Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

Pigs as Angels

I've re-read once more today Galway Kinnell's poem, "St. Francis and the Sow," and thought again of why I love it so, and why it came to me again this morning, by chance and by email. 

I am moved by the blessing, the self-blessing from within, and our need and gift for both relearning and reteaching, "in words and in touch / it is lovely / until it flowers again of self-blessing." 

And I am moved to remember a friend last evening telling us a story of her serious illness some years ago, a moment of sitting still, tired, waiting in the seat of a car, surrounded by wind and rain, glimpsing in the bushes a small thing so covered with earth she could not recognize it. So she opened the door, walked a short distance in the wind and rain, picked up the small thing covered with earth, which turned out when washed - a blessing - to be an angel, made of stone. 

So this morning, reading Kinnell, I thought to myself, when have I written before of this poem, and why? I discovered three occasions, two and three years ago, and I decided to weave together something new today, but drawn also from each of those occasions. (You can find them in Reckonings if you do a Google search there - in the right column - for Kinnell.)

One more personal word. I normally send these occasional musings and gifts of poems to friends anonymously, using the bcc line, and I'll do that here as well.  But I want to send this message openly (To:) a small group of people I have known so well for so long they are as family, my fellow members of the board of directors of The Christopher Reynolds Foundation, because the spirit evoked here has intimately to do with our search for a way to focus our attention and resources on a deeper conception of sustainability and responsibility for the earth's health than is common. 

Galway Kinnell's A New Selected Poems appeared in 2000. He was awarded both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for his first Collected Poems in 1980. In the autumn of 2001 he was interviewed by Elizabeth Lund, poetry editor of The Christian Science Monitor, and in her resulting account there is the following passage:

"Whether he's writing about his family or describing the loveliness of sows, Kinnell's work reveals affection for creatures both great and small. 'The other animals are the angels. Human babies are the angels.'

"A pig as an angel?"

"'I try to see past the usual clichés about things,' he smiles.  'Pig' is a pejorative word, but if you get to know them, get a feeling for them, you see that they have an extraordinary beauty. When creatures don't have an extraordinary beauty, it's because the person in contact with them is not seeing it. I feel more and more in love with other creatures as I get older.'"

On another occasion earlier in 2001 he said:

"I don't think of myself as a 'nature poet.' I don't recognize the distinction between nature poetry and—what would be the other thing?—human civilization poetry? We are creatures of the earth. All the creatures have their intricate ways of living on earth. Humans are unique in one respect: we've taken over. We've taken over so successfully that we've become a threat to many of the other creatures and even a danger to the earth itself, so that's why I don't think of myself as a 'nature poet.' Poems about other creatures may have political and social implications for us."

St. Francis and the Sow

The bud

stands for all things,

even those things that don't flower,

for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;

though sometimes it is necessary

to reteach a thing its loveliness,

to put a hand on its brow

of the flower

and retell it in words and in touch

it is lovely

until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;

as St. Francis

put his hand on the creased forehead

of the sow, and told her in words and in touch

blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow

began remembering all down her thick length,

from the earthen snout all the way

through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of

the tail,

from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine

down through the great broken heart

to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering

from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking

and blowing beneath them:

the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

 

~ Galway Kinnell ~

(Mortal Acts, Mortal Words)

 

Imagine, in yourself, the expressions of consciousness - in St. Francis, in the sow - Kinnell evokes in the poem. Imagine the blessings you have received, and those you have given, by touch. 

Kinnell says, "The other animals are the angels. Human babies are the angels... When creatures don't have an extraordinary beauty, it's because the person in contact with them is not seeing it. I feel more and more in love with other creatures as I get older.'" 

So what  creature does not have an angel within, if we can see? How do we say or teach and learn the intimacy of seeing and being? How close is the consciousness Kinnell describes to that of his fellow poet Robinson Jeffers when he writes, 

..... 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. There is a task worthy of our learning.

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 ~

A Shabat walk through the image of Noah's raven

Sometimes I write back and forth to my son who is a rabbi. He knows I love the poetry of W.S. Merwin, and a few days ago he sent me Merwin's poem called "Noah's Raven." I awoke very early this Shabat morning, and thought of Raven.

