{"id":18223,"date":"2016-07-08T10:00:03","date_gmt":"2016-07-08T14:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=18223"},"modified":"2016-07-08T06:51:59","modified_gmt":"2016-07-08T10:51:59","slug":"attentive-to-sights-unseen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2016\/07\/attentive-to-sights-unseen\/","title":{"rendered":"Attentive to Sights Unseen"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

[Image: a slide from the New Zealand Ministry of Education’s presentation <\/em>What Alice Saw, by Don Long. (And no, it wasn’t <\/em>that Alice, and she didn’t see the takahē-that-wasn’t down a rabbit-hole.) For more information, see the complete presentation<\/a> (it’s brief, and not a difficult read).]<\/em><\/p>\n

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

Swimming<\/strong><\/p>\n

Some nights, I rise from the latest excuse for
\nWhy not stay awhile<\/em>, usually that hour when
\nthe coyotes roam the streets as if they’ve always
\nowned the place and had come back inspecting now
\nfor damage. But what hasn’t been damaged? History
\nhere means a history of storms rushing the trees
\nfor so long, their bowed shapes seem a kind of star —
\nworth trusting, I mean, as in how the helmsman,
\nsteering home, knows what star to lean on. Do
\npeople, anymore, even say helmsman? Everything
\nin waves, or at least wave-like, as when another’s
\nsuffering, being greater, displaces our own, or
\nI understand it should, which is meant to be
\ndifferent, I’m sure of it, from that pleasure
\nLucretius speaks of, in witnessing from land
\na ship foundering at sea, though more and more
\nit all seems related. I love the nights here. I love
\nthe jetty’s black ghost-finger, how it calms
\nthe harbor, how the fog hanging stranded just
\nabove the water is fog, finally, not the left-behind
\nparts of those questions from which I half-wish
\nI could school my mind, desperate cargo,
\nto keep a little distance. An old map from when
\nthis place was first settled shows monsters
\neverywhere, once the shore gives out — it can still
\nfeel like that: I dive in, and they rise like faithfulness
\nitself, watery pallbearers heading seaward, and
\nI the raft they steady. It seems there’s no turning back.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Carl Phillips [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Recently I was walking to the park and, as I dropped the letter I was carrying into the mailbox, I was stilled by the notion, almost a prediction, that I would find a reindeer, a really tiny one, the size of, say, a lemon. This is the way the image came to me: it “popped in” (maybe fell? down from some nest?). Maybe the weather, a very cool June afternoon, encouraged the image’s weird arrival. I attempted to exchange the reindeer for something more seasonal, more discernibly trinkety and likely to surface (clover, penny, bottle cap), but the reindeer was stubborn. It was meaning to be found.<\/p>\n

I suppose I might dig around a bit, psyche-wise, and find the reindeer representing\/standing in for something delicate and hidden, meaningful in some way I cannot yet understand.<\/p>\n

Along the way there were white tulips so robust they reached to my waist. I saw some kind of evergreen whose uppermost branch shot out, like a hooked cane, into clear sky. Pink azaleas were dulling to brown and looked more like colonies of coral. And the place the reindeer sprang from, that swampy, rampant, tundral field, offered this image, too: a cleanly flensed frog. Now the two images were overlapping, the frog’s empurpled and milky-blue, skinned legs — and the whole and intact tiny-frog-sized reindeer.<\/p>\n

Then came the smell of gingerbread, though maybe I’m misidentifying some flower’s perfume, and while this whole sensation\/ eidolon\/charm wasn’t about winter at all, many wintry things kept adding up.<\/p>\n

To what, though? To what?<\/p>\n

I am of two minds about knowing.<\/p>\n

What if I thought about the images differently: simply, that they exist. Are out there embedded in shifting forms, and enter me, the moment’s site of odd happenings. No irritable reaching, just Hello, Reindeer. Hello, Frog. Your absolute smallness. Your unexplained blues. All fact and reason just let go of.<\/p>\n

These images are meaningful\/I have no idea what these images mean. And what do I get if I push these very real-but-odd pictures up against the nothing-in-hand?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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

<\/p>\n

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

As soon as we start looking through the outer and visible to the inner and invisible and trying to see how form and meaning relate, most of the old body\/soul dichotomy vanishes. The soul then becomes the body’s meaning<\/em>, and the body the expression of the soul.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Karlfried Durckheim [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and:<\/p>\n

Sickbed<\/strong><\/p>\n

There were two voices in the fever dream:
\nHers speaking from another room, and theirs,
\nThe teeny-boppers, singing from the screen.<\/p>\n

Hers spoke a litany of grievous thanks,
\nAnd thankful worries, who did what to whom,
\nAnd why, and thank God it wasn\u2019t worse, poor bastard,<\/p>\n

Poor thing, while theirs kept singing who wears short
\nShorts, we wear short shorts, over and over
\nTill I was singing too. Someone, thank God, at last,<\/p>\n

Was out of it, and some one else, thank God,
\nHad only lost a breast, and Shirley what
\nA good kid, what a beauty, what a doll,<\/p>\n

She let herself go when the bum walked out.
\nThank God they never had a child. Thank God
\nThey smelled the smoke; they found the keys, the dog;<\/p>\n

Thank God they all wore short shorts as they sang
\nTo me on little stages on the stage
\nWhere boys and girls were dancing all around them,<\/p>\n

Singing and dancing where it wasn\u2019t worse,
\nThank God, and, thank God, no one paused to wonder
\nWho to thank for just how bad it was.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Alan Shapiro [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and:<\/p>\n

I didn’t squawk about the steak, dear. I merely said I didn’t see that old horse that used to be tethered outside here.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(W.C. Fields [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Image: a slide from the New Zealand Ministry of Education’s presentation What Alice Saw, by Don Long. (And no, it wasn’t that Alice, and she didn’t see the takahē-that-wasn’t down a rabbit-hole.) For more information, see the complete presentation (it’s brief, and not a difficult read).] From whiskey river: Swimming Some nights, I rise from […]<\/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":"Lia Purpura, W.C. Fields, et al: 'Attentive to Sights Unseen'","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[247,1393,405,593,53,5,36,251,4159],"tags":[793,2573,3250,4300,4348,4349,4350],"class_list":{"0":"post-18223","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-ruminations","7":"category-whiskey-river-runningaftermyhat","8":"category-nature","9":"category-history-in-the-news","10":"category-movies-media","11":"category-06_writing","12":"category-reading","13":"category-poetry-writing_cat","14":"category-essays","15":"tag-attention","16":"tag-alan-shapiro","17":"tag-lia-purpura","18":"tag-carl-phillips","19":"tag-karlfried-durckheim","20":"tag-w-c-fields","21":"tag-invisibility","22":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-4JV","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18223","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=18223"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18223\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18232,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18223\/revisions\/18232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}