Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Search Results for: whiskey river

All the Wisps of a Day

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[Image: “Ghostweed (#everydaybandw 868 / 2020-02-11),” by John E. Simpson; original in my SmugMug gallery. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH).]

From whiskey river (a few additional sentences included here):

Living like this means the year stops making sense, and the month and the week. The dates fall away from the days, like glass punched out of window frames, or ice cubes out of a tray into a sink, identical, dateless, nameless durational blobs, melting into an undifferentiated puddle. Is that a Saturday, a Friday, a Monday? Is that an April 13, or a November 2? Living like this means you don’t have a container anymore for the different days, can’t hold in a little twenty-four-hour-sized box set of events that constitute a unit, something you can compartmentalize, something with a beginning and an end, something to fill with a to-do list. Living like this means that it all runs together, a cold and bright December morning with your father or a lazy evening in late August, one of those sunsets that seem to take longer than is possible, where the sun just refuses to go down, where the hour seems to elongate to the point that it doesn’t seem like it can stretch any farther without detaching completely from the hour before it, like a piece of taffy, like under sea molten lava forming a new island, a piece of time detaching from the seafloor and floating up to the surface.

(Charles Yu [source])

…and:

Summer Solstice
(excerpt)

I am visiting my life with reckless plenitude.
The air is fragrant with tiny strawberries.
Fireflies turn on their electric wills:
an effulgence. Let me come back
whole, let me remember how to touch you
before it is too late.

(Stacie Cassarino [source])

…and:

One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer and which in a general way are naturally believed, surmised, and admitted by you, but which you’ll unconsciously deny when it comes to the point of gaining hope or peace from such an admission. In the diary you find proof that in situations which today would seem unbearable, you lived, looked around and wrote down observations, that this right hand moved then as it does today, when we may be wiser because we are able to look back upon our former condition, and for that very reason have got to admit the courage of our earlier striving in which we persisted even in sheer ignorance.

(Franz Kafka [source])

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It’s True, You Can See It (But You May Have to Squint)

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[Video: In a scene deleted from Something’s Gotta Give, Jack Nicholson croons “La Vie en Rose” to Diane Keaton. (The audio was retained, though, as the soundtrack for the film’s closing credits.)]

From whiskey river:

Our task as [humans] is to find the few principles that will calm the infinite anguish of free souls. We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once more to peoples poisoned by the misery of the century. Naturally, it is a superhuman task. But superhuman is the term for tasks we take a long time to accomplish, that’s all.

(Albert Camus [source])

…and:

Tomorrow

there will be sun, scalloped by clouds,
ushered in by a waterfall of birdsong.
It will be a temperate seventy-five, low
humidity. For twenty-four hours,
all politicians will be silent. Reality
programs will vanish from TV, replaced
by the “snow” that used to decorate
our screens when reception wasn’t
working. Soldiers will toss their weapons
in the grass. The oceans will stop
their inexorable rise. No one
will have to sit on a committee.
When twilight falls, the aurora borealis
will cut off cell phones, scramble the internet.
We’ll play flashlight tag, hide and seek,
decorate our hair with fireflies, spin
until we’re dizzy, collapse
on the dew-decked lawn and look up,
perhaps for the first time, to read the long lines
of cold code written in the stars….

(Barbara Crooker [source])

…and:

Charity is the power of defending that which we know to be indefensible. Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate. It is true that there is a state of hope which belongs to bright prospects and the morning; but that is not the virtue of hope. The virtue of hope exists only in earthquake and eclipse. It is true that there is a thing crudely called charity, which means charity to the deserving poor; but charity to the deserving is not charity at all, but justice. It is the undeserving who require it, and the ideal either does not exist at all, or exists wholly for them. For practical purposes it is at the hopeless moment that we require the hopeful man, and the virtue either does not exist at all, or begins to exist at that moment. Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful.

(G. K. Chesterton [source])

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Sacred Necessaries

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[Image: “Four Rock Formation,” by Nicollazzi Xiong (discovered at the Pexels free stock-photography site — thank you!).]

