Jeopardy: No One Got It!

~ Christmas Gift Idea! ~

A funny sequence of events last night:

At 8pm:

I saw this facebook post on a friend's page:
"VILLANOVA! No one got it"
I meant to ask Gerry if it was perhaps a reference to a basketball game but forgot to do so. I don't know why my thoughts turned to basketball, but that's what came to mind.

At 9pm:
We watched Jeopardy! and could not guess this final clue on the topic of "Higher Education":

"Merrimack College is one of 2 Augustinian
institutions of higher learning in the U.S.;
in the news in 2025, this is the other."
We realized right away that they were asking where the new Pope went to college. Unfortunately, however, we did not know the answer, did not know anything about Merrimack College, and did not know that Villanova was Augustinian. Our bad.

To guess correctly, which we did not, you would need to know that

"Merrimack in Massachusetts and Villanova University in Pennsylvania are the only 2 Catholic Augustinian colleges in the USA. That’s just a fact you may know, and you may also know that Villanova was in the news in 2025 as the alma mater of Pope Leo XIV." [Reliable recaps: fikkle & fan]

At 10pm:
We decided to watch one of our seasonal favorites, Bill Murray's Scrooged.

Early in the movie, Bill / Frank announces to his coworkers that their new made - for - tv version of Dickens' Christmas Carol will "Scare the Dickens out of people." But, alas no one laughs at his joke, and he exclaims in annoyance: "No one gets me!"
At that moment the meaning of the facebook post
finally dawned on me; it was about Jeopardy!

"VILLANOVA! No one got it"!
Now why didn't it occur to me while watching Final Jeopardy! that even though I did not know the answer, I actually had the answer, as it had been given to me! As fate would have it, my friend's facebook post was such a subtly good hint — without being a spoiler -- that I didn’t get it until after the fact!

I wonder how often it happens -- with larger concerns than Facebook posts and Jeopardy! clues -- that we have been given   the answer on Monday that we are going to need on Wednesday.  The Universe has provided the information we need, but because we are human, we fail to realize.

Remember what Rilke says:

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."

from Letter Four: 16 July 1903
by Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926)

I also like this alternate translation from Stephen Mitchell:

"Perhaps then, someday far in the future,
you will gradually, without even noticing it,
live your way into the answer."

Gotta love Jeopardy!
Villanova
Moments of Truth
Running list of boo-boos
Purdue
Shakespeare
Olden days
Insomnia

Get Out of Town

Thanks to Jim Barnes ~ poet, teacher & friend
for helping me track down
this long-lost poem
by National Treasure
David Russell Wagoner
(June 5, 1926 - December 18, 2021)

Advice from a poet:
"Get out of town."

Wagoner graduated from highschool in 1944. "Valedictory to Standard Oil" was written 22 years later (published in 1966), and "Letter to An Old Poet" an additional 47 years later (2013). In the early poem, he thinks of those long-ago classmates, and in the later one he recalls a helpful English teacher and a grammar lesson from those schooldays in Whiting, Indiana. Thanks to Miss Clippinger, he realizes that his life task without ceasing is to consider every possibility and maximize his options:

Letter To An Old Poet

~Inspired by Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet

Do you still believe, old man, you are a poet?
If so, what you must do is so obvious,
you shouldn’t need reminding. You should keep trying
to do whatever you haven’t done or start
doing again what you didn’t manage to do
right in the first place. You should stay alive
as often as possible and keep yourself open
to anything out of place and everything
with nowhere else to go, to carry what’s left
of your voice out and beyond, into, over,
and under, past, within, outside, between,
among, across, along, and up and around
and to be beside yourself when the spirit moves you
and to thank Miss Clippinger for your prepositions.

David Wagoner (1926 - 2021)

Click here to read
more by David Wagoner

You See Yourself, Tiny

Black Cat

A ghost, though invisible, still is like a place
your sight can knock on, echoing; but here
within this thick black pelt, your strongest gaze
will be absorbed and utterly disappear:

just as a raving madman, when nothing else
can ease him, charges into his dark night
howling, pounds on the padded wall, and feels
the rage being taken in and pacified.

