Running After My Hat

Cutting-Loose Magic

August 9, 2019 by John 4 Comments

[Image: “North Florida Skyline, with Crow + Shadow,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river:

Is there no context for our lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong? You are an adult. The old one, the wise one. Stop thinking about saving your face. Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world. Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they go down in flames and nothing is left but their scald. Or if, with the reticence of a surgeon’s hands, your words suture only the places where blood might flow. We know you can never do it properly – once and for all. Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul. You, old woman, blessed with blindness, can speak the language that tells us what only language can: how to see without pictures. Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.

(Toni Morrison [source])

…and:

Cutting Loose

Sometimes from sorrow, for no reason,
you sing. For no reason, you accept
the way of being lost, cutting loose
from all else and electing a world
where you go where you want to.

Arbitrary, a sound comes, a reminder
that a steady center is holding
all else. If you listen, that sound
will tell where it is, and you
can slide your way past trouble.

Certain twisted monsters
always bar the path — but that’s when
you get going best, glad to be lost,
learning how real it is
here on the earth, again and again.

(William Stafford [source])

…and:

You must learn to stop being yourself. That’s where it begins, and everything else follows from that. You must let yourself evaporate. Let your muscles go limp, breathe until you feel your soul pouring out of you, and then shut your eyes. That’s how it’s done. The emptiness inside your body grows lighter than the air around you. Little by little, you begin to weigh less than nothing. You shut your eyes; you spread your arms; you let yourself evaporate. And then, little by little, you lift yourself off the ground.

Like so.

(Paul Auster [source])

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[Image: “Cookieee…!,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) This is one in a series I post occasionally at Instagram, hashtagged “#jesstorypix.” The idea is to start with an odd-looking photo and see a micro-story dwelling therein; for the story associated with this one, see the caption on the Instagram post.]

From whiskey river:

Most of us find it difficult to know what we are feeling about anything. In any situation it is almost impossible to know what is really happening to us. This is one of the penalties of being human and having a brain so swarming with interesting suggestions and ideas and self-distrust.

(Ted Hughes [source (not yet confirmed)])

…and:

Imaginary Conversation

You tell me to live each day
as if it were my last. This is in the kitchen
where before coffee I complain
of the day ahead—that obstacle race
of minutes and hours,
grocery stores and doctors.

But why the last? I ask. Why not
live each day as if it were the first—
all raw astonishment, Eve rubbing
her eyes awake that first morning,
the sun coming up
like an ingénue in the east?

You grind the coffee
with the small roar of a mind
trying to clear itself. I set
the table, glance out the window
where dew has baptized every
living surface.

(Linda Pastan [source])

…and:

There’s nothing wrong with enjoying looking at the surface of the ocean itself, except that when you finally see what goes on underwater, you realize that you’ve been missing the whole point of the ocean. Staying on the surface all the time is like going to the circus and staring at the outside of the tent.

(Dave Barry [source])

…and (italicized portion):

One human life is deeper than the ocean. Strange fishes and sea-monsters and mighty plants live in the rock-bed of our spirits. The whole of human history is an undiscovered continent deep in our souls. There are dolphins, plants that dream, magic birds inside us. The sky is inside us. The earth is in us. The trees of the forest, the animals of the bushes, tortoises, birds, and flowers know our future. The world that we see and the world that is there are two different things. Wars are not fought on battlegrounds but in a space smaller than the head of a needle. We need a new language to talk to one another. Inside a cat there are many histories, many books. When you look into the eyes of dogs strange fishes swim in your mind. All roads lead to death, but some roads lead to things which can never be finished. Wonderful things.

(Ben Okri [source])

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But Eventually…

July 19, 2019 by John 1 Comment

[Image: “Prison for a Day”; found it on Flickr (used here under a Creative Commons license; thank you!), posted by user “amberandclint.” This is a portion of the interior of an airport (Bangkok International? not sure; the caption’s wording is ambiguous), where the photographer once spent eleven hours while waiting for his wife’s flight to board.]

