Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

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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

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[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

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[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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Living Life, Whole, Where You Find It

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Note: Apologies for the day-late appearance of this post.

[Image: places in New Jersey I visited — or wish I could have — over the last week. The gold stars indicate places where I worked at one time or another; the regular place markers, green and blue, are those spots where I (green) and/or others critically important to me (blue) live(d). I can’t promise I didn’t miss somebody!]

From whiskey river:

“Carpe diem” doesn’t mean seize the day—it means something gentler and more sensible. “Carpe diem” means pluck the day. Carpe, pluck. Seize the day would be “cape diem,” if my school Latin serves. No R. Very different piece of advice.

What Horace had in mind was that you should gently pull on the day’s stem, as if it were, say, a wildflower or an olive, holding it with all the practiced care of your thumb and the side of your finger, which knows how to not crush easily crushed things… Pluck the cranberry or blueberry of the day tenderly free without damaging it, is what Horace meant—pick the day, harvest the day, reap the day, mow the day, forage the day. Don’t freaking grab the day in your fist like a burger at a fairground and take a big chomping bite out of it.

(Nicholson Baker [source])

…and:

34.
(excerpt)

Sometimes you are privileged with a glimpse of the other world,
when the light shines up from the west as the sun sets and dazzles
something wet. The world is just water and light, a slide show
through which your spirit glides.

(Fanny Howe [source])

…and:

You’ll notice that I haven’t talked about love. Or about happiness. I’ve talked about becoming—or remaining—the person who can be happy, a lot of the time, without thinking that being happy is what it’s all about. It’s not. It’s about becoming the largest, most inclusive, most responsive person you can be.

(Susan Sontag [source])

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RAMH@13: Scrambling After the Damned Hat

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[Image: “Ballcap Tanoura,” by John E. Simpson. For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

I’m preparing to head out of town (actually, out of state) for a week, which feels quite momentous. Yes, The Missus and I took a much needed weeklong break in October. But this one feels riskier — more exposed, y’know? — because that trip was a driving trip, just the two of us, to a destination where we’d be around no one at all for all but a few hours, total. For this trip, I’ll be flying to the Northeast US, to visit with several family members. Still no large crowds, except in the three airports I’ll go through… but, well, you get the idea. The main point now: at this early moment in its composition, this is shaping up as an uncharacteristically brief annual meditation on the state of RAMH.

The very first of those annual meditations offered some basic statistics:

  • 365 days; 310 published posts; 1,295 (published) comments…
  • …or a little less than one post a day, and a little over four comments per post.

Let’s see the standings as of now:

  • 4,758 days; 1,610 published posts; 7,084 comments (of which I myself apparently posted over 2,600)…
  • …i.e., about one post every three days, and — still — a little over four comments per post.

It’ can be entertaining, remotely and intellectually, to consider what these statistics might “mean”: for instance, What’s the state of blogging in general, or of this blog’s “popularity” in particular? Why do I blog, and has that reason changed over time, and what does that say about my audience, such as it is? But after 13 years of so much radical change in the context — society and culture, technology, the pandemic — I’m afraid what such statistics “mean” boils down, for me, to approximately, well, nothing at all.

I sometimes get notices from one company or another, alerting me to how I can “leverage” my “platform” by paying more careful attention to SEO, or search-engine optimization. this would basically require me to really sit down and analyze things like how long did visitors remain at the site, what did they look at while here, where did they come here from, and where’d they go next. Or, of course, these companies would be happy to do the analysis for me, and make recommendations for how to improve it all. For a fee. DUH.

Here’s what I’m pretty sure I’ll think of RAMH as of the moment I click the Publish button for this post: First, I know it provides a much-needed rhythm to my week — especially now that I’m free of the metaphorical time clock of a day job, and especially since the COVID-19 (etc.) mess has continued to grind on. That I don’t blog on anywhere near a daily basis is a blessing in this regard: the habit helps me remember which day of the week I’ve awoken to (heh).

For my Friday posts, I’ve settled into a rhythm of three mornings’ activities: (1) reviewing and selecting from the past week’s whiskey river posts, and kind of grope around for a common “theme” among them; (2) locating — from among my own recent reading, or just by looking online for — whatever seems to “go with” the whiskey river theme; and (3) finding an image (usually), a video, or some other media item to head the whole post. Write the image’s caption. I do a bunch of related tasks (proofreading, assigning categories and tags, editing for length if necessary, maybe writing a brief “maxim for nostalgists,” etc. Finalize the title. Click “Publish.” Confirm the post’s automated sharing, as needed/desired, to other social media.

