Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

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

"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.

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]