Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Midweek Music Break: “The Fantasticks”

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Among many, many other things that can be said about the Boomer generation is this: we lived constantly on one cusp or another — at the winding-down of one era, at the start of another, even as the lifespans of each succeeding era narrowed, and narrowed, and narrowed… While it’s true that we’re now woefully out of step with popular culture, basically all that’s happened is: we got tired of keeping up.

Anyhow, each of us seems able to recall at least one cultural pivot moment, some time when a fragment of the former world managed to touch us deeply just before that thing, whatever it was, went fully out of style. For me, one such moment was my first listen to the soundtrack of The Fantasticks.

Musical theater and films had never (as the expression goes) done it for me. They were all so cooooorny, y’know, their “plots” and “sentiments” almost ridiculously easy to lampoon: people meeting and falling in love, falling out of love, falling back in love again; the collision of worldly upper-crust characters with innocent young ingenues and songboys; aspiring singers and dancers getting their Big Chances in ridiculously overproduced numbers (any excuse, really, for the frequent, manifestly implausible burstings-into-song which the genre required); all the absurd reworkings of old classic non-musical genres (Westerns, especially) into misshapen pastiches of easy plot devices stitched together with music…

One of my sisters had latched onto musicals early on, and frequently played their Broadway original-cast soundtrack albums (around the house, where I could not escape the experience) — especially of My Fair Lady. (Ye gods, how many times must I have heard Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews warbling about Spainish weather?!?)

But here’s the thing: I could easily scorn all those tropes… because, well, I had almost no idea what was actually going on, onstage or -screen. I couldn’t hear a lot of what was being said, let alone sung, especially in musical numbers which often delivered their goods in rapid-fire fashion. (Missed that last line? Whoops, sorry, too late — here’s the next one!) Furthermore, I had close to zero life experience (especially with anything like romance, or, all right, with emotion in general). And finally, the culture itself was edging into cynicism and “cool.”

So then I got all the way to college, where an admired professor adroitly mocked my mockery, punctured my balloon: she simply observed the obvious. Which was: if I’d never really paid attention to the form at more than an eye-rolling dismissive level, then sorry, I had no idea what I was talking about. If I wanted to badmouth musicals, then fine, badmouth away… as long as I borrowed, listened to, and (very important!) returned to her this, her treasured original-cast soundtrack album of The Fantasticks.

It probably helped that I knew pretty much nothing about The Fantasticks at the time.

What little I did knew about it came from the pages of The New Yorker. I’d recently started picking up occasional copies of the magazine and would soon start subscribing to it. In the front of each issue, a section headed “Goings On About Town” simply listed — page after page after page — capsule details about art galleries, films being shown, dance performances, library events, concerts, and of course stage productions. About The Fantasticks it included the theater name and performance times, of course, but nothing at all about the plot; it simply said, like, “[Some ridiculous number in the thousands] performances and counting.” (From the start of its Off-Broadway run to its closing, it ultimately played at the same theater for 42 years — over seventeen thousand performances.)

But of the plot and music, the cast and so on: a complete blank space in my head: a blank space — a malleable hollow just ripe for filling.

Well, I’m not gonna try to convince you that it’s high art. (It never pretended to be.) It’s outdated in its attitudes about men, about women, about women-and-men, about children and parenting. Two songs in particular jar today — jar so much that the show’s creators struggled for years with how to completely rework them; they jar so much that if I’d come to the soundtrack for the first time at any point in the last 20-30 years, I’d be horrified. (The songs, for what it’s worth, are “It Depends on What You Pay” and “Rape Ballet,” and while the lyrics make plain the meaning — “rape” in the old, antiquated sense of “abduction,” as here — well, there it is: sticking up in the middle of the playlist like an upraised middle finger.)

But The Fantasticks meant something to twenty-year-old me. I’d recently tried my hand at poetry and discovered, you know: writing to a rhyme-and-rhythm form is hard as bejeezus… Primarily, though, it’s easy to be glib and cynical about love if you’ve never been in love. But when you’ve started — oh so tentatively — for the first time to feel something magnetic about one other person, and when you’re suddenly forced to listen to lyrics clever enough to appeal to your language-loving mind, and grateful for a work’s occasional, self-aware nod in the direction of its own genre’s artificiality…

…well, then, it’s easy to remember that kind of September, or March, or Tuesday, or year.