…and that’s all I put into RAMH, every week, for an average total of six to seven hours. Oh, some bits and bobs of blogging creep in — updating WordPress plugins, moderating occasional comments, that sort of thing. But I generally require a real “something in mind” to blog otherwise… usually, something which I’ve been thinking about for a while.

Which leads me to the two other ways I use RAMH — hence what it “means” to me — right now. Neither will surprise you if you’ve been a regular visitor.

  • Writing: I don’t write much here anymore, it’s true. But I also don’t write much of anything at all — nothing “writerly,” essays or fiction or what-not — outside of RAMH these days. I do think about it quite a bit, and in particular I keep thinking I should not (haha) close the book on the novel I once called Grail and, later, Seems to Fit. I have entered (as you may know) a handful of short-fiction writing contests, to no great ongoing effect. But I tend to think of writing successfully, outside of RAMH anyhow, as something I once craved but have lost almost all ambition for. The occasional book review or other one-off post here does keep my hand in.
  • Photography: well, again, you probably know about this. (If not, check out the posts in the “My Photography” category; many of these are only peripherally related — a post might simply include one of my photos, for example — but a reasonable number of them now address specifically one or another photographic technique/project in words (imagine that!).

The next year, RAMH-wise, will be very different from those before it, and I can’t tell you what to expect here at the blog because I don’t know. I’ll have more to say about this over the next couple months, as plans get finalized. For now, though, we will probably be leaving Florida, quite possibly for good, and road-tripping around the US for at least several months. “Homeless,” after a fashion: we’re thinking we can mix short-term rentals and family visits for a few days at a time. During such pauses in movement, sure, I’ll look forward to blogging (and the hope of writing, and photography).

But on a schedule? Beats me!

In any case, thank you for dropping in — and perhaps sticking around — during the (so-far) 13-year-old road trip around my head that Running After My Hat represents.

And thanks especially to The Missus, for her patience with my habit! (Well, I think of it as my routine, but let’s not quibble over word choice.)

_________________________

About the image: You may or may not remember the photo series I did last summer, called “Hat Dance” — mostly just an experiment in lighting a “still”-life subject which also happened to be in motion. (I posted about it, including the five shots I actually used, in July.)

I was so pleased with the results of that test that I tried again, a week or two later, using four or five baseball caps instead of just the two felt Indiana-Jones-style fedoras. The results: less pleasing. (The problems were many, and my time on the day of the shoot was limited.) Still, I found one shot I could do something with…

As for the title, I wanted to continue the “dance” theme of the earlier series. It just refers to the Egyptian Sufi folk dance called the tanoura. Dancers, traditionally male, wear brightly colored skirts with weights sewn into the hems, so that as they spin, the skirts flair out almost into two-dimensional disc-like shapes. (Of course, any patterns inherent in the skirt’s weave then blur and become unrecognizable while it’s in motion.)

Hunting for Clues in (of) the Interior

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[Image: “She Got a Lot Out of Those Physics and Shop Classes,” by Alan Levine; located this clue to someone’s interior at Flickr, naturally, and share it here under a Creative Commons license. (Thank you!) Posted there about 10 years ago, the image seems to have been one of a daily series — all telling (one enigmatic story? several enigmatic stories?) of a woman named Lori. The story itself seems to be in rough-draft form — typos, ever so slightly “off” phrasing, and so on — and I’m guessing it went straight from Levine’s keyboard, to the Flicker post, without an intervening spell-check and so on. But it was an interesting story nonetheless, and, most importantly, I do like this still life… especially as metaphor.]

From whiskey river (highlighted stanzas):

Wildly Constant
(excerpt)

The first thing I saw
the first morning I went out for a walk in Stykkishólmur
was a crow

as big as a chair.
What’s that chair doing on top of that house? I thought
then it flapped away.

A crow that big is called a raven.
Corvus corax in Linnaeus’s binomial system.
Each one makes a sound

like a whole townful of ravens
in the country I come from.
Three adjectives that recur

in the literature on ravens are
omnivorous.
Pernicious.

Monogamous.
I’m interested in monogamous.
I got married last May

and had my honeymoon in Stykkishólmur.
This year I returned to Stykkishólmur
to live with my husband

for three months in one small room.
This extreme monogamy
proved almost too much for us.

Rather than murder each other
we rented a second place
(Greta’s house)

near the pool.
Now we are happily
duogamous.

There are ravens on the roof
of both places.
Perhaps they are the same ravens.

…

I should learn more about signs.
I came to Stykkishólmur
to live in a library.

The library contains not books
but glaciers.
The glaciers are upright.

Silent.
As perfectly ordered as books would be.
But they are melted.

