Standby until March 23

Programming Note

For those who partake of this blog (specifically, Rick Grisel, and the ether), the maintenance man is departing his rock in the pacific for warmer climates. Fear not, for your fearless poster shall return and commence collecting and sharing favorite works of poetic words on or about March 23. Until then, and of course after then - be well.

Shared Presence

Having a companion fixes you
in time and that of the present, but
when the quality of alone-ness settles down,
past, present, and future
all flow together.

A memory,
a present event, and a forecast
all equally present.

-- John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley in Search of America
(arranged quote)

Susceptibility

In effect, revelation is
an act of violence perpetrated
on a system of knowledge.

Anyone possessing a system
of knowledge, therefore,
is susceptible to revelation.

-- Oliver Broudy, The Convert
(arranged quote)

Luck

"Luck, good or bad,"
said Rumfoord
up in his treetop,
"is not the hand of God."

"Luck," said Rumfoord
up in his treetop, "is the way
the wind swirls
and the dust settles
eons after God has passed by."

-- Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

Mothballed

When I went away
I had died, and so became
fixed and unchangeable.

My return caused only
confusion
and uneasiness.

Although they could not say it,
my old friends wanted me gone
so that I could take my proper place
in the pattern of remembrance—and

I wanted to go for the same reason.

Tom Wolfe was right.
You can’t go home again
because home has ceased to exist except in
the mothballs of memory.

-- John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley in Search of America

Those who pulled their homes from beyond the horizon

Traveling in
these giant cedar canoes,
the Haida
would regularly paddle their home
into, and
out of,
existence.

With each collective paddle stroke
they would have seen
their islands sinking
steadily
into the sea, while
distant snow-covered peaks
scrolled up before them
like a new planet.

Few people alive today
have any notion of how it might feel
to pull worlds up from
beyond the horizon
by faith and muscle alone.

--John Vaillant, The Golden Spruce (quote,
arranged)

A Deceptive Loss

And there are
true secrets in the desert.

In the war of sun
and dryness against living things,

life has its secrets of survival. Life,
no matter on what level,
must be moist or it will
disappear.

I find most interesting the conspiracy
of life in the desert
to circumvent the death rays of the all-conquering sun.

The beaten earth appears defeated
and dead, but it only appears so.

A vast and inventive organization of living matter
survives by
seeming to have lost.

-- John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley in Search of America

Alternatives

one drawback
of an active mind
is that one can
always conceive
alternative
explanations

-- Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes
(arranged quote)

The Tale is the Map which is the Territory

One describes a tale best by telling the tale.
You see? The way one describes a story,
to oneself or to the world,
is by telling the story.

It is a balancing act and it is a dream.

The more accurate the map,
the more it resembles the territory.

The most accurate map possible
would be the territory, and thus would be
perfectly accurate and perfectly useless.

The tale is the map which is the territory.

-- Neil Gaiman, American Gods

(arranged quote)

Mirrored Images

Pelorat sighed. “I will never
understand people.”

“There’s nothing to it.
All you have to do is
take a close look at
yourself

and you will understand
everyone else.

We’re in no way different ourselves.”

-- Isaac Asimov, Foundation's Edge
(arranged quote)

The Journey's End

My own journey started
long before I left, and was over
before I returned.

I know exactly where
and when it was over.

Near Abingdon, in
the dog-leg of Virginia, at
four o’clock of a windy afternoon,

without warning or good-by
or kiss my foot, my journey went away and
left me stranded far from home.

I tried to call it back, to catch it up—
a foolish and hopeless matter,
because it was definitely
and permanently over and finished.

-- John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley in Search of America
(arranged quote)

Time

Habituation is a falling asleep or
fatiguing of the sense of time;
which explains why young years
pass slowly, while later life flings
itself faster and faster upon its course.

 -- Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
(arranged quote)

Of the natural rights of all

A free people [claim] their rights
as derived from the laws
of nature, and not as
the gift
of their chief magistrate.

What is true of
every member of
the society, individually,
is true of them all
collectively;

since the rights of the whole
can be no more
than the sum of the rights
of the
individuals.

--Thomas Jefferson (arranged quote)

Every River is a World of Its Own

Swift or smooth, 

broad as the Hudson or 

narrow enough to 

scrape your gunwales, 

every river is 

a world of its own, 

unique in pattern and personality. 

Each mile on a river 

will take you 

further from home 

than a hundred miles on a road.

-- Bob Marshall
(arranged quote)

I Will Persist

I will persist until I succeed.
I was not delivered into this world in defeat,
nor does failure course in my veins.
I am not a sheep
waiting to be prodded by my shepherd.
I am a lion and I
refuse to talk, to walk, to sleep with the sheep.

The slaughterhouse of failure is not my destiny.
I will persist until I succeed.

-- Og Mandino, The Greatest Salesman In The World
(arranged quote)

Caper Gratefulness

I now inhabit a life
I don’t deserve,

but we all walk this earth
feeling we are frauds.

The trick is to
be grateful

and hope the caper doesn't
end any time soon.”

