3.7.2023 – sometimes a crumb falls

sometimes a crumb falls
from the tables of joy some
times a bone is flung

Pretty cheeky of me but this is adapted from the poem, Luck, by Langston Hughes, word for word.

Sometimes a crumb falls

From the tables of joy

Sometimes a bone

Is flung

To some people

Love is given

To others

Only heaven.

Angst?

Despair?

Some times for some people things fall, are flung, are given or found.

How can so much be packed into so few words?

I wonder what others might have made of this.

I also wanted a further attribution so I put the phrase, Sometimes a crumb falls in the google and was rewarded with a story that appeared in the New York Times on March 2, 1994.

In the article by Joe Sexton, Mr. Sexton reports on the New York City Transit authority was using ad space in the New York Subway system to display poetry in a program called Poetry in Motion.

On that day, March 2nd, in 1994, this poem was on display and Mr. Sexton rode along on the subway to ask commuters if they had noticed the poem, if they would read it, and want they thought it meant.

It is a fascinating read and a fabulous snapshot of a moment in the lives of several people who I am sure never once thought they might be talking to a reporter about Langston Hughes on the New York Subway.

For me, the poem might have its roots in the Bible story in Matthew 15:

The woman came and knelt before him. “Lord, help me!” she said.

He [Jesus] replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.”

“Yes it is, Lord,” she said. “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”

Then Jesus said to her, “Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.”

I could go one with this thought of crumbs that fall, a bone that is flung, love found on earth or in Heaven but I won’t.

That thought of Biblical roots does not show up in the thoughts listed by the reporter as he interviewed commuters.

“I can’t express it, but I get it,” Ms. McNeil says of the poem.

“A crumb? A bone?” she [another commuter] asked. “What’s it got to do with heaven?”

“… To me, the poem means that you are lucky if you even find just some happiness.”

The story was headlined, Langston Hughes On the IRT; A Poem Arouses Many Feelings.

Whatever the feelings, I have to feel that Mr. Hughes would have been happy to learn that his poem, posted in the subway, where people might have a few seconds to ponder its message, had many feelings.

One more thing.

Those tables of joy.

Simple phrase you can consider in your mind and find it is 20 minutes later in your day.

2.26.2023 – interpretation

interpretation
of reality like others
all is subjective

This shading of different realities is only the start.

It gets more fascinating – and much weirder. It’s one thing to allow that there might be an alternative perspective on colour, but quite another to accept that colour doesn’t actually exist outside our brains.

Not only is there no colour, but there’s also no sound or taste or smell.

What we perceive as red, for example, is just radiating energy with a wavelength of around 650 nanometres.

There’s nothing intrinsically red about it; the redness is in our heads.

What we think of as sound is just pressure waves, while taste and smell are no more than different conformations of molecules.

Although our sense organs do a splendid job of detecting each of these, it’s the brain that construes them, converting them into a framework for us to understand that world.

Valuable though this framework is, it’s an interpretation of reality and, like all interpretations, it’s subjective.

From It takes all 53 of our senses to bring the drab external world to life by Ashley Ward in the Guardian on Feb. 26.

Ms. Ward writes:

Underlying all of this is the brain’s frantic efforts to build its internal model, even though the sensory information it needs to construct that model has been cut off.

The results are odd, though to some they can feel disturbingly real.

But what is reality, and, more generally, what does it mean to be alive?

I repeat, what is reality, and, more generally, what does it mean to be alive?

I am reminded of Mr. Sandburg and his poem happiness.

I asked the professors who teach the meaning of life to tell
me what is happiness.
And I went to famous executives who boss the work of
thousands of men.
They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though
I was trying to fool with them
And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along
the Desplaines river
And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with
their women and children and a keg of beer and an
accordion.

To paraphrase Big Bill, Methinks we think too much.

2.19.2023 – morning sky goes blue

morning sky goes blue
sunset sky goes bronze time is
a storyteller

Adapted from The Fireborn are at Home in Fire by Carl Sandburg

Luck is a star.
Money is a plaything.
Time is a storyteller.
The sky goes high, big.
The sky goes wide and blue.
And the fireborn — they go far —
being at home in fire.

Can you compose yourself
The same as a bright bandana,
A bandana folded blue and cool,
Whatever the high howling,
The accents of blam blam?
Can I, can John Smith, John Doe,
Whatever the awful accents,
Whatever the horst wessel hiss,
Whatever books be burnt and crisp,
Whatever hangmen bring their hemp,
Whatever horsemen sweep the sunsets,
Whatever hidden hovering candle
Sways as a wafer of light?

Can you compose yourself
The same as a bright bandana,
A bandana folded blue and cool?
Can I, too, drop deep down
In a pool of cool remembers,
In a float of fine smoke blue,
In a keeping of one pale moon,
Weaving our wrath in a pattern
Woven of wrath gone down,
Crossing our scarlet zigzags
With pools of cool blue,
With floats of smoke blue?

Can you, can I, compose ourselves
In wraps of personal cool blue,
In sheets of personal smoke blue?
Bach did it, Johann Sebastian.
So did the one and only John Milton.
And the old slave Epictetus
And the other slave Spartacus
And Brother Francis of Assisi.
So did General George Washington
On a horse, in a saddle,
On a boat, in heavy snow,
In a loose cape overcoat
And snow on his shoulders.
So did John Adams, Jackson, Jefferson.
So did Lincoln on a cavalry horse
At the Chancellorsville review
With platoons right, platoons left,
In a wind nearly blowing the words away
Asking the next man on a horse:
“What’s going to become of all these
boys when the war is over?”

