Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

Jerome: Life and Language

St. Jerome is best known as a fourth century translator of the Bible from its original languages into Latin, then becoming the language of the Church. He was the personal secretary of Pope Damasus, who commissioned the young priest in 382 to undertake the task of translation. Jerome was an excellent choice, as he had mastered not only Greek, which had been the common language of the Western world, but also Hebrew and Aramaic, the first being the original language of the Bible, the second the language spoken by Jesus and his disciples in the Holy Land.

Jerome spent over twenty years at his task. He not only went to ancient texts of the Hebrew Bible, but actively--and at some cost to his reputation among his fellow churchmen, including Augustine--sought out help from Jewish teachers as well. He was sensitive to matters of idiom: sense for sense rather than word for word. And he was a gifted interpreter of the texts.

While he was still at work translating, his patron Damasus died in 384, and after a short time in Antioch, Jerome settled in Bethlehem. Among the most learned Christians of his day, he became widely known as the greatest scholar of the early Church. He said: “Love the holy Scriptures, and wisdom will love you. Love wisdom, and she will keep you safe.” Jerome died in Bethlehem at the age of 80 in the year 420.

Albrecht Dürer's famous 16th century engraving of Jerome at work in his study is the inspiration for a poem by the contemporary translator and poet Stephen Mitchell. A Jew having experience in a Christian school while a boy, Mitchell is well known for his translation of The Book of Job, The Book of Psalms, and for his own rendering of The Gospel According to Jesus, as well as for his translation of the poetry and prose of Ranier Maria Rilke, and a version of the Tao Te Ching. Erik Erikson said of Mitchell's translation of Job, "The thoughtful reading of this astonishing translation has been for me a rare experience combining poetry and enlightenment."

It is no wonder, then, that Mitchell was attracted to the scholar and translator of the early Church, and came to meditate so deeply and memorably upon Dürer's engraving.

The poem is especially moving in the intimacy, the love with which the poet addresses Jerome, and in its portrayal of Jerome's experience of the life of the Spirit--the Kingdom of God--"an innermost truth"--as one with the flesh, the sacred realities of everyday life. Tat twam asi. That art thou.

sunlight
and leaf-mold, the smell of fresh bread
from the bakery down the lane,
the rumble of an ox-cart, the unconscious
ritual of a young woman
combing her hair, the bray
of a mule, an infant crying

____________

JEROME

In Dürer’s engraving
You sit hunched over your desk,
writing, with an extraneous
halo around your head.
You have everything you need: a mind
at ease with itself, and the generous
sunlight on pen, page, ink,
the few chairs, the vellum-bound books,
the skull on the windowsill that keeps you
honest (memento mori).
What you are concerned with
in your subtle craft is not simply
the life of language—to take
those boulder-like nouns of the Hebrew
text, those torrential verbs,
into your ear and remake them
in the hic-haec-hoc of your time—
but an innermost truth. For years
you listened when the Spirit was
the faintest breeze, not even the
breath of a sound. And wondered
how the word of God could be clasped
between the covers of a book.
Now, by the latticed window,
absorbed in your work,
the word becomes flesh, becomes sunlight
and leaf-mold, the smell of fresh bread
from the bakery down the lane,
the rumble of an ox-cart, the unconscious
ritual of a young woman
combing her hair, the bray
of a mule, an infant crying:
the whole vibrant life
of Bethlehem, outside your door.
None of it is an intrusion.
You are sitting in the magic circle
of yourself. In a corner, the small
watchdog is curled up, dreaming,
and beside it, on the threshold, the lion
dozes, with half-closed eyes.

- Stephen Mitchell


Literally, yes, "the word becomes flesh," the sacred language comes alive, bursts from the text into life.  "Flesh" is descriptive of more than human being, of mule and leaf-mold and sunlight, of all the earth.

If Jerome was the man evoked by Stephen Mitchell, and heard his words, I can imagine him at such a moment taking up his quill pen and writing his own poem in response, something in the spirit of these lines by Robinson Jeffers:


..... I entered the life of the brown forest,
And the great lfe of the ancient peaks, the patience of stone, I felt the
     changes in the veins
In the throat of the mountain... and, I was the stream
Draining the mountain wood; and I the stag drinking; and I was the stars
Boiling with light, wandering alone, each one the lord of his own summit;
    and I was the darkness
Outside the stars, I included them, they were a part of me. I was mankind
    also, a moving lichen
On the cheek of the round stone...

_______________________

"I was mankind also, a moving lichen on the cheek of the round stone..." That is as lovely an image of homo sapiens as I know--as lovely and as necessary to absorb into our hearts, that we might renew ourselves and restore the earth we continue to destroy.

I am indebted to Leslie J. Hoppe, O.F.M., for his account of Jerome's life in the Church and the character of his translations, and to Joanna Macy's book, Coming Back to Life, for the gift of Robinson Jeffers' poem embodying earth consciousness. It is an excerpt from "The Tower Beyond Tragedy," The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, ed. Tim Hunt (Stanford University Press, 1988).

