A Claim on You

"She was such a little bit of a thing.  But while I was holding her, she opened her eyes.  I know she didn't really study my face.  Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was.  But I know she did look right into my eyes.  That is something.  And I'm glad I knew it at the time, because now, in my present situation, now that I am about to leave this world, I realize there is nothing more astonishing than a human face.  Boughton and I have talked about that, too.  It has something to do with incarnation.  You feel your obligation to a child when you have seen it and held it.  Any human face is a claim on you, because you can't help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it."

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

Pennsylvania

A Dark Husk

"Once when Boughton and I had spent an evening going through our texts together and we were done talking them over, I walked him out to the porch, and there were more fireflies out there than I had ever seen in my life, thousands of them everywhere, just drifting up out of the grass, extinguishing themselves in midair.  We sat on the steps a good while in the dark and the silence, watching them.  Finally Boughton said,

'Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward.'

And really, it was that night as if the earth were smoldering.  Well, it was, and it is.  An old fire will make a dark husk for itself and settle in on its core, as in the case of this planet.  I believe the same metaphor may describe the human individual, as well.  Perhaps Gilead.  Perhaps civilization.  Prod a little and the sparks will fly.  I don't know whether the verse put a blessing on the fireflies or the fireflies put a blessing on the verse, or if both of them together put a blessing on trouble, but I have loved them both a good deal ever since."

-Maryilynne Robinson, Gilead

Dawson's Cabin, Pennsylvania, December 8, 2013

Cathedral of Knowledge

This is supposedly the Cincinnati Library in 1874.  I have no idea if that is true, but it's cool regardless.

Being Free

'When someone seeks,' Siddhartha answered, 'then it happens all too easily that his eyes will see only the thing he is seeking, that he cannot find anything, cannot let anything in, because he is always thinking only of that thing he seeks, because he has a goal, because he is possessed by the goal.  Seeking means: having a goal.  But finding means: being free, being open, having no goal.  You, Venerable One, may indeed be a seeker, for striving toward your goal, there is much you do not see which is right before your eyes.'

-Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

Home.

It Comes at a Cost

'We would all like to be simpler, Paul,' she says, 'every one of us.  Particularly as we near the end.  But we are complicated creatures, we human beings.  That is our nature.  You want me to be simpler.  You want to be simpler yourself, more naked.  Well, I gaze in wonderment, believe me, upon your efforts to strip yourself down.  But it comes at a cost, the simple heart you so desire, the simple way of seeing the world...'

-J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man

City of Angels

George

Trips

Two from Siddhartha

At one time shramanas had passed through Siddhartha's city, ascetics on a pilgrimage, three scrawny, faded men, neither old nor young, dust and blood on their shoulders, nearly naked, scorched by the sun, ringed by solitude, alien and hostile to the world, foreigners and haggard jackals in the realm of human beings.  Behind them a breeze blew hot with the scent of silent passion, of mortification, of ruthless self-denial.

Patapsco State Park

The Buddha went his way, unassuming and sunk in contemplation, his still countenance was neither happy nor sad, it seemed gently to smile inwardly.  With a hidden smile, calm, peaceful, not unlike a healthy child, the Buddha walked, wearing the robe and setting his foot just as all his monks did, exactly as prescribed.  But his face and his tread, his calmly lowered gaze, his calmly hanging hand, and from that calmly downward-hanging hand every single finger expressed peace, expressed perfection, sought nothing, imitated nothing, breathed softly in an everlasting repose, an unfading light, and inviolable peace.

-Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

Returning to Myself

Men on small islands would do well to avoid the pursuit of philosophy.  The island illusion, that solitude and wisdom invented each other, is a very convincing one.  Day by day I seem to grow more profound.  Often I feel I am on the verge of some great philosophical discovery.  Man.  War.  Truth.  Time.  Fortunately I always return to myself.  I look beyond the white lace of the surf to my own unassembled past and I decide to let others stitch together the systems.  I enjoy the triteness of the situation, man and island, exile in the ultimate suburb.  The surf is massing and rolling, uneven now, page after page of terrible wild words.  All the colors borrow, sea from beach from sky, and after a while I follow my own foot prints back to the house.

-Don DeLillo, Americana

Glacier National Park

Travel

Travel

There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page
Of prancing poetry.
This traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul!

-Emily Dickinson

New York Public Library

Composure

"He seemed to be a young man but he had a look of composed dissatisfaction as if he understood life thoroughly."

-Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find

Mississippi at Sunset

Someday I'll be nothing too.

"I hated long views of life when the infinite overwhelms the finite subjects.  Not even forever lasts forever, and again I thought no matter what I do, someday I'd be nothing."  

Arthur Nersesian, The Fuck-Up

Madison, Wisconsin

The Truth of Man

"I, on the contrary, chose justice in order to remain faithful to the world.  I continue to believe that this world has no ultimate meaning.  But I know that something in it has a meaning and that is man, because he is the only creature to insist on having one.  This world has at least the truth of man, and our task is to provide its justifications against fate itself. "    

Albert Camus
"Letters to a German Friend: Fourth Letter" 
Resistance, Rebellion, and Death 
1943

Wisconsin-Iowa

Lust

"The virtue of Hope, in Enoch, was made up of two parts suspicion and one part lust."

-Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood

Iowa

Carl Sagan

Women's Weapons

Oh, reason not the need! Our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous.
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man's life is cheap as beast's.  Thou art a lady;
If only to go warm were gorgeous,
Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear'st,
Which scarcely keeps thee warm.  But, for true need--
You heavens, give me that patience; patience I need!
You see me here, you gods, a poor old man,
As full of grief as age, wretched in both.
If it be you that stirs these daughters' hearts
Against their father, fool me not so much
To bear it tamely; touch me with noble anger,
And let no women's weapons, water drops,
Stain my man's cheeks.  No, you unnatural hags,
I will have such revenges on you both
That all the world shall -- I will do such things--
What they are yet I know not, but they shall be
The terrors of the earth.  You think I'll weep.
No, I'll not weep.
I have full cause of weeping; but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws
O ere I'll weep.  Oh, Fool, I shall go mad!

-King Lear by William Shakespeare
Act 2, Scene 4, Lines 262-284

Wisconsin

*Bonus Post*

The Bluebird

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going
to let anybody see
you.

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that

Madison, WI

he's
in there.

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody's asleep.
I say, I know that you're there
so don't be
sad.

then I put him back
but he's singing a little
in there, I haven't quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it's nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don't
weep, do
you?

-Charles Bukowski

The Heart of Truth

"And I huddle in the lee of my paper mountain like Adam in the bushes and pick up a book and my eyes open panic-stricken in a world other than my own, because when I start reading I'm somewhere completely different, I'm in the text, it is amazing, I have to admit I've been dreaming, dreaming in a land of great beauty, I've been in the very heart of truth."

-Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud A Solitude

McGregor, Iowa

Trauma

What Cannot Be Held

"He squatted over the wolf and touched her fur.  He touched the cold and perfect teeth.  The eye turned to the fire gave back no light and he closed it with his thumb and sat by her and put his hand upon her bloodied forehead and closed his own eyes that he could see her running in the mountains, running in the starlight where the grass was wet and the sun's coming as yet had not undone the rich matrix of creatures passed in the night before her.  Deer and hare and dove and groundvole all richly empaneled on the air for her delight, all nations of the possible world ordained by God of which she was one among and not separate from.  Where she ran the cries of the coyotes clapped shut as if a door had closed upon them and all was fear and marvel.  He took up her stiff head out of the leaves and held it or he reached to hold what cannot be held, what already ran among the mountains at once terrible and of great beauty, like flowers that feed on flesh.  What blood and bone are made of but can themselves not make on any altar nor by any wound of war.  What we may well believe has power to cut and shape and hollow out the dark form of the world surely if wind can, if rain can.  But which cannot be held never be held and is no flower but is swift and a huntress and the wind itself is in terror of it and the world cannot lose it."

-Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

"Consummation of Grief"

I hear the mountains
the way they laugh
up and down their blue sides
and down in the water
the fish cry
and all the water
is their tears.
I listen to the water
on nights I drink away
and the sadness becomes so great
I hear it in my clock
it becomes knobs upon my dresser
it becomes paper on the floor
it becomes a shoehorn
a laundry ticket
it becomes
cigarette smoke
climbing a chapel of dark vines

it matters little

very little love is not so bad
or very little life

what counts
is waiting on walls
I was born for this

I was born to hustle roses down the avenues of the dead.

-Charles Bukowski

Another Kind of Place Altogether

"The Reverend Peters makes a funny ticking noise with his tongue sometimes when he is thinking.  And he smokes cigarettes and you can smell them on his breath and I don't like this.

I said that there wasn't anything outside the universe and there wasn't another kind of place altogether.  Except that there might be if you went through a black hole, but a black hole is what is called singularity, which means it is impossible to find out what is on the other side because the gravity of the black hole is so big that even electromagnetic waves like light can't get out of it, and electromagnetic waves are how we get information about things which are far away.  And if heaven was on the other side of a black hole, dead people would have to be fired into space on rockets to get there, and they aren't or people would notice."

Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time 

Happiness is...

A Constitution of Iron

"All his life he had tended and operated on the soft humans of civilization, who lived sheltered lives and had descended out of many sheltered generations.  Compared to White Fang, they were frail and flabby, and clutched life without strength in their grip.  White Fang had come straight from the Wild, where the weak perish early and shelter is vouchsafed to none.  In neither his father nor his mother was there any weakness, nor in the generations before them.  A constitution of iron and the vitality of the Wild were White Fang's inheritance, and he clung to life, the whole of him and every part of him, in spirit and in flesh, with the tenacity that of old belonged to all creatures."

