{"id":27991,"date":"2025-02-21T10:11:52","date_gmt":"2025-02-21T15:11:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=27991"},"modified":"2025-02-21T10:11:58","modified_gmt":"2025-02-21T15:11:58","slug":"you-feel-your-life-as-a-weekend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2025\/02\/you-feel-your-life-as-a-weekend\/","title":{"rendered":"You Feel Your Life as a Weekend"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

[Image: “Misty Morning, Loch Rannoch 6,” by a Flickr user with the handle “xylophilist” (Gr: <\/em>wood lover.) The original photo is here<\/a>; I’m pretty sure the photographer is one Tim Haynes, whose Web site is here<\/a>. I use this photo today under the terms of the photographer’s generous Creative Commons license<\/a>; thank you!]<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

From whiskey river’s commonplace book<\/a><\/em>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Things I Want Decided<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which shouldn’t exist
in this world,
the one who forgets
or the one
who is forgotten?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which is better,
to love
one who has died
or not to see
each other when you are alive?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which is better,
the distant lover
you long for
or the one you see daily
without desire?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which is the least unreliable
among fickle things—
the swift rapids,
a flowing river,
or this human world?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

(Izumi Shikibu, translated by Jane Hirshfield [source<\/a><\/em>])<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

…and:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Know that joy is rarer, more difficult, and more beautiful than sadness. Once you make this all-important discovery, you must embrace joy as a moral obligation.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

(Andr\u00e9 Gide [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’m 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\n\n\n

…and:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

What does it feel like to be alive?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Living, you stand under a waterfall. You leave the sleeping shore deliberately; you shed your dusty clothes, pick your barefoot way over the high, slippery rocks, hold your breath, choose your footing, and step into the waterfall. The hard water pelts your skull, bangs in bits on your shoulders and arms. The strong water dashes down beside you and you feel it along your calves and thighs rising roughly back up, up to the roiling surface, full of bubbles that slide up your skin or break on you at full speed. Can you breathe here? Here where the force is the greatest and only the strength of your neck holds the river out of your face. Yes, you can breathe even here. You could learn to live like this. And you can, if you concentrate, even look out at the peaceful far bank where you try to raise your arms. What a racket in your ears, what a scattershot pummeling!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is time pounding at you, time. Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation’s short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

(Annie Dillard [source<\/a><\/em>])<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not from whiskey river’s commonplace book<\/em>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

[…continuing from above…]<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Who turned on the lights? You did, by waking up: you flipped the light switch, started up the wind machine, kicked on the flywheel that spins the years. Can you catch hold of a treetop, or will you fall off the diving planet as she rolls? Can you ride out the big blow on a coconut palm’s trunk until you fall asleep again, and the winds let up? You fall asleep again, and you slide in a dream to the palm tree’s base; the winds die off, the lights dim, the years slip away as you idle there till you die in your sleep, till death sets you cruising down the Tamiami Trail<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Knowing you are alive is feeling the planet buck under you, rear, kick, and try to throw you; you hang on to the ring. It is riding the planet like a log downstream, whooping. Or, conversely, you step aside from the dreaming fast loud routine and feel time as a stillness about you, and hear the silent air asking in so thin a voice, Have you noticed yet that you will die? Do you remember, remember, remember? Then you feel your life as a weekend, a weekend you cannot extend, a weekend in the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O Augenblick verweile.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

(Annie Dillard [ibid.<\/em>])<\/p>\n\n\n\n

…and:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

My Brother the Artist, at Seven<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a boy he played alone in the fields
behind our block, six frame houses
holding six immigrant families,
the parents speaking only gibberish
to their neighbors. Without the kids
they couldn’t say “Good morning” and be
understood. Little wonder
he learned early to speak to himself,
to tell no one what truly mattered.
How much can matter to a kid
of seven? Everything. The whole world
can be his. Just after dawn he sneaks
out to hide in the wild, bleached grasses
of August and pretends he’s grown up,
someone complete in himself without
the need for anyone, a warrior
from the ancient places our fathers
fled years before, those magic places:
Kiev, Odessa, the Crimea,
Port Said, Alexandria, Lisbon,
the Canaries, Caracas, Galveston.
In the damp grass he recites the names
over and over in a hushed voice
while the sun climbs into the locust tree
to waken the houses. The husbands leave
for work, the women return to bed, the kids
bend to porridge and milk. He advances
slowly, eyes fixed, an animal or a god,
while beneath him the earth holds its breath.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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

[Image: “Misty Morning, Loch Rannoch 6,” by a Flickr user with the handle “xylophilist” (Gr: wood lover.) The original photo is here; I’m pretty sure the photographer is one Tim Haynes, whose Web site is here. I use this photo today under the terms of the photographer’s generous Creative Commons license; thank you!] From whiskey […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":27997,"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":null,"activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"federated","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Izumi Shikibu, Andr\u00e9 Gide, Annie Dillard, et al.: 'You Feel Your Life as a Weekend'","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[183,3286,247,1393,250,251,4159],"tags":[270,295,1645,2513,3415,3713,4057,5514,6070,6072,6073,6074],"class_list":{"0":"post-27991","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-everyday-life","8":"category-obsessions","9":"category-ruminations","10":"category-whiskey-river-runningaftermyhat","11":"category-art","12":"category-poetry-writing_cat","13":"category-essays","14":"tag-jane-hirshfield","15":"tag-annie-dillard","16":"tag-margaret-atwood","17":"tag-philip-levine","18":"tag-andre-gide","19":"tag-change","20":"tag-life-and-death","21":"tag-nature","22":"tag-izumi-shikibu","23":"tag-living-anew","24":"tag-the-little-things","25":"tag-tim-haynes","26":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/MistyMorning-LochRannoch6_xylophilist.jpg?fit=2048%2C1152&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-7ht","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27991","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=27991"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27991\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28001,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27991\/revisions\/28001"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}