Marge Piercy

RAMH@14.005479: In Search of Stasis

April 22, 2022 by John 4 Comments

*[Image: Cover of* Off Flew the Hat, a 2017 children’s book by Nili Ariely about — apparently — the pleasures of writing a blog over the course of many years. Says the description at that Amazon page, it’s about “about the wonders of discovery and friendship.” But even absent the latter — fresh friendships and shared discoveries — there’s always the thrill of a new discovery for oneself…]

In a typical week, whiskey river offers me at least one solid tie-in to something I’ve been thinking about. This week, a bonus: it floated two selections my way appropriate to the post’s theme. First:

The Mountain
My students look at me expectantly.
I explain to them that the life of art is a life
of endless labor. Their expressions
hardly change; they need to know
a little more about endless labor.
So I tell them the story of Sisyphus,
how he was doomed to push
a rock up a mountain, knowing nothing
would come of this effort
but that he would repeat it
indefinitely. I tell them
there is joy in this, in the artist’s life,
that one eludes
judgment, and as I speak
I am secretly pushing a rock myself,
slyly pushing it up the steep
face of a mountain.
Why do I lie
to these children? They aren’t listening,
they aren’t deceived, their fingers
tapping at the wooden desks—
So I retract
the myth; I tell them it occurs
in hell, and that the artist lies
because he is obsessed with attainment,
that he perceives the summit
as that place where he will live forever,
a place about to be
transformed by his burden: with every breath,
I am standing at the top of the mountain.
Both my hands are free. And the rock has added
height to the mountain.

(Louise Glück [source])

… and then there’s this:

Rising in Perilous Hope
What can I hold in my hands this morning
that will not flow through my fingers?
What words can I say that will catch
in your mind like burrs, chiggers that burrow?
If my touch could heal, I would lay my hands
on your bent head and bellow prayers.
If my words could change the weather
or the government or the way the world
twists and guts us, fast or slow,
what could I do but what I do now?
I fit words together and say them;
it is a given like the color of my eyes.
I hope it makes a small difference, as
I hope the drought will break and the morning
come rising out of the ocean wearing
a cloak of clean sweet mist and swirling terns.

(Marge Piercy [source])

Aside from the fact of, well, duh, Friday, today’s post has one other raison d’être, as I hinted a week ago: today is the 14th anniversary (plus a couple days, hence the nerd-jokey post title) of my first post at Running After My Hat.

Some statistics, since then:

1,667 posts, or about 119 posts a year (1,805 total, counting those I haven’t actually published for one reason or another)
104 pages (120 total)
7,176 comments (2,645 of which have been mine; plus 12 “in moderation”)

…and some thoughts about those statistics:

119 posts a year — two to three every week — sounds weirdly inflated even to me. But that’s only because I, and almost certainly you, have gotten used to the Fridays-only tempo around here. There was a time (he said, propping up his feet on a cracker barrel and lifting a harmonica to his lips to maximize the nostalgic moment) when I was determined to write a post every single day — and for a brief while actually did so. What happened? Just the usual: the world moves on, and we move on with it… especially online, when today’s Hot Tech (e.g., blogging) becomes tomorrow’s Quaint Handicraft. Maybe we need an Etsy just for blogs.

The “pages” count is probably about right, although I’ve never tried to verify it. A page is WordPress’s version of an undated diary entry. The top menu here shows you, apart from the “Home” link, links to four such pages:

The fact that you can see only four there points out a distinguishing feature of pages vs. posts: the former can be “found” pretty much only if the blogger has chosen to link to them. The pages themselves may lead you to other pages and/or to actual posts — you can see examples of both by clicking on that About Running After My Hat link at the top of the blog.

So what about the other 116 “pages”? What’s on them?

