Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Dancing Nimbly in a Tangle of Overlaps and Abutments

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[Image: “Manhattan Cocktail,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) This was #682 (2019-08-09) in my series of one thousand “#everydaybandw” posts on Instagram. As you can see, they weren’t always 100% “B&W”; I told myself I was honoring the spirit of the label rather than the letter. (Or maybe I was just making vague, hand-waving excuses of the sorta-kinda-close-enough variety.)]

From whiskey river:

“Monster” is derived from the Latin noun monstrum, “divine portent,” itself formed on the root of the verb monere, “to warn.” It came to refer to living things of anomalous shape or structure, or to fabulous creatures like the sphinx who were composed of strikingly incongruous parts, because the ancients considered the appearance of such beings to be a sign of some impending supernatural event. Monsters, like angels, functioned as messengers and heralds of the extraordinary. They served to announce impending revelation, saying, in effect, “Pay attention; something of profound importance is happening.”

(Susan Stryker [source])

…and:

When you observe that today’s controversies often reveal not relevance but the clash of the untaught with the wrongly taught, and when you can endure this knowledge without cynicism, as a lover of humankind, greater compensations will be open to you than a sense of your own importance or satisfaction in thinking about the unreliability of others.

(Idries Shah [source])

…and:

Is there
any way we can purely touch the world again, the way
a salamander does, breathing through its skin? Can we
become the strands of this shrine we weave ourselves into
hoping to emerge into a world where — where what?
There is no end to desire, which means no end to regret,
no end to our need for an ending, so that even the sky refuses
our touch, that sky which, at its bluest, is the most empty.

(Richard Jackson [source, apparently (unconfirmed); the last several lines of a poem called “Benediction”])

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How to Make the Trip from Unsatisfactory Here, to Vaguely-OK There, While Living with All the Godawful Stuff en Route

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[Image: “Dry Summer (Until It Wasn’t,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) This photo is among those in the “#oneoffs#” album at my SmugMug site.]

From whiskey river (all but the last sentence):

I hate endings. Just detest them. Beginnings are definitely the most exciting, middles are perplexing and endings are a disaster.The temptation towards resolution, towards wrapping up the package, seems to me a terrible trap. Why not be more honest with the moment? The most authentic endings are the ones which are already revolving towards another beginning. That’s genius. Somebody told me once that fugue means to flee, so that Bach’s melody lines are like he’s running away.

(Sam Shepard [source])

…and:

You go on by doing the best you can. You go on by being generous. You go on by being true. You go on by offering comfort to others who can’t go on. You go on by allowing the unbearable days to pass and allowing the pleasure in other days. You go on by finding a channel for your love and another for your rage.

(Cheryl Strayed [source (#24)])

…and:

The narrator is well aware of how regrettable is his inability to record at this point something of a really spectacular order—some heroic feat, or memorable deed like those that thrill us in the chronicles of the past. The truth is that nothing is less sensational than pestilence and by reason of their very duration. Great misfortunes are monotonous. In the memories of those who lived through them, the grim days of plague do not stand out like vivid flames, ravenous and inextinguishable, beaconing a troubled sky, but rather like the slow, deliberate progress of some monstrous thing crushing out all upon its path.

(Albert Camus [source])

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Perfect Moments: My Mathematical Breakthrough (Age 16)

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[Image: blurry version of the Borromean-ring logo of the International Mathematics Union (IMU). For the non-blurry version, just click the blurry one. And no, I had nothing at all to do with the creation of this logo, or with the sciences of either mathematics or physics, really. My “breakthrough” was much smaller and more personal.]

I sort of straddled peer groups at my fairly small high school: sort of an academic/bookish nerd (hello, Latin honors student!), sort of an arty writer/photographer-wannabe (remind me to tell you about my James Thurber ripoffs), and sort of a pilotfish attached to the flank of the social center (it helps to develop crushes on school yearbook and newspaper editors). I even dabbled very superficially in athletics, and acquired a varsity letter in tennis to prove it. All of which pretty much set me on course for the life which followed: not quite one thing, not quite another, and really not very much of something else, but a mishmash of them all.

My personal Venn diagram might look something like the Borromean rings shown above: indistinct and formless enough that at any one time, I’m not quite sure what domain I’m occupying… assuming it is indeed just one domain at the moment. The so-called “credential” which I use most often when answering questions on Quora is: Not an expert in much; probably interested in it anyhow.

I took three year-long classes with one teacher, Mr. Hanlon: trigonometry, physics, and calculus. (Aside: all nominally in the nerd category. But because Mr. Hanlon also introduced me to photography, via the Camera Club, his influence also fed the wannabe artiste in me.)

