The Hammock Papers: Console.

04 March 2015

Console.

Down in Patagonia we live in a canyon without the possibility of television reception, and a radio that attracts only a few Mexican stations. I don't see the newspaper until noon, which is too late for it to have any real part in forming the day's thought patterns, and magazines are forwarded once a week with the mail. If you are a lifelong news junkie this vacuum can become vertiginous. None of this was planned, mind you. Thoreau wasn't looming in the ideological background, nor were the Zen hermits I revere before flicking on the late news.

The game I have devised to counter or encompass this reality came to me while I was sleeping at the foot of a desert canyon. There was a layer of frost on the sleeping bag and all night the stars kept on moving, as they will. Here comes Scorpio, and only the week before Venus had nested in the cusp of the new moon! Sleep was erratic due to owl calls, coyotes, snuffling javelinas, and the fact that my pockets were full -- including a monocular, pliers (for pulling out cacti thorns), car keys, and talismans; and all this useful junk had lumpishly embedded itself in my flesh. It didn't occur to me to correct the discomfort by depositing the stuff in my nearby boots because I was in the midst of a Cosmic Wine Trance. Assuming you're interested in the prescription, drink a bottle or two of good Tuscan wine, eat quite a bit -- in this case rib eye steaks broiled over mesquite coals, folded in a tortilla with red onion, tomatoes, and salsa -- then chase the wine and food with a little Herradura tequila. The upshot is that you'll fall asleep at nine and wake up at 3:00 A.M. with mild indigestion, frost on your face, and the soul of a nineteen-year-old poet stuffed to the gills with incomprehension. Before you drifted off and the moon waned, you could see a thousand-year-old petroglyph of a half-man, half-lizard above you on the canyon wall. Now the only information that will console you is in the stars above your head. Lucky I got only one eye or I'd be keeping track of twice as many.

Jim Harrison

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL