{"id":29382,"date":"2026-03-20T13:09:58","date_gmt":"2026-03-20T17:09:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=29382"},"modified":"2026-03-20T13:10:10","modified_gmt":"2026-03-20T17:10:10","slug":"a-thing-to-reach-for-and-something-to-reach-it-with-maybe-the-same-thing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2026\/03\/a-thing-to-reach-for-and-something-to-reach-it-with-maybe-the-same-thing\/","title":{"rendered":"A Thing to Reach For, and Something to Reach It With: Maybe the Same Thing"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

[Image: “Forgotten ladders. Moon<\/a>,” by DeviantArt user BergionStyle, they say, “using AI tools.”]<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

\n

Proclamation of the actual mind, manifesting your mind, writing the mind, which goes back to Kerouac but also goes back to Milarepa<\/span>, goes back to his original instructions: Don’t you trust your own mind? Why do you need a piece of paper?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So writing could be seen as “writing your mind,” observing your own mind, or observe what’s vivid coming to mind. For the purpose of relieving your own paranoia, and others’, revealing yourself and communicating to others. It is a blessing for other people if you can communicate and relieve their sense of isolation, confusion, bewilderment, and suffering by offering your own mind as a sample of what’s palpable, visible, and whatever little you’ve learned…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In other words, if you can show your<\/em> mind it reminds people that they<\/em> have got a mind. If you can catch yourself thinking, it reminds people that they can catch themselves<\/em> thinking. If you have a vivid moment that’s more open and compassionate, it reminds people that they have those vivid moments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By showing your mind as a mirror, you can make a mirror for other people to recognize their own minds and see familiarity and not feel that their minds are unworthy of affection or appreciation. It is appreciation of consciousness, appreciation of our own consciousness.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

(Allen Ginsberg [source: here<\/a> and here<\/a><\/em>])<\/p>\n\n\n\n

…and:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Poetry<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a<\/p>\n\n\n\n

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
they are
useful. When they become so derivative as to become
unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand: the bat
holding on upside down or in quest of something to<\/p>\n\n\n\n

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless
wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse
that feels a flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician—
nor is it valid
to discriminate against “business documents and<\/p>\n\n\n\n

school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make
a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the
result is not poetry,
nor till the poets among us can be
“literalists of
the imagination”—above<\/p>\n\n\n\n

insolence and triviality and can present
for inspection, “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,”
shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

(Marianne Moore [source<\/a><\/em>])<\/p>\n\n\n\n

…and:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

As you go the way of life, you will see a great chasm. Jump. It is not as wide as you think.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

(Joseph Campbell, citing a Native American Indian saying [source: quoted widely, e.g., here<\/a><\/em>])<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From elsewhere:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Why Do I Write?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a good question. Ask it of yourself every once in a while. No answer will make you stop writing, and over time you will find that you have given every response…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baker Roshi from San Francisco Zen Center said, \u201c\u2018Why?\u2019 isn\u2019t a good question.\u201d Things just are. Hemingway has said, \u201cNot the why, but the what.\u201d Give the real detailed information. Leave the why for psychologists. It\u2019s enough to know you want to write. Write.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet it\u2019s a good and haunting question to explore, not so you can find the one final reason, but to see how writing permeates your life with many reasons. Writing is not therapy, though it may have a therapeutic effect. You don\u2019t discover that you write because of lack of love and then quit, as you might in therapy discover that you eat chocolate as a love substitute and, seeing the reason, stop (if you\u2019re lucky) eating Hershey\u2019s chocolate bars and hot fudge. Writing is deeper than therapy. You write through <\/em>your pain, and even your suffering must be written out and let go of…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We write in the moment and reflect our minds, emotions, environment in that moment. This does not mean that one is truer than the other\u2014they are all true. When the old nag in you comes around with \u201cWhy are you wasting your time? Why do you write?,\u201d just dive onto the page, be full of answers, but don\u2019t try to justify yourself. You do it because you do it. You do it because you want to improve your handwriting, because you\u2019re an idiot, because you\u2019re mad for the smell of paper.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

(Natalie Goldberg [source<\/a><\/em>])<\/p>\n\n\n\n

…and:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

# 37: <\/strong>The young man — who hoped someday to become one-tenth as wise as the master under whose tutelage he had grown — was riding as a passenger in his master’s car. It should have been a brief drive, no more than a half-hour’s duration, but they had left later than planned and so they were stuck in one traffic jam after another: construction delays, stalled vehicles, the exit ramps — which were clogged at any time of any day — now, at peak rush hour, spilling back into the traffic lanes like molasses in winter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“All this freaking traffic<\/em>,” the young man said during one prolonged stop, waving his hands to either side. “Where the heck is it even coming, or going, and why<\/em>? Who the heck are<\/em> all these people?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His master glanced in his direction, smiled wryly. “‘Traffic’?” he said. “‘All these <\/em>people’? ‘Why’?” He gestured once at the young man, once at himself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The two of them laughed; traffic resumed its crawl. In the distance, from over the horizon, a plume of black smoke twisted up in the sky: a fire or an explosion, a plane crash, who knew? The car came to a stop again. They sat in silence for a few minutes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Apparently the young man had been thinking not just about traffic, but about the direction his life had been taking–about his stubborn pursuit of art, of all things, in a world saturated with so much ugliness; when not standing still, it seemed always in the process of eruption and collapse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“What’s the point<\/em>?” he said aloud. “Look at all this! Look at me<\/em>! I mean, these little things I keep creating… I’m dodging the important questions of our time, I’m doing nothing to fix the world<\/em>, it’s falling down around us! I’m doing nothing<\/em> to help!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another pause as they crept slowly up to the latest obstacle, visible but still a good distance ahead: a small trailer overturned by the side of the highway. It had apparently been carrying a load of used books, perhaps bound for recycling. Whatever car or truck had been towing it had left the mess for someone else to clean up; the flashing blue lights of official vehicles had shot past the master’s car on the right shoulder, headed towards the problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The master glanced to his right. He smiled again — just a small smile this time. He took his hands off the steering wheel, waved them to the left and right. “The world!” he said, in a high-pitched whiny voice. “You! Me! Your work! My hands on the wheel, or waving in the air! My car, stuck in its lane just because there are stripes on the pavement and obstacles all around it! Why? Why? Why<\/span>?<\/strong><\/em>“<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They were at the mountain of scattered books now, and now they were past it. Traffic began to slacken, their speed to pick up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The young man began to laugh to himself. A very funny story had just occurred to him, and he reached for the pen and notebook in his pocket.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists<\/em>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Image: “Forgotten ladders. Moon,” by DeviantArt user BergionStyle, they say, “using AI tools.”] From whiskey river’s commonplace book: Proclamation of the actual mind, manifesting your mind, writing the mind, which goes back to Kerouac but also goes back to Milarepa, goes back to his original instructions: Don’t you trust your own mind? Why do you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29396,"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":"federated","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Allen Ginsberg, Natalie Goodman, et al.: 'A Thing to Reach For, and Something to Reach It With: Maybe the Same Thing'","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5,251,4159],"tags":[212,1191,3285,3816,6285,6286],"class_list":{"0":"post-29382","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-06_writing","8":"category-poetry-writing_cat","9":"category-essays","10":"tag-creativity","11":"tag-marianne-moore","12":"tag-maxims-for-nostalgists","13":"tag-joseph-campbell","14":"tag-allen-ginsberg","15":"tag-art-in-the-real-world","16":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/forgottenladdersthemoon_bergionstyle_deviantart_med.jpg?fit=1024%2C574&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-7DU","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29382","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=29382"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29382\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29399,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29382\/revisions\/29399"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}