Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

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."

 

The prodigal son - a thanksgiving toast

Thanksgiving evokes the theme of homecoming, return of the prodigal son. Rejoice, for he and she who were lost are found.

Rembrandt's vision is, for me, the most moving and profound of interpretations.

Look at the father's arms and hands, as expressive as his face. And the son's sandals worn to almost nothing, his head cradled upon his father's chest. Finally, the light upon them both. Jesus's parable — the last in a sequence of three stories about redemption in the Gospel of Luke — is a story of forgiveness, following an archytypal journey of a father's extravagent misjudgment, his younger son's longing, quest, loss, return and in this moment redemption. It is the father's prodigality that starts the ball rolling, the son's that carries it along, and their reunion, transformed, that brings it to conclusion.

This is meant to be a Thanksgiving toast. To offer such without mention of those who are genuinely without adequate shelter, food, health care and educational opportunity — the symbolic 99% —  would be uncharitable and cruel. The poor in these United States and elsewhere are invisible enough. We need not compound that absence of vision by ignoring them at Thanksgiving. As today's lead editorial in the New York Times says, "One in three Americans — 100 million people —  is either poor or perilously close to it." Nearly 50 million people are below the poverty line. Seventeen million of them are children.

As the Times concludes, "There is a growing out-of-sight-out-of-mind problem....The poor do without and the near poor, at best, live from paycheck to paycheck. Most Americans don’t know what that is like, but unless the nation reverses direction, more are going to find out." A dour but realistic note on which to end this Thanksgiving toast to all. Remember, it isn't the 1% who will inherit the earth. 

Striking in anger - some reflections of yesteryear

I need to learn to celebrate the unpredictability of my memory. If I only knew its logic I would feel some recompense. The mere idea that it may have logic gives heart.

Richard Davidson, one of my best friends, asked me about eight years ago my experience with “striking in anger.” My near autonomic response — written though after some reflection — was

I don’t strike; I am struck. I don’t even strike when struck. Neither, however, do I offer the other cheek. I just let the numb red one face whatever’s to come. No, I honestly can’t remember striking anyone in anger. I do recall being struck in anger, for example by the former boyfriend of a girl sitting in the car beside me. I’d rather look, and sometimes of course I don't see (I didn't see him coming, just his fist).

Although by God I have been angry, and I have a considerable repertoire of sublimation and repression. Upon early reflection, my assumption became: I haven’t struck because if I struck the impact would be so dire that prison and poverty were inevitable and the globe was at risk. Superman run amok; an island, not an atoll or a rock, but a real island, blown sky-high with the flash and then the mushroom cloud. Cosmic devastation.

Then a fork in the road (metaphor suddenly wrenched into another warp), and at least three Johns:

• (1) I feel ashamed and stupid and stuck; 
• (2) I understand all the many-layered implications of such fantasy, and feel wry humor and sympathy; and
• (3) I’m just tickled pink and scared shitless that I harbor such destructiveness —even if, especially if, the victim is but one other person (a wife, say; or a parent, to really draw circles within circles). 

Being angry and facing anger straight on, directed at me, literally make and made me sick. I do damned near anything to avoid it.... been true I think my whole life. Was I emotionally abused as a child? By neglect, not ill will, but yes. Will I remain that child for the rest of my small remaining span? Yes. Who else am I at heart, if anyone, and how could there possibly be room? A smidgen at least.

It has something to do with voices, first and third and whatever. Whose narrative is it? There are so damned many voices; if we listened to them all we would be reduced to schizophrenic coleslaw. If we don’t, we may be gambling with our souls. Some of the voices are true, some false, most misted in partiality and ambiguity. And how long is it incumbent upon us to wait? To even ask that question is arrant foolishness.

It still is.

 

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.

 

A Levertov poem for friends on my 72nd birthday, with thanks to Joe Riley

WITNESS

 

Sometimes the mountain

is hidden from me in veils

of cloud, sometimes

I am hidden from the mountain

in veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue,

when I forget or refuse to go

down to the shore or a few yards

up the road, on a clear day,

to reconfirm

that witnessing presence.

 

~ Denise Levertov ~

 

(Selected Poems)

 

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.)

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.