She seems to hide all looks that have ever fallen
into her, so that, like an audience,
she can look them over, menacing and sullen,
and curl to sleep with them. But all at once

as if awakened, she turns her face to yours;
and with a shock, you see yourself, tiny,
inside the golden amber of her eyeballs
suspended, like a prehistoric fly.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926)

My fb friend Tawny designed this one,
using the Tap Color app

Happy Halloween!

&

"Harvest Home"
my recent post

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

Red Tank Top

Ellie's 1st Birthday ~ August 16, 2021

Child in Red

Sometimes she walks through the village in her
little red dress
all absorbed in restraining herself,
and yet, despite herself, she seems to move
according to the rhythm of her life to come.

She runs a bit, hesitates, stops,
half-turns around
and, all while dreaming, shakes her head
for or against.

Then she dances a few steps
that she invents and forgets,
no doubt finding out that life
moves on too fast.

It's not so much that she steps out
of the small body enclosing her,
but that all she carries in herself
frolics and ferments.

It's this dress that she'll remember
later in a sweet surrender;
when her whole life is full of risks,
the little red dress will always seem right.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926)

Looking back over the photos
from last summer, it seems that the
best way to have a really happy day
is to wear a red tank top!

My Cousin Brent's 70s Birthday Party ~ July 2021

Mini - Reunion
With my Cousin Cindy & my Twin Brother Bruce

Slowly the West Reaches

Cold January Sunset

Sunset

Slowly the west reaches for clothes of new colors
which it passes to a row of ancient trees.
You look, and soon these two worlds both leave you
one part climbs toward heaven, one sinks to earth,

leaving you, not really belonging to either,
not so hopelessly dark as that house that is silent,
not so unswervingly given to the eternal as that thing
that turns to a star each night and climbs--

leaving you (it is impossible to untangle the threads)
your own life, timid and standing high and growing,
so that, sometimes blocked in, sometimes reaching out,
one moment your life is a stone in you, and the next, a star.

Another post & another poem
in honor of my mother's 91st birthday
January 21, 1931 ~ June 15, 2020

Again, Again!

Again, again, even if we know the country side of love,
and the tiny churchyard with it's names mourning,
and the chasm, more and more silent, terrifying, into which
the others

dropped: we walk out together anyway
beneath the ancient trees, we lie down again,
again among the flowers [or the snow!], and face the sky.

Both poems by Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926)
Translated by Robert Bly (1926 – 2021)

See also:
"Staying Alive" ~ FN & QK
"Fenceposts" ~ FN & QK

P.S.
Summer 2022

Not So Sure

My brother's New Year Joke:
"After 2020 and 2021,
I'm not so sure a New Year is such a good idea.
Couldn't we just get a Certified Pre-Owned Year from the 90's?"

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

I was reminded of how this beautiful sentiment
used to be my favorite quote for New Year's Day:

"And now let us welcome the new year,
full of things that have never been." --Rilke

But now -- after 2020 & 2021 --
it sounds like a threat. So, no thanks!

Falling From Far Up

Autumn
translation by Robert Bly

The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,
as if orchards were dying high in space.
Each leaf falls as if it were motioning "no."

And tonight the heavy earth is falling
away from all other stars in the loneliness.

We're all falling. . . .

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926)

On our walk today, Ellie and I encountered a sea of yellow - green leaves surrounding the majestic ginkgo that we always admire along our route. Sure we've seen it happen -- all the ginkgo leaves falling in one night, or one day, or one hour, in one consent. But aren't they usually bright gold when that happens? Not still half green, as these are:

Then we went a little further down the block and saw a curb covered with wholly green leaves. Summer one day, winter the next. Falling leaves, but no fall, and only the tiniest tinge of yellow - gold. This particular ginkgo is young and small, so you can count what's left. Not many!