___

A handful of additional resources, if you care to follow up:

  • The show’s home page (still active, after a fashion)
  • Wikipedia, inevitably
  • Lyrics
  • YouTube: the 1964 Hallmark Hall of Fame TV broadcast, complete with advertising (I vaguely remember this playing in our house, but 13-year-old me certainly wasn’t “into it”)
  • Variety: interview with librettist Tom Jones (no relation!), published after his death last year at age 95

Where in Your Time and Your Body

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[Video: Janice Ian performs “At Seventeen” on The Old Gray Whistle Test, a British music show broadcast back in the 1970s-80s. I included this song in a “Midweek Music Break” post some years ago about “haunting” music, and still think it deserves that descriptor.]

From whiskey river (last stanza):

Mother Talking in the Porch Swing

Inside the river is there a river?—
it could follow slow water the way
the real current follows a stiller
shore. And in your life the life that
hurries could pass, and pass its
open neighbor the earth, and its shore
the sky. To be here, and always to find
places in the current, the dreams
the river has—surely we bubbles
ought to tell about it?

Listen: One of the rooms the river has
after its bridge and its bend in the mountains
is a place waiting for the sun every
afternoon, when the sun dwells
at a slant under a log and finds
that little yellow room and a waterbug
trying to learn circles but never making
one its shadow approves. Miles later
the river tries to recall that dream,
turning with all of its twisting self
that found gravel and found it good.

Just before the ocean that river
turns on its back and side and slowly
invites the world and the air and the sky,
trying to give away everything, everything.

(William Stafford [source])

…and:

You needn’t to search for any hole in the ground to look through into somewhere else. You can’t go neither forwards nor backwards into your daddy’s time nor your children’s if you have them. In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got. If there was any Fall, look there, if there was any Redemption, look there, and if you expect any Judgment, look there, because they all three will have to be in your time and your body and where in your time and your body can they be?

(Flannery O’Connor [source])

Not from whiskey river:

XIII

Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were
behind you, like the winter that has just gone by.
For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter
that only by wintering through it will your heart survive.

Be forever dead in Eurydice—more gladly arise
into the seamless life proclaimed in your song.
Here, in the realm of decline, among momentary days,
be the crystal cup that shattered even as it rang.

Be—and yet know the great void where all things begin,
the infinite source of your own most intense vibration,
so that, this once, you may give it your perfect assent.

To all that is used-up, and to all the muffled and dumb
creatures in the world’s full reserve, the unsayable sums,
joyfully add yourself, and cancel the count.

(Rainer Maria Rilke [source])

…and:

She had read an article on this café in a magazine. The article had the headline “Uncovering Truth Behind ‘Time-Traveling Café’ Made Famous by Urban Legend.” The gist of the article was as follows.

The café’s name was Funiculi Funicula. It had become famous, with long queues each day, on account of the time-traveling. But it wasn’t possible to find anyone who had actually gone back in time, because of the extremely annoying rules that had to be followed. The first rule was: The only people you can meet while in the past are those who have visited the café. This would usually defeat the purpose of going back. Another rule was: There is nothing you can do while in the past that will change the present. The café was asked why that rule existed, but their only comment was that they didn’t know.

As the author of the article was unable to find anyone who had actually visited the past, whether or not it was actually possible to go back in time remained a mystery. Even supposing it was possible, the sticky point of not being able to change the present certainly made the whole idea seem pointless.

The article concluded by stating that it certainly made an interesting urban legend, but it was difficult to see why the legend existed. As a postscript, the article also mentioned there were apparently other rules that had to be followed but it was unclear what these were.

(Toshikazu Kawaguchi [source])

…and:

The Best Slow Dancer

Under the sagging clotheslines of crepe paper
By the second string of teachers and wallflowers
In the school gym across the key through the glitter
Of mirrored light three-second rule forever
Suspended you danced with her the best slow dancer
Who stood on tiptoe who almost wasn’t there
In your arms like music she knew just how to answer
The question mark of your spine your hand in hers
The other touching that place between her shoulders
Trembling your countless feet lightfooted sure
To move as they wished wherever you might stagger
Without her she turned in time she knew where you were
In time she turned her body into yours
As you moved from thigh to secrets to breast yet never
Where you would be for all time never closer
Than your cheek against her temple her ear just under
Your lips that tried all evening long to tell her
You weren’t the worst one not the boy whose mother
Had taught him to count to murmur over and over
One slide two slide three slide now no longer
The one in the hallway after class the scuffler
The double clubfoot gawker the mouth breather
With the wrong haircut who would never kiss her
But see her dancing off with someone or other
Older more clever smoother dreamier
Not waving a sister somebody else’s partner
Lover while you went floating home through the air
To lie down lighter than air in a moonlit shimmer
Alone to whisper yourself to sleep remember.

