Running After My Hat

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])

[Read more…]

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])

[Read more…]

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])

[Read more…]

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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Give Yourself Time, Because Time Doesn’t Give Itself to You

March 1, 2019 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “#everydaybandw 443,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) It seems to speak for itself, especially once you understand the context.]

From whiskey river:

TIME PASSES TIME does not pass. Time all but passes. Time usually passes. Time passing and gazing. Time has no gaze. Time as perseverance. Time as hunger. Time in a natural way. Time when you were six the day a mountain. Mountain time. Time I don’t remember. Time for a dog in an alley caught in the beam of your flashlight. Time not a video. Time as paper folded to look like a mountain. Time smeared under the eyes of the miners as they rattle down into the mine. Time if you are bankrupt. Time if you are Prometheus. Time if you are all the little tubes on the roots of a gorse plant sucking greenish black moistures up into new scribbled continents. Time it takes for the postal clerk to apply her lipstick at the back of the post office before the supervisor returns. Time it takes for a cow to tip over. Time in jail. Time as overcoats in a closet. Time for a herd of turkeys skidding and surprised on ice. All the time that has soaked into the walls here. Time between the little clicks. Time compared to the wild fantastic silence of the stars. Time for the man at the bus stop standing on one leg to tie his shoe. Time taking Night by the hand and trotting off down the road. Time passes oh boy. Time got the jump on me yes it did.

(Anne Carson [source])

…and:

The things you do not have to say make you rich. Saying things you do not have to say weakens your talk. Hearing things you do not need to hear dulls your hearing. And things you know before you hear them—those are you, those are why you are in the world.

(William Stafford [source])

…and:

Bad People

A man told me once that all the bad people
Were needed. Maybe not all, but your fingernails
You need; they are really claws, and we know
Claws. The sharks—what about them?
They make other fish swim faster. The hard-faced men
In black coats who chase you for hours
In dreams—that’s the only way to get you
To the shore. Sometimes those hard women
Who abandon you get you to say, “You.”
A lazy part of us is like a tumbleweed.
It doesn’t move on its own. Sometimes it takes
A lot of Depression to get tumbleweeds moving.
Then they blow across three or four States.
This man told me that things work together.
Bad handwriting sometimes leads to new ideas;
And a careless god—who refuses to let people
Eat from the Tree of Knowledge—can lead
To books, and eventually to us. We write
Poems with lies in them, but they help a little.

(Robert Bly [source])

[Read more…]

Too Magical Not to Believe

February 22, 2019 by John 1 Comment

[Image: photo of “Familiar,” sculpture by Dorcas Casey (winner of the 2013 Public Speaks Prize at the Broomhill (UK) National Sculpture competition. The detailing of these pieces appears to have been, well, too incredible not to be believed. Casey herself has said of them: “I intend these domestic creatures and materials to appear familiar, comforting and playful whilst also seeming disconcertingly sinister and malevolent.” See the gallery at her Web site for more examples of creatures which, once seen, are difficult to unsee (e.g., this closeup of the bull’s head).]

From whiskey river:

Magic doesn’t sweep you away; it gathers you up into the body of the present moment so thoroughly that all your explanations fall away: the ordinary, in all its plain and simple outrageousness, begins to shine—to become luminously, impossibly so. Every facet of the world is awake, and you within it.

The deeper I slid into the material density of the real, the more I found that there was nothing determinate or predictable about existence. Actuality, this inexhaustible mystery, cannot be domesticated. It is wildness incarnate. Reality shapeshifts.

(David Abram [source])

…and:

Not Anyone Who Says

Not anyone who says, “I’m going to be
careful and smart in matters of love,”
who says, “I’m going to choose slowly,”
but only those lovers who didn’t choose at all
but were, as it were, chosen
by something invisible and powerful and uncontrollable
and beautiful and possibly even
unsuitable—
only those know what I’m talking about
in this talking about love.

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

You have to return to the stillness often to balance yourself out and to keep from becoming as extreme as the jumpy little symbols that pulse through your mind. Return again and again until you come to see that you are really there all the time anyway. Until you listen to the sound of your own voice as if it were small and far away, and the sound gives you no real pleasure anymore, but the listening does, the listening contains all the richness that you used to seek.

Return over and over until you watch the movements of your mind and find that your thoughts have lost their cleverness somewhere down the line. They still ring, but ring hollow. You’re no longer so easily convinced as before, and the brilliance is now in the watching. The brilliance that you sought has remained hidden behind each movement of your mind, hidden in the twisted branches of the continual seeking.

