New Year's Resolution?

  "Are you going to try to improve yourself, or are you going to let the universe improve you?"

Dogen

Once Later

 It is not until later
 that you have to be young

 it is one of those things
you meant to do later

 but by then there is
 someone else living there

 with the shades rolled down
 how could you have been young there

 at that time
with all that was expected

 then what happened to
 the expectations

 there is no sign of them there
a shadow passes across the window shade

 what do they know in there
 whoever they are

  W.S. Merwin

The top image is a recent real estate photo taken in the back of the house where I grew up just outside Greensburg, PA.  The window to the left is to the room that had been my bedroom.  While I was in college, my parents took this window out, installed a door, and turned the room into a den.  At some point--probably not long ago-- a new owner took out the door and replaced the window, returning the room to being a bedroom.  You can see how the bricks are newer under the window.  So in this way, it is more as it was when I grew up there than it has been since. The wood deck is new as well--it had been a brick patio-- and judging from the wood and bricks piled in the photo, all this was done recently when the photo was taken several years ago. The real estate photos of the inside are interesting.  They show what has survived and what hasn't.  They also suggest that no children have lived here recently.  I don't think it has been a family home anymore.

I see that I've posted this poem here before, but it means even more to me when paired with this picture.

Another Blue Voice

Trinidad Ca 2008 BK Photo

This poem happens to contain this blog's name within in.  I'm not aware of having read the poem before I named the blog, which was a very long time ago in Internet years.  That's even though it happens to be by probably my favorite poet, William Stafford. I present it here now as a way to rededicate this blog, which I've neglected.  But it's always been my favorite blog, though I am apparently its only faithful reader. Here's the poem.

Sky

I like you with nothing.  Are you
what I was?  What I will be?
I look out there by the hour,
so clear, so sure, I could
smile, or frown--still nothing.

Be my father, be my mother,
great sleep of blue; reach
far within me; open doors,
find whatever is hiding; invite it
for many clear days in the sun.

When I turn away I know
you are there.  We won't forget
each other: every look is a promise.
Others can't tell what you say
when it's the blue voice, when
you come to the window and look for me.

Your word arches over
the roof of all day.  I know it
within my bowed head, where
the other sky listens.
You will bring me
everything when the time comes.

---William Stafford

Now Is Later

Once Later

It is not until later
that you have to be young

it is one of those things
you meant to do later

but by then there is
someone else living there

with the shades rolled down
how could you have been young there

at that time
with all that was expected

then what happened to
the expectations

there is no sign of them there
a shadow passes across the window shade

what do they know in there
whoever they are

W.S. Merwin
published in New York Review of Books
May 7,2015

Music

"You don't have to sell a hundred million records, you don't need thousands of platinum disks, you don't need to sing to millions and millions of people for music to nourish your soul.  You can sing and play to the cat, it will still mend your life.  My mantra is five simple words: Music is its own reward."

Sting

A Critical Need

From an essay by  Leon Wieseltier in the New York Times Book Review (emphases added):

"Amid the bacchanal of disruption, let us pause to honor the disrupted. The streets of American cities are haunted by the ghosts of bookstores and record stores, which have been destroyed by the greatest thugs in the history of the culture industry. Writers hover between a decent poverty and an indecent one; they are expected to render the fruits of their labors for little and even for nothing, and all the miracles of electronic dissemination somehow do not suffice for compensation, either of the fiscal or the spiritual kind.

"... What does the understanding of media contribute to the understanding of life? Journalistic institutions slowly transform themselves into silent sweatshops in which words cannot wait for thoughts, and first responses are promoted into best responses, and patience is a professional liability.

As the frequency of expression grows, the force of expression diminishes: Digital expectations of alacrity and terseness confer the highest prestige upon the twittering cacophony of one-liners and promotional announcements. It was always the case that all things must pass, but this is ridiculous.

 Meanwhile the discussion of culture is being steadily absorbed into the discussion of business. There are “metrics” for phenomena that cannot be metrically measured. Numerical values are assigned to things that cannot be captured by numbers. Economic concepts go rampaging through noneconomic realms: Economists are our experts on happiness! Where wisdom once was, quantification will now be.

 It is enabled by the idolatry of data, which has itself been enabled by the almost unimaginable data-generating capabilities of the new technology. The distinction between knowledge and information is a thing of the past, and there is no greater disgrace than to be a thing of the past. Beyond its impact upon culture, the new technology penetrates even deeper levels of identity and experience, to cognition and to consciousness..."

Quantification is the most overwhelming influence upon the contemporary American understanding of, well, everything.

 "Aside from issues of life and death, there is no more urgent task for American intellectuals and writers than to think critically about the salience, even the tyranny, of technology in individual and collective life. All revolutions exaggerate, and the digital revolution is no different. We are still in the middle of the great transformation, but it is not too early to begin to expose the exaggerations, and to sort out the continuities from the discontinuities. The burden of proof falls on the revolutionaries, and their success in the marketplace is not sufficient proof..."

" Every technology is used before it is completely understood. There is always a lag between an innovation and the apprehension of its consequences. We are living in that lag, and it is a right time to keep our heads and reflect. We have much to gain and much to lose."

