Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

Martin Luther King

 

Psalm 15 

Lord, who can be trusted with power,
and who may act in your place?
Those with a passion for justice,
who speak the truth from their hearts;
who have let go of selfish interests
and grown beyond their own lives;
who see the wretched as their family
and the poor as their flesh and blood.
They alone are impartial
and worthy of the people's trust.
Their compassion lights up the whole earth,
and their kindness endures forever.

 

 (A Book of Psalms, translations by Stephen Mitchell)

 

"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."

 

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

 

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. 

A poem and prayer of e.e. cummings

 

You must know this poem and prayer; it has long been with us.

And always worth saying and praying again, as repetition is often fresh gift to God, earth and ourselves, who are one and another.

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

 

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

 

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

 

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

 

 

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.

 

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.)

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.
 

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

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 poem for Christmas

W. S. Merwin's poem "Alba" is not exactly Christmas seasonal, so clearly is it set in the literal flowering of spring time. Still, there is much of the spirit of Christmas in it - the journey afoot and on mule, the blossom of new life, the unexpected companionship, a gift of breath, of song, a repeated song of praise, a kind of prayer, a greater gift for which we haven't words.

Alba

Climbing in the mist I came to a terrace wall
and saw above it a small field of broad beans in flower
their white fragrance was flowing through the first light
of morning there a little way up the mountain
where I had made my way through the olive groves
and under the blossoming boughs of the almonds
above the old hut of the charcoal burner
where suddenly the scent of the bean flowers found me
and as I took the next step I heard
the creak of the harness and the mule's shod hooves
striking stones in the furrow and then the low voice
of the man talking softly praising the mule
as he walked behind through the cloud in his white shirt
along the row and between his own words
he was singing under his breath a few phrases
at a time of the same song singing it
to his mule it seemed as I listened
watching their breaths and not understanding a word

            - W.S. Merwin