{"id":16357,"date":"2015-02-06T10:00:18","date_gmt":"2015-02-06T15:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=16357"},"modified":"2015-02-06T06:36:36","modified_gmt":"2015-02-06T11:36:36","slug":"the-gravity-of-the-unknown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2015\/02\/the-gravity-of-the-unknown\/","title":{"rendered":"The Gravity of the Unknown"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>\"'Remarkable<\/p>\n

[Image: “Remarkable things, passing,” by user PhotoGraham on Flickr.com<\/a>. (Used under a Creative Commons license.) See the note at the foot of this post<\/a> for more information.]<\/em><\/p>\n

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

Think of how little has been salvaged from the compost of time, of the hundreds of billions of dreams dreamt since the language to describe them emerged, how few names, how few wishes, how few languages even, how we don’t know what tongues the people who erected the standing stones of Britain and Ireland spoke or what the stones meant, don’t know much of the language of the Gabrielanos of Los Angeles or the Miwoks of Marin, don’t know how or why they drew the giant pictures on the desert floor in Nazca, Peru, don’t know much even about Shakespeare or Li Po. It is as though we make the exception the rule, believe that we should have rather than that we will generally lose. We should be able to find our way back again by the objects we dropped, like Hansel and Gretel in the forest, the objects reeling us back in time, undoing each loss, a road back from lost eyeglasses to lost toys and baby teeth. Instead, most of the objects form the secret constellations of our irrecoverable past, returning only in dreams where nothing but the dreamer is lost. They must still exist somewhere: pocket knives and plastic horses don’t exactly compost, but who knows where they go in the great drifts of objects sifting through our world?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Rebecca Solnit [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Abraham Joshua Heschel, a very interesting rabbi and mystic, said he didn’t pray for faith; he prayed for wonder.<\/p>\n

That is also my prayer. Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table; a tiny fleck of it stops time. My periodic table of the heart also has many other elements, still unidentified by science. One of them is unattainium<\/em>. That’s the one that continues to drive us forward whether or not we expect to succeed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Diane Ackerman [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Balance<\/strong><\/p>\n

I watched the arctic landscape from above
\nand thought of nothing, lovely nothing.
\nI observed white canopies of clouds, vast
\nexpanses where no wolf tracks could be found.<\/p>\n

I thought about you and about the emptiness
\nthat can promise one thing only: plenitude —
\nand that a certain sort of snowy wasteland
\nbursts from a surfeit of happiness.<\/p>\n

As we drew closer to our landing,
\nthe vulnerable earth emerged among the clouds,
\ncomic gardens forgotten by their owners,
\npale grass plagued by winter and the wind.<\/p>\n

I put my book down and for an instant felt
\na perfect balance between waking and dreams.
\nBut when the plane touched concrete, then
\nassiduously circled the airport’s labyrinth,<\/p>\n

I once again knew nothing. The darkness
\nof daily wanderings resumed, the day’s sweet darkness,
\nthe darkness of the voice that counts and measures,
\nremembers and forgets.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Adam Zagajewski [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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

Monastery Nights<\/strong><\/p>\n

I like to think about the monastery
\nas I’m falling asleep, so that it comes
\nand goes in my mind like a screen saver.
\nI conjure the lake of the zendo,
\nrows of dark boats still unless
\nsomeone coughs or otherwise
\nripples the calm.
\nI can hear the four a.m. slipperiness
\nof sleeping bags as people turn over
\nin their bunks. The ancient bells.<\/p>\n

When I was first falling in love with Zen,
\nI burned incense called Kyo-nishiki<\/em>,
\n“Kyoto Autumn Leaves,”
\nmade by the Shoyeido Incense Company,
\nKyoto, Japan. To me it smelled like
\nearnestness and ether, and I tried to imagine
\na consciousness ignorant of me.
\nI just now lit a stick of it. I had to run downstairs
\nfor some rice to hold it upright in its bowl,
\nwhich had been empty for a while,
\na raku bowl with two fingerprints
\nin the clay. It calls up the monastery gate,
\nthe massive door demanding I recommit myself
\nin the moments of both its opening
\nand its closing, its weight now mine,
\nI wanted to know what I was,
\nand thought I could find the truth
\nwhere the floor hurts the knee.<\/p>\n