(David Wagoner [source])

…and:

How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you was?

(Satchel Paige [source])

Potpourri: June 18 (2024 Edition)

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[No idea why this symphony — especially but not exclusively its second movement — might’ve been on my mind so much lately… For more, see below.]

Welcome to my more or less annual post consisting of nothing but whatever’s on my mind on June 18. The most notable feature of the 2024 edition, I think, is the feeling — lost for five years — of composing it from home. True, it’s (as they say) “only a rental,” but it is indeed a house, in a place where we have chosen to live.

(Technically, 2023 was our first June 18th here, but you will search in vain for a 2023 edition of this series… because there wasn’t one. We’d flown back across the country last year, for a wedding.)

About that Spotify playlist: I vaguely remember, sometime in the 1970s, deciding that I needed to “get” classical music — become more familiar with it, if not exactly, y’know, conversant with it. To that point, I was vaguely familiar only with Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, along with fragments like Brahms’s lullaby and so on; I suppose you could also throw in Gershwin and Copland, but I wanted to “get” pre-20th classical music. And I have no idea why I settled on Mahler. His music hadn’t been recommended to me by anyone I remember, and I hadn’t encountered it in the soundtrack of a film or other media context…

Anyhow, Mahler it was.

I could not tell you even back then (when I must have seen the album jacket a hundred times) nor later (ditto, cassette-tape and CD labels) which recordings of the First Symphony I listened to so many times, at home or in the car. I vaguely remember that the first album — by whoever performed it — was on the Deutsche Grammaphon label; I base this on the near-certainty that I wanted to impress myself with an “authoritative” actual-by-gods-real-German investment, as if I had any idea what I meant by that.

It wasn’t the Boston Symphony, though. And Seiji Ozawa wasn’t conducting. But this will more than suffice for today.

(Aside: I just discovered I also featured the second movement of the “Titan” symphony in a post back in 2019.)

I don’t talk much here about my experience of getting, well, old. When I do get into it with family and friends, it’s in what we might call a commiserative context: “Can you believe I’m/we’re over 70 now? And boy, do I ache when I get out of bed in the morning. And my hearing’s observably worse. And I need new glasses. Don’t even ask about my teeth. And what about all those whippersnappers cavorting on my lawn?!?” That sort of thing.

The one thing we don’t talk about (even kiddingly) is, well, The Thing. The one inescapable fact of life, after being born in the first place (both events more or less out of our control): the, y’know… terminus.

I’m not sure I’d even know how to talk about it, or why it should feel so off-limits as a topic — given, especially, how much and how thoroughly we — all those friends and family — have talked about every single other Big Event in all our lives. (I’ve always loved that I can talk with these folks about “anything.” And that’s true. Except for this.)

Now, the practicalities of death: oh yeah, we’ve discussed those (before moving hurriedly on to lighter matters, like major surgery). We talk about wills and estate planning, end-of-life directives and do-not-resuscitate forms, and so on. We talk about those things, I think, mostly because we have to: they necessarily involve other people (people about whom we generally care very, very much). Those are difficult but loving discussions.

But that’s not the sort of thing my mind is nudging up against at the moment. I’m thinking, more, about death as a personal thing: my death. What will it be like, to die? Will I know that it’s happening, before it happens, and if so, how soon before? What will I leave undone — what pieces will I have inadvertently left behind for others to pick up? (Because there are always unpicked-up pieces, aren’t there?)

Oh, I’m not morbid. I don’t want to think about such matters; a common trope in the media might be “good deaths,” but I doubt that many deaths at all — no matter how peaceful and pain-free for the dying — leave behind 100% nice and tidy lives for others involved.

I have been very, very fortunate to have had few deaths in my own family and among my dearest friends. I’ve lost my grandparents and dad; two friends from my younger days died way too early, but not, y’know, violently. On the other hand, I know this leaves me woefully unprepared to deal with the deaths — however peaceful and “good” or otherwise — of all these other people I’ve been close to my whole life. I don’t want to hurt them by being the first of our circle to die, but on the other hand I’m terrified of not being the first. (It’s weird to be thinking about this at all, I know.)

Enough of that. It’s just on my mind today, and, well, on most days anymore.

Edit to add: 100% coincidentally, I just now learned — while following up on a very old blog post — of an app called WeCroak. (That’s the logo at the left.) Says the Web site:

The WeCroak app is inspired by a Bhutanese folk saying: to be a happy person, one must contemplate death five times daily.

