Life Never Sleeps, and Your Muse Shouldn’t Either

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[Image: “Operational Readiness,” by Georgie Pauwels. Spotted it on Flickr, and use it here under a Creative Commons license: thank you!]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Thesaurus

Given a way would I be this; given
this thing would I be this. I never knew
how persons could be things, and yet we were

in the vast cosmic Thing; we were little
things. There were greater animations than
ourselves, and to them we were things. This was

a thought in the forest of —thesaurus
of—my nomenclature. How often had
I thought, am I alive or am I dead,

never knowing what either Thingness was.
These were the woods we were talking about,
these were the words we were talking about,

where the forest was always in the trees,
where what I saw was always what I was;
my words, some leaves, all bristling with my life,

animate and aimée, all that was all.
There was an aura, call it a halo,
call it the glow of the moment of grace;

there was something oracular and old,
there was the show and glow, there was hello,
there was yes, no, there was congenial

and genial and joy. There was genius,
a genie in the bottle, breath in the lungs,
there was more than just being as I was:

wind in the woods, a forest in my mind,
the mind of my life found in the forest,
the Thing being named my thing, as it was.

(Sarah Arvio, Sono [source])

…and (italicized portion):

“If artists don’t set out to make significant art, what do they do?”

“…Maybe they do set out to make something significant, in a roundabout sort of way, but it’s not like setting out to make something practical or useful. For one thing, it’s more like play than work. On the other hand, they don’t have a whole lot of choice in the matter. The good ones make art because they have to make it–even though they probably won’t understand why until after it’s already made.”

“But how do they know what to make?”

“That’s dictated by their vision.”

“You mean it comes to ’em like in a dream?”

“No, no, it’s seldom that dramatic. Listen, it’s really pretty simple. If there’s a thing, a scene, maybe, an image that you want to see real bad, that you need to see but it doesn’t exist in the world around you, at least not in the form that you envision, then you create it so that you can look at it and have it around, or show it to other people who wouldn’t have imagined it because they perceive reality in a more narrow, predictable way. And that’s it. That’s all an artist does.“

(Tom Robbins [source])

…and (italicized lines):

Why We Tell Stories
For Linda Foster

I

Because we used to have leaves
and on damp days
our muscles feel a tug,
painful now, from when roots
pulled us into the ground

and because our children believe
they can fly, an instinct retained
from when the bones in our arms
were shaped like zithers and broke
neatly under their feathers

and because before we had lungs
we knew how far it was to the bottom
as we floated open-eyed
like painted scarves through the scenery
of dreams, and because we awakened

and learned to speak

2

We sat by the fire in our caves,
and because we were poor, we made up a tale
about a treasure mountain
that would open only for us

and because we were always defeated,
we invented impossible riddles
only we could solve,
monsters only we could kill,
women who could love no one else
and because we had survived
sisters and brothers, daughters and sons,
we discovered bones that rose
from the dark earth and sang
as white birds in the trees

3

Because the story of our life
becomes our life

Because each of us tells
the same story
but tells it differently

and none of us tells it
the same way twice

Because grandmothers looking like spiders
want to enchant the children
and grandfathers need to convince us
what happened happened because of them

and though we listen only
haphazardly, with one ear,
we will begin our story
with the word and

(Lisel Mueller [source])

From elsewhere:

A weasel is wild. Who knows what he thinks? He sleeps in his underground den, his tail draped over his nose. Sometimes he lives in his den for two days without leaving. Outside, he stalks rabbits, mice, muskrats, and birds, killing more bodies than he can eat warm, and often dragging the carcasses home. Obedient to instinct, he bites his prey at the neck, either splitting the jugular vein at the throat or crunching the brain at the base of the skull, and he does not let go. One naturalist refused to kill a weasel who was socketed into his hand deeply as a rattlesnake. The man could in no way pry the tiny weasel off, and he had to walk half a mile to water, the weasel dangling from his palm, and soak him off like a stubborn label.

And once, says Ernest Thompson Seton—once, a man shot an eagle out of the sky. He examined the eagle and found the dry skull of a weasel fixed by the jaws to his throat. The supposition is that the eagle had pounced on the weasel and the weasel swiveled and bit as instinct taught him, tooth to neck, and nearly won. I would like to have seen that eagle from the air a few weeks or months before he was shot: was the whole weasel still attached to his feathered throat, a fur pendant? Or did the eagle eat what he could reach, gutting the living weasel with his talons before his breast, bending his beak, cleaning the beautiful airborne bones?