What would it be like
to live in a library
of melted books.

With sentences streaming over the floor
and all the punctuation
settled to the bottom as a residue.

It would be confusing.
Unforgivable.
A great adventure.

…I
stand amid glaciers.
Listen to the wind outside

falling towards me from the outer edges of night and space.I have no theory
of why we are here

or what any of us is a sign of.
But a room of melted glaciers
rocking in the nightwind of Stykkishólmur

is a good place to ponder it.
Each glacier is lit from underneath
as memory is.

Proust says memory is of two kinds.
There is the daily struggle to recall
where we put our reading glasses

and there is a deeper gust of longing
that comes up from the bottom
of the heart

involuntarily.
At sudden times.
For surprise reasons.

Here is an excerpt from a letter Proust wrote
in 1913:
We think we no longer love our dead

but that is because we do not remember them:
suddenly
we catch sight of an old glove

and burst into tears.

(Anne Carson [source — do consider reading the entire long poem!])

…and:

Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally.

(Fernando Pessoa [source])

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Watching the Traffic at the Corner of Contradiction and Clarity

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[Image: Stairwell at the Landesgalerie Niederösterreich (“State Gallery of Lower Austria”), in Krems an der Donau. (Building designed by Marte.Marte Architects; photo from the Web site of M+G Ingenieure, the engineering firm who actually planned and, I believe, managed its construction.) You might look at this and think, “Eh? Big deal. It’s a concrete stairway!” But no: you’re actually looking at two stairways: one, “the” stairway with the window, the railings, etc.; and one, on the far side of the concrete wall and ceiling — you’re looking at that stairway’s underside. This stairwell houses, in short, a double helix of stairways: the main stair, and the concrete-sealed fire/emergency stair. I’ll add more in a follow-up comment to the post.]

From whiskey river:

The path into the light seems dark,
the path forward seems to go back,
the direct path seems long,
true power seems weak,
true purity seems tarnished,
true steadfastness seems changeable,
true clarity seems obscure,
the greatest art seems unsophisticated,
the greatest love seems indifferent,
the greatest wisdom seems childish.

(Lao Tzu [source])

…and:

Reading Milosz

I read your poetry once more,
poems written by a rich man, knowing all,
and by a beggar, homeless,
an emigrant, alone.

You always wanted to go
beyond poetry, above it, soaring,
but also lower, to where our region
begins, modest and timid.

Sometimes your tone
transforms us for a moment,
we believe — truly —
that every day is sacred,

that poetry — how to put it? —
makes life rounder,
fuller, prouder, unashamed
of perfect formulation.

But evening arrives,
I lay my book aside,
and the city’s ordinary din resumes —
somebody coughs, someone cries and curses.

(Adam Zagajewski, translated by Clare Cavanagh [source])

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Startled by a Glimpse of the Invisible

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[Image: “Family Portraits IX,” one of a series by the photographic team known as Inka & Niclas (Inka and Niclas Lindergård). The series comprises what might be otherwise conventional natural-landscape/family-portrait photos (sometimes with their children, as here). The difference: the human subjects were dressed in full-body reflective garb, and illuminated with strobe lights in such a way as to minimize the effect of the lighting on their surroundings. Some, like this one, were taken in dark settings; others, in broad daylight. Overall, the photos simultaneously haunt and disquiet — bleached-out cousins of the human figures graven, in 1945, on the walls at Hiroshima.]

From whiskey river:

Funeral Music
(excerpt)

8.

Not as we are but as we must appear,
Contractual ghosts of pity; not as we
Desire life but as they would have us live,
Set apart in timeless colloquy.
So it is required; so we bear witness,
Despite ourselves, to what is beyond us,
Each distant sphere of harmony forever
Poised, unanswerable. If it is without
Consequence when we vaunt and suffer, or
If it is not, all echoes are the same
In such eternity. Then tell me, love,
How that should comfort us — or anyone
Dragged half-unnerved out of this worldly place,
Crying to the end ‘I have not finished’.

(Geoffrey Hill [source])

…and:

At a certain point we need to grow up; we need to look inside ourselves for our inner guidance. There are things most human beings know; they just don’t want to know them. They know deep down that certain things in their lives are working or aren’t working, that certain parts of their lives are functional and others are dysfunctional. But sometimes, as human beings, we don’t want to know what’s not convenient. So we pretend not to know.

(Adyashanti [source])

…and, from whiskey river‘s commonplace book:

What’s Not Here

I start out on this road, call it
love or emptiness. I only know what’s

not here: resentment seeds, back-
scratching greed, worrying about out-

come, fear of people. When a bird gets
free, it doesn’t go back for remnants

left on the bottom of the cage! Close
by, I’m rain. Far off, a cloud of fire.