Each day, we’ll send you five invitations to stop and think about death. Our invitations come at random times and at any moment, just like death. When they come, you can open the app to reveal a quote about death from a poet, philosopher, or notable thinker.

We encourage you to take one moment for contemplation, conscious breathing or meditation. We believe that a regular practice of contemplating mortality helps us accept what we must, let go of things that don’t matter and honor the things that do.

How about that? Unfortunately, it’s not available for my phone’s version of Android, but you might be interested (even if not in your 70s)!

___

One of my favorite “followees” over on Instagram is one whose handle there identifies her as ceegee_cgn — AKA Claudia, based in Cologne, Germany. Otherwise, I know only that she occasionally visits other cities around western continental Europe: Paris, Düsseldorf, Köln, Marseilles, and so on, with what seems to be an annual or semi-annual jaunt to Ibiza. Because I’ve asked her, I know that she shoots not with a “real” camera, but with an iPhone (“for me,” she says, “still the best way to catch moments while travelling”).

Okay, that’s not all I know about her. I know about her principally that she has an exquisite eye for geometry, especially the geometry of structures — and for the ways that people interact (often unconsciously) with the structures in whose presence they find themselves. Like most frequent photographers, she has favorite subjects which she returns to regularly, but she always finds a little something just so — just right, just different enough — to imbue the shot with one-of-a-kind authenticity. Her photos are almost exclusively in black-and-white, sometimes only B&W, with no shades of gray at all, and she generally follows the original Instagram format restriction (square pix only — exceptions for the rare portrait-format video clips). In a given caption, you’ll find little specific information: lots of general-purpose hashtags (#bw_lightandshadow, etc.)… which might be frustrating for some. But — for me — the dearth of information paradoxically adds weight to her reverence for the sheer beauty of form, for two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional geometry: girders, windows, railway stations, sidewalks, stairways… all boiled down to straight lines, circles, graceful loops and whorls, all the myriad fingerprints of civilization.

I thought I’d close today’s (this year’s) “Potpourri” post with a tiny gallery of some of Claudia’s work (the last one, a rare color shot). I’ve been following her for years, but the ten photos here go back only to 2022 or so.

My thanks to her for her permission to grace this space with a selection of her work. I greatly admire it, and am delighted to feature it in this post.

And with that, I’ll bring this yearly installment to a close. I hope you (whoever you are) are, like me, continuing to find reasons to be happy as well as, uh, excruciatingly aware of the passage of time. Cling to the good stuff, note but give no particular weight to the bad, and perhaps we’ll find ourselves crossing paths again next year, hmm?

The Blurry Passage from Dreaming to Being

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[Image: an early example of one of my so-called “#jesstorypix” photo series on Instagram — photos, usually enigmatic/ambiguous in some way, with little, uh, microfictional captions. The caption on this one (from August, 2018) reads: “Ironically, the jukebox in the diner was playing Jim Reeves’s ‘He’ll Have to Go’ at the time they had their last conversation. It didn’t work out as he’d planned.” (If you’re not familiar with the song, here’s a simple lyrics-only video.)]

From whiskey river:

Once while visiting his friend Max Brod, young Kafka awakened Brod’s father, who was asleep on a couch. Instead of apologizing, Kafka gently motioned him to relax, advanced through the room on tiptoe, and said softly: “Please — consider me a dream.”

(Franz Baumer [source, in original German])

…and (first stanza):

Scotch Tape Body

I never thought,
forty years ago,
taping my poems into a notebook,
that one day the tape
would turn yellow, grow brittle, and fall off
and that I’d find myself on hands and knees
groaning as I picked the pieces up
off the floor
one by one

Of course no one thinks ahead like that
If I had
I would have used archival paste
or better yet
not have written those poems at all

But then I wouldn’t have had
the pleasure of reading them again,
the pleasure of wincing
and then forgiving myself,
of catching glimpses of who I was
and who I thought I was,
the pleasure—is that the word?—of seeing
that that kid really did exist.

(Ron Padgett [source])

…and:

Take a moment from time to time to remember that you are alive. I know this sounds a trifle obvious, but it is amazing how little time we take to remark upon this singular and gratifying fact. By the most astounding stroke of luck an infinitesimal portion of all the matter in the universe came together to create you and for the tiniest moment in the great span of eternity you have the incomparable privilege to exist.