Jack London, White Fang

Lake Monona, Madison, Wisconsin

The History Boys

Madame Zilensky

"The reason for the lies of Madame Zilensky was painful and plain.  All her life long Madame Zilensky had worked -- at the piano, teaching, and writing those beautiful and immense twelve symphonies.  Day and night she had drudged and struggled and thrown her soul into her work, and there was not much of her left over for anything else.  Being human, she suffered from this lack and did what she could to make up for it.  If she passed the evening bent over a table in the library and later declared that she had spent that time playing cards, it was as though she had managed to do both those things.  Through the lies, she lived vicariously.  The lies doubled the little of her existence that was left over from work and augmented the little rag end of her personal life."

Carson McCullers, Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland

All of us

Raymond Carver

Willa

This will never stop being my favorite.

"She smiled -- though she was ashamed of it -- with the natural contempt of strength for weakness, with the sense of physical security which makes the savage merciless.  Nobody could die while he felt like that inside.  The springs there were wound so tight that it would be a long while before there was any slack in them.  The life in there was rooted deep.  She was going to have a few things before she died.  She realized that there were a great many trains dashing east and west on the face of the continent that night, and that they all carried young people who meant to have things.  But the difference was that she was going to get them!  That was all.  Let people try to stop her!  She glowered at the rows of feckless bodies that lay sprawled in the chairs.  Let them try it once!  Along with the yearning that came from some deep part of her, that was selfless and exalted, Thea had a hard kind of cockiness, a determination to get ahead.  Well, there are passages in life when that fierce, stubborn self-assertion will stand its ground after the nobler feeling is overwhelmed and beaten under." 

Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark

1937

Baya and the Thunderstorm, Wisconsin Summer, 2012

Flowery Benedictions

"The path the old man took was a fire trail that had been built by the C C C.  From the glade in which he now made his home he had to climb nearly a thousand feet to reach it, but once on the trail the walking was easy and excepting the injured shoe he would have swung along at a good pace.  It was six miles to the river where he crossed and came to the highway and the same ubiquitous crossroads store with the drunken porch, the huge and rock-battered Nehi signs, the weather-curled laths, the paintless stonecolored wood--but the old man had taken an early start.  Through the gap in the trees he could see the valley far below him where the river ran, a cauldron in the mountain's shadow where smoke and spume seethed like the old disturbance of the earth erupting once again, black mist languid in the cuts and trenches as flowing lava and the palisades of rock rising in the high-shored rim beyond the vally--and beyond the valley, circling the distant hoary cupolas now standing into morning, the sun, reaching to the slope where the old man rested, speared mist motes emblematic as snowflakes and broke them down in spangled and regimental disorder, reached the trees and banded them in light, struck weftwork in the slow uncurling ferns--the sun in its long lightfall recoined again in leafwater.

Brogan and cane and cracked pad clatter and slide on the shelly rocks and stop where a snake lies curled belly-up to the silent fold and dip of a petal-burst of butterflies fanning his flat and deadwhite underside.  Scout smells cautiously at the snake, the butterflies in slow riot over his head, flowery benedictions of their veined and harlequin wings.  With his cane the old man turns the snake, remarking the dusty carpet pattern of its dull skin, the black clot of blood where the rattles have been cut away.

They go on--steps soft now in the rank humus earth, or where carapaced with lichens the texture of old green velvet, or wet and spongy earth tenoned with roots, the lecherous ganglia of things growing--coming down, pursuing the shadowline into the smoking river valley."

Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper

Wisconsin, Summer 2012

New Books

thanks Imgur.

I Used to be Lonely

"The other side is made of men, Jim, men like you. Man hates himself. Psychologists say a man's self-love is balanced neatly with self-hate. Mankind must be the same. We fight ourselves and we can only win by killing every man. I'm lonely, Jim. I have nothing to hate. What are you going to get out of it, Jim?"

Jim looked startled. "You mean me?" He pointed a finger at his breast.

"Yes, you. What will you get out of all the mess?"

"I don't know; I don't care."

"Well, suppose blood-poisoning sets in in that shoulder, or you die of lockjaw and the strike gets broken? What then?"

"It doesn't matter," Jim insisted. "I used to think like you, Doc, but it doesn't matter at all."

"How do you get that way?" Burton asked. "What's the process?"

"I don't know. I used to be lonely, and I'm not anymore. If I go out now it won't matter. The thing won't stop. I'm just a little part of it. It will grow and grow. This pain in the shoulder is kind of pleasant to me; and I bet before he died Joy was glad for a moment. Just in that moment I bet he was glad."

In Dubious Battle by John Steinbeck, 1936

Lake Michigan

Cold Mornings

"Your cold mornings are filled with the heartache about the fact that although we are not at ease in this world, it is all we have, that it is ours but that it is full of strife, so that all we can call our own is strife; but even that is better than nothing at all, isn't it? And as you split frost-laced wood with numb hands, rejoice that your uncertainty is God's will and His grace toward you and that that is beautiful, and part of a greater certainty, as your own father always said in his sermons and to you at home. And as the ax bites into the wood, be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it.  And when you resent the ache in your heart, remember: You will be dead and buried soon enough."

Paul Harding, Tinkers