Search Results for: whiskey river

What Lies Beneath

February 8, 2013 by John 3 Comments

[Image: lunar surface, color-enhanced, per results of the NASA GRAIL mission.
For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

“My soul knows my meat is doing bad things, and is embarrassed. But my meat just keeps on doing bad, dumb things.”

“Your soul and your what?” he said.

“My soul and my meat,” I said.

“They’re separate?” he said.

“I sure hope they are,” I said. I laughed. “I would hate to be responsible for what my meat does.”

I told him, only half joking, about how I imagined the soul of each person, myself included, as being a sort of flexible neon tube inside. All the tube could do was receive news about what was happening with the meat, over which it had no control.

“So when people I like do something terrible,” I said, “I just flense them and forgive them.”

“Flense?” he said. “What’s flense?”

“It’s what whalers used to do to whale carcasses when they got them on board,” I said. “They would strip off the skin and blubber and meat right down to the skeleton. I do that in my head to people — get rid of all the meat so I can see nothing but their souls. Then I forgive them.”

(Kurt Vonnegut [source])

…and:

Eyes-Shut Facing Eyes-Rolling-Around

Pay close attention to your mean thoughts.

That sourness may be a blessing,
as an overcast day brings rain for the roses
and relief to dry soil.

Don’t look so sourly on your sourness!
It may be it’s carrying what you most deeply need
and want. What seems to be keeping you from joy
may be what leads you to joy.

Don’t call it a dead branch.
Call it the live, moist root.

Don’t always be waiting to see
what’s behind it. That wait and see
poisons your Spirit.

Reach for it.
Hold your meanness to your chest
as a healing root,
and be through with waiting.

(Jelaluddin Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks) [source])

…and:

Each person who ever was or is or will be has a song. It isn’t a song that anybody else wrote. It has its own melody, it has its own words. Very few people get to sing their song. Most of us fear that we cannot do it justice with our voices, or that our words are too foolish or too honest, or too odd. So people live their song instead.

(Neil Gaiman [source])

[Read more…]

Cold. So Cold.

February 1, 2013 by John 13 Comments

[Image: “ice-creeksicles,” by Jeremy Hiebert. For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

Winter Afternoon by the Lake

Black trunks, black branches, and white snow.
No one nearby, five o’clock, below zero,
Late January. No birds. No wind.
You look, and your life seems stopped. Perhaps

You died suddenly earlier today. But the thin
Moon says no. The trees say, “It’s been this way
Before, often. It’s cold, but it’s quiet.” We’ve experienced
This before, among the messy Saxons putting back

The hide flap. A voice says: “It’s old. You’ll never
See this again, the way it is now, because
Just today you sensed that someone gave you
Life and said, ‘Stay as long as you like.'”

The snow and the black trees, pause, to see if we’re
Ready to re-enter that stillness. “Not yet.”

(Robert Bly [source])

…and:

Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter

It is a cold and snowy night. The main street is deserted.
The only things moving are swirls of snow.
As I lift the mailbox door, I feel its cold iron.
There is a privacy I love in this snowy night.
Driving around, I will waste more time.

(Robert Bly [source])

…and:

There are stories that are true, in which each individual’s tale is unique and tragic, and the worst of the tragedy is that we have heard it before, and we cannot allow ourselves to feel it too deeply. We build a shell around it like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit, coating it with smooth pearl layers in order to cope. This is how we walk and talk and function, day in, day out, immune to others’ pain and loss. If it were to touch us it would cripple us or make saints of us; but, for the most part, it does not touch us. We cannot allow it to.

(Neil Gaiman [source])

[Read more…]

Mindflow

January 25, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

[Mountains and Rivers Without End: For information about this image,
see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

What is the relationship of thinking to reality? As careful attention shows, thought itself is in an actual process of movement. That is to say, one can feel a sense of flow in the stream of consciousness not dissimilar to the sense of flow in the movement of matter in general. May not thought itself thus be a part of reality as a whole? But then, what could it mean for one part of reality to “know” another, and to what extent would this be possible?

(David Bohm [source])

…and (excerpt):

There is smoke and grease, there is
the wrist’s exhaustion, there is laughter,
there is the letter seized in the clock
and the apple’s tang, the river
sliding along its banks, darker
now than the sky descending
a last time to scatter its diamonds
into these black waters that contain
the day that passed, the night to come.

