[Image: “Greenway Trail Abstraction,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) Said the caption when I posted this on Instagram: “Wooden bridge. Algae covered. Yellow ‘Don’t fall off!’-type warning stripe. What appear to be tread marks from a thousand different bicycles. And then the final touch (courtesy of time and gravity) which somehow ties the whole thing off: simple pine needles.”]
From a single day’s post at whiskey river:
Out there people are working and arguing and laughing, living their beautiful, terrible lives, falling in love and having babies and being bored out of their skulls and feeling depressed, then being consoled by some little thing like watching the patterns the light makes through the leaves of trees, casting shadows on the sidewalks.
I remember the line from that poem now.
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
(Kim Addonizio [source])
…and (italicized lines):
VIII
She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, “The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.”
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
(Wallace Stevens [source])
Not from whiskey river:
The box is our great symbol of classification. What box are you in? All words are boxes: animal, vegetable, mineral, solid, gas, liquid, Republican, Democrat, capitalist, communist, Christian, heathen, male, female, and so on. All boxes. And because we think in boxes, we live in boxes — poorly made, identical boxes. Instead, consider the types of fish who make homes in beautiful shells with glorious spirally wiggles on them and lovely colors. But we want everything straightened out, and that rigidity is always in contrast with the fluidity that surrounds us. We are landlubbers, as opposed to people of the waves, although we Brits have always made a great deal of associating freedom with the ocean.
{ The art of faith is not in taking a stand but in learning how to swim. }
We think of the sea as fluid and the land as solid, but nothing could be further from the truth. Where I live, in Sausalito, a lot of land was reclaimed along the waterfront, and they dredged out mud to make the marina, not realizing that land, too, is liquid. So the land adjoining the water is sinking because it’s filling up the hole made by the excavation. People don’t think of things like this, because they conceive of land as purely solid…
Learning to wiggle is fundamental to pleasure. We should let go and relax. But that doesn’t mean that we become droopy — relaxing means becoming supple. It means learning your weight, how to use it, and how to flow with gravity. Water always takes the course of least resistance — it flows and wiggles with gravity — and yet it possesses tremendous strength. For most of us, especially white Anglo-Saxon Protestants and Irish Catholics, taking the path of least resistance is somehow considered cowardly and despicable. You’ve got to get there the fastest way possible, which is again in a straight line, the supposed shortest distance between two points.
That’s why jogging isn’t the right way to run. The right way to run is by dancing.
(Alan Watts [source])
…and:
#3: We have been trained by motion-picture and related technologies to imagine that life — our memories, in particular — can be effectively captured as a series of unmoving images which merely simulate movement. We say, “I have a picture in my head of a time when [fill in the blank].” To say instead that we remember a week, a day, a moment as a wriggling, multicolored caterpillar would just sound, well, weird… although that’s exactly how life unfolds.
(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)
