A Dance to the Lilt of the Moment

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[Image: “Play that Tune,” 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:

You have consented to time and it is winter. The country seems bigger, for you can see through the bare trees. There are times when the woods is absolutely still and quiet. The house holds warmth. A wet snow comes in the night and covers the ground and clings to the trees, making the whole world white. For a while in the morning the world is perfect and beautiful. You think you will never forget.

You think you will never forget any of this, you will remember it always just the way it was. But you can’t remember it the way it was. To know it, you have to be living in the presence of it right as it is happening. It can return only by surprise. Speaking of these things tells you that there are no words for them that are equal to them or that can restore them to your mind. And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment, in this presence.

But you have a life too that you remember. It stays with you. You have lived a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present, and your memories of it, remember now, are of a different life in a different world and time. When you remember the past, you are not remembering it as it was. You are remembering it as it is. It is a vision or a dream, present with you in the present, alive with you in the only time you are alive.

(Wendell Berry [source])

…and:

That’s the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. “Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?”

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

Landscape And Soul

Though we should not speak about the soul,
that is, about things we don’t know,
I’m sure mine sleeps the day long,
waiting to be jolted, even jilted awake,
preferably by joy, but sadness also comes
by surprise, and the soul sings its songs.

And because no one landscape compels me,
except the one that’s always out of reach
(toward which, nightly, I go), I find myself
conjuring Breugel-like peasants cavorting
under a Magritte-like sky – a landscape
the soul, if fully awake, could love as its own.

But the soul is rumored to desire a room,
a chamber, really, in some far away outpost
of the heart. Landscape can be lonely and cold.
Be sweet to me, world.

(Stephen Dunn [source])

…and:

It is easy to overlook this thought that life just is. As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of the intoxicating existence we’ve been endowed with. But what’s life to a lichen? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours–arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on. Lichens don’t. Like virtually all living things, they will suffer any hardship, endure any insult, for a moment’s additions existence. Life, in short, just wants to be.

(Bill Bryson [source])

From elsewhere:

Naturalists call [stickywilly] by its botanical name, Galium aparine. It grows nearly everywhere and offers itself for many human uses: as a hot drink, in a cake, as a salve for eczema, or as protection from scurvy. But it goes by so many common names that stickywilly recipes passed down in rural families are hard to share because it would not be clear to others what wildflower, when dried and brewed, actually serves as a half-decent substitute for coffee. Is it catchweed? Bobby button or bedstraw or cleaverwort? Possibly it’s cleavers, or clivers, or any of the nearly endless riffs on the plant’s tendency to cling: stickyweed, stickybob, stickybud, stickyback, sticky molly, sticky grass, stickyjack, stickeljack, gripgrass, whippysticks. Shall I keep going? I could keep going for days…

I embrace the old-timey plants that evolved to feed wildlife, the plants with names that change from place to place and people to people. And I will always insist on the homely names of my Wiregrass ancestors. It was stickywilly in the fields of Lower Alabama, and it remains stickywilly to me all these years later in Tennessee. What you call the wildflowers will tell you who you are.

(Margaret Renkl [source])

…acnd:

Prayer for Joy

What was it we wanted
to say anyhow, like today
when there were all the letters
in my alphabet soup and suddenly
the ‘j’ rises to the surface.
The ‘j’, a letter that might be
great for Scrabble, but not really
used for much else, unless
we need to jump for joy,
and then all of a sudden
it’s there and ready to
help us soar and to open up
our hearts at the same time,
this simple line with a curved bottom,
an upside down cane that helps
us walk in a new way into this
forest of language, where all the letters
are beginning to speak,
finding each other in just
the right combination
to be understood.

(Stuart Kestenbaum [source])

…and:

We frequently walk with the sole purpose of getting from one place to another. But where are we in between? With every step, we can feel the miracle of walking on solid ground. We can arrive in the present moment with every step.

