Perfectly Wabi Sabi
The Satyr has filled this morning's mailbox with notices of writers' births:
Rachel Carson was born in 1907 Springdale, Pennsylvania. She gave us The Sea Around Us, and Silent Spring .
It's Linda Pastan's birthday. The poet was in the Bronx, of 1932 New York City. She died this past January after 91 years and managing to publish some of the best American poetry of the late 20th Century.
Novelist and short-story writer John Cheever was born on this day in 1912 Quincy, Massachusetts.
And, its the 129th anniversary of Dashiell Hammett's birth. The author of The Maltese Falcon was born on the eastern shore of Maryland on this day in 1894.
The Myth of Perfectability
. . . I sit here at the typewriter,
putting in a comma to slow down
a long sentence, then taking it out,
then putting it back again
until I feel like a happy Sisyphus,
or like a good farmer who knows
that the body's work is never done,
for the motions of plowing and planting continue
season after season, even in his sleep.
– Linda Pastan, in Poetry (December 1989)
Necessarily Woke
It’s Freya’s day, thank Odin. In the mailbox this morning, reminders:
Tina Turner died this week. She was 83.
Today is the 97th anniversary of Miles Davis' birth. The jazz trumpeter, bandleader, and composer was born in 1926 Alton, Illinois.
Photographer Dorothea Lange was born 128 years ago today in 1895 Hoboken, New Jersey.
The features of our unequal society are systematically (re)framed by the confidence culture as individual psychological problems, requiring us to change women [and minority “others” subjected to similar inequality and subjugation], not the world. – Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad
Of course, a culture as manically and massively materialistic as ours creates materialistic behavior in its people, especially in those people who've been subjected to nothing but the destruction of imagination that this culture calls education, the destruction of autonomy it calls work, and the destruction of activity it calls entertainment. . . .We've had over 100 years of psychotherapy and the world's getting worse . . . . Psychology, so dedicated to awakening human consciousness, needs to wake itself up to one of the most ancient human truths: we cannot be studied or cured apart from the planet. – James Hillman
We would like otherworldly visitations to come as distinct voices with clear instructions, but they may only give small signs in dreams, or as sudden hunches and insights that cannot be denied. They feel more as if they emerge from inside and steer you from within like an inner guardian angel. . . . And, most amazing, it has never forgotten you, although you may have spent most of your life ignoring it. – James Hillman
There is no need to shoulder a useless load. Whatever our past, whether we benefit from our experiences depends on our attitude toward the present. – Shundo Aoyama
Giants in the mailbox
It's Thor's day here in TulseyTown and the mailbox has been taken over by giants . . .
Ralph Waldo Emerson was born on this date 220 years ago. The philosopher, poet, and essayist was born in 1803 Boston. Emerson first introduced the concept of Transcendentalism — the idea that spiritual truth could be gained by intuition rather than by established doctrine or text
Today is the 118th anniversary of Theodore Roethke's birth. The poet was born on this date in 1908 Saginaw, Michigan. For more on Roethke.
The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a subjective side won’t get us very far. – Niels Bohr
. . .the only acceptable point of view appears to be one that recognizes both sides of reality — the quantitative and the qualitative, the physical and the psychical — as compatible with each other, and can embrace them simultaneously. – Wolfgang Pauli in Maria Popova's Marginalian (5/24/23).
Every true theorist is a kind of tamed metaphysicist – Einstein
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go. . . .Man a second shadow throws
beyond the visible he knows:
the mind, untrammeled, can outfly
the nets of mutability
and shake the shade that holds him close. – Ted Roethke
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense. – Emerson