Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

"Monet Refuses the Operation"

The Private Life, a book of 73 short poems in which "Monet Refuses the Operation" first appeared, was Liesel Mueller's second book of poems, published in 1976. That collection, which was the 1975 Lamont Poetry Selection, is filled with poems exploring the character of human lives with wonderful insight and power. Dick Allen wrote of those poems that he experienced "shocks of recognition.... She goes after our secrets, this poet; often, she finds them." Russell Brignano added that "her verses are filled with captivating figures and metaphors, projecting an imaginative, deeply reflective, subtle intelligence."

 

"Monet Refuses the Operation" is written in the voice of Claude Monet as an elderly man speaking to his physician. He has returned from a visit with the doctor in which the doctor has advised him to have surgery for an undisclosed ailment. The doctor has also advised his patient to abandon his gift of metaphoric imagination - the center of his life personally and as an artist - and return to a more literal, as the doctor would have it, more realistic view of the world. Monet, thankfully, refuses both the operation and the gratuitous and insensitive advice.

 

Sadly, that doctor's comments are still not unusual in our day. A friend recently told me she had been to her doctor recently: he came bustling into the examining room, his hands full of papers, saying "Now, here are the lab reports..." My friend, like Monet, stopped him and said, "You must ask me first, "How are you?" Fortunately the doctor complied, and I hope learned a lesson about human relationships that is not commonly taught in medical schools.

 

Perhaps returning home after that unsettling visit, Monet sits at his desk and puts into words the truth of experience the doctor does not understand. He does so clearly and beautifully, not in anger but eloquently and in a kind of wistful sympathy for the doctor's lack of imagination. He wishes his doctor might have something of the gift he has taken most of a lifetime to acquire.

 

Doctor, you say that there are no haloes

around the streetlights in Paris

and what I see is an aberration

caused by old age, an affliction.

 

 ______________________________

 

 

Monet Refuses the Operation

 

Doctor, you say there are no haloes

around the streetlights in Paris

and what I see is an aberration

caused by old age, an affliction.

I tell you it has taken me all my life

to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,

to soften and blur and finally banish

the edges you regret I don’t see,

to learn that the line I called the horizon

does not exist and sky and water,

so long apart, are the same state of being.

Fifty-four years before I could see

Rouen cathedral is built

of parallel shafts of sun,

and now you want to restore

my youthful errors: fixed

notions of top and bottom,

the illusion of three-dimensional space,

wisteria separate

from the bridge it covers.

What can I say to convince you

the Houses of Parliament dissolve

night after night to become

the fluid dream of the Thames?

I will not return to a universe

of objects that don’t know each other,

as if islands were not the lost children

of one great continent.  The world

is flux, and light becomes what it touches,

becomes water, lilies on water,

above and below water,

becomes lilac and mauve and yellow

and white and cerulean lamps,

small fists passing sunlight

so quickly to one another

that it would take long, streaming hair

inside my brush to catch it.

To paint the speed of light!

Our weighted shapes, these verticals,

burn to mix with air

and changes our bones, skin, clothes

to gases.  Doctor,

if only you could see

how heaven pulls earth into its arms

and how infinitely the heart expands

to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

The last triptych of Monet's paintings of water lilies on his pond at Giverny was painted near the end of his life, during the years 1920 to 1922. He was going blind, and many early critics found these paintings obscure and ill-made because his eyesight was failing, reflecting an alleged realism kin to that of Monet's doctor in Liesl Mueller's poem. The triptych lay in Monet's studio for twenty years after his death. Now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, they were most recently the subject of a special MOMA exhibition in late 2010 and early 2011. (Mueller herself was growing blind when she wrote the poem.) MOMA's curator on that occasion spoke revealingly of their character in contrast to Monet's paintings of the same water lilies 25 years earlier:

"The Japanese Footbridge is among Monet's last paintings of this subject, made between 1920 and 1922. Twenty-five years earlier, in the late 1890s, the footbridge provided the subject of Monet's first series of paintings of his pond at Giverny. While the paintings in the earlier series are more naturalistic in style, the later works feature dense swirls and loose strokes of color that almost obscure the form of the bridge. These later paintings also feature a fiery palette of maroons, rusts, and oranges unique within Monet's body of work.... The aim of his large Water Lilies paintings, Monet said, was to supply 'the illusion of an endless whole, of water without horizon or bank.'  In the attempt to capture the constantly changing qualities of natural light and color, spatial cues all but dissolve; above and below, near and far, water and sky all commingle. In his enveloping, large-scale canvases Monet sought to create 'the refuge of a peaceful meditation in the center of a flowering aquarium.'"

 

The last lines of Mueller's poem, again expressly addressing the doctor, speak of an opportunity awaiting any of us. To know how "the heart expands to claim this world," how any and all of our experience of the myraid things of this world can be transformed into the bright gift of a thousand suns, we have only to wait, to find "the refuge of a peaceful meditation." To gain some inkling of what is suggested by heaven pulling earth into its arms, we have only to disenthrall ourselves, to exercise our common gift of metaphoric imagination, to wait and yearn, to meditate or pray,  so we are in time — in a lifetime and in a moment — drawn into a larger consciousness of that which moves mysteriously and in silence behind, above and beyond us.  

