Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

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])

Stumbling, Surely; Blind, Maybe… But Wildly Free, by the Gods!

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[Image: untitled painting by Lino António (1923). I found this on Flickr, without really looking for it (or, really, anything like it), but it felt particularly well suited for a post wrapping up with Diane Ackerman’s poem “Bluenoses,” below.]

whiskey river reminded us recently:

It is a strange and wonderful fact to be here, walking around in a body, to have a whole world within you and a world at your fingertips outside you. It is an immense privilege, and it is incredible that humans manage to forget the miracle of being here. Rilke said, “being here is so much,” and it is uncanny how social reality can deaden and numb us so that the mystical wonder of our lives goes totally unnoticed. We are here. We are wildly and dangerously free.

(John O’Donohue [source])

…which was something of a relief to read, coming as it did on the heels of this more emotionally tricky thought from a couple days earlier:

You will see it coming. Not you actually because you don’t see for yourself yet, everyone is busy seeing for you, days filled with unsolicited advice you don’t take and trite warnings you can’t hear and the whitewashing of all your excitement. Yes, they definitely saw it coming, exactly the way it came.

When you’re older you will know that at some unconscious level not only did you see it coming, but you created it, in your own blind, stumbling way. You will console yourself with the fact that it wouldn’t have mattered, seeing it or not seeing it. You were a sponge for incident. Maybe everyone is when they’re young. They don’t remember, nobody remembers what it feels like to be so recklessly absorbent.

When you can’t see in front of you life is nothing but surprises. Looking back, there were truly so few of them.

(Stephanie Danler [source])

…which drew me back to this — not from whiskey river of course — from years ago (when, of course, I was too busy doing something I thought of as “living” to be in fact alive):

Dreaming, we become the earth’s dream.

It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery. However, many of life’s large, captivating principles and small, captivating details we may explore, unpuzzle, and learn by heart, there will still be vast unknown realms to lure us. If uncertainty is the essence of romance, there will always be enough uncertainty to make life sizzle and renew our sense of wonder. It bothers some people that no matter how passionately they may delve, the universe remains inscrutable. “For my part,” Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote, “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one’s curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb, aboard, and gallop over the thick, sun-struck hills every day. Where there is no risk, the emotional terrain is flat and unyielding, and, despite all its dimensions, valleys, pinnacles, and detours, life will seem to have none of its magnificent geography, only a length. It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.

(Diane Ackerman [source])

…which, in turn, made me wonder how Ackerman might regard the same “savage and beautiful country” decades later. I turned to an anthology of her poems, published in 2011:

Bluestockings

Oh lovely girl, once a mischief hound with me
when we twentied through school
as boy-brained, romping word-flingers
who gabbed the telephone wires thin,
studied, craved, shared revelations,
and wrote colorful wind-sprints for poems.

What a pang to see you, decades later,
over nouvelle pizza and cappuccino,
—a beautifully suited, associate dean
at a large rambunctious university,
where you hold the entrails of academics
in perfectly manicured hands.

Married long, mother of two teenage girls
(How did you raise daughters?
We could barely raise ourselves),
you’re a distinguished folklorist with a penchant
for fascinating, perfectly researched “smut”
(so the mischief remains!).

As we talk like old friends no longer intimate,
laughing, nostalgic, visibly older,
and our eyes ransack the other’s face,
reading lines etched by unshared dramas,
I keep slipping off the rind of the present,
through mind mirage, deep into the theaters of memory.

I see you perfectly then: a young woman
in her padded cell on the ledge of the galaxy,
wide-eyed, foul-mouthed, vision’s pupil,
shooting the rapids on an optic nerve;
my wicker self, but in a pink corduroy smock,
analytical and macabre, not yet disabused;

growing bone-tough, and agile as a lizard’s tongue,
immune to fear’s teeth in desire’s throat
draining new loves starch white as old wounds;
eager to pin back the ribs of the world;
seductive as a cipher, and nobody’s victim.

But the passing years, the disobedience of distance!
I cheer your victories, wish on your wishes.
Heart’s tinder crackles in my words.
You manage to keep a little something in reserve.
We are the same and not the same,
uniquely other, but with pages of shared history.
Like grown sisters, we were young together.