From whiskey river:

Promise of Blue Horses

A blue horse turns into a streak of lightning,
then the sun—
relating the difference between sadness
and the need to praise
that which makes us joyful, I can’t calculate
how the earth tips hungrily
toward the sun—then soaks up rain—or the density
of this unbearable need
to be next to you. It’s a palpable thing—this earth philosophy
and familiar in the dark
like your skin under my hand. We are a small earth. It’s no
simple thing. Eventually
we will be dust together; can be used to make a house, to stop
a flood or grow food
for those who will never remember who we were, or know
that we loved fiercely.
Laughter and sadness eventually become the same song turning us
toward the nearest star—
a star constructed of eternity and elements of dust barely visible
in the twilight as you travel
east. I run with the blue horses of electricity who surround
the heart
and imagine a promise made when no promise was possible.

(Joy Harjo [source])

…and:

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

(Cormac McCarthy [source])

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Stories All Around Us, Stories Inside

July 12, 2019 by John 1 Comment

[The StoryCorps project takes as its mission simply to record people’s personal stories, via interviews, and make them available to anyone who wants to listen to them. The organization has won numerous awards for its work — one of those “simple” ideas (like the similar one behind the Humans of New York photo project) which it’s great to see rewarded with praise.]

From whiskey river:

In summer, waiting for night, we’d pose against the afterglow on corners, watching traffic cruise through the neighborhood. Sometimes, a car would go by without its headlights on and we’d all yell, “Lights!”

“Lights!” we’d keep on yelling until the beams flashed on. It was usually immediate—the driver honking back thanks, or flinching embarrassed behind the steering wheel, or gunning past, and we’d see his red taillights blink on.

But there were times—who knows why?—when drunk or high, stubborn, or simply lost in that glide to somewhere else, the driver just kept driving in the dark, and all down the block we’d hear yelling from doorways and storefronts, front steps, and other corners, voices winking on like fireflies: “Lights! Your lights! Hey, lights!”

(Stuart Dybek [source])

…and:

The End of Science Fiction

This is not fantasy, this is our life.
We are the characters
who have invaded the moon,
who cannot stop their computers.
We are the gods who can unmake
the world in seven days.

Both hands are stopped at noon.
We are beginning to live forever,
in lightweight, aluminum bodies
with numbers stamped on our backs.
We dial our words like Muzak.
We hear each other through water.

The genre is dead. Invent something new.
Invent a man and a woman
naked in a garden,
invent a child that will save the world,
a man who carries his father
out of a burning city.
Invent a spool of thread
that leads a hero to safety,
invent an island on which he abandons
the woman who saved his life
with no loss of sleep over his betrayal.

Invent us as we were
before our bodies glittered
and we stopped bleeding:
invent a shepherd who kills a giant,
a girl who grows into a tree,
a woman who refuses to turn
her back on the past and is changed to salt,
a boy who steals his brother’s birthright
and becomes the head of a nation.
Invent real tears, hard love,
slow-spoken, ancient words,
difficult as a child’s
first steps across a room.

(Lisel Mueller [source])

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That It Not Be Found

July 5, 2019 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: Found this gizmo (sorry — out of stock!) at a retail site called “iFancee.” The caption there: Useless Box Kit – Useless Machine Leave Me Alone Box Kill Time Tricky, which seems to have pretty much covered the bases. Inside the box was a battery-powered motorized mechanism; when you flipped the switch labeled “Push,” a small acrylic “hand” emerged from under the box lid and flipped the switch back to the Off position. If so inclined, you can also view an animated GIF of the box — in the “gleaming acrylic” edition — in action.]