_______________________________

The Holy Fool

The holy fool, or the fool as wise soul, is a figure in many wisdom traditions, including notably those of the Sufis of Islam, Zen Buddhism, Christianity and the inheritors of the Hasidic movement of Judaism, as well as folklore that is not specifically religious, like some of the tales collected by the brothers Grimm. Fools in the courts of kings in the plays of Shakespeare are typically wise men who cloak their wisdom in a mask of foolishness, thereby reaching their master as straight men cannot.

Such fools amuse, confuse, sometimes speak in simile or circuitous riddles, are often ridiculed--they are, after all, intentionally ridiculous, sometimes insulting or scatological--but can succeed by that very character in breaking through a crust of resistance or disbelief. There is an enigmatic quality to the fool's cloak of madness or nonsense that provokes attention, response, reflection, as well as laughter. The fool's inherent humility, too, may loosen the defensive, ego-inflated character of those who make too much of themselves and thus lose touch with a deeper reality.

Finally, there is another sense of the holy fool, less a matter of conscious and intentional disguise, more a matter of guilelessness, transparency, embrace of wonder and mystery. "The path of soul, writes Thomas Moore, "is also the path of the fool, the one without pretense of self-knowledge or individuation or certainly perfection. If on this path we have achieved anything, it is the absolute unknowing Cusanus and other mystics write about, or it is the 'negative capability' of John Keats--'being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.'" (Care of the Soul, p. 261-262)

Here are a few illustrative stories:

Saint Symeon

Saint Symeon, for those who know of his existence at all, probably would be viewed as a curious candidate for canonization by the Catholic Church. He came to the Syrian city of Emesa in the sixth century. On his arrival, he tied a dead dog he found on a dunghill to his belt and entered the city gate, dragging the dog behind him. Schoolchildren saw him and called out, “Hey, a crazy abba [father].” For he was dressed in the habit of the ascetic Desert Fathers (indeed, that is the community from which he came), but behaved in Emesa quite otherwise. The next morning, a Sunday, he entered the church, put out the lights, and threw nuts at the women. On the way out of the church, he overturned the tables of the pastry chefs.

In Emesa, Symeon quickly consolidated his reputation as "a crazy abba." He walked about naked, ate enormous quantities of beans, farted prolifically, defecated in the streets, gorged himself on raw meat, pastries, virtually anything at hand, kept company with dancing girls and prostitutes, all without the slightest shame. On one occasion, having been invited to join the men in the public bath, he stripped off his clothing and wrapped it around his head like a turban. With his sexuality starkly apparent, he walked past the men’s bath and rushed into the women’s. When there was a new moon, “he looked at the sky and fell down and thrashed about.” In short, he violated virtually every norm of civilized urban behavior, and the citizens of Emesa responded with righteous indignation and not uncommonly with beatings. They were outraged: the most common word used to describe their reaction is "scandalized." That is our first hint of secret sainthood, for the same word was commonly used in the Bible to describe people's response to the behavior of Jesus.

Symeon left the desert for the city, having mastered the practice of the ascetic life of the Desert Fathers, with the purpose of saving souls and "mocking the world." He drew attention to the spiritual pollution of urban life in Emesa by exaggerating its expression. He maintained his spiritual practices in private, and his intimacy with the untouchables, the outcasts of Emesa, like that of Jesus, is full of loving kindness and the spirit of conversion, turning, metanoia.

In playing the fool, Symeon demonstrated that spiritual truth is obstructed, lost by the more dangerous pretenders: those upright, worldly and proper souls whose reputable lives hide an inner emptiness of spirit. In the phrase of St. Paul from First Corinthians, Symeon is "a fool for Christ's sake."

(I am indebted in this brief portrait of Symeon to Derek Krueger's scholarly study, Symeon the Holy Fool: Leontius' Life and the Late Antique City, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966. Krueger demonstrates that the later Church, although recognizing a tradition of the holy fool, had difficulty with some of the more colorful of Symeon's antics.)

Sufi Stories: Mulla Nasrudin

Probably the best known of the holy fools is Mulla Nasrudin, at once a central figure of the esoteric tradition of Sufism within Islam, and a popular folkloric figure from the Middle East to East Asia. The person who, above all, made Nasrudin accessible to readers of the Western world was the Afghan writer and Sufi scholar, Idries Shah (1924-1996), who wrote or compiled over thirty books on the Sufi way of life and Sufi stories. The way of the Sufis, in fact, antedates Islam, and has thrived in many cultures and wisdom traditions. That may be why so many people, in such diverse parts of the world, grew up hearing stories of the marvelous Mulla. Evidence of the interpenetration of stories in diverse traditions includes their reappearance in different cultural guises. That is true of several of several Sufi stories, including those of Mulla Nasrudin, as I shall illustrate and you may recognize below.

Unsentimental teaching stories are a staple of Sufi practice. They are intended lightly to provoke--laughter, mostly--then contemplation and insight. Some are longer, and some are very short. There are examples of both below.

A tortoise carries a stranded scorpion across a river. The scorpion stings the tortoise, who demands indignantly: "My nature is to be helpful. I have helped you and now you sting me." "My friend," says the scorpion, "your nature is to be helpful. Mine is to sting. Why do you seek to transform your nature into a virtue and mine into villainy?"