(Philip Levine [source])

[Read more…]

Somewhere Not Quite Here, Not Quite There

January 18, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

[Video: clip from Seinfeld episode #118. “The Pool Guy”]

From whiskey river:

Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place. Nothing outside you can give you any place. In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got.

You needn’t look at the sky because it’s not going to open up and show no place behind it. You needn’t search for any hole in the ground to look through into somewhere else. You can’t go neither forwards nor backwards into your daddy’s time nor your children’s if you have them. In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got. If there was any Fall, look there, if there was any Redemption, look there, and if you expect any Judgment, look there, because they all three will have to be in your time and your body and where in your time and your body can they be?

(Flannery O’Connor)

…and:

A Valley Like This

Sometimes you look at an empty valley like this,
and suddenly the air is filled with snow.
That is the way the whole world happened —
there was nothing, and then . . .
But maybe some time you will look out and even
the mountains are gone, the world become nothing
again. What can a person do to help
bring back the world?
We have to watch it and then look at each other.
Together we hold it close and carefully
save it, like a bubble that can disappear
if we don’t watch out.
Please think about this as you go on. Breathe on the world.
Hold out your hands to it. When mornings and evenings
roll along, watch how they open and close, how they
invite you to the long party that your life is.

(William Stafford)

[Read more…]

Life Lessons

January 11, 2013 by John 2 Comments

[Image: The Ultimate Answer, one of my few successful attempts at (representational) visual art]

From whiskey river:

The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that all seemed to be moving very slowly as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole universe and would take all time to complete. No one was paying attention to the sky.

(Flannery O’Connor [source])

…and (italicized portion):

I can often sense the spirit of a place, but I’m not entirely convinced such spirits have an existence separate from their environment. In that sense I’m both believer and skeptic; I’d like to believe, but keep searching for that elusive proof.

I do believe in an everyday sort of magic—the inexplicable connectedness we sometimes experience with places, people, works of art and the like; the eerie appropriateness of moments of syncronicity; the whispered voice, the hidden presence, when we think we’re alone. These are magics that many of us experience, parts of a Mystery that can’t—and perhaps shouldn’t—be explained.

I should add that often the magical elements in my books are standing in for elements of the real world, the small and magical-in-their-own-right sorts of things that we take for granted and no longer pay attention to, like the bonds of friendship that entwine our own lives with those of other people and places. When one of my characters becomes aware of a magical element, it might be because the world is wider than we assume it to be, but it might also be a reminder to pay attention to what is here already, hidden only because it’s been forgotten.

(Charles de Lint [source])

…and:

Passing Remark

In scenery I like flat country.
In life I don’t like much to happen.

In personalities I like mild colorless people.
And in colors I prefer gray and brown.

My wife, a vivid girl from the mountains,
says, “Then why did you choose me?”

Mildly I lower my brown eyes —
there are so many things admirable people do not understand.

(William Stafford [source])

[Read more…]

Midweek Music Break: Linda Ronstadt, “Old Paint”

January 9, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

Texas Longhorn Cattle Drive, by Nick Eggenhofer

[Image: Texas longhorn cattle drive, as depicted by Nick Eggenhofer.
The horse may or may not be old but it is not, alas, a paint.]

Let’s get the music going right at the outset, and save the background for a moment. Here’s Linda Ronstadt singing “Old Paint,” which closes her great 1977 album Simple Dreams:

Linda Ronstadt: 'Simple Dreams' (cover)

[Lyrics]

Pretty, no? Now, about that song:

On long trail drives, the old cowboys — so goes the legend — used to calm cattle’s nerves at night by riding around the herd’s perimeter, whistling or singing softly.* It’s a nice story, one I myself choose to accept (regardless of its truth) because it tells about good, kind, simple — and interesting — people and their relationship with animals.

Whether the story is factually true or not, there’s a whole genre of music, “cowboy songs” or “Western music,” characterized by stories of life moving cattle around on the Plains, sleeping under the stars, sharing everyday life with horses and longhorns, and dreaming about (sometimes) women — often, women the singers had voluntarily left behind. Wikipedia currently lists over sixty such songs, although this is far from complete; one collection devoted to the genre includes music and lyrics for two hundred of them. Lyrics aside, the songs are notable for their easy melodies and their rhythms, which seem geared to a capella renditions sung from the back of a horse. Indeed, Wikipedia notes:

Otto Gary, an early cowboy band leader, stated authentic Western music had only three rhythms, all coming from the gaits of the cowpony — walk, trot, and lope.