Some are private — scratchpad-type things, notes to myself (especially about the blog) and so on; you can’t find them by searching the Web, say. Some are password-protected, meaning I’ve shared them with other parties for particular reason(s) — you might be able to find links/references to one in a Web search, but without the proper password you couldn’t actually read the contents. (A good example: a series of pages I used while participating in an online writer’s workshop about six years ago — taking apart and reassembling a novel in which I’ve invested a lot of time and energy. Other workshop participants could read those pages because I’d shared the password with them.) Back in 2012, I wrote The Propagational Library, a science-fiction novella (sort of) by posting one chapter a week, in “real time” (meaning, the chapters as posted were first drafts, posted the day I wrote them) — and indexed them all, with some general commentary, on a single “table of contents” sort of page.

The rest? I’m not sure how to characterize them… You’ll just have to find them the same way I did a moment ago: by poking around to see where the hyperlinks lead you. (The links to actual posts here look like this: https://johnesimpson.com/blog/[yyyy]/[mm]/[title, in compact form] — if a link directs you to a RAMH resource which has no [yyyy] or [mm] component, you can bet it’s a page and not a post; the posts are always dated.)

Anyway, about today’s post’s title: yes, I’m getting a bit restless. But it’s a peculiar sort of restlessness — I’m wanting to, well, be parked somewhere for a while — somewhere I can think of as “home,” physically, really, geographically. (We’ve been parked with The Stepson since mid-December, but that’s only a borrowed, temporary resting spot, good only until we hit the road again in a few weeks; I’m restless, that is, to really come to rest.)

In a bloggish sense, though, I’m equally restless. I can’t recapture the “feel” of blogging in the early 2000s, when loose groups of a few dozen people who didn’t even know one another in real life would chance to gather (not in so many words) and “listen to” one another, round-robin style, and then to “talk” for a little while about the monologue they’d just read. These days, the choices seem to be:

Quick one- or two-paragraph (if that) pronouncements of one kind or another, which may or may not draw anyone else into a conversation;
“influencer”-focused long-form writings, via the likes of Substack, Medium, etc., in which Big Names craft professional essays upon which their audiences may comment but not really in the form of conversation (it’s like the sotto-voce muttering during a theatrical intermission); and
maybe — maybe — podcasts, to which I will never adapt because, y’know, hearing (and also because these are really just audio versions of the long-form Substack/Medium essays, with the additional option of including more than one “influencer” at a time, in conversation).

But I don’t despair. I think I can find value in writing regularly again, even if no one ever reads it — just because, by posting it in the open, I’ve exposed myself to the ~~danger~~ ~~opportunity~~ mere chance that someone might drop in…

In the meantime, I thank you — whoever you are, however (in)frequent a visitor you might be — for visiting Running After My Hat. I appreciate knowing you might be out there!

The World Recalls All You’ve Sought to Forget

February 28, 2020 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Mind Your Head Signage,” by Arthur Brognoli (found on the free-stock-photos site Pexels).]

From whiskey river:

Bedtime Story
The moon lies on the river
like a drop of oil.
The children come to the banks to be healed
of their wounds and bruises.
The fathers who gave them their wounds and bruises
come to be healed of their rage.
The mothers grow lovely; their faces soften,
the birds in their throats awake.
They all stand hand in hand
and the trees around them,
forever on the verge
of becoming one of them,
stop shuddering and speak their first word.
But that is not the beginning.
It is the end of the story,
and before we come to the end,
the mothers and fathers and children
must find their way to the river,
separately, with no one to guide them.
That is the long, pitiless part,
and it will scare you.

(Lisel Mueller [source])

…and:

Instructions for the Journey
The self you leave behind
is only a skin you have outgrown.
Don’t grieve for it.
Look to the wet, raw, unfinished
self, the one you are becoming.
The world, too, sheds its skin:
politicians, cataclysms, ordinary days.
It’s easy to lose this tenderly
unfolding moment. Look for it
as if it were the first green blade
after a long winter. Listen for it
as if it were the first clear tone
in a place where dawn is heralded by bells.
And if all that fails,
wash your own dishes.
Rinse them.
Stand in your kitchen at your sink.
Let cold water run between your fingers.
Feel it.

