Always Have the Blues a Little

Haiku by Basho
Gravestone at Cedar Grove Cemetery
University of Notre Dame
It seems that no matter the century or decade, whether you're young or old, whether it's a "Melancholy Moon" or a "Melancholy Baby," from cradle to grave, in order to be a properly tormented human being . . .

"You've got to win a little, lose a little,
always have the blues a little. . . . "

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

A Chain of MELANCHOLY Connections
the following quotations & more on my current post

~~ Melancholy and / or Properly Tormented ~~

@ The Fortnightly Kitti Carriker:
A Fortnightly [every 14th & 28th] Literary Blog of
Connection & Coincidence; Custom & Ceremony

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

What, after all, is a writer's life without a dose of despair?
from Dear Committee Members (p 68)
by Julie Schumacher

“The world is a hellish place, and bad writing
is destroying the quality of our suffering.”
Tom Waits

“I drank to drown my sorrows,
but the damned things learned how to swim.”
Frida Kahlo

Put on your red shoes and dance the blues
David Bowie

Holly Golightly: You know those days
when you get the mean reds?
Paul: The mean reds. You mean like the blues?
Holly: No. The blues are because you're getting fat, and maybe it's been raining too long. You're just sad, that's all. The mean reds are horrible. Suddenly you're afraid, and you don't know what you're afraid of.
Do you ever get that feeling?

from the screenplay ~ Breakfast at Tiffany's
based on the novel by Truman Capote

After thirty, a man wakes up sad every morning,
excepting perhaps five or six, until the day of his death.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

I never wake without finding life a more
insignificant thing than it was the day before.
Jonathan Swift

"Life is only on Earth. And not for long."
from the psycho - science - fiction movie Melancholia

Portal to the Divine

"I want to touch water and wood,
other’s hands--everything alive,
so steeped in summer sunshine
and the glory of rebirth."

~ Sister Celine Carrigan, O.S.B. ~

From the Wilds of News Mexico ~ Photo by Joni Menard
My dear friend Joni (since junior high days) shared this perfect photograph and the following kind and inspiring comment in response to my recent tribute to my dear departed friend Celine (since grad school days):

"So when you posted this, Curt and I were on our way to the wilds of New Mexico. I carried Celine's poem, your thoughts, the story with me as we hiked around this beautiful place. I never knew her, but all of this was so strongly on my heart and in my head. I am so grateful Kit. All the gifts. Miss Bell [our favorite 8th grade English teacher; if only we could find her on facebook!], you, and your drawing me in to poetry as a portal to the Divine. You have lost too many dear dear friends to cancer. I look forward to meeting Celine. I really do. Thank you for this. I hiked like I wanted to live. Really live. Like this is the moment to really live.

"My hiking mantra was "I want to touch water and wood" it was so wonderful. It changed everything. I touched them and they touched me. Again so grateful."

A couple of facebook friends referred to this as
Joni's Sound of Music photo.
I was also thinking "Salutation to the Sun"
or maybe Ralph Waldo Emerson!
Let me also take this opportunity to say Happy Birthday to Joni [and her twin brother Terry] who each and every single day lives out the true meaning of worship and adore -- not to mention adorable! Thanks, dear Joni for locating the beauty in every hour and passing that knowledge on to the rest of us who might miss it otherwise. You are a blessing! Best Friends For Life!

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

To the read the posts referred to by Joni,
including the rest of Celine's poem,
please click on the following posts:

August 29th ~ All Roots and Reasons

September 14th ~ Ever the Best of Friends

Burning Bush

First Snow Flakes, 11 November 2013

"Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God . . . "

from the poem "Aurora Lee"
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"So the poet's habit of living should be set
on a key so low and plain,
that the common influences should delight . . . "

from the essay "The Poet"
Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

I also like the way that in this photograph
the entire heavens are afire with God!

Photo of Dickinson's House by Stan Lichens
In honor of Emily Dickinson's birthday:
Born this day in 1830
[died May 15, 1886]

I posted a few days early this week on
The Fortnightly Kitti Carriker
A fortnightly [every 14th & 28th]
literary blog of connection & coincidence; custom & ceremony

Hope you will enjoy my essay
"Hopefully"

Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny*

Pumpkins Grown by Gerry in our Garden!