A winter's tale

A few weeks ago a friend and I, inspired by our similar responses to Scott Russell Sanders's wonderful essay in Orion magazine called "Mind in the Forest,"  decided we would try an experiment of finding a particular tree in our respective necks of our woods, hang out with it regularly as the seasons change, and see what kind of relationship began to develop. Here is part of my most recent report, which turned out to be a reflection on a poem of Ranier Maria Rilke as well:

Winter has come here in Norway, with cold, several days of soft snowfall, and sometimes a little wind, more darkness. My own habits are slower to change; I am not leaving my room as easily; I find reason to linger in the house, even beside the low circle of paraffin flame of the little stove in the front hall. (My coat and boots are right there, in the closet.)

So today I began to be an animal in winter, just as light was beginning to fade around 2:30 in the afternoon. I found my good winter gloves under the cake pan (where else?), my boots, vest, jacket, watch cap in the closet, and I set out for my tree. Of course it was there, at trail’s end, in a place long ago—probably 300 years or so—named “the end of the world,” I imagine because the farms and fields ended there; only wilderness—trees—stretched beyond, and one could see far into the distance. “The last before the infinite.” (See below.)

The old birch I had chosen grew there, with another grandfather birch that stood close by and as tall—I would guess 200 feet easily. Not so close that I could reach both with my arms spread, but if I stretch out on the ground (now wet snow) with arms extended I can feel one trunk with my feet, the other with my hands.

Now the fact that strikes me is that I can’t remember which I chose that first time. I have two trees, two hairy grandfather birches, covered with green gray lichen. And I stood with them quietly for a time, perhaps a little like Robinson Jeffers’s image of mankind as
 
a moving lichen
On the cheek of the round stone...
 
On my walk back I thought, this is going to take a very long time, but perhaps there is one way of understanding Rilke’s last lines,

When you have grasped its meaning with your will,
then tenderly your eyes will let it go.

You—I—we—have as long as it takes, as long as we need. Done with our grasping, our will, even with its—our—meaning—tenderly we will let go.

Garrison Keillor tells us that yesterday was Rilke’s birthday, December 4, 1875. And Keillor also reprints these lines of Rilke, without saying where they came from in his poetry. Wherever, they served to move me from my room, into winter and into the trees, where discovery awaited.
 
Whoever you are, go out into the evening,
leaving your room, of which you know each bit;
your house is the last before the infinite,
whoever you are.
Then with your eyes that wearily
scarce lift themselves from the worn-out door-stone
slowly you raise a shadowy black tree
and fix it on the sky: slender, alone.
And you have made the world (and it shall grow
and ripen as a word, unspoken, still).
When you have grasped its meaning with your will,
then tenderly your eyes will let it go.
 

Listening, and listening

I don't think my Amherst College classmate (1960) Dave Wood would mind my repeating here a short Facebook exchange he and I had in response to my earlier post of Scott Russell Sanders's reflections on listening to trees. And speaking of the pleasures of one thing putting another in mind, I am reprinting below a moving and closely related poem by David Wagoner, who still spends a lot of time listening in his beloved Pacific Northwest.

DW

This puts me in mind of the sounds we hear at night at our remote lakeside camp in eastern Maine--historically, Wabanaki (Penobscot and Passamaquoddy) land. The loons--and there are many--are there as soon as the ice is off the lake in the spring, and stay (at least the young ones do) until late in the fall. They have an other-wordly and complex language, one that clearly has social significance for them. Each night, an hour or two after sunset, they begin calling from all over the lake, as if trying to locate each other as they settle for the night. This goes on for several minutes, then quiets down. Then (if the night is still) we can sometimes hear barred owls ("eight hooters"), and bullfrogs croaking from the marsh across the lake. During the day, the ravens are raucous--and their language, too, is complex. By mid-summer the mergansers that we see courting in May parade proudly up and down the lakeshore with a dozen ducklings in tow, the mothers clucking orders to their brood (the males seem to disappear after their job is done). It's a wondrous world.

JRB

Many thanks, Dave, for your stories of living with the birds of eastern Maine. I share your love of loons, who feel like lifelong companions - along with mourning doves - I listen for them wherever I am, wonder at their voices - most vividly on early morning and evening kayaking on Squam Lake in New Hampshire, where I lived for several years. Ravens, too, are special companions of a different sort - I'm influenced by Raven's large and problematic place in Indian legend, not unlike a winged Coyote. It is indeed a wondrous world. My gratitude for membership is unbounded.

