Search Results for: whiskey river

Weekend Music Break/What’s In a Song: The Avalon Boys (and Not Incidentally, Laurel and Hardy), “At the Ball, That’s All”

January 12, 2019 by John Leave a Comment

Laurel and Hardy didn’t write this little number, nor did the Avalon Boys and, for that matter, nor did anyone else associated with the film. More about that history in a moment. For now, though, just sit back, click the Play button, and take pleasure in the guileless charm of this three-minute segment of one of their greatest films, 1937’s Way Out West.

(The setup for this scene: the boys have just arrived, via stagecoach, in an old Wild West town. They’re there with a purpose; before pursuing it, though, they turn to head into the saloon. And that’s where they encounter the Avalon Boys Quartet, arrayed on the wooden porch as though to formally welcome L&H to town.)

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…And So Seeing the Radiance

January 11, 2019 by John Leave a Comment

[Images: “Non-Geometric Geometry #1 (color) and #2 (black-and-white,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) These two images were the starting and ending points of a series, in which I gradually drained color from the original (top). As the color palette shrank, I realized where I’d seen this kind of geometry before: photographs taken in wind tunnels. Later, examining actual wind-tunnel photos, I discovered that it wasn’t those after all… but I know I’ve seen it somewhere! First person to answer the riddle for me (runningaftermyhat AT johnesimpson DOT com) gets a free professional print of either of these two shots. Seriously — it’s driving me crazy!]

From whiskey river:

In preparing this memoir, I have stuck to facts except when facts refused to conform with memory, narrative purpose, or the truth as I prefer to understand it. Wherever liberties have been taken with names, dates, places, events and conversations, or with the identities, motivations and interrelationships of family members and historical passages, the reader is assured that they have been taken with due abandon.
[…]
In a weird way, it’s a memoir of not my life, but my imaginative life, like a history of my imagination.

(Michael Chabon [source])

…and (italicized lines):

Shaving in the Dark

How old is the sun today

Where are the shoes of yesteryear

What an evil potato goes through
we can never know, but
I’m beginning to resemble one

Ah, a little light now

It is the hour
the moment
when it becomes possible
to distinguish a white
thread from a black,
so prayer begins

I see a shadowy reflection now our fingers touch

There’s nothing like what is

fragile and momentary
as the pale yellow light along the windowsill
in winter north
of nowhere yet
if not for winter, nothing
would get done

would finally get done

I’ve been all around this world

and not to die in hell
not to die in the flames of hell homeless with a cell phone
please

There’s nothing like today

And contributing one’s atoms to the green universe
how strange is that

and some have managed to live in a constant awareness
that all things, every evil thing
will be forgotten, neglecting
to mourn for every radiant thing, and so seeing
the radiance

(Franz Wright [source])

…and:

When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people’s, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment—once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognize and do not believe in—what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception.

{Zadie Smith [source])

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All the Snowflakes, the Pennies, the Carefully Stacked Blessings of All the Days

January 4, 2019 by John Leave a Comment

[About the video: Monk’s “Ruby, My Dear” inspired one of the two Billy Collins poems below; he might have been listening to it while creating the other, too.]

From whiskey river:

Calendars

Back in the blue chair in front of the green studio
another year has passed, or so they say, but calendars lie.
They’re a kind of cosmic business machine like
their cousin clocks but break down at inopportune times.
Fifty years ago I learned to jump off the calendar
but I kept getting drawn back on for reasons
of greed and my imperishable stupidity.
Of late I’ve escaped those fatal squares
with their razor-sharp numbers for longer and longer.
I had to become the moving water I already am,
falling back into the human shape in order
not to frighten my children, grandchildren, dogs and friends.
Our old cat doesn’t care. He laps the water where my face used to be.

(Jim Harrison [source])

…and:

This [year], mend a quarrel. Seek out a forgotten friend. Dismiss suspicion and replace it with trust. Write a letter. Give a soft answer. Encourage youth. Keep a promise. Forgo a grudge. Forgive an enemy. Apologize. Try to understand. Examine your demands on others. Think first of someone else. Be kind. Be gentle. Laugh a little more. Express your gratitude. Welcome a stranger. Gladden the heart of a child. Take pleasure in the beauty and wonder of the earth. Speak your love and then speak it again.

(Howard W. Hunter [source])

…and (in different format, without the first stanza):

Blessing in the Chaos

To all that is chaotic
in you,
let there come silence.

