Running After My Hat

Filling a Life Isn’t the Half of It

December 7, 2018 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Judy’s Husband’s Stuffed Pickles,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH). Taken at the North Florida Fair in November 2018; the husband was not in evidence, but the wife and the pickles did a fine job of representing the enterprise.]

From whiskey river:

Choosing to Think of It

Today, ten thousand people will die
and their small replacements will bring joy
and this will make sense to someone
removed from any sense of loss.
I, too, will die a little and carry on,
doing some paperwork, driving myself
home. The sky is simply overcast,
nothing is any less than it was
yesterday or the day before. In short,
there’s no reason or every reason
why I’m choosing to think of this now.
The short-lived holiness
true lovers know, making them unaccountable
except to spirit and themselves – suddenly
I want to be that insufferable and selfish,
that sharpened and tuned.
I’m going to think of what it means
to be an animal crossing a highway,
to be a human without a useful prayer
setting off on one of those journeys
we humans take. I don’t expect anything
to change. I just want to be filled up
a little more with what exists,
tipped toward the laughter which understands
I’m nothing and all there is.
By evening, the promised storm
will arrive. A few in small boats
will be taken by surprise.
There will be survivors, and even they will die.

(Stephen Dunn [source unknown, but probably here; appearing here])

…and (italicized portion):

You cannot write by thinking. You have plenty of time to think in between times. The period in between is when you stuff your eyeballs, when you read diversified multitudes of material in every field. I absolutely demand of you and everyone I know that they be widely read in every damn field there is: in every religion and every art form and don’t tell me you haven’t got time! There’s plenty of time. You need all of these cross-references. You never know when your head is going to use this fuel, this food for its purposes. Stuff yourself with serious subjects, with comic strips and motion pictures and radio and music; with symphonies, with rock, with everything! What we often forget is that thought is to be used to correct life. It’s not a way of life. If you make thought the center of your life, you’re not going to live it. So, what you have to do is be this kind of hysterical, emotional, vibrant creature who lives at the top of his lungs for a lifetime and then corrects around the edges so that he doesn’t go insane or drive his friends mad. Thought is the skin around the organ. The organ is full of blood and a beating heart, a soul and the exaltation of being alive!

(Ray Bradbury [source])

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Finally Time to Go In

November 30, 2018 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Holt Cemetery,” by Kevin O’Mara. (Found it on Flickr; used here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!) Cemeteries in New Orleans, famously, feature (often elaborate) above-ground tombs. As the photographer says of Holt Cemetery, “the only in-ground cemetery in New Orleans. It serves as a good reminder of why we usually lay our dead to rest above ground.” He adds, “the maintenance of the individual graves is up to those who purchased the plots. Because of the water table situation here most graves aren’t even dug six feet deep, and families are permitted to re-use them a year and a day after the last interment.”]

From whiskey river:

Our job is to record, each in his own way, this world of light and shadow and time that will never come again exactly as it is today.

(Edward Abbey [source])

…and:

Half Life

We walk through half our life
as if it were a fever dream

barely touching the ground

our eyes half open
our heart half closed.

Not half knowing who we are
we watch the ghost of us drift
from room to room
through friends and lovers
never quite as real as advertised.

Not saying half we mean
or meaning half we say
we dream ourselves
from birth to birth
seeking some true self.

Until the fever breaks
and the heart can not abide
a moment longer
as the rest of us awakens,
summoned from the dream,
not half caring for anything but love.

(Stephen Levine [source])

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

I have flipped through books, reading hundreds of opening and closing lines, across ages, across cultures, across aesthetic schools, and I have discovered that first lines are remarkably similar, even repeated, and that last lines are remarkably similar, even repeated. Of course in all cases they remain remarkably distinct, because the words belong to completely different poems. And I began to realize, reading these first and last lines, that they are not only the first and last lines of the lifelong sentence we each speak but also the first and last lines of the long piece of language delivered to us by others, by those we listen to. And in the best of all possible lives, that beginning and that end are the same: in poem after poem I encountered words that mark the first something made out of language that we hear as children repeated night after night, like a refrain: I love you. I am here with you. Don’t be afraid. Go to sleep now. And I encountered words that mark the last something made out of language that we hope to hear on earth: I love you. You are not alone. Don’t be afraid. Go to sleep now.