(Pat Schneider [source])

…and:

People spend too much time finding other people to blame, too much energy finding excuses for not being what they are capable of being, and not enough energy putting themselves on the line, growing out of the past, and getting on with their lives.

(J. Michael Straczynski [source: one of those great quotations which seem to have no confirmed point of origin: everyone just knows this is by [X], from one work or interview or another, and passes it along])

[Read more…]

What We Think We Want, and What the World Thinks About That

November 29, 2019 by John 1 Comment

[Image: photo by Pedro Ribeiro Simões of a portion of an exhibit (2015-16) at Lisbon’s Centro Cultural de Belem, by Colombian artist Nicolás Paris. The exhibit was called Four variations on nothing or talking about that which has no name, which — depending on your point of view — might say everything or nothing, or, really, anything in between. Quite a title, eh? (Found the photo on Flickr, naturally enough, and use it here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!)]

From whiskey river:

Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion, against injustice and lying and greed.
If you, not just you in this room tonight but in all the thousands of other rooms like this one about the world today and tomorrow and next week, will do this, not as a class or classes, but as but individuals, men and women, you will change the earth.
In one generation, all the Napoleons and Hitlers and Caesars and Mussolinis and Stalins, and all the other tyrants who want power and aggrandizement, and all the simple politicians and time-servers who themselves are merely baffled or ignorant or afraid, who have used, or are using, or hope to use, man’s fear and greed for man’s enslavement, will have vanished from the face of it.

(William Faulkner [source])

…and:

If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows.
And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge.

(Hannah Arendt [source])

…and:

What We Want
What we want
is never simple.
We move among the things
we thought we wanted:
a face, a room, an open book
and these things bear our names—
now they want us.
But what we want appears
in dreams, wearing disguises.
We fall past,
holding out our arms
and in the morning
our arms ache.
We don’t remember the dream,
but the dream remembers us.
It is there all day
as an animal is there
under the table,
as the stars are there
even in full sun.

(Linda Pastan [source])

[Read more…]

Words as Obstacles, Words as Solutions

March 30, 2018 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Aerial,” by Shane Taremi. (Found on Flickr; used here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!) According to the photographer, this is an aerial portrait of his wife’s face — evidently produced with the help of dozens (hundreds?) of other people. (I like to think his wife’s name is “Ariel,” but, well, no idea.) Can’t see the portrait? Shrink the browser window a bit narrower, or just move back a foot or two from the screen.]

From whiskey river:

Rising in Perilous Hope

What can I hold in my hands this morning
that will not flow through my fingers?

What words can I say that will catch
in your mind like burrs, chiggers that burrow?

If my touch could heal, I would lay my hands
on your bent head and bellow prayers.

If my words could change the weather
or the government or the way the world

twists and guts us, fast or slow,
what could I do but what I do now?

I fit words together and say them;
it is a given like the color of my eyes.

I hope it makes a small difference, as
I hope the drought will break and the morning

come rising out of the ocean wearing
a cloak of clean sweet mist and swirling terns.

(Marge Piercy [source])

…and:

To Sleep
(excerpt)

It’s dangerous to lie down
mid-day, late March and dark,
a heavy, wet snow falling from the sky
or rising from the ground, it’s hard
to say, the day a blur
as you drift off toward sleep
rather than keeping your eye on
the great world around you
where it should be if you are
to earn the right to be
called a poet, attentive to
the details of everyday life—
the quality of light, the specific
gravity of the snow, the exact
weight of birdsong and wing.

(Ronald Wallace [source])

[Read more…]

Things Flare Up… and Then — Poof!

June 30, 2017 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Metanoia: transformation, a change of heart or mind,” by Patricia Wu Wu; found on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license (thank you!). It’s not clear, exactly, but this image seems to be a draft, of sorts — sketches in black ink or paint: Patricia Wu Wu is a fashion/textiles designer. Apparently this image was included in her “Metanoia” show at the Glasgow School of Art (see the corresponding Flickr album for more). You can see more of the work she exhibited there at her own site.]

