Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

The Passage of Time, of Life, and of Many Many Words

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[Image: illustration — I guess woodcut or similar medium? — accompanying the poem “Magic Words,” below, by an uncredited artist. Found it here, in the 1967 book Songs and Stories of the of the Netsilik Eskimos, by Edward Field.]

From whiskey river:

Here are people who refused to cheat, who eagerly sought out the truth and shrank from neither poetry nor terror, the two poles of our globe—since poetry does exist in the world, in certain events, at rare moments. And there’s also no shortage of terror.

(Adam Zagajewski [source])

…and:

Magic Words

In the very earliest time,
When both people and animals lived on earth,
A person could become an animal if he wanted to
and an animal could become a human being.
Sometimes they were people
and sometimes animals
and there was no difference.
All spoke the same language.
That was the time when words were like magic.
The human mind had mysterious powers.
A word spoken by chance
might have strange consequences.
It would suddenly come alive
and what people wanted to happen could happen.
Nobody could explain this:
That’s the way it was.

(Nalungiaq, Netsilik/Inuit woman interviewed by ethnologist Knud Rasmussen; translated by Edward Field [source])

Not from whiskey river:

We don’t lack for clocks. From my desk I can see at least three clocks, two electric and one quartz. One is part of my computer and says it’s now 12:29. Another’s built into the radio and shows 12:30. Finally, my wristwatch gives me 12:31. Fortunately, my watch has traditional hands and doesn’t rely upon the ruthless go-betweens of glowing numerals. We’ve got a lot of time.

(Adam Zagajewski [source])

…and:

Heaven and Hell

And when we die at last,
we really know very little about what happens then.
But people who dream
have often seen the dead appear to them
just as they were in life.
Therefore we believe life does not end here on earth.

We have heard of three places where men go after death:
There is the Land of the Sky, a good place
where there is no sorrow and fear.
There have been angatoks who went there
and came back to tell us about it:
They saw people playing ball, happy people
who did nothing but laugh and amuse themselves.
What we see from down here in the form of stars
are the lighted windows of the villages of the dead
in the Land of the Sky.

Then there are two other worlds of the dead underground:
Way deep down is a place just like here on earth
except on earth you starve
and down there they live in plenty.
The caribou graze in great herds
and there are endless plains
with juicy berries that are nice to eat.
Down there too, everything
is happiness and fun for the dead.

But there is another place, the Land of the Miserable,
right under the surface of the earth we walk on.
There go all the lazy men who were poor hunters,
and all women who refused to be tattooed
not caring to suffer a little to become beautiful.
They had no life in them when they lived
so now after death they must squat on their haunches
with hanging heads, bad-tempered and silent,
and live in hunger and idleness
because they wasted their lives.
Only when a butterfly comes flying by
do they life their heads
(as young birds open pink mouths uselessly after a gnat)
and when they snap at it, a puff of dust
comes out of their dry throats.

Of course it may be
that all I have been telling you is wrong
for you cannot be certain about what you cannot see.
But these are the stories that our people tell.

(Nalungiaq, ibid. [source])

…and:

Animal minds are simple, and therefore sharp. Animals never spend time dividing experience into little bits and speculating about all the bits they’ve missed. The whole panoply of the universe has been neatly expressed to them as things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks. This frees the mind from unnecessary thoughts and gives it a cutting edge where it matters. Your normal animal, in fact, never tries to walk and chew gum at the same time.

The average human, on the other hand, thinks about all sorts of things around the clock, on all sorts of levels, with interruptions from dozens of biological calendars and time-pieces. There’s thoughts about to be said, and private thoughts, and real thoughts, and thoughts about thoughts, and a whole gamut of subconscious thoughts. To a telepath the human head is a din. It is a railway terminus with all the Tannoys talking at once. It is a complete FM waveband—and some of those stations aren’t reputable, they’re outlawed pirates on forbidden seas who play late-night records with limbic lyrics.

(Terry Pratchett [source])

The Word for the Thing Is Not the Thing

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[Image: “One Elvis,” by John E. Simpson. We toured the historic Sun Records studio in Memphis in November, 2021. (Sun Records was of course Elvis Presley’s first record label.) At that time, COVID-related social-distancing policies remained in effect in many places, and, well, you can fill in the blanks.]

Aside to regular visitors: company coming this weekend, so, y’know: this will of necessity be an abbeviated Friday post.

From whiskey river (italicized lines):

View with a Grain of Sand

We call it a grain of sand,
but it calls itself neither grain nor sand.
It does just fine without a name,
whether general, particular,
permanent, passing,
incorrect, or apt.

Our glance, our touch mean nothing to it.
It doesn’t feel itself seen and touched.
and that it fell on the windowsill
is only our experience, not its.
For it, it is no different from falling on anything else
with no assurance that it has finished falling
or that it is falling still.

The window has a wonderful view of a lake,
but the view doesn’t view itself.
It exists in this world,
colorless, shapeless,
soundless, odorless, and painless.