Off a Side Road Near Staunton

American Life in Poetry is a free weekly column attending to the work of contemporary American poets. It is published by the Poetry Foundation, which also publishes Poetry magazine.

This week's issue is introduced by Ted Kooser, another fine poet:

"In many of those Japanese paintings with Mt. Fuji in the background, we find tiny figures moving along under the immensity of the landscape. Here’s an American version of a scene like that, by Stanley Plumly of Maryland, one of our country’s most accomplished poets."

Stanley Plumly's "Off a side road near Staunton" gives us an opportunity to understand what we can see if we are willing to linger. We needn't wait for a special occasion. An ordinary day, a "nothing afternoon," will do just fine for us to fill, or a Japanese landscape upon a wall. An ordinary day, and time retreats into itself.

you could walk the rest of the day into the picture 

and not know why, at any given moment, you’re there. 

 

 Off A Side Road Near Staunton 

Some nothing afternoon, no one anywhere, 

an early autumn stillness in the air, 

the kind of empty day you fill by taking in 

the full size of the valley and its layers leading 

slowly to the Blue Ridge, the quality of country, 

if you stand here long enough, you could stay 

for, step into, the way a landscape, even on a wall, 

pulls you in, one field at a time, pasture and fall 

meadow, high above the harvest, perfect 

to the tree line, then spirit clouds and intermittent 

sunlit smoky rain riding the tops of the mountains, 

though you could walk until it’s dark and not reach those rains— 

you could walk the rest of the day into the picture 

and not know why, at any given moment, you’re there. 

 

- Stanley Plumly

 

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Reprinted from “Old Heart,” by Stanley Plumly. Copyright ©2007 by Stanley Plumly. Used by permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Introduction copyright © 2011 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate 

 

Before He Makes Each One: a day of politics and poetry

The poet Ranier Maria Rilke has given me and generations of others the gift of his wisdom throughout our lives. He speaks anew to me in successive stages of my own life, as I return to the same lines, old and still mysterious friends, again and again. The shock of rediscovery is as profound as the shock of first dawn. I rediscover what I had not known. Images and feelings appear, leave lingering traces, reappear freshly in new light, mingle gracefully with other gifts.

I thought today was going to be a political day of renewed hope. It was that for a few hours, and the impact lingers. But I found a midday turning in response to the Rilke poem below, and I was intensely moved.

So here is a paragraph about my political morning, before a related but more poetic and spiritually focused afternoon and evening:

After early morning at my writing table I went to breakfast having plucked from the internet and eagerly read the text of the president's speech yesterday in Osawatomie, Kansas. Barack Obama found again the voice that the mongrel wolves of Washington had muted but not destroyed. I suspect we'll discover that his canniness in these past three years has served us better than his critics on left and right have known. His words were clear, passionate, eloquent, and at least bear some measure of kinship to those of Theodore Roosevelt, his predecessor in Osawatomie a century ago. (President Obama may be seen and heard here. Timothy Egan offers a valuable and more critical perspective on Roosevelt and Obama here.)

What impact Obama's words will have we can't know. The times are still very dark, inequality continues to grow, plutocracy and war still reign, winter comes and the Occupy movement is at an unpredictable turning point, and the clarion call of a campaign for re-election has been heard.

_________________________________

Now to Rilke.

I'm not going to write about the poem that follows or Rilke's other work. Or the craft of Stephen Mitchell's translations, or the connections between politics and poetry. All in good time.

You will know or love or not, as you will, and may well know Rilke's gifts longer and better than I. The translation below is not Mitchell's but is nonetheless beautiful.

If you like, linger with the poem. You may then ease into its depths. Or it may carry you as if you stepped into a river.

I'll only note that some readers will need to draw upon their gift for metaphor, while others will see and hear, think and feel more immediately as strong a response as I felt and continue to feel. Those two alternatives are not mutually exclusive.

Before He Makes Each One

Before he makes each one
of us, God speaks.

Then, without speaking,
he takes each one 
out of the darkness.

And these are the cloudy
words God speaks
before each of us begins:

"You have been sent out
by your senses. Go
to the farthest edge
of desire, and give me
clothing: burn like a great
fire so that the stretched-out
shadows of the things
of the world cover
me completely.
Let everything happen
to you: beauty and terror.
You must just go--
no feeling is the farthest
you can go. Don't let
yourself be separated
from me. The country
called life is close.
By its seriousness,
you will know it.
Give me your hand."

~ Rainer Maria Rilke  ~

(Translated by Annie Boutelle, Metamorphoses Fall 2001)

Note to a friend at The Redwoods, my community

I feel grateful for what you say today, and what you said 40 years ago. Yes, Rich's poem "What kind of times are these" is indeed shockingly powerful.