(G. BlueStone [source])

[Read more…]

To Think About Thinking About What We Think About*

February 15, 2019 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Boat shoes tucked under hall tree,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH) I am inordinately fond of this photo, for reasons which generally escape me. But it’s probably got something to do with our taking steps to “downsize”: to move into a smaller home, and rid ourselves of a great deal of stuff we’ve gotten used to looking at over 25+ years.]

From whiskey river:

The world — whatever we might think when terrified by its vastness and our own impotence, or embittered by its indifference to individual suffering, of people, animals, and perhaps even plants, for why are we so sure that plants feel no pain; whatever we might think of its expanses pierced by the rays of stars surrounded by planets we’ve just begun to discover, planets already dead? still dead? we just don’t know; whatever we might think of this measureless theater to which we’ve got reserved tickets, but tickets whose lifespan is laughably short, bounded as it is by two arbitrary dates; whatever else we might think of this world — it is astonishing.

But “astonishing” is an epithet concealing a logical trap. We’re astonished, after all, by things that deviate from some well-known and universally acknowledged norm, from an obviousness we’ve grown accustomed to. Now the point is, there is no such obvious world. Our astonishment exists per se and isn’t based on comparison with something else.

Granted, in daily speech, where we don’t stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like “the ordinary world,” “ordinary life,” “the ordinary course of events”… But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world.

It looks like poets will always have their work cut out for them.

(Wislawa Szymborska (translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh) [source])

…and:

Common Book Pillow Book

Long enough since the genre was popular
we’ve forgotten what to call it: weird mix of quotes and collectibles, private
thoughts and uncensored meditations in brief, like locks of hair and
child height charts of your considerations
and ponderings. An abandoned art, you practice it with care: each quote
equal to the other, simple entries like coordinates of unmarked appearances
in the sky—twenty years, over
8,000 days—the weather is “what you make of sunshine,” and only women “can
make a man successful,” haven’t you heard
“God is the messenger, and we are all brothers and sisters,” organizations
of hate “must be fought with the ultimate crest: humanity,” and you
note a quote with a love reserved
for precision and the unattained, and I
suspend like cracked meteors in the ether
of your common message: go to bed, what is truly important in this world
has already been said.

“When people deserve love the least
is when they need it the most,” we are the axis
of cliche, “like mother like daughter,” sign your name
on this one before I turn out the light
and resume my interrupted prayer.

(Priscila Uppal [source])

[Read more…]

“…Light, Light, Light!”

February 8, 2019 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: ‘Elements Modular Kitchen,’ by Matthew Gilbride — a concept which took third place in the 2010 Design Lab competition sponsored by Electrolux, the appliance manufacturer. What you see in this photo are actually seven of the Y-shaped “kitchens,” each of which has an array of buttons in the little blue strip you can see on the outer edges of the surface. The buttons determine whether a given unit is being used for “cooking, refrigeration, air conditioning, [or] lighting.” The caption on the photo at Flickr continues: “The appliance draws power wirelessly through technology applied to the wall, which is supplemented through solar energy as required. Multiple units and surfaces automatically work together through wireless smart networking, whilst customisation is offered by being able to install the units as the user prefers.”]

From whiskey river:

Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next—and disappear. That’s why it’s so important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.

(Joshua Foer [source])

…and:

Correspondences
(excerpt)

Sometimes we are led through the doorway
by a child, sometimes
by a stranger, always a matter of grace changing
the past, for if there is anything we must change
it is the past. To look back
and see another map.

Love enough to fill
a shoe, a suitcase, a bit of ink,
a painting, a child’s eyes at a chalkboard,
a bit of chalk, a bit of
bone in ash.

All that is cupped,
all that is emptied

the rush of water from a pump,
a word spelled out
on a palm.

(Anne Michaels [source])

…and (from whiskey river’s commonplace book):

In a dream I am walking joyfully up the mountain. Something breaks and falls away, and all is light. Nothing has changed, yet all is amazing, luminescent, free. Released at last, I rise into the sky… This dream comes often. Sometimes I run, then lift up like a kite, high above earth, and always I sail transcendent for a time before awaking. I choose to awake, for fear of falling, yet such dreams tell me that I am a part of things, if only I would let go, and keep on going. “Do not be heavy,” Soen Roshi says. “Be light, light, light—full of light!”

(Peter Matthiessen [source])

[Read more…]