" . . . every pumpkin in the field,
goes through every point of pumpkin history."

Ralph Waldo Emerson
from the essay
"Nominalist and Realist"

I like the way that this one has re-situated itself amongst the oregano!

*Theory of Recapitulation

Primrose Path

"If any of us knew what we were doing, or where we are going, then when we think we best know! We do not know today whether we are busy or idle. In times we thought ourselves indolent, we have afterward discovered that much was accomplished and much was begun in us. All our days are so unprofitable while they pass, that 'tis wonderful where or when we every got anything of this which we call wisdom, poetry, virtue. We never got it on any dated calendar day. . . . Our life looks trivial, and we shun to record it . . . So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the pith of our genius contracts itself to a very few hours. . . . The years teach much which the days never know. . . . We must be very suspicious of the deceptions of the element of time. It takes a good deal of time to eat or to sleep, or to earn a hundred dollars, and a very little time to entertain a hope and an insight which becomes the light of our life."

Ralph Waldo Emerson
American Essayist, 1803 - 1882
from the essay "Experience"

Similarly:
"The imagination doesn't crop annually like a reliable fruit tree.
The writer has to gather whatever's there: sometimes too much,
sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all (115)"

Julian Barnes
British Novelist (b. 1946)
from the novel Flaubert's Parrot
P.S.
Supermoon
Unfortunately, it was so cloudy
that we could see only
the bottom half of the moonrise.

Later that night ~ still hazy.

An Experienced Old House

"I want a house that has got over all its troubles;
I don't want to spend the rest of my life bringing
up a young and inexperienced house."
~~ Jerome K. Jerome ~~
English Humorist, 1859 - 1927

"Build a fine house; and now you have a master,
and a task for life: to furnish, watch, show it,
and keep it in repair the rest of your life."

~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson ~~
American Essayist, 1803 - 1882

A strip of old wall paper -- a hundred years old? --
that Gerry discovered at the top of our stair case.

Detail

Just one more thing to love about our house!

Another find: wallpaper behind wallpaper
in our second Philadelphia renovation, 2001
(still there behind the drywall)

One Hundred Years From Now

The Empyrean ~ Mists of Time
~ Columbia River Gorge ~
"So is there no fact, no event, in our private history, which shall not, sooner or later, lose its adhesive, inert form, and astonish us by soaring from our body into the empyrean. Cradle and infancy, school and playground, the fear of boys, and dogs, and ferules, the love of little maids and berries, and many another fact that once filled the whole sky, are gone already; friend and relative, profession and party, town and country, nation and world, must also soar and sing."
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)
from The American Scholar [See more.]:
An Oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge,
August 31, 1837

"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

Steve Jobs (1955 - 2011)
CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios
from A Commencement Address delivered at Stanford University,
June 12, 2005
Old and Wise
[Click Title to Hear]
by Alan Parsons (b 1948)

As far as my eyes can see
There are shadows approaching me
And to those I left behind
I wanted you to know
You've always shared my deepest thoughts
You follow where I go

And oh when I'm old and wise
Bitter words mean little to me
Autumn winds will blow right through me
And someday in the mist of time
When they asked me if I knew you
I'd smile and say you were a friend of mine
And the sadness would be lifted from my eyes
Oh when I'm old and wise

As far as my eyes can see
There are shadows surrounding me
And to those I leave behind
I want you all to know
You've always shared my darkest hours
I'll miss you when I go

And oh, when I'm old and wise
Heavy words that tossed and blew me
Like Autumn winds will blow right through me
And someday in the mist of time
When they ask you if you knew me
Remember that you were a friend of mine
As the final curtain falls before my eyes
Oh when I'm old and wise

As far as my eyes can see
Vista House
~ Columbia River Gorge ~

P.S.
As Marilynne Robinson says in Gilead:
"It is worth living long enough to outlast
whatever sense of grievance you may acquire.
Another reason why you must be careful of your health" (238).

