape of its own accord—
from bird to ax, from pinwheel
to budded branch. It rolls over in the chest,
a brown bear groggy with winter, skips
like a child at the fair, stopping in the shade
of the fireworks booth, the fat lady’s tent,
the corn dog stand. Or the heart
is an empty room where the ghosts of the dead
wait, paging through magazines, licking
their skinless thumbs. One gets up, walks
through a door into a maze of hallways.
Behind one door a roomful of orchids,
behind another, the smell of burned toast.
The rooms go on and on: sewing room
with its squeaky treadle, its bright needles,
room full of file cabinets and torn curtains,
room buzzing with a thousand black flies.
Or the heart closes its doors, becomes smoke,
a wispy lie, curls like a worm and forgets
its life, burrows into the fleshy dirt.
Heart makes a wrong turn.
Heart locked in its gate of thorns.
Heart with its hands folded in its lap.
Heart a blue skiff parting the silk of the lake.
It does what it wants, takes what it needs, eats
when it’s hungry, sleeps when the soul shuts down.
Bored, it watches movies deep into the night,
stands by the window counting the streetlamps
squinting out one by one.
Heart with its hundred mouths open.
Heart with its hundred eyes closed.
Harmonica heart, heart of tinsel,
heart of cement, broken teeth, redwood fence.
Heart of bricks and boards, books stacked
in devoted rows, their dusty spines
unreadable. Heart
with its hands full.
Hieroglyph heart, etched deep with history’s lists,
things to do. Near-sighted heart. Club-footed heart.
Hard-headed heart. Heart of gold, coal.
Bad juju heart, singing the low down blues.
Choir boy heart. Heart in a frumpy robe.
Heart with its feet up reading the scores.
Homeless heart, dozing, its back against the Dumpster.
Cop-on-the-beat heart with its black billy club,
banging on the lid.

(Dorianne Laux [source])

Over at whiskey river a few days ago, I found this brief account of one such flywheel:

As in nature, the soul and the spirit have resources that are astonishing. Like wolves and other creatures, the soul and spirit are able to thrive on very little, and sometimes for a long time on nothing. To me, it is the miracle of miracles that this is so.

(Clarissa Pinkola Estés [source])

Like an Animal Crossing a Highway

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[Image: “Double exposures: Sunset & Night,” by Pawel Jusyn; found it on Flickr, and use it here, with gratitude, under a Creative Commons license.]

The Missus and I have embarked on a months-long road trip around the US. It’s an odd feeling not to be (as they say) “moving someplace else”; we have no “home” to come home to. We’ll just have to see where each succeeding horizon takes us.

Meanwhile…

#98: There’s never enough time — for doing the things you want to do or for having done them, let alone for remembering them afterwards. No one has ever lived that long, no one ever will. And yet, people do die contented — always have, always will.

How to explain this seeming contradiction?

Easy: the ones who die with something of a smile on their faces have acquired the gift of drawing pleasure from whatever experiences have been in front of them. Note that “in front of them” doesn’t mean physically, right there and then — it simply points to what they’re sensing, one way or another, at any given moment.

We know the dangers of confusing memories of events with the events themselves, and have often discussed in these pages such dangers. But the eyes, too, can be fooled. We can misunderstand sounds; confuse one spoken word for another; suffer from the pings, whistles, cracks and rattles of tinnitus. And the blind men and the elephant — they’re us, grasping at things and confabulating explanations for them from faulty premises. We excuse all of these sensory mistakes, one way or another. Yet for some reason the sensing of the past — the sensing which we call memory — is scorned for its imperfection. I think those smilers at the moment of death know better than the rest of us just how precious their world is, when handled with love by whatever senses, including nostalgia, they can command.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)

Loved the below from whiskey river over the last week — much of it chiming in resonance with things going on in my (our) life right now:

Choosing to Think of It

Today, ten thousand people will die
and their small replacements will bring joy
and this will make sense to someone
removed from any sense of loss.
I, too, will die a little and carry on,
doing some paperwork, driving myself
home. The sky is simply overcast,
nothing is any less than it was
yesterday or the day before. In short,
there’s no reason or every reason
why I’m choosing to think of this now.
The short-lived holiness
true lovers know, making them unaccountable
except to spirit and themselves – suddenly
I want to be that insufferable and selfish,
that sharpened and tuned.
I’m going to think of what it means
to be an animal crossing a highway,
to be a human without a useful prayer
setting off on one of those journeys
we humans take. I don’t expect anything
to change. I just want to be filled up
a little more with what exists,
tipped toward the laughter which understands
I’m nothing and all there is.
By evening, the promised storm
will arrive. A few in small boats
will be taken by surprise.
There will be survivors, and even they will die.

