Search Results for: whiskey river

Aqua Vitae

June 5, 2009 by John 5 Comments

[A modified version of the image above appears as the cover of Pascale Petit’s 2008
collection, The Treekeeper’s Tale. It also pretty much perfectly accompanies
Petit’s poem appearing below, as the first whiskey river entry in today’s post.]

From whiskey river:

What She Wanted

What she wanted was to return
to the original rainforest

hear water pushing
through the sapwood

and leaves eating light
as she wanted to eat light.

She knew her nature
was to be water, not wood.

She knew there was a grove
of vertical rivers

of roaring waterfall-trees,
and a grove of whirlpool-trees

with vortices she could dive through,
past the hollow years of her life

right back to the roots.

(Pascale Petit)

…and:

On those occasions when one’s serenity seems about to collapse, I recommend that one step out into the backyard and vigorously spit.

(David Huddle)

Not from whiskey river… a poet catalogues the waters and other landmarks on the map of her life:

[Read more…]

Her Little Voice

May 29, 2009 by John

[Above is the longer version of the Twin Peaks opening title sequence, including a fairly
complete cast listing (at least for the recurring characters). The “official” and higher-
quality version, with a truncated theme song and cast listing, is here.]

[Note: Comments disabled for this post, for what will eventually be obvious reasons. :)]

From whiskey river:

And then the kicker is this: in passing from the real to the imagined, in following that trail, you learn that both sides have a little of the other in each, that there are elements of the imagined inside your experience of the “real” world — rock, bone, wood, ice — and elements of the real — not the metaphorical, but the actual thing itself — inside stories and tales and dreams.

(Rick Bass)

Not from whiskey river:

your little voice
Over the wires came leaping
and i felt suddenly
dizzy
With the jostling and shouting of merry flowers
wee skipping high-heeled flames
courtesied before my eyes
or twinkling over to my side
Looked up
with impertinently exquisite faces
floating hands were laid upon me
I was whirled and tossed into delicious dancing
up
Up
with the pale important
stars and the Humorous
moon
dear girl
How i was crazy how i cried when i heard
over time
and tide and death
leaping
Sweetly
your voice

(E.E. Cummings)

…and:

Love one another, but make not a bond of love
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you
be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with
the same music.

(Kahlil Gibran)

And finally, who could argue with this?

One woman can make you fly like an eagle, another can give you the strength of a lion, but only one in the Cycle Of Life can fill your heart with wonder and the wisdom that you have known a singular joy.

(Deputy Tommy “Hawk” Hill, Twin Peaks)

…Okay, I said “finally” up there but, heck, as long as we’re on the theme we may as well go for broke:

[Below, click Play button to begin. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is about 5½ minutes long.]

[audio:falling_juleecruise.mp3|titles=Falling|artists=Julee Cruise]

Falling
(lyrics by David Lynch; music by Angelo Badalamenti;
performance by Julee Cruise)

Don’t let yourself be hurt this time.
Don’t let yourself be hurt this time.

Then I saw your face
Then I saw your smile

The sky is still blue
The clouds come and go
Yet something is different
Are we falling in love?

Don’t let yourself be hurt this time.
Don’t let yourself be hurt this time.

Then your kiss so soft
Then your touch so warm

The stars still shine bright
The mountains still high
Yet something is different
Are we falling in love?

Falling
Falling

Are we falling in love?

Happy anniversary, Baby. ♥

Airborne

May 22, 2009 by John 5 Comments

From whiskey river:

As you go the way of life, you will see a great chasm. Jump. It is not as wide as you think.

(Native American Indian saying)

Not from whiskey river:

Don Juan and don Genaro stood up and stretched their arms and arched their backs, as if sitting had made their bodies stiff. My heart began to pound fast. They made Pablito and me stand up.

“The twilight is the crack between the worlds,” don Juan said. “It is the door to the unknown.”

He pointed with a sweeping movement of his hand to the mesa where we were standing.

“This is the plateau in front of that door.”

He pointed then to the northern edge of the mesa.

“There is the door. Beyond, there is an abyss and beyond that abyss is the unknown.”

Don Juan and don Genaro then turned to Pablito and said good-by to him. Pablito’s eyes were dilated and fixed; tears were rolling down his cheeks.

I heard don Genaro’s voice saying good-by to me, but I did not hear don Juan’s.

Don Juan and don Genaro moved towards Pablito and whispered briefly in his ears. Then they came to me. But before they had whispered anything I already had that peculiar feeling of being split.

“We will now be like dust on the road,” don Genaro said. “Perhaps it will get in your eyes again, someday.”

Don Juan and don Genaro stepped back and seemed to merge with the darkness. Pablito held my forearm and we said good-by to each other. Then a strange urge, a force, made me run with him to the northern edge of the mesa. I felt his arm holding me as we jumped and then I was alone.

(Carlos Castaneda, Tales of Power — the last words of the book. I always thought Castaneda’s entire “Don Juan” series would have ended perfectly at this point, but no: he went on to write numerous further books, none of which attained the convincing — and impeccable — power of the early ones.)

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This Business of Busyness

May 15, 2009 by John 7 Comments

From whiskey river:

The feeling of being hurried is not usually the result of living a full life and having no time. It is on the contrary born of a vague fear that we are wasting our life. When we do not do the one thing we ought to do, we have no time for anything else — we are the busiest people in the world.