Now accomplished and admirable,
we greet in public clothes, accept invented selves,
mix goodwill with the genteel respect
we save for distinguished strangers,
as we talk ideas, mothers, jobs, old cronies,
avoid the minefield of marriage,
romp a bit, indulge in the cozy pastime
of whatever happened to that scallywag so-and-so.

When you’ve gone, I dream of flame pots
set out on a moonless runway in darkest Arabia,
and a pilot me piecing together a way home
between the treachery of fog and mountains,
searching down through darkness
for streaks of familiar, precious landmarks
leading to where we might have been.

(Ackerman [source])

As for me, well, you probably don’t really want to know how tangled are my thoughts on all of this… A question on Quora recently asked something like: “What’s the one thing you wish you could do to reset your life?” I started to offer my own answer; after it had ballooned to a couple thousand words, I realized the answer’s bottom line, really, was Nothing I could have done then would have made it better, and might have made it worse… and deleted it all. As you probably know, I’m fond of looking backwards — but the practice doesn’t always reward!

When the Not-World Is Too Little With Us

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[Image: “Tales from the Loop,” by Thorsten Bonsch; found on Flicker, using it here under a Creative Commons license — thank you! The photographer explains the title: “‘Tales from the Loop’ is a series of illustrations and short stories by Swedish artist Simon Stalenhag about fictional 1980s in which robots and magnetrine (antigrav) ships exist. The Loop is a particle accelerator close to the city, where strange things happen… I love his art, his books and together with some friends, we enjoy the ‘Tales from the Loop’ RPG.” He also refers to the Amazon Prime streaming TV series by the same name.]

Those of you who’ve been stopping by RAMH regularly over the years may be wondering about the USA road trip The Missus and I had been talking about so much (and I, occasionally mentioning here). The bottom line:

  • We moved out of our apartment in North Florida as scheduled, put into storage all we wouldn’t need for the next six months, and set out in our 2016 Honda CR-V.
  • After completely leaving Florida at the end of July, we stopped briefly in Savanna, GA, and Charleston, SC.
  • In North Carolina, we stayed in Airbnbs in a couple of towns we might consider as “retirement destinations,” post-trip.
  • Stopped for a night in NJ to visit The Brother and Sister-in-Law.
  • Spent a couple nights in Salem, MA, three in Bar Harbor, ME, two in Lincoln, NH, and four (!) in Saratoga Springs, NY.
  • At the moment, we’re still in upstate New York for a few more nights, then off to central Vermont for what we hope will be a quiet, restful, full week stay in an Airbnb.

I’m leaving out a lot of stuff that completely whacked out our schedule and caused us to gallop through or past things we’d imagined to be “destinations”: a so-called “breakthrough” case of COVID-19 while still in Florida; two hurricanes (Elsa in Florida, Henri in New England); a collision which totaled our car (no injuries, thank the gods) and required the purchase of a replacement, ASAP; the temporary loss of a really nice digital camera (well, it was a permanent loss — electronics damaged in the car crash — but again, managed to be replaced, just yesterday, thanks to the wonders of Internet shopping and overnight delivery); a hearing aid put out of commission thanks to an inadvertent bath in a sinkful of water; …and I know I’m omitting a lot but trust me: the world has been just a bit too much with us since we’ve been out in it.

So I read this over at whiskey river a few days ago and was reminded of the balm which certain kinds of fantasy provides:

Children understand that Once upon a time refers not only—not even primarily—to the past, but to the impalpable regions of the present, the deeper places inside us where princes and dragons, wizards and talking birds, impassable roads, impossible tasks, and happy endings have always existed, alive and bursting with psychic power.

(Stephen Mitchell [source])

…and that (as often happens after I’ve visited whiskey river) inspired a memory of something somebody else once said about holding reality at bay, if just for a while — this, from Albert Einstein, in a 1929 interview published in the Saturday Evening Post:

[Einstein:] I believe in intuitions and inspirations. I sometimes feel that I am right. I do not know that I am. When two expeditions of scientists, financed by the Royal Academy, went forth to test my theory of relativity, I was convinced that their conclusions would tally with my hypothesis. I was not surprised when the eclipse of May 29, 1919, confirmed my intuitions. I would have been surprised if I had been wrong.