From whiskey river:

I am, by calling, a dealer in words; and words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind. Not only do words infect, ergotise, narcotise, and paralyse, but they enter into and colour the minutest cells of the brain, very much as madder mixed with a stag’s food at the Zoo colours the growth of the animal’s antlers. Moreover, in the case of the human animal, that acquired tint, or taint, is transmissible. May I give you an instance? There is a legend which has been transmitted to us from the remotest ages. It has entered into many brains and coloured not a few creeds. It is this: Once upon a time, or rather, at the very birth of Time, when the Gods were so new that they had no names, and Man was still damp from the clay of the pit whence he had been digged, Man claimed that he, too, was in some sort a deity. The Gods were as just in those days as they are now. They weighed his evidence and decided that Man’s claim was good—that he was, in effect, a divinity, and, as such, entitled to be freed from the trammels of mere brute instinct, and to enjoy the consequence of his own acts. But the Gods sell everything at a price. Having conceded Man’s claim, the legend goes that they came by stealth and stole away this godhead, with intent to hide it where Man should never find it again. But that was none so easy. If they hid it anywhere on Earth, the Gods foresaw that Man, the inveterate hunter—the father, you might say, of all hunters—would leave no stone unturned nor wave unplumbed till he had recovered it. If they concealed it among themselves, they feared that Man might in the end batter his way up even to the skies. And, while they were all thus at a stand, the wisest of the Gods, who afterwards became the God Brahm, said, “I know. Give it to me!” And he closed his hand upon the tiny unstable light of Man’s stolen godhead, and when that great Hand opened again, the light was gone. “All is well,” said Brahm. “I have hidden it where Man will never dream of looking for it. I have hidden it inside Man himself.” “Yes, but whereabouts inside Man have you hidden it?” all the other Gods asked. “Ah,” said Brahm, “that is my secret, and always will be; unless and until Man discovers it for himself.

(Rudyard Kipling [source])

…and:

Moon Fishing

When the moon was full they came to the water,
some with pitchforks, some with rakes,
some with sieves and ladles,
and one with a silver cup.

And they fished till a traveler passed them and said,
“Fools,
to catch the moon you must let your women
spread their hair on the water—
even the wily moon will leap to that bobbing
net of shimmering threads,
gasp and flop till its silver scales
lie black and still at your feet.”

And they fished with the hair of their women
till a traveler passed them and said,
“Fools,
do you think the moon is caught lightly,
with glitter and silk threads?
You must cut out your hearts and bait your hooks
with those dark animals;
what matter you lose your hearts to reel in your dream?”

And they fished with their tight, hot hearts
till a traveler passed them and said,
“Fools,
what good is the moon to a heartless man?
Put back your hearts and get on your knees
and drink as you never have,
until your throats are coated with silver
and your voices ring like bells.”

And they fished with their lips and tongues
until the water was gone
and the moon had slipped away
in the soft, bottomless mud.

(Lisel Mueller [source])

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Giving Over

June 28, 2019 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Painted Walkway, Frenchtown,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) The Frenchtown neighborhood, within easy walking distance of the building where I work, has been gradually remaking itself in recent years — resisting not just the slide into despair which might be considered “typical” of inner-city neighborhoods, but also the pull of gentrification and, at the neighborhood’s fringes, the appetite of a nearby university for ever more student housing. Frenchtown’s “giving over” is not a passive resignation, a surrender, but an active, happy return to spirited youthfulness: the things which make life worth living.]

From whiskey river:

It’s something people don’t discuss, because it’s something most people are aware of only as a general crisis of sense of inadequacy, or helpless dependence, or pointless loneliness, or a sense of not having a strong enough ego to meet and master inner storms that come from an unexpected angle. But not many people realise that it is, in fact, the suffering of the child inside them. Everybody tries to protect this vulnerable two three four five six seven eight year old inside, and to acquire skills and aptitudes for dealing with the situations that threaten to overwhelm it. So everybody develops a whole armour of secondary self, the artificially constructed being that deals with the outer world, and the crush of circumstances. And when we meet people this is what we usually meet. And if this is the only part of them we meet we’re likely to get a rough time, and to end up making ‘no contact’. But when you develop a strong divining sense for the child behind that armour, and you make your dealings and negotiations only with that child, you find that everybody becomes, in a way, like your own child. It’s an intangible thing. But they too sense when that is what you are appealing to, and they respond with an impulse of real life, you get a little flash of the essential person, which is the child. Usually, that child is a wretchedly isolated undeveloped little being. It’s been protected by the efficient armour, it’s never participated in life, it’s never been exposed to living and to managing the person’s affairs, it’s never been given responsibility for taking the brunt. And it’s never properly lived. That’s how it is in almost everybody. And that little creature is sitting there, behind the armour, peering through the slits. And in its own self, it is still unprotected, incapable, inexperienced. Every single person is vulnerable to unexpected defeat in this inmost emotional self. At every moment, behind the most efficient seeming adult exterior, the whole world of the person’s childhood is being carefully held like a glass of water bulging above the brim. And in fact, that child is the only real thing in them. It’s their humanity, their real individuality, the one that can’t understand why it was born and that knows it will have to die, in no matter how crowded a place, quite on its own. That’s the carrier of all the living qualities. It’s the center of all the possible magic and revelation.