Here is David Wagoner's poem:

The Silence of the Stars

 

When Laurens van der Post one night
In the Kalihari Desert told the Bushmen
He couldn't hear the stars
Singing, they didn't believe him.  They looked at him,
Half-smiling.  They examined his face
To see whether he was joking
Or deceiving them.  Then two of those small men
Who plant nothing, who have almost
Nothing to hunt, who live
On almost nothing, and with no one
But themselves, led him away
From the crackling thorn-scrub fire
And stood with him under the night sky
And listened.  One of them whispered,
Do you not hear them now?
And van der Post listened, not wanting
To disbelieve, but had to answer,
No.  They walked him slowly
Like a sick man to the small dim
Circle of firelight and told him
They were terribly sorry,
And he felt even sorrier
For himself and blamed his ancestors
For their strange loss of hearing,
Which was his loss now.  On some clear nights
When nearby houses have turned off their visions,
When the traffic dwindles, when through streets
Are between sirens and the jets overhead
Are between crossings, when the wind
Is hanging fire in the fir trees,
And the long-eared owl in the neighboring grove
Between calls is regarding his own darkness,
I look at the stars again as I first did
To school myself in the names of constellations
And remember my first sense of their terrible distance,
I can still hear what I thought
At the edge of silence where the inside jokes
Of my heartbeat, my arterial traffic,
The C above high C of my inner ear, myself
Tunelessly humming, but now I know what they are:
My fair share of the music of the spheres
And clusters of ripening stars,
Of the songs from the throats of the old gods
Still tending even tone-deaf creatures
Through their exiles in the desert.

 

~ David Wagoner ~

How do we hear the rest of the natural world? By learning to listen. Would we listen to nature if our lives depended upon it?

"I live on Tolowa (Indian) land. Prior to the arrival of the dominant culture, the Tolowa lived here for 12,500 years, if you believe the myths of science. If you believe the myths of the Tolowa, they lived here since the beginning of time....

"How do we hear the rest of the natural world? Unsurprisingly enough, the answer is: by listening. That’s not easy, given that we have been told for several thousand years that these others are silent. But the fact that we cannot easily hear them doesn’t mean they aren’t speaking, and does not mean they have nothing to say. I’ve had people respond to my suggestion that they listen to the natural world by going outside for five minutes and then returning to say they didn’t hear anything. But how can you expect to learn any new language (remember, most nonhumans don’t speak English) in such a short time? Learning to listen to our nonhuman neighbors takes effort, humility, and patience.

"The Tolowa believed the nonhuman world had something to say, and that what the nonhuman world had to say was vital to their own survival. Given that they were living here sustainably for 12,500 years, and given that we manifestly are not, perhaps the least we could do is acknowledge that they were on to something, and maybe even explore just what that kind of relationship might look and feel like."

from Derrick Jensen, "Playing for Keeps: Would we listen to nature if our lives depended on it?", Orion Magazine, November-December 2009

50th Reunion Book, Amherst College, 2010

In 500+ words, a summary of one's life, view of the world and the impact of Amherst:

The poet David Wagoner was 28 when, at his friend Theodore Roethke’s suggestion, he moved from his Indiana homeland to the Pacific Northwest. He was awestruck by the green luxuriance of life. “When I came over the Cascades and down into the coastal rainforest for the first time in the fall of 1954, it was a big event for me, it was a real crossing of a threshold, a real change of consciousness. Nothing was ever the same again.”

I didn’t travel as far – just a few miles down the Notch road, in fact. But I felt a similar new life in the offing at about the same age, when I resigned my faculty position at Amherst to join the intrepid little band just down the road in the apple orchards of South Amherst, preparing to give birth to Hampshire College.

Mapping those liminal or threshold times is one way I’ve imagined the character and consistency of my life. It serves in this instance to say something that must be true in a sense for all of us.  The four years from the fall of 1956 to the spring of 1960 were an extended coming-of-age experience, with attendant pains, pleasures, accomplishments and missings of the mark.

The first months at Amherst were mostly excruciating. I did my shame-ridden best to hide the fright, but my skills of hiding seemed – to me, at least – to have deserted me with all the rest. Everything felt stripped away but the soft underbelly. At Thanksgiving I told my mother I was going to join the Army; it had to be more forgiving of my deficiencies.