(Bill Bryson [source])

Not from whiskey river:

“What if we had a chance to do it again and again,” Teddy said, “until we finally did get it right? Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”

(Kate Atkinson [source])

…and:

This is my home. This is where I was born. This is the bayou that runs in my dreams, this is the bayou bank that taught me to love water, where I spent endless summer hours alone or with my cousins. This is where I learned to swim, where mud first oozed up between my toes. This is where I saw embryos inside the abdomens of minnows. This is where I believed that if I was vain and looked too long into the water I would turn into a flower.

This is where I learned the legend of the greedy dog. There was an old dog on a raft and he had a bone in his teeth and he looked down into the water and saw a dog carrying a bone and he dropped the one he was holding to snatch the other dog’s bone away and so lost both bones, the real and the imaginary…

This is my world, where I was formed, where I came from, who I am. This is where my sandpile was. I have spent a thousand hours alone beneath this tree making forts for the fairies to dance on in the moonlight. At night, after I was asleep, my mother would come out here and dance her fingers all over my sand forts so that in the morning I would see the prints and believe that fairies danced at night in the sand.

(Ellen Gilchrist [source])

…and:

“Imagine,” Emrys continued, “imagine into your thirsty hand I am putting a heavy bottle. Drink, I say to you, and so you do.

“You lift the heavy bottle to your mouth and you open your lips and into your mouth pours — just a little, for I have so warned you — into your mouth pours a brew like none you have ever tasted. There are the hops and the barley, the malt, sure there are for this is ale after all. You can feel too the creamy foam on your lips. The brew is heavy yet curiously light upon the palate. Stout, you think, but no it is not stout despite the mouthfeel, nor bitters nor barley wine. For you can taste, ‘neath it all, a sweet tang as of honey and roasted hazelnuts. You can taste the clean smooth sparkling water of mountain brooks. You can taste the first shoots of spring and the green of summer and the dusk of early autumn nights, Is that perhaps apple? now you’re asking yourself, and you can feel yourself warmed by the glow of a winter’s fireside, your companions and your wife and yer little ones…”

[…]

Tavern patrons were frozen, immobilized, their mouths open, tankards in mid-air. The barmaids’ eyes swam and they stood riveted in place as though frozen in time, nailed to the floor. The barman himself had gone all glassy-eyed and ruddy, his mouth open as well. They looked like finely crafted wax statues, and they looked at him, Emrys ap Rhys, and Emrys had a mad moment during which he thought he must be dreaming a dream in which there was no time and yet too much of it.

(JES, Seems to Fit)

Putting Wings on Your Say-So Doesn’t Mean It’ll Fly

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[Image: “Oodnadatta track”; found on Flickr, taken by a photographer who identifies himself as simply “Brett.” The subject is a sculpture called “Planehenge,” in Australia’s Mutonia Sculpture Park. (The short bit about the sculpture park begins around 5:25 into that video.) The motorcycle is apparently Brett’s own, not part of the Planehenge work.]

From whiskey river:

Listen, listen. In a filmed interview I conducted with the writer James Baldwin, more than 40 years ago, he said, “No one was ever born who agreed to be a slave, who accepted it. That is, slavery is a condition imposed from without. Of course, the moment I say that,” Baldwin continued, “I realize that multitudes and multitudes of people for various reasons of their own enslave themselves every hour of every day to this or that doctrine, this or that delusion of safety, this or that lie. Anti-Semites, for example,” he went on, “are slaves to a delusion. People who hate Negroes are slaves. People who love money are slaves. We are living in a universe really of willing slaves, which makes the concept of liberty and the concept of freedom so dangerous,” he finished. Baldwin is making a profoundly psychological and even spiritual statement, not just a political or racial or social one. He knew, just as Lincoln knew, that the enemy is often us. We continue to shackle ourselves with chains we mistakenly think is freedom.

(Ken Burns [source])

…and (first stanza):

The Sixth Meditation: Faces of God

It is convenient for the old men to blame Eve.
To insist we are damned because a country girl
talked to the snake one afternoon long ago.
Children must starve in Somalia for that,
and old women be abandoned in our greatest cities.
It’s why we will finally be thrown into the lakes
of molten lead. Because she was confused
by happiness that first time anyone said
she was beautiful. Nevertheless, she must be
the issue, so people won’t notice that rocks
and galaxies, mathematics and rust are also
created in His image.

____________

The forest must
not show the other face: slugs and grubs,
nematodes, and greenhead flies laying eggs
so their white larvae squirm in the filth.
Tent caterpillars, high in the trees, swarm out
from their offensive shrouds to eat the green
luxury bare. Spiders cast their nets in the dark.
Aphids gorge on lice. The braconid wasps lay eggs
under the skin of sphinx caterpillars so the larvae
will bore their way out through the host.
The other faces of God are not mediated by our
heart’s need. We are not stone, nor even jungle.
We are animals haunted by love. Not spirits
buried in flesh, but the flesh itself.
And the spirit we are is not separated from it.