Previously ~ The Gingko Light

Readings for a Soulful Day

"Our effort, I suggest, can be dedicated to this: to assume the unity of Life and Death and let it be progressively demonstrated to us. So long as we stand in opposition to Death we will disfigure it. Believe me, my dear Countess, Death is our Friend, our closest friend, perhaps the only friend who can never be misled by our ploys and vacillations. And I do not mean that in the sentimental, romantic sense of distrusting or renouncing life. Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love. . . . Life always says Yes and No simultaneously. Death (I implore you to believe) is the true Yea-sayer. It stands before eternity and says only: Yes."

from Rainer Maria Rilke's (1875 - 1926)
"Letter to Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouy"
Epiphany, 1923

Transformations

Portion of this yew
Is a man my grandsire knew,
Bosomed here at its foot:
This branch may be his wife,
A ruddy human life
Now turned to a green shoot.

These grasses must be made
Of her who often prayed,
Last century, for repose;

And the fair girl long ago
Whom I often tried to know
May be entering this rose.

So, they are not underground,
But as nerves and veins abound
In the growths of upper air,
And they feel the sun and rain,
And the energy again
That made them what they were!

Thomas Hardy (1840 - 1928)

~ See also Edna St. Vincent Millay ~

Cemetery Photos ~ Charleston, South Carolina

Thanks to my friends
Ruth for sharing Rilke's letter
& Claude for sharing the Hardy poem.

Black Catscapes

Black Cat by Owen Gent

Black Cat by Rainer Maria Rilke

A ghost, though invisible, still is like a place
your sight can knock on, echoing; but here
within this thick black pelt, your strongest gaze
will be absorbed and utterly disappear:

just as a raving madman, when nothing else
can ease him, charges into his dark night
howling, pounds on the padded wall, and feels
the rage being taken in and pacified.

The Two James

She seems to hide all looks that have ever fallen
into her, so that, like an audience,
she can look them over, menacing and sullen,
and curl to sleep with them. But all at once

as if awakened, she turns her face to yours;
and with a shock, you see yourself, tiny,
inside the golden amber of her eyeballs
suspended, like a prehistoric fly.

Read more by Rilke on:
The Fortnightly KC ~ The Quotidian Kit ~ Kitti's List

Catscapes by Lim Heng Swee

Childlike Spring

The Easter Bunny?

Spring has come again.
The Earth is like
a child who knows
poems by heart.

~ Rilke ~
from Sonnets to Orpheus
~ translated by Edward Snow ~

I love this whimsical snail planter (found in the British garden of my parents - in - law) and the above bunny rabbit statuette (belonging to my British sister - in - law). Both figurines, as well as their attendant flowers, exemplify the child - like nature of Spring that Rilke captures in his simile of Earth as a poetic youngster. The following, also by Rilke, is a more serious poem for the Easter season; but keep in mind that, despite the maturity of its intropection, "this is how children cherish You":

Prayer #12

I believe in everything that has not been said,
I want to free my most pious feelings;
what no one has ever dared to want
will suddenly become my nature.

If this is impudent, my God, forgive me.
But with this I want to tell You
that my noblest power should be an instinct,
and thus without anger and without hesitation --
this is how children cherish You.

With this flood, with this flow
into the broad arms of the open sea,
with this expansive return,
I want to bear witness to You; I want to proclaim You
like none before.

And if this is pride, the let me be proud
in my prayer,
which stands so earnest and alone
before Your shadowed brow.

from Prayers of a Young Poet
written by by Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926)
translated by Mark S. Burrows

Many thanks to my dear friend and spiritual advisor
Nancy C. Tiederman
for sending me this latest translation of Rilke's Prayers

Ready for the Shift

Surely Rilke would have been quick to observe that
Daylight Savings Time doesn't really save us anything.
It merely shifts an hour of light from morning to evening,
or an hour of darkness from evening to morning --
whichever way you want to look at it.