(Ted Hughes [source])

…and:

Lord, the air smells good today, straight from the mysteries
within the inner courts of God.
A grace like new clothes thrown
across the garden, free medicine for everybody.
The trees in their prayer, the birds in praise
the first blue violets kneeling.
Whatever came from Being is caught up in being, drunkenly forgetting the way back.

(Jelaluddin Rumi [source])

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The Only Creatures That Claim to Be Anything

June 21, 2019 by John Leave a Comment

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

From whiskey river:

Our lives are not as limited as we think they are; the world is a wonderfully weird place; consensual reality is significantly flawed; no institution can be trusted, but love does work; all things are possible; and we all could be happy and fulfilled if we only had the guts to be truly free and the wisdom to shrink our egos and quit taking ourselves so damn seriously.

(Tom Robbins [source (in part)])

…and (last six lines):

Rest before you sleep

Requiem after Fauré, for my father

Rest before you sleepYou’ll be walking for hours
thenas usualaway from homeyour shoes
in your handyour feet not yet used to the road
Perhaps they need to feel the gravel
to know where they’re headed

A woman I knewwho lived mostly in the woods
mentioned the danger in presuming to know
what an animal thinksThe foxfor example
stopping by her open tent and looking in

I suppose she would’ve felt this way about your feet
She would’ve said how could anyone know
what a pair of tired feet need along the way

I would’ve asked her how she knew the feet
were tiredSuch discourse produces nothing
but anything less would be silence
and that would be intolerable
I wish I knew why I was telling you this

It’s easier to read the mind of a fox than to guess
what a man’s about to say when he returns
from the woodshead full of rootsveins
more like branchesshoes in one handfeet
blisteredand none of this necessarily
an indication of how the feet feelwhat miles
uphill and back have done to the soles
and to the small bones that propel a man

It’s safe nowI thinkto speak for the fox
who is only as cunning as we say it is
We’re the only creatures that claim to be anything
then build a house of facts around the claim

I’ve come for vindicationNo point in trying
to disguise it as a lesser wishWake upstop
while you still know where you arePut away
your elusive countryGive your sleep a rest

(Dionisio D. Martínez [source])

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My SmugMug Gallery

June 15, 2019 by John Leave a Comment

I’ve added a page here at RAMH with information about viewing, and possibly even obtaining printed copies of, the numerous photos I’ve been posting on Instagram and elsewhere. Particularly, I’ve been using a gallery-and-sale site called SmugMug to make this easy for people. No purchase required, or even expected, and now that I’m even mentioning it I’m already embarrassed… but the option is there if you want it!

Thanks, as ever, for visiting Running After My Hat.

Note: Aside, while on the subject of my photos… over there in the right sidebar, you’ll see an area titled “Recently, on Instagram.” If you’re viewing the site using any browser but Firefox, you’ll see thumbnails of the most recent five photos I’ve posted to (duh) Instagram; clicking on a thumbnail takes you to the corresponding Instagram post. These thumbnails are generated by a blogging plugin — in very wide use — which apparently is experiencing problems with Firefox, which prevents the thumbnails from showing up. However, the Instagram links still work. (I’ll remove this note should the plugin suddenly start working again.)

