Softly, softly ~ Lightly, lightly

Willa Cather & Aldous Huxley
for All Souls Day

In those days, even in European countries, death had a solemn social importance. It was not regarded as a moment when certain bodily organs ceased to function, but as a dramatic climax, a moment when the soul made its entrance into the next world, passing in full consciousness through a lowly door to an unimaginable scene. . . . Something soft and wild and free, something that whispered to the ear on the pillow, lightened the heart, softly, softly picked the lock, slid the bolts, and released the prisoned spirit of man into the wind, into the blue and gold, into the morning, into the morning!

from Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)
by Willa Cather (1873 - 1947)
Book V, chap 2, pp 169-70; Book IX, chap 3, p 273

It’s dark because you are trying too hard.
Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly.
Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply.
Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig.
Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me.
When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic.
No rhetoric, no tremolos,
no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell.
And of course, no theology, no metaphysics.
Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light.

So throw away your baggage and go forward.
There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet,
trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair.
That’s why you must walk so lightly.
Lightly my darling,
on tiptoes and no luggage,
not even a sponge bag,
completely unencumbered.

by Aldous Huxley (1894 – 1963)
from his final novel Island (1962)

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More Cather & Huxley

My Dust Will Find a Voice

Sara Teasdale for All Saints Day

The Answer

When I go back to earth
And all my joyous body
Puts off the red and white
That once had been so proud,
If men should pass above
With false and feeble pity,
My dust will find a voice
To answer them aloud:

“Be still, I am content,
Take back your poor compassion—
Joy was a flame in me
Too steady to destroy.
Lithe as a bending reed
Loving the storm that sways her—
I found more joy in sorrow
Than you could find in joy.”

I Could Snatch a Day

I could snatch a day out of the late autumn
And set it trembling like forgotten springs.
There would be sharp blue skies and new leaves shining,
And flying shadows cast by flying wings.

I could take the heavy wheel of the world and break it --
But we sit brooding while the ashes fall,
Cowering over an old fire that blackens,
Waiting for nothing at all.

Both poems by Sara Teasdale (1884 - 1933)

Neewollah

Lots of places have Halloween,
but Independence, Kansas,
has Neewollah --
the largest annual celebration in Kansas!

Theme in Yellow

I spot the hills
With yellow balls in autumn.
I light the prairie cornfields
Orange and tawny gold clusters
And I am called pumpkins.
On the last of October
When dusk is fallen
Children join hands
And circle round me
Singing ghost songs
And love to the harvest moon;
I am a jack-o'-lantern
With terrible teeth
And the children know
I am fooling.

By Carl Sandburg (1878 – 1967)

And many more Halloween Poems

P.S.
I just love this essay for Halloween!
A Blessed Samhaim to All

Fall Fortnightlies

"Beauty in the Macabre"
Thanks to my friend Steven for sharing this winsome cartoon.

Also: The Danse Macabre ~ QK ~ A Fun Example

Images of the macabre combined with
autumnal poems by Ted Hughes

@The Fortnightly Kitti Carriker
A literary blog of connection & coincidence;
custom & ceremony

Another Tree, Another Stone

Standing on my patio,
looking above, looking below:

Within This Tree

Within this tree
another tree
inhabits the same body:
within this stone
another stone rests,
its many shades of grey
the same,
its identical
surface and weight.
And within my body,
another body,
whose history, waiting,
sings: there is no other body,
it sings,
there is no other world.

By Jane Hirshfield (born 1953)
American poet and translator
From her beautiful book The October Palace

Within Within Within

Optimistic Verion

"You can think of the universe as a set of wooden Russian matryoshka dolls, with each doll having a smaller one inside of it. The entire visible universe is the outermost doll, and nested inside it are galaxies, solar systems, stars, planets -- right down to the smallest doll, which is you. But inside of you is an even smaller doll that somehow has the biggest doll inside of it. When you figure out this riddle, you will have discovered the key to your ascension!"

from Reincarnation: The Missing Link In Christianity
by Elizabeth Clare Prophet (1939 - 2009)

Pessimistic Version

“You just, like, hate yourself? You hate being yourself?"