The lake’s floor exists floorlessly,
And its shore exists shorelssly.
Its water feels itself neither wet nor dry
and its waves to themselves are neither singular nor plural.
They splash deaf to their own noise
on pebbles neither large nor small.

And all this beneath a sky by nature skyless
in which the sun sets without setting at all
and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud.
The wind ruffles it, its only reason being
that it blows

A second passes.
A second second.
A third.
But they’re three seconds only for us.

Time has passed like a courier with urgent news.
But that’s just our simile.
The character is invented, his haste is make-believe,
his news inhuman.

(Wislawa Szymborska [source])

Not from whiskey river:

The wind, with its hands in its pockets, whistles a tune as it wanders down the road—a jaunty melody, at odds with the surroundings—and the theme is picked up by everything it passes, until all of Aldersgate Street, in the London borough of Finsbury, has joined in. The result tends towards the percussive. A bottle in the gutter rocks back and forth, cha-chink cha-chunk, while a pair of polystyrene cartons, one nestled in the other’s embrace, whisper like a brush on a snare drum way up on the pedestrian bridge. A more strident beat is provided by the tin sign fixed to the nearest lamppost, which warns dogs not to foul the pavement, a message it reinforces with a rhythmic rattle, while in the Barbican flowerbeds—which are largely bricked-in collections of dried-up earth—pebbles rock and stones roll. By the entrance to the tube there’s a parcel of newspapers bound by plastic strips, whose pages gasp and sigh in choral contentment. Dustbins and drainpipes, litter and leaves: the wind’s conviction that everything is its instrument is justified tonight.

And yet halfway down the road it pauses for breath, and the music stops. The wind has reached a black door, wedged between a dirty-windowed newsagent’s, visibly suffering from lack of public interest, and a Chinese restaurant offering the impression that it’s still in lockdown, and plans to remain so. This door, irredeemably grimy from the exhalations of passing traffic, is a sturdy enough construction, the only gap in its armour a long-healed wound of a letterbox, impervious to junk mail and red-lettered bills, but a door is only a door for all that, and the wind has blown down bigger. Perhaps it considers rendering this supposed obstruction into dust and matchsticks, but if so, the moment passes; the wind moves on, and its orchestra goes with it…

So the black door is left unshaken and unstirred. But just as it never opens, never closes during daylight hours, nor is it about to yield now, and anyone intent on entry must take the stagedoor johnny route, down the adjacent alley, past the overflowing wheelie-bins and the near-solid stench from the drains, through the door that sticks in all seasons, and then, once inside, climb stairs whose carpet has worn thin as an actor’s ego, and whose walls boast mildew stains, and lightbulbs that are naked and/or spent. It’s dark in here, a bumpy kind of dark, with sound effects provided by rising damp and falling plaster, and the offstage antics of vermin. The stairs grow narrower the higher they go, and the paired offices that lurk on each landing are furnished with shabby props, scratched on every surface and torn in all the ways they can tear—nothing capable of being damaged twice has been damaged only once, because history repeats itself, first as tragedy then as farce, and here in Slough House the daily grind is of such unending repetition that the performers can barely tell one from the other…

(Mick Herron [source])

…and:

#25: If I said, “I’m about to hit you over the head with the phrase ‘baseball bat,'” you’d think I was nuts, but not dangerous. You wouldn’t actually duck, would you? Some people apparently would.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)

The Hard, Mysterious Wisdom of What We Cannot Touch

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

From whiskey river:

The unreal is more powerful than the real.

Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it.

Because it’s only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die.

But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.

If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. If you do that, you can change the way people live their lives. And that’s the only lasting thing you can create.

(Chuck Palahniuk [source])

…and:

Here where the world ends, and has beginning,
Here where the sunlight-spring of all our minds
Has birth again, and new beginning
The seeker finds.

Here there is body’s peace, and the heart’s uprising,
Here the illumined minds of other men
Are beacons on a mountain peak uprising
Beyond our ken.

Here there is quiet, and the world about us,
Here there is wisdom foolish men must know.
The earth is dumb with suffering about us,
And I must go.

(Christmas Humphreys, Both Sides of the Circle [source: despite a wide search, I never could find the full original source for this quotation; Both Sides of the Circle is the title of Christmas Humphreys’ autobiography, but the passage does not appear therein… it does appear in a fragment from one 1984 volume of a journal, The Theosophist, but the entire text isn’t available online])

Not from whiskey river:

Hod Putt

Here I lie close to the grave
Of Old Bill Piersol,
Who grew rich trading with the indians, and who
Afterwards took the bankrupt law
And emergeed from it richer than ever.
Myself grown tired of toil and poverty
And beholding how Old Bill and others grew in wealth,
Robbed a traveler one night near Proctor’s Grove,
Killing him unwittingly while doing so,
For the which I was tried and hanged.
That was my way of going into bankruptcy.
Now we who took the bankrupt law in our respective ways
Sleep peacefully side by side.