(Jack Gilbert [source])

Not from whiskey river:

[341]

The greatest stress. How, if some day or night a demon were to sneak after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you, “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything immeasurably small or great in your life must return to you—all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over and over, and you with it, a dust grain of dust.” Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or did you once experience a tremendous moment when you would have answered him, “You are a god, and never have I heard anything more godly.” If this thought were to gain possession of you, it would change you, as you are, or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “Do you want this once more and innumerable times more?” would weigh upon your actions as the greatest stress. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to crave noting more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science [source])

…and:

“To a forest,” Mannon said, “we might appear as forest fires. Hurricanes. Dangers. What moves quickly is dangerous, to a plant. The rootless would be alien, terrible.”

(Ursula K. LeGuin [source])

…and:

Poem For A Lady [*]
Whose Voice I Like

so he said: you ain’t got no talent
if you didn’t have a face
you wouldn’t be nobody

and she said: god created heaven and earth
and all that’s Black within them

so he said: you ain’t really no hot shit
they tell me plenty sisters
take care better business than you

and she said: on the third day he made chitterlings
and all good things to eat
and said: “that’s good”

so he said: if the white folks hadn’t been under
yo skirt and been giving you the big play
you’d a had to come on uptown like everybody else

and she replied: then he took a big Black greasy rib
from adam and said we will call this woeman and her
name will be sapphire and she will divide into four parts
that simone may sing a song

and he said: you pretty full of yourself ain’t chu

so she replied: show me someone not full of herself
and i’ll show you a hungry person

(Nikki Giovanni [source])

_____

* Aside: the “lady” of Nikki Giovanni’s poem was Lena Horne.

[back]

Remembering the Silences of the Future

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[Can we hear silence? Well, I dunno; the gods know I’m no authority on hearing things. But here’s a Spotify playlist of pianist Simone Dinnerstein’s recordings of Bach’s “Goldberg Variations.” Feel free to pick and choose — the complete cycle as presented here is well over an hour long — or to just let the thing play in the background as you make your way through the day. But try to hear not only the notes themselves, but what’s going on in the split-seconds scattered among the notes; anticipate and catch yourself in the act of “hearing” them.]

From whiskey river:

The Moment

Oh, the coming-out-of-nowhere moment

when,   nothing

happens

no what-have-I-to-do-today-list
 

maybe   half a moment

the rush of traffic stops.

The whir of I should be, I should be, I should be

slows to silence,

the white cotton curtains hanging still.

(Marie Howe [source])

…and (italicized portion):

Stephen Hawking… found it tantalizing that we could not remember the future. But remembering the future is child’s play for me now. I know what will become of my helpless, trusting babies because they are grown-ups now. I know how my closest friends will end up because so many of them are retired or dead now… To Stephen Hawking and all others younger than myself I say: ‘Be patient. Your future will come to you and lie down at your feet like a dog who knows and likes you no matter what you are.

(Ted Chiang, quoting Kurt Vonnegut [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Every cop who’s been undercover knows there’s nothing in the world quite like the day before you go into a job. I figure astronauts on countdown know the feeling, and parachute regiments lining up for the jump. The light turns dazzling and unbreakable as diamonds, every face you see is beautiful enough to take your breath away; your mind is crystal clear, every second spreads itself out in front of you in one great smooth landscape, things that have baffled you for months suddenly make perfect sense. You could drink all day and be stone-cold sober; cryptic crosswords are easy as kids’ jigsaws. That day lasts a hundred years.

(Tana French [source])

…and:

X

Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies.
And be it gash or gold it will not come
Again in this identical disguise.

(Gwendolyn Brooks [source])

…and:

I came across the remarkable story of Simone Dinnerstein, who, after having some daimon in her wakened upon hearing Glenn Gould’s version of the Goldbergs, shifted her piano studies in a different direction and found her own vision for the piece. I thought that Gould would be perfection for me, but Simone’s playing had a vitality and lightness that forced me to rethink what I had enshrined. I read an interview with her in which she said that people listening to her performances were having mystical experiences…

“I grew up without any religion,” Simone told me at the beginning of our conversation. Yet she and her audiences are aware that there is something about her playing that takes you to a spiritual place. For having been brought up without formal religion, Simone Dinnerstein is able to give people a mystical experience. In my estimation, she is a theologian in the world of music and a teacher of a certain spiritual discipline in which her method requires a piano.

