HERE ARE SOME QUESTIONS

About 1% of the things I've been thinking about lately:

  1. What if the artificial inseminations don't work and the white rhino really does become extinct? I'm not much of a cryer but I think I would cry.
  2. Would people rather die or drastically change their lives so that their being-ness restores earth's resources instead of depleting them? I feel like they would rather die.
  3. Has anyone done a study on how poetry affects the brain? (I bet it's a cross between meditation and listening to music)
  4. Do birds sleep in nests? (The answer is FASCINATING)
  5. Why is contact solution so expensive? It’s just saline in a bottle.
  6. Should you ever have to ask someone to love you?
  7. What would cross-dressers do if fashion became completely androgynous?
  8. Why do I feel trite for wanting to wear a wedding dress someday?
  9. Why doesn’t Cinderella’s glass slipper disappear at midnight with everything else?
  10. How do people go on european trips where they land in a new country every 2 days? Is that enough time to get a sense of anything? (except constant motion and considerable disorientation)
  11. Why are outdoor music festivals so popular? The fashion?
  12. Can we use track pads and touch screens for fingerprint passwords instead of trying to make up a new and appropriate combination of words and symbols for EVERYTHING?
  13. And finally, why don't we broadcast Nick Drake from the tops of the tallest buildings every morning like a call to prayer:

Look At Your Fish

This is from an old David McCullough interview in the Paris Review:

It says, “Look at your fish.” It’s the test that Louis Agassiz, the nineteenth-century Harvard naturalist, gave every new student. He would take an odorous old fish out of a jar, set it in a tin pan in front of the student and say, Look at your fish. Then Agassiz would leave. When he came back, he would ask the student what he’d seen. Not very much, they would most often say, and Agassiz would say it again: Look at your fish. This could go on for days. The student would be encouraged to draw the fish but could use no tools for the examination, just hands and eyes. Samuel Scudder, who later became a famous entomologist and expert on grasshoppers, left us the best account of the “ordeal with the fish.” After several days, he still could not see whatever it was Agassiz wanted him to see. But, he said, I see how little I saw before. Then Scudder had a brainstorm and he announced it to Agassiz the next morning: Paired organs, the same on both sides. Of course! Of course! Agassiz said, very pleased. So Scudder naturally asked what he should do next, and Agassiz said, Look at your fish.

I love that story and have used it often when teaching classes on writing, because seeing is so important in this work. Insight comes, more often than not, from looking at what’s been on the table all along, in front of everybody, rather than from discovering something new. Seeing is as much the job of an historian as it is of a poet or a painter, it seems to me. That’s Dickens’s great admonition to all writers, “Make me see.”

And thank you to one of my dearest, best, and oldest friends for taking me away for a breath of cabin air last weekend. It was a short and cold but beautiful and relaxing 28 hours.

Beyond Appearances

The appetite for reading or listening or learning—seeking out meanings—is an attempt to get beyond superficial, beyond appearances, to realize what is significant. The senses are fallible, and of course our minds are fallible, and I don’t have the belief in my ability or anyone’s ability to get very far beyond appearances, but again, I have the appetite for it . . . Like, I don’t think we ever find out what things are really like, but trying to get nearer is a hunger.

William Stafford, The Art of Poetry No. 67

Counterpoint

I'm not going to tell you how to live your life but gosh at least try reading a little poetry. Tom Hennen is a poet that I've only just started reading. The last verse of this one is so so good:
 

What the Plants Say
By Tom Hennen

Tree, give up your secret. How can you be so satisfied? Why
don’t you need to change location, look for a better job, find
prettier scenery, or even want to get away from people?

Grass, you don’t care where you turn up. You appear running
wild in the oat field, out of a crack in a city street. You are
the first word in the vocabulary of the earth. How is it that you
are able to grow so near the lake without falling in? How can
you be so alert for the early frost, bend in the slightest breeze,
and yet be so hard to break that you are still there, quiet, green,
among the ruins of others?

Weed, it is you with your bad reputation that I love the most.
Teach me not to care what anyone has to say about me. Help me
to be in the world for no purpose at all except for the joy of
sunlight and rain. Keep me close to the edge where every wild
thing begins.