All of what you say feels true in the best sense of that often poorly used word.  Your note prompts me to re-imagine the much-remembered line with which Robert Frost begins his poem "Mending Wall." 

"Something there is that doesn't love a wall."

I don't like to speak or read poetry independently of the whole poem. Seeing that single line hanging out there on my mental clothesline feels unkind to the poet and so much of my own and others' experience of "Mending Wall." The setting is Frost's own, New Hampshire or Vermont.

Because I don't know how you may know that poem, or come again to know it, I am including it for you here as a small gift of thanks.

Many thanks, my friend,

John

Mending Wall

by Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun;

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

The work of hunters is another thing:

I have come after them and made repair

Where they have left not one stone on a stone,

But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,

To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,

No one has seen them made or heard them made,

But at spring mending-time we find them there.

I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again.

We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

And some are loaves and some so nearly balls

We have to use a spell to make them balance:

"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"

We wear our fingers rough with handling them.

Oh, just another kind of out-door game,

One on a side. It comes to little more:

There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors."

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

"Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offense.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,

But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather

He said it for himself. I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

He will not go behind his father's saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

 

Gail Collins - an appreciation

Gail Collins writes with good humor in her own distinctive voice and on New York Times opinion pages.

No one could or will take the place of Mark Twain's adventures of Huckleberry Finn or his friend Tom Sawyer. We won't have a contemporary Will Rogers or know the likes of Molly Ivins or Herblock. Joan Rivers at 76 isn't worried that anyone will succeed her. She's enterprising enough for a dozen followers, and with any luck will be an actress until she dies. (You should, however, see the fine documentary, "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work," written, directed, produced — and brilliantly edited — by Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern.) Dave Barry, author of I'll Mature When I'm Dead, is probably right. And that's just fine. He is a splendidly prolific author of adult and children's literature, as well as a newspaper columnist.

This isn't the place to plumb the difference between varieties of good humor, or between humor and comedy, much less comedy and tragedy.

So we're free simply to celebrate Gail Collins, and gratefully to read her excellent columns in the Times.

Underneath every truly successful comic is an intelligent critic. In this event, a critic skilled in combining humor and biting analysis to characterize American politics, cultural craziness and corporate ripoffs. She is especially good at deflating the pretentiousness of politicians caught in their own maze of contradictions and foibles.

Political humor or genuinely humorous political commentary is a necessary and largely lost art, but every generation seems to bring us at least one wonderful example of doing it well. Gail Collins bids fair to become that example in this second decade of the 21st century. I wish her a long and happy life.

Witness a few of the opening paragraphs of her column today, Saturday, December 3, 2011.

"It’s weird how you can lose track of our ever-changing world. For instance, until recently, I thought 'reality TV' meant games about people who were stuck on an island or locked in a house together for the summer. Then, suddenly, I noticed that there were seven different regularly scheduled shows about real housewives, three about people who bid on abandoned storage lockers and two about people who kill wild hogs for a living. 

"And then there was online education. (Confession: This entire column is actually going to be about online education. I just used the wild hogs to reel you in.)

"I always thought that the only kids getting their entire public schooling online were in the hospital, living in the Alaskan tundra, or pursuing a career as a singing orphan in the road company of 'Annie.' Not so. There are now around 250,000 cyberschool students in kindergarten through high school [actually through college and graduate school], and the number is growing fast...." 

She goes on to point out that behind every such ripoff there is enterprising capitalism, at least one corporation and probably several making a tidy profit off American taxpayers, in this instance including a company called K12 Inc.

She even manages to bring out the humor in David Brooks:

David Brooks: Gail, which was your favorite not-Romney boomlet? Did you like the Bachmann Spring, the Cain Supernova, the Trump Tornado or the Gingrich Comet?

Gail Collins: David, we may part philosophical company as this campaign rolls along, but I like to think we will always have Donald Trump, Presidential Front-Runner.

David: I think I liked the Cain moment the best because this was a presidential campaign predicated on the conviction that the candidate was not actually running for president. The whole campaign had a modernist “This is Not a Pipe” absurdity to it, and I’m sorry to see him collapse, though I did see a nice tweet from somebody who observed that the only thing Herman Cain knows about foreign affairs is that he denies having had any. Read more…

 

 

A letter to my rabbi son about poems and poetry, truth and fiction

Joshua, I thought of you when I read an Orion blog posting by an unlikely Miami denizen, Karen Russell, author of two books for children with intriguing titles: a book of short stories called St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, and the novel Swamplandia!