(Thomas Moore [source])

“The Place Where, When You Go There, They Have to Take You In”

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[“At a special corner in the town where The Boy lived stood a silvery steel pole which rang like a dinner plate when you struck it with a broom handle or fast-moving bicycle. Atop the pole were mounted two white-painted sheet-metal strips turned at right angles to each other. On one, the embossed black letters spelled out THIRD ST; on the other, HOLLY ST.” (Those black-on-white sheet-metal strips, of course, have since been replaced.) Photo by John E. Simpson.]

The universe’s mysterious energies have aligned to offer two quotes (via whiskey river) which seem in tune with personal life of the moment (given my weeklong stay with family back in New Jersey)…

First:

If you could be anyone, would you choose to be yourself?

(Naomi Shihab Nye [source])

…and then:

There was a smell of Time in the air tonight. He smiled and turned the fancy in his mind. There was a thought. What did time smell like? Like dust and clocks and people. And if you wondered what Time sounded like it sounded like water running in a dark cave and voices crying and dirt dropping down upon hollow box lids, and rain. And, going further, what did Time look like? Time looked like snow dropping silently into a black room or it looked like a silent film in an ancient theater, 100 billion faces falling like those New Year balloons, down and down into nothing. That was how Time smelled and looked and sounded.

(Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles [source])

Not from whiskey river, but in that same dimension of spirit:

A man travels the world over in search of what he needs, and returns home to find it.

(George A. Moore [source])

…and:

Deep in his being, The Boy knew that somewhere out there existed a world wider than his own, and what The Boy thought he knew about this wider world was this:

Somehow, weirdly, this other world continued to spin on its axis even without The Boy at its core. Presidents, artists, convicts, detectives, and saints walked on this strange world’s uncracked pavement (their mothers’ backs forever safe). It was a world where movie musicals were filmed, where automobiles functioned as their manufacturers promised. A world where eating caramel candy by the bagful led straight to smiles — yes, as in The Boy’s own world — but never to a dentist’s chair. A world where he would fear neither the shadows of the night nor the heavy climbing rope of gym class, a world in which no one he loved would ever die, and there was no ham.

The people in this wider world spoke in exotic tongues, their melodic speech lacking the sweetly nasal twang and erratic rhythms to which The Boy was accustomed. Their hair (even beneath the helmets, war bonnets, and coonskin caps which many of them wore) was combed and coiffed immaculately. Some of these people had children, or were children themselves, some of whom were children that The Boy might eventually (in that murky future when he and they had ceased to be children) come to know and even to love.

This wider world lay not miles but whole light years of imagination from the town where The Boy lived, remote and untouchable, far beyond the range of his parents’ battered car (any of their half-dozen sputtering, wheezing, gear-grinding cars) which bore The Boy and his family through his own world’s dark heart.

Yet The Boy knew deep in his own heart that what separated that wider world from his own was not geography, but ignorance. Its people, even its children, knew nothing at all of his world. They did not (and would never) know of the boundaries of his life: the town, the neighborhood, the intricate web of human eccentricity which cross-hatched the map of The Boy’s daily wanderings…

(JES, The Boy’s Seasons: How It Was)

…and:

You can almost always return to Home, The Place. But — eventually — you can never return to Home, The Actuality. It’s as gone as gone can be. Those big maples along [my childhood home on] Third Street used to drop all their leaves in autumn over about the same month-long period, and you could smell the aroma of curbside leaf fires (which were still legal, until they weren’t) that whole time. I used to think about that aroma, those glowing and brown particles of smoke drifting up and through the air, eventually settling on neighbors’ lawns and out onto the surface of the river. Those particles are still there, in some form — I was right about that. But eventually they stopped being added to, and eventually the trees themselves were gone, and now few people in the town remember or think of any of that. They’ve all got their own homes, homes they’ll eventually never be able to return to.

We’ll all just have to carry Home, The Actuality, around with us, until our own blood stops pumping. And then Home, The Actuality, will have some new and just as unrecoverable shape: whatever Home is, it’s not something “out there” to return to. It’s something inside, to which we can all return (or not) as we want, as often as we want.

(JES, quora.com [source])

__________

Note: the title of today’s post is a quotation from Robert Frost’s “The Death of the Hired Man” ([source]).

