Running After My Hat

Incantations

May 3, 2019 by John 1 Comment

[Image: “The Paper Burns, But the Words Fly Free,” by user “Kylie_Jaxxon” on Flickr. (Used here under a Creative Commons license; thank you!) There’s not much context provided for this Second Life work, except this: “Quote by Akiba Ben Joseph” — the quote in question presumably being the image’s title. In any case, the title was perfect for my purposes this week! (For what it’s worth, though, the book depicted appears to be The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett.]

From whiskey river:

Inside

No one to hear but
Records for the broken player.
No reason for order but order
persists, from breakfast to bath
to work, rain falling at one speed,
the windows darkening and blurring,
accident beating against belief.
A loud engine, which is one way to say
one thing. The floors swept daily,
though it takes at least one hour for the first,
one for the last. In the pages of a book,
quick studies of gesture,
tents of hands.

(Saskia Hamilton [source])

…and:

Imagine a world where speaking or writing words can literally or directly make things happen, where getting one of those words wrong can wreak unbelievable havoc, but where with the right spell you can summon immensely powerful agencies to work your will. Imagine further that this world is administered: there is an extensive division of labour, among the magicians themselves and between the magicians and those who coordinate their activity. It’s bureaucratic, and also (therefore) chaotic, and it’s full of people at desks muttering curses and writing invocations, all beavering away at a small part of the big picture. The coordinators, because they don’t understand what’s going on, are easy prey for smooth-talking preachers of bizarre cults that demand arbitrary sacrifices and vanish with large amounts of money.”

(Ken MacLeod [source])

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Exhortations

April 26, 2019 by John 1 Comment

[Image: “Leap into the Void,” by Yves Klein (1960). For some background about it, see the Rebecca Solnit quotation below. I don’t know what she means by “controversy,” but she may just allude to the fact that this is a fake — a product of a double exposure: the upper portion of one photo, the bottom of another. In Klein’s actual leap, a team of burly friends stood on the street below him, catching with a tarp.]

From whiskey river:

Things to Think

Think in ways you’ve never thought before
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you’ve ever heard,
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,
Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose
Has risen out of the lake, and he’s carrying on his antlers
A child of your own whom you’ve never seen.

When someone knocks on the door, think that he’s about
To give you something large: tell you you’re forgiven,
Or that it’s not necessary to work all the time, or that it’s
Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.

(Robert Bly [source])

…and (italicized portion):

Rumination

I sit up late dumb as a cow,
which is to say
somewhat conscious with thirst
and hunger, an eye for the new mooon
and the morning’s long walk
to the water tank. Everywhere
around me the birds are waiting
for the light. In this world of dreams
don’t let the clock cut up
your life in pieces.

(Jim Harrison [source])

…and:

Packing for the Future: Instructions

Take the thickest socks.
Wherever you’re going
you’ll have to walk.

There may be water.
There may be stones.
There may be high places
you cannot go without
the hope socks bring you,
the way they hold you
to the earth.

At least one pair must be new,
must be as blue as a wish
hand-knit by your mother
in her sleep.

*

Take a leather satchel,
a velvet bag and an old tin box—
a salamander painted on the lid.

This is to carry that small thing
you cannot leave. Perhaps the key
you’ve kept though it doesn’t fit
any lock you know,
the photograph that keeps you sane,
a ball of string to lead you out
though you can’t walk back
into that light.

In your bag leave room for sadness,
leave room for another language.

There may be doors nailed shut.
There may be painted windows.
There may be signs that warn you
to be gone. Take the dream
you’ve been having since
you were a child, the one
with open fields and the wind
sounding.

*

Mistrust no one who offers you
water from a well, a songbird’s feather,
something that’s been mended twice.
Always travel lighter
than the heart.

(Lorna Crozier [source])
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RAMH@11: The Tendency of a Body in Motion to Remain in Motion (and a Playlist)

April 20, 2019 by John 2 Comments

Image: cover of 'While You Were Chasing a Hat,' by Lilian Moore, illustrated by Rosanne Litzinger

[Image: cover of While You Were Chasing Your Hat, a children’s book written by Lilian Moore and illustrated by Rosanne Litzinger, published in 2001. Kirkus Reviews said of it: “The simplicity of the words, coupled with the uncomplicated yet beautiful illustrations, offers a soothing look at the natural world.” I’m ready for some soothing!]

