The Longing Light

“Nothing in your education has taught you that what you notice is important.”

— Verlyn Klinkenborg

———

I love this time of year and especially in Idaho when apples, carrots, and beets are ready to eat and tomatoes and peppers too. It’s cooler too which means we can listen to Tom Waits again (most of his albums don’t work in the summer) and Coltrane (fall/winter) and the later Miles Davis (winter/spring) and really read poetry again and the old novels from falls before and enjoy the longer lengths of light illuminating the yellowing edges of trees.

These things too inspired me recently:

An act of perpetual self-authorization. “...But everything you notice is important. Let me say that a different way: If you notice something, it’s because it’s important. But what you notice depends on what you allow yourself to notice, And that depends on what you feel authorized, permitted to notice In a world where we’re trained to disregard our perceptions.” — Verlyn Klinkenborg

The One Question NOT to Ask for Healthy Introspection (And What to Ask Instead). What is it about language that informs how we think through a thing?

5 Languages That Could Change the Way You See the World. If your language had no words to describe “the future,” would you still stress over it?

If a Book Can Be Summarized, Is It Worth Reading? I love the end of this quote that Austin Kleon quotes from an interview with Ian McGlichrist on why he became a psychologist after years of being an Oxford literary scholar (wow, what a shitty sentence, Jeff. You could do better but tick tock…). The end gets at one of the things I love about reading and experiencing poems:

I love literature very much and I found that a lot of the things that I could see were very valuable were very hard to convey once one started taking the thing apart… It seemed to me that people who make works of art, whatever they might be, have gone to great trouble to make something unique which is embodied in the form that it is and not in any other form and that it transmits things that remain implicit.  If you explain a joke, you lose a power of it.  If you have to explain a poem you’re going to lose a bit of the power of that too.  It struck me that there was two or three rather important philosophical points about a work of art, that first of all what it conveyed needed to remain implicit and when you stuck something, yanked it out of context, and stuck it into the middle of the spotlight of attention you actually changed what it was because you hadn’t found out more about what was there in the first place.  It needed to be incarnate.  I mean, works of art are not just disembodied, entirely abstract, conceptual things.  They are embodied in the words they’re in or in paint or in stone or in musical notes or whatever it might be and much of that power and the fact that those things also affect us neurophysicologically. When you read a poem it affects your heart rate, your breathing, you feel things in your bodily frame….