(Stephen Dunn [source… and I don’t mind at all that I also used in a post about two-and-a-half years ago])

Smitten: Summer

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[Image: “Let Me Rest, Human,” by John Brighenti. (Found on Flickr, naturally, and used here under a Creative Commons license — thank you very much!) Depending on your point of view and willingness to suspend disbelief, the squirrel may seem either (a) stupefied by the colossal heat of a summer day, or (b) distracted to the point of immobility by some thunderous emotion. Knowing that the photo was taken in midsummer 2020 doesn’t make choosing the point of view easier.]

Summer in Manhattan, circa 1949:

It is seven o’clock and I re-examine an ex-speakeasy in East 53rd Street, with dinner in mind. A thin crowd, a summer-night buzz of fans interrupted by an occasional drink being shaken at the small bar. It is dark in here (the proprietor sees no reason for boosting his light bill just because liquor laws have changed). How dark, how pleasing; and how miraculously beautiful the murals showing Italian lake scenes—probably executed by a cousin of the owner. The owner himself mixes. The fans intone the prayer for cool salva­tion. From the next booth drifts the conversation of radio executives; from the green salad comes the little taste of garlic. Behind me a young intellectual is trying to persuade a girl to come live with him and be his love. She has her guard up, but he is extremely reasonable, careful not to overplay his hand. A combination of intellectual companionship and sexuality is what they have to offer each other, he feels. In the mirror over the bar I can see the ritual of the second drink. Then he has to go to the men’s room and she has to go to the ladies’ room, and when they return, the argument has lost its tone. And the fan takes over again, and the heat and the relaxed air and the memory of so many good little dinners in so many good little illegal places, with the theme of love, the sound of ventilation, the brief medicinal illusion of gin.

Another hot night I stop off at the Goldman Band concert in the Mall in Central Park. The people seated on the benches fanned out in front of the band shell are attentive, appreciative. In the trees the night wind stirs, bring­ing the leaves to life, endowing them with speech; the electric lights illuminate the green branches from the underside, translating them into a new lan­guage. Overhead a plane passes dreamily, its running lights winking. On the bench directly in front of me, a boy sits with his arm around his girl; they are proud of each other and are swathed in music. The cornetist steps forward for a solo, begins, “Drink to me only with thine eyes…” In the wide, warm night the horn is startlingly pure and magical. Then from the North River another horn solo begins—the Queen Mary announcing her intentions. She is not on key; she is a half tone off. The trumpeter in the bandstand never flinches. The horns quarrel savagely, but no one minds having the intimation of travel injected into the pledge of love. “I leave,” sobs Mary. “And I will pledge with mine,” sighs the trumpeter. Along the asphalt paths strollers pass to and fro; they behave considerately, respecting the musical atmosphere. Popsicles are moving well. In the warm grass beyond the fence, forms wriggle in the shadows, and the skirts of the girls approaching on the Mall are bal­looned by the breeze, and their bare shoulders catch the lamplight. “Drink to me only with thine eyes.” It is a magical occasion, and it’s all free.

(E.B. White [source])

But as whiskey river reminds us, many summers elsewhere, elsewhen, provide glimpses of such magic:

Later in Life
(excerpt)

I step out and suddenly notice this: Summer arrives, has arrived, is arriving. Birds grow
less than leaves although they cheep, dip, arc, a call across the tall fence from an invisible neighbor to his child is heard
right down to the secret mood and the child also hears. One hears in the silence that follows the great
desire for approval
and love
which summer holds aloft, all damp leeched from it like a thing floating out on a frail but
perfect twig end. Light seeming to darken in it yet
glow. Please, it says, but not with the eager need of
spring! Come what may, says summer. Smack in the middle I will stand and breathe.
The
future is a super fluidity I do not
taste, no, there is no numbering
here, it is a gorgeous swelling, no emotion, as in this love is no emotions, no, also no
memory—we have it all, now, & all
there ever was is
us, now.