An elephant and a mouse fell in love. On the wedding night the elephant keeled over and died. The mouse said, "Oh Fate! I have unknowingly bartered one moment of pleasure and tons of imagination for a lifetime of digging a grave."

Stories of Nasrudin:

My beloveds, I remember a time long ago when I was still a Mulla. I lived in a small town, just big enough for a real mosque, with a beautiful mosaic wall. I remember one evening, we had finished our prayers. The stars were clear and bright, and seemed to fill the sky solidly with lights. I stood at the window, gazing at the lights so far away, each one bigger than our world, and so distant from us across vast reaches of space. I thought of how we walk this earth, filled with our own importance, when we are just specks of dust. If you walk out to the cliffs outside the town, a walk of half an hour at most, you look back and you can see the town, but the people are too small to see, even at that meager distance. When I think of the immensity of the universe, I am filled with awe and reverence for power so great.

I was thinking such thoughts, looking out the window of the mosque, and I realized I had fallen to my knees. "I am nothing, nothing!" I cried, amazed and awestruck.

There was a certain well-to-do man of the town, a kind man who wished to be thought very devout. He cared more for what people thought of him than for what he actually was. He happened to walk in and he saw and heard what passed. My beloveds, I was a little shy at being caught in such a moment, but he rushed down, looking around in the obvious hope someone was there to see him. He knelt beside me, and with a final hopeful glance at the door through which he had just come, he cried,

"I am nothing! I am nothing!"

It appears that the man who sweeps, a poor man from the edge of the village, had entered the side door with his broom to begin his night's work. He had seen us, and being a man of true faith and honest simplicity, his face showed that he entertained some of the same thoughts that had been laid on me by the hand of Allah (wonderful is He). He dropped his broom and fell to his knees up there in a shadowed corner, and said softly,

"I am nothing...I am nothing!"

The well-to-do man next to me nudged me with his elbow and said out of the side of his mouth,

"Look who thinks he's nothing!"

_______________________

Late one moonlit night a friend came upon Nasrudin stooped, walking back and forth in the street in front of his house. "What are you doing, Mulla?" said the friend. "I have lost my keys and am looking for them," replied Nasrudin. The friend agreed to help, and they both continued to comb the ground. Finally the friend asked, "Where did you lose them?" "I lost them in the house," said Nasrudin, "but there's more light out here."

_______________________

My beloveds, I travelled again to the village of my friend Tekka, after years away. He had become very devout in his ways, sometimes a little pompous, but still the kind soul I had loved for years.

I visited him, and we picked up our friendship as if we had never been apart.

"Nasrudin, you are a light to the eyes," said Tekka, "Please stay with me. I insist."

I accepted his kind invitation. He showed me my sleeping room, with a window to the east, and the bed made up. "I have arranged it so your head faces toward Mecca," he said proudly. "You must always sleep with your head toward Mecca, out of respect for the Prophet, on whom be peace."

My first night, I tossed and turned, and finally fell asleep. I am apparently an active sleeper, for when Tekka shook me awake the next morning, he was very agitated.

"Nasrudin, I am disappointed in you!" I looked at myself, and said, "I am often disappointed in myself, Tekka, what seems to be today's problem?"

"You have slept with your feet toward Mecca! This is most disrespectful!"

"My apologies, Tekka, it was unintentional. I am a very active sleeper."

Tekka was mollified, but insisted that the next night I must do better. I promised I would.

The next night resembled the first. I slept well, after some tossing and turning, but awoke to find my feet on my pillow and my head resting on the floor at the end of the sleeping mat. Just as I realized my predicament, Tekka stood in the door and clucked in concern.

"This will never do, Nasrudin. I am a good citizen and a good Muslim. You must sleep with your feet pointing the opposite way from Mecca, and your head pointing toward Mecca, out of respect for the Prophet and devotion to Allah."

"What is your reason for insisting on this, my friend?" I asked.

"You must point your head toward God!" he said, and repeated it, "You must point your head toward God and your feet away from Him."

I thought about this. We spent the day together, and that night Tekka was most emphatic. "Nasrudin," he said, "If you cannot sleep with your head toward God, I regret to say I cannot have you in my house. It pains me to say this to an old friend, but my devotion is to Allah."

The third night was much like the other two, except that this time I awoke with my nose pressed against the floor at the foot of the sleeping mat. It was pushed out of shape, and I was rubbing it when Tekka appeared. His face was clouded with anger and sadness.

"Before you speak, Tekka, answer me this," I said, springing up. "Does Allah rule over everything, even the fate of men?"

"You know he does," replied Tekka, puzzled.

"Is Allah there in every part of His creation?"

"Of course he does."

I pointed out the window at the birds rising from the edge of the well. "Does he live in the birds of the air?"

"Yes," said Tekka. "Why are you asking these questions?"

"Please have patience with an old friend," I replied. "Is Allah everywhere, even across the desert and the mountains?"

"Allah is the creation. Allah is in the creation, and is the lord over the creation!" exclaimed Tekka.

"So, Tekka," I said, holding out my feet. "Point my feet where God is not!"

_________________________

Nasrudin was invited to give a sermon.
When the people had assembled, Nasrudin asked:
"Do you know what I'm going to tell you?"
"No", they answered.
"In that case", said Nasrudin, "there's no point in telling you anything. You're too ignorant to start with. I'd be wasting my time."
The people were disappointed. They asked Nasrudin to come back the following week.
When he did, he started his sermon by asking the same question.
"Yes!", they shouted.
"Very well", said Nasrudin, "then I see no reason to speak."
And he left.
But Nasrudin was persuaded to come back a third time.
"Do you know, or don't you?", he asked the people.
"Some of us do, and some of us don't."
"Great!", said Nasrudin. "Those who know can share their knowledge with those who don't."
Having said that, he went home.

______________________

Nasrudin used to stand in the street on market-days, to be pointed out as an idiot. No matter how often people offered him a large and a small coin, he always chose the smaller piece.

One day a kindly man said to him, "Mulla, you should take the bigger coin. Then you will have more money and people will no longer be able to make a laughingstock of you."

"That might be true," said Nasrudin. "but if I always take the larger, people will stop offering me money to prove that I am more idiotic than they are. Then I would have no money at all."

_________________________

Consider this one in relation to the meaning of Sabbath time:

Mulla Nasrudin was eating a poor man's diet of chickpeas and bread. His neighbor, who also claimed to be a wise man, was living in a grand house and dining upon sumptuous meals provided by the emperor himself.

His neighbor told Nasrudin, "If only you would learn to flatter the emperor and be subservient as I do, you would not have to live on chickpeas and bread."

Nasrudin replied, "And if only you would learn to live on chickpeas and bread, as I do, you would not have to flatter and live subservient to the emperor."

_______________________

Nasrudin sat on a river bank when someone shouted to him from the opposite side:
    - "Hey! how do I get across?"
    - "You are across!" Nasrudin shouted back.

_______________________

Since we began this venture with one saint, Symeon, let's end it with another, this one an imaginative creation of the translator and poet Stephen Mitchell, leaving us with the valuable conclusion that one need not be wise to be a holy fool.

Saint Ineptus

Born in third-century Illyria, he soon established a reputation for spilling his food, bruising himself, and tripping over non-existent objects in the street. His parents wanted him to become a doctor, in the hope that the rigorous training would make him more attentive. But he refused. Instead, he spent his time looking for angels in the dark alleyways of his native town, and feeding the stray cats. Even his martyrdom was botched. He felt so terrified, as the wild beasts approached him in the amphitheater, that he forgot the words of the Lord's Prayer.

He has become the patron saint of the clumsy, the tactless and the unqualified. They are instructed to leave a candle burning for him once a month (making sure there is nothing flammable in the vicinity). His intercession is said to do more good than harm.
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Whatever Happened to the Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County?

Reprinting an entire newspaper article is hardly the ordinary style of Reckonings, much less one two-and-a-half years old. My excuse in this event is that the article is drawn from the archives of The Daily Reprobate, the sister publication of Reckonings for several years but with much more distinguished pedigree, having been (allegedly) founded in 1866 by Mark Twain when he was working as a journalist in San Francisco.

If there was a single piece of short fiction which launched Mark Twain's career as a writer, it was surely "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." In the spring of 2003 the chief (and only) roving correspondent of The Reprobate proposed to its editor that an investigative article was in order to reveal the fate of jumping frogs in Calaveras County. Despite his reporter's incurable habit of profligacy with his expense account, the editor responded with enthusiasm, hoping I imagine for a small boost in circulation. His judgment was not off the mark; the boost, in fact, was not small. Readers of The Reprobate have asked that I reprint the article here, partially to draw a little more attention to Mr. Twain and the journal to which those readers remain so loyal, but mostly because they found the story such a representative piece of Americana. So here it is in its entirety.

 

Pogo Possum

Pogo and the other inhabitants of the Okefenokee Swamp* disappeared from the newspapers' comic strip pages shortly after their maker, Walt Kelly, died in 1973. I grew up with his world in the 50s and 60s.

I still tune in to Doonesbury now and then. I have been devoted to Calvin and Hobbes, Opus, and Gary Larson's wonderful upside down and sideways view of the world. For a time, as a child, the thoroughgoing loving kindness of Al Capp's shmoos captivated me. But Kelly's way with character, setting and especially language  were satisfying as no other comic strip. As Brad Leithauser writes, "Pogo was different. It had depth, a madcap unpredictability, and a restive verbal playfulness; it was, in short, the only comic strip spun through the mind of a poet."

The denizens of the Swamp--Pogo, Albert the alligator, Beauregard the hound, Owl, Porky Pine, the ominous wildcat Simple J. Malarkey (modeled on Senator Joseph McCarthy), the blowhard bear P.T. Bridgeport, Miz Beaver and the fetching French skunk, Ma'm'selle Hepzibah, with whom Pogo is shyly enchanted--lent the strip a wonderful range of linguistic warp and woof, lyricism, affection and (mostly) friendly dissension the likes of which we have not seen since.

The pace of life in the Swamp is... well, like a swamp should be: comfortable, slow, yet with unpredictable depth and color.