(Thich Nhat Hanh [source])

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On a Ship to the Outer Solar System

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[Image: “At the Hinge of Daylight (Carmel-by-the-Sea, California),” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

I’m going to start this Friday post, uncharacteristically, with a quotation from a source other than whiskey river — and not remotely a source I’d usually cite. (Fear not; the river‘s turn is coming.) It’s this:

The World Is Too Much With Us

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. —Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

(William Wordsworth [source])

In the face of so much wrongness in mid-2022 — I won’t bore you (or raise your blood pressure) with a catalog of specifics — who doesn’t sometimes dream, like ol’ Bill, of frolicking with the gods of antiquity? especially if the alternative is (as it seems to be) more bad news from every quarter?

Now let’s consider this, from whiskey river:

Obviously there is some risk in making affection the pivot of an argument about economy. The charge will be made that affection is an emotion, merely “subjective,” and therefore that all affections are more or less equal: people may have affection for their children and their automobiles, their neighbors and their weapons. But the risk, I think, is only that affection is personal. If it is not personal, it is nothing; we don’t, at least, have to worry about governmental or corporate affection. And one of the endeavors of human cultures, from the beginning, has been to qualify and direct the influence of emotion. The word “affection” and the terms of value that cluster around it—love, care, sympathy, mercy, forbearance, respect, reverence—have histories and meanings that raise the issue of worth. We should, as our culture has warned us over and over again, give our affection to things that are true, just, and beautiful. When we give affection to things that are destructive, we are wrong.

(Wendell Berry [source])

…and this, not from whiskey river (and a pretty fair distance from William Wordsworth, for that matter):

I spent most of my [young] life angry, a chip on my shoulder, afraid. At some moment I simply changed my mind. I decided to be happy more or less, no matter the circumstance. Whatever I have to work with, and that’s not a lot really, I tell myself: imagine you are on a ship to the outer solar system—every single experience on this earth would be welcome, good or bad. Be on that ship, for one day this will all be over. Treasure it all. Be a joyful noise.

(Rickie Lee Jones [source])

Wordsworth wasn’t wrong to feel angry and frustrated with current events. (Haha, right: like I’m sure his ghost looks down upon my approval and sighs with relief.)

But really, at any given time in recorded history, you can find many, many smart, good people who believed that the world had gone to sh!t in their lifetimes. What’s hard for anyone to bear in mind is that those lifetimes (let alone the sh!t years) are mere blips in the universe’s — or the planet’s, or their neighborhood’s — history. Over centuries and millennia, the quality of “things” smooths out. And if anything, things — the arc of human history — tend to get better over long spans of time.

The difference for our age, I think, is climate change. I don’t know that I’ll live to see how it all plays out, but I mean, come on: we collectively as well as individually simply will not live forever. And all the angry storms, floods, droughts, fires, widespread extinctions of other species — all that, I believe, is pretty much just the world expressing its distaste for us. We’ve pushed it to the limits of its patience: we are too much with the world. I doubt that we’ll “win” in the contest of wills, nature vs. humanity.

But even if my fear is right, or even if everyone else’s — that war, indecent human politics, rampant capitalism, racism, transphobia, etc., are going to destroy us or ours — is right, well… it doesn’t matter. In the meantime, we can live our lives as we maybe should have been living them all along: just paying attention to what and who are in front of us at the time. We can have happiness. We just have to choose it.

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In the Uncomfortable Embrace of Past and Future

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[Video: actress/comedian Leigh French made a series of regular appearances on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour TV series in the 1960s. Her specialty: playing long-straight-haired “hippie chicks” who often made much more sense (in retrospect) than they seemed to at the time. In an interview last summer, she said of this particular skit: “…if I did it today and just changed a little of the slang and the dates, it would be as significant today as it was decades ago.”]

From whiskey river:

When I was born, humanity was 95 per cent illiterate. Since I’ve been born, the population has doubled and that total population is now 65 per cent literate. That’s a gain of 130-fold of the literacy. When humanity is primarily illiterate, it needs leaders to understand and get the information and deal with it. When we are at the point where the majority of humans themselves are literate, able to get the information, we’re in an entirely new relationship to the Universe. We are at the point where the integrity of the individual counts and not what the political leadership or the religious leadership says to do.

