Search Results for: whiskey river

Finding Your Way Around RAMH

Miscellaneous map (NOT of Running After My Hat :) Running After My Hat is not about anything in particular. Which makes it easy to follow over time, maybe… but it can really complicate things for first-time visitors.

The best way to find what you might be interested in is to use the list of categories over there in the left-hand sidebar. Clicking on a category for a list of all posts which (according to me, anyhow) fall under that topic.

A couple of points to remember about this list:

Categories are not mutually exclusive. A given post may be (usually is) assigned to more than one category.
Not often, but every now and then, I add a new category. After I’ve done that, I recall an earlier post which might belong to that category. Do I then revisit the post and assign it to that category, as well as any others? Naaaaah.

You can also search the blog’s content; use the “Search this site…” field at the top right. Note that this does not seem to search comments — only posts. The best way to search everywhere at the site is to use Google’s “site:” feature. For instance:

site:johnesimpson.com music -"big band" ella OR armstrong

This looks for all content here (including comments etc.) containing the word music, NOT including (see the little minus sign?) the phrase big band, but also including either the word ella or the word armstrong.

Now that I’ve been doing this for a few years, maybe the “truest” way to discover what it’s about is to explore the sub-categories under the category called “Running After My Hat.”

Each of these sub-categories constitutes a recurring series of posts on a particular topic. Current series listed over there are:

Flange: none of these have been posted for quite some time. Flange is my co-blogger, an ancient gargoyle with a craving for self-expression.
Midweek Music Break: the most recently added series. As you might guess, every Wednesday there’s (brief) entry focusing on a single song, music video, or — less often — performer.
Paying Attention: what does it take to write satisfying fiction? My answer, more or less evolving, boils down to this. Each entry in the series focuses on something or other which I’ve recently encountered and which is yet another something I’ve got to worry about keeping straight. They’re almost never about straight-up writing mechanics like dialogue. For instance, three successive posts in this category were called “Paying Attention to Your Sense of Play,” “…to Unpleasantness,” and “…to the Magical.”
Perfect Moments: I don’t expect the moments documented here to match everyone’s idea of “perfect.” They were for me, though: oh yes, they were. (Formerly a subcategory under Everyday Life.)
Real-Life Dialogue: more or less what it says. Transcriptions of actual conversations, in most (all?) of which I’ve participated myself.
What’s in a Song: Fairly heavily researched posts, most in two parts, about American popular songs with long histories. Many of these have focused on show tunes from the 1920s and ’30s still being recorded today, but I’ve got one on a Shaker hymn, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find something from (say) the country or gospel traditions here.
whiskey river Fridays: too hard to explain this one here. It’s the only series with its own page of explanation. :)

By the way, the numbers in parentheses after the category names indicate how many posts are so categorized. (In the right sidebar’s “recent entries” list, parenthesized numbers indicate how many comments have been offered so far on a given post.)

It Was Like This

August 1, 2008 by John 3 Comments

My weekly favorite selection from the incomparable whiskey river (which daily seems as unlike a blog as it’s possible for a blog to be):

It Was Like This: You Were Happy

It was like this:
you were happy, then you were sad,
then happy again, then not.

It went on.
You were innocent or you were guilty.
Actions were taken, or not.

At times you spoke, at other times you were silent.
Mostly, it seems you were silent – what could you say?

Now it is almost over.

Like a lover, your life bends down and kisses your life.

It does this not in forgiveness –
between you, there is nothing to forgive –
but with the simple nod of a baker at the moment
he sees the bread is finished with transformation.

Eating, too, is now a thing only for others.

It doesn’t matter what they will make of you
or your days: they will be wrong,
they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man,
all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.

Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad,
you slept, you awakened.
Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons.

(by Jane Hirshfield)

Wallowing in Unhappiness

July 25, 2008 by John Leave a Comment

Per whiskey river:

As incredible as it sounds, an unhappy man does not realize that happiness is better than unhappiness. Knowing only his own concealed anguish, he worships it, which is the same as self-worship. – Vernon Howard

Sound familiar? It will if you listen in on enough writerly conversation: it’s the sound of writers who aren’t writing.