[…]

We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience—even of silence—by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn’t “attack” anything; a weasel lives as he’s meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity.

I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you’re going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.

(Annie Dillard [source])

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See the Mountain… Ask the Questions… Watch for Answers

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[Video: “Mars in 4K: The Ultimate Edition,” compiled from the NASA originals by an independent filmmaker who runs a Patreon project dubbed “ElderFox Documentaries.” The video’s description as posted at YouTube says: “A few years ago I threw together some Mars images and rendered them in 4k. Back then, I had little editing knowledge. The video went on to get over 60 million views. It was something that hadn’t been done before, and was a case of the right place at the right time. I’m not expecting this video to come close to the view count of the original, but I just wanted to do it justice and give you all something nice to watch.”]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book (italicized portion):

My eleven-year-old son came to me recently and in a tone of patient suffering, asked, “How much longer do I have to go to school?”

“About fifteen years,” I said.

“Oh! Lord,” he said despondently. “Do I have to?”

“I ’m afraid so. It’s terrible and I’m not going to try to tell you it isn’t. But I can tell you this — if you are very lucky, you may find a teacher and that is a wonderful thing.”

“Did you find one?”

“I found three,” I said.

It is customary for adults to forget how hard and dull school is. The learning by memory all the basic things one must know is the most incredible and unending effort. Learning to read is probably the most difficult and revolutionary thing that happens to the human brain and if you don’t believe that watch an illiterate adult try to do it. School is not so easy and it is not for the most part very fun, but then, if you are very lucky, you may find a teacher. Three real teachers in a lifetime is the very best of luck. I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.

(John Steinbeck [source])

…and:

Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say, like you’re a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves.

Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we’re not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don’t. Who knows, maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who doesn’t have to.

(Alan Watts [source: nothing canonical; quoted in various forms here and there, e.g. here])

…and:

Deep down, all of us are probably aware that some kind of mystical evolution is our true task. Yet we suppress the notion with considerable force because to admit it is to admit that most of our political gyrations, religious dogmas, social ambitions, and financial ploys are not merely counter-productive but trivial.

(Tom Robbins [source])

From elsewhere:

I might say: if the place I want to reach could only be climbed up to by a ladder, I would give up trying to get there. For the place to which I really have to go is one that I must actually be at already.

Anything that can be reached with a ladder does not interest me.

(Ludwig Wittgenstein [source])

…and:

Counting, This New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain to Me

The world asks, as it asks daily:
And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured?

I count, this first day of another year, what remains.
I have a mountain, a kitchen, two hands.

Can admire with two eyes the mountain,
actual, recalcitrant, shuffling its pebbles, sheltering foxes and beetles.

Can make black-eyed peas and collards.
Can make, from last year’s late-ripening persimmons, a pudding.

Can climb a stepladder, change the bulb in a track light.

For four years, I woke each day first to the mountain,
then to the question.

The feet of the new sufferings followed the feet of the old,
and still they surprised.

I brought salt, brought oil, to the question. Brought sweet tea,
brought postcards and stamps. For four years, each day, something.

Stone did not become apple. War did not become peace.
Yet joy still stays joy. Sequins stay sequins. Words still bespangle, bewilder.

Today, I woke without answer.

The day answers, unpockets a thought from a friend

don’t despair of this falling world, not yet

didn’t it give you the asking

(Jane Hirshfield [source])

…and:

# 999, or Thereabouts (Epilogue)

Keep walking. Just keep walking: as fast as you can, no faster. (Perhaps it’s not walking, as such… No: it’s definitely not walking, as such…) Maybe you go just a few steps, and then you have to rest; maybe you can go a mile before stopping to catch your breath. Should a passerby offer a lift, and you feel like talking, ride with them for a distance — take a load off. And then when your paths diverge, walk some more. Walk. Walk…

There will come a time when you walk for just two steps, before needing to rest. And then you will walk just one more step, and need to rest again. And perhaps if you’re lucky, there will be a bench (no luck involved, there’s always a bench), and you can rest on the bench, and say honestly and without regret: I’ve walked enough.

Look back the way you came then. How far you’ve walked! How much higher you are now than when you started! You didn’t even realize you were ascending — it was just putting one foot ahead of the other, over and over…

Close your eyes. Remember the first hundred steps. Remember that odd building you passed, the one with the funny turrets, and the first passerby who stopped for you and that strange story they shared — what was it, something about a pet chinchilla? — and that stand of willows in the middle of the field, by the little creek, and the way the startlingly purple sun rose on the first day after the first night you slept in the open. Remember the one-thousandth one hundred steps, the bus station you passed, with all the waiting taxis… the older driver who stopped to talk but did not offer you a ride… That first night it rained…

Rest.

