Running After My Hat

Smitten: Summer

June 25, 2021 by John Leave a Comment

[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)

June 18, 2021 by John 2 Comments

[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

June 18, 2021 by John Leave a Comment

[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

June 11, 2021 by John Leave a Comment

[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?

June 4, 2021 by John Leave a Comment

[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”

May 28, 2021 by John Leave a Comment

[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.

[back to top]

Everything Continuing in All Directions

May 21, 2021 by John Leave a Comment

[Image — more or less untitled — by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) It does in fact have a functional “title,” but not one I’m particularly fond of, nor chained to. Ideas?]

From whiskey river:

The Wonder Is
The washing never gets done.
The furnace never gets heated.
Books never get read.
Life is never completed.
Life is like a ball which one must continually
catch and hit so that it won’t fall.
When the fence is repaired at one end,
it collapses at the other. The roof leaks,
the kitchen door won’t close,there are cracks in the foundation,
the torn knees of children’s pants . . .
One can’t keep everything in mind. The wonder is
that beside all this one can notice
the spring which is so full of everything
continuing in all directions — into evening clouds,
into the redwing’s song and into every
drop of dew on every blade of grass in the meadow,
as far as the eye can see, into the dusk.

(Jaan Kaplinski [source (among others)])

Not from whiskey river:

#23: To appreciate post-apocalyptic fiction, we generally must imagine being among the survivors: the last person to eat a can of beans, say; the last to “own” a pet dog or cat; the last to consult — let alone to care about consulting — a wristwatch. In a world of uncontrolled entropy, we wonder, what must it feel like to defend (successfully or not) the ramparts of order and routine?
Here’s the mystery: any apocalypse — fictional or real, without a “post-” — marks only one point in the timeline. And of course we all know what a given midpoints feel like, in the moment. But what happened at the starting line?
What must it have felt like, say, as the very first person to perform some action that one was aware of performing? Not just the first to open a can of beans, but the first to remember something — something from even a moment ago, let alone from decades ago? What does it mean to “know” something at all, let alone to “remember” it later? When you type a sentence which begins with a capital “W,” do you “know” you’ve just struck that particular combination of keys? Do you “remember” having done so, a split-second or a minute afterwards? Did you ever know or remember it? And if so, did you fail to notice the miraculous first moment when that thing apparently happened on its own, without decision or reflection? Can you even imagine such a moment, as it must have felt when it popped and sparked in your ancestors’ ancestors’ ancestor’s head…?
Maybe living through and then, later, remembering complex experiences — phases of life, everyday (or, for that matter, uncommon) events, people and relationships we consider unforgettable — is like typing a sentence. It’s impossible not to notice a given first-time experience. (To experience something is to notice it, no?) But thereafter? Within the cavernous, routinely mined spaces of our souls, re-experiencing something we’ve lived through consists of just taking a scoop from the tailings piled off to the side, from an imagination-dump — a muddied or gloriously colored dump, as the case may be. But the outcome scarcely resembles anything we might call conscious or controlled… let alone (the gods know) true.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)

[Where’s the rest of this “Fridays at RAMH” post? See this note from a couple of days ago.]

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

May 19, 2021 by John 2 Comments

Thirteen years ago in July, I did the first of what (here at RAMH, anyhow) I categorized as a “whiskey river Friday” post. Back then, I imagined I’d be putting in several days’ worth of effort, every week, in making Running After My Hat a megaphone for cogent — albeit quirky — commentary about this, that, and the other thing, supported by dozens (if not hundreds) of loyal readers and commenters… In short, I imagined that blogging in general would go on like that, forever.

By 2011, I thought maybe I might be able, just possibly, to manage the trick. But “stuff” was happening in the wider world. By then, competitors to blogging (F*ceb**k et al.) had already established beachheads in the social-media battlefield, and various blogging friends had started to wander off, listless, distracted, and disheartened. Still, I’ve kept going after a fashion, especially with the weekly whiskey river Fridays series.

But that’s about to change.

Without going into details for now, by the end of June, 2021, The Missus and I will be here and there (hmm, maybe here or there, more precisely) around the continental US. Among the least of the disruptions to our routines: it will become almost impossible for me to prepare my Friday posts in the same manner I’ve always done them.