But it is growing damp and I must go in. Memory’s fog is rising. Among Emily Dickinson’s last words (in a letter). A woman whom everyone thought of as shut-in, homebound, cloistered, spoke as if she had been out, exploring the earth, her whole life, and it was finally time to go in. And it was.

(Mary Ruefle [source])

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At an Intersection Not So Much Seen as Glimpsed

November 23, 2018 by John 3 Comments

[Image: “The Abbeycwmhir Panoramic,” by Andrew Bowden. (Discovered it on Flickr, and use it here under a Creative Commons license; thank you!) The photographer’s caption to this photo of a “crossroad” says, “On the left was a forest road plunging into a deep and dark woodland. On the right, a barren and strangely alien mound. And straight on, our path”… which you have to look hard to see. It helps to enlarge the photo by clicking on it, especially if you’ve got a nice wide monitor. Even better, visit the Flickr link above to see the original — a 9,000-pixels wide monster.]

From whiskey river:

If we knew we were on the right road, having to leave it would mean endless despair. But we are on a road that only leads to a second one, and then to a third one and so forth. And the real highway will not be sighted for a long, long time, perhaps never. So we drift in doubt. But also in an unbelievable, beautiful diversity. Thus the accomplishment of hope remains an always unexpected miracle. But in compensation, the miracle remains forever possible.

(Franz Kafka [source: searched high and low for a definitive one, but this must be a paraphrase — possibly (according to numerous sources which phrase it thusly) from his Diaries])

…and:

[Describing an incident where he felt suspended several feet above the ground enclosed in a white sphere of light, when a voice spoke to him. This was what it said:]

From now on you need never await temporal attestation to your thought. You think the truth. You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to the Universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others.

(R. Buckminster Fuller [source])

…and:

Metonymy as an Approach to a Real World

Whether what we sense of this world
is the what of this world only, or the what
of which of several possible worlds
—which what?—something of what we sense
may be true, may be the world, what it is, what we sense.
For the rest, a truce is possible, the tolerance
of travelers, eating foreign foods, trying words
that twist the tongue, to feel that time and place,
not thinking that this is the real world.

Conceded, that all the clocks tell local time;
conceded, that “here” is anywhere we bound
and fill a space; conceded, we make a world:
is something caught there, contained there,
something real, something which we can sense?
Once in a city blocked and filled, I saw
the light lie in the deep chasm of a street,
palpable and blue, as though it had drifted in
from say, the sea, a purity of space.

(William Bronk [source])

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Knowing Your Place

November 16, 2018 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “I Know the Place Where You Keep Your Secrets,” by Thomas Hawk. Found it on Flickr, and use it here under a Creative Commons license (thank you!).]

From whiskey river:

At the age of twenty-nine Gautama slipped away from his palace in the middle of the night, leaving behind his family and possessions. He traveled as a homeless vagabond throughout northern India, searching for a way out of suffering. He visited ashrams and sat at the feet of gurus but nothing liberated him entirely — some dissatisfaction always remained. He did not despair. He resolved to investigate suffering on his own until he found a method for complete liberation. He spent six years meditating on the essence, causes and cures for human anguish. In the end he came to the realization that suffering is not caused by ill fortune, by social injustice, or by divine whims. Rather, suffering is caused by the behavior patterns of one’s own mind.

Gautama’s insight was that no matter what the mind experiences, it usually reacts with craving, and craving always involves dissatisfaction. When the mind experiences something distasteful it craves to be rid of the irritation. When the mind experiences something pleasant, it craves that the pleasure will remain and will intensify. Therefore, the mind is always dissatisfied and restless. This is very clear when we experience unpleasant things, such as pain. As long as the pain continues, we are dissatisfied and do all we can to avoid it. Yet even when we experience pleasant things we are never content. We either fear that the pleasure might disappear, or we hope that it will intensify. People dream for years about finding love but are rarely satisfied when they find it. Some become anxious that their partner will leave; others feel that they have settled cheaply, and could have found someone better. And we all know people who manage to do both.

(Yuval Noah Harari [source])

…and:

It’s All Right

Someone you trusted has treated you bad.
Someone has used you to vent their ill temper.
Did you expect anything different?
Your work—better than some others’—has languished,
neglected. Or a job you tried was too hard,
and you failed. Maybe weather or bad luck
spoiled what you did. That grudge, held against you
for years after you patched up, has flared,
and you’ve lost a friend for a time. Things
at home aren’t so good; on the job your spirits
have sunk. But just when the worst bears down
you find a pretty bubble in your soup at noon,
and outside at work a bird says, “Hi!”
Slowly the sun creeps along the floor;
it is coming your way. It touches your shoe.