Love and Laughter

July 12, 2008 by John 2 Comments

Yesterday I went into a soapbox-lecture rant, shall we say? (yes, let’s — rants seem to be another thing that’s done a lot), about some of the comments to a recent post on Nathan Bransford’s blog.

At the end of every week, Bransford posts a “This Week in Publishing” entry summing up recent industry news and often alluding to the conversation on his own blog. Yesterday’s “This Week,” naturally, referred to the hypothetical questions he’d posed earlier — and to the answers, answers, answers, answers it elicited. And one of the mini-conversations resulting from the “This Week” post caught my eye.

It took place between someone identifying herself as Thomma Lynn, and someone with the moniker “a paperback writer” (evocative, for those of us Of A Certain Age). In the midst of a lot of hard-eyed appraisals of the harsh realities of art, the harsher realities of business, the naivete of writing newcomers, and the thick skins of writing veterans, Thomma Lynn and a paperback writer suddenly found themselves talking about — of all things — love:

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On the Devil’s Side

July 2, 2008 by John Leave a Comment

It’s a cliché that villains are often more interesting — especially more interesting to write about — than heroes. The archetypes, I guess, are Faust’s Mephistopheles and old Screwtape.

(The latter must have been an especially delicious but guilty pleasure for C.S. Lewis to write about; I don’t really take it as gospel, as Wikipedia says, that “Lewis claimed that the book was distasteful to write.” Screwtape is the older, more experienced, wiser demon, offering advice to nephew Wormwood. The uncle has a wonderful voice. Or maybe — since The Screwtape Letters supposedly represent a Christian tract on temptation — maybe the wonderful, alluringly entertaining voice is exactly the point.)

From the ever-reliable whiskey river comes this, a quotation from Stephen Dunn:

Always a little more fun on the Devil’s side. I’ve been his advocate, have opposed what I most believed, testing if what I believed was true. It sometimes almost was; that’s the best I can say. But you can bedevil yourself if you keep playing that game. You don’t want to stand in a torturer’s shoes for long. Still, when it comes to seeking a truth, a certain cruelty can go a long way – right through the heart of a thing to some other side. Doesn’t every far-reaching truth cause a lesser truth to die? Most of us are content to stop at the heart. When I’ve been good’s advocate, playing the less clever role, I’ve gone as far as good can go. Maybe some orthodoxy or some abomination lost ground for a while. Maybe not. The one time I had the Devil down, thinking he’d give, he whispered, “Remember, the punishment for being good is a life of goodness.” I laughed, and he was gone.

“The punishment for being good is a life of goodness”: ha! That pretty much sums up a villain’s motives, eh?

We Choose What to Fear and What to Embrace

November 1, 2024 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: The so-called “Cosmic Bat Nebula,” officially designated Lynds’ Catalog of Dark Nebulae — i.e., LDN — 43 (photo credited to Mark Hanson and Mike Selby). Spotted this photo at NASA’s “Astronomy Picture of the Day” (APOD) post for October 27; the caption there notes: “Far from being a harbinger of death, this 12-light year-long filament of gas and dust is actually a stellar nursery. Glowing with eerie light, the bat is lit up from inside by dense gaseous knots that have just formed young stars.”]

From whiskey river:

This Only

A valley and above it forests in autumn colors.
A voyager arrives, a map led him here.
Or perhaps memory. Once, long ago, in the sun,
When the first snow fell, riding this way
He felt joy, strong, without reason,
Joy of the eyes. Everything was the rhythm
Of shifting trees, of a bird in flight,
Of a train on the viaduct, a feast of motion.
He returns years later, has no demands.
He wants only one, most precious thing:
To see, purely and simply, without name,
Without expectations, fears, or hopes,
At the edge where there is no I or not-I.

(Czeslaw Milosz, translated by Robert Hass [source; not exactly canonical, but it’ll do for now])

…and:

I wrote this book for the ghosts, who, because they’re outside of time, are the only ones with time. After the last rereading (just now), I realize that time isn’t the only thing that matters, time isn’t the only source of terror. Pleasure can be terrifying too, and so can courage.