(Jorie Graham [source])

Potpourri: June 18 (2021 Edition)

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Age: 6(ish)

[The latest installment in my sorta-kinda imperfectly-annual series of whatever-the-hell-I-want posts on this month and day.]

Things have been so nuts these last few months, especially in the last couple weeks, that I can’t remember what, if anything, I’ve said about The Next Phase of life — of retirement, generally. So apologies in advance if any of this is not new-new to you…

In short, we’re going homeless — by design — for a few months. Since we had to bag the Europe tour in 2020, and we couldn’t of course anticipate whether “things” would have opened up over there by this year, we decided we’d head out on a road trip across the US. Nominally, it’s a US National Parks road trip — The Missus has visited only a single National Park/Monument of which she has a record, and I’ve visited none.

But the parks etc. provide just the general shape of the itinerary. Really, neither of us has ever seen much of the country. So we’re hoping to correct that, between now and whenever we call it quits, sometime in the first half of 2022.

We’ll just have to wait and see what comes next.

Laurie Anderson is one of those musicians of whom I can genuinely say: I wish I liked her work as much as I admire it. It’s never struck me as music to “like” anyhow, I guess. We’re not meant to, y’know, dance to it, and “a Laurie Anderson” earworm seems, by design, a contradiction in terms. But since I first saw this performance a few weeks ago I’ve kept going back to rewatch it. Maybe that’s what I should’ve been doing all along… The occasion seems to have been a re-release, on its near-40th anniversary, of her Big Science album. For more, see this writeup at the Nonesuch Music site — and, of course, the video itself:

(A comment at the YouTube site says, “I randomly throw in the line ‘He may have been a hat check clerk at an ice rink’ in conversation, and while nobody ever knows what I am talking about, it makes me happy.” This anecdote, including the quotation from the opening of “Let x=x,” may represent the perfect starting point in trying to grok whatever Anderson is up to: when you’re in the music garage with her, understanding is the one tool you should leave hanging on the pegboard.)

The tradition of particularly celebrating so-called milestone birthdays in multiples of 10 may not be “silly,” exactly. I know why it’s done — we count naturally on our fingers, right? But on average, little about someone’s life at age 30 differs from their life at 31, or 29. (In fact, if you think about it, the distribution of actual milestones throughout a lifetime probably has something of a Schrödinger quality to it an event becomes a milestone, forever etched in your head, only after the fact — when observed in retrospect — such that Milestone A occurred [whenever]; B, nine years later; C, three years; D, six; E, four; and so on.)

All of which said, yes, my 2021 birthday would, traditionally, be regarded as a milestone birthday: the one sometimes described as “the allotted three-score and ten.” That word “allotted” unsettles a bit, yes? Not only does it imply the presence of some outside authority, parceling out lifespans by divine choice; it also implies that whatever one has done and experienced to that point, whatever comes next is just gravy — disposable, so we need to just accept it and move on, preferably soon.

In this context, I recently encountered and here offer to you this passage in Thomas Moore’s A Religion of One’s Own:

On my first trip to Italy I asked some friends to take me to the Villa Medici in Careggi, just outside Florence. The villa was then part of a medical center and had been preserved and maintained, especially the beautiful gardens that, though modified in the nineteenth century, showed off the spirit of the Renaissance. Walking through the exotic plants and trees, I came upon an extraordinary sculpture… It is an image of an old man with a child’s body and bird claws for feet, sitting on an owl…

The lesson I take from the mysterious image in the garden is to realize how important it is to deal with life’s mysteriousness, using your imagination and intuition, prepared for paradoxes and surprises, able to appreciate how intricate the path toward fulfillment can be. It isn’t enough to be reasonable, to follow the crowd, to do what is expected, and to be normal and adjusted. We have to be like that figure in the garden: old and young, feeble and birdlike, infantile and wise.

I haven’t been able to find a decent photo of the sculpture in question which I can use here… except for one, frustratingly taken from behind, at the site of the V&A museum. It’s apparently a statue of Aesop. For me, this makes Moore’s determination to draw a lesson from the statue a bit more on point, maybe a bit less like nagging.