[Interviewer:] Then you trust more to your imagination than to your knowledge?

[Einstein:] I am enough of the artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

(George Sylvester Viereck [source])

Child as Child, Child as Adult, Adult as Child

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One of whiskey river‘s gems over the past week was Stephen Dunn’s poem, “Our Parents” [source]. Its last stanza reads, in part:

We try to say what happened in that first house
where we were, like most children, the only
needy people on earth. We remember
what we were forbidden, who got the biggest slice.
Our parents, meanwhile, must have wanted something
back from us…

Almost inevitably, this put me in mind of Peter Handke’s “Song of Childhood.” I’ve featured this a couple of times before here at RAMH; it forms the basis of the opening voiceover monologue of Wim Wenders’s 1987 film Wings of Desire, like so (in part):

When the child was a child
It walked with its arms swinging,
wanted the brook to be a river,
the river to be a torrent,
and this puddle to be the sea.

When the child was a child,
it didn’t know that it was a child,
everything was soulful,
and all souls were one…

(Hence, of course, the video at the top of this post. I’ve never included a clip from the film’s opening before — mostly because all such videos seemed to be taken down regularly. This one, though, has been up since 2015, so maybe…?)

Of my two earlier references to the poem, I much prefer the “indirect” one, from 2011; it’s not particularly philosophical, but it is a bit more, y’know, written… thanks to the cue of Handke’s refrain. (It’s a post about the music imprinted in me by the mass media of the 1950s — e.g., “When The Boy was a boy, he imagined that each story, verse, and tune had been crafted just for him and for people like him, all within the last few years.”)

But then thinking about all this also brings to mind — yes — a maxim:

#19: As children, few of us were as innocent as we like to imagine. This lack of innocence continues to dog us into adulthood. (Surely one must doubt the hand of coincidence at work here.) What we call — what we imagine to be — “memory” does a nice job of smoothing the rough edges of our experience of youth. Unfortunately, no one has yet invented nostalgia for the present time. Maybe it’s time someone tried; at least then we could wind down our time on earth free of the burdens of conscious guilt.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)

The Time Is Ripe: Simply So

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[Image: “:: Equanimity in the City ::,” by user “Jazer” on DeviantArt. (The colons seem significant to the image title, for whatever reason.) The photographer doesn’t identify the setting or subject, exactly, stating in a comment only that it was”somewhere in the Central Business District of Singapore. We went late in the night about 11p.” The photo was shot in April, 2004 — long before RAMH was a gleam in my eye; who knows if this place still exists? or if Jazer himself does? (His last post to that site, at least under that name, was in late 2008/early 2009.]

From whiskey river (minus the first three stanzas):

Dying

Nothing to be said about it, and everything—
The change of changes, closer or further away:
The Golden Retriever next door, Gussie, is dead,

Like Sandy, the Cocker Spaniel from three doors down
Who died when I was small; and every day
Things that were in my memory fade and die.

Phrases die out: first, everyone forgets
What doornails are; then after certain decades
As a dead metaphor, “dead as a doornail” flickers

And fades away. But someone I know is dying—
And though one might say glibly, “everyone is,”
The different pace make the difference absolute.

The tiny invisible spores in the air we breathe,
That settle harmlessly on our drinking water
And on our skin, happen to come together

With certain conditions on the forest floor,
Or even a shady corner of the lawn—
And overnight the fleshy, pale stalks gather,

The colorless growth without a leaf or flower;
And around the stalks, the summer grass keeps growing
With steady pressure, like the insistent whiskers

That grow between shaves on a face, the nails
Growing and dying from the toes and fingers
At their own humble pace, oblivious

As the nerveless moths, that live their night or two—
Though like a moth a bright soul keeps on beating,
Bored and impatient in the monster’s mouth.