There are some genuine bad guys among the residents of the swamp--Mole with his omnipresent shades, and his sidekick The Deacon, for example--but they are more like literate rednecks than real evil. The only source of threatened (never realized) violence is the manifestly malignant Malarkey.

Some of Kelly's lines remain with me well over a quarter century after they were uttered. "We have met the enemy and he is us." Whenever I hear "Deck the Halls" at Christmas time, I find myself quietly singing, "Deck us all with Boston Charlie..." And when I tend to go on longer than I should--a common professorial malady--I recall one of Pogo's rhymes:

Riddle you the little dew
And little do you do?
Little did is little done,
Tho' little did'll do.

I hope to weave into these pages at least a little did'll of Pogo's gentleness, kindness, exuberance and nonsense.

For those interested in a contemporary tribute to Kelly and his creation, and a sample of some of his characters' antics, I recommend Brad Leithauser's essay, "Lyrics in the Swamp," in the April 25, 2002 issue of The New York Review of Books. There are several collections of Pogo still available in paperback.

* The real Okefenokee Swamp, thankfully, is still with us, and is a heartening story of environmental intelligence at work.  Covering approximately 700 square miles of South Georgia and North Florida, it is a primitive wetland which harbors thousands of birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians, many of which are endangered or threatened. The north end of the swamp is bordered by pine forests and thick tangles of vegetation. Small water trails lead south to the open prairies and west to the Suwannee River. Nearly 400,000 acres of the Okefenokee were designated as the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge in 1937, protecting the headwaters of the Suwannee and St. Marys Rivers from further human development. For that, Pogo would be proud.

Reprobates and Curmudgeons

I had the great privilege, for several years around the recent turn of the century, of editing an online journal, The Daily Reprobate, that in its original print version was founded by Mark Twain in 1866. (There is some scholarly controversy about the details, even the veracity, of that founding legend, but such controversy in general can be safely ignored.) Some articles and snippits from The Reprobate will inevitably find their way into Reckonings, if only to lend it a much-needed antidote to its insufferable seriousness. Most of those posts will be lodged in the category I've called "Words and Whimsey," whose character will be described shortly in another post. In the meantime, here is a brief description of The Daily Reprobate, a reasonable definition of its operative word, and a similarly felicitous description of its close sibling, "curmudgeon."

The Reprobate's founder, Mark Twain, once remarked aptly, "Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense." Edward Abbey, a modern inheritor of Twain's spirit, added the companion truth, "The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny." The Daily Reprobate has honored that wisdom since its founding 140 years ago as "a congenial companion for the intelligent and irascible reader gifted with a sense of humor and a love of language." The origins of The Reprobate will be further discussed later. Here I'll just draw from its archives a concise description of two words that suggest the enduring importance of its mission.

Reprobate

For the linguistically challenged,  we provide a short definition of our operative word, reprobate. It has a distinguished pedigree, having risen over the last 3000 years or so from its wretched beginnings when reprobates were lost souls rejected by God, wicked Sabbath-breaking sons of Belial, fallen angels, Israelites in the desert when Moses wasn't around. A small residue of that early meaning is preserved in the forbidding language of Calvinism, and in that of evangelical Christians intent upon their own virtue and others' salvation even if it kills them.

More currently, and for our own guidance over our many years of publication, reprobates are shameless rascals. Often reproved as unrepentant scalawags by the Authorities (the bearers of cultural, moral and political orthodoxy) they in fact stand as bastions, fonts of discriminating disapproval. Sometimes they are wily and subtle, coyote shape-shifters resorting to irony and satire, at others straightforward firebrands. In whatever guise, they are pungent critics of deceit and abuse in the established order.

Curmudgeon

We take a moment's opportunity to enjoy a word lover's delight (and no doubt someone else's sheer boredom): contemplation of the relationship between reprobates and curmudgeons. We are, by blood, title and persuasion, the former. But we offer a congenial home to curmudgeons, who are, in a roundabout way, the closest of kin. On a good day, we can find the two spirits commingling in our hearts. Repromudgeon.

Purely as a pedigreed word, curmudgeon is a poor relative. No one appears to know where it came from. There's been speculation about its connection to Middle English and Old French words relating to stealing and hoarding; and it is said that a correspondent of Dr. Johnson attempted to assign an etymology to it based on the fusion of coeur (heart) and méchant (malicious, spiteful). Mischievous souls, these amateur etymologists.

"Curmudgeon seems, vexedly, just to appear sometime in the latter half of the 16th century, a nonce-word, made up. There is little doubt that a curmudgeon is a churlish fellow of independent mind, and tolerates neither fools nor those who provoke others' suffering for their own advantage. His critics call him greedy, a muckworm and pinchgut, a lickpenny. In truth he is none of those. Like Robin of the Hood, he steals and hoards only in the interest of equity, and knows more than most that gifts remain gifts only by passing them on. The reprobate is marginally more consistent; his reprobacy is likely to be characterological. The curmudgeon's totem animals are the chameleon and the lion. He commonly pads among soberly collected wisdom, fulmination, frothing outrage, depression, and sleepy abandonment to the muse.

Both are formidable critics, both shape-shifters.