-- David Carr, The Night of the Gun
(arranged quote)
[New Yorker Postscript: David Carr, 1956-2015]

I Fellowed Sleep

I fellowed sleep who kissed me in the brain,
Let fall the tear of time; the sleeper's eye,
Shifting to light, turned on me like a moon.
So, planning-heeled, I flew along my man
And dropped on dreaming and the upward sky.

I fled the earth and, naked, climbed the weather,
Reaching a second ground far from the stars;
And there we wept I and a ghostly other,
My mothers-eyed, upon the tops of trees;
I fled that ground as lightly as a feather.

'My fathers' globe knocks on its nave and sings.'
'This that we tread was, too, your father's land.'
'But this we tread bears the angelic gangs
Sweet are their fathered faces in their wings.'
'These are but dreaming men. Breathe, and they fade.'

Faded my elbow ghost, the mothers-eyed,
As, blowing on the angels, I was lost
On that cloud coast to each grave-grabbing shade;
I blew the dreaming fellows to their bed
Where still they sleep unknowing of their ghost.

Then all the matter of the living air
Raised up a voice, and, climbing on the words,
I spelt my vision with a hand and hair,
How light the sleeping on this soily star,
How deep the waking in the worlded clouds.

There grows the hours' ladder to the sun,
Each rung a love or losing to the last,
The inches monkeyed by the blood of man.
And old, mad man still climbing in his ghost,
My fathers' ghost is climbing in the rain.

-- Dylan Thomas

Occasionally saved

Literature usually
gives us a story
and sometimes gives us
a moral, but
life mostly gives us the
opposite;

not a plot but a lot
of set pieces;

not happily ever after, but
happy, occasionally,
in the middle.

If there is no overarching narrative,
if life has ups and downs but no
denouement, an ending
but no conclusion, then
all we get from it
is whatever we love enough
to save.

-- Kathryn Schulz
(arranged quote)

The Great Innovation

When the great innovation
appears, it will
almost certainly be in a muddled,
incompleteandconfusing form.

To the discoverer himself
it,
will be a mystery.

For any speculation
which does not
at    first    glance
   look   crazy,
there is no hope.

-- Freeman Dyson (arranged quote
from The Starship and The Canoe)

Bankruptcy before the thunders silence

The
years thunder
by.

The dreams
of youth grow
dim, where they lie caked
in dust on the
shelves of patience.

Before we
know it, the tomb
is sealed.

Where then
lies the answer?

In choice. Which
shall it be:

bankruptcy
of purse or
bankruptcy of life?

--Sterling Hayden, Wanderer
(arranged quote)

the important act is dreaming

the important act is dreaming

so let dreams flood over you endlessly

along with the intense desire to make some of them come true

and let's love what should be loved

and forget what should be forgotten

let's wish for passions

as well as silences

and bird song upon awakening

and the laughter of children.

let us resist being swallowed up

and resist indifference

resist the negative virtues of our age.

above all, let us all just be, and be ourselves.

or try to - for as long as we can, as hard as we can.

--Jacques Brel, quote

from A Sea Vagabond's World by Bernard Moitessier,

arranged by Jen Buttery of Hey Sailor

The future's fit

The plan,
a memory of


the future,
tries on reality


to see if it fits.

-- Laurence Gonzalez
(arranged quote)

Messy Room

Whosever room this is should be ashamed!
His underwear is hanging on the lamp.
His raincoat is there in the overstuffed chair,
And the chair is becoming quite mucky and damp.
His workbook is wedged in the window,
His sweater's been thrown on the floor.
His scarf and one ski are beneath the TV,
And his pants have been carelessly hung on the door.
His books are all jammed in the closet,
His vest has been left in the hall.
A lizard named Ed is asleep in his bed,
And his smelly old sock has been stuck to the wall.
Whosever room this is should be ashamed!
Donald or Robert or Willie or --
Huh? You say it's mine? Oh dear,
I knew it looked familiar!

-- Shel Silverstein

The trick of living

The world is
as sharp as
the edge of a knife.

If you live
on the edge of a circle,
that is the present moment.

What's inside
is knowledge, experience:
the past.

What's outside has
yet to be
experienced.

The knife's edge is so fine
that you can live
either in the past, or
in the future.

The real trick,
is to live on the edge.

--Robert Davidson, Haida artist (quoted
by John Vaillant, The Golden Spruce,
arranged)

Holy Ground

One place comes back from my early ranging ground:
A shelf of limestone alive with cedar and cactus,
A sampler of Palestine in North Alabama.
The glinting sewage of blue and brown glass

Made me know that the widow who'd lived below
Had made this unplantable tract a dumping ground.
The rock was pocked and puddled with rainwater
And felt blood-soaked and haunted with prophecy.

What I liked best were the prickles
Of the cactus that bound me to constant
Watchfulness and the whorled grain
Of the cedar branches scattered by the storm.

Stripping the bark, I'd find the balance
Of a handhold, then the stock and bolt.
Others may have seen sticks. I saw guns
To shape and stock carefully among the limbs

Of leafless treees. These would stem invasions,
And if the bomb fell, the one like a club,
Dark red and rich with pith, was the torch
That would lead me to shelter in the cave.

-- Rodney Jones, Holy Ground