(Robert Pinsky [source])

I’ve had the next selection (which, of course, is not from whiskey river) sitting around waiting for an opportunity to post it. I think today is that opportunity:

Even if your house is flooded or burnt to the ground, whatever the danger that threatens it, let it concern only the house. If there’s a flood, don’t let it flood your mind. If there’s a fire, don’t let it burn your heart. Let it be merely the house, that which is external to you, that is flooded and burnt. Allow the mind to let go of its attachments. The time is ripe.

You’ve been alive a long time. Your eyes have seen any number of forms and colors, your ears have heard so many sounds, you’ve had any number of experiences. And that’s all they were — just experiences. You’ve eaten delicious foods, and all the good tastes were just good tastes, nothing more. The unpleasant tastes were just unpleasant tastes, that’s all. If the eye sees a beautiful form, that’s all it is, just a beautiful form. An ugly form is just an ugly form. The ear hears an entrancing, melodious sound and it’s nothing more than that. A grating, disharmonious sound is simply so.

The Buddha said that rich or poor, young or old, human or animal, no being in this world can maintain itself in any one state for long, everything experiences change and estrangement. This is a fact of life that we can do nothing to remedy. But the Buddha said that what we can do is to contemplate the body and mind so as to see their impersonality, see that neither of them is “me” or “mine.” They have a merely provisional reality. It’s like this house: it’s only nominally yours, you couldn’t take it with you anywhere. It’s the same with your wealth, your possessions and your family — they’re all yours only in name, they don’t really belong to you, they belong to nature. Now this truth doesn’t apply to you alone; everyone is in the same position, even the Lord Buddha and his enlightened disciples. They differed from us in only one respect and that was in their acceptance of the way things are; they saw that it could be no other way.

(Ajahn Chah [source])

I/Thou/We: A Surprised Affection

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[Image: “Selfie (at Altitude),” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) I don’t often post one of my photos here within a few days of doing so over at Instagram, but this one felt to me to fit easily into the context of this week’s readings, as a sort of visual counterpoint.]

Here’s one of whiskey river‘s offerings over the past week:

We are humanity, Kant says. Humanity needs us because we are it. Kant believes in duty and considers remaining alive a primary human duty. For him one is not permitted to “renounce his personality,” and while he states living as a duty, it also conveys a kind of freedom: we are not burdened with the obligation of judging whether our personality is worth maintaining, whether our life is worth living. Because living it is a duty, we are performing a good moral act just by persevering.

(Jennifer Michael Hecht [source])

In one of those rare, unironically happy coincidences with which social media sometimes blesses us, Facebook offered me a “Your Memories” item a few days ago — I’d shared it on the same day in 2017. Less coincidentally, probably, I’d also shared a chunk of it here at RAMH on the same day I posted it to Facebook (and a different chunk a couple years before that):

I came away from the [Tucson] zoo with something, a piece of news about myself: I am coded, somehow, for otters and beavers. I exhibit instinctive behavior in their presence, when they are displayed close at hand behind glass, simultaneously below water and at the surface. I have receptors· for this display. Beavers and otters possess a “releaser” for me, in the terminology of ethology, and the releasing was my experience. What was released? Behavior. What behavior? Standing, swiveling flabbergasted, feeling exultation and a rush of friendship. I could not, as the result of the transaction, tell you anything more about beavers and otters than you already know. I learned nothing new about them. Only about me, and I suspect also about you, maybe about human beings at large: We are endowed with genes which code out our reaction to beavers and otters, maybe our reaction to each other as well. We are stamped with stereotyped, unalterable patterns of response, ready to be released. And the behavior released in us, by such confrontations, is, essentially, a surprised affection. It is compulsory behavior and we can avoid it only by straining with the full power of our conscious minds, making up conscious excuses all the way. Left to ourselves, mechanistic and autonomic, we hanker for friends.

Everyone says, stay away from ants. They have no lessons for us; they are crazy little instruments, inhuman, incapable of controlling themselves, lacking manners, lacking souls. When they are massed together, all touching, exchanging bits of information held in their jaws like memoranda, they become a single animal. Look out for that. It is a debasement, a loss of individuality, a violation of human nature, an unnatural act.