You probably know of the Q-and-A site called Quora: post a question there, and get answers — sometimes over the course of years — from people with a whole range of credentials. An answer’s worth, of course, can be evaluated by referring to the answerer’s credentials. But further validation comes simply from the number of upvotes the answer gets, relative to other answers to the same question.

If you’ve answered a question there, you get various notifications about other Quorans responses: comments, up- and downvotes, requests to answer similar questions, and so on.

A few days ago, I got an upvote on a question I’d answered back at the start of the year: “What is the best instrumental opening to a rock song?” My answer was no great shakes, and the gods know I have no authoritative musical credentials (even just as a listener) to brandish. But re-reading the answer got me thinking of a playlist here, for this year’s anniversary post…

As a child of the ’60s, I am naturally a fan of what we might call “hook-y music”: no, not music to skip school by (er, do they still call that “playing hooky”?), but music springing from a hook, an instrumental hook. (There are hook-y lyrics, sure, but I’m not talking about lyrics. Hell, I’m not even auditorily equipped to talk about lyrics!)

So, to the point: this year’s playlist consists of hook-y songs featured (at length or glancingly) on RAMH since 2008. (Well, not all of them were actually featured; some were just mentioned, or featured in posts which never (yet) saw the light of day.) From their opening notes and throughout, they continue to hook me — and I recognize them within the first few seconds of playing time. As with many such lists, this one could have grown to ridiculous lengths, but I’ve opted to follow the standard anniversary practice here: taken together, they’ll all fit onto a single audio CD. Vocals, most of them, and by and large rock or pop songs, but the list opens with an instrumental-only number whose first notes pretty much says to me: This is how a songwriter hooks a listener.

As with many such lists, this one could have grown to ridiculous lengths, but I’ve opted to follow the standard anniversary practice here: taken together, they’ll all fit onto a single audio CD. As usual, there’s a certain logic to their sequencing here — but as (almost?) always, I think the best way to listen to these is in “shuffle” mode — happy accidents, all that… and some of them may even be soothing.

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Enumerating the Domains of Mind

April 19, 2019 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Last Temptation: The Last Temptation of Eve,” by user Hartwig HKD (Hartwig Kopp=Delaney) on Flickr. (Used here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!) The photographer provides virtually no information about the photo’s “meaning,” or its construction for that matter, and I’m not sure it’s worth trying to tease it out. But I will say it feels right for this week’s theme, such as it is… and that that feeling itself may be the point.]

From whiskey river:

Thought is said to be the mind; we have the notion that it is something abstract or spiritual or immaterial. Then there is the body, which is very physical. And we have emotions, which are perhaps somewhere in between. The idea is that they are all different. That is, we think of them as different. And we experience them as different because we think of them as different.

(David Bohm [source])

…and:

We make our lives pleasurable, and therefore bearable, by picturing them as they might be; it is less obvious, though, what these compelling fantasy lives — lives of, as it were, a more complete satisfaction — are a self-cure for. Our solutions tell us what our problems are; our fantasy lives are not — or not necessarily — alternatives to, or refuges from, those real lives but an essential part of them… There is nothing more obscure than the relationship between the lived and the unlived life… So we may need to think of ourselves as always living a double life, the one that we wish for and the one that we practice; the one that never happens and the one that keeps happening.

(Adam Phillips [source])

…and (italicized paragraph):

Maybe it’s all utterly meaningless. Maybe it’s all unutterably meaningful. If you want to know which, pay attention to what it means to be truly human in a world that half the time we’re in love with and half the time scares the hell out of us. Any fiction that helps us pay attention to that is religious fiction. The unexpected sound of your name on somebody’s lips. The good dream. The strange coincidence. The moment that brings tears to your eyes. The person who brings life to your life. Even the smallest events hold the greatest clues…

So pay attention. As a summation of all that I’ve ever had to say as a writer I’d settle for that. And as a talisman or motto for that journey in search of a homeland, which is what faith is, I’d settle for that, too.