It is intriguing that reprobates and curmudgeons are typically identified as men rather than women. Current explanations are unsatisfactory, and the truth belies the myth. A plausible but untested hypothesis rests upon a curious transposition of subject and object. It is not that there are fewer female than male reprobates and curmudgeons. The people whose lives and works they deflate and disarm, however, are far more often men than women, for a simple reason: men have thus far been the world's destroyers.

Edward Abbey's reflections in A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (1989) are fitting here: "I have been called a curmudgeon, which my obsolescent dictionary defines as 'a surly, ill-mannered, bad-tempered fellow.' ...But through frequent recent usage, the term is acquiring a broader meaning, which our dictionaries have not yet caught up to. Nowadays, curmudgeon is likely to refer to anyone who hates hypocrisy, cant, sham, dogmatic ideologies, the pretenses and evasions of euphemism, and has the nerve to point out unpleasant facts and takes the trouble to impale these sins on the skewer of humor and roast them over the fires of empiric fact, common sense, and native intelligence. In this nation of bleating sheep and braying jackasses, it then becomes an honor to be labeled curmudgeon."

The last word should be given, in justice, to an inspired taxonomist. John Winokur, in his introduction to The Portable Curmudgeon Redux (a successor to The Portable Curmudgeon, and predecessor of A Curmudgeon's Garden of Love and Return of the Portable Curmudgeon), writes:

I remain convinced that there is no hope for the human race and that we are in the terminal stages of Life As We Know It. This book is an attempt to amuse myself and others while we're waiting for the last lug nut to fly off the last wheel of civilization.

__________________________________

Reflections on Soul: Loss and Redemption

More than a decade ago, Thomas Moore suggested that the greatest malady of our time was neither heart disease nor cancer, but loss of soul: loss of wisdom about it, loss of interest in it. "When soul is neglected," he wrote, "it doesn't just go away; it appears symptomatically in obsessions, addictions, violence, and loss of meaning."

While Moore (in Care of the Soul) warns against efforts at precise definition, he associates the word soul with recognition of depth and genuineness or authenticity in our lives. As such it is no less present or absent in our ordinary daily rounds--work and love, play, active and contemplative times--than it is in rare moments of dramatic crisis, insight or vision. He argues, I think persuasively but less capaciously than is justified, that the instrument of soul is imagination. That is so if we understand imagination to include experience of all of our sensory, emotional and intuitive faculties, including the enormous range of bodily sensations in movement and at rest.

But, with that caveat, imagination is a useful word, because it conveys the important sense that soul is not merely more or less present or absent in our lives, but that there are crafts available for its cultivation, renewal and redemption. One further limitation of the term, however, is that it encourages us to conceive of soul as an exclusively human phenomenon. More classical notions of soul acknowledge that it is present in all animate creatures; indeed, it may be most usefully understood as the very principle of animation or vitality, and care of the soul as the craft of reanimation. Anima mundi, Moore reminds us, refers not to some abstract concept of  world soul or organizing divinity, but to "the soul in each thing," and our capacity truly to tend with lingering and loving attention.

Paradoxically, as spiritual traditions have commonly recognized, soul is more accessible, more nourished, when we are simply attentive and mindful, rather than when we deliberately seek. One of the most beautiful expressions is found in the Taoist classic, the Tao Te Ching (here in my own adaptation from several versions; I don't speak or read or write Chinese, but this book has been a treasured companion.)

Of old, he who was well versed in the way
was subtle, mysteriously comprehending,
and too profound to be known.
Just because he is unknowable,
The best one can do is describe him.

His alertness was as that of one crossing
        a river in winter.
His caution was as that of one who must meet danger on every side.
His gravity was as that of a guest.
He was fluid as melting ice,
simple as uncarved wood,
open as a valley.
inscrutable as murky water.

Who can be muddy and yet, settling,
        slowly  become limpid?
Who can be at rest
till the right action arises by itself?

He who preserves this way
does not seek fulfillment.
Not seeking, not expecting,
he is present, and can welcome all things.

When we think of ways of caring for soul, tradition often suggests, rightly, that we think of the liturgies,  the music and other practices of our religious traditions, including prayer and meditation. For all of us, though--and especially for those who have lost effective connection with those traditions, it is worth recalling that soul makes no hard and fast division between sacred and secular. Reckonings time and again recognizes poetry as a deep well of imagining, reimagining, evoking soul.

One of the oldest and most treasured ways of gaining access to soul is through the ancient craft of storytelling. Many traditional tales, if written--or preferably spoken, sung or enacted--by a genuine artist, bring soul to life in ways that are both moving and profound. A contemporary example is the work of an old friend, Gioia Timpanelli, who, in her writing and (best) in the full presence of her telling before an evening fire, breathes new life into old tales in ways that reveal both the depth of their familiarity and their ineluctable mystery.

