what not to believe

[Image: “Mini Hoop / Toss (Santa Monica, California),” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river:

Yes, and the luminous and shocking beauty of the everyday is something I try to remain alert to, if only as an antidote to the chronic cynicism and disenchantment that seems to surround everything, these days. It tells me that, despite how debased or corrupt we are told humanity is and how degraded the world has become, it just keeps on being beautiful. It can’t help it.

(Nick Cave [source])

…and:

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

(D. H. Lawrence [source])

Not from whiskey river:

#80: You’d like to believe people are good and charitable. You’d like to believe in what they used to call the Progress of Man. You’d like to believe you yourself matter in some lasting way, even to people you have never met — people you never could have met. You’d like to believe you’ll get through today without a single disappointment, without a single near-miss heart-stopping scare, without a single perversion of your intentions, without a single interruption even…

And then the evening comes, and you look back. And you realize, the one feature of your everyday life which never ever annoys you in the slightest, the one saving grace, the one scrap of flotsam to which you always and ever happily cling, is this: not any of the things you believe in, but belief itself.

The more you think about this odd assertion, the truer it seems. Finally you smile, and you drift off to sleep, believing anew.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)

[Image: “Stringed Relief” (1937), by Henry Moore. Nothing in particular suggested a connection between this image and the theme(s) of today’s post. Yet I would say everything in general suggests such a connection.]

From whiskey river:

It does always seem as though making things — including books — ends up a grand compromise, or at least negotiation, between one’s ambition, visions, or inspiration for them, and the actual manifested result. This can seem disheartening or deflating until one has written enough to know that this isn’t an impediment to the process of creating — it is the process. Then one can begin to marvel at the sometimes perverse, often surprising, relation between the imagined and the manifest: it can be engaged, expected, enjoyed.

(Maggie Nelson [source: none canonical, but I trust whiskey river])

…and:

Wise men have regarded the earth as a tragedy, a farce, even an illusionist’s trick; but all, if they are truly wise, and not merely intellectual rapists, recognize that it is certainly some kind of stage in which we all play roles, most of us being very poorly coached and totally unrehearsed before the curtain rises. Is it too much if I ask, tentatively, that we agree to look upon it as a circus, a touring carnival wandering about the sun for a record season of four billion years and producing new monsters and miracles, hoaxes and bloody mishaps, wonders and blunders, but never quite entertaining the customers well enough to prevent them from leaving, one by one, and returning to their homes for a long and bored winter’s sleep under the dust?

(Robert Anton Wilson [source])

…and (from the commonplace book):

NOTE: An evening at the theatre. It occurred to me that there is something weird about someone wanting to be someone else. And even more so about someone sitting down for a couple of hours to look at someone they don’t know, pretending to be someone else, talking to someone who is also pretending to be someone else. A dialogue, furthermore, invented by somebody who imagined they were pretending to be each of these in turn.

(Alan Fletcher [source: none canonical, but a few references including this one])

…and:

Within This Tree

Within this tree
another tree
inhabits the same body;
within this stone
another stone rests,
its many shades of gray
the same, its identical
surface and weight.
And within my body,
another body,
whose history, waiting,
sings: there is no other body,
it sings,
there is no other world.

(Jane Hirshfield [source])

[Read more…]

Something — at Long Last — You Can Believe In

No Other Body, No Other World