Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

I Am Curious… Rock

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As you probably know, the Mars rover Curiosity includes, among its impressive onboard chemical-analysis instruments, a powerful laser. The idea is to focus in on small pebbles here and there on the Red Planet’s surface; from a distance of a few meters, the laser can zap a spot on a pebble very briefly, but strongly enough that it heats up, emitting gases and tiny particles whose chemical spectra can then be analyzed.

The JPL/NASA team announced early this past weekend that they’d singled out the first target for testing, a tiny little pyramid of basalt at first simply numbered N165… and, shortly, renamed Coronation. The scheduled moment of zapping was Sunday.

Of course, as with any public event, this one brought the Internet wags out in force. Of particular interest at the moment is the Twitter feed of a user named N165 aka Coronation. The first few tweets went up on Saturday (read from the bottom up):

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Writerly Tics, and The Willy-Billy Touchy Botfly

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The careful writer of novels, I regret to report, knows no rest; he can never indefinitely regard a final draft as final. At best, he arrives at the first printing stage. As soon as such a (haha) finished object comes out of the box, he opens it, a-tremble with anticipation… unerringly to a page on which:

  • he’s assaulted by that bit of awkward phrasing which, goddammit, he’d been meaning to tidy up ever since that sentence’s first draft, like, fifteen goddam years ago; and/or
  • a character named Lewis is referred to as “Louis”; and/or
  • a historical or scientific factoid which he knows to be false shrieks at him in mad hilarity, because he didn’t know it was false until last week; and/or
  • the Latin phrase pro bono appears as pro boner; and/or
  • etc.

All of which weighs on my mind today because even though Seems to Fit‘s first printing remains hypothetical, even as I noodle around with the book’s marketing campaign, such as it is, I continue to tinker with the work itself. Among this morning’s tasks: the global spellcheck.

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Miracles of Confusion

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[Image: a grainy photograph of a couple of volcanoes someplace. (Maybe another
planet.) Or are they? See the note at the foot of this post for more information.]

From whiskey river:

Dharma

The way the dog trots out the front door
every morning
without a hat or an umbrella,
without any money
or the keys to her doghouse
never fails to fill the saucer of my heart
with milky admiration.

Who provides a finer example
of a life without encumbrance —
Thoreau in his curtainless hut
with a single plate, a single spoon?
Gandhi with his staff and his holy diapers?

Off she goes into the material world
with nothing but her brown coat
and her modest blue collar,
following only her wet nose,
the twin portals of her steady breathing,
followed only by the plume of her tail.

If only she did not shove the cat aside
every morning
and eat all his food
what a model of self-containment she
would be,
what a paragon of earthly detachment.
If only she were not so eager
for a rub behind the ears,
so acrobatic in her welcomes,
if only I were not her god.

(Billy Collins [source])

…and:

Tour

Near a shrine in Japan he’d swept the path
and then placed camellia blossoms there.

Or — we had no way of knowing — he’d swept the path
between fallen camellias.

(Carol Snow [source])

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Neither Here Nor There

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[Image: a frame from Between Two Worlds, the 2009 film by director
Vimukthi Jayasundara. For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

The search for reason ends at the known; on the immense expanse beyond it only the sense of the ineffable can glide. It alone knows the route to that which is remote from experience and understanding. Neither of them is amphibious: reason cannot go beyond the shore, and the sense of the ineffable is out of place where we measure, where we weigh.

We do not leave the shore of the known in search of adventure or suspense or because of the failure of reason to answer our questions. We sail because our mind is like a fantastic seashell, and when applying our ear to its lips we hear a perpetual murmur from the waves beyond the shore.

Citizens of two realms, we all must sustain a dual allegiance: we sense the ineffable in one realm, we name and exploit reality in another. Between the two we set up a system of references, but we can never fill the gap. They are as far and as close to each other as time and calendar, as violin and melody, as life and what lies beyond the last breath.

(Abraham Joshua Heschel [source])

…and:

Social Security
(excerpt)

Long ago, everyone felt safe. Aristotle
never felt danger. Herodotus felt danger
only when Xerxes was around. Young women
were afraid of winged dragons, but felt
relaxed otherwise. Timotheus, however,
was terrified of storms until he played
one on the flute. After that, everyone
was more afraid of him than of the violent
west wind, which was fine with Timotheus.
Euclid, full of music himself, believed only
that there was safety in numbers.

(Terence Winch [source])

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A Chocolate Break Thursday

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…in lieu of a Midweek Music Break, and to compensate (sorta) for a postponed whiskey river Friday.

My brother alerted me to this news from the other day, from Estes Park, Colorado. Although the key video is probably playing at numerous spots around the Web, I think this is the best — notable for the enthusiasm not only of its creative, persistent main subject, but also of the reporter:

The Missus and I will be out of town for a couple days. I’m hoping to post the whiskey river thing Saturday; in the meantime, do yourself a favor and dream of chocolate. (Also fur.)