Rest.

Rest.

Rest… and always, always remember.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)

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When I Walked onto the Strand, I Recognized Nothing

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[Image: “The Strand at Carmel-by-the-Sea,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book (the third stanza included there; this is the complete poem):

On Living

I

Living is no laughing matter:
        you must live with great seriousness
                like a squirrel, for example—
        I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
                I mean living must be your whole occupation.
Living is no laughing matter:
        you must take it seriously,
        so much so and to such a degree
      that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
                                your back to the wall,
        or else in a laboratory
                in your white coat and safety glasses,
                you can die for people—
             even for people whose faces you’ve never seen,
             even though you know living
                is the most real, the most beautiful thing.
        I mean, you must take living so seriously
             that even at seventy, for example, you’ll plant olive trees—
             and not for your children, either,
             but because although you fear death you don’t believe it,
             because living, I mean, weighs heavier.

II

Let’s say you’re seriously ill, need surgery—
which is to say we might not get
    from the white table.
Even though it’s impossible not to feel sad
    about going a little too soon,
we’ll still laugh at the jokes being told,
we’ll look out the window to see it’s raining,
or still wait anxiously
    for the latest newscast…
Let’s say we’re at the front—
  for something worth fighting for, say.
There, in the first offensive, on that very day,
  we might fall on our face, dead.
We’ll know this with a curious anger,
    but we’ll still worry ourselves to death
    about the outcome of the war, which could last years.
Let’s say we’re in prison
and close to fifty,
and we have eighteen more years, say, 
   before the iron doors will open.
We’ll still live with the outside,
with its people and animals, struggle and wind—
      I mean with the outside beyond the walls.
I mean, however and wherever we are,
    we must live as if we will never die.

III

This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
               and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet—
  I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even 
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
  in pitch-black space… 
You must grieve for this right now
—you have to feel this sorrow now—
for the world must be loved this much
                               if you’re going to say “I lived”…

(Nâzim Hikmet, translated by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk [source])

…and (in slightly different form):

Our purpose is to consciously, deliberately evolve toward a wiser, more liberated and luminous state of being, to return to Eden, make friends with the snake, and set up our computers among the wild apple trees.

Deep down, all of us are probably aware that some kind of mystical evolution—a melding into the godhead, into love—is our true task. Yet we suppress the notion with considerable force be-cause to admit it is to acknowledge that most of our political gyrations, religious dogmas, social ambitions, and financial ploys are not merely counterproductive but trivial. Our mission is to jettison those pointless preoccupations and take on once again the primordial cargo of inexhaustible ecstasy. Or, barring that, to turn out a good thin-crust pizza and a strong glass of beer.

(Tom Robbins [source])

From elsewhere:

The history of science can, in fact, be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that were once accepted as “givens” as phenomena that can now be understood in terms of fundamental causes and principles. One can add to the list of the fully explained: the hue of the sky, the orbits of planets, the angle of the wake of a boat moving through a lake, the six-sided patterns of snowflakes, the weight of a flying bustard, the temperature of boiling water, the size of raindrops, the circular shape of the sun. All of these phenomena and many more, once thought to have been fixed at the beginning of time or the result of random events thereafter, have ultimately been explained as necessary consequences of the fundamental laws of nature—laws found by us human beings.

(Alan Lightman [source])

…and:

The Doctor Sighs

as he removes the otoscope
It’s not just the hammer,

anvil, and stirrup, he says.
It’s the blacksmith, too.
And the dry goods store
with the weaselly clerk,
not to mention the saloon
rife with cowboys and
a prostitute with humble
cleavage. And I’m afraid
it’s also the calibrated hearts
in that freezing ten-room
hotel, the mayor’s daughter
weeping into well water,
the moon spreading its
anxious light over everything

In short, Ronald, I’m not
surprised you called
for an appointment today.

(Ron Koertge [source])

…and:

# 28 (“I See What You Did There”): The history of art and philosophy can, in fact, be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that have never been accepted as “givens” as real phenomena that cannot be understood entirely, if at all, in terms of fundamental causes and principles. One can add to the list of the inadequately explained: the circular shape of the sky, the six-sided patterns of planets, the hue of the wake of a bustard moving through a lake, the angle of snowflakes, the temperature of a flying boat, the orbits of water, the size of raindrops, the boiling weight of the sun. None of these phenomena, and many more, are explicable as necessary consequences of the fundamental laws of nature–laws found by us human beings. But there they are: comprehensible, apparently meaningful, even profound, but defying explanation.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)

…and:

The human body is the most resistant thing there is to magic, ’cause it’s a vessel of will.