Ms. Russell quotes a great poet and an even greater novelist, both women, both memorably creative and of highly distinctive voice, whose words evoked my memory of your sermon about the number of poems we don't understand on the way to the one we do. First, the brilliant Flannery O’Connor, who said, “The truth is not distorted here, but rather a distortion is used to get at truth.”  And then Marianne Moore calls poets "literalists of the imagination" and poems themselves "imaginary gardens with real toads in them." Marianne Moore in turn brings to mind a thought apropos of your sermon. Like William Carlos Williams, she had a second vocation, like being a rabbi, that served household economy, social justice and the nourishment of her art. After her graduation from Bryn Mawr in 1909 she taught at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, until 1915, when she began to publish her poetry. Afterward she served as editor of the literary and cultural journal The Dial.

 Marianne Moore 

The Orion Blog

Bookshelf: Swamplandia (with thanks to Orion Magazine, a wonderful publication entirely without advertisement; see http://www.orionmagazine.org)

November 04, 2011, by Karen Russell

Karen Russell is the author of the book of short stories St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and the novel Swamplandia! , reviewed recently in the May/June 2011 issue of Orion. We asked Karen a few questions about the intersecting roles of place and fantasy in her writing.

Whenever I’m asked about the ratio of the real to the fantastic in my work, I will shamelessly plagiarize Flannery O’Connor, who said, “The truth is not distorted here, but rather a distortion is used to get at truth.” Another quote that comes to mind comes from the poet Marianne Moore, who calls poets “literalists of the imagination” and poems themselves “imaginary gardens / with real toads in them.”

When I first started writing stories, eons before I ever did any reflecting on “craft” or “process,” I would just sort of naturally begin with setting, usually an aqueous or a densely wooded one, a literal, concrete place that I could see in my mind’s eye. In St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, the story “The Stargazer’s Log” I imagined as being set on a sleepy beach like Marco Island, on Florida’s Gulf coast; “Ava Wrestles the Alligator” was set on a failing alligator park in a kind of haunted version of the Everglades; and “Z.Z.‘s Sleepaway Camp for Disordered Dreamers” was a camp on an island of pines where it seemed always to be twilight or midnight, aMidsummer’s Night Dream of a woods.

In Florida, fantasy is our big industry, so I think it’s natural that in my writing I keep returning to settings where the boundary between the real and the fantastic, the natural and the artificial, gets effaced. I was very influenced by the theme parks that surrounded me as a kid in South Florida, these artificial worlds like the Miami Seaquarium that fronted the real ocean, or the Gatorland park in Orlando where you walk through a gaping, cartoon-green archway built to look like an alligator’s jaws in order to see the real thing. Here’s a creature that hasn’t changed in millions of years, and who survived its ancestors, the dinosaurs. It’s like a splinter of time. And while this Mesozoic monster is swimming around an artificial lagoon, children are wandering around the park with balloons, and infants are sucking on rubber pacifiers in their strollers while their dads push them, talking on cell phones.

Flannery O'Connor at the age of 39, well before publication of her mature works of fiction in the 1950s and 1960s.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

I think the geography of my childhood conditioned me to be drawn to fiction that was elastic enough to contain multiple universes, to juggle many worlds at once. Because that was daily life in my homestate. That collision of different kinds of time and natures and realities. For example, it took us forty minutes to drive from the Dadeland Mall, with its frenzied music and Food Court and zillions of people from every country you can imagine, and the “Hurry! Hurry! Buy! Buy!” vertigo of all malls, down the Dixie to the Everglades National Park, which felt dizzying in a very different way. I was an anxious kid, and somehow going to the Everglades could cure me of that shallow-breathing feeling. There is so much sky. And green spots of color on the horizon, these hammocks, tree islands, that appear to be floating in a sea of dark yellow grass. Even as a nearsighted child with a short attention span, I think I realized the sublimity of a sky that huge, of birds and trees as comically strange as the pelican, the royal palm. The Everglades, compared to the high-speed, honkadelic retail at Dadeland Mall, felt like a timeless, mythic setting: palm trees and gumbo limbo, big flame-red poinciana, mangroves and sawgrass, white ibis and great blue heron, anhingas frozen on pylons, turtles, manatees, and the grinning alligators, of course.

As a reader, I’ve always been attracted to books with settings that feel both wholly real and wholly other. Siamese-twin universes, where the daylit world we know is connected to an underworld or alternative reality. When I was a kid, so many of my favorite books seemed to simultaneously occur in a world that I recognized and some alternate zone—a bunch of anemic, pink-eyed British kids walking through their closet door to become the heroes of Narnia, say. Or siblings tesseracted through space to a different dimension, explorers plummeted in a submarine to an alien, liquid realm. A Midsummer’s Night Dream is set in both a real woodland and an enchanted fairyland where all ordinary laws are suspended.

So long as you have a human character interacting with a landscape, all those dreams zipped up in a skinsuit, I think you’re going to end up with an amalgam of fantasy and reality. Every tree and rock is filtered through that particular human’s eye. Any physical setting, in whatever book you take down off the shelf, whether it’s Venice or a Martian bear cave, reveals these other dimensions: the fantastic, subjective, invisible dimensions of the material world.