In her novella, Rusina, Not Quite in Love, a retelling of the Beauty and the Beast fable in Sicilian guise, she weaves a tapestry of mutual awakening, that of the young woman Rusina and that of the reclusive Master Gardener, Sebastian, whom Rusina initially knows as both gentle and "the ugliest man I had ever seen." The story, of course, is that of their coming to know each other more deeply, and particularly that of Rusina's awakening, through kindness, care and love, to Sebastian's true nature. At story's end, when they are talking, Sebastian says, "My favorite part of the story, Rusina, is when you take my hand and look into my eyes and see me." Rusina replies, "As always, mine, Sebastian, is now when you will say for the first time and again, 'This has happened not because we have loved beauty but because it has loved us.'" (Gioia Timpanelli, Sometimes the Soul, NY: W.W. Norton, 1998)

Care of the soul, writes Moore, "appreciates the mystery of human suffering and does not offer the illusion of a problem-free life. It sees every fall into ignorance and confusion as an opportunity to discover that the beast residing at the center of the labyrinth is also an angel."

I spent my professional life (as well as much of my childhood and adolescence) in schools, colleges and universities, which--particularly as one moves from high school to college and on to graduate study--pay too little attention to recognizing and developing the crafts of soul. The very pace and fragmentation of the school day, as well as preoccupation with information, cognition and skill, have more to do with socialization and functionality in the marketplace than with human development. Intellect and soul are not antithetical; at best, they complement and nourish each other. When they are out of balance, when intellectual accomplishment and physical prowess are rewarded in service to a narrow or superficial sense of vocation, soulfulness--a more capacious identity--withers.

Nature and God—I neither knew
Yet Both so well knew me
They startled, like Executors
of My identity.

        - Emily Dickinson

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A Brief Reflection on T.S. Eliot's "Ash Wednesday"

Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit
of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.


Every day as I climb the stairs to our second floor I pass those lines framed on the wall. More often than not, used as I am to them, they register obliquely, with little consciousness. But I always know they are there. Less often, but sometimes, I stop and say them again, as prayer, breviary. The calligraphy in which they were written is sun- and time-faded now. The words and their plea will outlast us all.

They are the last eleven lines of T.S. Eliot's poem, "Ash Wednesday." Less widely celebrated and anthologized than his earlier and later work--especially "The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock," "The Waste Land," and, incomparably, "The Four Quartets"--"Ash Wednesday" is a poem of midlife, both chronologically and spiritually. It was completed when the poet was 42 years old, three years after he was confirmed in the Church of England: his first major poem after that formal turning.

And "Ash Wednesday"—like and unlike its great successor “The Four Quartets”—is a poem of spiritual turning, purgatorial and penitential, as is the day, the changing season, the cyclical movement of its meditation: life, death, and rebirth. Turning (which I'll discuss elsewhere in Reckonings) is explicit in the poet's language, in the poem's structure, its circling, moving refrain.

It is liminal time, between time, dream time.

Here are the years that walk between, bearing
Away the fiddles and the flutes, restoring
One who moves in the time between sleep and waking…

The right time and the right place are not here
No place of grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice

….....


Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying

The absence of hope is not foregone, but turns from loss, mourning, mimetic hunger for worldly things, turns slowly, with many a backward, suffering slip—is one "between birth and dying" or "between dying and birth" or both?—to sitting still, silent, listening, waiting for new life.

The poem begins,

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?

The poem is full of repetition, cadence, circularity in its journey like that of Dante as he rises through the circles of Inferno and Purgatory. Near the end of the poem there is, of course, no resolution, no final synthesis. There is prayer. It is still

….the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

Always dialogue, even in solitude. The yew-trees: aged, ageless, often planted in churchyards, associated with loss, grief and strength, an ancient symbol of the tree of life.

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Living and Dying: Jane Kenyon

I wrote recently that I'd sidetracked myself while planning to write a short piece on Jane Kenyon.  Sidetracking in my experience is more often a good thing than a source only of distraction: I like to think that the sideways skittle of crabs is the product of eons of natural selection. They got the hang of it before the rest of us did. In the instance at hand, the day before yesterday, I wrote about companionship and solitude, and included a Kenyon poem that memorably expressed her love of peonies.

In the darkening June evening
I draw a blossom near, and bending close
search it as a woman searches
a loved one’s face.

There is a world of difference between this experience and, say, looking admiringly during a stroll in one's garden--or even more, not looking, or looking but not seeing. Mr. Ramsey, in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, is vaguely aware of color in some periphery of his vision but he neither looks nor sees while walking with Mrs. Ramsey in her summer garden. In Kenyon's poem the experience is one of genuine intimacy, bending close, searching "as a woman searches a loved one's face." It is a kind of consciousness, an identity, a dimension of relationship that Mrs. Ramsey has--with her children and other people, as well as with the natural world. One can't imagine Mr. Ramsey, who has eight children and is devotedly dependent upon his wife, searching a loved one's face, except to determine if it can be turned to his own needs.

It is too much to identify this quality of consciousness with life and its absence with death-in-life. But not a great deal too much, for it is a quality of consciousness that is critical to nourishing life. It's absence does not necessarily destroy, abuse or deplete life, but without it life lacks, I'm convinced, a crucial depth of perception, of imagination, that has profound consequences for our capacities to care for ourselves, each other, the earth around us, and other people and creatures whose well-being depends on our capacity and will to attend to them.

In that context I want today to circle back on the writing of Jane Kenyon.