Evolution Tango

June 14, 2019 by John Leave a Comment

[Video: surrealist photographer and “photo-composite artist” Erik Johannson introduces a TED audience to his work. In this brief talk, he doesn’t address so much how his images come about, as why they do. But he’s not shy about revealing his secrets, either; he may take several, dozens of, even hundreds of carefully planned and lighted photographs, and then spend hours or even months snipping away at and reassembling them — their edges veeeery subtly removed or obscured — into landscapes which could never exist, but surely look as though they could. Coverage of his work and interviews with him are scattered here and there around the Web (e.g.), and he’s got his own YouTube channel of “behind the scenes” videos. Very clever and exhaustively but lovingly detailed work.]

From whiskey river:

The simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being; almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth. In all sobriety, he has much more of the external appearance of one bringing alien habits from another land than of a mere growth of this one. He has an unfair advantage and an unfair disadvantage. He cannot sleep in his own skin; he cannot trust his own instincts. He is at once a creator moving miraculous hands and fingers and a kind of cripple. He is wrapped in artificial bandages called clothes; he is propped on artificial crutches called furniture. His mind has the same doubtful liberties and the same wild limitations. Alone among the animals, he is shaken with the beautiful madness called laughter; as if he had caught sight of some secret in the very shape of the universe hidden from the universe itself…

There may be a broken trail of stone and bone faintly suggesting the development of the human body. There is nothing even faintly suggesting such a development of this human mind. It was not and it was; we know not in what instant or in what infinity of years. Something happened; and it has all the appearance of a transaction outside of time.

(G. K. Chesterton [source])

…and:

Although at first glance there may appear to be a fairly thin line between them, there are significant differences between the attempt to somehow magically exert one’s will on tangible reality for one’s own benefit (manifestation), and the inspiration to imagine entirely new realities (sometimes to add color and bounce to the drab waltz of existence, sometimes to facilitate the recognition of wonder, sometimes just for the hell of it); between an attempt to mentally force fortune to alter its course for one’s personal gain (to manifest, say, a winning lottery ticket), and possessing the lightness of spirit and the freedom of mind to live as if such developments would pale in comparison to those one regularly experiences at the piano, the easel, the writing pad, or upon viewing a pattern of fallen leaves in the gutter; to live — against all evidence — as if advances in fortune were already here.

(Tom Robbins [source])

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Admin: WordPress, Gutenberg, RAMH

June 8, 2019 by John Leave a Comment

*[Partial screen capture, the WordPress Gutenberg editor]*

If you’re familiar with the general appearance of an RAMH post for the last few years, or even if you just poke around into recent posts shown in the “Hats Recently Chased” sidebar, you won’t notice much if any difference in the specific appearance of this post: the colors and fonts are the same, the Japanese running-after-my-hat banner is the same, and so on.

But…

In my previous “Admin” post from a few days ago, I mentioned I’d be plunging (finally) into the new(ish) default editor for WordPress posts — a version which goes by the name “Gutenberg.” The image atop this post is a partial screen capture of what I myself saw a few minutes ago, when I started editing the post. (It would have been very confusing to me if I hadn’t already seen similar user interfaces elsewhere.)

That box over at the upper left of the image (“Search for a block,” “Most Used,” etc.) isn’t always there — only when you click on the little plus-sign-in-a-circle icon above it. The sidebar to the right, with the Document and Block tabs: it can easily be suppressed. So what, then, might I be seeing at first, if the sidebar were gone? Something more like this:

*[Partial screen capture, the WordPress Gutenberg editor, simplified]*

See the difference? Greatly reduced, almost nonexistent clutter. It’s just a, well, a blank page.

Fancy that: a “writing” interface which doesn’t distract the writer with a lot of menus, toolbars, and other optional clutter. Oh, the clutter is there, all right, not far away once you know what triggers its appearance. But otherwise, it’s just you… and a universe of unwritten content. (Of course, that universe has always been there. But all the baroque trim — the bells and whistles, the switches and buttons, the GUI bric-a-brac of the contemporary “word processor” — all that has been crammed into a toolbox and then shut up in a closet. Refreshing, in a way.

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