Running After My Hat

That Is Magic!

April 20, 2018 by John Leave a Comment

[Note to long-time readers of RAMH: To the extent that I follow anything like a schedule here, I have a tradition of posts appearing on or around April 20 each year (e.g., here and here and here, and of course here (hence the traditional date)). For various reasons, my “April 20” post this year ~~will appear tomorrow,~~ appears here, i.e., on April 21.]

[Image: “As if he grew there, house and all — Together,” by Carol Jacobs-Carre. (Found on Flickr, naturally, and used here under a Creative Commons license; thank you!) After quoting the poem by Thomas Cowper from which she drew the image’s title, the photographer explains: “These snails grab a bit of needles and so forth when they retreat into their shells, making the shell appear ‘dead’. If you look above the snail you can see where it was lying as well as a very small snail shell in the litter.”]

From whiskey river (italicized lines — from the July, 1999, issue of Poetry):

Tomorrow

I

Tomorrow I will start to be happy.
The morning will light up like a celebratory cigar.
Sunbeams sprawling on the lawn will set
dew sparkling like a cut-glass tumbler of champagne.
Today will end the worst phase of my life.

I will put my shapeless days behind me,
fencing off the past, as a golden rind
of sand parts slipshod sea from solid land.
It is tomorrow I want to look back on, not today.
Tomorrow I start to be happy; today is almost yesterday.

II

Australia, how wise you are to get the day
over and done with first, out of the way.
You have eaten the fruit of knowledge, while
we are dithering about which main course to choose.
How liberated you must feel, how free from doubt:

the rise and fall of stocks, today’s closing prices
are revealed to you before our bidding has begun.
Australia, you can gather in your accident statistics
like a harvest while our roads still have hours to kill.
When we are in the dark, you have sagely seen the light.

III

Cagily, presumptuously, I dare to write 2018.
A date without character or tone. 2018.
A year without interest rates or mean daily temperature.
Its hit songs have yet to be written, its new-year
babies yet to be induced, its truces to be signed.

Much too far off for prophecy, though one hazards
a tentative guess—a so-so year most likely,
vague in retrospect, fizzling out with the usual
end-of-season sales; everything slashed:
your last chance to salvage something of its style.

(Dennis O’Driscoll [source])

…and (italicized portion of last paragraph):

Zen was known for its cavalier, if not dismissive, attitude toward words. “To talk about it is to go right by it,” those old Zenmen were fond of saying. And yet no school of Buddhism has generated as much literature. Thousands of books have been written, in the East as well as in the West, about what cannot be expressed by language. I wanted to circle around from behind and maybe catch it unawares…

Whenever I say Zen, people are always correcting me: “It’s Ch’an/Chan (the Wade-Giles and Pin-yin romanizations of the word).” They say, “Zen is the Japanese form of Ch’an. Chinese Ch’an is different from Japanese Zen.” That’s one way of looking at Zen, as a cultural phenomenon. But Chinese Ch’an, Japanese Zen, and Korean Son all point to the same moon of the mind. And there aren’t two kinds of mind.

The reason I like to point with Zen, as opposed to Ch’an, is that I love a good Z… Besides, Zen isn’t Chinese or Japanese anymore. It belongs to anyone willing to see their nature and become a Buddha, anyone who lives the life of no-mind and laughs in these outrageous times.

(Bill Porter [source])

[Read more…]

Of Crabapples, Clarets, and Clarinets

April 13, 2018 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Masks,” by Gus Mayer. (Found on Flickr; used here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!) The photographer’s caption/description didn’t mean anything to me, and may not mean much of anything to anyone except the person in whose honor he posted the photo. But I liked the photo in its own right, especially for an accompaniment to this week’s selections.]

From whiskey river:

Instructions on Not Giving Up

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

(Ada Limón [source])

…and:

A poet once said, “The whole universe is in a glass of wine.” We will probably never know in what sense he meant it, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflection in the glass, and our imagination adds atoms. The glass is a distillation of the earth’s rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe’s age, and the evolution of stars. What strange array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization; all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts—physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on—remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!

(Richard Feynman [source])

…and:

Trees

They stand in parks and graveyards and gardens.
Some of them are taller than department stores,
yet they do not draw attention to themselves.

You will be fitting a heated towel rail one day
and see, through the louvre window,
a shoal of olive-green fish changing direction
in the air that swims above the little gardens.

Or you will wake at your aunt’s cottage,
your sleep broken by a coal train on the empty hill
as the oaks roar in the wind off the channel.

Your kindness to animals, your skill at the clarinet,
these are accidental things.