One of my favorite recent examples of the “lope” rhythm was Norah Jones’s take on “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” (written by Bob Dylan), featured here at RAMH in a whiskey river Friday post a couple of years ago. The guitar comes in first, repeating a seven- or eight-beat rhythm over and over… My first-hand experience with horses — limited to fairground pony rides and such (and I’m not sure it ever included loping) — stopped sometime in the ’60s, but even to me that rhythm feels like the rippling roll of a saddled horse’s back beneath the rider.

As for the walk…

No one knows when “(I Ride an) Old Paint” originated, or to whom it should be credited. It was collected for several studies of cowboy music around the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries, so it goes back at least that far. Poet/Historian Carl Sandburg assembled an anthology of American folk tunes in 1927, called The American Songbag; in it, he wrote:

This arrangement is from a song made known by Margaret Larkin of Las Vegas, New Mexico, who intones her own poems or sings cowboy and Mexican songs to a skilled guitar strumming, and by Linn Riggs, poet and playwright, of Oklahoma in particular and the Southwest in general. The song came to them at Santa Fe from a buckaroo who was last heard of as heading for the Border with friends in both Tucson and El Paso.

(Margaret Larkin — per Wikipedia — was was by no means some mere local folkie wandering from saloon to auditorium, as this description makes her out to be, but a well-published author and activist. Likewise, “Linn” Riggs was actually one (Rollie) Lynn Riggs, whose play Green Grows the Lilacs provided the source material for Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!)

As I think I’ve always heard it, the song consists of three verses, alternating with three choruses. Verse 1 briefly states the singer’s circumstances — roaming the plains on an old pony, heading to Montana for a roundup — and the final verse, borderline mawkish, asks that his lifeless body be saddled up one last time and released to roam the land. The second verse, though, is an oddball: not a general sentimental statement, but a story in lurid pulp miniature. That verse’s subject, one “old Bill Jones,” seems to have fathered a daughter and a son, and his wife “died in a poolroom fight.” (Oh, America: you sure do know what to sing about!) But that doesn’t stop old Bill, who still wanders the West, singing as he goes…

I really like the song’s language, especially in the first verse. It’s a saddlebag from beneath whose flaps protrude raggedy bits of trail jargon:

The paint referred to here is a type of spotted pony, a pinto.
Old Dan: I’ve seen this described as a common name for a horse, but this seems like a stretch to me. (Why should the singer name the horse he’s leading around, but not the one he rides?) Again, I’m no expert but a more likely explanation is, I think, that the words actually are/were old dam — where dam simply refers to a mare. (In the lyrics page I linked to, I’ve used dam.)
Throw the hoolihan (variously spelled — Sandburg says it’s hoolian): in rodeo, apparently, bulldogging cowboys used to be allowed to jump on a steer’s horns in such a way that the steer’s legs buckled, flipping it rather er, ass-over-teakettle. (Yes: jump on its horns. Not that bulldogging in general strikes me as the most humane way to comport with an animal…) This move — since outlawed — was called the hoolihan. Possibly related to this in some way, cowboys also (reportedly) developed a way of tossing a lariat over a horse or steer, a technique also called (and also variously spelled) a houlihan. As with “old Dan/old dam,” this lariat toss, rather than the wrestling move, seems the more likely meaning.
A coulee is a ditch or ravine cut into the landscape by running water; a draw, more or less the same thing — a gully or small canyon.
Dogies are calves.
The fiery and the snuffy: again like “old Dan,” some interpretations claim that “Fiery” and “Snuffy” are common names for horses. (Yeah, sure. Bend over backwards much?) When I hear or read this phrase, though, I think of two kinds of impatient cows (or maybe horses). The first is the hot-headed untamable type, chafing angrily and perhaps rearing and bucking at restraints actual or circumstantial; the second, a more fearful beast, snorting through its nostrils as it eyes the landscape nervously. (The Pooch does this sometimes on walks, although from her four-inches-high perspective the landscape extends mere yards in a given direction.)