I do like doing them — particularly, I still love what whiskey river‘s anonymous presenter, er, presents, several times a week. So I’ll be continuing for the foreseeable future to post something in the manner of what I’ve been doing for thirteen years…

…starting this Friday, 21 May, 2021.

Thanks as ever to those of you who’ve continued to drop by!

________

P.S. “Don’t want to be a richer man / just gonna have to be a different man…!”

Go Through the Door, and Find (Bring) Your Magic

May 14, 2021 by John 4 Comments

[Image: untitled landscape by Ma Yuan (c. 1160-1225); spotted it here This is almost certainly not the painting referred to in the Alan Watts passage below; on the other hand, his “reference,” as though to a specific painting, was only glancing/ambiguous. So we can choose, right?]

From whiskey river:

I live in a world that is completely seamless between the two. Fantasy is the real story. The world in which we live is structured from notions that are completely fabricated; your clothes, your wallet, that we all agree that pieces of paper are worth something. Geography is a complete fabrication. Where does Mexico start and America end? From space, nowhere. We agree to kill each other, to tax each other, to shame each other from notions that are complete fabrications. To me, those are harmful fantasies. Whereas my fantasies are liberating.

(Guillermo Del Toro [source: nothing canonical])

…and:

The Farm When I Was Five
The most magic thing
was the pump in the backyard.
And a dipper to drink from.
For a long time the pump
was as tall as I was
and I used to make it do its magic
even when I wasn’t thirsty.
The sound of the water
coming up from a dark somewhere
was a hollow roaring noise
that broke suddenly loose
and splashed a crystalline miracle
on the darkening cement.
Grandma always said,
“Stop wasting the water!”
I didn’t waste it, Grandma.
There is this poem.

(Grace Butcher [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Where the Poems Come From Now That I Ride a Motorcycle
They don’t come from the sun
so much anymore—
or not from the sun alone
but from he glint of sun on chrome.
And not so much
from the dark roads
as from the unrolling
of the roads with a sound
like wind.
And sometimes now from
the way the quiet stars
blow back behind me
and I have no thought at all
till later.
I notice how everything is changing:
nothing comes from where it used to.
I make decisions at crossroads
I have never seen before.
So does the wind.
The directions we are heading
have not yet even been named.

(Grace Butcher [source])

…and:

We feel, from a Western standpoint, that haiku are unfinished. They are simply titles; first lines of something that could go on to elaborate and express everything. But in this kind of artistry, one leaves the best part unsaid, because the work of the poet is not to impress everybody with how clever he is, and leave them speechless, but to evoke something in the listener. In exactly the same way, the art of the painter–in the tradition of Sung Chinese painting–is to leave something to the beholder’s imagination; hence, there is what is called “one-corner painting.”
A painter like Mahiwon [i.e., Ma Yuan]–or Byon, as he is known in Japanese–is a master of one-corner painting. He indicates a line of hills somewhere near the top, and down at the bottom there is a single drifting boat and a fisherman. This is all there is. The path, as it were, comes to an end in the parsley. To understand this, you have to go back to childhood. Remember how as a child you loved to explore paths and get right down among the stalks of grasses and weeds, to see where it all goes? One of the eternal children’s stories is that you were one day walking along a little lane and discovered a door in a wall that you had never seen before. You opened it, and it led into a magical garden where all the bushes were covered in jewels, and there were marvelous birds and fantastic songs. And you came out because you had to get home in time for dinner, and the next day you looked for that door again but you couldn’t find it anywhere. You knew it was there–it was just between this fence and that fence. But today it isn’t there. And yet somehow it is always there.
So, for every child there is always a kind of funny place that leads to somewhere else, and you don’t figure out exactly where it leads because that would spoil it. You mustn’t know. And all this haiku poetry, and this kind of painting that the Sung artists so marvelously mastered, seeks to evoke that sense of what I would call possibility or potentiality, without actually filling in any details. And that is real magic.