Like many students in those three classes, I often had to grapple with what we (and maybe everyone) called “word problems.” These dressed up pure-math theory in the garb of applied math, so you might be asked something like, “If you’re in a train heading east at 30 miles per hour, and there’s a train 15 miles away, heading west at 45 miles per hour, how long do you have until the head-on collision?” Solving such problems, for me, often involved two steps: (a) untangling the language so I understood more or less exactly what the premise was, and (b) sketching out the specifics, often on graph paper, if (as here) the specifics lent themselves to being sketched.

But there was a specific subset of word problems quite different, in that while it involved words, and of course numbers, “solving” a given problem required no particular knowledge or manipulation of either. Instead, the solution — for me — simply consisted of… well, for lack of a better way of expressing it, simply consisted of flipping a switch. These were problems — and/or solutions — of unit conversion.

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All Aboard the Train to Utter Stillness

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[Image: “Vogel duikbank,” by a Flickr user who goes by the name (?) Ebelien. Found it there, of course, and — likewise — use it here under a Creative Commons license. (Thank you!)]

From whiskey river:

More than ever, I’ve come to see conspiracy theories as the refuge of those who have lost their natural curiosity and ability to cope with change. Is it any wonder that the world seems full of strange and implacable forces to someone who doesn’t know how to look up a Zip Code, use a computerized card catalog, or even make a long-distance phone call? When my husband tended bar in Lemmon, he was often asked to place calls for people flustered by a pay phone. The night he telephoned a research library at a university in California to settle a barroom dispute about the planets is now part of local legend. He might as well have been a shaman.

(Kathleen Norris [source])

…and:

Directions

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world.
— Hamlet

Take a plane to London.
From King’s Cross take the direct train to York.
Rent a car and drive across the vale to Ripon,
then into the dales toward the valley of the Nidd,
a narrow road with high stone walls on each side,
and soon you’ll be on the moors. There’s a pub,
The Drovers, where it’s warm inside, a tiny room,
you can stand at the counter and drink a pint of Old Peculier.
For a moment everything will be all right. You’re back
at a beginning. Soon you’ll walk into Yorkshire country,
into dells, farms, into blackberry and cloud country.
You’ll walk for hours. You’ll walk the freshness
back into your life. This is true. You can do this.
Even now, sitting at your desk, worrying, troubled,
you can gaze across Middlesmoor to Ramsgill,
the copses, the abbeys of slanting light, the fells,
you can look down on that figure walking toward Scar House,
cheeks flushed, curlews rising in front of him, walking,
making his way, working his life, step by step, into grace.

(Joseph Stroud [source])

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The Mysterious Experience of the Sirens’ Song

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[Image: “Yam awely,” by Emily Kame Kngwarreye. (1995; synthetic polymer paint on canvas; approximately 16 feet wide by 5 feet high. For more information, see the site of the National Gallery of Australia, where the original resides.) From the essay where I encountered it this week: “It is not our cultural differences that strike me when I look at this painting. I know that a complex set of ideas, stories, and experiences have informed its maker. But what captures me is beyond reason. It cannot be put into words. My felt response to this work does not answer questions of particular cultures or histories. It is more universal than that. I am aware of a beautiful object offered up by its maker, who surely felt the beauty of her creation just as I do.”]

From whiskey river (although there it omitted a crucial sentence on the next-to-last paragraph):

One day Dostoevsky threw out the enigmatic remark: “Beauty will save the world.” What sort of a statement is that? For a long time I considered it mere words. How could that be possible? When in bloodthirsty history did beauty ever save anyone from anything? Ennobled, uplifted, yes — but whom has it saved?

There is, however, a certain peculiarity in the essence of beauty, a peculiarity in the status of art: namely, the convincingness of a true work of art is completely irrefutable and it forces even an opposing heart to surrender. It is possible to compose an outwardly smooth and elegant political speech, a headstrong article, a social program, or a philosophical system on the basis of both a mistake and a lie. What is hidden, what distorted, will not immediately become obvious.

Then a contradictory speech, article, program, a differently constructed philosophy rallies in opposition — and all just as elegant and smooth, and once again it works. Which is why such things are both trusted and mistrusted.

In vain to reiterate what does not reach the heart.

But a work of art bears within itself its own verification: conceptions which are devised or stretched do not stand being portrayed in images, they all come crashing down, appear sickly and pale, convince no one. But those works of art which have scooped up the truth and presented it to us as a living force — they take hold of us, compel us, and nobody ever, not even in ages to come, will appear to refute them.