Prayer #1

The hour bows down and stirs me
with a clear and ringing stroke;
my senses tremble. I feel that I can —
and I seize the forming day.

Nothing was yet done before I beheld it,
and every becoming stood still;
my ways of seeing are ripe, and, like a bride,
to each one comes the thing each wills.

Nothing is too small for me, and I love it anyway
and paint it on the golden base and large —
and hold it high; and I don’t know whose
soul this might yet free . . .

On the 20th of September in the evening after a lengthy rainstorm,
when the sun suddenly broke through the forest’s dark canopy and through me.

Prayer #20

My life is not this steep hour
in which You see me hurrying so.
I am a tree standing before what I once was;
I am only one of my many mouths,
and, at that, the first to close.

I am the stillness between two notes
that don't easily harmonize,
because the note Death wants to lift itself up . . .

But in the dark interval both notes come
trembling, to join as one . . .
and the song remains, beautiful.

After this, the monk drew very near to God; on the same evening.

[Concluding notes from Rilke;
italics and ellipses in original text]
Both selections from Prayers of a Young Poet
written by by Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926)
translated by Mark S. Burrows

Many thanks to my dear friend and spiritual advisor
Nancy C. Tiederman
for sending me this latest translation of Rilke's Prayers

Wind from a Leaf

Flowering Cherry with Poem Slips
Japanese painter, Tosa Mitsuoki, 1617 – 1691
If only I'd known this poem
back when Y2K was all the rage:

from Prayer #8

I'm living just as the century departs.
One feels the wind from a large leaf
that God and you and I had written on,
which turns above by hands no one knows.

One feels the radiance of a new page
on which everything could still come to be. ~ 1899

by Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926)
from Prayers of a Young Poet
translated by Mark S. Burrows

Mitsuoki ~ Autumn Maples

Previous March First Posts

2010: Kiss Me & Kiss Today

2011: My Vegetable Love

2012: Love However Brief

2013: Beyond Ideas

2014: The First [Mild] Day of March

Thanks George Sfedu!

Or ~ more like what we're experiencing today:
Snow in March, 1904
by Russian Impressionist
Igor Grabar, 1871 - 1960

To Track the Quotidian

The little things? The little moments?
They aren't little.
Jon Kabat-Zinn

The Large Interior
Jean Brusselmans, 1884 - 1953
Of the many paintings that Gerry and I saw in various museums about Bruges, here is one of my favorites. I was torn whether to post it here on my Quotidian page or save it for my Fortnightly page, where I always try to feature, in one way or another, "a house where all's accustomed, ceremonious." Indeed, Brusselmans has depicted just such a house, filled with order and harmony; yet he also captures the dailyness of the woman's routine, her collections and her knick - knacks -- not to mention the book in her lap -- perfect for my book blog!

Also by Brusselmans: Village Scene

Over the weekend, Gerry and I watched the 2014 film Boyhood. We viewed it somewhat less generously than the critics, placing it, after some consideration, in the "good not great" category. What we did find fascinating, however, was Mary Jo Murphy's review, comparing Boyhood to the British Up Series, of which we are great fans! As I read Murphy's comparison, the word quotidian jumped off the page at me. How accurate and applicable her description is to my Quotidian Kit:

Both skip life’s “big moments” to track the quotidian, on the understanding that this is where life unspools, where the particular translates so nearly to the universal, which is the irresistible appeal of such living documents. So no births, deaths, first kisses, exams, graduations,* illnesses or accidents. Just human beings forming inexorably before our eyes on screen. [emphasis added]

The "Up" Documentaries as Precursors to "Boyhood"
NY Times ~ 6 Feb 2015
Mary Jo Murphy

Or, as we find in the poetry of Rilke:" . . . the delight that grips us when our awareness of ordinary things seems to be raised to a higher intensity of awareness." ~Mark S. Burrows

*Actually, in Boyhood, there is a graduation.