From whiskey river (italicized lines):

Funny Strange 

We are tender and our lives are sweet

and they are already over and we are
visiting them in some kind of endless
reprieve from oblivion, we are walking
around in them and after we shatter
with love for everything we settle in.

Thou tiger on television chowing,
thou very fact of dreams, thou majestical
roof fretted with golden fire. Thou wisdom
of the inner parts. Thou tintinnabulation.

Is it not sweet to hand over the ocean’s
harvest in a single wave of fish? To bounce
a vineyard of grapes from one’s apron
and into the mouth of the crowd? To scoop up
bread and offer up one’s armful to the throng?
Let us live as if we were still among

the living, let our days be patterned after
theirs. Is it not marvelous to be forgetful?

(Jennifer Michael Hecht [source])

…and:

Braided Creek : A Conversation in Poetry
(excerpts)

Under the storyteller’s hat
are many heads, all troubled.

Rowing across the lake
all the dragonflies are screwing.
Stop it. It’s Sunday.

Only today
I heard
the river
within the river.

I want to describe my life in hushed tones
like a TV nature program. Dawn in the north.
His nose stalks the air for newborn coffee.

Nothing to do.
Nowhere to go.
The moth just drowned
in the whiskey glass.
This is heaven.

Let go of the mind, the thousand blue
story fragments we tell ourselves
each day to keep the world underfoot.

If you can awaken
inside the familiar
and discover it strange
you need never leave home.

(Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser [source])

…and:

Oh my God, what if you wake up some day, and you’re 65, or 75, and you never got your memoir or novel written, or you didn’t go swimming in those warm pools and oceans all those years because your thighs were jiggly and you had a nice big comfortable tummy; or you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life, of imagination and radical silliness and staring off into space like when you were a kid? It’s going to break your heart. Don’t let this happen.

(Anne Lamott [source: nothing canonical; possibly a specific edition of this (but it’s not in the copy I own)])

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RAMH@12: Still Here, Just Differently (and a Playlist)

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[Painted wood carving, Wind Blows my Hat Off #1, by folk artist Mary Michael Shelley]

My practice in these anniversary posts has been to open with a playlist. Each such playlist has always included selections from music-related posts over the years… but this year, at least, seems to call for something different. (Not least, because I’ve so seldom done music-related posts in recent years: scant fresh music to draw on!)

So, then, the 2020 edition of the RAMH anniversary playlist includes 15 selections from a single album — at that, an album never discussed here: Silk Baroque, by a performer named (or at least going by the name!) Wu Wei. I discovered Wu quite by accident; if you’ve visited here recently, you probably already know which post‘s preparation led me to him. His instrument of choice is the modern version of an ancient Chinese wind instrument called the sheng; at his Web site, Wu describes this instrument as follows:

The Sheng, a mouth organ, formed out of a bundle of bamboo reeds and cased in a metal bowl, sounds as the singing phoenix from a Chinese legend: silvery and fleeting as the wind.

I won’t promise that the sheng’s sound will indeed say singing phoenix to you (whatever the hell a singing phoenix sounds like; I thought they pretty much just squawked). For me, I’ll say only that the Silk Baroque album has helped me a great deal to retain the frame of mind described in that post from two weeks ago.

Per usual for an anniversary post, I’ll add a few stray blogging-anniversary notes after the playlist — presumably setting the mood for your reading, ha.