(William Stafford [source])

…and:

Hawk

The forest is the only place
where green is green and blue is blue.
Walking the forest I have seen
most everything. I’ve seen a you
with yellow eyes and busted wing.
And deep in the forest, no one knew.

(Wendy Videlock [source])

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Drink, and Be Whole Again

November 9, 2018 by John Leave a Comment

[About the image: “Trophies of Hurricane Michael,” by John E. Simpson (shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH).]

From whiskey river:

The important thing is allowing the whole world to wake up. Part of allowing the whole world to wake up is recognizing that the whole world is free—everybody is free to be as they are. Until the whole world is free to agree with you or disagree with you, until you have given the freedom to everyone to like you or not like you, to love you or hate you, to see things as you see them or to see things differently—until you have given the whole world its freedom—you’ll never have your freedom.

(Adyashanti [source])

…and:

Perfected

The droppings of last year’s horses
Blaze up into golden stones.

– James Wright

The pond is feathered, grey-backed, moving north.
Nothing can hold it.
The fat little saint in the garden prays only
for a paint-job.
Flickers and downies contend at the feeder.
Is this a world in good order?

A red-winged blackbird grates on the world’s nerves—
another of the saints of repetition.
This is not a day
to ask after the gardener.

If Earth is perfected,
it is in its cycles, its seasons, its relentless
replications,
as Time is perfected in the saint’s plaster leprosy,
the scabbed mud of the shoreline,
the pile of lobbed limbs
in the hollow.

As for the geese, they’ve turned to alchemy,
depositing green tubes underfoot, vials
the winds will powder and carry
down to the water.

Drink, and be whole again.

As light sinks, the waters,
resistant to the world’s thirst, stiffen
beneath a glinting shield.
Still, the deer bend to whatever is on offer.
The saints, too, are making do
with gold.
Hard on a throat, gold.
Who would dare to ask after
the gardener?

The pond is flying north against
all natural law,
dragging the dead,
and whatever is un-rooted, uprooted,
unresolved.
See how the waters have broken
into scales, red in the last light, silver
where the moon

touches, troughs, touches.

With sunrise and the washing
of heaven’s flesh in risen mist, ask:
Is this a world in good order?

Ask again. Tomorrow
is the only answer, every sacred
dying cell of it.

(Marjorie Stelmach [source])

At the source page, the poet says of “Perfected”: “Arriving in a damp, chilly, early spring for a stay at a retreat center I have always loved, I asked after the woman who had welcomed me on previous visits and learned that she had been diagnosed with advanced stage cancer. The poem came from my contemplation of the sad disarray of her garden and the untended beauty of the adjacent wetland wilderness. Angered by the apparent intentions—so opposed to my own wishes—of the disease, of the seasons, of the Gardener, I struggled to understand anew the term ‘perfected’ (from Latin: completion), and to accept the world as complete, able to contain all things including disorder and even death and, by the alchemy of time and change, to remain in some sense ‘perfected.’ I can’t say I succeeded in convincing myself, but the poem represents my own attempt, as Frost put it, to ‘drink and be whole again / beyond confusion.'”

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Ghosts Necessary and Otherwise

November 2, 2018 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Are You Santa Claus (c. 1900),” a postcard uploaded to Flickr by user “pellethepoet.” (Used here under a Creative Commons license; thank you!)]

From whiskey river (which this week pulled a handful of favorites from Hallowe’ens gone by):

Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable and finally has come to look and not to buy. So shoes are worn and hassocks are sat upon and finally everything is left where it was and the spirit passes on, just as the wind in the orchard picks up the leaves from the ground as if there were no other pleasure in the world but brown leaves, as if it would deck, clothe, flesh itself in flourishes of dusty brown apple leaves and then drops them all in a heap at the side of the house and goes on.

(Marilynne Robinson [source])

…and:

14 rue Serpentine: a Paris Notebook
(excerpt)

14.