My favorite twist in the lyrics, though, comes in that odd second verse: one went to Denver, the other went wrong. This stands as an actually pretty good example of a figure of speech called a zeugma: a series of terms, the last one of which ostensibly follows but actually breaks the syntactic/grammatical pattern established earlier. (The example I’ve most often seen goes like this: He took his hat, his coat, and his leave.)

And, well, whaddaya know: Carl Sandburg himself recorded some of the songs in that “songbag,” including this week’s selection:

(If you followed the link to Sandburg’s Songbag book, a few paragraphs back, you may have noticed his claim that the lyrics say old Bill Jones had two daughters and a song. I’m sure this made sense in a poetry-technical sense, as a more exact rhyme for “…and the other went wrong.” But it doesn’t make a lot of sense on other grounds!)

________________________

* The steers probably didn’t get the same consideration once they’d arrived at the stockyard.

Intersecting Panes

January 4, 2013 by John 1 Comment

From whiskey river:

Indeterminacy means, literally: not fixed, not settled, uncertain, indefinite. It means that you don’t know where you are. How can it be otherwise, say the Buddhist teachings, since you have no fixed or inherent identity and are ceaselessly in process? Life is filled with uncertainty. Chance events happen to all of us. Each of us must take responsibility and make decisions. None of us should be imposing our ego image on others.

There’s another way to live. Accept indeterminacy as a principle, and you see your life in a new light, as a series of seemingly unrelated jewel-like stories within a dazzling setting of change and transformation. Recognize that you don’t know where you stand, and you will begin to watch where you put your feet. That’s when the path appears.

(Kay Larson, on John Cage [source])

…and (from whiskey river’s commonplace book — not counting the lovely epigraph, which walks a line between mysterious and profound):

Nothing is too wonderful to be true.
— Michael Faraday

There is a hole in the universe.

It is not like a hole in a wall where a mouse slips through, solid and crisp and leading from somewhere to someplace. It is rather like a hole in the heart, an amorphous and edgeless void. It is a heartfelt absence, a blank space where something is missing, a large and obvious blind spot in our understanding of the universe.

That missing something, strange to say, is a grasp of nothing itself. Understanding nothing matters, because nothing is the all-important background upon which everything else happens.

(K. C. Cole [source])

…and:

To the Reader

As you read, a white bear leisurely
pees, dyeing the snow
saffron,

and as you read, many gods
lie among lianas: eyes of obsidian
are watching the generations of leaves,

and as you read
the sea is turning its dark pages,
turning
its dark pages.

(Denise Levertov)

[Read more…]

Just Finding Your Way Around the Map

December 28, 2012 by John 2 Comments

[Video: “Sailing to Philadelphia,” by Mark Knopfler (performed with James Taylor) (lyrics)]

From whiskey river:

Desire is never on the map

it’s that unnamed lake you found
once, driving a gravel road, not
where you thought you were going,
fast, window down, hair
loose to the dry wind,
bare foot pressing metal,
soft feathers of cottonwood
drift through, maple seed
spinning in its wild gyre.
Bugs spatter on the windshield
in Rorschach you want to
read like tea leaves, imagine
you might learn how you’ve
come to this road, which
left turn at midnight, which
wrong side of town.

Then there it is before you,
glittering pure and cold and
suddenly you want
that stone-skipping ache
more than your life, even
knowing how the cold water
makes each hair stand on end
as you enter, one foot at a time
sand crumbling underfoot,
the delicious submersion,
as you slip the laws of
surface tension, gravity…

and so it is you push off from shore,
not caring, this lake, as you knew
the moment you saw it,
has no bottom.

(Holly J. Hughes [source])

…and:

Going home does not come naturally to me. If my father’s medium was silence, mine had tended to be escape. But there’s no future in escape because the world is round. So the faster you run away, the faster you end up, right back where you started, face to face with whatever you were running from in the first place. Your worst fears, they’re always the most patient. They’ll wait up for you. That’s what makes them the worst.

(Holly J. Hughes)

[Read more…]

Still, Life

December 21, 2012 by John 1 Comment

[Image: “Snow Face, Straight On” (2011): Gus, the Labradoodle, in a wintry photo
by Janet Nezon at her Lessons from Gus blog]

From whiskey river:

…It’s more like, if you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it… I know that sounds a little pious.

(David Foster Wallace [source]

…and:

Motto

In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing
About the dark times.