(Frederick Buechner [source])

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Being Both Things and Being Neither, All at Once

April 12, 2019 by John Leave a Comment

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

From whiskey river:

We do our twenty minutes of meditation a day in the hope that, properly stilled, our minds will stop just reflecting back to us the confusion and multiplicity of our world but will turn to a silvery mist like Alice’s looking glass that we can step through into a world where the beauty that sleeps in us will come awake at last. We send scientific expeditions to Loch Ness because if the dark and monstrous side of fairy tales can be proved to exist, who can be sure that the blessed side doesn’t exist, too? I suspect that the whole obsession of our time with the monstrous in general—with the occult and the demonic, with exorcism and black magic and the great white shark—is at its heart only the shadow side of our longing for the beatific, and we are like the knight in Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal, who tells the young witch about to be burned at the stake that he wants to meet the devil her master, and when she asks him why, he says, “I want to ask him about God. He, if anyone, must know.

(Frederick Buechner [source])

…and:

Photosynthesis

Morning falls out of its orbit
and swims up through the blue.
Last night, when I heard the news,
I forgot my human hunger.

Now I am making calculations
with a row of ivy and old hibiscus.
I am silent as a shadow in the ferns,
I am frond green and curled.

It may be necessary to drink through
the roots; I could eat sunlight and air,
start a green factory in each finger;
I could make each arm a branch.

Let me begin as stem and leaf.
I’ll make something you can breathe.

(Joyce Sutphen [source])

…and:

As The Poems Go

as the poems go into the thousands you
realize that you’ve created very
little.
it comes down to the rain, the sunlight,
the traffic, the nights and the days of the
years, the faces.
leaving this will be easier than living
it, typing one more line now as
a man plays a piano through the radio,
the best writers have said very
little
and the worst,
far too much.

(Charles Bukowski [source: various, none canonical — apparently from an out-of-print literary magazine, On the Bus])

…and:

In one recorded dialogue with a student, Basho instructed, “The problem with most poems is that they are either subjective or objective.” “Don’t you mean too subjective or too objective?” his student asked. Basho answered, simply, “No.”

(Jane Hirshfield [source])

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As If / As Is

April 5, 2019 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: adapted from “Mermaid birdbath closer,” by Flickr user “orchid dude.” There are a lot of images of mermaids in concrete and stone in some kind of watery setting, but this one by far had the best representation of one of the despondent and possibly ill-tempered creatures depicted in Matthea Harvey’s poem this week…]

From whiskey river:

I’ll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.

(Cheryl Strayed [source])

…and (epigraph + last two stanzas):

The Blue Guitar

“They said, ‘You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.’
The man replied, ‘Things as they are
are changed upon the blue guitar.'”
— The Blue Guitar (Wallace Stevens)

I do my best to tell it true
a thing exceeding hard to do
or tell it slant as Emily
advises in her poetry,
and, colour blind, how can I know
if green is blue or cinnabar.
Find me a colour chart that I
can check against a summer sky.
My eye is on a distant star.
They said, ‘You have a blue guitar.’

‘I have,’ the man replied, ‘it’s true.
The instrument I strum is blue
I strum my joy, I strum my pain
I strum the sun, I strum the rain.
But tell me, what is that to you?
You see things as you think they are.
Remove the mote within your ear
then talk to me of what you hear.’
They said, ‘Go smoke a blue cigar!
You do not play things as they are.’

‘Things as they are? Above? Below?
In hell or heaven? Fast or slow …?’
They silenced him. ‘It’s not about
philosophy, so cut it out.
We want the truth and not what you
are playing on the blue guitar.
So start again and play it straight
don’t improvise, prevaricate.
Just play things as they really are.’
The man replied, ‘Things as they are

are not the same as things that were
or will be in another year.
The literal is rarely true
for truth is old and truth is new
and faceted — a metaphor
for something higher than we are.
I play the truth of Everyman
I play the truth as best I can.
The things I play are better far
when changed upon the blue guitar.’