We lost this game a long way back.
Look at you. You’re reading poetry.
Outside the spring air is thick
with the seeds of their children.

(Mark Haddon [source])

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Is Poetry Enough?

April 6, 2018 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: One of the pieces by American artist Brad Downey in his show, “Reverse Culture Shock,” currently at the gallery MU in Eindhoven, Netherlands. (Photo by Hanneke Wetzer.) Found on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license. (Thank you!) Says MU at the Flickr page for all the photos from the show’s opening: “We are living in interesting times – and what a mixed blessing it is! The optimism that swept across the western world after the fall of the Berlin Wall has been replaced by bewilderment. ‘What the [beep/fuck/f**k] is happening?!’ would sum it up nicely.” It adds that the exhibition is Downey’s “most engaged exhibition to date because, as he says, sometimes poetry is not enough.” Hmm.]

From whiskey river:

Read poetry every day of your life. Poetry is good because it flexes muscles you don’t use often enough. Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand. And, above all, poetry is compacted metaphor or simile. Such metaphors, like Japanese paper flowers, may expand outward into gigantic shapes. Ideas lie everywhere through the poetry books, yet how rarely have I heard short story teachers recommending them for browsing…

What poetry? Any poetry that makes your hair stand up along your arms. Don’t force yourself too hard. Take it easy. Over the years you may catch up to, move even with, and pass T. S. Eliot on your way to other pastures. You say you don’t understand Dylan Thomas? Yes, but your ganglion does, and your secret wits, and all your unborn children. Read him, as you can read a horse with your eyes, set free and charging over an endless green meadow on a windy day.

(Ray Bradbury [source])

…and:

The Poem to End All Poems

If I had to write a poem to end all poems,
it would be the word ‘lonely’
in every language.
It would ask for nothing,
only echo, echo, cry, then sleep.
Please don’t make me write it.
Don’t make me be honest.
Not after all this time, all this
gorgeous pretending.
I have finally spun a story that doesn’t
look like a failure,
and all I want to do is stay in it.
All I want to do is keep singing.
Let me stay in this kingdom without
a name.
The one I made.
Let me sit with my tin crown on my makeshift throne.
Let me do all of it.
Let me fight.
Let me be the dragon and the
spear that kills it.
I would very much like to be both.

(Caitlyn Siehl [source])

…and:

My Segment on the NewsHour
(excerpt)

But that is just half the story.
The Gospel of Thomas has what I take to be the full text.

The Kingdom of God is within youThomas, Saying 3
and all around you.

Split a piece of wood. I am there.Saying 77
Lift up a stone, and you will find me there.

The holiest thing then, the kingdom, is inside,
the observing consciousness, the deep core of being,
and outside, the Brown Thrasher, the little girl skipping
over the squares of the sidewalk, the universe itself
that, so far as we know is unlimited.

It would be best here to start singing and dancing
for the spacious joy of inside and outside.

(Coleman Barks [source])

[Read more…]

Words as Obstacles, Words as Solutions

March 30, 2018 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Aerial,” by Shane Taremi. (Found on Flickr; used here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!) According to the photographer, this is an aerial portrait of his wife’s face — evidently produced with the help of dozens (hundreds?) of other people. (I like to think his wife’s name is “Ariel,” but, well, no idea.) Can’t see the portrait? Shrink the browser window a bit narrower, or just move back a foot or two from the screen.]

From whiskey river:

Rising in Perilous Hope

What can I hold in my hands this morning
that will not flow through my fingers?

What words can I say that will catch
in your mind like burrs, chiggers that burrow?

If my touch could heal, I would lay my hands
on your bent head and bellow prayers.

If my words could change the weather
or the government or the way the world

twists and guts us, fast or slow,
what could I do but what I do now?

I fit words together and say them;
it is a given like the color of my eyes.

I hope it makes a small difference, as
I hope the drought will break and the morning

come rising out of the ocean wearing
a cloak of clean sweet mist and swirling terns.

(Marge Piercy [source])

…and:

To Sleep
(excerpt)

It’s dangerous to lie down
mid-day, late March and dark,
a heavy, wet snow falling from the sky
or rising from the ground, it’s hard
to say, the day a blur
as you drift off toward sleep
rather than keeping your eye on
the great world around you
where it should be if you are
to earn the right to be
called a poet, attentive to
the details of everyday life—
the quality of light, the specific
gravity of the snow, the exact
weight of birdsong and wing.

(Ronald Wallace [source])

[Read more…]

Looking Where You Don’t Look

March 23, 2018 by John 2 Comments

[Image: “Turning Points,” by Aftab Uzzaman; found on Flickr, of course, and used here under a Creative Commons license. (Thank you!) The photographer supplies no information about the context of the photo, but other information at that Flickr page makes me believe it may be an aerial view of a scene in ~~Bangladesh~~ Alaska.]