(Alan Watts [source])

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Regarding Incongruity — Baffled, Maybe, But with Eyes Wide Open

May 7, 2021 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Now Hiring Parts,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) For some rumination about the photo, in the context of incongruities, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

Dear Friend
(excerpt)
I become each day more reckless,
too impatient for summer, the unbearable heat,
the calm that comes with it. There are no hills here,
not one, and I’m bored with the stillness
of the yellow field outside my window. And you,
who cannot keep still, who can never
look back, where will you go next?
How will I find you?
Can you feel the world pull
apart, the seams loosen?
What, tell me, will keep it whole,
if not you? if not me?
Send a postcard, picture, tell me
how you’ve been.

(Blas Falconer [source])

…and:

Now, as far as I was concerned, there are two ways of living, and because we’re on a ball in space these were more or less exactly poles apart. The first, accept the world as it is. The world is concrete and considerable, with beauties and flaws both, and both immense, profound and perplexing, and if you can take it as it is and for what it is you’ll all but guarantee an easier path, because it’s a given that acceptance is one of the keys to any kind of contentment. The second, that acceptance is surrender, that there’s a place for it, but that place is somewhere just before your last breath where you say All right then, I have tried and accept that you have lived and loved as best you could, have pushed against every wall, stood up after every disappointment, and until that last moment, you shouldn’t accept anything, you should make things better.

(Niall Williams [source])

—

Not from whiskey river:

Although nobody planned it that way, most of us wind up emerging from adolescence with a deeply nuanced sense of what is real, with shades of gray all over the place. (However, I have known, and probably you have too, reader, a few adults for whom every issue that strikes me as subtle seems to them to be totally black-and-white — no messy shades of gray at all to deal with. That must make life easy!) Actually, to suggest that for most of us life is filled with “shades of gray” is far too simple, because that phrase conjures up the image of a straightforward one-dimensional continuum with many degrees of grayness running between white and black, while in fact the story is much more multidimensional than that.
All of this is disturbing, because the word “real”, like so many words, seems to imply a sharp, clear-cut dichotomy. Surely it ought to be the case that some things simply are real while other things simply are not real. Surely there should be nothing that is partly real — that wouldn’t make sense! And yet, though we try very hard to force the world to match this ideal black-and-white dichotomy, things unfortunately get terribly blurry.

(Douglas R. Hofstadter [source])

…and:

The Festival of Almost Getting There
At the festival of almost getting there
Zeno pokes his head out halfway, asks
directions, half-heartedly, to the train,
admits he’s been riding on the tortoise,
been running after arrows to watch them
stand still. He understands course, path,
way, even relative position (dichotomize,
divide) but motion’s still a figment:
distance halved and halved (split infinity,
twin trajectory) the long, long way, and all
that longing (two-fold, doubled) (moments,
instants, continuous or discrete) for some
unfamiliar end—such unforgiving progress,
portioned, yes, bisected. A half-assed effort?
No, he’s as good as got it. So much struggle
and amends. Sure, we’re goddamned tired of
this much waiting, but look! He’s halfway there.

(Renée Ashley [source])

__________________________

About the photo: The caption to this entry in my #jesstorypix collection on Instagram: “In retrospect, the HR manager at the heavy-equipment retailer decided, the Spring 2021 recruitment campaign had been quite misguided. If only he’d known the psychiatrist residing next door was THE ‘Hannibal Lecter’…”

Most often, I think of puns as “verbal coincidences”: two meanings just happen to collide at an intersection shaped like a single unit of sound. But “getting” a pun also relies on choosing fun over common sense: not doing the possibly difficult work of choosing “rightly” or “wrongly,” but just lazily recognizing the existence of a choice at all: a choice between the superficial “meaning” of an arbitrary passage (word, phrase, sentence) and the, other, generally more interesting and, well, profound and true meaning. Asserting “I don’t get puns” means, in effect, “I recognize the alternatives, but why should I skip between them when I can simply walk?” But taking just such a sprightly and incongruous leap — from word to word, from concept to concept — is the whole point… not just of puns but of any jokes. No?

[Aside: as clever visitors will have noticed, the very first word in this post’s title is a bit of a pun (albeit not an especially sprightly one): (a) “regarding,” in jargon-speak for “concerning the matter of…”? or (b) “regarding,” literally looking at and taking the measure of?]

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