I must have mentioned at least once — probably many years ago — that Running After My Hat is not my first blog (although it’s the longest-lived). As best I can recall, I previously posted with any regularity to a half-dozen others (all of them apparently still available in some form, via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine if not actually still “live”):

  • Something called flixml.org: a blog set up in the late 1990s nominally to support my books and other writings about a technology called XML (for eXtensible Markup Language). It also included posts and other content on one thing or another unrelated to the core topic, such as an account of my and The Missus’s honeymoon in Alaska in 2000. A Wayback Machine snapshot is here, as of sometime in early 2002 (well after my last post there).
  • A group blog composed by members of my family only (hence no link available), where we did a brain dump of various details remembered from our childhood — family history, “big events,” and so on — in 1950s-’60s New Jersey.
  • Where Left Is Right: a politically-focused blog — its orientation probably obvious, from the title — composed during the first term of the Bush II Presidency, under the pseudonym “FLJerseyBoy.” A while after I stopped posting there, the blog name having been co-opted by some damned squatter or another; as a result, I reconstituted it — sans images, alas — as Where Left Is Right/The Old Site.
  • A Dog Starv’d: more politics, but less exclusively so, in 2007-11, again from “FLJerseyBoy.”
  • The Book Book: a book-review blog established by the erstwhile editorial-assistant blogger who then called herself “Moonrat.” Reviews there were by her and others she recruited over the years (including RAMH oldtimer Froog) — I myself was just satisfied with my own initials. (My last review there was in 2011… just about a week after RAMH‘s third anniversary.)

When I started here, I meant the blog to become the centerpiece of a “platform” whence to launch a book, specifically an e-book. I imagined myself at the vanguard of a New Age, you see: an age in which authors would simply post their work online, and readers would pay to read it there.

(Yeah, I know. Hahahaha. LOL. *eyeroll* All that.)

Things didn’t work out as planned, of course. I never had and never will have the stamina and focus of a successful self-published author.

But I found, over time, that RAMH fed some needs in me otherwise. Partially, it was the company of other people going through much the same aspiration/crashing-and-burning cycle of the unsatisfactorily published writer. Partially — as with the whiskey river Fridays series — it presented a periodic challenge and opportunity to break away from mundane everyday stuff: programming, Web development, household life. Some of the other series of posts (particularly the music-related series — e.g., here, here, here, and here) came out of nowhere to give me reasons to learn about and share stuff I’d never imagined becoming obsessed with. It forced me to write openly, without too much embarrassment, at a time in Internet history when readership has wandered away to entertainments not quite so driven (as blogging is) by a performer-audience model. (It even enabled me, for a short but wild few months, to research, compose, and upload something like a novella in something like real time.)

Gone, now, the daily preoccupation with work. And for a good part of the next N months, of course, like everyone else I’ll be stuck more or less at home, my travel more or less restricted to whatever I can do on foot. I do look forward to whatever the next phase in the blog’s development turns out to be. Whatever it is, whatever it becomes, I remain confident the blog will continue to warrant its name: I’m still chasing the damned hats.

Thanks as always — whoever you may be — for joining me here!

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Still, a Kind of Realism

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[Image: “Still as Rain,” by Tim Sackton. (Discovered on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license: thank you!)]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

And the Moon on Its Stem Will Steal You Away

That’s a good one, the idea of the moon having a stem and somehow
stealing you, whoever you are, kind of like Persephone or Orpheus,
portrayed or alluded to in countless forms of art and popular culture
including poetry, film, opera, music, and painting. And it kind of fits
my mood this morning, something vaguely cartoonish and devoid
of real gravitas, but still, a kind of realism, even so. And the area
around is the void, outer space, nothing, because explaining things
is never as interesting as wanting them, the desire to know, set against
a backdrop of black velvet and rhinestones. Let’s say that you wake up
one day and realize you don’t remember anything that happened
yesterday. Maybe for five minutes or so. And for those five minutes
you’re thinking, as I was thinking this morning, that this is it. Car keys.
The word for when you really want something and work for it.
Your dog’s name. There are not enough blank pages for all this
forgetting, like debris falling back to earth, you and yours hiding in
the underbrush with hopes of your own, of rescue or escape.
When you don’t remember why you’re hiding in the underbrush,
you’ve been hiding in the underbrush forever. This whole other
existence leaps forward in possibility. And then the five minutes
are up, and it’s oh yeah, eggs, Saturday. Some day that was.
A chemist once told me luminol was her favorite color. It glows
a beautiful greenish-blue when it comes into contact with blood
by reacting to the iron in hemoglobin, looking a bit like the sky
this morning. It’s a kind of truth of blue, that uncovers, that
remembers. It’s used by investigators to detect blood at crime scenes
where no blood is visible. There are so many things to forget,
to lose, and in so many different ways. But even so, one can be wrong
about the past, and deduce from error, but still be right about
the future or the present. And when you don’t remember what day
it is, happy birthday. Despite all our best efforts, there’s a wolf
on the horizon making a movie of your approach, and it’s
a shipwreck playing across me as I’m pouring sugar into my cup.