(T.L. Huchu [source])

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The Stalk That I Call Me (This Quiet Day)

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[Image: “7:19 AM,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Moving Forward

The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were opening out.
It seems that things are more like me now,
that I can see farther into paintings.
I feel closer to what language can’t reach.
With my sense, as with birds, I climb
into the windy heaven, out of the oak,
and in the ponds broken off from the sky
my feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes.

(Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Robert Bly [source])

…and:

The human mind has grown even since the time of the Buddha, 2,500 years ago. The human mind is more noisy and more all-pervasive, and the egos are bigger. There’s been an ego growth over thousands of years; it’s growing to a point of madness, with the ultimate madness having been reached in the twentieth century. One only needs to read twentieth-century history to see that it has been the climax of human madness, if it’s measured in terms of human violence inflicted on other humans.

So in the present time, we can’t escape from the world anymore; we can’t escape from the mind. We need to enter surrender while we are in the world. That seems to be the path that is effective in the world that we live in now. It may be that at the time of the Buddha, withdrawing was much, much easier than it would be now. The human mind was not yet so overwhelming at that time.

(Eckhart Tolle [source])

…and:

In his book On Having No Head, Douglas Harding pointed out that our actual experience of life is of being a stalk, the body, which ends at the chest and shoulders, upon which sits the entire universe. We can’t directly experience ourselves as having a head; we simply assume we are looking out through the eyes in our head because we see others doing that, and when we look in the mirror, that’s what we see. But our experience is of an undifferentiated world of colors, shapes, textures, sounds, feelings and sensations, all existing in one reality, roughly in the spot where we think of our head as being. All that exists, exists on top of the stalk that I call me.

The truly amazing next step in this realization is that the stalk I call me is included in the total existence that extends outward from the top of the stalk. My actual experience is that nothing is separate. I cannot say that any one thing is separate from any other one thing because they all occupy the same space — the space that exists, and contains, the stalk that I call me.

(Cheri Huber [source])

…and:

There are two kinds of people in this world; those who think there are two kinds of people and those who are smart enough to know better.

(Tom Robbins [source])

From elsewhere:

He didn’t doubt that I was telling the truth. He had spoken to me and had forgotten it. That was what scared him. It was one thing for me to have encountered a fracture in the normal progression of time, but the idea that he had played a part in my day and that he had had conversations and done things he could not remember obviously gave him the same feelings of faintness and unease which I had had when I saw that slice of bread drifting floorward. That strange moment when the ground under one’s feet falls away and all at once it feels as though all predictability can be suspended, as though an existential red alert has suddenly been triggered, a quiet state of panic which prompts neither flight nor cries for help, and does not call for police, fire brigade or ambulance. It is as if this emergency response mechanism is there on standby at the back of the mind, like an undertone, not normally audible, but kicking in the moment one is confronted with the unpredictability of life, the knowledge that everything can change in an instant, that something which cannot happen and which we absolutely do not expect, is nonetheless a possibility. That time stands still. That gravity is suspended. That the logic of the world and the laws of nature break down. That we are forced to acknowledge that our expectations about the constancy of the world are on shaky ground. There are no guarantees and behind all that we ordinarily regard as certain lie improbable exceptions, sudden cracks and inconceivable breaches of the usual laws.

(Solvej Balle [source])

…and:

What [an international team of consciousness researchers] did was simple and elegant. To test how different parts of the cortex were talking to each other, they stimulated activity in one location and recorded how this pulse of activity spread to other cortical regions over space and time. They did this by combining two techniques: EEG and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). A TMS rig is a precisely controlled electromagnet which allows a researcher to inject a short and sharp pulse of energy directly into the brain through the skull, while EEG in this case is used to record the brain’s response to this zapping. It’s like banging on the brain with an electrical hammer and listening to the echo.

(Anil Seth [source])

…and:

Two people have been living in you all your life. One is the ego, garrulous, demanding, hysterical, calculating; the other is the hidden spiritual being, whose still voice of wisdom you have only rarely heard or attended to. As you listen more and more to the teachings, contemplate them, and integrate them into your life, your inner voice, your innate wisdom of discernment, what we call in Buddhism “discriminating awareness,” is awakened and strengthened, and you begin to distinguish between its guidance and the various clamorous and enthralling voices of ego. The memory of your real nature, with all its splendor and confidence, begins to return to you.