"There's no self to hate. It's like, when I look into myself, there's no actual me — just a bunch of thoughts and behaviors and circumstances. And a lot of them just don't feel like they're mine. They're not things I want to think or do or whatever. And when I do look for the, like, Real Me, I never find it. It's like those nesting dolls, you know? The ones that are hollow, and then when you open them up, there's a smaller doll inside, and you keep opening hollow dolls until eventually you get to the smallest one, and it's solid all the way through. But with me, I don't think there is one that is solid. They just keep getting smaller.”

from Turtles All the Way Down
by John Green (b 1977)

Halloween Houses

Haunted Houses

All houses wherein men have lived and died
Are haunted houses. Through the open doors
The harmless phantoms on their errands glide,
With feet that make no sound upon the floors.

We meet them at the door-way, on the stair,
Along the passages they come and go,
Impalpable impressions on the air,
A sense of something moving to and fro.

There are more guests at table than the hosts
Invited; the illuminated hall
Is thronged with quiet, inoffensive ghosts,
As silent as the pictures on the wall.

The stranger at my fireside cannot see
The forms I see, nor hear the sounds I hear;
He but perceives what is; while unto me
All that has been is visible and clear.

We have no title-deeds to house or lands;
Owners and occupants of earlier dates
From graves forgotten stretch their dusty hands,
And hold in mortmain still their old estates.

The spirit-world around this world of sense
Floats like an atmosphere, and everywhere
Wafts through these earthly mists and vapours dense
A vital breath of more ethereal air.

Our little lives are kept in equipoise
By opposite attractions and desires;
The struggle of the instinct that enjoys,
And the more noble instinct that aspires.

These perturbations, this perpetual jar
Of earthly wants and aspirations high,
Come from the influence of an unseen star
An undiscovered planet in our sky.

And as the moon from some dark gate of cloud
Throws o’er the sea a floating bridge of light,
Across whose trembling planks our fancies crowd
Into the realm of mystery and night,—

So from the world of spirits there descends
A bridge of light, connecting it with this,
O’er whose unsteady floor, that sways and bends,
Wander our thoughts above the dark abyss.

By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 – 1882)

Thanks to my friend Aimee Adelle for this one!

***********

And to the Lafayette Tour of Terror
for the following three . . .

As Mysterious as a Cat

A Little Bit of Pre- Halloween Magic

"Straight on Till Morning"
by Maggie Vandewall

Thanks to my nephew Aaron
for sharing these cats!

“I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat .”
Edgar Allan Poe

BFFs ~ The Owl & the Pussycat

So Like Still Water

In Ireland, even the bottled water is literary!

“We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.”

― William Butler Yeats
The Celtic Twilight: Faerie and Folklore

The Old Men Admiring Themselves In The Water

I heard the old, old men say,
"Everything alters,
And one by one we drop away."
They had hands like claws, and their knees
Were twisted like the old thorn-trees
By the waters.
I heard the old, old men say,
"All that's beautiful drifts away
Like the waters."

― William Butler (1865 - 1939)

P.S.
Lots More Yeats
"accustomed, ceremonious" ~ "take down this book"

R.I.P ~ E.A.P.

Rest in Peace ~ Edgar Allan Poe
January 19, 1809 - October 7, 1849

"Three Little Poe - ettes"
Thanks to Antoinette & Igor for the Poe - themed Whimsy!

Favorite Poe Quotes

“All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of
fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.”

“If you wish to forget anything on the spot,
make a note that this thing is to be remembered.”

“I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.”

*****************

Compare this line from Poe . . .

“Every poem should remind the reader
that they are going to die.”

with this one from Thomas Pynchon . . .

"When we speak of 'seriousness' in fiction, ultimately we are talking about an attitude toward death -- how characters may act in its presence, for example, or how they handle it when it isn't so immediate. Everybody know this, but the subject is hardly ever brought up with younger writers, possibly because given to anyone at the apprentice age, such advice is widely felt to be effort wasted." (p 146)

quoted by David Shields
in his amazing book:
The Thing About Life is That One Day You'll Be Dead

*****************

Compare this line from Poe . . .