The Circuit Judge

Take note, passers-by, of the sharp erosions
Eaten in my head-stone by the wind and rain —
Almost as if an intangible Nemesis or hatred
Were marking scores against me,
But to destroy, and not preserve, my memory.
I in life was the Circuit judge, a maker of notches,
Deciding cases on the points the lawyers scored,
Not on the right of the matter.
O wind and rain, leave my head-stone alone!
For worse than the anger of the wronged,
The curses of the poor,
Was to lie speechless, yet with vision clear,
Seeing that even Hod Putt, the murderer,
Hanged by my sentence,
Was innocent in soul compared with me.

(Edgar Lee Masters [source: here and here])

…and:

Certainly, the most violent pain that one can experience is for a mother the loss of a child, and for a son the loss of a mother. It is violent and terrible, it overturns and lacerates; but one is healed of such catastrophes, as of large, bleeding wounds. But, certain accidents, certain things hinted at, suspected, certain secret griefs, certain perfidy, of the sort that stirs up in us a world of grievous thoughts, which opens before us suddenly the mysterious door of moral suffering, complicated, incurable, so much the more profound because it seems worthy, so much the more stinging because unseizable, the more tenacious because artificial, these leave upon the soul a train of sadness, a feeling of sorrow, a sensation of disenchantment that we are long in ridding ourselves of.

(Guy de Maupassant [source])

…and:

For What Binds Us

There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they’ve been set down—
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There’s a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh,
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest—

And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.

(Jane Hirshfield [source])

RAMH@16: The Plate Tectonics of Blogging

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[Image: animated GIF (five loops) of a brief clip from the film Miller’s Crossing (1990). Why five loops? Well, I had to stop somewhere! The original version of this GIF looped endlessly, which might be fun/interesting as a meme-type image on a social media platform, but looked ridiculous — compulsive and twitchy — when spread across a canvas this grand. Heh.]

Per tradition, here’s a playlist to start off my anniversary post this year. It’s the soundtrack from — yes! — Miller’s Crossing. (Tempting to select just track , for obvious reasons, but this is the whole thing.)

[Original score for Miller’s Crossing by Carter Burwell (a.k.a. “the third Coen Brother” for his frequent collaborations with Joel and Ethan Coen (writers/directors/producers of this film and others). In the film itself there were also a handful of songs not written by Burwell, including Jelly Roll Morton’s “King Porter Stomp” and Jimmy Campbell’s “Goodnight Sweetheart.” Note that the score as embedded here is brief, only about a half-hour in length.]

The very first post here on Running After My Hat laid out what — as I prematurely imagined — the blog would be “about”: a series of booklets I’d originally written as Christmas gifts for my family. In fairly short order, I added posts providing further information about the background of these little things, such as this one about the real-world town which provided the setting for the books’ accounts of growing up there.

Well, things happened (as things, yes, tend to do). I kept revisiting the How It Was stories, in my head and on the blog. When such a thing became possible, I experimented with turning the booklets into e-booklets, for distribution to a wider audience. But these experiments never quite got off the ground…

…until recently.

Mainly, and outwardly, this newfound effort was driven by my rediscovering a cache of short stories I’d written over the course of some 25 years. (Of course, this rediscovery itself had to wait until The Missus and I finally settled down somewhere after our two years’ rambling around the country, post-COVID lockdown, and started unpacking boxes.) After about four months of modestly revamping and reformatting the stories — to say nothing of banging my head against the whole “make an e-book, and then make a REAL book” learning curve, those stories are now available via Amazon either in Kindle-readable format or in print (paperback) editions of two anthologies. Yes, that’s a photo of the “author’s proof” editions of the paperbacks at right. (The gray bands across the covers do not appear in the books as finally printed.)

The links below take you to Amazon’s pages for the paperback editions; once there, you can if you want opt for the eBook (Kindle) version — and regardless of format, there are several pages of sample text available:

  • Webster, Unabridged: a half-dozen tales featuring the same protagonist — occasionally mistaken for the author — known only as Webster.
  • Left-Handed Inventions: a full dozen stories — different characters, different genres, different “voices,” and so on.

…all of which has led me to visit — again — the notion of “publishing” the How It Was series. I should have more on that front sometime in the next few months.

In the meantime…

You probably know already of the Substack platform for making one’s writing available to wider audiences — basically, a form of what we’ve always called blogging, with some 21st-century accoutrements (easy subscriptions — paid or free; easily managed mailing lists and commenting systems; “Share” buttons and the like).

Substack first made its way into my consciousness because they’d signed up some “big names”: Garrison Keillor, for instance, and Salman Rushdie, and novel/short-story author George Saunders. It’s a very simple platform both for posting occasional writings and for reading them: more restrictive than, say, a WordPress blog in terms of what you can do besides post writing there, and in terms of the look-and-feel of your site, but yes, much much simpler.

Anyway, long story short, I set up a Substack site — also called Running After My Hat — back in November. As you can see, I haven’t really figured out (or “decided”) what exactly I’m doing there as well as here. The things I’ve posted there are original, not duplicates of what’s here… on the other hand, there was no particular reason why I didn’t post them here instead. They’re pretty much RAMH posts in Substack garb.