 

Curiosity’s “Seven Minutes of Terror”: Best Explanation

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This video has been out for awhile, but I still find it entertaining. It’s a bunch of NASA folks explaining all the things that have to happen exactly right in order to get the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), a/k/a Curiosity, safely from space to the Martian surface. It’s way more complicated than the landings of earlier rovers: this one is the size of a small car, weighs about a thousand pounds, and is (per the device’s full name) chock-full of chemical-analysis and other testing instruments.

One of the cooler items on board: a rock-blasting laser. It can focus in on a rock several meters away, and vaporize it — filming the dust, which will tell it [something or other] about the material the rock was made of.

(On the other hand, I have a little science-fiction scenario in my head: say there are two single-celled organisms remaining on Mars, on the whole planet, following eons of extinction. Say these two have just successfully mated, and reproduced single-celled organism . The happy family is all excited, of course, and starts to plan for the future of their species on, oh no!, on exactly the wrong pebble…)

As you probably know by now, the landing seems to have gone off without a hitch. So, so cool.

Update, 2012-08-08: Just saw this cartoon in the e-newsletter for The Funny Times, which pointed out that both Gabby Douglas and Curiosity stuck their landings.

 

You Gotta Look If You Wanna See

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[Image: conceptual design/sketch of the Look-See Tree, by Ally Reeves (2007). For more
information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

Men are not free when they are doing just what they like. The moment you can do just what you like, there is nothing you care about doing. Men are only free when they are doing what the deepest self likes.

And there is getting down to the deepest self! It takes some diving.

(D. H. Lawrence [source])

…and:

Dear Reader

Baudelaire considers you his brother,
and Fielding calls out to you every few paragraphs
as if to make sure you have not closed the book,
and now I am summoning you up again,
attentive ghost, dark silent figure standing
in the doorway of these words.

Pope welcomes you into the glow of his study,
takes down a leather-bound Ovid to show you.
Tennyson lifts the latch to a moated garden,
and with Yeats you lean against a broken pear tree,
the day hooded by low clouds.

But now you are here with me,
composed in the open field of this page,
no room or manicured garden to enclose us,
no Zeitgeist marching in the background,
no heavy ethos thrown over us like a cloak.

Instead, our meeting is so brief and accidental,
unnoticed by the monocled eye of History,
you could be the man I held the door for
this morning at the bank or post office
or the one who wrapped my speckled fish.
You could be someone I passed on the street
or the face behind the wheel of an oncoming car.

The sunlight flashes off your windshield,
and when I look up into the small, posted mirror,
I watch you diminish — my echo, my twin —
and vanish around a curve in this whip
of a road we can’t help traveling together.

(Billy Collins [source])

…and:

Say you could view a time lapse film of our planet: what would you see?

Transparent images moving through light, “an infinite storm of beauty.”

The beginning is swaddled in mists, blasted by random blinding flashes. Lava pours and cools; seas boil and flood. Clouds materialize and shift; now you can see the earth’s face through only random patches of clarity. The land shudders and splits, like pack ice rent by widening lead. Mountains burst up, jutting, and dull and soften before your eyes, clothed in forests like felt. The ice rolls up, grinding green land under water forever; the ice rolls back. Forests erupt and disappear like fairy rings. The ice rolls up — mountains are mowed into lakes, land rises wet from the sea like a surfacing whale — the ice rolls back.

A blue-green streaks the highest ridges, a yellow-green spreads from the south like a wave up a strand. A red dye seems to leak from the north down the ridges and into the valleys, seeping south; a white follows the red, then yellow-green washes north, then red spreads again, then white, over and over, making patterns of color too intricate to follow. Slow the film. You see dust storms, locusts, floods, in dizzying flash-frames.

Zero in on a well-watered shore and see smoke from fires drifting. Stone cities rise, spread, and crumble, like paths of alpine blossoms that flourish for a day an inch above the permafrost, that iced earth no root can suck, and wither in a hour. New cities appear, and rivers sift silt onto their rooftops; more cities emerge and spread in lobes like lichen on rock. The great human figures of history, those intricate, spirited tissues whose split second in the light was too brief an exposure to yield any image but the hunched shadowless figures of ghosts.

Slow it down more, come closer still. A dot appears, a flesh-flake. It swells like a balloon; it moves, circles, slows, and vanishes. This is your life.