(Eric Hoffer)

Not from whiskey river:

Pray let us have no more bussiness, but busyness : the deuse take me if I know how to spell it, your wrong spelling, madam Stella, has put me out: it does not look right; let me see, bussiness, busyness, business, bisyness, bisness, bysness; faith, I know not which is right, I think the second; I believe I never writ the word in my life before ; yes, sure I must though; business, busyness, bisyness. I have perplexed myself, and can’t do it. Prithee ask Walls. Business, I fancy that’s right. Yes it is; I looked in my own pamphlet, and found it twice in ten lines, to convince you that I never writ it before. O, now I see it as plain as can be; so yours is only an s too much.

(Jonathan Swift, Dr. Swift’s Letters to Stella, Letter XXXV [source])

…and:

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What We Miss When We Shutter Our Senses

May 8, 2009 by John Leave a Comment

[Above image, “Magic Eye” by Jennifer Love, first appeared on TrekEarth.]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

Beside the grand history of the glaciers and their own, the mountain streams sing the history of every avalanche or earthquake and of snow, all easily recognized by the human ear, and every word evoked by the falling leaf and drinking dear, beside a thousand other facts so small and spoken by the stream in so low a voice the human ear cannot hear them. The wing scars the sky, making a path inevitably as the deer in snow, and the winds all know it and tell it though we hear it not.

(John Muir, John of the Mountains [source])

Not from whiskey river:

When your eyes are functioning well you don’t see your eyes. If your eyes are imperfect you see spots in front of them. That means there are some lesions in the retina or wherever, and because your eyes aren’t working properly, you feel them. In the same way, you don’t hear your ears. If you have a ringing in your ears it means there’s something wrong with your ears. Therefore, if you do feel yourself, there must be something wrong with you. Whatever you have, the sensation of I is like spots in front of your eyes — it means something’s wrong with your functioning.

(Alan Watts, Ego)

…and:

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Collisions Between Poetry and… Other Stuff

May 1, 2009 by John 5 Comments

[Artist’s rendering above depicts “planets colliding in a sun-like binary system about
300 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Aries.” Click image for more info.]

From whiskey river:

Poetry

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this
fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers
in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
they are
useful. When they become so derivative as to become
unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand: the bat
holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf
under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that
feels a flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician —
nor is it valid
to discriminate against “business documents and

school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make
a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result
is not poetry,
nor till the poets among us can be
“literalists of
the imagination” — above
insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” shall
we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.

(Marianne Moore [source])

…and:

The wind blows hard among the pines
Toward the beginning
Of an endless past
Listen: you’ve heard everything.

(Shinkichi Takahashi [source])

Not from whiskey river:

[Read more…]

“Just Where Have You Been, Young Man?!?”

April 27, 2009 by John 9 Comments

So, yes, I disappeared for[…counting…] four days there. (Friday’s whiskey river-based meditation brought to you through the miracle of WordPress’s scheduled-posts feature.) Long story short (so unlike me, I know), for now: I spent the time with The Brother, up in NJ. We were joined Saturday by The Sisters.

That’s the three of them in the photo above (click it to enlarge), channeling Gilbert & Sullivan; and, for reference, a somewhat earlier photo of all four of us in the photo at right.

(If you want to try your hand at morphing them from their 1950-something selves to now, note that the bottom row at the right is in the opposite order from the sequence in the top photo.)

And just to keep things fair — actually more than fair — I’ll include one photo of me (and The Younger of Two Sisters) below the fold.

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These Things Must Be Done Delicately

April 24, 2009 by John 5 Comments

From the originating page: “Osmanthus [JES: a/k/a cinnamon flower] is a unique Asian flower, with a smooth and rich scent of green tea, apricot and suede leather. It is used to scent green tea as well as special confections and Chinese baked goods. The peak of the osmanthus flowers season is… end of September until mid October, when the days start to become short, and rainstorms fight to take over the last sunny days. The osamnthus flowers falls to the wet ground and release their dusky aroma which fills the moist, air.”

From whiskey river:

In our idleness, cinnamon blossoms fall.
In night quiet, spring mountains stand
empty. Moonrise startles mountain birds:
here and there, cries in a spring gorge.

(Wang Wei)

…and:

People are delicate, aren’t they?

(Yusunari Kawabata)

[Read more…]

“There Is No Next-Time-Round”

April 17, 2009 by John 1 Comment

From whiskey river:

Shifting brilliancies. Then winter light
In a doorway, and on the stone doorstep
A beggar shivering in silhouette.

So the particular judgement might be set:
Bare wallstead and a cold hearth rained into —
Bright puddle where the soul-free cloud-life roams.

And after the commanded journey, what?
Nothing magnificent, nothing unknown.
A gazing out from far away, alone.

And it is not particular at all,
Just old truth dawning: there is no next-time-round.
Unroofed scope. Knowledge-freshening wind.

(Seamus Heaney, Lightenings: i)

Not from whiskey river; I just liked the soft chime it makes when paired with the above:

The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise
Were all at prayers inside the oratory
A ship appeared above them in the air.

The anchor dragged along behind so deep
It hooked itself into the altar rails
And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,

A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope
And struggled to release it. But in vain.
‘This man can’t bear our life here and will drown,’

The abbot said, ‘unless we help him.’ So
They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back
Out of the marvellous as he had known it.

(Seamus Heaney, Lightenings: viii [source])

…and:

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Riding the Now

April 10, 2009 by John 6 Comments

[Today’s image is of the literal-minded “Now Watch,” widely believed to be the most accurate timepiece ever. Found it at Wired’s Gadget Lab blog.]

From whiskey river:

And if there is not any such thing as a long time, nor the rest of your lives, nor from now on, but there is only now, why then now is the thing to praise and I am very happy with it.

(Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls)

Not from whiskey river:

If on earth there be
a Paradise of Bliss,
It is this,
It is this,
It is this.

(Firdausi)

This brings me to one of my favorite E.E. Cummings poems.

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