I seem restless, but I am deeply at ease.
Branches tremble; the roots are still.

I am a universe in a handful of dirt,
whole when totally demolished. Talk

about choices does not apply to me.
While intelligence considers options,

I am somewhere lost in the wind.

(Jelaluddin Rumi [source])

…and (in slightly different words):

The easiest way of illuminating this term [“grades of significance”] is by means of a classic example of the diverse responses and grade of significance that an object may elicit. For example, an animal may see an oddly shaped black and white object, a tribal person a rectangular flexible object with curious markings. To a Western child it is a book, while to an adult it may be a particular type of book, namely a book that makes incomprehensible, even ridiculous claims about reality. Finally, to a physicist, it may be a profound text on quantum physics…

What this example so nicely demonstrates is that when we cannot comprehend higher levels of significance, we can blithely believe that we have fully understood something whose true significance we have completely missed. As Schumacher pointed out:

…All levels of significance up to the adequate level, i.e., up to the level of meaning in the example of the book, are equally factual, equally logical, equally objective, but not equally real… When the level of the knower is not adequate to the level (or the grade of significance) of the object of knowledge, the result is not factual error but something much more serious: an inadequate and impoverished view of reality.

This raises an arresting question: What higher levels of significance, what profound meanings and messages, does the world give us that we are overlooking?

(Helen Palmer [source])

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Book Review: The Broken Earth Trilogy, by N.K. Jemisin

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Recently, I came across reports of some medical studies about the dermatological condition called rosacea. (I think the studies themselves are fairly recent; here’s a summary.)

The gist of these studies: possible connections, even correlations, between rosacea and the presence on the skin of a common type of mite, and the bacteria that the mite carries in its gut.

Of course, dermal mites don’t (as we understand them) have anything like conscious intent — even less so, the bacteria they carry. But imagine, if you will, that these tiny creatures are conscious enough at least to know that they can get something from human beings that they can get nowhere else — something needed not just to survive, but to flourish. Imagine that they have evolved and are shrewd enough to learn that they can pull even more of this something from us than is available merely on the surface. Imagine the horror when a human host discovers this, begins swatting at its face, douses itself with pharmaceutical and cosmetic substances, trains lasers at itself…

…imagine the fury, the hatred in the human host, then, when it learns that none of these superficial “treatments” helps; they seem, in fact, to make things even worse. How might the human host respond, finally?

And now: picture the Earth, and billions of creatures swarming across it…

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The Poetry of Others’ Making

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[Image: “What I Study,” by Amber Case. (Spotted on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!) I had no idea what sort of image might illustrate today’s “theme”… and then I found this one. An interesting exercise: try to guess what a stranger’s work might be, when you understand the English language well enough… but the mix of English-language words and phrases they use to describe it seems positively, well, Duchampian: furry teacup, bicycle wheel mounted on a stool, that sort of thing. As it happens, most of these are used metaphorically. I fought being sucked into speculating on the color coding and the background grid, features which suggest a deeper understanding is possible. For now, I just wanted to marvel that someone, anyone, anywhere or -time, can describe their life’s work in this manner (and mean it). For what it’s worth, you can see Case’s TED Talk — “We Are All Cyborgs Now” — here.]

From whiskey river:

In some communities there is a man who sells whistles by the courthouse or paper kites down by the river. In others there is a woman who decorates her home with multicolored lights and streamers every holiday. Usually these people are no more than small figures at the periphery of everyone’s attention, but when they die, it can be more surprising than the death of a prominent leader or a renowned artist, because no one has ever regarded them carefully enough to consider what their absence might mean.

(Kevin Brockmeier [source])

…and:

We have an obligation to one another, responsibilities and trusts. That does not mean we must be pigeons, that we must be exploited. But it does mean that we should look out for one another when and as much as we can; and that we have a personal responsibility for our behavior; and that our behavior has consequences of a very real and profound nature. We are not powerless. We have tremendous potential for good or ill. How we choose to use that power is up to us; but first we must choose to use it. We’re told every day, “You can’t change the world.”

But the world is changing every day. Only question is… who’s doing it? You or somebody else?

(J. Michael Straczynski [source])

…and:

Another Beauty
(excerpt)

We find comfort only in
another beauty, in others’
music, in the poetry of others.
Salvation lies with others,
though solitude may taste like
opium. Other people aren’t hell
if you glimpse them at dawn, when
their brows are clean, rinsed by dreams.

(Adam Zagajewski [source])

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