So the dead are among us again
even here where Halloween is not celebrated
and the moon flies through the skeletons of trees
and men in rowboats fish for souls on the river
There is a woman with spidery hair swinging a lantern
disappearing down the colonnade
a row of buildings tilted like gravestones
in which a single window is lit
a wall from whose depths shadows emerge
assuming the contours of bodies they will follow
all night and abandon at dawn:
a revelation to you
that each day we take on a new shadow

(Nicholas Christopher [source])

…and:

There was a time when the coming of this night meant something. A dark Europe, groaning in superstitious fear, dedicated this Eve to the grinning Unknown. A million doors had once been barred against the evil visitants, a million prayers mumbled, a million candles lit. There was something majestic about the idea.

(Robert Bloch [source: none canonical, but I found the story reproduced here])

…and:

Ghost Stories

In the back yard
the heavy frost lies
exactly in the shape of
the shadow of the house,
minute by minute disappearing
as the earth spins.

Who would live in such a
frosted house of shadows?
Ghosts turned silver with age.
They come and go with
the rising of the sun,
the turning of the seasons.

In summer I think they
live in the dew at the edge
of deep woods where the
last pasture touches
the first trees.

Sometimes they slip in among
the hickories and beech,
darkening into silhouettes.
It is hard to walk in the woods
without stepping on them:
what you think is the spongy floor
of the forest is their dark bodies
lying all in one direction,
circling the trees they cling to,
always rooted somehow
wherever they choose to lie down.

All the stories are true.

(Grace Butcher [source])

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In and Out of Context

October 26, 2018 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Prague – Diving Pig,” by a photographer identifying him/herself only as “BR0WSER.” Found it at Flickr, of course, and use it here under a Creative Commons license (thank you!). Depending on your mindset at the moment, the picture can be amusing or disorienting; it helps to read the caption, which identifies this as a sculpture by one Jan Kedlec. For a bit more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

The sky was clear that morning and there might still have been stars although he saw none. The thought of stars contributed to the power of his feeling. What moved him was a sense of those worlds around us, our knowledge however imperfect of their nature, our sense of their possessing some grain of our past and of our lives to come. It was that most powerful sense of our being alive on the planet. It was that most powerful sense of how singular, in the vastness of creation, is the richness of our opportunity. The sense of that hour was of an exquisite privilege, the great benefice of living here and renewing ourselves with love. What a paradise it seemed!

(John Cheever [source])

…and:

But is this really what having a self feels like? Do selves always seek their good, in the end? Are they never perverse? Do they always want meaning? Do they not sometimes want its opposite? And is this how memory works? Do our childhoods often return to us in the form of coherent, lyrical reveries? Is this how time feels? Do the things of the world really come to us like this, embroidered in the verbal fancy of times past? Is this really realism?

(Zadie Smith [source])

…and:

An Archival Print

God snaps your picture — don’t look away —
this room right now, your face tilted
exactly as it is before you can think
or control it. Go ahead, let it betray
all the secret emergencies and still hold
that partial disguise you call your character.

Even your lip, they say, the way it curves
or doesn’t, or can’t decide, will deliver
bales of evidence. The camera, wide open,
stands ready; the exposure is thirty-five years
or so — after that you have become
whatever the veneer is, all the way through.

Now you want to explain. Your mother
was a certain — how to express it? — influence.
Yes. And your father, whatever he was,
you couldn’t change that. No. And your town
of course had its limits. Go on, keep talking —
Hold it. Don’t move. That’s you forever.

(William Stafford [source])

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What You (and I) Cannot Really Know

October 19, 2018 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Portrait of the Unknown Saxophonist,” by Tom Waterhouse. Found it on Flickr, and use it here under a Creative Commons license (thank you!).

From whiskey river:

You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you will contain within your modest frame no less than 7 x 10¹⁸ joules of potential energy—enough to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point.

(Bill Bryson [source])

…and:

A Face

It’s just by chance, who
you are, but given myself
I take care of this being.
Nobody else will remember
its hunger, cold, loneliness:
I will be reminded, and care.

This face, like an old watch,
I carry wherever I go.
Grandmothers, grandfathers, you pictures,
you should forgive my regret:
my wanting another. I carry it
as you did. It belongs
somewhere, and I am taking it there.

On corners I let the wind
have all the world, and I turn
as a ship accepts the waves
but is itself and has a voyage
built into it, stubbornly.

The choice of being who you are
is offered us, or being nothing.
The mask of myself is an old gift
nobody else took. So I brought it here.