In Swamplandia!, I often found the physical settings through which Ava and Kiwi and Ossie travel to be analogous to their emotional states—when Ava has to escape from the swamp, for example, I pictured her trip across the vast floodplain as the literalization of what it feels like to move through grief. Similarly, when Kiwi gets “swallowed” by the Leviathan slide at the mainland World of Darkness theme park, I thought of that as symbolic of what it feels like to be digested by an impersonal institution: to become anonymous. Setting for me almost always operates on both a literal and a figurative plane, but only over the course of drafting does it become sort of shockingly obvious to me. Grief in a swamp, you don’t say? I’m always the last to know!

I discovered a lot of the places that ended up seeping into my fiction between the ages of ten and fifteen, when I would go on these long bike rides. I was a little bit of a loner, and I’d ride my bike to Matheson Hammock almost every day after school—it’s one of the last remaining hammocks in Miami, and right in the heart of the city, a really quiet oasis where I liked to pedal fast through this truly eerie mangrove tunnel. Sometimes I’d be the only one there and I’d see this beautiful heron that I swear looked as tall as me, just standing stock-still in the water. James Merrill has that beautiful line: “the world beneath the world is brightening.” Whenever I saw that great blue heron, that’s exactly how I felt—like some mystery was drawing closer to the surface, where you could almost glimpse it. And I think that’s the power of the richest settings in fiction—they take you to where the world beneath the world begins to brighten.

Karen Russell, a native of Miami, received the 5 Under 35 award from the National Book Foundation in 2009. Her novel Swamplandia! was published in February 2011 by Alfred A. Knopf.

Love,

Dad

 

Facing change - a very short and circular story about a cow and a chicken

We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us was good for the world. 

We have been wrong.

We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us.

And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it.

Wendell Berry

 

A wise friend of mine, who farms and keeps company with honeybees in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, reminded me of poet Wendell Berry's words. My friend also wrote and sent along a little story as companion to Berry's compelling thought. "When driving to the sanctuary," he wrote,

we pass a poultry farm, and every day we saw one single cow grazing on the hill. We could not avoid feeling pity for her being alone; cows are herd animals.

One day, to our surprise, we saw a chicken with her, and for the next weeks we kept seeing this same scene every day: cow grazing––chicken picking; cow walking––chicken walking behind; cow lying––chicken lying. It filled us with joy: the cow was not alone anymore.

What is going on, a chicken leaving her flock to hang around with a cow? Sure, she found plenty of delicious things to pick, but it was more than that. It is clear to us: in addition to our earthly climate, the human soul and nature in totality are changing.

 

Frederico Fellini's "La Strada"

Frederico Fellini's magnificent "La Strada" (The Road, 1954) was the first ever to receive the Academy Award for best foreign language film, in 1956. Its impact upon American audiences persuaded members of the Academy of Motion Pictures, normally focused on the produce of Hollywood, to recognize that fine films had long been made elsewhere in the world.

"La Strada" deeply moved me. Filmed in stark black and white, its rural Italian landscapes are spare and hard, suggesting poverty, age, ravage of war. The story and characters are simple and manifold, comedic and tragic, like those of a fairy tale.

Indeed, the word "fey" has been used to describe the brilliance of "La Strada's" central presence, Gelsomina. She is played by the Italian actress Giulietta Masina, Fellini's wife and muse. "Fey" means magical, fairy-like, strange, more literally and deeply, "fated to die." Gelsomina, a truly magical woman, does die, as do the film's two other principal characters, Zampanò (Anthony Quinn) and The Fool, touchingly portrayed by Richard Besehart. 

The story is simple and profound. A girl is sold by her impoverished mother to a crude traveling "strong man," entertainer and illusionist Zampanò. Gelsomina becomes Zampanò's assistant and companion, and as they travel by wonderful contraption — half wagon, half ancient motorcycle — from town to town, fair to fair, season to season, Gelsomina offers Zampanò a gift of true magic and love. She is a mythic presence of eros, a gift he is incapable of recognizing or reciprocating. 

The Fool, in this instance an aerialist, classical embodiment of humor, cleverness, tenderness and wisdom, recognizes Gelsomina as Zampanò cannot. But The Fool can only show the way. He himself, unlike those he serves, is powerless to effect transformation. He knows that gifts die if not recognized and passed on.

An Italian film critic wrote of this film, "how much meaning, how much ferment enrich this apparent simplicity. It is all there although not always evident." 

"La Strada" is a beautiful embodiment of human frailty, longing, resilience and aching loss. Like the enduring stories of old, it may be viewed and understood on many levels, at once manifest and elusive.

 

FDR's Four Freedoms then and now, 1941 and 2011

President Franklin D. Roosevelt's State of the Union Address to Congress on 6 January 1941 deserves renewed attention today. 

It became known thereafter as one of his most eloquent and important speeches. FDR proposed four essential human freedoms people throughout the world should enjoy, and went on to say more concretly what they imply for any of us.

We might begin by reading and reflecting upon his own words, and listening, as  we still can, to his resonant clarion voice.