I understand no one I consider to be religious.
\nI have no idea what’s meant when someone says
\nthey’ve been intimate with a higher power.
\nI seem to have been born without a god receptor.
\nI have fervor but seem to lack
\neven the basic instincts of the many seekers,
\nmostly men, I knew in the monastery,
\nsitting zazen all night,
\nwearing their robes to near-rags
\nboy-stitched back together with unmatched thread,
\nsmoothed over their laps and tucked under,
\nunmoving in the long silence,
\nthe field of grain ripening, heavy tasseled,
\nfield of sentient beings turned toward candles,
\nflowers, the Buddha gleaming
\nlike a vivid little sports car from his niche.<\/p>\n

What is the mind that precedes
\nany sense we could possibly have
\nof ourselves, the mind of self-ignorance?
\nI thought that the divestiture of self
\ncould be likened to the divestiture
\nof words, but I was wrong.
\nIt’s not the same work.
\nOne’s a transparency
\nand one’s an emptiness.<\/p>\n

Kyo-nishiki<\/em>…
\nToday I’m painting what Mom
\ncalls no-colors, grays and browns,
\nevergreens: what’s left of the woods
\nwhen autumn’s come and gone.
\nAnd though he died, Dad’s here,
\nstill forgetting he’s no longer
\nmarried to Annie,
\nthat his own mother is dead,
\nthat he no longer owns a car.<\/p>\n

Surprise half inch of snow.
\nWhat good are words?<\/p>\n

And what about birches in moonlight,
\nRussell handing me the year’s
\nfirst chanterelle—
\nShouldn’t God feel like that?<\/p>\n

I aspire to “a self-forgetful,
\nperfectly useless concentration,”
\nas Elizabeth Bishop put it.
\nSo who shall I say I am?
\nI’m a prism, an expressive temporary
\nsentience, a pinecone falling.
\nI can hear my teacher saying, No. <\/em>
\nThat misses it<\/em>.
\nBuddha goes on sitting through the century,
\nleaving me alone in the front hall,
\nwhich has just been cleaned and smells of pine.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Chase Twichell [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

<\/a>______________________________<\/p>\n

About the image:<\/strong> The photographer’s caption reads: “The end of a book. An unexpected but unremarkable closing note in a remarkable novel. But look deeper, at the very fibres of the page, the shine of the ink, the curves of the type, and remark upon it.” Enlarging the image<\/a> to its full 7.2-megabyte (!) size does reveal microscopic wonders. This last page of the novel in question<\/a> is simply “A Note on the Type”:<\/p>\n

The text of this book is set in Berling roman. A modern face designed by K.E. Forsberg between 1951-58. In spite of its youth it does carry the characteristics of an old face. The serifs are inclined and blunt, and the g has a straight ear.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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[Image: “Remarkable things, passing,” by user PhotoGraham on Flickr.com. (Used under a Creative Commons license.) See the note at the foot of this post for more information.] From whiskey river: Think of how little has been salvaged from the compost of time, of the hundreds of billions of dreams dreamt since the language to describe […]<\/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":[247,1393,223,250,5,36,251],"tags":[1438,1633,3709,3884,3961,3962],"class_list":{"0":"post-16357","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-ruminations","7":"category-whiskey-river-runningaftermyhat","8":"category-books-as-books","9":"category-art","10":"category-06_writing","11":"category-reading","12":"category-poetry-writing_cat","13":"tag-diane-ackerman","14":"tag-adam-zagajewski","15":"tag-chase-twichell","16":"tag-rebecca-solnit","17":"tag-ignorance","18":"tag-knowledge","19":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-4fP","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16357","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=16357"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16357\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16373,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16357\/revisions\/16373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}