{"id":13635,"date":"2013-05-17T13:16:07","date_gmt":"2013-05-17T17:16:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=13635"},"modified":"2013-05-17T13:16:07","modified_gmt":"2013-05-17T17:16:07","slug":"the-line-between-should-and-do","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2013\/05\/the-line-between-should-and-do\/","title":{"rendered":"The Line Between Should<\/em> and Do<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Modal<\/a><\/p>\n

[Image: The English translation — with original emphasis — is, “Daughter, you have to<\/strong> go out<\/span> and become rich<\/span>.” Found it at the <\/em>Grimm Grammar<\/a> site of the University of Texas, which uses 36 characters from the classic fairy tales to illustrate how German grammar works; the characters above are Cinderella’s stepmother and a (bored, dissolute) stepsister. This illustration accompanies the discussion of modal verbs.]<\/em><\/p>\n

From\u00a0whiskey river<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n

We continually look and hope for a new, special thing that is going to last or make us happy, fulfill our needs, answer all our questions. In actuality, what are we going to get? We will get more seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and thinking. That’s it. That’s what life is.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Jack Kornfield [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and<\/a>:<\/p>\n

What the Living Do<\/strong>
\n(excerpt)<\/em><\/p>\n

…We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
\nwhoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss — we want more and more and then more of it.<\/p>\n

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
\nsay, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep<\/p>\n

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
\nI am living…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Marie Howe [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The Moment<\/strong><\/p>\n

Oh, the coming-out-of-nowhere moment
\nwhen,\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0nothing
\nhappens
\nno what-have-I-to-do-today-list<\/p>\n

maybe\u00a0\u00a0half a moment
\nthe rush of traffic stops.
\nThe whir of I should be, I should be, I should be
\nslows to silence,
\nthe white cotton curtains hanging still.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Marie Howe [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Not from\u00a0whiskey river<\/em>:<\/p>\n

One morning last winter a small item appeared in my local newspaper, announcing the birth of an extraordinary animal. A team of researchers at Texas A&M University had succeeded in cloning a whitetail dear. Never before done. The fawn, known as Dewey, was developing normally and seemed to be healthy. He had no mother, just a surrogate who had carried his fetus to term. He had no father, just a “donor” of all his chromosomes. He was the genetic duplicate of a certain trophy buck out of south Texas whose skin cells had been cultured in a laboratory. One of those cells furnished a nucleus that, transplanted and rejiggered, became the DNA core of an egg cell, which became an embryo, which became Dewey. So he was wildlife, in a sense, but in another sense\u00a0elaborately\u00a0synthetic. This is the sort of news, quirky but epochal, that can cause a person with a mouthful of toast to pause and marvel. What a dumb idea, I marveled.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(David Quammen [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and:<\/p>\n

(This Line Intentionally Left Blank)<\/strong><\/p>\n

we all got tickets to The Truth<\/em>
\nfinally we thought finally
\nwhen the curtain fell away
\nour indrawn breaths could be heard
\neven in the next theater
\neven the gasp of the mime
\nwho had slipped in among us
\na loud whushing like reams of litter
\nwhirling upward in a gale
\nhands shot to mouths and mouths
\nfell open I couldn\u2019t say within
\nhow many seconds
\nall our minds shut some
\nslamming others just a click
\nlike 300 parallel
\nrows of tipped dominoes
\na racket of almost unison<\/p>\n

believe me we wouldn\u2019t
\nhave resisted anything
\nbut the truth
\nso instantly and universally
\nyet we sat there and waited
\nfor something else
\nwhich you could say we also got
\nif you count the mime\u2019s
\nunpleasant remark
\nso she wasn\u2019t even a real mime
\nprobably part of what was
\nclearly just a performance<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(J. Allyn Rosser [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and:<\/p>\n