(John Gallaher [source])

…and (italicized stanzas):

The Face

Is there a single thing in nature
that can approach in mystery
the absolute uniqueness of any human face, first, then   
its transformation from childhood to old age—

We are surrounded at every instant   
by sights that ought to strike the sane   
unbenumbed person tongue-tied, mute   
with gratitude and terror. However,

there may be three sane people on earth   
at any given time: and if
you got the chance to ask them how they do it,   
they would not understand.

I think they might just stare at you
with the embarrassment of pity. Maybe smile
the way you do when children suddenly reveal a secret   
preoccupation with their origins, careful not to cause them shame,

on the contrary, to evince the great congratulating pleasure   
one feels in the presence of a superior talent and intelligence;   
or simply as one smiles to greet a friend who’s waking up,
to prove no harm awaits him, you’ve dealt with and banished all harm.

(Franz Wright [source])

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All You Knew Must Be Learned Again

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[Video: high-definition trailer for the wordless 1992 film Baraka, a sequel of sorts to the better-known Koyaanisqatsi (and directed by that film’s photographer). According to Roger Ebert’s review of the restored DVD edition (2008), “‘Baraka’ is a Sufi word meaning ‘a blessing, or the breath, or the essence of life, from which the evolutionary process unfolds.’ In Islam generally, it is ‘a quality or force emanating originally from Allah but capable of transmission to objects or to human beings.’ In Judaism, it is a ceremonial blessing. In Swahili, it means ‘blessing.’ In French slang, it means ‘good luck.'”]

From whiskey river:

How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps, but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?

Travellers at least have a choice. Those who set sail know that things will not be the same as at home. Explorers are prepared. But for us, who travel along the blood vessels, who come to the cities of the interior by chance, there is no preparation. We who were fluent find life is a foreign language. Somewhere between the swamp and the mountains. Somewhere between fear and sex. Somewhere between God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back is worse.

(Jeanette Winterson [source])

…and:

The Ninth Elegy
(excerpt)

Why, if it’s possible to spend this span
of existence as laurel, a little darker than all
other greens, with little waves on every
leaf-edge (like the smile of a breeze), why, then,
must we be human and, shunning destiny,
long for it?…

Oh, not because happiness,

that over-hasty profit of loss impending, exists.
Not from curiosity, or to practice the heart,
that would also be in the laurel…
but because to be here is much, and the transient Here
seems to need and concern us strangely. Us, the most transient.
Everyone once, once only. Just once and no more.
And we also once, Never again. But this having been
once, although only once, to have been of the earth,
seems irrevocable.

(Rainer Maria Rilke [source])

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The Physiology of the Soul

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[Image: “ThreeWay,” by Daniel Friedman. (Found on Flickr, naturally, and used here under a Creative Commons License: thank you!) Among the quotations which appear as the image’s description: “A metaphysical conclusion is either a false conclusion or a concealed experimental conclusion.” (Hermann von Helmholtz, from On Thought in Medicine (1877))]

From whiskey river:

The Bodies
(excerpt)

We move, we love, we cry out,
we hold or cannot hold to what we are
and finally wake to find ourselves
changed beyond all imagining.
Was it enough to have lived?
In that moment of still approach,
will it be given to us to know?

(Elizabeth Spires [source])

…and:

Time seems to pass. The world happens, unrolling into moments, and you stop to glance at a spider pressed to its web. There is a quickness of light and a sense of things outlined precisely and streaks of running luster on the bay. You know more surely who you are on a strong bright day after a storm when the smallest falling leaf is stabbed with self-awareness. The wind makes a sound in the pines and the world comes into being, irreversibly, and the spider rides the wind-swayed web.

