{"id":21429,"date":"2019-08-30T06:42:00","date_gmt":"2019-08-30T10:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=21429"},"modified":"2019-08-30T06:42:48","modified_gmt":"2019-08-30T10:42:48","slug":"mortal-satisfactions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2019\/08\/mortal-satisfactions\/","title":{"rendered":"Mortal Satisfactions"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

[Image: “Itinerantes #4<\/a>: Satisfaction,” by Jon D\u00edez Supat; found on Flickr<\/a>, and used here under a Creative Commons license (thank you!). I wanted to know what product\/service\/event the poster advertised, and in what language, but Google Translate wasn’t much help: it said the caption in the center translates from Basque as “Bring your payroll now and bring this exclusive Lotus watch.” (Actually, <\/em>eraman seems to translate more accurately — especially in context — as “take away” or “get,” rather than a second “bring.”)]<\/em><\/p>\n

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

beasts bounding through time —<\/strong><\/p>\n

Van Gogh writing his brother for paints
\nHemingway testing his shotgun
\nCeline going broke as a doctor of medicine
\nthe impossibility of being human
\nVillon expelled from Paris for being a thief
\nFaulkner drunk in the gutters of his town
\nthe impossibility of being human
\nBurroughs killing his wife with a gun
\nMailer stabbing his
\nthe impossibility of being human
\nMaupassant going mad in a rowboat
\nDostoevsky lined up against a wall to be shot
\nCrane off the back of a boat into the propeller
\nthe impossibility
\nSylvia with her head in the oven like a baked potato
\nHarry Crosby leaping into that Black Sun
\nLorca murdered in the road by the Spanish troops
\nthe impossibility
\nArtaud sitting on a madhouse bench
\nChatterton drinking rat poison
\nShakespeare a plagiarist
\nBeethoven with a horn stuck into his head against deafness
\nthe impossibility the impossibility
\nNietzsche gone totally mad
\nthe impossibility of being human
\nall too human
\nthis breathing
\nin and out
\nout and in
\nthese punks
\nthese cowards
\nthese champions
\nthese mad dogs of glory<\/p>\n

moving this little bit of light toward
\nus
\nimpossibly<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Charles Bukowski [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The universe is a great unknown wonderful place, and we know nothing, really, to speak of about it. I think that either depresses and frightens one or is exhilarating. We are very important, and we’re not important in quite the way we think we are. Each one of us is unique, and we can find out a whole lot just by examining ourselves. I think that’s the essential thing. Not paying attention to how you’re going to make money, just paying attention to whatever is around you. Each one of those seconds is your only chance. It’s your life. And it’s wonderful. The more attention that we pay to our ordinary lives leads to a real elation that we’re here at all.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(W. S. Merwin [source<\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Cherries<\/strong><\/p>\n

Fireweed loves the yard
\nand the fire that conjured it
\ninto the light.<\/p>\n

And the scarlet elderberry
\nloves the old junkpile
\nit leans against.<\/span><\/p>\n

The morning glory smothers everything
\nin an embrace: the fence,
\nthe wood workbench,
\nthe rusted steel.<\/p>\n

Here’s a summer day that’s so slow
\neven the light
\nmoves like honey;<\/span><\/p>\n

Daisies jump fences
\nand then just mill around.<\/span><\/p>\n

Here’s a cherry tree that’s so rich
\nwhen it offers its heart to the birds,<\/p>\n

every cherry
\nis a year of cherries.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Barbara LaMorticella [source: nothing canonical, but found it here<\/a> and elsewhere<\/em>])<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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

In Blackwater Woods<\/strong><\/p>\n

Look, the trees
\nare turning
\ntheir own bodies
\ninto pillars<\/p>\n

of light,
\nare giving off the rich
\nfragrance of cinnamon
\nand fulfillment,<\/p>\n

the long tapers
\nof cattails
\nare bursting and floating away over
\nthe blue shoulders<\/p>\n

of the ponds,
\nand every pond,
\nno matter what its
\nname is, is<\/p>\n

nameless now.
\nEvery year
\neverything
\nI have ever learned<\/p>\n

in my lifetime
\nleads back to this: the fires
\nand the black river of loss
\nwhose other side<\/p>\n

is salvation,
\nwhose meaning
\nnone of us will ever know.
\nTo live in this world<\/p>\n

you must be able
\nto do three things:
\nto love what is mortal;
\nto hold it<\/p>\n

against your bones knowing
\nyour own life depends on it;
\nand, when the time comes to let it
\ngo,
\nto let it go.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Mary Oliver [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and:<\/p>\n

The visitors drifted over to the office to see the compressors and the pipe diagram. Sears walked around the edge of the pond to the beginnings of the brook. Some mint grew here and he broke a leaf in his fingers. It was in the early summer but the sun was hot. The sound of water and the broken leaf reminded him of waking one morning with Renee. It was early. It was the first of the light. She lay in his arms and smelled of last night’s perfume and of her own mortality, her yesterday. Her eyelashes had been dyed black and these contrasted with her blondness. They seemed quite artificial. The beauty of her breasts was no longer the beauty of youth and he knew that she worried about their size. He thought this charming. Her hair was not long but it was long enough to need some restraint, and she had, the night before, pulled up her hair—he could easily imagine the gesture—and secured it with a gold buckle. He had not seen her do this but now he saw the gold buckle and the hair it contained and the strands that had escaped. He kissed the loveliness of her neck and caressed the smoothness of her back and seemed to lose himself in the utter delight of loving. It seemed, in his case, to involve some clumsiness, as if he carried a heavy trunk up a staircase with a turning.<\/p>\n

The sky was clear that morning and there might still have been stars although he saw none. The thought of stars contributed to the power of his feeling. What moved him was a sense of those worlds around us, our knowledge however imperfect of their nature, our sense of their possessing some grain of our past and of our lives to come. It was that most powerful sense of our being alive on the planet. It was that most powerful sense of how singular, in the vastness of creation, is the richness of our opportunity. The sense of that hour was of an exquisite privilege, the great benefice of living here and renewing ourselves with love. What a paradise it seemed!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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

[Image: “Itinerantes #4: Satisfaction,” by Jon D\u00edez Supat; found on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license (thank you!). I wanted to know what product\/service\/event the poster advertised, and in what language, but Google Translate wasn’t much help: it said the caption in the center translates from Basque as “Bring your payroll now […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21440,"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":"Mary Oliver, John Cheever, et al.: 'Mortal Satisfactions'","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":[247,1393,250,5,251,4159],"tags":[351,595,3485,3957,4965,4966,4967],"class_list":{"0":"post-21429","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-poetry-writing_cat","12":"category-essays","13":"tag-ws-merwin","14":"tag-mary-oliver","15":"tag-john-cheever","16":"tag-charles-bukowski","17":"tag-barbara-lamorticella","18":"tag-mortality","19":"tag-delight","20":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/itinerantes4satisfaction_jondiezsupat_thumb.jpg?fit=500%2C332&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-5zD","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21429","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=21429"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21429\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21439,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21429\/revisions\/21439"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}