{"id":16010,"date":"2014-09-12T06:33:54","date_gmt":"2014-09-12T10:33:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=16010"},"modified":"2014-09-12T06:34:47","modified_gmt":"2014-09-12T10:34:47","slug":"the-trap-of-what-never-might-have-happened","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2014\/09\/the-trap-of-what-never-might-have-happened\/","title":{"rendered":"The Trap of What Never (Might Have) Happened"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"10th<\/a><\/p>\n

[Image: “10th July 2008 – The Dream Diary,” by user practicalowl on Flickr.com<\/a>. (Right-click and view in a new window\/tab for a much larger version.)) Used under a Creative Commons license.]<\/em><\/p>\n

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

Song for the Deer and Myself to Return On<\/strong><\/p>\n

This morning when I looked out the roof window
\nbefore dawn and a few stars were still caught
\nin the fragile weft of ebony night
\nI was overwhelmed. I sang the song Louis taught me:
\na song to call the deer in Creek, when hunting,
\nand I am certainly hunting something as magic as deer
\nin this city far from the hammock of my mother’s belly.
\nIt works, of course, and deer came into this room
\nand wondered at finding themselves
\nin a house near downtown Denver.
\nNow the deer and I are trying to figure out a song
\nto get them back, to get all of us back,
\nbecause if it works I’m going with them.
\nAnd it’s too early to call Louis
\nand nearly too late to go home.<\/p>\n

for Louis Oliver<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Joy Harjo [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Some religions call life a dream, or a dreaming, but what if it is a memory? What if this new world isn’t new at all but a memory of a new world?<\/p>\n

What if we really do keep making the same mistakes again and again, never remembering the lessons to learn but never forgetting either that it had been different, that there was a pristine place?<\/p>\n

Perhaps the universe is a memory of our mistakes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Jeanette Winterson [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Birthday<\/strong>
\n(excerpt)<\/em><\/p>\n

I know this world is far from perfect.
\nI am not the type to mistake a streetlight for the moon.
\nI know our wounds are deep as the Atlantic.
\nBut every ocean has a shoreline
\nand every shoreline has a tide
\nthat is constantly returning
\nto wake the songbirds in our hands,
\nto wake the music in our bones,
\nto place one fearless kiss
\non the mouth of that new born river
\nthat has to run through the center of our hearts
\nto find its way home.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Andrea Gibson [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Shuttered Windows<\/strong><\/p>\n

To speak of the smell and feel
\nof books, the erotics of the text,
\nhas begun to sound perverse<\/p>\n

One by one, the old places of worship
\nchurches, bookstores, Nature herself
\nbecome quaint and are vacated<\/p>\n

In their stead a gleaming, ambitious screen
\npart shuttered window, part distorting mirror
\nfull of wandering, restless spirits<\/p>\n

Like so many ghosts in limbo —
\nfree of the tyranny of bodies,
\nyet aching for their phantom limbs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Yahia Lababidi [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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

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

You wake before dawn beside someone
\nyou don’t recognize, a dark woman who snores
\nfrom her belly as though she were churning inside.
\nIt alarms you at first, though you’re drawn
\nto the shape of her ears, to her neck, the way
\nher long black hair drapes across the pillow,
\nand you move over a little, naked and cool
\nunder the covers, you nudge her so you can
\nobserve the other parts of her body more closely.
\nThe room is still half dark, so you listen to the tick-
\ntock of your wind-up alarm clock, which tells you
\nthis is the bedroom you’ve slept in for years,
\nevery evening winding that silly contraption
\nshe gave you before you were married—so you would
\nremember her love each time you wound it
\nand set the alarm. Or else it will run down<\/em>,
\nshe’d said, and stop somewhere in the middle of the night,<\/em>
\n and you’ll just keep sleeping.<\/em>
\nBut who is this woman beside you?
\nCould this be your wife? She’s beautiful, maybe
\nas lovely as your wife is. And when you get up
\nand wander through the bedroom, you notice that everything’s
\njust as you left it, familiar as your own
\nmiddle-aged body: the old dog asleep
\non his towel in the corner is the same mutt you bought
\nfor your children when they were just children; the house
\nis full of your children’s absence as you roam,
\npicking up books and notebooks and trinkets
\nthey’ve left behind on their visits. But it’s still too early
\nto get up. You’re tired. You should go back to bed,
\nlie down beside this beautiful woman
\nwho will become your wife again
\nin a few hours when the alarm pulls you
\nfrom dreams back into the man you’ve been
\nfor so many years now it’s hard to remember
\nwho you were before you became him.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Michael Hettich [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and:<\/p>\n

The girl who hated Joni [Mitchell] and the woman who loves her seem to me… divorced from each other, two people who happen to have shared the same body. It’s the feeling we get sometimes when we find a diary we wrote, as teen-agers, or sit at dinner listening to an old friend tell some story about us of which we have no memory. It’s an everyday sensation for most of us, yet it proves a tricky sort of problem for those people who hope to make art. For though we know and recognize discontinuity in our own lives, when it comes to art we are deeply committed to the idea of continuity… It is by reading and watching consistent people on the page, stage, and screen that we are reassured of our own consistency.<\/p>\n

This instinct in audiences can sometimes extend to whole artistic careers. I’d like to believe that I wouldn’t have been one of those infamous British people who tried to boo Dylan offstage when he went electric, but on the evidence of past form I very much fear I would have. We want our artists to remain as they were when we first loved them. But our artists want to move. Sometimes the battle becomes so violent that a perversion in the artist can occur: these days, Joni Mitchell thinks of herself more as a painter than a singer. She is so allergic to the expectations of her audience that she would rather be a perfectly nice painter than a singer touched by the sublime. That kind of anxiety about audience is often read as contempt, but Mitchell’s restlessness is only the natural side effect of her artmaking, as it is with Dylan, as it was with Joyce and Picasso. Joni Mitchell doesn’t want to live in my dream, stuck as it is in an eternal 1971—her life has its own time. There is simply not enough time in her life for her to be the Joni of my memory forever. The worst possible thing for an artist is to exist as a feature of somebody else’s epiphany.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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

[Image: “10th July 2008 – The Dream Diary,” by user practicalowl on Flickr.com. (Right-click and view in a new window\/tab for a much larger version.)) Used under a Creative Commons license.] From whiskey river: Song for the Deer and Myself to Return On This morning when I looked out the roof window before dawn and […]<\/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":[247,1393,74,250,5,251],"tags":[61,992,1897,3695,3875,3876,3877,3878,3879],"class_list":{"0":"post-16010","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-ruminations","7":"category-whiskey-river-runningaftermyhat","8":"category-music","9":"category-art","10":"category-06_writing","11":"category-poetry-writing_cat","12":"tag-memory","13":"tag-dreams","14":"tag-joni-mitchell","15":"tag-zadie-smith","16":"tag-yahia-lababidi","17":"tag-andrea-gibson","18":"tag-jeanette-wnterson","19":"tag-joy-harjo","20":"tag-michael-hettich","21":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-4ae","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16010","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=16010"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16010\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16025,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16010\/revisions\/16025"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}