(P. K. Page, from The Blue Guitar [source])

…and:

Under the trees,
welcoming spring.
Things take care of themselves.
[…]
Filling the eye,
blue, blue mountains
in all directions.

(Gesshu Soko [source])

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Brain Dumps

March 29, 2019 by John 2 Comments

[Video: This fourteen-minute Bill Evans rendition of “Never Let Me Go” is from his 1968 Grammy-winning album Alone. (It also appears on the posthumous Quiet Now compilation, from 1999.) The song was written for a noir film directed by Michael Curtiz, The Scarlet Hour (Nat King Cole played it on the film’s soundtrack, apparently the only really laudable thing about the film). It’s not to be confused with many other songs by the same name; Wikipedia’s disambiguation reference lists ten “Never Let Me Go” songs, and then ten more “Never Let You Gos.”]

From whiskey river:

“You … travel to other worlds?”

“Yes. I travel to other worlds.”

I put the glass down and pulled out a cigarette; lit it before speaking.

“In the flesh?”

“If you can tell me where the flesh ends and the mind begins, I will answer that.”

“You um … you have some evidence of this?”

“Ample evidence.” He allowed a moment to pass. “For those with the intelligence to see it.”

(John Fowles [source])

…and:

Close your eyes and get quiet for a minute, until the chatter starts up. Then isolate one of the voices and imagine the person speaking as a mouse. Pick it up by the tail and drop it into a mason jar. Then isolate another voice, pick it up by the tail, drop it in the jar. And so on. Drop in any high-maintenance parental units, drop in any contractors, lawyers, colleagues, children, anyone who is whining in your head. Then put the lid on, and watch all these mouse people clawing at the glass, jabbering away, trying to make you feel like shit because you won’t do what they want – won’t give them more money, won’t be more successful, won’t see them more often. Then imagine that there is a volume-control button on the bottle. Turn it all the way up for a minute, and listen to the stream of angry, neglected, guilt-mongering voices. Then turn it all the way down and watch the frantic mice lunge at the glass, trying to get to you. Leave it down, and get back to your shitty first draft. A writer friend of mine suggests opening the jar and shooting them all in the head. But I think he’s a little angry, and I’m sure nothing like this would ever occur to you.

(Anne Lamott [source])

…and:

The reason for writing it down on paper or on a computer where you can see it is because the brain, unlikely as it may sound, is no place for serious thinking. Any time you have serious thinking to do, the first step is to get the whole shootin’ match out of your head and set it up someplace where you can walk around it and see it from all sides. Attack, switch sides and counter-attack. You can’t do that while it’s still in your head. Writing it out allows you to act as your own teacher, your own critic, your own opponent. By externalizing your thoughts, you can become your own guru; judging yourself, giving feedback, providing a more objective and elevated perspective.

(Jed McKenna [source])

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Under the Skin

March 22, 2019 by John 1 Comment

[Image: page/installment #11 (2019-03-12) in Chapter 1 — “Claws that Catch” — of Obverse & Reverse, part 2 of the long-running Skin Deep webcomic from Kory Bing. See the note at the foot of this post for more information… or, even better, just read the comic from start to finish.]

From whiskey river:

Have an uncomfortable mind; be strange. Be disturbed: by what is happening on the planet, and to it; by the cruelty and stupidity humanity is capable of; by the unbearable beauty of certain music, and the mysteries and failures of love, and the brief, confusing, exhilarating hour of your own life.

(Kim Addonizio [source])

…and:

I Have Just Said

I have just said
something
ridiculous to you
and in response,

your glorious laughter.
These are the days
the sun
is swimming back

to the coast
and the light on the water
gleams
as never, it seems, before.

I can’t remember
every spring,
I can’t remember
everything—

so many years!
Are the morning kisses
the sweetest
or the evenings

or the inbetweens?
All I know
is that “thank you” should appear
somewhere.

So just in case
I can’t find
the perfect place—
“Thank you, thank you.”

