[Untitled image (but I think “Looking for the Light” works as well as anything) by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) See the post on Instagram for some background on the photo.]

In a couple of entries over the last week, whiskey river (as in the italicized lines below, from Jack Gilbert’s poem) seems to have taken special note of the need for a 360-degree perspective: to sense the reality of, yes, lots of ugliness in front of us (thank you, online world and mass media of all kinds!) — but also of the delight and happiness which lie behind (or within), waiting patiently and quietly for our attention.

A Brief For The Defense

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

(Jack Gilbert [source])

…all of which echoes this — not from whiskey river, and much more oblique in effect:

Lingering in Happiness

After rain after many days without rain,
it stays cool, private and cleansed, under the trees,
and the dampness there, married now to gravity,
falls branch to branch, leaf to leaf, down to the ground

where it will disappear—but not, of course, vanish
except to our eyes. The roots of the oaks will have their share,
and the white threads of the grasses, and the cushion of moss;
a few drops, round as pearls, will enter the mole’s tunnel;

and soon so many small stones, buried for a thousand years,
will feel themselves being touched.

(Mary Oliver [source])

Now that I’m thinking about it, and speaking perhaps only for myself… Maybe the easy characterization of emotional states as a one-dimensional continuum — from misery to ecstasy — is glib and short-sighted. Maybe it’s really two- or three-dimensional, forming a circle or sphere around the tiny little nub of a me at the center. Very seldom (never?) do I switch from one emotional state to another; more often (always?), I’m in transition — drifting. Misery fades into anger, which fades into rue and hurt, which in turn yield to a sort of gallows humor, which becomes, a moment later, actual outright laughter…