Let there be
a calming
of the clamoring,
a stilling
of the voices that
have laid their claim
on you,
that have made their
home in you,

that go with you
even to the
holy places
but will not
let you rest,
will not let you
hear your life
with wholeness
or feel the grace
that fashioned you.

Let what distracts you
cease.
Let what divides you
cease.
Let there come an end
to what diminishes
and demeans,
and let depart
all that keeps you
in its cage.

Let there be
an opening
into the quiet
that lies beneath
the chaos,
where you find
the peace
you did not think
possible
and see what shimmers
within the storm.

(~~John O’Donohue~~ Jan Richardson [source])

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Watching (But First Recognizing) Yourself

December 28, 2018 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Screened,” by a Flickr user who identifies him/herself only as “new 1lluminati”; used here under a Creative Commons license (thank you!).]

From whiskey river:

But I also know of yet another life. I know and want it and devour it ferociously. It’s a life of magical violence. It’s mysterious and bewitching. In it snakes entwine while the stars tremble. Drops of water drip in the phosphorescent darkness of the cave. In that dark the flowers intertwine in a humid fairy garden. And I am the sorceress of that silent bacchanal. I feel defeated by my own corruptibility. And I see that I am intrinsically bad. It’s only out of pure kindness that I am good. Defeated by myself. Who lead me along the paths of the salamander, the spirit who rules the fire and lives within it. And I give myself as an offering to the dead. I weave spells on the solstice, spectre of an exorcised dragon.

(Clarice Lispector [source])

…and:

Here is the best true story on giving I know, and it was told by Jack Kornfield of the Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre. An eight-year-old boy had a younger sister who was dying of leukemia, and he was told that without a blood transfusion she would die. His parents explained to him that his blood was probably compatible with hers, and if so, he could be the blood donor. They asked him if they could test his blood. He said sure. So they did and it was a good match. Then they asked if he would give his sister a pint of blood, that it could be her only chance of living. He said he would have to think about it overnight.

The next day he went to his parents and said he was willing to donate the blood. So they took him to the hospital where he was put on a gurney beside his six-year-old sister. Both of them were hooked up to IVs. A nurse withdrew a pint of blood from the boy, which was then put in the girl’s IV. The boy lay on his gurney in silence while the blood dripped into his sister, until the doctor came over to see how he was doing. Then the boy opened his eyes and asked, “How soon until I start to die?”

(Anne Lamott [source])

…and:

The more you think, the faster you cut your own throat. What is there to think about? It always ends up the same way. In your mind there is a bolted door. You have to work hard not to go near that door. Parties, lovers, career, charity, babies, who cares what it is, so long as you avoid the door. There are times, when I am on my own, fixing a drink, walking upstairs, when I see the door waiting for me. I have to stop myself pulling the bolt and turning the handle. Why? On the other side of the door is a mirror, and I will have to see myself. I’m not afraid of what I am. I’m afraid I will see what I am not.

(Jeanette Winterson [source])

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In Praise of the Awful, But Mostly of Awe

December 21, 2018 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Self-Portrait with 12 Bags of Trash,” by Anne-Katrin Spiess. The artist explains: “I noticed litter lining both sides of a very scenic stretch of desert Highway 191 in Utah. I decided to ‘Adopt a Highway’ and cleaned the stretch between mile markers 176 and 177. I photographed each object I picked up, and sorted my findings by category to create ‘Self Portrait With 12 Bags of Trash.'”]

From whiskey river:

On Bitching
after Catullus

Listen, Hilarius, you’ve got to snap out of it.
I know you’re in your fifties now,
but don’t let yourself give in to bitterness.
Sure, when you were younger the muse
used to visit more often, sprawling across your lap
and whispering in your ear, but at least
she treats you now and then to an idea
or plants a stanza in your head as you’re waking up.
And stop bitching about editors
who keep publishing each other’s poems
in Pretension Quarterly or The Moribund Review.
Try not to let it bother you so much.
Why waste your energy enumerating
all the petty injustices that have gone on
since ancient times and are bound to continue
for centuries to come? And there’s no point
in envying the poets who swagger into rooms,
charging every molecule with their need
to be important. So, let them be important.
And if, sometimes, you feel as if you
hardly exist, well, as a great poet once said,
be secret and exult . . . instead of sulking.
Believe me, I agree with you, it’s too bad
things sometimes work the way they do,
but it’s exasperating to listen to you
after you’ve had a few too many cups of wine
railing against the zealously self-promoting
postmodern obfuscators, the hip ironists revved up
on their own cleverness, the tedious fundamentalists
of rhyme and meter, or the one you call
the formalist narcissist Stalinist surrealist.
Not bad, Hilarius, but you need to get over it.
You didn’t want power, remember?
You wanted to write poems. So, write them.
And the next time some self-satisfied preener
wins a prize, don’t dwell on it, but remind yourself
of all the poems that didn’t get away, the poems
of your friends and how they’ve borne you up
and spurred you on with a better envy,
and remember the friends themselves, laboring
alone at their desks, mostly under the radar
(unlike the “famous poets” you call the oxymorons),
and giving you what literary life you have
which if not dazzling is at least genuine –
and thank the gods to the end of your days
for the time they’ve granted you to spend
on making poems, even if they come to nothing.