(Roberto Bolaño [source])

Not from whiskey river:

There were dead children in every family, carried off by sudden incurable diseases: diarrhea, convulsions, diphtheria. All that remained of their brief time on earth were tombstones shaped like baby cribs and inscribed “an angel in heaven.” There were photos that people showed while furtively wiping their eyes, and hushed, almost serene conversations that frightened surviving children, who believed they were living on borrowed time. They would not be safe until the age of twelve or fifteen, having made it through whooping cough, measles, chicken pox, mumps, ear infections, and bronchitis every winter, escaped tuberculosis and meningitis, at which time people would say they’d “filled out”…

The blurred and damaged photo of a little girl standing on a bridge in front of a guardrail. She has short hair, slender thighs, and knobby knees. She holds her hand over her eyes to block the sun. She is laughing. Written on the back of the photo, Ginette 1937. On her tombstone: died at the age of six on Holy Thursday, 1938.

(Annie Ernaux [source])

…and:

Halloween

Some yellow sunflowers open down the street,
A ladder is open beneath someone’s apple tree.
Beneath a dead sky the contours are flattened.
So the land of the dead is closer today.

The land of the dead, they say, is closer.
But what if my lot lies with the living?
Out in the yard a long-billed bird eats something from dust.
Its throat has a dark patch in the shape of a smile
But full, as if its throat had been slit open.

But look, the bird is still pecking and alive.
Elsewhere, a sports game, ropes of rain come down and open the earth.
Here it’s so dry they’d just roll off the dust.

But what if my loves, like the bird, are living?
What if my loves, like the bird, are living for now?

Most of the apples have already fallen.
The sunflowers turn into dusty spiked balls.
But what if my land is the land of the living?
The bird from the dust takes flight
Then turns multiple—

A handful of birds rising in the dead sky
Opened to receive them.
But my loves for now are here and living, and I want more of them.
Like the bird on the ground I pick what I need from the dust.

(Lindsay Turner [source])

…and:

#61: We vote (we insist) for the sake of a future we desire: a future peopled with laughing children, adults who validate or complement our own tastes and preferences with their own, strangers who wish us no ill (as we wish for them). Yet we vote also in rebuke of the remembered past: those horrors which haunt our minds from nightmares we experienced ourselves or witnessed in the lives of others, and never want to live through or see again. At the conjunction of those two impulses lies the empty oval we fill with ink, the switch we choose to throw, the thumb we turn up or down. To vote only from the one impulse — the smiling hope or the fretful anger — is to betray the holiness of the responsibility not just as citizens, but as human beings: to kid only ourselves (if not anyone else) that we are good.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)

What We See When We Finally See

October 11, 2024 by John 2 Comments

[Image: “Mirrored Self-Portrait on the Threshold of COVID,” by John E. Simpson. Taken in mid-December, 2019, it wasn’t meant to be flattering in any way. (Which is kind of the point here, today.) And, for the record: no, I never did get the virus, then or since. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river:

Storm on the Island

We are prepared: we build our houses squat,
Sink walls in rock and roof them with good slate.
This wizened earth has never troubled us
With hay, so, as you see, there are no stacks
Or stooks that can be lost. Nor are there trees
Which might prove company when it blows full
Blast: you know what I mean — leaves and branches
Can raise a tragic chorus in a gale
So that you listen to the thing you fear
Forgetting that it pummels your house too.
But there are no trees, no natural shelter.
You might think that the sea is company,
Exploding comfortably down on the cliffs
But no: when it begins, the flung spray hits
The very windows, spits like a tame cat
Turned savage. We just sit tight while wind dives
And strafes invisibly. Space is a salvo,
We are bombarded with the empty air.
Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.

(Seamus Heaney [source])

…and:

Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back — in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.

(Frederick Buechner [source])

…and (last two sentences):

I found myself delighted by the language and imagery of the early monks. Here, for example, is the seventh-century monk of Sinai, John Climacus, on the subject of pride, from a book that is still read in Orthodox monasteries during Lent:

Pride is a denial of God, an invention of the devil, contempt for men. It is the mother of condemnation, the offspring of praise, a sign of barrenness. It is a flight from God’s help, the harbinger of madness, the author of downfall. It is the cause of diabolical possession, the source of anger, the gateway of hypocrisy. It is the fortress of demons, the custodian of sins, the source of hardheartedness. It is the denial of compassion, a bitter pharisee, a cruel judge. It is the foe of God. It is the root of blasphemy.