(R. Buckminster Fuller [source])

…and:

Living in a dream of the future is considered a character flaw. Living in the past, bathed in nostalgia, is also considered a character flaw. Living in the present moment is hailed as spiritually admirable, but truly ignoring the lessons of history or failing to plan for tomorrow are considered character flaws.

(Sarah Manguso [source])

…and (except for first two paragraphs):

The scientists and humanists were saying one thing, but the artists and poets were saying something else…

Someone was wrong.

In the very age when communication theory and technique reached its peak, poets and artists were saying that men were in fact isolated and no longer communicated with each other.

In the very age when the largest number of people lived together in the cities, poets and artists were saying there was no longer a community.

In the very age when men lived longest and were most secure in their lives, poets and artists were saying that men were most afraid.

In the very age when crowds were largest and people flocked closest together, poets and artists were saying that men were lonely.

Why were poets and artists saying these things?

Was it because they were out of tune with the spirit of the modern age and so were complaining because the denizens of the age paid no attention to them?

Or was it that they were uttering the true feelings of the age, feelings however which could not be understood by the spirit of the age?

Nobody wants to hear about his unspeakable feelings. It is only when the feelings become speakable, that is, understandable by a new anthropology, that people can bear hearing about them.

(Walker Percy [source])

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In the Land of What’sToCome

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[Video: The Hello Strangers, last seen at RAMH in October 2014, released this video cover of Doris Day’s 1956 classic earlier this year — not coincidentally, on Day’s 91st birthday. Also not coincidentally, their grandfather, Ronald Chace, had both sung with Doris Day and played second trombone in Les Brown’s Big Band during Day’s tenure with Brown in the 1940s. The Strangers recorded this song in Chace’s memory.]

From whiskey river:

After Thanksgiving

Lord, as Rilke says, the year bears down toward winter, past
the purification of the trees, the darkened brook.
Only 4:45, and the sky’s sheer black
clasps two clear planets and a skinny moon
as we drive quietly home from the airport,
the last kid gone.

The time of preparation’s over, the time of
harvesting the seed, the husk, the kernel, saving
what can be saved—weaves of sun like
rags of old flannel, provident peach stones,
pies, pickles, berry wines to
hold the sweetness for a few more months.

Now the mountains will settle into their old
cold habits, now the white
birch bones will rise
like all those thoughts we’ve tried to repress:
madness of the solstice, phosphorescent
logic that rules the fifteen-hour night!

Our children, gorged, encouraged, have taken off
in tiny shuddering planes. Plump with stuffing,
we too hurry away, holding hands, holding on.
Soon it’ll be January, soon snow will
shuffle down, cold feathers, swathing us in
inches of white silence—

and the ways of the ice
will be narrow, delicate.

(Sandra M. Gilbert [source])

…and:

Language is the element of definition, the defining and descriptive incantation. It puts the coin between our teeth. It whistles the boat up. It shows us the city of light across the water. Without language there is no poetry, without poetry there’s just talk. Talk is cheap and proves nothing. Poetry is dear and difficult to come by. But it poles us across the river and puts a music in our ears. It moves us to contemplation. And what we contemplate, what we sing our hymns to and offer our prayers to, is what will reincarnate us in the natural world, and what will be our one hope for salvation in the What’sToCome.

(Charles Wright [source])

…and:

How To Listen

Tilt your head slightly to one side and lift
your eyebrows expectantly. Ask questions.

Delve into the subject at hand or let
things come randomly. Don’t expect answers.

Forget everything you’ve ever done.
Make no comparisons. Simply listen.

Listen with your eyes, as if the story
you are hearing is happening right now.

Listen without blinking, as if a move
might frighten the truth away forever.

Don’t attempt to copy anything down.
Don’t bring a camera or a recorder.

This is your chance to listen carefully.
Your whole life might depend on what you hear.

(Joyce Sutphen [source — click on the ‘Two Poems’ link])

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Finding Home

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[Video: “Die gut gemeinten Fesseln,” by Bernhard Riedl, on Vimeo. The title translates as something like “The Well-Meaning Ropes (or Bonds, etc.).”]