But of course they’re not identical, except superficially. “Under the hood,” a post on Substack (vs. on a WordPress blog) is more likely to be read by a wider variety of new folks, because of the easy subscribe-and-share features.

I don’t expect to abandon RAMH-the-original for the new platform; I hope eventually to figure out a way to keep both healthy and familiar to the people used to reading them, without cross-posting duplication.

But the main reason I’m bringing it up now is because of a series called “The Fiction Garage.” (The series as a whole is collected here.) It doesn’t get into the nuts-and-bolts of self-publishing on Amazon, but it does lay out the general outline (for now) of how and why the two anthologies — Webster, Unabridged and Left-Handed Inventions — came into being. At some point, I hope to add a related series on getting How It Was (subtitle: The Boy’s Year) into print as well.

Which will sorta bring the whole “running after my How It Was” saga full circle.

In the meantime (again) I’m glad you — whoever you are* — are here, reading this. Thank you for 16 years’ attention, however intermittent or steady!

[Yes, I know — corny and obvious, maybe. But surely I’m entitled!]

_____________________________________________

* “Whoever you are*, haha. Right. I probably know who you are — among others, thank you for your years of reading, especially: Cynth and Michael (someone’s bruther); Marta; Paul in Southeast Asia and Susan in Italy; and a bunch of people who may still be putting in silent appearances from time to time: Nance, Misssy, Jayne, Squirrel, whaddayameantheresnodessert… the list is endless! And it goes without saying, maybe, but thank you as well to my anonymous (because, really, unknown) source of weekly blogging inspiration: the always thoughtful, always challenging whiskey river — hard to imagine RAMH without that mysterious hat blowing by the window and pulling me outside every few days.

What It Means to Observe, and to Know It

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[Video: Peter Frampton’s instrumental cover of Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun,” recorded at a concert in Los Angeles last weekend. (Frampton was diagnosed several years ago with a muscular disease called inclusion body myositis, hence his performance in a chair throughout the concert.) Soundgarden’s original version of the song was released with a spectacularly surreal video which I thought of including here instead, just as an object lesson in “What the hell am I looking at here, and what does it mean?” which seemed apt for this week’s theme. But really: it was just too… too weird.]

From whiskey river (italicized lines):

Sincerely, the Sky

Yes, I see you down there
looking up into my vastness.

What are you hoping
to find on my vacant face,

there between the crisscross
of telephone wires?

You should know I am only
bright blue now because of physics:

molecules break and scatter
my light from the sun

more than any other color.
You know my variations—

azure at noon, navy by midnight.
How often I find you

then on your patio, pajamaed
and distressed, head thrown

back so your eyes can pick apart
not the darker version of myself

but the carousel of stars.
To you I am merely background.

You barely hear my voice.
Remember I am most vibrant

when air breaks my light.
Do something with your brokenness.

(David Hernandez [source])

…and:

Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I’m one of them.

(Ray Bradbury [source])

Not from whiskey river:

The Gate

I had no idea that the gate I would step through
to finally enter this world

would be the space my brother’s body made. He was
a little taller than me: a young man

but grown, himself by then,
done at twenty-eight, having folded every sheet,

rinsed every glass he would ever rinse under the cold
and running water.

This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me.
And I’d say, What?

And he’d say, This—holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich.
And I’d say, What?

And he’d say, This, sort of looking around.

(Marie Howe [source])

…and:

That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.

(Charles Dickens [source])

…and:

On the Fifth Day

On the fifth day
the scientists who studied the rivers
were forbidden to speak
or to study the rivers.

The scientists who studied the air
were told not to speak of the air,
and the ones who worked for the farmers
were silenced,
and the ones who worked for the bees.

Someone, from deep in the Badlands,
began posting facts.

The facts were told not to speak
and were taken away.
The facts, surprised to be taken, were silent.

Now it was only the rivers
that spoke of the rivers,
and only the wind that spoke of its bees,

while the unpausing factual buds of the fruit trees
continued to move toward their fruit.

The silence spoke loudly of silence,
and the rivers kept speaking
of rivers, of boulders and air.

Bound to gravity, earless and tongueless,
the untested rivers kept speaking.

Bus drivers, shelf stockers,
code writers, machinists, accountants,
lab techs, cellists kept speaking.

They spoke, the fifth day,
of silence.

(Jane Hirshfield [source])

The Practice of Counter-Inevitability

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[Image: “Something Like (But Not the Same As) Inevitability,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river:

Probability

Most coincidents are not
miraculous, but way more
common than we think —
it’s the shiver
of noticing being
central in a sequence
of events
that makes so much
seem wild and rare —
because what if it wasn’t?
Astonishment’s nothing
without your consent.