&

As Walt Whitman says:
"Whoever denies me, it shall not trouble me;
Whoever accepts me, he or she shall be blessed,
and shall bless me."
See "Loos'd of Limits"

Ben's Birthday: The World is His

Ben's 12th Birthday ~ 10 Years Ago Today
"Let him [the American Scholar] not quit his belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom. In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself; add observation to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach, and bide his own time, -- happy enough if he can satisfy himself alone that this day he has seen something truly. . . . The world is his who can see through its pretension. Success treads on every right step.

"For the instinct is sure that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind he has descended into the secrets of all minds."

by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 82)
American Transcendentalist
from his essay "On the American Scholar" [See more.]
Our Birthday Song
Close your eyes, make a wish.
I hope your wish comes true.
A very happy birthday I wish for you.
When I was in primary school at Euguene Field Elementary, in Neosho, Missouri, our music teacher, Mrs. McNabb played this pretty little song on her autoharp whenever anyone had a birthday. It always made such a nice change from the usual "Happy Birthday to You."

I have never heard it sung or played anywhere else since then and have never been able to identify composer or lyricist; but, even so, the simple tune has never left my memory. When Ben & Sam came along, I sang it regularly as their bedtime song, replacing "birthday" with whatever occasion was appropriate: "a very Happy Monday," "a very Happy St. Patrick's Day," "a very happy going to the swimming pool day" -- that kind of thing. We still do it every now and then for old time's sake.

Excellent Images

Haiku [if you ask me!]
‎"Things more excellent than every image,"
says Iamblichus,
"are expressed through images."

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 82)
American Transcendentalist
from his essay "The Poet"

This passage from Emerson sprang immediately to mind when I first viewed a series of paintings by my friend and mentor Leonard Orr (in fact, the line from Emerson is something I learned in one of his classes years ago). I am rarely one to suffer writer's block; in my case it's usually the opposite, same as when I'm talking: how can we get her to stop!

However, when I feel the need for some creative focus, I like to make a little game of scrolling through Len's artwork and assigning one - word descriptions to each picture that catches my eye. As I look at each successive creation, my mind races to figure out what it might mean, what it makes me think of. Other viewers have responded to the various paintings by commenting in the form of brief pleasing poems: Click here to see and read.

Last month on facebook, Len mentioned his summer task of reorganizing his paintings: "In preparation for my daughter's visit, I restacked all of the paintings in my apartment to make them take the least amount of floor space (the walls are already covered with paintings). It occurred to me I should start painting over some of these before I use new canvases or else I will have to become a hunger artist, barely able to fit through my rooms and halls."

"Pentimento!" I replied. And Len responded, "Exactly! I have always been drawn to the palimpsest, the liminal, and multilayered."

Inspired by this intriguing list of words, I decided to look through Len's paintings in search of just the right one to illustrate each concept. You may choose differently, but here are my choices:

liminal (from the Latin limen, meaning threshold; relating to a sensory threshold, barely perceptible, an intermediate state, phase, or condition):

multilayered (self - explanatory!):
pentimento (from the Italian pentirsi, meaning to repent; traces of previous work in a painting, indicating an artist's change of plan during the creation process):

palimpsest (from the Greek meaning scraped clean; a page from which the text has been scraped off and written over). This one was easy, as I have already described a couple of Len's painting as such, when I was writing last autumn about the beauty and mystery of ginkgo tree:
Additional paintings by Leonard Orr,
seen previously on this blog:

Golden Paintings by Leonard Orr

End of Summer Sounds

Dream For Your Life

Deer in Our Backyard
Photo taken by Ben McCartney, June 2007
"A gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. So our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts. We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing our duty. We loiter in winter while it is already spring."

~Henry David Thoreau


"Be not the slave of your own past -- plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with self-respect, with new power, with an advanced experience, that shall explain and overlook the old."

~Ralph Waldo Emerson


"We should not look back unless it is to derive useful lessons from past errors, and for the purpose of profiting by dearly bought experience."

~George Washington


"You did then what you knew how to do,
and when you knew better, you did better."

~Maya Angelou


"Is willing to accept that she creates her own reality except for some of the parts where she can't help but wonder what the hell she was thinking."