(William Stafford [source: various occurrences around the Web, none complete or canonical])

…and:

Sometimes people think they know you. They know a few facts about you, and they piece you together in a way that makes sense to them. And if you don’t know yourself very well, you might even believe that they are right. But the truth is, that isn’t you. That isn’t you at all.

(Leila Sales [source])

…and:

What are we? A fleeting, intricate presence riding a tiny speck of water and rock, out here in the dark, sailing the ship of wonder ever more deeply into the void from which we came, that is our true home and mysterious destination.

(Whitley Strieber and Jeffrey J. Kripal [source])

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A Luxurious Bite of the Present

October 5, 2018 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Please Do Not Obstruct (Ludlow, UK),” by John E. Simpson (shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH).]

From whiskey river (italicized lines):

Ode to the Present

This
present moment,
smooth
as a wooden slab,
this
immaculate hour,
this day
pure
as a new cup
from the past—
no spider web
exists—
with our fingers,
we caress
the present; we cut it
according to our magnitude
we guide
the unfolding of its blossoms.
It is living,
alive—
it contains
nothing
from the unrepairable past,
from the lost past,
it is our
infant,
growing at
this very moment, adorned with
sand, eating from
our hands.
Grab it.
Don’t let it slip away.
Don’t lose it in dreams
or words.
Clutch it.
Tie it,
and order it
to obey you.
Make it a road,
a bell,
a machine,
a kiss, a book,
a caress.
Take a saw to its delicious
wooden
perfume.
And make a chair;
braid its
back;
test it.
Or then, build
a staircase! Yes, a
staircase.
Climb
into
the present,
step
by step,
press your feet
onto the resinous wood
of this moment,
going up,
going up,
not very high,
just so
you repair
the leaky roof.
Don’t go all the way to heaven.
Reach
for apples,
not the clouds.
Let them
fluff through the sky,
skimming passage,
into the past. You
are
your present,
your own apple.
Pick it from
your tree.
Raise it
in your hand.
It’s gleaming,
rich with stars.
Claim it.
Take a luxurious bite
out of the present,
and whistle along the road
of your destiny.

(Pablo Neruda [source])

…and:

Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backwards in time and exist in two places at once.

It was my brother Stephen who told me that, when he wore his raveling maroon sweater to study in and spent a lot of time standing on his head so that the blood would run down into his brain and nourish it. I didn’t understand what he meant, but maybe he didn’t explain it very well. He was already moving away from the imprecision of words.

But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another. You don’t look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.

(Margaret Atwood [source])

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This Here, This Now, This You

September 28, 2018 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: Untitled photograph by Mike Liu; it was taken in 2016, at San Francisco International Airport. (I found it on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license –thank you!) About the image, the photographer says only: “I always seem to take the same photograph from the same spot of the same subject after getting off the plane. It is because I think the airport is a place of minor miracles, where connections are lost and made and reunions are the everyday trade.”]

From whiskey river (first paragraph):

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.

For endless eons there was no you. Before you know it, you will cease to be again. And in between you have this wonderful opportunity to see and feel and think and do. Whatever else you accomplish with your life, nothing will remotely compare with the incredible accomplishment of having managed to get yourself born. Congratulation. Well done. You really are special.

(Bill Bryson [source])

…and (last four stanzas):

Roses, Late Summer

What happens
to the leaves after
they turn red and golden and fall
away? What happens

to the singing birds
when they can’t sing
any longer? What happens
to their quick wings?

Do you think there is any
personal heaven
for any of us?
Do you think anyone,

the other side of that darkness,
will call to us, meaning us?
Beyond the trees
the foxes keep teaching their children

to live in the valley.
so they never seem to vanish, they are always there
in the blossom of the light
that stands up every morning

in the dark sky.
And over one more set of hills,
along the sea,
the last roses have opened their factories of sweetness

and are giving it back to the world.
If I had another life
I would want to spend it all on some
unstinting happiness.

I would be a fox, or a tree
full of waving branches.
I wouldn’t mind being a rose
in a field full of roses.

Fear has not yet occurred to them, nor ambition.
Reason they have not yet thought of.
Neither do they ask how long they must be roses, and then what.
Or any other foolish question.

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

A day when one has not pushed oneself to the limit seems a damaged damaging day, a sinful day. Not so! The most valuable thing one can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of a room.

(May Sarton [source])

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