You will find, in fact, that you have uncovered in yourself your own wise guide. Because he or she knows you through and through, since he or she is you, your guide can help you, with increasing clarity and humor, negotiate all the difficulties of your thoughts and emotions. Your guide can also be a continual, joyful, tender, sometimes teasing presence, who knows always what is best for you and will help you find more and more ways out of your obsession with your habitual responses and confused emotions. As the voice of your discriminating awareness grows stronger and clearer, you will start to distinguish between its truth and the various deceptions of the ego, and you will be able to listen to it with discernment and confidence.

(Sogyal Rinpoche [source])

…and:

Mind Wanting More

Only a beige slat of sun
above the horizon, like a shade
pulled not quite down. Otherwise,
clouds. Sea rippled here and
there. Birds reluctant to fly.
The mind wants a shaft of sun to
stir the grey porridge of clouds,
an osprey to stitch sea to sky
with its barred wings, some dramatic
music: a symphony, perhaps
a Chinese gong.

But the mind always
wants more than it has—
one more bright day of sun,
one more clear night in bed
with the moon; one more hour
to get the words right; one
more chance for the heart in hiding
to emerge from its thicket
in dried grasses—as if this quiet day
with its tentative light weren’t enough,
as if joy weren’t strewn all around.

(Holly Hughes [source])

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High Time to Find Your Center

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[Image: “View to the East, 10:12:45 PM,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

If you need to visualize the soul, think of it as a cross between a wolf howl, a photon, and a dribble of dark molasses. But what it really is, as near as I can tell, is a packet of information. It’s a program, a piece of hyperspatial software designed explicitly to interface with the Mystery. Not a mystery, mind you, the Mystery. The one that can never be solved.

To one degree or another, everybody is connected to the Mystery, and everybody secretly yearns to expand the connection. That requires expanding the soul. These things can enlarge the soul: laughter, danger, imagination, meditation, wild nature, passion, compassion, psychedelics, beauty, iconoclasm, and driving around in the rain with the top down. These things can diminish it: fear, bitterness, blandness, trendiness, egotism, violence, corruption, ignorance, grasping, shining, and eating ketchup on cottage cheese.

Data in our psychic program is often nonlinear, nonhierarchical, archaic, alive, and teeming with paradox. Simply booting up is a challenge, if not for no other reason than that most of us find acknowledging the unknowable and monitoring its intrusions upon the familiar and mundane more than a little embarrassing.

But say you’ve inflated your soul to the size of a beach ball and it’s soaking into the Mystery like wine into a mattress. What have you accomplished? Well, long term, you may have prepared yourself for a successful metamorphosis, an almost inconceivable transformation to be precipitated by your death or by some great worldwide eschatological whoopjamboreehoo. You may have. No one can say for sure.

More immediately, by waxing soulful you will have granted yourself the possibility of ecstatic participation in what the ancients considered a divinely animated universe. And on a day to day basis, folks, it doesn’t get any better than that.

(Tom Robbins [source])

…and (ibid.):

How many Zen masters does it take to change a light bulb?
Two. One to change it, and one not to change it.

(Anonymous […but here’s one source])

Not from whiskey river:

Dream Job

Editorial Assistant. Executive Assistant. Administrative Assistant. Writing
Center Director. Writing Teacher. Receptionist. Poetry Fellow. Technical
Writer. Barista. Waitress. Applying for three jobs a day doesn’t get me a
job. I get an offer from the diner and then the diner burns down. I flop an
interview at the local Subway. I make a couple hundred a month writing
blogs for hotels I cannot afford. I write a blog about Benjamin Franklin’s
Ghost House. It’s a chalk outline in the ground where his house was torn
down. I have a Ghost Life. My friends all get jobs. I know because they
each come to the bar with a polished eye around their neck. The eyes can
foresee only positive futures. In the future, my friends eat takeout and
rescue a dog. They have children they’ve made on purpose and call by
fashionable names. I try to look into their job-eyes, and the eyes close
their bulbous lids. The lids make a horrible smacking sound like someone
closing their mouth to go hmmmm—then not saying what everyone knows
they want to say. Was my phone voice too weak? Did my neck look too
brittle to hold a full-size job-eye? The lease is running out much faster
than my life is. Every day, my apartment gets one-cubic-inch smaller. The
walls get so short I only have room for the bed. I lie there and dream of
having any real job.