Raven, you remember, is a scavenger. He collects and hides what is precious, as well as a lot of junk. There are many stories of Raven in native American traditions, but I decided to stick, in my walk through Google, to the associations to Noah's raven. Here is the circle of my Raven-like going and coming home (back to the ark):

Dear Joshua,

My early morning Shabat studies...

Noah's Raven
 
Why should I have returned?
My knowledge would not fit into theirs.
I found untouched the desert of the unknown,
Big enough for my feet. It is my home.
It is always beyond them. The future
Splits the present with the echo of my voice.
Hoarse with fulfillment, I never made promises.

 

                       - W.S. Merwin

I confess I forgot long ago the presence of Noah's raven, and I'm very happy that you introduce him to me through Merwin. Yes, ravens endure an ominous legacy, black carrion birds, Hitchcock creatures. The Biblical passage is one inviting commentary, isn't it. From a medieval Islamic scholar quoted in Wikipedia: "Noah spent five or six months aboard the Ark, at the end of which he sent out a raven. But the raven stopped to feast on carrion, and so Noah cursed it and sent out the dove, which has been known ever since as the friend of mankind." 

So the dove, white and pure as a bride waiting for her groom, gets all the credit. No sense that the raven has paved the way. He never made promises; his knowledge would not fit into theirs. There are no easy lessons; it is, if not always, still usually beyond them/us. 

From Genesis: ""And it came to pass at the end of forty days, that Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made. He sent out the raven, and it kept going and returning until the drying of the waters from upon the earth. And he sent out the dove from him to see whether the water had subsided from the face of the ground." (Genesis 8:6-8).  The key passage, "He sent out the raven, and it kept going and returning until the drying of the land. 

"The Rashi, the preeminent Torah commentator, explains that initially, Noah was intent on sending the raven to search for dry land. However, the raven was hovering around the ark instead. Why did it refuse to go on the expedition? According to the Talmud (Tractate Sanhedrin 108b), the raven refused to go because it was concerned for the preservation of its species. It challenged Noah along these lines: "I am hated because seven of the clean species were taken in the ark, while only two of the unclean (of which the raven is considered; see Leviticus 11:15.) were granted refuge. Yet you choose to send me out!" It reasoned that were harm to come to it during a reconnaissance flight, there would only be the female left of its kind.  from upon the earth." 

Midrash passages are wonderfully contradictory, but seem to settle on the raven as among the unclean and mostly cruel:  He "was prepared for another mission, during the days of Elijah the prophet. To reproach the people and their wicked King Ahab, Elijah decreed a drought upon the land, whereupon no rain fell. G-d instructs Elijah to journey to the desert: "It shall be that you will drink from the brook; and I have commanded the ravens to supply you with food there." Thereafter, ravens brought Elijah nourishment. (I Kings 17:4-6).

"This, then, is the meaning of the Torah’s statement that Noah’s raven "kept going and returning until the drying of the waters." The raven’s calling was ultimately fulfilled when the rains "dried up" during Elijah’s era."

At the end, that particular teaching is lovely, if a little less than full of reminders of the struggle: "The raven teaches us to be merciful, patient, and forgiving toward others. Even if they do wrong, we must love them, reach out to them, and be compassionate to them. Everybody is important. The raven reminds us of the famous saying of our sages (Ethics of Our Fathers 4:3): "Do not be scornful of any person, and do not be disdainful of any thing, for you have no person without his hour and you have no thing without its place."

Found near our little house in South Hadley, MA, perhaps once a desert - a fossil that came to be known as the raven's footmarks:

There's a lot about Raven violating the prohibition against procreation aboard the ark, and impregnating his wife....

"... many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased." Daniel, 12:4s

"Why should I return?" Yet he returns, again and again, like a bodhisattva. 

Love on this Shabat morning,

Dad

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

E.J. Dionne and David Brooks on Reinhold Niebuhr as "Obama's theologian"

A fascinating and lively program.

David Brooks, E.J. Dionne on the Legacy of Reinhold Niebuhr and the Future of Christian Realism from Speaking of Faith on Vimeo.

Elizabeth Gilbert on the nature of genius

"Witness," a poem by Denise Levertov

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 ~


Note: For commentary on Levertov and three more of her poems, click here.

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 ~