Companionship

One of the pleasures of keeping a journal like this is the fairly frequent experience of a certain kind of felicitous serendipity. (Jung would have called it synchronicity.) I set out this morning to find some old notes about the life and work of the poet Jane Kenyon, having in mind stimulus to a new piece of writing about her gifts. I couldn't find those notes, but instead ran across a journal entry I wrote over three years ago while on a solo kayaking expedition in the Canadian wilderness. Despite its largely waterborne character, I called that journey a walkabout, because it seemed to share with that Australian aboriginal practice a sense of going where one is moved to go, without preconceived itinerary or pace or even conscious direction.

In the days of that trip I frequently returned in my journal thoughts to discoveries I was making, or that my travels were reawakening, about the character of walkabout. In one of them, devoted to solitude and companionship, I found myself returning to an earlier reading of a poem by Jane Kenyon. That I could have written those lines today was both reassuring and humbling--the latter because it brought to mind how few original thoughts I appear to have had in a lifetime, the former because those few seem, on the whole, to suffice. Their marination over the years has revealed dimension I'd earlier neglected, and sustained an experience of adventure. That marination continues as I circle back now upon the core themes I am slowly unpacking in these new Reckonings.

Here is what I wrote very early in that time of discovery, on Thursday, August 28, 2003, from the village of Bartlett, New Hampshire:

Walkabout as Companionship

When I first began to learn about the tradition and meaning of walkabout, I understood it as a solitary experience. I imagined a single person, laying down his ordinary, accustomed, everyday rounds to follow a mysterious calling; walking into some wilderness with no other guide than inspiration, care and alertness would provide.

There is truth in that image, especially if “wilderness” is regarded as a wide array of inner and outer territory that is unaccustomed and unpredictable. But it is the singularity about which I’ve come to have second thoughts, and the romantic notion of abandoning the everyday elements of our lives. Yes, walkabout entails the giving of oneself, the release of a self-imposed order that has gradually, over time, dug a narrow confining channel within which I’d grown used to living. And it’s already brought more sustained experience of solitude than I’ve ever known before.

But I’m coming to understand again (in my heart and bones, not just in my head) that solitude and aloneness are not the same, that walkabout, like authentic and wholehearted living under any circumstances, is essentially relational. I walk, to borrow Thoreau’s now hackneyed phrase, to a different drummer, more slowly, over less familiar terrain—but it is the character and quality of my consciousness, my open invitation to linger, the following of tracks I have not laid down, nor even anticipated, that make the difference. Like Thoreau during the time he recounted in Walden, I can return to my own Concord, to friendships and meals and gardens I have tended, and remain on walkabout.

More and more I’m realizing that walkabout is of its nature companionable. When I think of our own culture’s Songlines, I keep hearing the embracing, wonderfully extravagant voice of Walt Whitman, and of contemporary voices who sing of the compelling, astonishing intimacy of everyday.

A good friend, reading of my ventures, perhaps noting how deeply I was moved by the film, “Winged Migration,” sent me a poem of Mary Oliver:

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Speaking in another vein of such companionship in “the family of things,” I hear Stanley Kunitz talking with Bill Moyers about his and others’ life and work: “The echo that mocks us comes from the Stone Age caves. The poem on the page is only a shadow of the poetry and the mystery of the things of this world. So we must try again, for the work is never finished. I don’t think it’s absurd to believe that the chain of being, our indelible genetic code, holds memories of the ancient world that are passed down from generation to generation. Heraclitus speaks of ‘mortals and immortals living in their death, dying into each other’s lives.’”

Jane Kenyon

Jane Kenyon, who lived with the excruciating, immobilizing isolation of depression her whole life, knew as deeply as anyone the redemptive walkabout in her own garden, especially with her beloved peonies:

Peonies at Dusk

White peonies blooming along the porch
send out light
while the rest of the yard grows dim.

Outrageous flowers as big as human
heads! They’re staggered
by their own luxuriance: I had
to prop them up with stakes and twine.

The moist air intensifies their scent,
and the moon moves around the barn
to find out what it’s coming from.

In the darkening June evening
I draw a blossom near, and bending close
search it as a woman searches
a loved one’s face.

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Keepers: a new photo album

I added a new photo album to Reckonings today which I'm calling "Keepers." I've been reorganizing and culling my photo files, being sure I've securely backed up those I know I want to keep. A natural outgrowth of that review was to keep a small folder of favorite pictures, and that's "Keepers." I was reviewing pictures taken, for the most part, during the last three or four years. So far I've only posted 18 photos to "Keepers," as I think there's a useful distinction between those I want to tuck away for future work, for family and close friends, and those that may be of some interest to others, readers of Reckonings.

It's a diverse collection--"motley" was the word that first came to mind, but each of those images reminds me of a memorable experience and continues to stir the pot of my intrigue with seeing and responding more clearly and surely to that which quickens the imagination.

There are evocations of home, of my beloved White Mountains of New Hampshire, a month's trek through Provence in 2005, another visit to the F.D.R. Memorial in Washington, and a few precious moments of dawn and dusk spent with snow geese and sandhill cranes at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in southwestern New Mexico. I'll add carefully to "Keepers" over the next weeks and months, and perhaps include some annotation to individual photos.