(Nicole Connolly [source])

…and:

The places inside matter as much as the ones outside. It is as though in the way places stay with you and that you long for them they become deities—a lot of religions have local deities, presiding spirits, geniuses of the place. You could imagine that in those [old country] songs Kentucky or the Red River is a spirit to which the singer prays, that they mourn the dreamtime before banishment, when the singer lived among the gods who were not phantasms but geography, matter, earth itself.

There is a voluptuous pleasure in all that sadness, and I wonder where it comes from, because as we usually construe the world, sadness and pleasure should be far apart. Is it that the joy that comes from other people always risks sadness, because even when love doesn’t fail, mortality enters in; is it that there is a place where sadness and joy are not distinct, where all emotion lies together, a sort of ocean into which the tributary streams of distinct emotions go, a faraway deep inside; is it that such sadness is only the side effect of art that describes the depths of our lives, and to see that described in all its potential for loneliness and pain is beautiful?

(Rebecca Solnit [source])

…and:

How many Zen mas­ters does it take to change a light bulb?
The peach blos­soms fall softly on the warty old frog.

(Bhikkhu Sujato [source])

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Haunting the Margin Between Thee and Me

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[Image: photo of “On the Margins of the Borderland,” a mixed-media work by António Ole. Found it at the site of the Smithsonian Learning Lab, where it is described this way: “A broken canoe of welded iron holds stacks of newspapers and colonial era papers in one half and piles of crumbling bricks in the stern. Each of the boat’s two sections holds a monitor playing scenes of light reflecting on water and topped by a pied crow. A used fishing net falls across the papers filling the canoe’s broken prow.” For more details, see the note below.]

From whiskey river:

Those who possess wisdom cannot just ladle it out to every wantwit and jackanapes who comes along and asks for it. A person must be prepared to receive wisdom, or else it will do him more harm than good. Moreover, a lout thrashing about in the clear waters of wisdom will dirty those waters for everyone else. So, a man seeking knowledge must be first tested to determine if he is worthy.

(Tom Robbins [source])

…and:

You start to think of contempt as a virus. Infecting individuals first, but spreading rapidly through families, communities, peoples, power structures, nations. Less flashy than hate. More deadly. When contempt kills you, it doesn’t have to be a vendetta or even entirely conscious. It can be a passing whim. It’s far more common, and therefore more lethal.

(Zadie Smith [source])

…and (from whiskey river’s commonplace book):

I See My Beauty in You

I see my beauty in you. I become
a mirror that cannot close its eyes

to your longing. My eyes wet with
yours in the early light. My mind

every moment giving birth, always
conceiving, always in the ninth

month, always the come-point. How
do I stand this? We become these

words we say, a wailing sound moving
out into the air. These thousands of

worlds that rise from nowhere, how
does your face contain them? I’m

a fly in your honey, then closer, a
moth caught in flame’s allure, then

empty sky stretched out in homage.

(Jelaluddin Rumi [source])

Not from whiskey river:

The Least Figure

I tried to think of some way
to let my face become yours.

“Could I whisper in your ear
a dream I’ve had? You’re the only one
I’ve told this to.”

You tilt your head, laughing,
as if, “I know the trick you’re hatching,
but go ahead.”

I am an image you stitch with gold thread
on a tapestry, the least figure,
a playful addition.

But nothing you work on is dull.
I am part of the beauty.

(Jelaluddin Rumi [source])

…and:

Marginalia

Finding an old book on a basement shelf—
gray, spine bent—and reading it again,
I met my former, unfamiliar, self,
some of her notes and scrawls so alien

that, though I tried, I couldn’t get (behind
this gloss or that) back to the time she wrote
to guess what experiences she had in mind,
the living context of some scribbled note;

or see the girl beneath the purple ink
who chose this phrase or that to underline,
the mood, the boy, that lay behind her thinking—
but they were thoughts I recognized as mine;

and though there were words I couldn’t even read,
blobs and cross-outs; and though not a jot
remained of her old existence—I agreed
with the young annotator’s every thought:

A clever girl. So what would she see fit
to comment on—and what would she have to say
about the years that she and I have written
since—before we put the book away?

