{"id":19309,"date":"2017-05-19T06:24:29","date_gmt":"2017-05-19T10:24:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=19309"},"modified":"2017-05-19T06:24:29","modified_gmt":"2017-05-19T10:24:29","slug":"department-of-unmagical-thinking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2017\/05\/department-of-unmagical-thinking\/","title":{"rendered":"Department of Unmagical Thinking"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>\"Image:<\/a><\/p>\n

[Image: “1688 miracle,” by nebojsa mladjenovic on Flickr<\/a>. (Used here under a Creative Commons license; thank you!) For more information, see the note<\/a> at the foot of this post.]<\/em><\/p>\n

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

A certain man… once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish—but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Vladimir Nabokov [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Making a Fist<\/strong><\/p>\n

We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.<\/em>
\n—Jorge Luis Borges<\/span><\/p>\n

For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
\nI felt the life sliding out of me,
\na drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
\nI was seven, I lay in the car
\nwatching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.
\nMy stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.<\/p>\n

“How do you know if you are going to die?”
\nI begged my mother.
\nWe had been traveling for days.
\nWith strange confidence she answered,
\n“When you can no longer make a fist.”<\/p>\n

Years later I smile to think of that journey,
\nthe borders we must cross separately,
\nstamped with our unanswerable woes.
\nI who did not die, who am still living,
\nstill lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
\nclenching and opening one small hand.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Naomi Shihab Nye [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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

Nurse<\/strong><\/p>\n

My mother went to work each day
\nin a starched white dress, shoes
\ndamped to her feet like pale
\nmushrooms, two blue hearts pressed
\ninto the sponge rubber soles.
\nWhen she came back home, her nylons
\nstreaked with runs, a spatter
\nof blood across her bodice,
\nshe sat at one end of the dinner table
\nand let us kids serve the spaghetti, sprinkle
\nthe parmesan, cut the buttered loaf.
\nWe poured black wine into the bell
\nof her glass as she unfastened
\nher burgundy hair, shook her head, and began.
\nAnd over the years we mastered it, how to listen
\nto stories of blocked intestines
\nwhile we twirled the pasta, of saws
\nteething cranium, drills boring holes in bone
\nas we crunched the crust of our sourdough,
\ncarved the stems off our cauliflower.
\nWe learned the importance of balance,
\nhow an operation depends on
\ncooperation and a blend of skills,
\nthe art of passing the salt
\nbefore it is asked for.
\nShe taught us well, so that when Mary Ellen
\nran the iron over her arm, no one wasted
\na moment: My brother headed straight for the tee
\nOur little sister uncapped the salve.
\nAnd I dialed the number under Ambulance,
\nmy stomach turning to the smell
\nof singed skin, already planning the evening
\nmeal, the raw fish thawing in its wrapper,
\na perfect wedge of flesh.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Dorianne Laux [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and:<\/p>\n

It is when we stop believing that religions have been handed down from above or else that they are entirely daft that matters become more interesting. We can then recognize that we invented religions to serve two central needs which continue to this day and which secular society has not been able to solve with any particular skill: first, the need to live together in communities in harmony, despite our deeply rooted selfish and violent impulses. And second, the need to cope with terrifying degrees of pain which arise from our vulnerability to professional failure, to troubled relationships, to the death of loved ones and to our decay and demise. God may be dead, but the urgent isssues which impelled us to make him up still stir and demand resolutions which do not go away when we have been nudged to perceive some scientific inaccuracies in the tale of the seven loaves and fishes.<\/p>\n

The error of modern atheism has been to overlook how many aspects of the faiths remain relevant even after their central tenets have been dismissed. Once we cease to feel that we must either prostrate ourselves before them or denigrate them, we are free to discover religions as repositories of a myriad ingenious concepts with which we can try to assuage a few of the most persistent and unattended ills of secular life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Alain De Botton [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and:<\/p>\n

In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference… Poised midway between the unvisualizable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and the dubious, shadowy flickerings of charged quanta, we human beings, more like rainbows and mirages than like raindrops or boulders, are unpredictable self-writing poems — vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, and sometimes exceedingly beautiful.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Douglas Hofstadter [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

<\/a>_____________<\/p>\n

About the image:<\/strong> The photograph’s title has no magical hidden meaning; the photographer just numbers all the photos in his photostream, in sequential order, from 001 on up, and appends (usually) a single word — it might be the name of a subject, or a simple descriptor. (The most recent is “3475 La Chaume 2<\/a>” — chaume is French for “thatch,” perhaps the name of the cat shown.) The “miracle” in this case refers to an Albert Einstein quotation serving as a caption to the photo, “There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle.” I like the poem which the photographer cites on his Flickr profile page:<\/p>\n

I Am Not I<\/strong><\/p>\n

I am not I.
\nI am this one
\nwalking beside me whom I do not see,
\nwhom at times I manage to visit,
\nand whom at other times I forget;
\nwho remains calm and silent while I talk,
\nand forgives, gently, when I hate,
\nwho walks where I am not,
\nwho will remain standing when I die.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Juan Ram\u00f3n Jim\u00e9nez, translated By Robert Bly)<\/p>\n

[back<\/a>]<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Image: “1688 miracle,” by nebojsa mladjenovic on Flickr. (Used here under a Creative Commons license; thank you!) For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.] From whiskey river: A certain man… once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19313,"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":"Nabokov, Shihab Nye, et al., on events that may or may not have happened -- and why: 'Department of Unmagical Thinking'","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":[247,1393,250,5,50,251,3477,4159],"tags":[1172,1513,2124,2268,2697,2959,3256],"class_list":{"0":"post-19309","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ruminations","8":"category-whiskey-river-runningaftermyhat","9":"category-art","10":"category-06_writing","11":"category-language-writing_cat","12":"category-poetry-writing_cat","13":"category-fantasy-06_writing","14":"category-essays","15":"tag-naomi-shihab-nye","16":"tag-coincidence","17":"tag-vladimir-nabokov","18":"tag-dorianne-laux","19":"tag-miracles","20":"tag-alain-de-botton","21":"tag-douglas-hofstadter","22":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/1688miracle_nebojsamladjenovic-_thumb.jpg?fit=640%2C480&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-51r","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19309","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=19309"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19309\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19316,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19309\/revisions\/19316"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}