From whiskey river:

Then again, if physics is right, we shouldn’t exist. You can watch ions hop across synapses, follow nerve impulses from nose to toes; nothing in any of those processes would lead you to expect the emergence of subjective awareness. Physics describes a world of intelligent zombies who do everything we do, except understand that they’re doing it. That’s what we should be, that’s all we should be: meat and computation. Somehow the meat woke up. How the hell does that even work?

(Peter Watts [source])

…and:

Prelude

Waking up is a parachute jump from dreams.
Free of the suffocating turbulence the traveler
sinks toward the green zone of morning.
Things flare up. From the viewpoint of the quivering lark
he is aware of the huge root systems of the trees,
their swaying underground lamps. But above ground
there’s greenery—a tropical flood of it—with
lifted arms, listening
to the beat of an invisible pump. And he
sinks toward summer, is lowered
in its dazzling crater, down
through shafts of green damp ages
trembling under the sun’s turbine. Then it’s checked,
this straight-down journey through the moment, and the wings spread
to the osprey’s repose above rushing waters.
The bronze-age trumpet’s
outlawed note
hovers above the bottomless depths.

In day’s first hours consciousness can grasp the world
as the hand grips a sun-warmed stone.
The traveler is standing under a tree. After
the crash through death’s turbulence, shall
a great light unfold above his head?

(Tomas Tranströmer [source])

…and:

The plain truth is we are going to die. Here I am, a teeny speck surrounded by boundless space and time, arguing with the whole of creation, shaking my fist, sputtering, growing even eloquent at times, and then — poof! I am gone. Swept off once and for all. I think that is very, very funny.

(Charles Simic [source (via)])

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All of a Piece, a Piece of All

April 1, 2016 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Broken promises Project 365(3),” by Keith Williamson (user “elwillo”) on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons license.]

From whiskey river:

All good things are one thing. Sunsets, schools of philosophy, cathedrals, operas, mountains, horses, poems — all these are mainly disguises. One thing is always walking among us in fancy-dress, in the grey cloak of a church or the green cloak of a meadow.

(G. K. Chesterton [source])

…and:

Where Is God?

It’s as if what is unbreakable—
the very pulse of life—waits for
everything else to be torn away,
and then in the bareness that
only silence and suffering and
great love can expose, it dares
to speak through us and to us.

It seems to say, if you want to last,
hold on to nothing. If you want
to know love, let in everything.
If you want to feel the presence
of everything, stop counting the
things that break along the way.

(Mark Nepo [source])

…and, from whiskey river’s commonplace book:

People Like Us
for James Wright

There are more like us. All over the world
There are confused people, who can’t remember
The name of their dog when they wake up, and people
Who love God but can’t remember where

He was when they went to sleep. It’s
All right. The world cleanses itself this way.
A wrong number occurs to you in the middle
Of the night, you dial it, it rings just in time

To save the house. And the second-story man
Gets the wrong address, where the insomniac lives,
And he’s lonely , and they talk, and the thief
Goes back to college. Even in graduate school,

You can wander into the wrong classroom,
And hear great poems lovingly spoken
By the wrong professor. And you find your soul
And greatness has a defender, and even in death you’re safe

(Robert Bly [source])

…and:

Japanese Shape

The way it forces you to look
watching your step
so as not to turn your ankle
on a rock
or step into water nearby

The way it turns the torso
this way and that
view after view
spaces between spaces
and spaces between

The way it slows you down
step after step
no skipping between
there is no short cut
to the edge of this garden

The way it swirls the vision
into brown and black
and green and light with
sound in the air until
only a blanket remains

The way it stops the mind.

(Harry Palmer [no alternative source located])

[Read more…]

“An Echo That Did Not Die Away”

May 6, 2011 by John 10 Comments

[Image: a communications “satelloon.” For more information,
see the note at the foot of this post.]
From whiskey river:

There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else. You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you’ve been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw — but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realize that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you were transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of — something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat’s side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it — tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest — if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself — you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say “Here at last is the thing I was made for.” We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.

(C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain [source])

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