So perhaps that ancient trinity of Truth, Goodness and Beauty is not simply an empty, faded formula as we thought in the days of our self-confident, materialistic youth? If the tops of these three trees converge, as the scholars maintained, but the too blatant, too direct stems of Truth and Goodness are crushed, cut down, not allowed through — then perhaps the fantastic, unpredictable, unexpected stems of Beauty will push through and soar TO THAT VERY SAME PLACE, and in so doing will fulfill the work of all three?

In that case Dostoevsky’s remark, “Beauty will save the world”, was not a careless phrase but a prophecy? After all he was granted to see much, a man of fantastic illumination.

(Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn [source])

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Where Have We Been That Has Brought Us Here?

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[Video: original video version of Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime.” This isn’t the first time I’ve accompanied a Friday post with this song, but come on — it’s been over twelve years. And with a post title like today’s, how could I not have been reminded of these lyrics?]

From whiskey river:

Desperate Note from Byron’s Palace in Lerici

In the blue wind the leaves begin to think they are birds.
This is when you lean your body against its sorrows.
The truth is always there with its hidden reefs.
Your touch still hovers over the shore. Each wave is
a mirror that washes in a past we wanted hidden.
Now our voices are roosting in the branches.
Everything is echo, or shadow. Your shadow
walking on the other side of the street, your shadow
sitting in a passing car, your last words casting
the shadow that has replaced my own. Where have
we been that has brought us here? The past burrows
into me like an insect. The tree frogs, after tonight’s
rain, fill the woods. They throw their voices
so predators can’t find them. The old truths are
falling from the branches. The old dreams wash up
on the shores of our souls. Sometimes I think
the soul is a shadow even gravity can’t touch,
and love is what passes in the mirror as we look away.

(Richard Jackson [source — apparently originally here, though])

…and:

Ancient maps of the world — when the world was flat — inform us, concerning that void where America was waiting to be discovered, HERE BE DRAGONS. Dragons may not have been here then, but they are certainly here now, breathing fire, belching smoke; or, to be less literary and biblical about it, attempting to intimidate the mores, morals, and morality of this particular and peculiar time and place. Nor, since this country is the issue of the entire globe and is also the most powerful nation currently to be found on it, are we speaking only of this time and place. And it can be said that the monumental struggles being waged in our time and not only in this place resemble, in awesome ways, the ancient struggle between those who insisted that the world was flat and those who apprehended that it was round.

(James Baldwin [source, originally here])

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Gig Lamps or Halo? This Lump or That One?

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[Image: “Whole in the Wall,” by Alan Davey. (I found it on Flickr, and use it here under a Creative Commons license. Thank you!) This abandoned storefront was found by the photographer in Mitchell, Oregon, about which Davey offers some information from Wikipedia. While not related specifically (as far as I know) to the building, the last paragraph cited is particularly haunting. I’ve reproduced it in a note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being ‘like this.’ Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions — trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls different from that of old; the moment of importance came not here but there… Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

(Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction [source])

…and (in oft-cited but slightly different and, well, not quite right form — below, with ellipses added, is the correct one):

[Wollman said to me,] “…you think you know everything, but you don’t know the difference between an inconvenience and a problem.

“If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire—then you’ve got a problem. Everything else is an inconvenience. Life is inconvenient. Life is lumpy.

“Learn to separate the inconveniences from the real problems. You will live longer. And you will not annoy people so much…”

I think of this as the Wollman Test of Reality. A lump in the oatmeal, a lump in the throat and a lump in the breast are not the same kind of lump. One should learn the difference.

(Robert Fulghum [source])

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In the Unmapped Land Between Me and Not-Me

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[Image: “That’s not me in the mirror,” by Anais Gómez-C (whose Flickr username seems to be sweet_vengeance; found it on Flickr, and use it here under a Creative Commons license. (Thank you!) I don’t usually select watermarked images for these posts: certainly it’s up to the photographer or artist to embed a signature or not, yet I find it distracts from the work in order to highlight the work’s creator. (Again, it also may indicate just a touch too much insecurity about their work being “stolen.”) But this image was too apropos to disregard, and the watermark, too discreet to worry about.]

From whiskey river:

Between two and three o’clock—at the half-way house of night—I heard slow hoofs below my window, and leaning out, saw under moonshine two great cart-horses wandering down the road together. They were enjoying a phase of their existence unknown to us. They conversed in little sounds and when one stopped, to snort and sniff at the water of a duck-pond by the way, the other also stopped, raised his head and looked steadfastly up into the starry sky. I saw the moonlight in his big eyes. Presently they put their noses together. Then one gave a slight start—perhaps at the opinions of the other—and side by side they sauntered away into the night-hidden land.

