take various paths sky is door never closed sun moon aren’t doorknobs
I’m trying to create an option for all these doors in life. You’re inside or out, outside or in. Of late, doors have failed us more than the two-party system or marriages comprising only one person. We’ve been fooled into thousands of dualisms which the Buddha says is a bad idea. Nature has portals rather than doors. There are two vast cottonwoods near a creek and when I walk between them I shiver. Winding through my field of seventy-seven large white pine stumps from about 1903 I take various paths depending on spirit. The sky is a door never closed to us. The sun and moon aren’t doorknobs. Dersu Uzala slept outside for forty-five years. When he finally moved inside he died.
Doors by Jim Harrison.
I drove out to my workplace for the first time in a month due to construction on the workplace.
The last time I drove, I drove my car into the rising sun.
Today, I drove in the dark.
I take various paths to work as the light changes as the Earth tips.
The path is the same but at least seems different.
night and day sometimes we live without noticing or overtrying
Based on the poem Carpe Diem by Jim Harrison
Night and day seize the day, also the night — a handful of water to grasp. The moon shines off the mountain snow where grizzlies look for a place for the winter’s sleep and birth. I just ate the year’s last tomato in the year’s fatal whirl. This is mid-October, apple time. I picked them for years. One Mcintosh yielded sixty bushels. It was the birth of love that year. Sometimes we live without noticing it. Overtrying makes it harder. I fell down through the tree grabbing branches to slow the fall, got the afternoon off. We drove her aqua Ford convertible into the country with a sack of red apples. It was a perfect day with her sun-brown legs and we threw ourselves into the future together seizing the day. Fifty years later we hold each other looking out the windows at birds, making dinner, a life to live day after day, a life of dogs and children and the far wide country out by rivers, rumpled by mountains. So far the days keep coming. Seize the day gently as if you loved her.
“Carpe Diem” by Jim Harrison from Dead Man’s Float, (Copper Canyon Press, 2016)
I enjoy this poem.
Carpe Diem.
Or Seize the Day or more accurately Seize the Present!
And why?
Quam minimum credula postero.
For tomorrow, a new day comes.
Sunset on the May River from the bluff in Bluffton, SC 8/26/2023
palingenetic ultranationalistic age meet the enemy …
In the book, The Winds of War, Rhoda Henry is in Berlin and sees all the Third Reich icons and says to her husband Pug,
“What on earth does NSDAP stand for?” Rhoda said, peering out of the window of the embassy car at the multitudinous gilded poles. “National Socialist German Workers Party,” said Pug. “Is that the name of the Nazis? How funny. Sounds sort of Commie when you spell it all out.”
I like words and I write this blog to recognize unique word usage but when I ran across palingenetic ultranationalistic this morning in the article, US businessman is wannabe ‘warlord’ of secretive far-right men’s network by Jason Wilson (The Guardian, 8/22/2023) I had to stop and say, “What on Earth is palingenetic ultranationalistic.”
According to Wikipedia, palingenetic ultranationalistic is the effort .. to attract large masses of voters who have lost their faith in traditional politics and religion by promising them a brighter future.
The palingenetic myth can also possibly stand for a return to a golden age in the country’s history so that the past can be a guidebook to a better tomorrow.
… there will be one great leader who battles the representatives of the old system with grassroots support. It appears as one mass of people with only one goal: to create their new future. They have infinite faith in their mythical hero as he stands for everything they believe in. With him, the country will rise like a phoenix from the ashes of corruption and decadence.
Sounds sort of Commie when you spell it out.
North Korean type Commie.
Joseph Stalin kind of Commie.
But it seems to the be the basis for a secretive, men-only, invitation-only far-right network here in America.
Still sounds sort of Commie when you spell it out.
Not that spelling it out helped me too much.
Wikipedia tries to help explain by using palingenetic ultranationalistic in a sentence.
National-anarchism has been argued to be a syncretic political ideology that was developed in the 1990s by former Third Positionists to promote a “stateless palingenetic ultranationalism”.
Have to say I haven’t seen so many poly syllabic words is so short a sentence in a long time.
I did notice that according to the article this far right network is a registered non profit under section 501(c)(10) of the Internal Revenue code.
Jim Harrison once wrote something along the lines of if you really want to take a stand and protest against the government, stop paying your taxes.
So I feel a little less threatened that these folks are concerned about their non-profit status.
Or should I feel more threatened?
Kind of like Tony Soprano hustling around to get his W2 ready.
Never the less, the article was chilling and the comments about warlords and maximum leaders brought to mind Mr. Big Brother from George Orwell’s 1984.
” … on the face of the coin [was] the head of Big Brother. Even from the coin the eyes pursued you. On coins, on stamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on posters, and on the wrapping of a cigarette packet — everywhere. Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed — no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.”
Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.
Who are these people?
Where did this people come from?
As Pogo said back over 50 years ago, we have met the enemy and they are us.
That’s the whole point of this blog and these haiku.
To point out the wonderful word combinations that real writers accomplish in print and bring to the attention of my vast audience.
I don’t like to change the original word order of anyone’s work.
I especially don’t like to change the original word order just to make in my American grammar school haiku rhythm of 5 – 7 – 5 syllables (and yes I have read all the arguments about this and that Japanese sound patterns and English syllables are not necessarily equivalent but its my blog my rules and my rules say a haiku, for the purpose of this blog, follows the 5 -7 -5 pattern so there) but I did in this case and the change made quite the impact.
Mr. Harrison wrote: Of course we are loaned this life, then suddenly one day it’s overdue.
Which, due to the 5 – 7 – 5 rule, I hammered into:
of course we are loaned this life then suddenly it’s one day overdue
In a way, I liked that.
I like that a lot.
Suddenly, it’s one day overdue.
Overdue or just one day overdue, when we are talking about the loan of life is the same and yet it isn’t.
Just one day …
Can I have just one day more …
One more day …
Just one day or not, life has no amnesty day or forgiveness policy.
I have to wonder if Mr. Harrison would have liked and I can say, with pretty much solid confidence, he would NOT.
Famously he refused to talk to an editor for years who dared edit something he wrote.
With that in mind, I stayed with the phrase and worked it into:
Of course we are loaned this life, suddenly one day it is overdue
eight years spent longing for Hollywood’s realism and sincerity
Lawyer, Actor and Politician Fred Thompson described his thoughts on who he might include in his autobiography.
Mr. Thompson wrote:
There were the early days when I was a federal prosecutor.
Then there would be a part about my role as counsel for the Watergate committee, and my part in revealing the taping system in the Nixon White House.
Then, of course, I would relate some of my experiences in the movie business as well as on the TV show Law & Order.
And there would be the eight years I spent in the U.S. Senate (which made me long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood).
The U.S. Senate made me long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood.
I am reminded of something I heard Jim Harrison say in an interview that the only way he, Mr. Harrison, could stand being in Hollywood was the knowledge that, due to air travel, he could be back where he lived in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in just a matter of hours.
Mr. Thompson’s time in the US Senate made him long for Hollywood.
Mr. Harrison’s time in Hollywood made him long for Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
Have you have been to the U.P.?
I’ll let you draw any conclusions but often I think it is not a question of whether or not this Republic WILL survive, but HOW did we make it this far?
*From Teaching the Pig to Dance: A Memoir of Growing Up and Second Chances by Fred Thompson, Crown, 2010.