Old, young; feeble, birdlike; infantile, wise… Like the passage of milestone birthdays, I think the adjective “wise” is one which can be applied usefully only in retrospect, and ideally never by oneself. But I’ll accept the other descriptors for now, with the hope of repeating the status report in a “Potpourri” post on June 18, 2022.

Your World Among Many, Many Worlds Within Yours

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

Consider:

Emerald Spider Between Rose Thorns

Imagine, not even or really ever tasting
a peach until well over 50, not once
sympathizing with Blake naked in his garden
insisting on angels until getting off the table
and coming home with my new heart. How absurd
to still have a body in this rainbow-gored,
crickety world and how ridiculous to be given one
in the first place, to be an object
like an orchid is an object, or a stone,
so bruisable and plummeting, arms
waving from the evening-ignited lake,
heading singing in the furnace feral and sweet,
tears that make the face grotesque,
tears that make it pure. How easy
it is now to get drunk on a single whiff
like a hummingbird or ant, on the laughter
of one woman and who knew how much I’d miss
that inner light of snow now that I’m in Texas.

(Dean Young [source])

…and:

There Is Another Way

There is another way to enter an apple:
a worm’s way.
The small, round door
closes behind her. The world
and all its necessities
ripen around her like a room.

In the sweet marrow of a bone,
the maggot does not remember
the wingspread
of the mother, the green
shine of her body, nor even
the last breath of the dying deer.

I, too, have forgotten
how I came here, breathing
this sweet wind, drinking rain,
encased by the limits
of what I can imagine
and by a husk of stars.

(Pat Schneider [source])

….all of which flowed just from having brushed up, lightly, against this (courtesy of whiskey river):

Who do you think you are? Imagine there’s a version of you that sees all of it. A version that knows when versions are messing with the other ones, trying to get things off track, trying to erase things. A record of all the keystrokes, the storage of all the versions, partial and deleted and written over. All the changes. All truths about all parts of our self. We break ourselves up into parts. To lie to ourselves, to hide things from ourselves. You are not you. You are not what you think you are. You are bigger than you think. More complicated than you think. You are the only version of you that is you. There are less of you than you think, and more. There are a million versions of you, half a trillion. One for every particle, every quantum coin flip. Imagine this uncountable number of yous. You don’t always have your own best interests at heart. That’s true. You are your own best friend and your own worst enemy. You can’t trust a guy who gives you a book and says, This is your life. He might have been your future, he might not. Only you know how you get there. Only you know what you need to do. Imagine there is a perfect version of you. Out of all the oceans of oceans of you, there is exactly one who is perfectly you. And that’s me. And I’m telling you: you are the only you.

(Charles Yu [source])

__________

P.S.Traditionally on this day, I add an entry to my Potpourri series. I hope one will make an appearance later today… but it might get bumped to tomorrow. Who knows? In the series’ Oh, whatever the hell I want spirit, maybe I’ll post it anytime in the next several days… and just back-date it to today. *mad, evil laughter*

Suddenly Practical Alchemy

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[Image: “Learning to Fly,” by the master photo manipulator known as “endegor,” on DeviantArt.]

The phenomenon of twinning, at root, just represents an extreme on the continuum of otherness. Like the kids’ song says, “One of these things is not like the other / One of these things is not the same.” Even when we perceive two things as indistinguishable, even microscopically, we know they are not the same: they do not colocate; they do not coincide; one stands here/now and the other, elsewhere/elsewhen. Yin and yang. Prince and pauper. Alpha and omega, fore and aft, surface and edge…

Twinning, of one kind or another, seems lately to have become the trope in popular fiction. The recent TV series Counterpart, for example, posits a world which an East German scientist had split in two in 1987, just to see how the two worlds evolved differently. A single underground passage links the two; and over time — although existing, essentially, in two separate universes — the worlds have established diplomatic relations. Furthermore each often sends spies through the passage to gather intelligence available only to their (heh) counterparts in the other.

(You are forgiven if all that reminds you a lot of China Miéville’s novel The City & The City, from 2009 — or in some respects of the Borges short story, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” Of the latter, Wikipedia says: “Much of the story engages with the philosophical idealism of George Berkeley, who questioned whether it is possible to say that a thing exists if it is not being perceived.”)