More important, we have both reason and opportunity to read and listen as if we heard the same words spoken today, for Roosevelt evoked values and needs, fear and thanksgiving, deeply of this day as well as his own.

He spoke of freedoms grounded in the U.S. Constitution — freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship. Then Roosevelt added two more, drawn from his New Deal for an American people suffering from the Depression:

• freedom of people everywhere to enjoy economic security, and 
• freedom from aggression, as he memorably put it, "freedom from fear" at home and everywhere in the world.

Norman Rockwell's painting of Freedom from Fear

In the autumn of 2011, this nation — 99% of us — know too little economic security, and have reason to fear, with others of this world, the political and military policies of our own American government, a corporate and military oligarchy as much as or more than a democracy.

We need the energy, transparency, clarity and leadership represented by Franklin Roosevelt as deeply as did the nation he addressed in the war-shadowed and war-torn year of 1941, seventy years ago.

It is valuable, then, to assess the relevance of the four freedoms to this earth's and its people's well-being.

In the next few days and weeks, I hope to do that, and I welcome response from others.

The Occupy movement is at a crossroads; we must not let it wither in the face of oligarchic opposition and suppression.

 

Below are the critical moments in FDR's address. (Emphases are mine, added to draw out for the reader unfulfilled needs in our own time.)

Eleanor Roosevelt, in her own right one of the most admired people of the 20th century, was an important voice in her husband's conception of the four freedoms. She went on, after his death in April 1945, to serve their accomplishment — everywhere in the world — for the remaining years of her life, until her death on November 7, 1962.

The nation takes great satisfaction and much strength from the things which have been done to make its people conscious of their individual stake in the preservation of democratic life in America.  Those things have toughened the fiber of our people, have renewed their faith and strengthened their devotion to the institutions we make ready to protect.

Certainly this is no time for any of us to stop thinking about the social and economic problems which are the root cause of the social revolution which is today a supreme factor in the world. For there is nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy.

The basic things expected by our people of their political and economic systems are simple. They are:

• Equality of opportunity for youth and for others.
• Jobs for those who can work.
• Security for those who need it.
• The ending of special privilege for the few.
• The preservation of civil liberties for all.
• The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.

These are the simple, the basic things that must never be lost sight of in the turmoil and unbelievable complexity of our modern world. The inner and abiding strength of our economic and political systems is dependent upon the degree to which they fulfill these expectations.

Many subjects connected with our social economy call for immediate improvement. As examples:

• We should bring more citizens under the coverage of old-age pensions and unemployment insurance.
• We should widen the opportunities for adequate medical care.
• We should plan a better system by which persons deserving or needing gainful employment may obtain it.

I have called for personal sacrifice, and I am assured of the willingness of almost all Americans to respond to that call. A part of the sacrifice means the payment of more money in taxes. In my budget message I will recommend that a greater portion of this great defense program be paid for from taxation than we are paying for today. No person should try, or be allowed to get rich out of the program, and

• the principle of tax payments in accordance with ability to pay 

should be constantly before our eyes to guide our legislation.

If the Congress maintains these principles the voters, putting patriotism ahead pocketbooks, will give you their applause.

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

1. The first is freedom of speech and expression -- everywhere in the world.
2. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way -- everywhere in the world.
3. The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants -- everywhere in the world.
4. The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor -- anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. 

That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called “new order” of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.

To that new order we oppose the greater conception -- the moral order. A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear.

Since the beginning of our American history we have been engaged in change, in a perpetual, peaceful revolution, a revolution which goes on steadily, quietly, adjusting itself to changing conditions without the concentration camp or the quicklime in the ditch. The world order which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.

This nation has placed its destiny in the hands and heads and hearts of its millions of free men and women, and its faith in freedom under the guidance of God. 

Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. 

Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights and keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose.

 

W.S. Merwin's "To the New Year"

Read at the conclusion of a memorial service in Tucson; posted here on Martin Luther King Day 2011

 

To the New Year

 

With what stillness at last

you appear in the valley

your first sunlight reaching down

to touch the tips of a few

high leaves that do not stir

as though they had not noticed

and did not know you at all

then the voice of a dove calls

from far away in itself

to the hush of the morning

 

so this is the sound of you

here and now whether or not

anyone hears it this is

where we have come with our age

our knowledge such as it is

and our hopes such as they are

invisible before us

untouched and still possible

 

RECKONINGS: A brief introduction

Blueberries and granite, photo by John R. Boettiger

Reckonings is a journal focused on human and cultural change, and justice in its range of interactive dimension - personal, social, economic, environmental.

Attention to such themes is typically expository and analytic. But true reckonings include imagery and story, drama, dance, poetry and song, the world of our dreams, shadow as well as light. Wall off or ignore any of these and our exploration of lives and their character risks desiccation and superficiality.