Welcome to the truth: that’s the feeling I have when I read such a text. And the monk Evagrius, the first to write down and attempt to codify the beliefs and practices of the desert monks with regard to sin (which they called “demons” or “bad thoughts”), not only provides me with a means of understanding my own “bad thoughts” but also with the tools to confront them. His view of anger is typically sensible. Anger, he wrote, is given to us by God to help us confront true evil. We err when we use it casually, against other people, to gratify our own desires for power or control.

(Kathleen Norris [source])

Not from whiskey river:

The things that happen here do not seem to mean anything; they mean something somewhere else. Somewhere else retribution will come on the real offender. Here it often seems to fall on the wrong person.

(G.K. Chesterton [source])

…and:

“The old gods are everywhere,” she says. “They swim in the river, and grow in the field, and sing in the woods. They are in the sunlight on the wheat, and under the saplings in spring, and in the vines that grow up the side of that stone church. They gather at the edges of the day, at dawn, and at dusk…

“The old gods may be great, but they are neither kind nor merciful. They are fickle, unsteady as moonlight on water, or shadows in a storm. If you insist on calling them, take heed: be careful what you ask for, be willing to pay the price… And no matter how desperate or dire, never pray to the gods that answer after dark.”

(V.E. Schwab [source])

…and:

A Letter in October

Dawn comes later and later now,
and I, who only a month ago
could sit with coffee every morning
watching the light walk down the hill
to the edge of the pond and place
a doe there, shyly drinking,

then see the light step out upon
the water, sowing reflections
to either side—a garden
of trees that grew as if by magic—
now see no more than my face,
mirrored by darkness, pale and odd,

startled by time. While I slept,
night in its thick winter jacket
bridled the doe with a twist
of wet leaves and led her away,
then brought its black horse with harness
that creaked like a cricket, and turned

the water garden under. I woke,
and at the waiting window found
the curtains open to my open face;
beyond me, darkness. And I,
who only wished to keep looking out,
must now keep looking in.

(Ted Kooser [source])

…and:

He rolled down his window. The morning cold came roaring in at him and he hung his head out the window and into the wind; it roared around and over and into the pores of his face and scalp, blurring his vision and scrubbing scrubbing his skin but leaving untouched the scent at his core. A thousand questions glittered down at him from the sky, one question per star, only the least consequential of which were sure to be forthcoming from the Jaguar owner’s insurance company but for the most part unanswerable questions about what he was — well, thought he was — and what he wanted (or, well, all right: thought he wanted) to be, and what he had done and would have to do now, what he could do now and what he would never be able to do again. Lined up behind a tractor trailer which was mysteriously obeying the speed limit, on a wild impulse Webster reached forward and shut off the Galaxie’s headlights.

Bobbing like a cork, borne on desire, face to the wind. Heart racing, alone in the dark.

(JES [source])

Opening Up to the Precarious Life

August 23, 2024 by John Leave a Comment

[Illustration, by Julian Peters, of a passage from T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. You can read a guide to the poem here — which is where I found this illustration itself. The complete 24-page comic can be viewed at Peters’s own site, here — you can even order a print version of it.]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

This is it. This is my personality, this is my body, this is my life. Just this life is it. It’s hard to describe the feeling of accepting this a little more deeply. It’s a feeling of settling in a little more, or settling down, or opening up, of ceasing to fight against what is. This is not to say that I don’t keep working on my conduct, that I don’t intend to keep studying and practicing, but somehow my attitude shifted a little lately. A little away from trying to be someone else, a little more squarely on just being this person. “Just be yourself” our teachers tell us.

Letting go of trying to be someone else is liberation. You don’t need to apologize anymore. If you really accept that this is it you don’t need to strive anymore, you don’t need to fight what is. You make effort out of joy, out of curiosity, out of compassion for beings, out of the sheer pleasure of engagement with the world. And when things don’t work out you aren’t thrown, you understand that as part of what this is. You don’t think, “oh there is trouble so I’m going about things the wrong way” rather you understand trouble as part of what this is. You adjust and react to the feedback of the universe but just as adjusting, just as reacting not as someone who has failed.