My mother thought not, and I returned to Amherst. A kind of competence began to take hold, and an interest in the wider world reawakened – especially at that time the world of politics, my Roosevelt family’s delight and pride, bread and butter of the dinner table. Alongside a few Amherst friends and memorable teachers – foremost, Henry Steele Commager and Leo Marx – my real mentor was my grandmother, whose home became mine in those years. Her compassion and canny wisdom, her belief in the United Nations, social justice and human rights, fed me and shaped my values and choices. I didn’t begin my undergraduate years with social conscience or consciousness, at least none focused or articulate. Thanks largely to her I graduated with some measure of both.

For me, Amherst seemed – and seems still – effectively to have done what it promised, or at least that which the College most prized. I learned how to think more carefully and usefully, to apply discipline, practice, and the rules of evidence to the intellectual challenges I encountered, to find satisfaction in words that fit what I needed to describe and understand.  

God knows – and my mother, sister and girlfriends knew – I didn’t grow up. Emotionally I was as callow a youth at 21 as at I’d been at 17. For me at least, and I think for the Amherst culture I knew, maturity in that deeper sense was not among the liberal arts. I later sought, with middling success, to make it so in my designs for Hampshire College.                 

Speaking of God, while I learned something about the application and misapplication of imagination and metaphor in those years, I learned next to nothing about their essential applicability to spiritual life. Intuitively I knew otherwise, but I didn’t find my way until later to those who would reawaken that hunger, help me understand that religion was more than the blessing of a no longer required attendance at Chapel. Soul and psyche – the central re-pairing of my adult years of teaching and learning at Hampshire and after – hadn’t yet come into conscious focus.

We’re born yearning for companionship and community, and I’m still growing in their realization. My wife and I now live and work as members of a gifted community of healing in southern Norway - psychiatric hospital, research institute, community outreach program for couples and families, pastoral and professional retreat centers for clergy, physicians, psychologists and nurses.

This past March all of my immediate family – Leigh and I, four children and their spouses, and seven grandchildren – gathered on a Pacific Northwest shore, my birthplace, to celebrate Grandpa’s 70 years. My first great-grandchild - a girl, we already know - is expected at Christmas time. I worry a lot about the state of the earth; I’m very happy to anticipate sharing it with her.

Robert Bly's "In the Month of May"

Robert Bly's poem came to me today, over the transom, through the ether, at the right moment, and as I read and reread, resonance grew. It is a love poem, a layered weaving of season, spirit, the vivid life of an aging, unfinished, still changing soul waiting for - celebrating - the miraculous.

I find such tenderness in his last lines:

Along the roads, I see so many places
I would like us to spend the night.

In the Month of May

In the month of May when all leaves open,
I see when I walk how well all things
lean on each other, how the bees work,
the fish make their living the first day.
Monarchs fly high; then I understand
I love you with what in me is unfinished.

I love you with what in me is still
changing, what has no head or arms
or legs, what has not found its body.
And why shouldn't the miraculous,
caught on this earth, visit
the old man alone in his hut?

And why shouldn't Gabriel, who loves honey,
be fed with our own radishes and walnuts?
And lovers, tough ones, how many there are
whose holy bodies are not yet born.
Along the roads, I see so many places
I would like us to spend the night.

                                - Robert Bly

A hole in the floor

I had an exchange of notes the other day with one of my sons, thinking of the many homes he and I shared over the years of living together and then the visits with each other as he grew into adulthood and began to find and live in his own homes. My mind lingered, as it will, on the sheer number of comings and goings and the frequency of moving, the complex tangle of feelings and forces at work in leaving a home and breaking new ground. I was astonished, dumb wondering as I counted from memory 43 homes in 70 years. I can still walk through all but the very earliest, the first two. Too many comings and goings, I wrote. And he replied, from his own memory drawn from the well of experience we share,

"I remember you saying once when we were hiking in Wonalancet – that day we got lost, remember? - and looking over the mountains and you saying, ‘another place in that interminable succession of places’ -  and the best we can do is to be present for them – their grief, their promise, their tears of joy, forgiveness, loss, return. And when we cannot be present, to try to greet that, too, with compassion. So maybe life is this interminable succession of places, that is, of comings and goings. Thank God we can witness each other through this, and share many of those places."

As I was ruminating on his words I thought of a poem of Richard Wilbur that had not come to mind for many years, the powerful and so deeply evocative image of a carpenter's hole in the parlor floor, gazing down and down, an archeological find, kneeling, looking "where the joists go into hiding,"

A pure street, faintly littered
With bits and strokes of light,
Enters the long darkness
Where its parallels will meet.

and in the end, "the buried strangeness," the spring "which nourishes the known," source of danger, host of life.