From whiskey river:

Galileo thought that comets were an optical illusion. This is fertile ground: since we are certain that they’re not, we can look at what scientists are saying with fresh hope. What if there are really gleaming castellated cities hung upside-down over the desert sand? What limpid lakes and cool date palms have our caravans passed untried? Until, one by one, by the blindest of leaps, we light on the road to these places, we must stumble in darkness and hunger.

(Annie Dillard [source])

…and:

Once in a lifetime, perhaps, one escapes the actual confines of the flesh. Once in a lifetime, if one is lucky, one so merges with sunlight and air and running water that whole eons, the eons that mountains and deserts know, might pass in a single afternoon without discomfort. The mind has sunk away into its beginnings among old roots and the obscure tricklings and movings that stir inanimate things. Like the charmed fairy circle into which a man once stepped, and upon emergence learned that a whole century had passed in a single night, one can never quite define this secret; but it has something to do, I am sure, with common water. Its substance reaches everywhere; it touches the past and prepares the future, it moves under the poles and wanders thinly in the heights of air. It can assume forms of exquisite perfection in a snowflake, or strip the living to a single shining bone cast up by the sea.

Many years ago, in the course of some scientific investigations in a remote western country, I experienced, by chance, precisely the sort of curious absorption by water—the extension of shape by osmosis—at which I have been hinting. You have probably never experienced in yourself the meandering roots of a whole watershed or felt your outstretched fingers touching, by some kind of clairvoyant extension, the brooks of snow-line glaciers at the same time that you were flowing toward the Gulf over the eroded debris of worn-down mountains.

(Loren Eiseley [source])

…and (italicized lines in second section):

On Gambling

To a frog that’s never left his pond the ocean seems like a gamble. Look what he’s giving up: security, master of his world, recognition! The ocean frog just shakes his head. “I can’t really explain what it’s like where I live, but someday I’ll take you there.”

***

If you want what visible reality
can give, you’re an employee.

If you want the unseen world,
you’re not living your truth.

Both wishes are foolish,
but you’ll be forgiven for forgetting
that what you really want is
love’s confusing joy.

***

Gamble everything for love,
if you’re a true human being.

If not,
leave this gathering.

Half-heartedness doesn’t reach
into majesty. You set out
to find God, but then you keep
stopping for long periods
at mean-spirited roadhouses.

***

In a boat down a fast-running creek,
it feels like trees on the bank
are rushing by. What seems

to be changing around us
is rather the speed of our craft
leaving this world.

(Rumi [source])

[Read more…]

Hands of the Clock

March 16, 2018 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “March of the Wheelbarrows,” by JES. (Licensed for
Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial International use.)]

From whiskey river:

Sleeping for Kafka

I heard on the radio this morning that prayers can heal. Experiments demonstrate that cancer patients who are prayed for, even by an anonymous person, have a better prognosis than those who receive no prayers.

A person can purchase prayers from Grace Church in Kansas by dialing 1-800-prayers. Visa and Mastercard are accepted.

I read that Kafka, a chronic insomniac, felt refreshed after watching his beloved sleep. Sometimes he invited her over, just to admire how she draped herself over his couch, wrapped in immaculate rest.

Some speculate it was the dreams of his beloved he wrote.

Thoughts like dreams drift from mind to mind. Some are heavy and sink to the ground or disappear under water where they grow like sea plants, while others are light and glide upwards like helium molecules.

When Jacob saw angels going up and down a ladder, they were merely tracing his thoughts.

Nietzsche said few people think their own thoughts. Instead they are thought. Many people are dreamt and prayed. They are like seashells inhabited by hermit crabs.

Most of us have no clue whose dream we are.

(Nin Andrews [source])

…and:

Gabriel
(excerpt)

There are enigmas in darkness
There are mysteries
Sent out without searchlights

The stars are hiding tonight
The moon is cold and stony
Behind the clouds

Nights without seeing
Mornings of the long view
It’s not a sprint but a marathon

Whatever we can do
We must do
Every morning’s resolve

(Edward Hirsch [source])

…and (italicized portion):

Debtors

They used to say we’re living on borrowed
time but even when young I wondered
who loaned it to us? In 1948 one grandpa
died stretched tight in a misty oxygen tent,
his four sons gathered, his papery hand
grasping mine. Only a week before, we were fishing.
Now the four sons have all run out of borrowed time
while I’m alive wondering whom I owe
for this indisputable gift of existence.
Of course time is running out. It always
has been a creek heading east, the freight
of water with its surprising heaviness
following the slant of the land, its destiny.
What is lovelier than a creek or riverine thicket?
Say it is an unknown benefactor who gave us
birds and Mozart, the mystery of trees and water
and all living things borrowing time.
Would I still love the creek if I lasted forever?