Leaf Pressed, Moon Tipped

"So our job as writers is not to diddle around our whole lives in the dot but to take one big step out of it and sink into the big sky and write from there. Let everything run through us and grab as much as we can of it with a pen and paper. Let yourself live in something that is already rightfully yours—your own wild mind." ~Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind

Into this World
Let us die gracefully into this world
like a leaf pressed in stone
let us go quietly breathing our last breath
let the sun continue to revolve in its great golden dance
let us leave it be as it is
and not hold on
not even to the moon
tipped as it will be tonight
and beckoning wildly in the sea [emphasis added]

Natalie Goldberg

*************************
Just the other day I was writing about Elinor Wylie's often anthologized poem, "Velvet Shoes" (see Fortnightly and Quotidian posts; and also Nets to Catch the Winds, 1921). It seems that I have known Wylie's elegant, seasonal poem forever, though I can't remember when or where I first encountered it. Most likely my long familiarity comes from its inclusion in one of my many Christmas anthologies. You can find it here, for example:

I'm also lucky enough to own a vintage copy of Wylie's fourth and last collection of poems, Angels and Earthly Creatures, published in 1929.

Front page inscription seen below:
Marie Hobson
Park Chambers
N.Y.C.

One of my favorites from Angels and Earthly Creatures is this brief lyric, tucked in amidst the sonnets and longer elegies:

Fair Annet's Song
One thing comes and another thing goes:
Frosts in November drive away the rose;
Like a blowing ember the wind-flower blows
And drives away the snows.

It is sad to remember and sorrowful to pray:
Let us laugh and be merry, who have seen today
The last of the cherry and the first of the may;
And neither one will stay.

Wylie's bittersweet comparison of November to May has been set to music a number of times, notably by composer Paul Carey in his four movement tribute to the seasons of the year, Into This World. [click to read his explanation].

Carey choses Wylie's poem, "Annet's Song" to symbolize spring (though equally appropriate for late autumn); Robert Louis Stevenson's "Tropic Rain" to capture summer's intensity; an adaptation of Rilke's "The Leaves are Falling" to evoke a gentle autumn; and to remind us of winter's finality -- as well as for the title of his choral arrangement -- the haunting lines of Natalie Goldberg's "Into this World" (above).

*************************
P.S.
I seem to recall my son Ben taking a picture
of me photographing the sidewalk leaf in the rain:

New Year's Eve 2012 ~ Dallas

P.S.S.
For more wintry snow poems
see my current FORTNIGHTLY post
~ "First Snow in Indiana"

Ancestors

ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Paternal Grandparents

~ Recent Family History ~
a poem
by Ernest Sandeen (1908 - 1997)
Looking out at us from their photographs,
mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles,
now dead for forty - five years or more,
don't recognize us, can't even imagine us.
And we are helpless to penetrate the safety
of their innocence . . .
from Collected Poems (237)

Maternal Grandparents

" . . . we start [that which] we will not live to see,
just as our ancestors could not live to see us.
And yet they, who passed away long ago, still exist in us,
as predisposition, as burden upon our fate, as murmuring blood,
and as gesture that rises up from the depths of time."
by Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926)
from Letters to a Young Poet (62)

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

See more
"Ancestors"
on the
The Fortnightly Kitti Carriker
A fortnightly [every 14th & 28th]
literary blog of connection & coincidence; custom & ceremony

Ripening Like A Tree: Arbor Day

Being an artist means: not numbering and counting,
but ripening like a tree, which doesn’t force its sap,
and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid
that afterward summer may not come.
It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient,
who are there as if eternity lay before them,
so unconcernedly silent and vast.
I learn it every day of my life,
learn it with pain I am grateful for:
patience is everything!

from Letter Four
23 April 1903 [Shakespeare's 339th Birthday!]
by Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926)
in Letters to a Young Poet
[click to read online]
Additional Excerpts
from Letters to a Young Poet:

Mental Beauty
Ancestors
************
Live the Questions
Gender Equity
************
Rilke and Maso
Holiday Thoughts

P.S. StoryPeople for Arbor Day