(Annie Dillard [source])

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How It Was: The Boy, The Water…

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[Not The Boy’s dangerous swimming area]

Many people, I know, actually look forward to mid-summer. It reminds them of easy childhood days (it has that effect on me, too), and suggests the prospect of recapturing some of those moments. You laze around a house or porch or beach, maybe with a book. Maybe board games are involved. Certainly, food cooked (or at least consumed) out-0f-doors will figure into it somehow. You swat at mosquitoes and siblings, while the ones stab at your skin and the others, at your psyche. Cicadas buzz at twilight, and fireflies ignite a little while later. (Maybe the cicadas were just the power generators kick-starting themselves.) The smell of newly mown grass perfumes the air. The moon rises in a star-speckled night sky; from a couple of back yards away, you can hear the laughter of adults discussing who knows what…

Memories of mid-summer also fire off in your head, almost inescapably, when the day is hot, the humidity high, and you hear from somewhere nearby a good, solid splash. I’m not talking the plain old splash of a spoon into dishwater, either, or even of an ice cube into a glass of tea. I mean the splash of a good-sized living creature into a substantial body of water: a pool, a lake, a river, even (between waves) the sea.

For some of you, no doubt, this splash makes you all wistful and nostalgic. Even the grown-up version of The Boy appreciates this sensation, vicariously. But the grown-up version of The Boy can’t help associating this splash with another, decades ago…

—

The Boy lived a mere two blocks from a great and beautiful body of water known to insiders as, simply, “the river.”

You could go down to the river on a hot summer afternoon, clamber down to the bank from the concrete wall erected (legend had it) by laborers during the period known as The Great Depression in order to hold back the mighty flood tides that they had had back then, when the Ice Age was ending and there was suddenly more water than the world could cope with. You could find flat stones, slimy mollusk shells, and (if you were willing to dare having your fingers slashed) shards of green Rolling Rock bottles to skip across the surface in the direction of the mansion on the far side, whose white pillars and especially whose windows gleamed invitingly a mere half-mile distant.

Yet perhaps it was the river itself that was the source of the discomfort The Boy had always had with the notion of buoyancy.

The Boy had many years ago been warned away from the river by his parents. His father had threatened him, as was his wont, with a sentence beginning, “If I ever, ever catch you down there…” and ending with a phrase the exact contents of which did not matter, since all such phrases always promised total annihilation. “A dragon lives there,” said his mother, more fancifully.

This dragon, The Boy imagined, was long and undulant, its silver skin scaly and iridescent; its head looked like an automobile hood ornament, steely and unforgiving. There would be a splash as it surfaced when adults (but never their children) were present, and it would glare at them with its red, hungry eyes, projecting telepathic thoughts at them like Bring me your children. It would look at The Boy’s own parents and add, Yours first.

 

In the Large Dark and the Long Light

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From whiskey river:

It’s true that someone will always say that good and evil don’t exist: that is a person who has never had any dealings with real evil. Good is far less convincing than evil, but it’s because their chemical structures are different.

Like gold, good is never found in a pure state in nature: it therefore doesn’t seem impressive. It has the unfortunate tendency not to act; it prefers, passively, to be seen.

(Amélie Nothomb, Les Catilinaires)

…and:

In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned.

(Annie Dillard [source])

…and:

People are frightened of themselves. It’s like Freud saying that the best thing is to have no sensation at all, as if we’re supposed to live painlessly and unconsciously in the world. I have a much different view. The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of this, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.

(Marilynne Robinson [source])

…and:

Let Me Make This Perfectly Clear

Let me make this perfectly clear.
I have never written anything because it is a Poem.
This is a mistake you always make about me,
A dangerous mistake. I promise you
I am not writing this because it is a Poem.

You suspect this is a posture or an act
I am sorry to tell you it is not an act.

You actually think I care if this
Poem gets off the ground or not. Well
I don’t care if this poem gets off the ground or not
And neither should you.
All I have ever cared about
And all you should ever care about
Is what happens when you lift your eyes from this page.

Do not think for one minute it is the Poem that matters.
It is not the Poem that matters.
You can shove the Poem.
What matters is what is out there in the large dark
and in the long light,
Breathing.

(Gwendolyn MacEwen [source])

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Not Exactly What You Had in Mind

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[Image: promotional photo for Later the Same Evening, a one-act opera about five paintings by Edward Hopper. In this photograph, Hotel Room (also shown below) is the third painting from the left.]

From whiskey river:

Dark Pines Under Water

This land like a mirror turns you inward
And you become a forest in a furtive lake;
The dark pines of your mind reach downward,
You dream in the green of your time,
Your memory is a row of sinking pines.

Explorer, you tell yourself this is not what you came for
Although it is good here, and green;
You had meant to move with a kind of largeness,
You had planned a heavy grace, an anguished dream.

But the dark pines of your mind dip deeper
And you are sinking, sinking, sleeper
In an elementary world;
There is something down there and you want it told.

(Gwendolyn MacEwen [source])

…and:

Thomas Merton wrote, “there is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.” There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage. I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus…

Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock — more than a maple — a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.

(Annie Dillard [source])

…and:

I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn’t resolve. But I was outside the Baghdad Theatre one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes and he never opened his eyes.

After that I liked jazz music.

Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way.

I used to not like God because God didn’t resolve. But that was before any of this happened.

(Donald Miller [source])

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