(Don DeLillo [source])

…and:

No matter what the universe has in store, it cannot take away from the fact that you were born. You’ll have some joy and some pain, and all the other experiences that make up what it’s like to be a tiny part of a grand cosmos. No matter what happens next, you were here. And even when any record of our individual lives is lost to the ages, that won’t detract from the fact that we were. We lived. We were part of the enormity. All the great and terrible parts of being alive, the shocking sublime beauty and heartbreak, the monotony, the interior thoughts, the shared pain and pleasure. It really happened. All of it. On this little world that orbits a yellow star out in the great vastness. And that alone is cause for celebration.

(Sasha Sagan [source])

…and:

One Heart

It is late afternoon and I have just returned from
the longer version of my walk nobody knows
about. For the first time in nearly a month, and
everything changed. It is the end of March, once
more I have lived. This morning a young woman
described what it’s like shooting coke with a baby
in your arms. The astonishing windy and altering light
and clouds and water were, at certain moment,
You.

There is only one heart in my body, have mercy
on me.

The brown leaves buried all winter creatureless feet
running over dead grass beginning to green, the first scent-
less violet here and there, returned, the first star noticed all
at once as one stands staring into the black water.

Thank You for letting me live for a little as one of the
sane; thank You for letting me know what this is
like. Thank You for letting me look at your frightening
blue sky without fear, and your terrible world without
terror, and your loveless psychotic and hopelessly
lost
with this love.

(Franz Wright [source])

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Tonight, I’d Really Like Not to Choose

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[Image: sculpture in black iron, Durante o Sono (“During Sleep”) by Rui Chafes. (Photo by Pedro Ribeiro Simões, found on Flickr and used here under a Creative Commons License — thank you!) The photographer’s description of this work says, among other things: “The equilibrium is presented as being solid, but unexpected; the ratio of the image of weight to that of fragility is inverted, the question of gravity is raised. Might the title, Durante o Sono, refer to a nightmare moment? Does this organism represent the dream itself? Or a frightening perception of its strangeness?”]

From whiskey river:

There’s more than one way to be a person. Actually, there are more than two or three ways. You’d think that was obvious, but I find that often it is not. The world is essentially a collection of teams. Life is a process of deciding which ones we’re going to join.

(Meghan Daum [source])

…and:

As for this reclusiveness — I think of it as profoundly helpful to my work. Darkness, silence and solitude, by throwing their heavy cloaks over my shoulders, have forced me to recreate all the light, all the music and the joys of nature and society in myself. My spiritual being no longer comes up against the barriers of the visible world and nothing hampers its freedom…

When by chance a thin ray of sunlight manages to slip in here… my whole being, like the ancient statue of Memnon, that gave out harmonious sounds when the rays of the rising sun struck it, bursts with joy, and I feel myself transported into realms of radiant light…

I have tried to follow life itself, in which unsuspected aspects of a person suddenly reveal themselves to our eyes. — We live alongside people, thinking we know them. All that’s missing is the incident that will make them suddenly appear other than we knew them to be…

Throughout our lives we have alongside us like a fellow prisoner shackled by the same chain, a man who is different from our physical self — You see, when you think of yourself, you create a certain idea of yourself. And when one looks in a glass, the mirror reflects our real image. — The other was a stranger — It was the spiritual self. — Well, it is this one alone that matters to me.

I only consider my objective self (take this word in the sense meant by philosophers) as an experimental instrument which has no inherent interest but that links me to my spiritual side so that I can penetrate certain realities and especially the shadowy areas of consciousness on which I try to throw light —

(Marcel Proust [source])

…and:

The Bookstall

Just looking at them
I grow greedy, as if they were
freshly baked loaves
waiting on their shelves
to be broken open—that one
and that—and I make my choice
in a mood of exalted luck,
browsing among them
like a cow in sweetest pasture.