(Lia Purpura [source])

…and:

There was a silly damn bird called a Phoenix back before Christ, every few hundred years he built a pyre and burnt himself up. He must have been the first cousin to Man. But every time he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we’re doing the same thing, over and over, but we’ve got one damn thing the Phoenix never had. We know the damn silly thing we just did. We know all the damn silly things we’ve done for a thousand years and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, someday we’ll stop making the goddamn funeral pyres and jumping in the middle of them. We pick up a few more people that remember every generation.

(Ray Bradbury [source])

Not from whiskey river:

The Difference Between Pepsi and Coke

Can’t swim; uses credit cards and pills to combat
intolerable feelings of inadequacy;
Won’t admit his dread of boredom, chief impulse behind
numerous marital infidelities;
Looks fat in jeans, mouths clichés with confidence,
breaks mother’s plates in fights;
Buys when the market is too high, and panics during
the inevitable descent;
Still, Pop can always tell the subtle difference
between Pepsi and Coke,
Has defined the darkness of red at dawn, memorized
the splash of poppies along
Deserted railway tracks, and opposed the war in Vietnam
months before the students,
Years before the politicians and press; give him
a minute with a road map
And he will solve the mystery of bloodshot eyes;
transport him to mountaintop
And watch him calculate the heaviness and height
of the local heavens;
Needs no prompting to give money to his kids; speaks
French fluently, and tourist German;
Sings Schubert in the shower; plays pinball in Paris;
knows the new maid steals, and forgives her.

(David Lehman [source])

…and:

We care nothing for the present. We anticipate the future as too slow in coming, as if we could make it move faster; or we call back the past, to stop its rapid flight. So imprudent are we that we wander through the times in which we have no part, unthinking of that which alone is ours; so frivolous are we that we dream of the days which are not, and pass by without reflection those which alone exist. For the present generally gives us pain; we conceal it from our sight because it afflicts us, and if it be pleasant we regret to see it vanish away. We endeavor to sustain the present by the future, and think of arranging things not in our power, for a time at which we have no certainty of arriving.

If we examine our thoughts, we shall find them always occupied with the past or the future. We scarcely think of the present; and if we do so, it is only that we may borrow light from it to direct the future. The present is never our end; the past and the present are our means, the future alone is our end. Thus we never live, but hope to live; and while we always lay ourselves out to be happy, it is inevitable that we can never be so.

(Blaise Pascal [source])

…and:

Dividend of the Social Opt Out

How lovely it is not to go. To suddenly take ill.
Not seriously ill, just a little under the weather.
To feel slightly peaked, indisposed. Plagued by
a vague ache, or a slight inexplicable chill.

Perhaps such pleasures are denied
to those who never feel obliged. If there are such.

How pleasant to convey your regrets. To feel sincerely
sorry, but secretly pleased to send them on their way
without you. To entrust your good wishes to others.
To spare the equivocal its inevitable rise.

How nice not to hope that something will happen,
but to lie on the couch with a book, hoping that
nothing will. To hear the wood creak and to think.
It is lovely to stay without wanting to leave.

How delicious not to care how you look,
clean and uncombed in the sheets. To sip
brisk mineral water, to take small bites
off crisp Saltines. To leave some on the plate.

To fear no repercussions. Nor dodge
the unkind person you bug.

Even the caretaker has gone to the party.
If you want something you will have to
get it yourself. The blue of the room seduces.
The cars of the occupied sound the wet road.

You indulge in a moment of sadness, make
a frown at the notion you won’t be missed.
This is what it is. You have opted to be
forgotten so that your thoughts might live.

(Jennifer Moxley [source])

Digging Deep for Compassion When Cynicism Comes to Call

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[Image: On my first visit to downtown Durham, NC, in the fall of 2022, I was struck — moved — both by the obvious demographic diversity and by the displays of public art, especially murals. This mural (I haven’t been able to learn the artist’s name) commemorates (among other things) a particularly fraught moment in the history of that diversity: the establishment in the early 1970s of a “charrette” to help resolve ongoing racial tensions, especially surrounding school integration. The two people seated at the table at top left were appointed by a Federal judge to lead the charrette; from left to right, they are C.P. Ellis and Ann Atwater. At the start of the project, Ellis was the angry “Exalted Cyclops” of Durham’s Ku Klux Klan; Atwater, an angry community activist and organizer. You can read more about the charrette — and the “best of enemies” relationship between Ellis and Atwater — here, here, here, and elsewhere.]

From whiskey river:

Now it’s April, and the whales have come home. The finbacks and the humpbacks and the rare right whales, arriving along the coast, coming into the bay, sometimes into the harbor, their massive length and weight churning and breaching as though they, like us, know playfulness. He maketh the deep to boil like a pot, he maketh a path to shine after him, said Job, who, I fear, could not know that there is also a reasoning and a gentleness in these mountains of flesh. Once a whale tangled in line came into the harbor with another swimming just alongside, a companion that would not leave the roped animal but lingered, while brave men went out in little boats and were able to cut the entangling line away. The eye of the humpback is like all the darkness and hope and pain one sees in the eye of the elephant, in whose brain, it is avowed by those who know, nothing is ever forgotten. It is an eye deeper than the deepest well.

