{"id":26983,"date":"2024-02-16T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-02-16T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=26983"},"modified":"2024-02-15T10:15:23","modified_gmt":"2024-02-15T15:15:23","slug":"celebrate-increase-make-it-be-spring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2024\/02\/celebrate-increase-make-it-be-spring\/","title":{"rendered":"Celebrate Increase. Make It Be Spring."},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n

[Image: “It may be Winter,” by H.Kopp-Delaney (a.k.a. “Hartwig HKD”). I’ve used a good number of his Flickr images on <\/em>RAMH over the years, so he easily qualifies as a favorite there. Found this one, also, on Flickr<\/a>, and have used here (with a slightly trimmed black frame) under a Creative Commons License; thank you!]<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

\n

Night’s Mardi Gras<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Night is the true democracy. When day
Like some great monarch with his train has passed,
In regal pomp and splendor to the last,
The stars troop forth along the Milky Way,
A jostling crowd, in radiant disarray,
On heaven’s broad boulevard in pageants vast.
And things of earth, the hunted and outcast,
Come from their haunts and hiding-places; yea,
Even from the nooks and crannies of the mind
Visions uncouth and vagrant fancies start,
And specters of dead joy, that shun the light,
And impotent regrets and terrors blind,
Each one, in form grotesque, playing its part
In the fantastic Mardi Gras of Night.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

(Edward J. Wheeler [source<\/a><\/em>])<\/p>\n\n\n\n

…and<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

You’ll notice that I haven’t talked about love. Or about happiness. I’ve talked about becoming — or remaining — the person who can be happy, a lot of the time, without thinking that being happy is what it’s all about. It’s not. It’s about becoming the largest, most inclusive, most responsive person you can be.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

(Susan Sontag [source: quoted widely as an excerpt from a Vassar commencement speech in 2003 — nothing canonical (like a complete transcript) seems to be online anywhere, but you can find this excerpt and others — by Sontag and others — here<\/a>]<\/em>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

\n

February Evening in New York<\/strong><\/p>\n

As the stores close, a winter light
opens air to iris blue,<\/span>
glint of frost through the smoke<\/span>
grains of mica, salt of the sidewalk.<\/span>
As the buildings close, released autonomous
feet pattern the streets<\/span>
in hurry and stroll; balloon heads<\/span>
drift and dive above them; the bodies<\/span>
aren’t really there.<\/span>
As the lights brighten, as the sky darkens,
a woman with crooked heels says to another woman<\/span>
while they step along at a fair pace,<\/span>
“You know, I’m telling you, what I love best<\/span><\/em>
is life. I love life! Even if I ever get<\/span><\/em>
to be old and wheezy—or limp! You know?<\/span><\/em>
Limping along?—I’d still…”<\/em> Out of hearing.<\/span>
To the multiple disordered tones
of gears changing, a dance<\/span>
to the compass points, out, four-way river.<\/span>
Prospect of sky<\/span>
wedged into avenues, left at the ends of streets,<\/span>
west sky, east sky: more life tonight! A range<\/span>
of open time at winter’s outskirts.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Denise Levertov [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n\n\n

…and:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Friday Snow<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Something needs to be done—like dragging a big black plastic sack through the upstairs rooms, emptying into it each waste basket, the trash of three lives for a week or so. I am careful and slow about it, so that this little chore will banish the big ones. But I leave the bag lying on the floor and I go into my daughter’s bedroom, into the north morning light from her windows, and while this minute she is at school counting or spelling a first useful word I sit down on her unmade bed and I look out the windows at nothing for a while, the unmoving buildings—houses and a church—in the cold street.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Across it a dark young man is coming slowly down the white sidewalk with a snowshovel over his shoulder. He’s wearing a light coat, there’s a plastic showercap under his dirty navy blue knit hat, and at a house where the walk hasn’t been cleared he climbs the steps and rings the doorbell and stands waiting, squinting sideways at the wind. Then he half wakes and he says a few words I can\u2019t hear to the storm door that doesn’t open, and he nods his head with the kindly farewell that is a habit he wears as disguise, and he goes back down the steps and on to the next house. All of this in pantomime, the way I see it through windows closed against winter and the faint sounds of winter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My daughter’s cross-eyed piggy bank is also staring out blankly, and in its belly are four dollar bills that came one at a time from her grandmother and which tomorrow she will pull out of the corked mouthhole. (It’s not like the piggy banks you have to fill before you empty them because to empty them you have to smash them.) Tomorrow she will buy a perfect piece of small furniture for her warm well-lit dollhouse where no one is tired or weak and the wind can\u2019t get in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sitting on her bed, looking out, I didn\u2019t see a bundled-up lame child out of school and even turned out of the house for a while, or a blind woman with burns or a sick bald veteran—people who might have walked past stoop-shouldered with what\u2019s happened and will keep happening to them. So much limping is not from physical pain—the pain is gone now, but the leg’s still crooked. The piggy bank and I see only the able young man whose straight back nobody needs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When he finally gets past where I can see him, it feels as if a kind of music has stopped, and it’s more completely quiet than it was, an emptiness more than a stillness, and I get up from the rumpled bed and I smooth the covers, slowly and carefully, and I look around the room for something to pick up or straighten, and I take a wadded dollar bill from my pocket and put it into the pig and I walk out.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

(Reginald Gibbons [source<\/a><\/em>])<\/p>\n\n\n\n

…and:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

February<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries
to get onto my head. It’s his
way of telling whether or not I’m dead.
If I\u2019m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am
He’ll think of something. He settles
on my chest, breathing his breath
of burped-up meat and musty sofas,
purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,
not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,
declaring war. It’s all about sex and territory,
which are what will finish us off
in the long run. Some cat owners around here
should snip a few testicles. If we wise
hominids were sensible, we’d do that too,
or eat our young, like sharks.
But it’s love that does us in. Over and over
again, He shoots, he scores!<\/em> and famine
crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing
eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits
thirty below, and pollution pours
out of our chimneys to keep us warm.
February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.
I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You’re the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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

[Image: “It may be Winter,” by H.Kopp-Delaney (a.k.a. “Hartwig HKD”). I’ve used a good number of his Flickr images on RAMH over the years, so he easily qualifies as a favorite there. Found this one, also, on Flickr, and have used here (with a slightly trimmed black frame) under a Creative Commons License; thank you!] […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26991,"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":"Susan Sontag, Denise Levertov, et al.: 'Celebrate Increase. Make It Be Spring.'","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":[183,247,1393,250,251,4159],"tags":[850,1645,3281,4132,4665,5367,5857,5858,5859],"class_list":{"0":"post-26983","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-everyday-life","8":"category-ruminations","9":"category-whiskey-river-runningaftermyhat","10":"category-art","11":"category-poetry-writing_cat","12":"category-essays","13":"tag-denise-levertov","14":"tag-margaret-atwood","15":"tag-winter","16":"tag-hartwig-hkd","17":"tag-reginald-gibbons","18":"tag-susan-sontag","19":"tag-edward-j-wheeler","20":"tag-february","21":"tag-winter-always-yields","22":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/itmaybewinter_hkoppdelaney.jpg?fit=1025%2C865&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-71d","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26983","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=26983"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26983\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26997,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26983\/revisions\/26997"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}