From whiskey river:

Pillow

There’s nothing I can’t find under there.
Voices in the trees, the missing pages
of the sea.

Everything but sleep.

And night is a river bridging
the speaking and the listening banks,

a fortress, undefended and inviolate.

There’s nothing that won’t fit under it:
fountains clogged with mud and leaves,
the houses of my childhood.

And night begins when my mother’s fingers
let go of the thread
they’ve been tying and untying
to touch toward our fraying story’s hem.

Night is the shadow of my father’s hands
setting the clock for resurrection.

Or is it the clock unraveled, the numbers flown?

There’s nothing that hasn’t found home there:
discarded wings, lost shoes, a broken alphabet.

Everything but sleep. And night begins

with the first beheading
of the jasmine, its captive fragrance
rid at last of burial clothes.

(Li-Young Lee [source])

…and:

The country seems bigger, for you can see through the bare trees. There are times when the woods is absolutely still and quiet. The house holds warmth. A wet snow comes in the night and covers the ground and clings to the trees, making the whole world white. For a while in the morning the world is perfect and beautiful. You think you will never forget.

You think you will never forget any of this, you will remember it always just the way it was. But you can’t remember it the way it was. To know it, you have to be living in the presence of it right as it is happening. It can return only by surprise. Speaking of these things tells you that there are no words for them that are equal to them or that can restore them to your mind. And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment, in this presence.

But you have a life too that you remember. It stays with you. You have lived a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present, and your memories of it, remember now, are of a different life in a different world and time. When you remember the past, you are not remembering it as it was. You are remembering it as it is. It is a vision or a dream, present with you in the present, alive with you in the only time you are alive.

(Wendell Berry [source])

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Feeling Your Way

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Cartoon by David Sipress, from The New Yorker 2000-07-31

[Image: cartoon by David Sipress, from The New Yorker (July 31, 2000). Original here.]

From whiskey river:

Goods

It’s the immemorial feelings
I like the best: hunger, thirst,
their satisfaction; work-weariness,
earned rest; the falling again
from loneliness to love;
the green growth the mind takes
from the pastures in March;
The gayety in the stride
of a good team of Belgian mares
that seems to shudder from me
through all my ancestry.

(Wendell Berry [source])

…and:

Even now, all possible feelings do not yet exist, there are still those that lie beyond our capacity and our imagination. From time to time, when a piece of music no one has ever written or a painting no one has ever painted, or something else impossible to predict, fathom or yet describe takes place, a new feeling enters the world. And then, for the millionth time in the history of feeling, the heart surges and absorbs the impact.

(Nicole Krauss [source])

…and:

298

A monk said, “In the day there is sunlight, at night there is firelight. What is ‘divine light’?”

The master said, “Sunlight, firelight.”

(uncredited [source])

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Here (for Now)

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'Too bad about old Ainsworth,' by Barney Tobey in the New Yorker

[Image: cartoon by Barney Tobey in The New Yorker of September 13, 1982 (source)]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

The Sensual World

I call to you across a monstrous river or chasm
to caution you, to prepare you.

Earth will seduce you, slowly, imperceptibly,
subtly, not to say with connivance.

I was not prepared: I stood in my granmother’s kitchen,
holding out my glass. Stewed plums, stewed apricots —

the juice poured off into the glass of ice.
And the water added, patiently, in small increments,

the various cousins discriminating, tasting
with each addition —

aroma of summer fruit, intensity of concentration:
the colored liquid turning gradually lighter, more radiant,

more light passing through it.
Delight, then solace. My grandmother waiting,

to see if more was wanted. Solace, then deep immersion.
I loved nothing more: deep privacy of the sensual life,

the self disappearing into it or inseparable from it,
somehow suspended, floating, its needs

fully exposed, awakened, fully alive —
Deep immersion, and with it

mysterious safety. Far away, the fruit glowing in its glass bowls.
Outside the kitchen, the sun setting.

I was not prepared: sunset, end of summer. Demonstrations
of time as a continuum, as something coming to an end,

not a suspension; the senses wouldn’t protect me.
I caution you as I was never cautioned:

you will never let go, you will never be satiated.
You will be damaged and scarred, you will continue to hunger.