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

Let Them Not Say

Let them not say: we did not see it.
We saw.
Let them not say: we did not hear it.
We heard.
Let them not say: they did not taste it.
We ate, we trembled.
Let them not say: it was not spoken, not written.
We spoke,
we witnessed with voices and hands.
Let them not say: they did nothing.
We did not-enough.
Let them say, as they must say something:
A kerosene beauty.
It burned.
Let them say we warmed ourselves by it,
read by its light, praised,
and it burned.

(Jane Hirshfield [source])

…and:

Prayer for the Abuser
(excerpt)

To those who see only division and separateness,
I remind you that a part is born only by bisecting a whole.
For those who have forgotten the tender mercy of a mother’s embrace,
I send a gentle breeze to caress your brow.
To those who still feel somehow incomplete,
I offer the perfect sanctity of this very moment.

(Kuan Yin [source: widely quoted, including here, but nothing canonical I can find])

Not from whiskey river:

A Ritual to Read to Each Other

If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dike.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

(William Stafford [source])

…and:

Some schools of Buddhism teach that [skillful means (upaya)] goes along with two other aspects of the spiritual life: compassion (karuna) and wisdom (prajna). I’d like to borrow this Buddhist trio of virtues for my own religion. What could be more perfect than basing your life on wisdom, compassion, and skillful means? What better way to describe religion than as a deep way of life that takes into account your mind, your heart, and your hands?

In my own private book of spiritual practices, along with these three central ingredients I would add wonder and serenity, two items I borrow from Glenn Gould. That gives me a five-legged table on which to build my religion: wisdom, compassion, skillful methods, wonder, and serenity. I’ve borrowed them all, but now, in this new configuration, they become mine…

It isn’t always easy to practice the virtues of wisdom, compassion, skillful means, wonder, and serenity. Especially serenity. The world might like you to do something else.

(Thomas Moore [source])

Picking Out the Surprises Behind the Mundane

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[Image: “Unmade Bed” (1957), by Imogen Cunningham. We saw this at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 2022; for my purposes today, I found it here, at the site of the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM). Cunningham’s friend and fellow photographer Judy Dater once said of this photo, “She sometimes would give that photograph to people as a wedding present so that the husband would know that the wife was going to be busy, that she had things to do, and not to expect the bed to always be made.“]

From whiskey river:

St. Augustine wrote that the things of the world pour forth from God in a double way: intellectually into the minds of the angels and physically into the world of things. To the person who believes this—as the western world did up until a few centuries ago—this physical, sensible world is good because it proceeds from a divine source. The artist usually knows this by instinct; his senses, which are used to penetrating the concrete, tell him so. The artist penetrates the concrete world in order to find at its depths the image of its source, the image of ultimate reality. This in no way hinders his perception of evil but rather sharpens it, for only when the natural world is seen as good does evil become intelligible as a destructive force and a necessary result of our freedom.

(Flannery O’Connor [source])

…and (second paragraph):

…there is a growing apprehension that existence is a rat-race in a trap: living organisms, including people, are merely tubes which put things in at one end and let them out at the other, which both keeps them doing it and in the long run wears them out. So to keep the farce going, the tubes find ways of making new tubes, which also put things in at one end and let them out at the other. At the input end they even develop ganglia of nerves called brains, with eyes and ears, so that they can more easily scrounge around for things to swallow. As and when they get enough to eat, they use up their surplus energy by wiggling in complicated patterns, making all sorts of noises by blowing air in and out of the input hole, and gathering together in groups to fight with other groups. In time, the tubes grow such an abundance of attached appliances that they are hardly recognizable as mere tubes, and they manage to do this in a staggering variety of forms. There is a vague rule not to eat tubes of your own form, but in general there is serious competition as to who is going to be the top type of tube. All this seems marvelously futile, and yet, when you begin to think about it, it begins to be more marvelous than futile. Indeed, it seems extremely odd.

It is a special kind of enlightenment to have this feeling that the usual, the way things normally are, is odd—uncanny and highly improbable. G. K. Chesterton once said that it is one thing to be amazed at a gorgon or a griffin, creatures which do not exist; but it is quite another and much higher thing to be amazed at a rhinoceros or a giraffe, creatures which do exist and look as if they don’t. This feeling of universal oddity includes a basic and intense wondering about the sense of things. Why, of all possible worlds, this colossal and apparently unnecessary multitude of galaxies in a mysteriously curved space-time continuum, these myriads of differing tube-species playing frantic games of one-upmanship, these numberless ways of “doing it” from the elegant architecture of the snow crystal or the diatom to the startling magnificence of the lyrebird or the peacock?

(Alan Watts [source])

Not from whiskey river:

…no varnish can hide the grain of the wood; and […] the more varnish you put on, the more the grain will express itself.