A Hole In The Floor
     
      for Rene Magritte

The carpenter's made a hole
In the parlor floor, and I'm standing
Staring down into it now
At four o'clock in the evening,
As Schliemann stood when his shovel
Knocked on the crowns of Troy.

A clean-cut sawdust sparkles
On the grey, shaggy laths,
And here is a cluster of shavings
From the time when the floor was laid.
They are silvery-gold, the color
Of Hesperian apple-parings.

Kneeling, I look in under
Where the joists go into hiding.
A pure street, faintly littered
With bits and strokes of light,
Enters the long darkness
Where its parallels will meet.

The radiator-pipe
Rises in middle distance
Like a shuttered kiosk, standing
Where the only news is night.
Here's it's not painted green,
As it is in the visible world.

For God's sake, what am I after?
Some treasure, or tiny garden?
Or that untrodden place,
The house's very soul,
Where time has stored our footbeats
And the long skein of our voices?

Not these, but the buried strangeness
Which nourishes the known:
That spring from which the floor-lamp
Drinks now a wilder bloom,
Inflaming the damask love-seat
And the whole dangerous room.

- Richard Wilbur

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 ~

Memento Mori

                                                          PERSONAL HISTORY

                                     MEMENTO MORI

                                   "The port from which I set out was the port of my loneliness."

                                                                            - Henry James

Preface

It is nearly thirty years since I wrote a book about my parents and the extraordinarily different families and personal histories from which they came [A Love in Shadow, New York: W.W. Norton, 1978].  I had made a conscious decision at that time to tell their stories as truthfully as I could, and to venture as modestly as possible into the realm of autobiography.

One of the book’s more perspicacious reviewers, Geoffrey Wolff, recognized the fault line in that choice. In revealing little of my own experience, my memories of my own childhood with (and without) my parents, I revealed less of them. This brief essay, then, is an experiment in remediation, a rebalancing of a chapter of my personal book. I write now, as I did then, particularly for my children, that they may know better a part of their own histories.

Each of those children, now adults, two with children of their own, have asked me for memories of my parents, particularly of the grandfather they never knew, around whose legacy an ominous and beguiling cloud still lingers. So much of that memory is gone, casualty of time and trauma. What remains is part of my truth, my story, even as I have inevitably reshaped it through the years, even as it has become difficult to separate the real memories from the stories of others, from the photographs into which I have poured so much of my hunger. For those reasons and others of which I speak here, he must always be the father I barely knew. My children only knew him through the fragments of my telling, and have wondered about his shadowed gifts to me, and through me, to themselves. I did not write or speak much of my loss of him when they were young.

My parents met on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s campaign train in the autumn of 1932, and immediately fell in love. Both were married to others at the time, though separated from their spouses. On that train they were not successful in hiding their liaison from the press corps of which my father was a member.  Had the story of their affair broken, it is just conceivable that the campaign, and perhaps the course of history, would have taken a lurch. Or so, much later, I liked to imagine.

[continued]

Sabbath 2 - Reflections on a Parable

The following reflections and retelling - reimagining - of a familiar story are drawn from one of a series of talks shared in the winter and spring of 2007 with staff and patients at Modum Bad, a psychiatric hospital, retreat center and learning community in Vikersund, Norway.

I discovered Modum Bad in 2005, and returned for a second extended time as a consultant in February 2007. Of course I've learned more than I've taught. My first impressions of Modum Bad, gathered after a first leisurely visit in 2005, are gathered in an informal essay on Modum Bad's website. I am revising and extending that essay for publication later in 2007, Modum Bad's 50th anniversary year -  in fact,  its 150th anniversary year, as it began as a healing spa in 1857. Modum Bad means The Baths at Modum, gathered around St. Olavs Kilde, St. Olav's Spring. My own retelling of Jesus's parable owes a great deal to the translation and commentary of Stephen Mitchell in his Gospel According to Jesus Christ (2001).

The story I retell here is the last and longest of three parables of Jesus recounted in Luke's gospel. The thread they share is that of losing and finding and rejoicing in the renewal or life-redeeming experience. It is a tale of critical turning in life's journey. The theme of turning – a cycle of loss, of tender, halting discovery, and of redemption – is a central one in the history of the human psyche and soul, in the generations that gave us birth, in our Judeo-Christian tradition. The movement is that from life to death to rebirth.