(Jim Harrison [source])

[Read more…]

Weekend Music Break: Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats, “Hey Mama”

March 11, 2018 by John 2 Comments

I thought I’d never even heard of this band before this week. But that notion, apparently, makes sense only because I’d never paid attention to various email notifications I’d received about them in recent years. Suddenly they’re again on everyone’s radar — including mine, this time around — for the release of their second album, Tearing at the Seams.

How to characterize their music…? The sound is country-ish, Americana-ish, sorta-kinda Southern rock, but the label which seems most often and most strikingly mentioned alongside the band’s name is soul. Rateliff’s powerful voice won’t make you think Sam Cooke has been reincarnated. And the lead instrumental voices are those of rock, principally guitar, bass, and drums. But yeah: in the spirit of the music and the sense of the lyrics you’ll find plenty of soul. (It doesn’t hurt that the label behind them is the legendary Stax Records, described by Wikipedia as “a major factor in the creation of Southern soul and Memphis soul music.”)

“Hey Mama,” the single whose video I’ve featured here, can be interpreted literally — as a dialogue between a young man and his mother. The guy feels sorry for himself, how hard he works, how little reward he’s gotten for it all, and so on. But his mother’s simply not having it:

Better start acting like this here’s a race…
You ain’t gone far enough to say
At least I tried
You ain’t worked hard enough to say
Well, I’ve done mine
You ain’t run far enough to say
My legs have failed

As I say, the literal interpretation works just fine. But pretty much anyone who’s tried (and tried hard) to succeed at one art form or another may see in it an interior dialogue, too: between the self-pitying voice that says, I may as well give up, and the loving but sterner one that says, Who are you trying to kid? You haven’t started working yet!

The visuals which accompany the song seem to encourage a non-literal understanding of what it’s about. It’s “just” a black-and-white film, not quite all in one take (although it feels like it), of a driver’s-eye view through the windshield of a car in almost non-stop traffic. The moments when the forward movement is interrupted — for pedestrians, for traffic signals which hold things up for a moment — provide some relief. But the overall sense is of an experience which simply does not stop, is impatient with pauses, is relentless.

The frustrated souls who recognize the two voices of the lyrics arguing in their heads will probably recognize this feeling, too.

Only See When You See

March 9, 2018 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Split,” by a user known simply as “Colin.” (Found it on Flickr, of course, and use it here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!) It takes a moment to realize what this actually depicts.]

From whiskey river:

It has been said repeatedly that one can never, try as he will, get around to the front of the universe. Man is destined to see only its far side, to realize nature only in retreat.

(Loren Eiseley [source])

…and (italicized lines):

Catastrophe Theory II

The foot goes forward, yes.
Yet there are roots. And a giant orb
which focuses its cyclopic eye
on a moiré morning.
When the microcosm is dry—it’s earth;
wet—it’s water.

Water, reeds, electric eel: one possibility.
Sun, reeds, dust mote and mite: another.
Whatever the elements
(it’s urban/it’s pastoral,
it’s empty/it’s open), the theory says
it could always be worse.

Until it is. Then theory fails,
leaving a tracer mark.
From blood you come to blood
you go. Sudden things happen
inside a frame. A flame is
lit. Look

at those pathetic wiggly squiggles.
Inferno or garden?
An immeasurable distance
sizzles between them.
Watching it all. But taking so little in.
Just what will fit on the flat

of a glass lens. The ticker is hopeful.
Pathetic fallacy.
Look at the numbers move.
The mystery of ticks.
One per second, sixty per Mickey.
Four becomes ten, one in six

bombs falls in a bushel, a basket,
a two o’clock casket. Do you wish to stay
connected? The seen blurs
into the just heard. A bird outside the wide
open window. The warm day
of March. It changes. It has

all changed. The world
as a distracting disaster.
MY, what little SENSE you make, said the wolf
to Mary Jo. The theory rests
on a tipping point.
The clock steps in a direction.