Finding Something Like a Sweet Spot

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[An atypical image for a Friday post here… For the last several months, I’ve been playing a CRPG (computer role-playing game) called Divinity: Original Sin II. It’s one of those looong, immersive games in which your character, in the company of optional others, must explore terrain, battle monsters, find treasure, and so on. The “land” you’re exploring, Rivellon, consists of several regions which are quite complex in terms of their variety and the ingenuity with which various features are hidden — too complex, really, to carry all around inside your (well, my) head. The image here is screen capture of an interactive map of Fort Joy, the game’s first major region, courtesy of the mapgenie.io site; different types of “people” and experiences are indicated with different types of icons — helping me sort out and remember what I need to do next, what I should avoid for now, and what I most enjoyed (or didn’t, haha). And yes: the “interactive” element of the map lets me zoom in and out, and show/reveal any or all of these features, so I’m not overwhelmed with everything at once. I can’t tell you how much this map has helped preserve my sanity.]

From whiskey river (first paragraph):

To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don’t know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly. And that the unofficial history of the world shows that dedicated individuals and popular movements can shape history and have, though how and when we might win and how long it takes is not predictable.

Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it; despair is a confident memory of the future… Optimism is similarly confident about what will happen. Both are grounds for not acting. Hope can be the knowledge that we don’t have that memory and that reality doesn’t necessarily match our plans.

(Rebecca Solnit [source])

…and:

If the world gives you the blues, if you wake up in the middle of the night with waves of fear and senseless panic washing over you, I am your friend. If you’re overcome by a desperation that makes your mouth open for a scream that never comes out but just freezes your face in mute despair, then you and I have something in common. If you can’t understand them for the life of you, even though you’ve tried so hard, when that dislocation makes you feel like you’re the only one of your species on the planet, I know I can confide in you. If this endless ghetto of lies and heart break, this life-long run of fences and flickering neon signs, night sweats and suicidal urges makes you feel like stopping, just stopping, like stopping breathing, wait. Wait. You don’t have to tell me your name. You don’t have to prove yourself to me. I accept you. If you’re finding life to be the one thing that’s trying to kill you, I want you to stay alive to rise with the sun and fight back.

(Henry Rollins [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Today

If ever there were a spring day so perfect,
so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze

that it made you want to throw
open all the windows in the house

and unlatch the door to the canary’s cage,
indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,

a day when the cool brick paths
and the garden bursting with peonies

seemed so etched in sunlight
that you felt like taking

a hammer to the glass paperweight
on the living room end table,

releasing the inhabitants
from their snow-covered cottage

so they could walk out,
holding hands and squinting

into this larger dome of blue and white,
well, today is just that kind of day.

(Billy Collins [source])

…and:

In Perpetual Spring

Gardens are also good places
to sulk. You pass beds of
spiky voodoo lilies
and trip over the roots
of a sweet gum tree,
in search of medieval
plants whose leaves,
when they drop off
turn into birds
if they fall on land,
and colored carp if they
plop into water.

Suddenly the archetypal
human desire for peace
with every other species
wells up in you. The lion
and the lamb cuddling up.
The snake and the snail, kissing.
Even the prick of the thistle,
queen of the weeds, revives
your secret belief
in perpetual spring,
your faith that for every hurt
there is a leaf to cure it.

(Amy Gerstler [source])

…and:

Once more I’m encoded to fear dying and to sense I never will.

Yet an otherwise banal moment may all at once suffuse me with strangeness when I realize: “This is a day I didn’t think I’d have.” All the days since [my night of near-death at Chaco Canyon] have been those. At any odd moment, a room’s most prosaic object—a terra cotta pot, for example—may say: “This light from red clay is light you might not have been around for.”

If Chaco gave me that, it also gave me the dark twin to go with it: “nothing matters.” In a healthy sense, the latter realization doesn’t cancel its sibling. Their two ways of looking differently at the same thing may amount to no more than seeing the evanescence of what’s cherishable—except that to leave one’s own body out of what went into its deepest knowledge yields a wisdom thin as paper. It takes the actual, that full flood of bodily terror, long continued, to widen the pupil of one’s inner eye. Once it has, we forget—though never completely, and rarely for long. Out of the trivial chaos of an afternoon, rain on a manhole cover may suddenly give back the sweetness of existing.

The glossy black tip on a magpie’s wingfeather can do it. Checking the body for deer ticks can suddenly bathe one’s calves and thighs with gratitude. Iridescence in sun-stricken paint on old cars. Sweetness of the plainest, most everyday faces. Richness of one’s boredoms, their motions and textures. Of a bank teller’s eyes that, for a half-second, look into mine with normal and therefore intricate brilliance.

(Reg Saner [source])

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)

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