Anyhow, courtesy of whiskey river last week, I came across this poem:

The Half-Finished Heaven

Despondency breaks off its course.
Anguish breaks off its course.
The vulture breaks off its flight.

The eager light streams out,
even the ghosts take a draught.

And our paintings see daylight,
our red beasts of the ice-age studios.

Everything begins to look around.
We walk in the sun in hundreds.

Each man is a half-open door
leading to a room for everyone.

The endless ground under us.

The water is shining among the trees.

The lake is a window into the earth.

(Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Robin Fulton [source])

Which leads me to…

[Read more…]

Living in Caves, or in New Jersey?

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[Video: Florence + The Machine, “Shake It Out.” Lyrics here and, of course, elsewhere.]

Among the gems rolling around the streambed in the gentle currents over at whiskey river during the last week, these lines from Joy Harjo’s poem “Remember” especially jumped out at me:

Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.

It’s a liberating thought: that shorn of our skins, or perhaps blessed with transparent ones, we’d be shorn of our “races,” unable to form the instant “Oh, I see: Thou art That!” snap judgments which (yes) color our everyday interaction with strangers — speaking especially, of course, of “races” other than our own.

I’m not naïve enough to think we’d be free of all stereotypes and prejudices — our bigotry is instinctive, a product not just of prehistoric survival in a Darwinian world but of our perceptions, which depend on observing differences among classes of, well, things. A wall is not the same “thing” as the artwork hanging on it. But we enthusiastically proclaim our love of the nuances of Musical Genre X while sneering at the subtly different nuances of Genre Y. My favorite along these lines is the argument which goes, more or less: I’m not as prejudiced as you are! (a) I’m open-minded, but (b) you are a flaming ignoramus, an unknowing prisoner of your cultural reality, and (c) I’ll never believe otherwise! Of course, speaking for myself, I have nothing but contempt for people who so argue *cough*.

I remember the intellectual bliss of learning in 2003 that the Human Genome Project had successfully completed its task, of determining the precise location of all human genes along their respective chromosomes — two years ahead of schedule, even. And it really was a marvel of scientific observation, practice, and cooperation. The catch: I didn’t really know what “mapping” the “genome sequence” meant. It did not mean, especially, that we knew (or know, even now) what every one of those genes does, let alone in combination with other genes. From the National Institute of Health’s Human Genome Research Institute:

A genome is an organism’s complete set of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), a chemical compound that contains the genetic instructions needed to develop and direct the activities of every organism. DNA molecules are made of two twisting, paired strands…

The human genome contains approximately 3 billion of these base pairs, which reside in the 23 pairs of chromosomes within the nucleus of all our cells. Each chromosome contains hundreds to thousands of genes, which carry the instructions for making proteins. Each of the estimated 30,000 genes in the human genome makes an average of three proteins.

…and, a bit later on the same page:

Sequencing means determining the exact order of the base pairs in a segment of DNA. Human chromosomes range in size from about 50,000,000 to 300,000,000 base pairs. Because the bases exist as pairs, and the identity of one of the bases in the pair determines the other member of the pair, scientists do not have to report both bases of the pair.

The numbers in those passages simply overwhelm the flailing of my own meager genetic predilection, such as it is, for solving mathematical puzzles. But in general, they explain why we hear announcements, seemingly monthly, that a “gene” for some characteristic has been isolated or discovered. (I suspect those announcements will continue for a looong time.) Somewhere out there, I’m certain, someone longs for the identification of a “skin-color gene” — or even better, a gene specifically for Color A, B, or C. Because once we have that, we think, we could make everyone have the same skin color! Far more ambitious and worthy a goal, it seems, might be to identify a “prejudice gene”: the switch that gets flipped such that we pump culturally acquired stimuli from our five senses into our lizard brains — ensuring we not only observe differences between groups of people, but also react emotionally to them. That’s a gene I’d happily dispense with!

Here’s Harjo’s poem in full (with gratitude, again, to whiskey river):

Remember

Remember the sky that you were born under,
know each of the star’s stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is.
Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother’s, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life, also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the
origin of this universe.
Remember you are all people and all people
are you.
Remember you are this universe and this
universe is you.
Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember language comes from this.
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Remember.