(Nomon Tim Burnett [source])

…and:

You know, you could not see me unless you could also see my background, what stands behind me. If I, myself, the boundaries of my skin, were coterminous with your whole field of vision you would not see me at all… You would not see me because, in order to see me, not only would you have to see what is inside the boundary of my skin, but also what is outside it.

Now, that’s terribly important. Really, the fundamental, ultimate mystery, the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets is this: that for every outside there is an inside, and for every inside there is an outside, and though they are different, they go together. There is, in other words, a secret conspiracy between all insides and all outsides, and the conspiracy is this: to look as different as possible and yet underneath to be identical, because you do not find one without the other.

(Alan Watts [source])

…and:

When you live your life at peace with every circumstance of your life, favorable or terrible, you situate yourself at the still point of the turning universe. Then you are the world of cause and effect itself, you become this. You become, with nothing between you and it, this precarious world. You are precariousness itself and so you are no longer subject to precariousness. When you live like this you are the master of precariousness, the master of cause and effect, and then everything is blessed, just as it is.

Interestingly, the root of the word precarious is “prayer,” or “imprecation.” When you fully enter precariousness, our ordinary human world of one mistake after another, you are “full of prayer,” open to connectedness. Then you can see how a life of human limitation is also a life of grace.

(Susan Murphy [source])

Not from whiskey river:

It is in the nature of things to be lost and not otherwise. Think of how little has been salvaged from the compost of time of the hundreds of billions of dreams dreamt since the language to describe them emerged, how few names, how few wishes, how few languages even, how we don’t know what tongues the people who erected the standing stones of Britain and Ireland spoke or what the stones meant, don’t know much of the language of the Gabrielanos of Los Angeles or the Miwoks of Marin, don’t know how or why they drew the giant pictures on the desert floor in Nazca, Peru, don’t know much even about Shakespeare or Li Po. It is as though we make the exception the rule, believe that we should have rather than that we will generally lose. We should be able to find our way back again by the objects we dropped, like Hansel and Gretel in the forest, the objects reeling us back in time, undoing each loss, a road back from lost eyeglasses to lost toys and baby teeth. Instead, most of the objects form the secret constellations of our irrecoverable past, returning only in dreams where nothing but the dreamer is lost. They must still exist somewhere: pocket knives and plastic horses don’t exactly compost, but who knows where they go in the great drifts of objects sifting through our world?

(Rebecca Solnit [source])

…and:

Dangerous Life

I quit med school when I found out the stiff they gave me
had book 9 of Paradise Lost and the lyrics
to “Louie Louie” tattooed on her thighs.

That morning as the wind was mowing
little ladies on a street below, I touched a Bunsen burner
to the Girl Scout sash whose badges were the measure of my worth:

Careers…
Cookery, Seamstress…
and Baby Maker… all gone up in smoke.

But I kept the merit badge marked Dangerous Life,
for which, if you remember, the girls were taken to the woods
and taught the mechanics of fire,

around which they had us dance with pointed sticks
lashed into crucifixes that we’d wrapped with yarn and wore
on lanyards round our necks, calling them our “Eyes of God.”

Now my mother calls the pay phone outside my walk-up, raving
about what people think of a woman—thirty, unsettled,
living on food stamps, coin-op Laundromats & public clinics.

Some nights I take my lanyards from their shoebox, practice baying
those old camp songs to the moon. And remember how they told us
that a smart girl could find her way out of anywhere, alive.

(Lucia Perillo [source])

Watching the Traffic at the Corner of Contradiction and Clarity

April 9, 2021 by John 1 Comment

[Image: Stairwell at the Landesgalerie Niederösterreich (“State Gallery of Lower Austria”), in Krems an der Donau. (Building designed by Marte.Marte Architects; photo from the Web site of M+G Ingenieure, the engineering firm who actually planned and, I believe, managed its construction.) You might look at this and think, “Eh? Big deal. It’s a concrete stairway!” But no: you’re actually looking at two stairways: one, “the” stairway with the window, the railings, etc.; and one, on the far side of the concrete wall and ceiling — you’re looking at that stairway’s underside. This stairwell houses, in short, a double helix of stairways: the main stair, and the concrete-sealed fire/emergency stair. I’ll add more in a follow-up comment to the post.]

