Ram Dass

[Image: adapted from “Mermaid birdbath closer,” by Flickr user “orchid dude.” There are a lot of images of mermaids in concrete and stone in some kind of watery setting, but this one by far had the best representation of one of the despondent and possibly ill-tempered creatures depicted in Matthea Harvey’s poem this week…]

From whiskey river:

I’ll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.

(Cheryl Strayed [source])

…and (epigraph + last two stanzas):

The Blue Guitar

“They said, ‘You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.’
The man replied, ‘Things as they are
are changed upon the blue guitar.'”
— The Blue Guitar (Wallace Stevens)

I do my best to tell it true
a thing exceeding hard to do
or tell it slant as Emily
advises in her poetry,
and, colour blind, how can I know
if green is blue or cinnabar.
Find me a colour chart that I
can check against a summer sky.
My eye is on a distant star.
They said, ‘You have a blue guitar.’

‘I have,’ the man replied, ‘it’s true.
The instrument I strum is blue
I strum my joy, I strum my pain
I strum the sun, I strum the rain.
But tell me, what is that to you?
You see things as you think they are.
Remove the mote within your ear
then talk to me of what you hear.’
They said, ‘Go smoke a blue cigar!
You do not play things as they are.’

‘Things as they are? Above? Below?
In hell or heaven? Fast or slow …?’
They silenced him. ‘It’s not about
philosophy, so cut it out.
We want the truth and not what you
are playing on the blue guitar.
So start again and play it straight
don’t improvise, prevaricate.
Just play things as they really are.’
The man replied, ‘Things as they are

are not the same as things that were
or will be in another year.
The literal is rarely true
for truth is old and truth is new
and faceted — a metaphor
for something higher than we are.
I play the truth of Everyman
I play the truth as best I can.
The things I play are better far
when changed upon the blue guitar.’

(P. K. Page, from The Blue Guitar [source])

…and:

Under the trees,
welcoming spring.
Things take care of themselves.
[…]
Filling the eye,
blue, blue mountains
in all directions.

(Gesshu Soko [source])

[Read more…]

[Image: “Judy’s Husband’s Stuffed Pickles,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH). Taken at the North Florida Fair in November 2018; the husband was not in evidence, but the wife and the pickles did a fine job of representing the enterprise.]

From whiskey river:

Choosing to Think of It

Today, ten thousand people will die
and their small replacements will bring joy
and this will make sense to someone
removed from any sense of loss.
I, too, will die a little and carry on,
doing some paperwork, driving myself
home. The sky is simply overcast,
nothing is any less than it was
yesterday or the day before. In short,
there’s no reason or every reason
why I’m choosing to think of this now.
The short-lived holiness
true lovers know, making them unaccountable
except to spirit and themselves – suddenly
I want to be that insufferable and selfish,
that sharpened and tuned.
I’m going to think of what it means
to be an animal crossing a highway,
to be a human without a useful prayer
setting off on one of those journeys
we humans take. I don’t expect anything
to change. I just want to be filled up
a little more with what exists,
tipped toward the laughter which understands
I’m nothing and all there is.
By evening, the promised storm
will arrive. A few in small boats
will be taken by surprise.
There will be survivors, and even they will die.

(Stephen Dunn [source unknown, but probably here; appearing here])

…and (italicized portion):

You cannot write by thinking. You have plenty of time to think in between times. The period in between is when you stuff your eyeballs, when you read diversified multitudes of material in every field. I absolutely demand of you and everyone I know that they be widely read in every damn field there is: in every religion and every art form and don’t tell me you haven’t got time! There’s plenty of time. You need all of these cross-references. You never know when your head is going to use this fuel, this food for its purposes. Stuff yourself with serious subjects, with comic strips and motion pictures and radio and music; with symphonies, with rock, with everything! What we often forget is that thought is to be used to correct life. It’s not a way of life. If you make thought the center of your life, you’re not going to live it. So, what you have to do is be this kind of hysterical, emotional, vibrant creature who lives at the top of his lungs for a lifetime and then corrects around the edges so that he doesn’t go insane or drive his friends mad. Thought is the skin around the organ. The organ is full of blood and a beating heart, a soul and the exaltation of being alive!

(Ray Bradbury [source])

[Read more…]

As If / As Is

Filling a Life Isn’t the Half of It