Justice, hope and history: so inevitably issues of

• meaning and value,
• good and evil,
• sacred and profane,
• body, mind, heart and soul as one integrated, systemic whole,
• the evolution of human consciousness through a lifetime and from one generation to another, to the seventh generation,
• the character and health of our relationships with each other, our roots in family, community and place,
• our membership in the natural world of which we are an interactive part, and for which we bear unique responsibility.

The word reckoning is rich in implication, suggesting the most careful regard, seeking true direction, and (as in "day of reckoning") the consequences of our lives and the mysteries of forgiveness. Our tools and the ways of our work are those common to writer and artist: attention, contemplation, patience, persistence, imagination, conversation, crafting one's learning with as much clarity, truth and grace as may be found or given.

The subtitle and theme of Reckonings are drawn from Seamus Heaney's The Cure at Troy, a version of Sophocles' play Philoctetes. It has become an obscure play, but Heaney's version, while little performed, has rescued it for continued reflection, and I've written about it here. (See the post "Wounding and Cure.")

The pages of Reckonings change frequently, more in keeping with kairos than chronos. They are linear only in the sense that one follows another from day to day, but it may just as well be said they are circular. Subjects appear, metamorphose, fade, reappear in response to discovery, learning and revision; and in response to that which most needs attention -- the love and wisdom, the neglect and cruelty of those who bear responsibility for the lives of others -- ways the first can be nourished, the second transformed and redeemed.

Comments, conversation, sharing, subscription: I welcome communication with anyone who feels a kinship with one or more of the themes of Reckonings. Offer comments on individual posts, or write me directly, john@reckonings.net. Click on "Comments" at the end of any post to leave a comment. Click on "ShareThis" to share a post with friends via email or networking sites. Subscribe to Reckonings by clicking one of the subscription options in the column on the right. (I trust needless to say, your email address will never be shared with anyone.)

Tiger Woods and Barack Obama as Persons of the Year?

Why did I imagine - admittedly with a touch of fear - that this sharp piece on Tiger Woods and our culture of marketing and deception (by Frank Rich a week ago in the NY Times) would end with at least some speculation about Barack Obama? 

This president walks so many tight ropes that the soles of his feet must feel like those struck by the ropes of interrogators. Thus far, though, he has been true to the character and intent of the man portrayed in his books and, on the whole, in the 2008 elections. Those who feel betrayed have misread, or simply not read.

We should still be celebrating - and praying for the safety and integrity of - the man we voted for last November and watched with lingering disbelief and unalloyed pride in Grant Park and on the Washington Mall a year ago. And praying and working for a larger Democratic majority in Congress next November  - against the odds, perhaps, but progressives are used to that, and it's a little early to calculate them securely.

Op-Ed Columnist - Tiger Woods, Person of the Year - NYTimes.com

www.nytimes.com

"Tiger Woods, whose sham beatific image was questioned by no one until it collapsed, exemplifies the decade of Enron, in which most of us have been so easily bamboozled."

Wild Child, Wild Elder

Two poems came over the transom today, as every day, and sometimes one or both are wonderful examples of synchronicity at work, coincidence whose meaning is far more than accident. There are deep and special connections between two of C.G. Jung's most fruitful concepts, synchronicity and active imagination. Both come especially alive when I think, as I have been recently, of teaching young children. 

I've begun to think again upon the wild child, not in the popular sense of Tarzan's early years, or a child raised by wolves, say, who encounters a human community later and inevitably with problematic consequences. I'm thinking of a more ordinary child -- but still extraordinary, perhaps now in our urban and electronic culture, more rare, even among the endangered species? If so, here is one that belongs on the list of the International Union for Conservation of Nature and WorldWatch. 

Because the child I imagine is simply he or she who grows even from infancy with an experience of the natural wild, the wilderness, in and around him or her. The wind and the rain, the arcs and play of light of sun and moon, the other species with which symbiotic relationship -- inter-being is a Buddhist term -- is less and less a matter of assumption, more and more a matter of necessity. 

The climate crisis slips from our consciousness, yes, because we fear for our economic security and our safety, but more deeply because we've lost, or never truly have known, our membership in the natural world, our wildness. As life has literally disappeared - died - from hundreds and thousands of square miles of once fertile earth and river and sea, we do not experience that loss as a loss of home, a loss of soul, as it is.

So nourishing the wild child, passing on the wisdom of the wild elder, teaching wildness in our families, kindergartens and colleges, as a critical dimension or domain of our human development, is an urgent need. I want to know -- I am hungry to know -- who does it and how.

Here are the two poems that floated into my space today. 

The first (afterward, check out the astonishing picture attached) reminds me of my love of Annie Dillard, who is a wild elder. I don't know Lynn Ungar yet, except through this poem, but it is a perfect example of the wild spirit, grown -- more, clearly, than that which we all begin, our experience of yearning. The wild spirit is now largely counter-cultural. it needs to be learned, and learned well, taught by those who are themselves taught, taught in the wild and taught, maybe we could say something like the prince tames the fox in Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince, to tame the wild also (not really, not like a pet), to bring it indoors, to bring it into conversation and companionship with other realms and ways of being. 