The shape of your shadow
Comes from you — and you only?
Your personal fixed decision
Out of you — and your mouth only?
Your No, your Yes, your own?

Bronze old timers belong here.
Yes, they might be saying:
Shade the flame
Back to final points
Of all sun and fog
In the moving frame
Of your personal eyes.
Then stand to the points.
Let hunger and hell come.
Or ashes and shame poured
On your personal head.
Let death shake its bones.
The teaching goes back far:
Compose yourself.

Luck is a star.
Money is a plaything.
Time is a storyteller.
And the sky goes blue with mornings.
And the sky goes bronze with sunsets.
And the fireborn — they go far —
being at home in fire.

1.15.2023 – how did dare expect

how did dare expect
so much of life and how could
act so stupidly

I was in the library the other day and as I do in libraries, I walked down the H aisle of fiction to see how many Jim Harrison books were on the shelf.

I was pleased to see 8.

I looked them over and the book titled, “The Summer He Didn’t Die“, caught my eye.

I knew it was on the shelf at home among the remaining titles in my hard cover library and I also knew I hadn’t opened it in years.

To sidestep into the discussion of EBooks, EReaders and printed books, I am 100% in agreement with those who say there is something to the printed page and holding a book in your lap.

But I also say, move several times and your thoughts on a personal multi volume library will change.

I still say I love print, but am very THANKFUL for electronic versions of any and all books.

But I digress.

When I got home, I took The Summer He Didn’t Die off the shelf and sat in my rocking chair and opened it.

There are, as usual with Mr. Harrison, three long short stories in the book.

The first one was the title short story, The Summer He Didn’t Die, and it is part of the Brown Dog oeuvre.

If you never read anything else going forward, I ask you to find a copy of Brown Dog (what you don’t a free archive.org account?) which has all 6 of the Brown Dog stories anthologized in one volume, and enjoy the trip to world you never considered.

It’s the same world we live in, but it’s not the same world we live in at the same.

You won’t be in Kansas anymore.

The 2nd long short story is titled, “Republican Wives.”

I am sure I read the story when I got the book but I did not have any memory of it.

This was fabulous.

It was new ground or, at least, forgotten old ground, one of the few benefits of getting older.

Reading the long short story, on the 2nd page I hit this line:

How did I dare expect so much of life. And by contrast, how could I have acted so stupidly?

And I stopped reading.

30 minutes later I was still looking at that page.

In the book, The Caine Mutiny, Herman Wouk wrote about the hero, young Willie Keith, after a near death experience, sat back with a cigar and thought.

Wouk writes:

With the smoke of the dead sailor’s cigar wreathing around him, Willie passed to thinking about death and life and luck and God.

Philosophers are at home with such thoughts, perhaps, but for other people it is actual torture when these concepts – not the words, the realities – break through the crust of daily occurrences and grip the soul.

A half hour of such racking meditation can change the ways of a lifetime …

How did I dare expect so much of life.

And by contrast, how could I have acted so stupidly?

More than saying, But for the Grace of God, go I.

Thank God, and I mean THANK GOD, for grace.

But daring to expect so much of life?

Deep in my soul I think of Prospero in the Tempest.

We are such stuff, as dreams are made on.

Dreams?

Expectations?

Dare to dream.

Dare to expect much.

But, don’t act so stupidly, can’tcha?

Gee Whiz.

1.9.2023 – instagrammable

instagrammable
moments lacking are listed
don’t we need to pee?

Ginia Bellafante, writing in the New York Times (Must We Gentrify the Rest Stop?) about the changes at rest stops on the New York State Thruway stated:

Five years ago, the New York State Thruway Authority conducted a survey of more than 2,600 drivers to take measure of the customer experience at the service areas lining the 570 miles of road that make up one of the largest toll highways in the country, stretching from the edge of the Bronx up past Buffalo. Whether participants were traveling for work or for pleasure, they had needs that apparently were going unfulfilled.

The resulting report listed as chief takeaways that leisure travelers complained about unappealing interiors and the lack of “Instagrammable moments.”

Instagrammable moments?

Instagrammable moments!

When I was studying history back in college, I was taught over and over, in lectures, in statements, in LOUD RED LETTERS WRITTEN on term papers, to AVOID A SENSE OF PRESENT MINDEDNESS.

What was an instagrammable moment 10 years ago?

What will be an instagrammable moment be ten years from now.

Since the beginning of time people traveling from point A to point B have hoped for a clean, well lighted place to answer a call to nature.

And if it wasn’t too much trouble, maybe a decent cup of coffee and a bun or a biscuit or a doughnut maybe.

Why do these two things do not figure in as the chief takeaway on a survey of customer experience of service areas?

As Ms. Bellafante writes: In a society so casually stratified that major airlines now offer five classes of service and airport security lines can be bypassed for an annual fee, rest stops remain one of the few spaces in modern life that can be generally counted on to level us.

As my Dad would have put it, “Everybody has to pee.”

That won’t change but if it comes it to that, spare me anything instagrammable that captures that moment.