(Charles Dickens [source])

…and:

Truth is I would like to escape myself

Truth is I would like to escape myself.
Detach my body from my skin,
peel it layer by layer to uncover
beneath the surface of petals
and thorns piled up year after year,
who I am and who I want to be.
I want to be the flower that grows
in dirt, the feather that flies free between
the cracks of fences. A wise woman
once told me, don’t worry about you,
worry about who you could be.
I want to be the woman who sits
on a desk and writes pieces of oceans,
rivers on a white space in a place
where imagination has no border.

(Nour Al Ghraowi [source])

…and:

My research was only underway a month when, quite unexpectedly, one woman dragoned—a nineteen-year-old girl from Iowa named Stella. Her dragoning was fairly consistent with the other cases documented over the years by the WRC. By all accounts, she transformed in a state of rage. Four airmen perished instantly. A fifth man—an older mechanic by the name of Cal—was the only witness. He said that he saw the men surround Stella. He called it “hassling.” He heard her yelling to be left alone, and had headed toward her at a run, hoping to help. Instead, he heard her scream, and saw her transform in a terrible burst of fire. The blast was so strong, it blew him a full twenty feet backward. The ground shook like they had been bombed. The men had been blown apart. It wasn’t clear if either the transformation or the subsequent death of the airmen was intentional. The mechanic did not believe so. When the dragon came to her senses, she noticed Cal staring at her, wetting himself with fear. She patted his head and flew away.

(Kelly Barnhill [source])

The View out the Window of Meta-Perception

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[Image: “Ghosts in the Skylight,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river:

I got up to get us a drink of water and as I stood in the kitchen in the early morning light, running the water out of the tap, I looked out at the hills at the back of the town, at the trees on the hills, at the bushes in the garden, at the birds, at the brand new leaves on a branch, at a cat on a fence, at the bits of wood that made the fence, and I wondered if everything I saw, if maybe every landscape we casually glanced at, was the outcome of an ecstasy we didn’t even know was happening, a love-act moving at a speed slow and steady enough for us to be deceived into thinking it was just everyday reality.

(Ali Smith [source])

…and (first four stanzas):

Personal

Don’t take it personal, they said;
but I did, I took it all quite personal—

the breeze and the river and the color of the fields;
the price of grapefruit and stamps,

the wet hair of women in the rain—
And I cursed what hurt me

and I praised what gave me joy,
the most simple-minded of possible responses.

The government reminded me of my father,
with its deafness and its laws,

and the weather reminded me of my mom,
with her tropical squalls.

Enjoy it while you can, they said of Happiness
Think first, they said of Talk

Get over it, they said
at the School of Broken Hearts

but I couldn’t and I didn’t and I don’t
believe in the clean break;

I believe in the compound fracture
served with a sauce of dirty regret,

I believe in saying it all
and taking it all back

and saying it again for good measure
while the air fills up with I’m-Sorries

like wheeling birds
and the trees look seasick in the wind.

Oh life! Can you blame me
for making a scene?

You were that yellow caboose, the moon
disappearing over a ridge of cloud.

I was the dog, chained in some fool’s backyard;
barking and barking:

trying to convince everything else
to take it personal too.

(Tony Hoagland [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Questions About Angels

Of all the questions you might want to ask
about angels, the only one you ever hear
is how many can dance on the head of a pin.

No curiosity about how they pass the eternal time
besides circling the Throne chanting in Latin
or delivering a crust of bread to a hermit on earth
or guiding a boy and girl across a rickety wooden bridge.

Do they fly through God’s body and come out singing?
Do they swing like children from the hinges
of the spirit world saying their names backwards and forwards?
Do they sit alone in little gardens changing colors?

What about their sleeping habits, the fabric of their robes,
their diet of unfiltered divine light?
What goes on inside their luminous heads? Is there a wall
these tall presences can look over and see hell?

If an angel fell off a cloud, would he leave a hole
in a river and would the hole float along endlessly
filled with the silent letters of every angelic word?

If an angel delivered the mail, would he arrive
in a blinding rush of wings or would he just assume
the appearance of the regular mailman and
whistle up the driveway reading the postcards?

No, the medieval theologians control the court.
The only question you ever hear is about
the little dance floor on the head of a pin
where halos are meant to converge and drift invisibly.

It is designed to make us think in millions,
billions, to make us run out of numbers and collapse
into infinity, but perhaps the answer is simply one:
one female angel dancing alone in her stocking feet,
a small jazz combo working in the background.

She sways like a branch in the wind, her beautiful
eyes closed, and the tall thin bassist leans over
to glance at his watch because she has been dancing
forever, and now it is very late, even for musicians.

(Billy Collins [source])

and (the speaker is a ghost, addressing his grieving life’s partner):

Simon, time is real for you, and you are travelling through it without me now. I won’t be waiting for you on the other side, because I find that there is no side, and there is no self, and in this undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns, there are no borders; it is world without end — and it may be that something that was you and something that was me will occur — that is the best word I can think of — yes, perhaps we will occur again, together again, in the strangeness of… The strangeness of what? I don’t know the word. Shall we call it the strangeness and leave it at that?