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

As I see it, to refuse the possibility of finding another person interesting, complex and as complicated as oneself is a form of violence. At bottom, this is a refusal of nuance, and I wish to posit that nuance is sacred. To call it sacred is to value it so highly that we find it fitting to somehow set it apart as something to which we’re forever committed. Nuance refuses to envision others degradingly, denying them the content of their own experience, and talks us down tenderly from the false ledges we’ve put ourselves on. When we take it on as a sacred obligation, nuance also delivers us out of the deadly habit of cutting people out of our own imaginations. This opens us up to the possibility of at least occasionally finding one another beautiful, the possibility of communion.

(David Dark [source])

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“I Do Know That I Know What I Know, Because I Know I Do”

March 15, 2019 by John 4 Comments

[Image: “When I Grow Up I Want to Be A Ballerina. No, An Astronomer. No, A Ballerina.,” by Tom Waterhouse. Found on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license. (Thank you!)]

From whiskey river:

What do we know for sure? That’s the real question. That’s what the cogito is. That’s what solipsism is. This isn’t theory. This isn’t belief or faith. This is the basic fact of existence. It’s all about figuring out exactly what we know for certain as opposed to everything else. It’s truly amazing that something so glaringly obvious and irrefutable is so universally ignored by science and philosophy and religion.

(Jed McKenna [source])

…and:

We don’t live our lives by choice, but by default. We play the roles we are born to. We don’t live our lives, we dispose of them. We throw them away because we don’t know any better. And the reason we don’t know any better is because we never asked. We never questioned or doubted. Never stood up. Never drew a line. We never walked up to our parents or our spiritual advisers or our teachers or any of the other formative presences in our early lives and asked one simple. honest, straightforward question. The one question that must be answered before any other question can be asked:
“What the hell is going on here?”

(Jed McKenna [source])

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A Cast of Thousands

March 8, 2019 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “The Matryoshka Dolls,” by Mathieu Croisetière; found on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license (thank you!). While the photo was posted by Croisetière, the piece is actually the work of multimedia artist Laetitia Soulier. (The full name is “The Matryoshka Dolls 2”; it’s the second panel in a triptych.) You can read more about Soulier’s “Fractal Architecture” series — of which this image is but one part — here and here (and elsewhere around the Web). Her process is quite involved — fascinating, I think — and as the saying goes, you can’t argue with results.]

From whiskey river:

Costumes Exchanging Glances

The rhinestone lights blink off and on.
Pretend stars.
I’m sick of explanations. A life is like Russell said
of electricity, not a thing but the way things behave.
A science of motion toward some flat surface,
some heat, some cold. Some light
can leave some after-image but it doesn’t last.
Isn’t that what they say? That and that
historical events exchange glances with nothingness.

(Mary Jo Bang [source])

…and:

Last night I had a dream within a dream. I dreamed that I was calmly watching actors working on a stage. And through a door that was not locked men came in with machine guns and killed all the actors. I began to cry: I didn’t want them to be dead. So the actors got up off the ground and said: we aren’t dead in real life, just as actors, the massacre was part of the show. Then I dreamed such a good dream: I dreamed this: in life we are actors in an absurd play written by an absurd God. We are all participants in this theater: in truth we never shall die when death happens. We only die as actors. Could that be eternity?

(Clarice Lispector [source])

…and (italicized stanza):

Passing Through

—on my seventy-ninth birthday

Nobody in the widow’s household
ever celebrated anniversaries.
In the secrecy of my room
I would not admit I cared
that my friends were given parties.
Before I left town for school
my birthday went up in smoke
in a fire at City Hall that gutted
the Department of Vital Statistics.
If it weren’t for a census report
of a five-year-old White Male
sharing my mother’s address
at the Green Street tenement in Worcester
I’d have no documentary proof
that I exist. You are the first,
my dear, to bully me
into these festive occasions.

Sometimes, you say, I wear
an abstracted look that drives you
up the wall, as though it signified
distress or disaffection.
Don’t take it so to heart.
Maybe I enjoy not-being as much
as being who I am. Maybe
it’s time for me to practice
growing old. The way I look
at it, I’m passing through a phase:
gradually I’m changing to a word.
Whatever you choose to claim
of me is always yours;
nothing is truly mine
except my name. I only
borrowed this dust.

(Stanley Kunitz [source])

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