For life is continuous
as long as they wait
to be read—these inked paths
opening into the future, page
after page, every book
its own receding horizon.
And I hold them, one in each hand,
a curious ballast weighting me
here to the earth.

(Linda Pastan [source])

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The Reassessment

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[Image: “Do I Know You?,” by Tom Waterhouse (an old favorite, whose work I last featured just about exactly a year ago). As with his other photos, I found this one on Flickr (and use it here under a Creative Commons license; thank you!). This is not a posed photo, Waterhouse says: “I’ve not really come across the concept of ‘testing’ a mirror before — you know, presumably in case it doesn’t reflect what you want to see — but this man went through a whole range of exercises, even going so far at one point as to wave at himself.”]

From whiskey river:

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])

…and:

Guidelines for The Honorable Harvest

Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you may take care of them.
Introduce yourself. Be accountable as the one who comes asking for life. Ask permission before taking. Abide by the answer.
Never take the first. Never take the last. Take only what you need.
Take only that which is given.
Never take more than half. Leave some for others. Harvest in a way that minimizes harm.
Use it respectfully. Never waste what you have taken. Share.
Give thanks for what you have been given.
Give a gift, in reciprocity for what you have taken.
Sustain the ones who sustain you and the earth will last forever.

(Robin Wall Kimmerer [source])

…and:

…Disease empties a sector, a billion sectors.

People look at the sky and at the other animals. They make beautiful objects, beautiful sounds, beautiful motions of their bodies beating drums in lines. They pray; they toss people in peat bogs; they help the sick and injured; they pierce their lips, their noses, ears; they make the same mistakes despite religion, written language, philosophy, and science; they build, they kill, they preserve, they count and figure, they boil the pot, they keep the embers alive; they tell their stories and gird themselves.

Will knowledge you experience directly make you a Buddhist? Must you forfeit excitement per se? To what end?

Say you have seen something. You have seen an ordinary bit of what is real, the infinite fabric of time that eternity shoots through, and time’s soft-skinned people working and dying under slowly shifting stars. Then what?

(Annie Dillard [source])

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…and Sometimes the Story Chooses You

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[Image: “Peeping Tourists,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river:

As it is, we are merely bolting our lives—gulping down undigested experiences as fast as we can stuff them in—because awareness of our own existence is so superficial and so narrow that nothing seems to us more simple than simple being. If I ask you what you did, saw, heard, smelled, touched, and tasted yesterday, I am likely to get nothing more than the thin, sketchy outline of the few things that you noticed, and of those only what you thought worth remembering. Is it surprising that an existence so experienced seems so empty and bare that its hunger for an infinite future is insatiable? But suppose you could answer, “It would take me forever to tell you, and I am much too interested in what’s happening now.” How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such a fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself as anything less than a god?  And, when you consider that this incalculably subtle organism is inseparable from the still more marvelous patterns of its environment—from the minutest electrical designs to the whole company of the galaxies—-how is it conceivable that this incarnation of all eternity can be bored with being?

(Alan Watts [source])

…and:

Blessing for a Writer

May you hear in your own stories
the moan of wind around the corners
of half-forgotten houses
and the silence in rooms you remember.

May you hear in your own poems
the rhythms of the cosmos,
the sun, the moon and the stars
rising out of the sea and returning to it.

May you, too, pull darkness out of light
and light out of darkness.
May you hear in your own voice
the laughter of water falling over stones.

May you hear in your own writing
the strangeness, the surprise of mystery,
the presence of ancestors, spirits,
voices buried in the cells of your body.

May you have the courage to honor
your own first language, the music of those
whose lives inhabit your own.
May you tell the truth and do no harm.

May you dare in your own words to touch
the broken heart of the world.
May your passion for peace and justice be wise:
remember—No one can argue with story.

May you study your craft as you would study
a new friend or a long time, much loved lover.
And all the while, lost though you may be in the forest,
drop your own words on the path like pebbles

and write your way home.

(Pat Schneider [source])

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