(Jeanette Winterson [source: not sourced online, but a passage which I highlighted in this book])

…and:

Tony Manero: I’ve never been asked to leave before.

Laura: Oh, don’t take it personally.

Tony Manero: I’ve got to — there’s nobody else here in the room!

(source)

Seeing What We Want to See, Seeing What We Don’t — But Seeing, Regardless

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[Image: “No Mowing (No Kidding),” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) I admit, I laughed when I saw this sign — planted, as it was, in the center of a large marshy area beside the path.]

From whiskey river:

One of the most impressive discoveries was the origin of the energy of the stars, that makes them continue to burn. One of the men who discovered this was out with his girl friend the night after he realized that nuclear reactions must be going on in the stars in order to make them shine. She said “Look at how pretty the stars shine!” He said “Yes, and right now I am the only man in the world who knows why they shine.” She merely laughed at him. She was not impressed with being out with the only man who, at that moment, knew why stars shine. Well, it is sad to be alone, but that is the way it is in this world.

(Richard Feynman [source])

…and:

Consider the difference between the two types of globemaps of planet Earth, the physical and the political. The first is a marvelous wiggly affair, blue, green, brown, yellow, and occasionally white. The second, especially on the North American continent, is angrily scratched across with straight lines, and the one earth (and we should not forget the one air) covered with patches of contrasting colors to identify the domains of differing bands of gangsters. Which of the two more closely resembles Earth as seen from outer space?

(Alan Watts [source])

Not from whiskey river:

“This is your house,” says the poet Conrad Aiken, and you know he is talking about the human skull. “On one side there is darkness,” he warns you; “on one side there is light.” He wrote better than he knew, that sad-voiced man, for nature had pondered the problem before him. On the table as I write lies the skull of a relative of ours, a spectral creature which flits from tree to tree in the night-time forests of Borneo. It is about the size of a kitten’s skull, but it possesses a most remarkable feature. If the human cranium were built to similar proportions, every aspect of the human face would be squeezed to provide for two great bony saucers with projecting rims. These saucers would occupy and extend far beyond the area now represented by our eye sockets. We would then possess the enormous owl eyes of a creature who is totally nocturnal but who must leap and spring about in the midnight darkness of a tropical rain forest.

This is your house, said nature, in essence, to the spectral tarsier, and the light, what there is of it, must be made to come in. This is your house, she also said to man, but your eyes will be day eyes. You will not need to cherish every beam of moonlight, or the spark of a star through a leaf. You will see what you must, but leave the dark alone. So this far-off relative of ours, with the thin and delicate fingers of a man, lives the life of a ghost. And man, who bumps his head and fumbles in the dark because of his small day-born eyes, fears the ghosts of the dark above all things.

(Loren Eiseley [source])

…and:

Recycling Center

The labeled bins on the California hillside
catch the glint and quarter-glint of passing cars.
Families pull up with their interesting trash
and start unloading: Here, sweetheart,
this goes over in Newspaper. The bundle
hits with a thud. Diet soda cans
spin almost noiselessly down, and the sun-
permitting bottles from a day’s pleasure
are tossed into Mixed Glass by the children
who like to hear the smash, unknowable, chaotic,
as matter greets itself and starts to change.

What mystery is inside a thing! If we peered
into the bin, we could see it waiting there,
could believe everything is alive and specific
and personal, could tell by the tilt of one
bottle against the next that it’s difficult
to be singular, to have identity, to keep
an outline safe in the terrors of space.
Even the child knows this. Bye, bottle! she shouts,
tossing it in; and the bottle lies there
in the two o’clock position, temporarily itself,
before being swept into the destiny of mixture…

And what if some don’t want to. What if some items
in the piles of paper, the orange and blue
envelopes from a magazine sweepstakes, numbers
pressing through the cloudy windows
with our names, some among those pale sheets curled
with moisture, would rather stay as they are.
It’s spring; we’ve thrown away mistakes—
tax forms, recipes, tennis-ball-sized
drafts of poems—that which was blank
shall be made blank again—but what if
that failed letter wants to be a failure,
not go back to pulp, and thought…
Or across the parking lot, where light insists
on changing the dull cans, a few cans don’t want
to be changed, though they should want to,
shouldn’t they, should want to be changed
by light, light which is called sweet reason,
honeyed, spectra, magnitude, light that goes
from the parking lot looking helpless
though it is matter that has been betrayed…

All afternoon the bins are carried off
by those who know about where things should go,
who are used to the clatter the cans make,
pouring out; and the families, who believed change
would heal them are pulling away in their vans,
slightly embarrassed by that which refused…
The bins fill again with hard substances,
the hills bear down with their fugitive gold,
the pampas grass bending low to protect
what was briefly certain and alive with hope.

(Brenda Hillman [source])

___________________

Aside: One side effect of this long-running series of Friday dances with whiskey river is that one or the other of us periodically repeats ourselves. In my case, at least, these echoes are generally inadvertent… Brenda Hillman’s “Recycling Center,” as it happens, cropped up here almost eleven years ago.

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