Hawks

by Lynn Ungar

Surely, you too have longed for this -- 

to pour yourself out

on the rising circles of the air 

to ride, unthinking, 

on the flesh of emptiness.

Can you claim, in your civilized life, 

that you have never leaned toward 

the headlong dive, the snap of bones,

the chance to be so terrible, 

so free from evil, beyond choice?

The air that they are riding 

is the same breath as your own. 

How could you not remember? 

That same swift stillness binds 

your cells in balance, rushes 

through the pulsing circles of your blood.

Each breath proclaims it -- 

the flash of feathers, the chance to rest 

on such a muscled quietness, 

to be in that fierce presence, 

wholly wind, wholly wild.

  

And then the second poem, as startling in its way -- harder to see in "the ashy city." The cry follows the sustained sight, breaks through the felt absence of imagination: "Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us," even here, even now.  We need wise elders to teach wise children, or at least to teach those who teach wise children, and Mary Oliver is that kind of wise elder. This is the wise elder's sight, and a wonderful example of bringing that sight, that energy, indoors, as it were, into conversation with grief, into encounter with existential pain: the poet's "heart pumping hard," like "the pulsing circles of your blood."

Starlings in Winter

by Mary Oliver

Chunky and noisy,

but with stars in their black feathers, 

they spring from the telephone wire

and instantly

they are acrobats

in the freezing wind.

And now, in the theater of air,

they swing over buildings,

dipping and rising;

they float like one stippled star

that opens,

becomes for a moment fragmented,

then closes again;

and you watch

and you try

but you simply can't imagine

how they do it

with no articulated instruction, no pause,

only the silent confirmation

that they are this notable thing,

this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin

over and over again,

full of gorgeous life.

Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,

even in the leafless winter,

even in the ashy city.

I am thinking now

of grief, and of getting past it;

I feel my boots 

trying to leave the ground,

I feel my heart

pumping hard, I want

to think again of dangerous and noble things.

I want to be light and frolicsome.

I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,

as though I had wings.

Pouncing fox

I was arrested by this image. I think the photographer caught a quintessential moment when there is no turning back, the literal height of suspense. It may be all in a day's work, but I imagine extraordinary joy. 

Download Pouncing fox (a .pdf file, so I couldn't post it as a picture).

Rain

"In From the Rain" (New York Times, 2 August 2009) is Verlyn Klinkenborg at his best, observant, attentive to the small dramas of the earth in ways that convey their familiarity and their sometimes ominous mysteries. Like him, I have been thinking much of water this summer, and especially of the power of rain. 

Grey wall moving. 

Darker air, fresh wet smell, 

wind filling the trees. 

When the rain comes, 

there is nothing else. 

- John R. Boettiger

Rain, photo by John R. Boettiger

Contemplation

I often feel more like the dog.

A walk in Norwegian woods

A Wendell Berry poem, for contemplation

No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.
More and more you have become
those lives and deaths
that have belonged to you.
You have become a sort of grave
containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved
then, now, and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree
standing over a grave.
Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.

~ Wendell Berry ~

Michael Leunig

This note comes by way of my refrigerator, where I just posted this admonitory observation of the incomparable Australian cartoonist and social critic Michael Leunig.

Leunig is a treasure not to be missed. He is 5th generation Australian, in his early 60s now, something of a national treasure among Australian progressives. He has a very interesting website of his own, with writing about his work and his politics. A well-informed admirer, who maintains a Leunig appreciation website called Curly Flat, has described Leunig as follows:

Though his profession may be listed as "cartoonist" on his tax return, Michael Leunig is much more. Although his work is at times incredibly mirth provoking he is not so much a humorist as an observer, philosopher, commentator, historian of the absurd and catalyst for free thinking. Born in East Melbourne (Victoria, Australia) in 1945, Leunig subsequently evolved in Footscray, an eclectic inner industrial suburb, until his success as a satirical political cartoonist afforded him the means to escape the city in favour of the gentler ambience of nearby country environs. From his early work in the 60's when he was published in such diverse journals as Newsday, Woman's Day and the controversial London Oz magazine, Leunig developed his distinctive pen style and eye for the ridiculous which led to publication in 1974 of his first book The Penguin Leunig (see elsewhere on the site for a complete anthology). These days he lives somewhere near Melbourne where he is a regular contributor to the local daily broadsheet The Age and fridge doors all over the country. While most Australians are familiar with his work, few could tell you anything about the man and yet through his cartoons, know everything about him. By all accounts he is indeed shy, gentle and pensive, and his work reveals him to be cynical, witty, sensitive, deeply spiritual, emotionally precarious, at times depressed and always insightful. A dysfunctional genius perhaps.  Michael Leunig simultaneously defines and defies most Australian stereotypes, and I, for one, am thankful.

On a similar and complementary theme:


And a final moment of contemplative wisdom:

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).

_______________________________