(Mary Jo Bang [source])

…and:

The Art of Drinking Tea

A man has been lonely for so long, he fears he is becoming but an apparition, a ghost of who he once was. He takes up wearing a black suit and hat and studying Zen Buddhism with a black-haired woman who has mastered the art of drinking tea. She is one of the few on earth who only drinks tea when she drinks tea. She performs the drinking of tea when she is drinking tea before large audiences. When one is drinking tea, the woman explains, there is no woman, no tea, there is only the drinking of tea. Often while sipping tea and listening to the instructions on the drinking of tea, the man closes his eyes and tries to fully experience the drinking of tea. But he always fails. Instead he dreams of the black-haired woman as an unrobed woman who only makes love when she makes love. He pictures her first removing his hat, then slowly unbuttoning him from the dark coat of his life. She lifts him to her lips like a china cup and sips so slowly, a one night stand lasts 49 days and nights. In the end there is no woman, no tea, no man. Just thinking of it, he barely remembers his own name. In this way he attains enlightenment.

(Nin Andrews [source])

[Read more…]

Freer than You Think

March 2, 2018 by John 5 Comments

[Image: “Chess Knights in Battle,” by Ken Teegardin on Flickr. (Used here under a Creative Commons license; thank you!) The photographer apparently took this photo as some kind of illustration for his own Web site, having to do with senior retirement planning; however, his site seems not to exist anymore. So I’ll use it here, as a photographic metaphor for having options we don’t necessarily see right away.]

From whiskey river:

As they say “to be in the world, but not of the world.” You can go to the Himalayas and miss it completely, and you can be stuck in the middle of New York and be very spiritual. I mean, I noticed in certain places, like New York, it brings out a certain thing in myself. If I go to some place like Switzerland, I find a lot of uptight people because they’re living amongst so much beauty there’s no urgency in trying to find the beauty within themselves. If you’re stuck in New York you have to somehow look within yourself — otherwise you’d go crackers. So, in a way, it’s good to be able to go in and out of both situations. Most people think when the world gets itself together we’ll all be okay. I don’t see that situation arriving. I think one by one, we all free ourselves from the chains we have chained ourselves to. But I don’t think that suddenly some magic happens and the whole lot of us will all be liberated in one throw.

(George Harrison [source])

…and:

At Seventy-Five: Re-Reading An Old Book

My prayers have been answered, if they were prayers. I live.
I’m alive, and even in rather good health, I believe.
If I’d quit smoking I might live to be a hundred.
Truly this is astonishing, after the poverty and pain,
The suffering. Who would have thought that petty
Endurance could achieve so much?
And prayers—
Were they prayers? Always I was adamant
In my irreligion, and had good reason to be.
Yet prayer is not, I see in old age now,
A matter of doctrine or discipline, but rather
A movement of the natural human mind
Bereft of its place among the animals, the other
Animals. I prayed. Then on paper I wrote
Some of the words I said, which are these poems.

(Hayden Carruth, Dr. Jazz [source: none canonical, but found here])

[Read more…]

Under Every Grief and Pine, a Joy with Silken Twine

February 23, 2018 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: ‘L’agonie du soleil,’ by Michel Schmid on Flickr (used here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!)]

From whiskey river:

And we the people are so vulnerable. Our bodies are shot with mortality. Our legs are fear and our arms are time. These chill humors seep through our capillaries, weighting each cell with an icy dab of nonbeing, and that dab grows and swells and sucks the cell dry. That is why physical courage is so important — it fills, as it were, the holes — and why it is so invigorating. The least brave act, chance taken and passage won, makes you feel loud as a child.

(Annie Dillard [source])

…and (italicized lines):

February Elegy

This bald year, frozen now in February.
This cold day winging over the ugly
Imperfect horizon line,
So often a teeth line of ten buildings.
A red flag flapping
In the wind. An orange curtain is noon.
It all hurts her eyes. This curtain is so bright.
Here is what is noticeably true: sight.
The face that looks back from the side
Of the butter knife.
A torn-bread awkwardness.
The mind makes its daily pilgrimage
Through riff-raff moments. Then,
Back into the caprice case to dream
In a circle, a pony goes round.
The circle’s association: There’s a center
To almost everything but never
Any certainty. Nothing is
More malleable than a moment. We were
Only yesterday breathing in a sea.
Some summer sun
Asked us over and over we went. The sand was hot.
We were only yesterday tender hearted
Waiting. To be something.
A spring. And then someone says, Sit down,
We have a heart for you to forget. A mind to suffer
With. So, experience. So, the circus tent.
You, over there, you be the girl
In red sequins on the front of a card selling love.
You, over there, you, in black satin.
You be the Maiden’s Mister Death.

(Mary Jo Bang [source])

…and:

Silent Journal

Inaudible consonant inaudible vowel
The word continues to fall
in splendor around us
Window half shadow window half moon
back yard like a book of snow
That holds nothing and that nothing holds
Immaculate text
not too prescient not too true.

(Charles Wright [source])

[Read more…]