![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/images\/deepdimuniverse_sm.jpg?resize=500%2C400&ssl=1\" "\\"The")
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[Photo above taken by the Hubble Wide-Field Camera 3 and released a few days ago by NASA. Several thousand galaxies are visible in the original<\/a>, “a peek at the universe as it looked about 600 million years after the Big Bang.” More info here<\/a> and here<\/a>.]<\/em><\/p>\n From whiskey river<\/em><\/a> (which excerpted from this poem, in different words, via translation):<\/p>\n The startling reality of things<\/strong><\/p>\n The startling reality of things To be whole, it is enough simply to exist.<\/p>\n I’ve written a good many poems. Sometimes I start looking at a stone. Occasionally I hear the wind blow, I don’t know what others reading this will think; I was once called a materialist poet (Fernando Pessoa [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n …and:<\/p>\n Your beloved and your friends were once strangers. Somehow at a particular time, they came from the distance toward your life. Their arrival seemed so accidental and contingent. Now your life is unimaginable without them. Similarly, your identity and vision are composed of a certain constellation of ideas and feelings that surfaced from the depths of the distance within you. To lose these now would be to lose yourself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n (John O’Donohue [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Not from whiskey river<\/em>:<\/p>\n It was once when I read a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip<\/em>: as their highnesses traveled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of: for instance, one of them discovered that a camel blind of the right eye had traveled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than on the right — now do you understand serendipity<\/em>? One of the most remarkable instances of this accidental sagacity<\/em> (for you must observe that no discovery of a thing you are looking for, comes under this description) was of my Lord Shaftsbury, who happening to dine at Lord Chancellor Clarendon’s, found out the marriage of the Duke of York and Mrs. Hyde, by the respect with which her mother treated her at table.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n (Horace Walpole, who — per Wikipedia<\/a> — coined the word serendipity<\/em> in this passage from a letter to a friend)<\/p>\n …and:<\/p>\n …through a sequence of events too complex to recount here (the connections between which, in any case, are never fully explained), everything in [the protagonist] Lorimer’s life begins to go wrong. His reversal of fortune is attributed to a principle defined in one of the reflective passages from his diary that punctuate the action of the novel:<\/p>\n[…]\n ”So what is the opposite of Serendip, a southern land of spice and warmth, lush greenery and hummingbirds, seawashed, sunbasted? Think of another world in the far north, barren, icebound, cold, a world of flint and stone. Call it Zembla. Ergo: zemblanity, the opposite of serendipity, the faculty of making unhappy, unlucky and expected discoveries by design. Serendipity and zemblanity: the twin poles of the axis around which we revolve.”<\/p>\n Zemblanity in Lorimer’s life takes many forms: a paranoid rock star selects him as a confidant; his car is vandalized, either by the subject of one of his insurance investigations or by Flavia Malinverno’s jealous husband; he inherits his elderly neighbor’s dog; his father dies.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n (from a New York Times<\/em> review<\/a> of William Boyd’s Armadillo<\/em> (1998))<\/p>\n Finally… There’s so much information on the Web about the long-lived American New Wave band Devo<\/a> that i’d feel ridiculous trying to summarize it all. While I admit that I have not followed their idiosyncratic career, the bits of it that I have<\/em> been snagged on have always entertained (and in some cases challenged) me. While researching this post, I serendipitously — perhaps even zemblanitously — came across a couple of static YouTube videos of what seems to be an obscure song by them, “Find Out.”<\/p>\n Unambiguous information on “Find Out” is difficult to, er, find. One of the two videos’ descriptions says that it’s from the Oh, No! It’s Devo<\/em><\/a> album (1982). This seems to be true only if you’re referring not to the original album, but to a remastered re-release in 1995; Wikipedia reports that “Find Out” was the B-side song of the single “Peek-a-Boo,” which may explain its obscurity.<\/p>\n In any event, of the two videos on YouTube, the one below has the better audio (I think — but Lord knows, I’m no authority!). Lyrics, per usual, appear below the video.<\/p>\n
\nIs my discovery every single day.
\nEvery thing is what it is,
\nAnd it’s hard to explain to anyone how much this delights me
\nAnd suffices me.<\/p>\n
\nI shall write many more, naturally.
\nEach of my poems speaks of this,
\nAnd yet all my poems are different,
\nBecause each thing that exists is one way of saying this.<\/p>\n
\nI don’t start thinking, Does it have feeling?
\nI don’t fuss about calling it my sister.
\nBut I get pleasure out of its being a stone,
\nEnjoying it because it feels nothing,
\nEnjoying it because it’s not at all related to me.<\/p>\n
\nAnd I find that just hearing the wind blow makes it worth having been born.<\/p>\n
\nBut I find it must be good since it’s what I think without effort,
\nWith no idea that other people are listening to me think;
\nBecause I think it without thoughts,
\nBecause I say it as my words say it.<\/p>\n
\nAnd was surprised, because I didn’t imagine
\nI could be called anything at all.
\nI’m not even a poet: I see.
\nIf what I write has any merit, it’s not in me;
\nThe merit is there, in my verses.
\nAll this is absolutely independent of my will.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n