Beginning of a Long Thought

"Recently, while moving my CD collection to new shelving, I struggled with feelings of obsolescence and futility...The tide has turned against the collector of recordings, not to mention the collector of books: what was once known as building a library is now considered hoarding."
Alex Ross
"The Classical Cloud"
New Yorker September 8, 2014

The Enterprise

"...when it comes to representing the outer world, no painting can compare to a window pane. This principle applies much more forcibly to literature, because there is no verbal equivalent of the window pane.  Words can describe things only approximately: all they do with any real accuracy is hang together, in puns, metaphor, assonances, and the self-contained fictions of grammar and syntax."

Northrup Frye
Creation & Recreation

Telling the Story

“It felt good to tell it, in a way. Because it was his story, his and his alone, nobody else’s. And in telling it he gained a sort of control over it he had never had when it happened. That was the value of telling one’s story, a value exactly the reverse of the experience itself. What was valuable in the experience was that he had been out of control, living moment to moment with no plan, at the mercy of other people. What was valuable in telling the story was that he was in control, shaping the experience, deciding what it meant, putting other people in their proper place. The two values were complementary, they added up to something more than each alone could, something that... completed things.

 So he told them his story, and they listened.”

 Kim Stanley Robinson
Pacific Edge (The Three Californias)

Image: Storyteller by Judy Toya

The Connection

"You said that we owe literature almost everything we are and what we have been. If books disappear, history will disappear, and human beings will also disappear. I am sure you are right. Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence. Some people think of reading only as a kind of escape: an escape from the "real" everyday world to an imaginary world, the world of books. Books are much more. They are a way of being fully human." 

 Susan Sontag
 "A Letter to Borges"
quoted by Jonathan Cott in his new book, Susan Sontag: The Complete Rolling Stone Interview (Yale.)

 photo from Truffaut's film version of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451

They connect us to the past, to the many dimensions of our past, and to the future, by which the past is given meaning beyond itself.  They connect the unknown, the hidden and even furtive parts of ourselves to the many dimensions of our world, and of the universe, in the present.  They make connections, which is the very life of the mind...  Some ways of being more fully human.

Or On That Guitar

"How many of us would be willing to settle when we're young for what we eventually get?  All those plans we made...what happens to them?  It's only a handful of the lucky ones that can look back and say that they even came close...So before they clean out that closet Mr. Kirby, I think I'd get in a few good hours on that saxophone."

Kaufman and Hart
You Can't Take It With You

The Decisive Question

“The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interest upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance. Thus we demand that the world grant us recognition for qualities which we regard as personal possessions: our talent or our beauty. The more a man lays stress on false possessions, and the less sensitivity he has for what is essential, the less satisfying is his life. He feels limited because he has limited aims, and the result is envy and jealousy. If we understand, and feel that in this life we already have a link with the infinite, desires and attitudes change. In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the essential we embody, and if we do not embody that, life is wasted.”

C. G. Jung
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
p. 325

painting by Rene Magritte

The Shared Solitude of Writing

"Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone. Or rather writing is saying to the no one who may eventually be the reader those things one has no someone to whom to say them. Matters that are so subtle, so personal, so obscure that I ordinarily can’t imagine saying them to the people to whom I’m closest. Every once in a while I try to say them aloud and find that what turns to mush in my mouth or falls short of their ears can be written down for total strangers. Said to total strangers in the silence of writing that is recuperated and heard in the solitude of reading. Is it the shared solitude of writing, is it that separately we all reside in a place deeper than society, even the society of two? Is it that the tongue fails where the fingers succeed, in telling truths so lengthy and nuanced that they are almost impossible aloud?"

Rebecca Solnit

Bird in the Moonlight

"The artist struggles against indifference, yet anonymity is a protection.  When he becomes known he becomes vulnerable.  In what manner do we catch the eye of Polyphemus and become recognized as an individual and not one of his sheep?"

Morris Graves by Frederick S. Wight, John I.H. Baur and Duncan Phillips
painting: "Bird in the Moonlight" by Morris Graves

Today's Prayer

"It occurred to me that lots of people have to sit through meetings every day, and I said a prayer for them as you would for those lost at sea."

Tim Kreider, one of many sadly funny lines in an illuminating testimony in the NYTimes to the cognitive dissonance of  writing v. publishing a book in this new Youtubian Twitterverse.

"Find out as soon as possible what are the best things in your composition, and then shape the rest to fit them.  The former will be the midrib and veins of the leaf.

There is always some accident in the best things, whether thoughts or expressions or deeds.  The memorable thought, the happy expression, the admirable deed are only partly ours.  The thought came to use because we were in a fit mood; also we were unconscious and did not know that we had said or done a good thing.  We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success.  What we do best or most perfectly is what we have most thoroughly learned by the longest practice, and at length it falls from us without our notice, as a leaf from a tree.  It is the last time we shall do it,--our unconscious leavings."

H.D. Thoreau--Journal  March 11, 1859

“The function of an artist is to work for a)himself b) to leave something memorable, for the future, to shore up the ruins.”

Bruce Chatwin
painting: Self-Portrait by Gino Severini

“Writing is always my metre of health—writing, which a sane philosopher would probably say was the surest symptom of a diseased mind.”
Emerson

"The difference in the intelligence world between very clever and very stupid is often very small. It's the same in writing."

John Le Carre

“We measure ourselves by many standards. Our strength and our intelligence, our wealth and even our good luck, are things which warm our heart and make us feel ourselves a match for life. But deeper than all such things and able to suffice unto itself without them, is the sense of the amount of effort we can put forth...He who can make none is but a shadow; he who can make much is a hero.”
William James