From whiskey river:

The path into the light seems dark,
the path forward seems to go back,
the direct path seems long,
true power seems weak,
true purity seems tarnished,
true steadfastness seems changeable,
true clarity seems obscure,
the greatest art seems unsophisticated,
the greatest love seems indifferent,
the greatest wisdom seems childish.

(Lao Tzu [source])

…and:

Reading Milosz
I read your poetry once more,
poems written by a rich man, knowing all,
and by a beggar, homeless,
an emigrant, alone.
You always wanted to go
beyond poetry, above it, soaring,
but also lower, to where our region
begins, modest and timid.
Sometimes your tone
transforms us for a moment,
we believe — truly —
that every day is sacred,
that poetry — how to put it? —
makes life rounder,
fuller, prouder, unashamed
of perfect formulation.
But evening arrives,
I lay my book aside,
and the city’s ordinary din resumes —
somebody coughs, someone cries and curses.

(Adam Zagajewski, translated by Clare Cavanagh [source])

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Startled by a Glimpse of the Invisible

April 2, 2021 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Family Portraits IX,” one of a series by the photographic team known as Inka & Niclas (Inka and Niclas Lindergård). The series comprises what might be otherwise conventional natural-landscape/family-portrait photos (sometimes with their children, as here). The difference: the human subjects were dressed in full-body reflective garb, and illuminated with strobe lights in such a way as to minimize the effect of the lighting on their surroundings. Some, like this one, were taken in dark settings; others, in broad daylight. Overall, the photos simultaneously haunt and disquiet — bleached-out cousins of the human figures graven, in 1945, on the walls at Hiroshima.]

From whiskey river:

Funeral Music
(excerpt)
8.
Not as we are but as we must appear,
Contractual ghosts of pity; not as we
Desire life but as they would have us live,
Set apart in timeless colloquy.
So it is required; so we bear witness,
Despite ourselves, to what is beyond us,
Each distant sphere of harmony forever
Poised, unanswerable. If it is without
Consequence when we vaunt and suffer, or
If it is not, all echoes are the same
In such eternity. Then tell me, love,
How that should comfort us — or anyone
Dragged half-unnerved out of this worldly place,
Crying to the end ‘I have not finished’.

(Geoffrey Hill [source])

…and:

At a certain point we need to grow up; we need to look inside ourselves for our inner guidance. There are things most human beings know; they just don’t want to know them. They know deep down that certain things in their lives are working or aren’t working, that certain parts of their lives are functional and others are dysfunctional. But sometimes, as human beings, we don’t want to know what’s not convenient. So we pretend not to know.

(Adyashanti [source])

…and, from whiskey river‘s commonplace book:

What’s Not Here
I start out on this road, call it
love or emptiness. I only know what’s
not here: resentment seeds, back-
scratching greed, worrying about out-
come, fear of people. When a bird gets
free, it doesn’t go back for remnants
left on the bottom of the cage! Close
by, I’m rain. Far off, a cloud of fire.
I seem restless, but I am deeply at ease.
Branches tremble; the roots are still.
I am a universe in a handful of dirt,
whole when totally demolished. Talk
about choices does not apply to me.
While intelligence considers options,
I am somewhere lost in the wind.

(Jelaluddin Rumi [source])

…and (in slightly different words):

The easiest way of illuminating this term [“grades of significance”] is by means of a classic example of the diverse responses and grade of significance that an object may elicit. For example, an animal may see an oddly shaped black and white object, a tribal person a rectangular flexible object with curious markings. To a Western child it is a book, while to an adult it may be a particular type of book, namely a book that makes incomprehensible, even ridiculous claims about reality. Finally, to a physicist, it may be a profound text on quantum physics…
What this example so nicely demonstrates is that when we cannot comprehend higher levels of significance, we can blithely believe that we have fully understood something whose true significance we have completely missed. As Schumacher pointed out:
…All levels of significance up to the adequate level, i.e., up to the level of meaning in the example of the book, are equally factual, equally logical, equally objective, but not equally real… When the level of the knower is not adequate to the level (or the grade of significance) of the object of knowledge, the result is not factual error but something much more serious: an inadequate and impoverished view of reality.
This raises an arresting question: What higher levels of significance, what profound meanings and messages, does the world give us that we are overlooking?

(Helen Palmer [source])

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