Tag Archives: Ice Friday

Ice Friday: Song of Kiche Manitou

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The Creator, for the Ojibway, is Kiche Manitou:

Young and old asked: Who gave to me the breath of Life, the beat of flesh? Who gave to me the beat of heart my vision to behold? Who? How to Bear the gift of sense of time, a place of wandering? How to Eagle came the gift of a glance of love, the flash of rage? How? Who gave to us the gifts we do not own but borrow and pass on? Who made us one? Who set the Path of Souls? Who carved the Land of Peace? Who?*

(*From Basil Johnston’s Ojibway Culture)

Ice Friday: Salinger’s Holden Caulfield

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“You ought to go to a boys’ school sometime. Try it sometime,” I said. “It’s full of phonies, and all you do is study so that you can learn enough to be smart enough to be able to buy a goddamn Cadillac some day, and you have to keep making believe you give a damn if the football team loses, and all you do is talk about girls and liquor and sex all day, and everybody sticks together in these dirty little goddamn cliques. The guys that are on the basketball team stick together, the Catholics stick together, the goddamn intellectuals stick together, the guys that play bridge stick together. Even the guys that belong to the goddamn Book-of-the-Month Club stick together. If you try to have a little intelligent–” “Look,” I said. “Here’s my idea. How would you like to get the hell out of here? Here’s my idea. I know this guy down in Greenwich Village that we can borrow his car for a couple of weeks. He used to go to the same school I did and he still owes me ten bucks. What we could do is, tomorrow morning we could drive up to Massachusetts and Vermont, and all around there, see. It’s beautiful as hell up there, It really is.” I was getting excited as hell, the more I thought of it, and I sort of reached over and took old Sally’s goddamn hand. What a goddamn fool I was. “No kidding,” I said. “I have about a hundred and eighty bucks in the bank. I can take it out when it opens in the morning, and then I could go down and get this guy’s car. No kidding. We’ll stay in these cabin camps and stuff like that till the dough runs out. Then, when the dough runs out, I could get a job somewhere and we could live somewhere with a brook and all and, later on, we could get married or something. I could chop all our own wood in the wintertime and all. Honest to God, we could have a terrific time! Wuddaya say? C’mon! Wuddaya say? Will you do it with me? Please!”

Ice Friday: Kerouac’s “On The Road”

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It was a magnificent car; it could hold the road like a boat holds the water. Gradual curves were its singing ease. “Ah, man, what a dreamboat,” sighed Dean. “Think if you and I had a car like this what we could do. Do you know there’s a road that goes down Mexico and all the way to Panama? – and maybe all the way to the bottom of South America where the Indians are seven feet tall and eat cocaine on the mountainside.” “Yes! You and I, Sal, we’d dig the whole world with a car like this because, man, the road must eventually lead to the whole world. Ain’t nowhere else it can go, right?”

Ice Friday: Woody Allen on Misery

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I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That’s the two categories. The horrible are like, I don’t know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don’t know how they get through life. It’s amazing to me. IMG_4593And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you’re miserable, because that’s very lucky, to be miserable.

(As Alvy Springer, Annie Hall, 1976)

Ice Friday: Luigi Pirandello’s “Mattia Pascal”

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Oh why…I asked myself desperately…does mankind toil so to make the apparatus of its living more and more complicated? Why this clatter of machines? And what will man do when machines do everything for him? Will he then realize that what is called progress has nothing to do with happiness? 20150714_155428Even if we admire all the inventions that science sincerely believes will enrich our lives, what joy do they bring us after all?

Ice Friday: James Jones “Thin Red Line”

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The stark World War II prose of James Jones in The Thin Red Line remind us of what happens to the psyche when everything else is stripped away:

He heard the soft “shu-u-” of the mortar shell for perhaps half a second. There was not even time to connect it with himself or frighten him, before there was a huge sunburst roaring of an explosion almost on top of him, then black blank darkness. He had a vague impression that someone screamed but did not know it was himself. As if seeing dark film shown with insufficient illumination, he had a misty picture of someone other than himself  half-scrambling, rolling down the slope. Then nothing. Dead? Are we, that other one is I? am he? img_4553“Am I hit? Am I hit?”

“Yes,” Train mumbled. “Y-you are.” He also stuttered. “In the head.”

“Am I?” Fife looked at his hands and found them completely covered with the wet red. He understood now that peculiar red haze. Then terror blossomed all through him like ballooning great fungus, making his heart kick and his eyes go faint.

Ice Friday: Saramago’s “Death Interrupted”

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A letter from death in Jose Saramago’s 2008 novel Death with Interruptions:

One day you will find out about Death with a capital D, and at that moment, in the unlikely event that she gives you the time of day, you will understand the real difference between the relative and the absolute, between full and empty, between still alive and no longer alive.
p1000854And when I say real difference, I am referring to something that mere words will never be able to to express, relative, absolute, full, empty, still alive and no longer alive, because, sir, in case you don’t know it, words move, they change from one day to the next, they are unstable as shadows, are themselves shadows.

Ice Friday: Coetzee’s “Childhood of Jesus”

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I’m willing to cut J.M. Coetzee a break on this one. The author of Waiting for the Barbarians and Disgrace has much to live up to, and doesn’t in The Childhood of Jesus. While the idea seems solid – Jesus as a metaphorical refugee in a nameless land – the realization is not.

“There is no such thing as one’s own language.”

“There is! La la fa fa yam ying tu tu.”

“That’s just gibberish. It doesn’t mean anything.IMG_4667The book reads like an outline, a hodgepodge of dialogue glued together without description or development.

“Toilets are just toilets, but poo is not just poo,” he says. “There are certain things that are not just themselves, not all of the time. Poo is one of them.”

The boy shakes his head. “It’s my poo. I want to stay!”

“It was your poo. But you evacuated it. You got rid of it. It’s not yours anymore. You no longer have a right to it.”

Enough said about that.

 

Ice Friday: Ned Hallowell’s “Flow”

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“To reach flow,” explains psychiatrist Ned Hallowell, “one must be willing to take risks. The lover must be willing to risk rejection to enter this state. The athlete must be willing to risk physical harm, even loss of life, to enter this state.IMG_3366 “The artist must be willing to be scorned and despised by critics and the public and still push on. And the average person must be willing to fail, look foolish should we wish to enter this state.”*

(*From Peter Diamandis & Steven Kotler’s Bold.)