“A short story must have a single mood
and every sentence must build towards it.”

with this anecdote from Annie Dillard . . .

Dillard tells the story of a fellow
writer who was asked by a student:
"Do you think I could be a writer?"

"Well," the writer said, "do you like sentences?"

~ The Writing Life (1989)

*****************

Of course, Poe is just right when it comes to
black cats, and ravens, and Halloween . . .
but also Christmas and Valentine's Day!

Dear E. A. P.,
We wish your days had been longer upon this earth.

Picture Perfect Leaves

Trapeze

It leans on me, this changing season,
breathless as these old photographs

under the lamp. White smiles will
smile forever; the tossed ball is fixed in

space and will not move, nor will
divers, diving, ever touch water.

Even the leaves outside my window
do not move. Gilded now, they pose:

picture perfect leaves posing for me---
or for whoever, looking up, tomorrow,

might happen to see their trapeze act:
the wave to the crowd, a flutter and

spins in rising air for the letting go;
then the vertiginous game with sudden

wind, yellow skirts lifted in spiraling
exuberance before the plummet.

By Dorothea Tanning (1910 – 2012)
American poet and artist
Found in her book Coming to That

Quoted also on my recent post:
Grandmothers in the Stars

*****************

Special Effects by Instatoon

Previous ~ Sidewalk Leaves

Autumn, Without Diminishment

Good Shepherd Card from
Mother Nancy C. Tiederman

Autumn

Again the wind
flakes gold-leaf from the trees
and the painting darkens—
as if a thousand penitents
kissed an icon
till it thinned
back to bare wood,
without diminishment.

By Jane Hirshfield (born 1953)
American poet and translator
From her beautiful book The October Palace

More Hirshfield on my recent Fortnightly post:
Grandmothers in the Stars
Also perfect for the Autumnal Equinox or Leap Day!

Researching the Ancestors

Pioneers of the West, 1934
Helen Lundeberg, 1908 – 1999

********************

Beautiful surroundings . . . those light-hearted mornings of the desert, for that wind that made one a boy again. He had noticed that this peculiar quality in the air of new countries vanished after they were tamed by man and made to bear harvests. Parts of Texas and Kansas that he had first known as open range had since been made into rich farming districts, and the air had quite lost that lightness, that dry aromatic odour. . . . one could breathe that only on the bright edges of the world, on the great grass plains or the sage-brush desert."

from Death Comes for the Archbishop
Book IX, Ch. 3, pp 272-73
by Willa Cather

Recent Fortnightlies:

July 28 ~ Missing, Presumed Dead

August 14 ~ Missing Ancestors

August 28 ~ Your Mother, Her Grandfather

September 14 ~ Grandmothers in the Stars

September 28 ~ Birkinbines

In My Bookbag

Catching up after
summer break . . .

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The family, that dear octopus
from whose tentacles we never quite escape,
nor in our innermost hearts, ever quite wish to.
~ Dodie Smith ~
From her play Dear Octopus

Also lovely: her novel / movie: I Capture the Castle

Above:
New Octopus Bookbag
Thanks Beata!

Below:
Recent Book Blogs:

July ~ With Liberty and Justice for All

August ~ Land Value Tax

September ~ Naomi Shihab Nye

Facebook Photo

Chicago Haiku

Sam was telling me about going for a walk in Chicago,
and I turned his comments into a haiku:

The color palette
of Chicago: blue, silver.
Shades of the city.

***************

Scenes from the DNC 2024
Thanks ~ Peggy Morris!

A Black Cat for All Seasons

Calling all Black Cats: Register to Vote!

Back in May, I realized it was time to take down the Easter / Spring wreaths but didn’t really have anything summery or any little flags for Memorial Day, So — instead of holding out for Halloween — I jumped straight to my new black cat. After all, it’s ALWAYS Black Cat Season around here, right?

By adding a red, white, and blue bow, we were all set for Memorial Day, the 4th of July, Bastille Day and Labor Day!

Now it's time to change back to orange for Fall!

Outside looking in . . . Inside looking out

The Real Black Cats: Interior Decor!