What does this sound like:<\/p>\n

Where I held my finger to the window and warmed a small circle in the frost this morning, a new flower has grown. The new flower began in the shape of a star.\u00a0Codium fragile<\/em><\/span>. Silver-leaved. I am only writing what is true — true to form — when I say the flower, whose fronds are in motion, grew from a star. To say every scrap of matter bears a trace of the beginning of the universe, that a star lives in our blood, a star with its fingers in the riverbed of our bloodstream, tributaries, filigree, silver-etched, is a fern, an ice crystal, to say that the star’s disappearance, ongoing, is what we see at night — sounds unbelievable.<\/p>\n

This sounds unbelievable.<\/p>\n

But sitting down to this work, this work, too, seems unlikely: that particulars mingle, particulars assert, conspire, assemble. That what I didn’t know I knew was\u00a0somewhere\u00a0<\/em>… waters be gathered, waters bring forth … and how, what seems in the end like intention, arrives only piecemeal. How what seems in the end\u00a0inevitable<\/em>, is a trail of particulars finding each other.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Lia Purpura [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and:<\/p>\n

Murray Dreaming<\/strong><\/p>\n

It’s not the sharks
\nSliding mere inches from his upturned face
\nThrough warps of water where the tunnel arcs
\nTransparent overhead,
\nTheir lipless jaws clamped shut, extruding teeth,
\nTheir eyes that stare at nothing, like the dead,
\nStaring at him; it’s not the eerie grace
\nOf rays he stood beneath,
\nGaping at their entranced slow-motion chase<\/p>\n

That is unending;
\nIt’s not the ultra-auditory hum
\nOf ET cuttlefish superintending
\nThe iridescent craft
\nOf their lit selves, as messages were sent,
\nTurning the sight of him they photographed
\nTo code: it is not this that left him dumb
\nWith schoolboy wonderment
\nThose hours he wandered the aquarium.<\/p>\n

It is that room,
\nThat room of Murray River<\/a> they had walled
\nIn glass and, deep within the shifting gloom
\nAnd subtle drifts of sky
\nThat filtered down, it seemed, from the real day
\nOf trees and bird light many fathoms high,
\nThe giant Murray cod<\/a> that was installed
\nIn stillness to delay
\nAll that would pass. The boy stood there enthralled.<\/p>\n

Out in the day
\nAgain, he saw the famous streets expound
\nTheir theories about speed, the cars obey,
\nRacing to catch the sun,
\nThe loud fast-forward crowds, and thought it odd
\nThat in the multitudes not everyone
\nShould understand as he did the profound
\nProfession of the cod,
\nThat held time, motionless, unknown to sound.<\/p>\n

In bed at night,
\nAre his eyes open or is this a dream?
\nThe room is all dark water, ghosted light,
\nAnd midway to the ceiling
\nThe great fish with its working fins and gills
\nSuspended, while before it glide the reeling
\nAnd see-through scenes of day, faintly agleam,
\nUntil their passage stills
\nAnd merges with the deep unmoving stream.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Stephen Edgar [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Image: The English translation — with original emphasis — is, “Daughter, you have to go out and become rich.” Found it at the Grimm Grammar site of the University of Texas, which uses 36 characters from the classic fairy tales to illustrate how German grammar works; the characters above are Cinderella’s stepmother and a (bored, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[247,1393,95,405,250,5,50,251],"tags":[1914,2587,3028,3250,3474,3475,3476],"class_list":{"0":"post-13635","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-ruminations","7":"category-whiskey-river-runningaftermyhat","8":"category-science-medicine","9":"category-nature","10":"category-art","11":"category-06_writing","12":"category-language-writing_cat","13":"category-poetry-writing_cat","14":"tag-stephen-edgar","15":"tag-j-allyn-rosser","16":"tag-david-quammen","17":"tag-lia-purpura","18":"tag-jack-kornfield","19":"tag-grimm-grammar","20":"tag-marie-howe","21":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-3xV","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13635"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13635\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13648,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13635\/revisions\/13648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}