(Deborah Warren [source])

…and:

#57: In the diner booth, my old friend’s hands on the table between us; mine, inches away from my friend’s. I don’t recognize those spots on my friend’s hands; my friend seems puzzled by this line on my wrist, the line above that one, the line below. The space between our fingertips swirling, memories tracing the woodgrain and the syrup smears. It’s not obvious where one swirl begins and leaves off, nor one memory, nor another: whose smear is whose; whose memory. All those years, those sticky dots on the timelines, some overlapping, most not. While X was happening to me, Y was rattling my friend’s life; we shared a Z from two different sides, each unrecognizable to the other. No memory, no smear or adhesive moment identical for us both. And yet somehow, a perfectly shared past…

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)

_____

Note: more about “In the Margins of the Borderland,” from the work’s label as it appeared at the Smithsonian:

Over the past 15 years António Ole has created several provocative and critically acclaimed installations, of which this is the first. It has been exhibited on three continents and appears here for the first time in North America. The work stems from Ole’s desire to draw attention to the history of colonial and local violence and to the architectural decay that surrounds him in Angola. Inside a broken boat that goes nowhere are police reports the artist collected off the street outside an administrative office. He paired the bundles of papers with birds that no longer fly and bricks that are not being used to build. The birds, net and scenic ocean waves playing on the TV sets refer to Angola’s coast, his homeland. At once haunting and beautiful, this installation reveals Ole’s ability to address difficult subject matter and still create a visually rich experience.

[back to top]

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The World’s Happy to Answer the Questions You Don’t Ask

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[Image: “Petaluma Ramble No. 2 (No Questions),” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river:

In the Mountains on a Summer Day

Gently I stir a white feather fan,
With open shirt sitting in a green wood.
I take off my cap and hang it on a jutting stone;
A wind from the pine-trees trickles on my bare head.

(Li Bai, translated by Arthur Waley [source])

…and:

A Settlement
(excerpt)

And I am walking out into all of this with nowhere to
go and no task undertaken but to turn the pages of
this beautiful world over and over, in the world of my
mind.

Therefore, dark past,
I’m about to do it.
I’m about to forgive you
for everything.

(Mary Oliver [source])

Not from whiskey river:

[Anthropologist Jaime] De Angulo goes on to say that wandering can lead to death, to hopelessness, to madness, to various forms of despair, or that it may lead to encounters with other powers in the remoter places a wanderer may go. He concludes, “When you have become quite wild, then perhaps some of the wild things will come to take a look at you, and one of them may perhaps take a fancy to you, not because you are suffering and cold, but simply because he happens to like your looks. When this happens, the wandering is over, and the Indian becomes a shaman.”

(Rebecca Solnit [source])

…and:

It’s meaning that is of no meaning. That paradox is the key to the meaning of meaning. To look for meaning—or the lack of it—in things is a game played by beings of limited consciousness. Behind everything in life is a process that is beyond meaning. Not beyond understanding, mind you, but beyond meaning.

(Tom Robbins [source])

…and:

Once there was a man of Chu’u selling shields and halberds. In praising his shields he said, ‘My shields are so solid that nothing can penetrate them.’ Again, in praising his halberds, he said, ‘My halberds are so sharp that they can penetrate anything.’ In response to his words somebody asked, ‘How about using your halberds to pierce through your shields?’ To this the man could not give any reply.

(Tim Bayne, quoting from Han Fei Tzu [source])

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You’ve Got to Blink If You Want to See

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[Image: “(Half-)Shoeless in Paradise,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH). This was #779 (2019-11-14) in my series of 1,000 “everyday black-and-white” posts on Instagram (a series which I wrapped up in June, 2020).]

From whiskey river:

For the crust presented by the life of lies is made of strange stuff. As long as it seals off hermetically the entire society, it appears to be made of stone. But the moment someone breaks through in one place, when one person cries out, “The emperor is naked!” — when a single person breaks the rules of the game, thus exposing it as a game — everything suddenly appears in another light and the whole crust seems then to be made of a tissue on the point of tearing and disintegrating uncontrollably.

(Václav Havel [source])

…and:

But there are other people, people who choose to be crazy in order to cope with what they regard as a crazy world. They have adopted craziness as a lifestyle. I’ve found that there is nothing I can do for these people because the only way you can get them to give up their craziness is to convince them that the world is actually sane. I must confess that I have found such a conviction almost impossible to support.