Sometimes people argue this point of view seriously and with deep thought. Be individuals, solitary and selfish, is the message. Altruism, a jargon word for what used to be called love, is worse than weakness, it is sin, a violation of nature. Be separate. Do not be a social animal. But this is a hard argument to make convincingly when you have to depend on language to make it. You have to print up leaflets or publish books and get them bought and sent around, you have to turn up on television and catch the attention of millions of other human beings all at once, and then you have to say to all of them, all at once, all collected and paying attention: Be solitary; do not depend on each other. You can’t do this and keep a straight face.

Maybe altruism is our most primitive attribute, out of reach, beyond our control. Or perhaps it is immediately at hand, waiting to be released, disguised now, in our mind of civilization, as affection or friendship or attachment. I don’t see why it should be unreasonable for all human beings to have strands of DNA coiled up in chromosomes, coding out instincts for usefulness and helpfulness. Usefulness may turn out to be the hardest test of fitness for survival, more important than aggression, more effective, in the long run, than grabbiness.

(Lewis Thomas [source])

Addendum: Another social-media coincidence… For more on the interrelationships between humans and animals, see this Susan Orlean essay over at Medium. It made me wonder about how Thomas’s essay might have differed if he’d imagined the otters as food animals rather than objects of curiosity or entertainment.

Living, Dying, Making Connections, and Living With It All

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[Image: “Danse Macabre,” by Rodolfo Pace. Found on Flickr; using it here under a Creative Commons license (thank you!)

From whiskey river:

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?

(Richard Dawkins [source])

Although that passage (as whiskey river noted) was excerpted from Dawkins’ book, Unweaving the Rainbow, that wasn’t where the whiskey river blogger(s) encountered it. Instead, they apparently crossed paths with it at the estimable blog/newsletter called brain pickings.

Contemplating even a single brain pickings post at length can induce a sort of stupor — a mix of awe, secondhand exhaustion, mental overstimulation… It’s possible to subscribe to it, and certainly deserves any pennies you can spare, because it represents the work of a single person, Maria Popova — who also has a day job, and writes regularly for such “lightweight” media outlets as The New York Tmes, The Atlantic… I cannot imagine what her daily schedule must be. (On the other hand, she freely discusses her regimen when interviewed by those same publications. She makes it sound so inconsequentially casual and off-the-cuff that one must conclude: This young woman seriously needs to get her modesty engine in for an overhaul.)

At the core of her brain pickings work: a phrase which, she says, she picked up from elsewhere — combinatorial creativity. (Einstein used the phrase “combinatorial play” — an appealingly lightweight way of saying the same thing.) Her role, she says elsewhere, is that of an “interestingness curator… someone who digs out interesting cross-disciplinary content in a way that allows people to become interested in things they didn’t know they were interested in until they discovered them.”

Anyhow, an essential component of any brain pickings post is its, well, its assemblage — Popova concentrates on a single work by a single writer, painter, sculptor, but apparently she has not just a hard-working modesty machine but an automatic idea-magnetizer as well: she sticks works together from all over, all disciplines, multiple artists…

Consider: in the entry which cites the Dawkins passage, Popova also refers (at least glancingly) to a handful of earlier posts of hers, covering or mentioning in passing:

  • Jorge Luis Borges,
  • Milan Kundera,
  • “French novelist, poet, and philosophical pamphleteer Léon Bloy (July 11, 1846–November 3, 1917),”
  • the late Emily Levine (standup comic, public speaker, writer, actress, and a friend of Popova’s),
  • the poet Anna Belle Kaufman,
  • Marcus Aurelius,
  • Montaigne,
  • Charles Darwin,

…and so on and so forth — each a multi-branching rabbit hole of its own, generously illustrated with art and photography (much of it her own). Here’s one of those connected bits, from a post in September, 2012 — a bit crafted by a notoriously cranky sufferer of a cancer which would eventually kill him:

The notorious stage theory of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whereby one progresses from denial to rage through bargaining to depression and the eventual bliss of “acceptance,” hasn’t so far had much application to my case. In one way, I suppose, I have been “in denial” for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it’s all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me. Rage would be beside the point for the same reason. Instead, I am badly oppressed by the gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read — if not indeed to write — the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger? But I understand this sort of non-thinking for what it is: sentimentality and self-pity.

(Christopher Hitchens [source])

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.]

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