(Jeffrey Harrison [source])

…and:

Tides and storms, the patterns of seasons and migrations, the quality of the soil and the air – all of these continue to influence and are influenced by us; they remind us of the intricate web from which we cannot disentangle ourselves, try as we might. Also, some of us are still lucky enough to live in places where we are awakened by birdsong in the morning, where at night we can see the Milky Way spilled across the sky. These things are part of our daily human experiences. As such, these phenomena —like anything else—can take on particular meaning, both original and universal.

Such meaning depends on authenticity, which often depends on engagement. This is the case whether we are talking about authenticity between people and people or between people and nature. We must be attentive; we must give our senses over to the other.

(Hannah Fries [source])

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The Ineluctability of the Small, the Nearby, the Now

December 14, 2018 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “East Side Railroad Tunnel East Portal,” by Erik Gould. (Spotted on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license: thank you!) If you’ve got a nice wide monitor, be sure to click the image for the whole panorama.The photographer’s lengthy description of the subject includes this anecdote: “On May 1st. 1993, a group of students gathered at the western portal below Benefit St. for a May Day party. They lit fires, put on animal masks, pounded on drums until early the next morning, when police arrived. Fearing the activities in the tunnel were unsafe, they attempted to get the students to leave. The situation escalated quickly as some students refused to go, the police responded with pepper spray and the students answered with rocks and bricks. The ensuing melee ended with many injuries and a badly damaged police car, and the police charge in the next day’s paper that they had encountered ‘satanic rituals’. As a result the portals on both ends were sealed up with steel doors, which soon were forced open.”]

From whiskey river (italicized lines):

Little Things

After she’s gone to camp, in the early
evening I clear our girl’s breakfast dishes
from the rosewood table, and find a dinky
crystallized pool of maple syrup, the
grains standing there, round, in the night, I
rub it with my fingertip
as if I could read it, this raised dot of
amber sugar, and this time,
when I think of my father, I wonder why
I think of my father, of the Vulcan blood-red
glass in his hand, or his black hair gleaming like a
broken-open coal. I think I learned to
love the little things about him
because of all the big things
I could not love, no one could, it would be wrong to.
So when I fix on this image of resin
or sweep together with the heel of my hand a
pile of my son’s sunburn peels like
insect wings, where I peeled his back the night before camp,
I am doing something I learned early to do, I am
paying attention to small beauties,
whatever I have—as if it were our duty to
find things to love, to bind ourselves to this world.

(Sharon Olds [source])

…and:

Am I free? There’s something that still restrains me. Or am I fastening myself to it? Either way, it’s like this: I’m not completely free because I’m tied to everything. In fact, a person is everything. It’s not a heavy burden to carry by yourself because it isn’t simply carried: one is everything.

It seems to me that for the first time I’m gaining in understanding about things. The impression is that I don’t try anymore to come closer to things so I won’t go beyond myself. I have a certain fear of myself, I’m not to be trusted and I distrust my false power.

This is the word of someone who cannot.

I don’t control anything. Not even my own words. But it isn’t sad: it’s humble happiness. I, who live to the side, I’m to the left of whoever comes in. And within me trembles the world.

(Clarice Lispector [source])

…and:

Suddenly

Suddenly—the word most used by Dostoevsky. Somebody told me that. Some Dostoyevsky expert. Suddenly. As though any kind of action could be drawn into words: Suddenly music. Suddenly turning. Suddenly silent. Suddenly. As though I never saw the process.

Everyone in the old house is sick but me. Silence, except for the snoring, coughing, and occasional trips to the bathroom. Snow everywhere through the windows. You can’t look out without seeing it. Suddenly winter. Frozen rivers. Bitter cold. Barren trees. Small silver plane etched out against a chalk, still sky. Suddenly, completely alone.

(Sam Shepard [source])

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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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