(Joy Harjo [source])

_______

Note: The title of this week’s post alludes to a passage from Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth. One of the characters, a hilariously cynical (but not too cynical) maid named Sabina, makes periodic biting observations about the play, through the fourth wall. Like so:

I can’t invent any words for this play, and I’m glad I can’t. I hate this play and every word in it.

As for me, I don’t understand a single word of it, anyway,—all about the troubles the human race has gone through, there’s a subject for you.

Besides, the author hasn’t made up his silly mind as to whether we’re all living back in caves or in New Jersey today, and that’s the way it is all the way through.

I’ve never seen a production of the play, only read the script — when I was 18 or 19 years old, the first time — but have always loved it.

This String of Pearls We Call “Moments”

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[Video: unsurprisingly, YouTube’s got many videos set to this song — even to this exact version. I’m not sure why the person who posted this one decided to illustrate it with a black-and-white montage of Hollywood actresses, not all of them contemporaneous with the recording; I assume the idea was to present them strung together, like a metaphorical… well, you get the idea. For more on the song, though, see the note at the foot of this post.]

A few days ago, the always reliable whiskey river floated this poem ([source]) from Czeslaw Milosz our way:

Gift

A day so happy.
Fog lifted early. I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over the honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw blue sea and sails.

Diane Ackerman ([source]) muses on moments like Milosz’s, thus:

The brain is a gifted illusionist. Here’s one of its best tricks: I seem to perceive the winter woods today in lavish detail, because whatever I pay attention to looms, furiously present, and saturates my awareness. An ice storm has turned a Japanese maple into a glass figurine. As I caress it with my eyes, the rest of the scene blurs, unless I shift my focus to something else, when that leaps into view—a female cardinal with taupe breast feathers and beak orange as candy corn sitting atop a starry fence. I don’t feel like I’m looking through a periscope, but glancing outside at nature in the round. A subtle sense of all that’s lurking in the rest of the scene lulls me into thinking I’m seeing the yard in a single eye-gulp.

That “single eye-gulp” may not entirely, or even remotely fairly represent the world actually seen. It does, though, speak to the heart as much as — more than — all the details considered serially.

(Helen and Glenn Miller, 1936; note the string of pearls around Mrs. Miller’s neck)

About “A String of Pearls”:

The best single source of information about the 1941 song I found while preparing today’s post is an informal research report (from 2017) by one Dennis M. Spragg. Among much else about the composer, Glenn Miller, the song’s chart history, and so on, it provided me with the photo at right. (I found it nowhere else.)

In many ways the song is unremarkable; as one source said, it’s effectively a melody without a melody… which is nonetheless instantly recognizable. The Miller orchestra’s original arrangement, however, does include one (heh) pearl of genius: the cornet solo, a bit more than thirty seconds long, plopped into the middle.

That solo was the work of Bobby Hackett, a talented multi-instrumentalist (guitar, cornet, etc.), who’d joined Miller’s Big Band a few months before they recorded the song. When he was let loose in November 1941 to improvise in “A String of Pearls,” Miller reportedly so appreciated the result that he asked Hackett if he could play it again, exactly that way, in all future performances and recordings; Hackett replied something like, “Uh, yeah, I think so…” Thus do inspired, one-of-a-kind phenomena become note-for-note rote icons!

One more note: until reading up about the song over the last few days, I didn’t know that it had ever had lyrics — was, y’know, actually singable. A bit forced, maybe, given the music’s relentless dah, dah, DAH-dah-dah rhythm, but the lyricist did what he could with it. Here are the first couple of verses:

Ba-by, here’s a five-and-dime
Ba-by, now’s about the time
For a string of pearls à la Woolworth

Every pearl’s a star above
Wrapped in dreams, and filled with love
That old string of pearls à la Woolworth

The rational, word-parsing mind (mine, anyhow) resists lyrics which hammer at it, especially with a dumb claim like “These pearls from an old discount chain store are magical and quite valuable.” It doesn’t help when said lyrics cram the claim into a narrow meter, syllables bulging through he seams. Oddly, though, once I slowed down and drew a breath — temporarily pulling back from tongue-clucking semantic aggression — the words seemed shaped for today’s theme after all. On balance, I’m happy to have met them.

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