Your body will age, you will continue to need.
You will want the earth, then more of the earth —

Sublime, indifferent, it is present, it will not respond.
It is encompassing, it will not minister.

Meaning, it will feed you, it will ravish you,
it will not keep you alive.

(Louise Glück [source])

…and:

Aphorism #33

One of the best means for arousing the wish to work on yourself is to realize that you may die at any moment. But first you must learn how to keep it in mind.

(George Ivanovich Gurdjieff [source])

…and (italicized portion):

Sabbaths: VII

Again I resume the long
lesson: how small a thing
can be pleasing, how little
in this hard world it takes
to satisfy the mind
and bring it to its rest.

With the ongoing havoc
the woods this morning is
almost unnaturally still.
Through stalled air, unshadowed
light, a few leaves fall
of their own weight.

The sky
is gray. It begins in mist
almost at the ground
and rises forever. The trees
rise in silence almost
natural, but not quite,
almost eternal, but
not quite.
What more did I
think I wanted? Here is
what has always been.
Here is what will always
be. Even in me,
the Maker of all this
returns in rest, even
to the slightest of His works,
a yellow leaf slowly
falling, and is pleased.

(Wendell Berry [source])

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A Glorious Mess

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[Lyrics here. More about the video below.]

From whiskey river:

Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but “steal” some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.

(Albert Camus, Notebooks [source (unverified)])

…and:

I have no right to call myself one who knows. I was one who seeks, and I still am, but I no longer seek in the stars or in the books; I’m beginning to hear the teachings of my blood pulsing within me. My story isn’t pleasant. It’s not sweet and harmonious like invented stories. It tastes of folly and bewilderment, of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves.

(Hermann Hesse [source])

…and:

A Warning to My Readers

Do not think me gentle
because I speak in praise
of gentleness, or elegant
because I honor the grace
that keeps this world. I am
a man crude as any,
gross of speech, intolerant,
stubborn, angry, full
of fits and furies. That I
may have spoken well
at times, is not natural.
A wonder is what it is.

(Wendell Berry [source])

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And Counter-Intuition Replied…

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[Video: studio version of “I’ve Seen All Good People,” by Yes]

From whiskey river:

Not a few, but everyone, makes art. There is no art beyond the sensibility of the people confronting it: art is an interaction between object and beholder. The idea of a human being forced to concede the superiority of a work of art without in fact being able to participate in judging that quality is a surrealistic idea. In my area, the coyotes are still the best poets.

(William Stafford)

…and:

learn to say “I don’t know”
learn to say “I can’t say” “I don’t remember”
learn to say nothing

train your memory to fail
recognize that you have the right to make mistakes
to stay mute

insist that the noise in your ears is due merely
to history’s winds or to the changes in pressure
that make mirages out of daily life

(Urszula Koziol, To a Young Man)

…and:

In a dream I meet
my dead friend. He has,
I know, gone long and far,
and yet he is the same
for the dead are changeless.
They grow no older.
It is I who have changed,
grown strange to what I was.
Yet I, the changed one,
ask: “How you been?”
He grins and looks at me.
“I been eating peaches
off some mighty fine trees.”

(Wendell Berry)

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Intersections Close By, Milestones Passed

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[Image: the cruise ship Queen Elizabeth 2 and the New York City skyline at night (January, 2011)]

From whiskey river:

Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance, haunted by the knowledge of our proximity, yet still demonstrably on the wrong side of the line, our dealings with reality undermined by a range of minor yet critical psychological flaws (a little too much optimism, an unprocessed rebelliousness, a fatal impatience or sentimentality). We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or a bicycle.

(Alain de Botton [source])

…and:

IV

A man is walking in a field
and everywhere at his feet
in the short grass of April
the small purple violets
are in bloom. As the man walks
the ground drops away,
the sunlight of day becomes
a sort of darkness in which
the lights of the flowers rise
up around him like
fireflies or stars in a sort
of sky through which he walks.

(Wendell Berry [source])

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