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.
hurricane waiting rain raining and wind blowing not much else happens
It became evident to me after a few fast rounds with the radio that the broadcasters had opened up on Edna awfully far in advance, before she had come out of her corner, and were spending themselves at a reckless rate. During the morning hours, they were having a tough time keeping Edna going at the velocity demanded of emergency broadcasting. I heard one fellow from, I think, Riverhead, Long Island, interviewing his out-of-doors man, who had been sent abroad in a car to look over conditions on the eastern end of the island.
That is a short excerpt from EB White’s famous essay, The Eye of Edna (The New Yorker, September 25, 1954) where Mr. White told the story following Hurricane Edna using live reports … on the radio.
It was on my mind today as Hurricane Idalia came by.
Lots of dire warnings.
Lots of views of other places.
But here.
Rain raining.
Wind blowing.
The tide might be high but there is that blue moon anyway to help that along.
But you don’t want to be caught out in this if it gets worse.
So the wait continues.
Back in Mr. White wrote that. “The radio either lets Nature alone or gives her the full treatment, as it did at the approach of the storm. The idea, of course, is that the radio shall perform a public service by warning people of a storm that might prove fatal; and this the radio certainly does. But another effect of the radio is to work people up to an incredible state of alarm many hours in advance of the blow, while they are still fanned by the mildest zephyrs.”
The people I used to work with in TV News always shouted, “We are here to INFORM you, not scare you!”
And pass along advice.
As they did in 1954 when Mr. White noted, “… a man was repeating the advice I had heard many times. Fill the car with gas before the pumps lose their power. Get an old-fashioned clock that is independent of electricity. Set the refrigerator adjustment to a lower temperature”
I never thought about the clock today but I made sure my phone was charged though that will depend on cell towers being up and working.
Mr. White said, “There are always two stages of any disturbance in the country — the stage when the lights and the phone are still going, the stage when these are lost.”
All these moderns connections and conveniences.
Haven’t really come that far in the face of a Hurricane I guess.
I will tell one thing that caught me off guard.
I have been watching the storm all day through my window.
Its gray and windswept.
I know these days from growing up in Michigan.
Then I went outside for a quick trip to grab some supplies and I ran out the door and ducked my head … into the 40mph 85 degree storm.
It WAS HOT.
From my window, it was a COLD gray Michigan day.
Walking into 100% humidity and seeing folks in T shirts and shorts caught me off guard.
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.
thinking of death but dressing it in the raiment lyric, metaphor
Most of the people I like, or love, or can barely stand are between the ages of forty-five and sixty-five, give or take a year or two at either end, and only about three of them are capable any longer of achieving what was once casually called, and is now wistfully called, a good night’s rest.
For ours is the age of the four “A”s: anxiety, apprehension, agonizing, and aspirin.
People are smoking more and enjoying it less, drinking more and feeling it more, and waking around three in the morning to lie there gloomily staring at the mushroom-shaped ceiling, listening for the approaching drone of enemy bombers, and thinking of death but dressing it in the raiment of lyric or metaphor: the gate in the garden wall, the putting out to sea, the mother of beauty, the fog in the throat, the ruffian on the stair, the man in the white coat, the sleep that rounds our little lives.
From The Watchers of the Night in Lanterns & Lances by James Thurber.
For ours is the age of the four “A”s:
Anxiety,
Apprehension,
Agonizing,
and Aspirin.
Change Aspirin to Advil and change mushroom-shaped ceiling to and waking around three in the morning to lie there gloomily staring at the ceiling fan and counting the blades as they go around and you got me, nearly 70 years after Thurber wrote these lines.
I agonize about my apprehension over my anxiety so I take an Advil.
Then though, reading this, I seem to be right on schedule.