One knew that they were revealing much about themselves concealed from their masters, and meditating upon life in their fashion while man slept.

(Eden Phillpotts [source])

Not from whiskey river:

There is such a dreamlike quality to snow as it falls heavily and piles up, transforming our regular world into an uncanny landscape. Sitting here, watching it, one feels the urge to remember what is underneath, just as when waking from a dream.

Sometimes it isn’t easy to see into what is there in front of us. We know that our dreams are just ways we have of telling ourselves about ourselves when we are asleep, and yet we have learned to keep from ourselves so much of who we fully, truly are that our dreams seem strange. Amazing, isn’t it? What we tell ourselves about ourselves must be told with so much secrecy and arcane symbolism that we can’t remember it, and if we can, we can’t understand it. At such moments our inner world seems shrouded, muted, alienated, as the natural world seems when it is covered with snow.

Isn’t it sad to realize that we have learned not to accept who we fully are? And isn’t it wonderful to remember that gradually, with courage, we can come to accept and include even what at first had appeared so strange, so horrible, so not-me in our dreams?

Can we be resolute about facing, with bare attention, the reality of things? Even when we discover that the old, narrow myth of who we are no longer holds, and the emerging, fuller person is so unexpected?

(Sylvia Forges Ryan [source])

It Can Go Either Way (Hint: So Can You)

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[Image: “Every Day a New Balancing Act,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river (last three stanzas):

what they did yesterday afternoon

they set my aunts house on fire

i cried the way women on tv do
folding at the middle
like a five pound note.
i called the boy who use to love me
tried to ‘okay’ my voice
i said hello
he said warsan, what’s wrong, what’s happened?

i’ve been praying,
and these are what my prayers look like;
dear god
i come from two countries
one is thirsty
the other is on fire
both need water.

later that night
i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?

it answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere.

(Warsan Shire [source])

…and:

I am of the order whose purpose is not to teach the world a lesson but to explain that school is over.

(Henry Miller [source, apparently (unconfirmed)])

…and:

Do you remember the happiest day of your life? What about the saddest? Do you ever wonder if sadness and happiness can be combined, to make a deep purple feeling, not good, not bad, but remarkable simply because you didn’t have to live on one side or the other?

(Ocean Voung [source])

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A Quirky Eclectic Christmas Mix (2020 Ed.)

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[Video: “Sleigh Ride,” from the ten-year-old YouTube series called “Post-Modern Jukebox.” (Tip o’the hat to the erstwhile blogger and longtime RAMH friend known as Froog for reminding me of the collection.) PMJ’s videos feature a rotating stable (!) of contemporary performers rendering classics or contemporary pop music in retro musical styles, often in a form of musical irony — hence the “post-modern” of the title, I guess. As in many (most? all?) of the videos, PMJ’s creator, Scott Bradlee, features here on the keyboard. Unlike — as far as I know — any of the others, this one places at the centerpiece not a vocalist or instrumentalist, but a dancer. I don’t think I’d ever considered tapdancing as a type of percussion instrument but, y’know, maybe…?]

Want to visit the pages for earlier playlists, which include videos, other songs, and some background material not in the “official” current list? Here y’go:

2008 2009
2010 2011
2012 2013
2014 2015
2016 2017
2018 2019

Greetings, and welcome to the latest of Running After My Hat‘s annual Christmas fests, such as they are. Of course, since this is 2020, it’s only natural that this would be the thirteenth such iteration — but let’s dwell no further, for now, on the prospect of things going wrong. To the music, then!

As always beginning in 2008, I’ve added to the heap ten songs previously not included; the playlist therefore now includes 130 songs (the first is just a scrap of dialogue). Total time required to listen to the whole thing, start-to-finish, is now up to around seven hours of music. This means that — unless you’re interested in only this year’s ten — the best way to play the whole thing is in random order, as background so to speak. Then you can just close this browser window, and go about your holiday business.

So, first, here’s the complete playlist, presented in random order. Note: you can open it in a pop-out window by clicking (duh) the little “Popout” button at the top left (that’s the way to go, in my opinion) and if you don’t like this random order, just reload the page:  

…or, if you’re in a hurry, here are the ten 2020 selections only. Unlike the complete list, this player just runs through the songs in sequential order:

In either case, or even if you don’t want to listen at all, you might want to glance at the complete current list of song titles and performers. (Note: the window that opens when you click that link is just a listing; you cannot play music from it.)

Want to know why I recommend the random order? Check the 2018 post; it lays out my reasoning in probably excruciating detail.

And that’s it for the music per se. Below, some further ruminations…

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