~Brian Andreas


And finally this, from one of my wisest friends, who pulled all the above passages together for me:

"Yes, looking back can be a trap, for me anyway. I like the Serenity Prayer--because "accept the things I cannot change" includes the entire past, through and including five minutes ago. That doesn't leave me off the hook for "changing the things I can." But it saves wear and tear on my nerves and heart to forgive myself for all my decisions, and to remember that given the emotional and other data I had at the time, I made what seemed like the best decision I could, at the consciousness level I had achieved to that point. That's what it is to be human--no crystal ball.

"Having said that, I think it is the ongoing challenge to listen to the "still small voice." That is my spirituality. I don't equate the voice with God. It's more like my own unique and local feeling of happiness and aliveness, in any scenario where I am one of the key players. What will I wish I had done, when the immediate pressures bearing on the situation are no longer there? Is it too much to ask, to be allowed to be true to myself? Something like that."

And to conclude ~
A couple of my favorite songs
sung by Judy Collins
on her CD Trust Your Heart

"Trust Your Heart"
The heart will teach us all we need to learn
We have dreams, we hold them to the light like diamonds . . .
Some we keep to light the dark nights on our journey . . .
The heart can see beyond our prayers
Beyond our fondest schemes . . . Trust your heart.
[emphasis added]


"The Life You Dream"
There's a time that comes once every morning
When you choose the kind of day you will have
It comes in with the sun and you know you've begun
To live the life you dream
You can light all your candles to the dawn
And surrender yourself to the sunrise
You can make it wrong you can make it right
You can live the life you dream.

Lyrics & music for both by Judy Collins
[also on Kitti's List: book blog on "Inner Quiet"]

The picture at top is better, but this one, with the corner of the garage included, gives a better idea of the proximity. Ben took a few at first through the window, so the deer wouldn't be startled. But those shots turned out so hazy, and the deer continued to remain so calm that Ben took the chance of going right outside. As you can see, the deer were only too happy to pose quietly for him!

A Screen of Purest Sky

"People forget that it is the eye which makes the horizon."

You will not remember . . . (Formby Beach, Merseyside, England)
Life is a series of surprises, and would not be worth taking or keeping, if it were not. God delights to isolate us every day, and hide from us the past and the future. We would look about us, but with grand politeness God draws down an impenetrable screen of purest sky, and another behind us of purest sky. "You will not remember," God seems to say, "and you will not expect."

from the essay "Experience"
by Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882)
American Transcendentalist, essayist, philosopher and poet

You will not expect . . .(Tulum, On The Mayan Riviera)

FOR MORE ON RALPH WALDO EMERSON
READ THE LATEST POST ON MY FORTNIGHTLY BLOG:

"Through a Glass Brightly"

THE FORTNIGHTLY KITTI CARRIKER
(A fortnightly [every 14th & 28th] literary blog of
connection & coincidence; custom & ceremony)

Through A Glass Brightly

"A very very very fine house . . .


Such a cozy room,


the windows are illuminated


by the evening sunshine through them,


fiery gems for you . . ."


~ Graham Nash

In a section sadly omitted from the final version of his novel, Gustave Flaubert pictures Madame Bovary standing before the colored windows at Vaubyessard. She looks out at the countryside through variously colored window panes in a passage strangely reminiscent of Emerson's colored beads and lenses. Moving as from dream to dream, Emma Bovary looks at the illusion offered by each pane.

Through the blue pane, all seems sad; through the yellow pane everything grows smaller, lighter, and warmer; through the green pane everything she sees appears leaden and frozen. She remains longest in front of the red glass, looking at a landscape that frightens her, until she averts her eyes to the ordinary daylight of a transparent pane.

FOR MORE ABOUT
MADAME BOVARY AND RALPH WALDO EMERSON
READ TODAY'S NEW POST
ON
THE FORTNIGHTLY KITTI CARRIKER: A LITERARY BLOG
OF CONNECTION & COINCIDENCE; CUSTOM & CEREMONY
www.kitticarriker.blogspot.com

Stained Glass Design in Fireman's Hall Museum, Philadelphia

[Above: Custom - made front door, Society Hill, Philadelpha]