[continued]

                                                                            

Rummaging in the attic (I)

I've been spending time in the attic before the weather gets too cold, rummaging through old files I've carried around through too many moves. I'm not a pack rat who deliberately collects things. I have little patience for filing, so when I do get around to it, what is filed tends to stay filed; I have as little interest in getting rid of those boxes as I did filling them in the first place. Also, moving is traumatic enough without having to make decisions about what goes and what doesn't.

But this month, sitting on the floor in the dim light and the dry, quiet air of disuse and time past that attics everywhere seem to possess, I began to feel something like the old adventure and intrigue of archival research. However likely it was that most of this stuff will become (already was) trash, there is something of my history here, and therefore the history of those I love. With patience, perhaps, a treasure or a painful artifact of years gone may work its way into time present with unpredictable consequences. Who knows? There may be gifts buried here that if freely given and received will renew themselves and create new life.

So I have begun to find, thanks to a first priming experience. I brought a box home, among several that had been stored in a friend's barn, and found it on top of the pile. My friend had alerted me to the fact that it contained something unusual, a special copy of a book written by my father.

John Boettiger wrote one book in the course of his 50 years. It was called Jake Lingle, or Chicago on the Spot, and was published by E.P. Dutton & Co. in 1931. In those years, the 1920s and early 1930s, my father was a general assignment reporter for The Chicago Tribune, then as now Chicago's morning daily paper. For ten years he had known Jake Lingle, The Tribune's senior reporter who had long covered the city's criminal underworld.  Lingle  had long known people on both sides of the law, as well as those--like himself--who plied the shadow world between the two.

John Boettiger, reporter for The Chicago Tribune, at the time he covered the Lingle case

So when Jake Lingle was shot in the back of the head at close range on June 9, 1930 while walking in the Loop on his way to the racetrack, it was assumed that the murder was a gangland execution, and my father was assigned by The Tribune's notorious boss, Col. Robert McCormick, to cover the case. Arriving at the crime scene only minutes after Lingle's death, he spent the next 11 months almost as close to the investigation--and the subsequent trial and conviction of Lingle's killer--as the police themselves. He was on hand, crouched silently in the neighboring apartment, when the suspect was surprised and apprehended outside his door in the Lake Crest Drive Apartment Hotel on  December 21, 1930.

So readers of The Chicago Tribune were treated to a succession of first-hand accounts of an absorbing homicide case, for as my father put it in the foreword of the resulting book, "Never, before the murder of Lingle, had the murderer in a Chicago gang killing been caught and punished."

I read Jake Lingle when I was a boy, and several times since. My father's prolonged absences from the family when I was very young, and his death by suicide when I was 11, precipitated a long search for the man he was, and the book was for a long time one of the few tangible artifacts I had--the kind of artifact that lent itself to the romance I wanted to construct. When I was not much older than he was when he wrote that book, I wrote one of my own, using all the resources I could find to make sense of the lives, families, generations and times from which I had emerged.

But the particular copy of Jake Lingle I held in my hands yesterday in the attic was indeed a special one. I had thought it a major discovery when I was writing 30 years ago, but it had since slipped from memory. Putnam's had mailed my father several early copies at publication time, and he sent one of them to his parents, who had retired from Chicago to San Diego. I don't know how my father got that copy back--likely from his family after his parents' deaths--but it was passed on to me, his only child. Tucked in among its pages is an envelope dated October 10, 1931, postmarked San Diego, addressed to Mr. John Boettiger, Oakdale Ave., Glencoe, Ill. It contained two long letters, one from his father Adam, the other from his mother Dora, responding to the gift of their son's book.

There is no other surviving correspondence between my father and his parents. Those two letters, full of pride and pleasure, written to the 31-year-old reporter and author whom they both still called "my baby boy," offer but one small window on his meaning for them, small and ambiguous hints in their language, their references and asides to inevitably more complex relationships. They are no less precious for that.

The same could be said of the lines written in my father's hand on the book's fly leaf, lines I thought about often in earlier years, and feel again as I re-type them here:

To my beloved Mother and Dad
whom I could never repay in a million years
for the love and the will to live
and to learn and to write
which they gave to me.

From their ever devoted and grateful son

John.

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).

_______________________________