(Bertolt Brecht [source])

…and:

Pleasures

First look from morning’s window
The rediscovered book
Fascinated faces
Snow, the change of the seasons
The newspaper
The dog
Dialectics
Showering, swimming
Old music
Comfortable shoes
Comprehension
New music
Writing, planting
Traveling
Singing
Being friendly.

(Bertolt Brecht [source])

[Read more…]

That Could’ve Been Me

December 14, 2012 by John 5 Comments

[Image: “When Thoughts Break” (found at the site of Dharma Consulting)]

From whiskey river (highlighted portion):

Here and Now

for Barbara

There are words
I’ve had to save myself from,
like My Lord and Blessed Mother,
words I said and never meant,
though I admit a part of me misses
the ornamental stateliness
of High Mass, that smell

of incense. Heaven did exist,
I discovered, but was reciprocal
and momentary, like lust
felt at exactly the same time—
two mortals, say, on a resilient bed,
making a small case for themselves.

You and I became the words
I’d say before I’d lay me down to sleep,
and again when I’d wake—wishful
words, no belief in them yet.
It seemed you’d been put on earth
to distract me
from what was doctrinal and dry.
Electricity may start things,
but if they’re to last
I’ve come to understand
a steady, low-voltage hum

of affection
must be arrived at. How else to offset
the occasional slide
into neglect and ill temper?
I learned, in time, to let heaven
go its mythy way, to never again

be a supplicant
of any single idea. For you and me
it’s here and now from here on in.
Nothing can save us, nor do we wish
to be saved.

Let night come
with its austere grandeur,
ancient superstitions and fears.
It can do us no harm.
We’ll put some music on,
open the curtains, let things darken
as they will.

(Stephen Dunn [source])

…and:

The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. If creation had been left up to me, I’m sure I wouldn’t have had the imagination or courage to do more than shape a single, reasonably sized atom, smooth as a snowball, and let it go at that.

(Annie Dillard [source])

…and (highlighted portion; these are excerpts from the full piece, from which is hard not to excerpt a lot more):

…I remember—I must have been eight or nine—wandering out to the ungrassed backyard of our newly constructed suburban house and seeing that the earth was dry and cracked in irregular squares and other shapes, and I felt I was looking at a map and I was completely overcome by this description, my first experience of making a metaphor, and I felt weird and shaky and went inside and wrote it down: the cracked earth is a map. Although it only takes a little time to tell it, and it is hardly interesting, it filled a big moment at the time, it was an enormous ever-expanding room of a moment, a chunk of time that has expanded ever since and that my whole life keeps fitting into.

I remember John Moore, another teacher, who did the damnedest thing. We were studying Yeats, and at the beginning of one class Mr. Moore asked us if we would like to see a picture of Yeats. We nodded, and he held up a photograph of Yeats taken when he was six months old, a baby dressed in a long white gown. Maybe he was even younger, maybe he was an infant. I thought it was the funniest thing anyone had ever done, the strangest, most ridiculous, absurd thing to have done. But nobody laughed and if Mr. Moore thought it was funny, you couldn’t tell by his face. I always liked him for that. The poems we were reading in class were not written by a baby. And yet whenever I think of Yeats, I see him as a tiny baby wearing a dress—that photograph is part of my conception of the great Irish poet. And I love that it is so. We are all so small.
[…]
I remember the day I stood in front of a great, famous sculpture by a great, famous sculptor and didn’t like it. Such a moment is a landmark in the life of any young artist. It begins in confusion and guilt and self-doubt and ends in a triumphant breakthrough: I see the world and I see that I am free before it, I am not at the mercy of historical opinion and what I want to turn away from, I turn away from, what I want to approach, I approach. Twenty-five years later I read an essay by John Berger on Rodin and in it Berger was able to articulate all that I felt on that afternoon, standing in front of a great Rodin. But by then I was old and vain and the pride of being vindicated was, I admit, just as exciting as Berger’s intellectual condemnation of Rodin’s desire toward dominance.

I remember thinking my feelings implicated me with Rodin and though now I liked him less than ever, my repulsion was braided with a profound sympathy inseparable from my feelings for myself. And that is a landmark in the life of an old artist looking at art: the realization that none of us can ever be free from ourselves.

I remember the first time I realized the world we are born into is not the one we leave.

(Mary Ruefle [source])

[Read more…]