(Tom Robbins [source])

…and:

Reality Is Always Freshly Born

The more successful a technique, the more it is guaranteed to produce certain results.
But reality can never be known in advance.
Creativity is not a matter of just applying know-how in order to achieve ends that have been figured out in advance.
Indeed, we may say that if you know what to do in any situation, it’s the wrong thing.
Living truth has to be created in the act of living and even the means have to be created in the act of giving ourselves to the task.
If you know what to say, it’s a lie.
If you know how to teach, you’re a propagandist.
If you know how to compose a verse, you’re not a poet.
If you know how to get along with your husband or wife, you’re not really married, you’re simply applying psychology.
(If you know how to heal your client, you’re not a real therapist.)
Reality is not gained by know how.
Reality is always freshly born.
Whenever a relationship or action is real, it is being created and re-created from moment to moment.
The real question is not what to do, but
How can I give myself more completely to the situation, to the task, to the person at hand?
As one learns how to give oneself more and more unreservedly, one is led step by step and
Discovers what to do

(Bernard Phillips [source (anecdotal/hearsay)])

[Read more…]
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The Only Creatures That Claim to Be Anything

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Image: 'The Kiss,' by John E. Simpson

[Image: “The Kiss,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river:

Our lives are not as limited as we think they are; the world is a wonderfully weird place; consensual reality is significantly flawed; no institution can be trusted, but love does work; all things are possible; and we all could be happy and fulfilled if we only had the guts to be truly free and the wisdom to shrink our egos and quit taking ourselves so damn seriously.

(Tom Robbins [source (in part)])

…and (last six lines):

Rest before you sleep

Requiem after Fauré, for my father

Rest before you sleepYou’ll be walking for hours
thenas usualaway from homeyour shoes
in your handyour feet not yet used to the road
Perhaps they need to feel the gravel
to know where they’re headed

A woman I knewwho lived mostly in the woods
mentioned the danger in presuming to know
what an animal thinksThe foxfor example
stopping by her open tent and looking in

I suppose she would’ve felt this way about your feet
She would’ve said how could anyone know
what a pair of tired feet need along the way

I would’ve asked her how she knew the feet
were tiredSuch discourse produces nothing
but anything less would be silence
and that would be intolerable
I wish I knew why I was telling you this

It’s easier to read the mind of a fox than to guess
what a man’s about to say when he returns
from the woodshead full of rootsveins
more like branchesshoes in one handfeet
blisteredand none of this necessarily
an indication of how the feet feelwhat miles
uphill and back have done to the soles
and to the small bones that propel a man

It’s safe nowI thinkto speak for the fox
who is only as cunning as we say it is
We’re the only creatures that claim to be anything
then build a house of facts around the claim

I’ve come for vindicationNo point in trying
to disguise it as a lesser wishWake upstop
while you still know where you arePut away
your elusive countryGive your sleep a rest

(Dionisio D. Martínez [source])

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Evolution Tango

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[Video: surrealist photographer and “photo-composite artist” Erik Johannson introduces a TED audience to his work. In this brief talk, he doesn’t address so much how his images come about, as why they do. But he’s not shy about revealing his secrets, either; he may take several, dozens of, even hundreds of carefully planned and lighted photographs, and then spend hours or even months snipping away at and reassembling them — their edges veeeery subtly removed or obscured — into landscapes which could never exist, but surely look as though they could. Coverage of his work and interviews with him are scattered here and there around the Web (e.g.), and he’s got his own YouTube channel of “behind the scenes” videos. Very clever and exhaustively but lovingly detailed work.]

From whiskey river:

The simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being; almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth. In all sobriety, he has much more of the external appearance of one bringing alien habits from another land than of a mere growth of this one. He has an unfair advantage and an unfair disadvantage. He cannot sleep in his own skin; he cannot trust his own instincts. He is at once a creator moving miraculous hands and fingers and a kind of cripple. He is wrapped in artificial bandages called clothes; he is propped on artificial crutches called furniture. His mind has the same doubtful liberties and the same wild limitations. Alone among the animals, he is shaken with the beautiful madness called laughter; as if he had caught sight of some secret in the very shape of the universe hidden from the universe itself…

There may be a broken trail of stone and bone faintly suggesting the development of the human body. There is nothing even faintly suggesting such a development of this human mind. It was not and it was; we know not in what instant or in what infinity of years. Something happened; and it has all the appearance of a transaction outside of time.

(G. K. Chesterton [source])

…and:

Although at first glance there may appear to be a fairly thin line between them, there are significant differences between the attempt to somehow magically exert one’s will on tangible reality for one’s own benefit (manifestation), and the inspiration to imagine entirely new realities (sometimes to add color and bounce to the drab waltz of existence, sometimes to facilitate the recognition of wonder, sometimes just for the hell of it); between an attempt to mentally force fortune to alter its course for one’s personal gain (to manifest, say, a winning lottery ticket), and possessing the lightness of spirit and the freedom of mind to live as if such developments would pale in comparison to those one regularly experiences at the piano, the easel, the writing pad, or upon viewing a pattern of fallen leaves in the gutter; to live — against all evidence — as if advances in fortune were already here.

(Tom Robbins [source])

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