Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

Jerome: Life and Language

St. Jerome is best known as a fourth century translator of the Bible from its original languages into Latin, then becoming the language of the Church. He was the personal secretary of Pope Damasus, who commissioned the young priest in 382 to undertake the task of translation. Jerome was an excellent choice, as he had mastered not only Greek, which had been the common language of the Western world, but also Hebrew and Aramaic, the first being the original language of the Bible, the second the language spoken by Jesus and his disciples in the Holy Land.

Jerome spent over twenty years at his task. He not only went to ancient texts of the Hebrew Bible, but actively--and at some cost to his reputation among his fellow churchmen, including Augustine--sought out help from Jewish teachers as well. He was sensitive to matters of idiom: sense for sense rather than word for word. And he was a gifted interpreter of the texts.

While he was still at work translating, his patron Damasus died in 384, and after a short time in Antioch, Jerome settled in Bethlehem. Among the most learned Christians of his day, he became widely known as the greatest scholar of the early Church. He said: “Love the holy Scriptures, and wisdom will love you. Love wisdom, and she will keep you safe.” Jerome died in Bethlehem at the age of 80 in the year 420.

Albrecht Dürer's famous 16th century engraving of Jerome at work in his study is the inspiration for a poem by the contemporary translator and poet Stephen Mitchell. A Jew having experience in a Christian school while a boy, Mitchell is well known for his translation of The Book of Job, The Book of Psalms, and for his own rendering of The Gospel According to Jesus, as well as for his translation of the poetry and prose of Ranier Maria Rilke, and a version of the Tao Te Ching. Erik Erikson said of Mitchell's translation of Job, "The thoughtful reading of this astonishing translation has been for me a rare experience combining poetry and enlightenment."

It is no wonder, then, that Mitchell was attracted to the scholar and translator of the early Church, and came to meditate so deeply and memorably upon Dürer's engraving.

The poem is especially moving in the intimacy, the love with which the poet addresses Jerome, and in its portrayal of Jerome's experience of the life of the Spirit--the Kingdom of God--"an innermost truth"--as one with the flesh, the sacred realities of everyday life. Tat twam asi. That art thou.

sunlight
and leaf-mold, the smell of fresh bread
from the bakery down the lane,
the rumble of an ox-cart, the unconscious
ritual of a young woman
combing her hair, the bray
of a mule, an infant crying

____________

JEROME

In Dürer’s engraving
You sit hunched over your desk,
writing, with an extraneous
halo around your head.
You have everything you need: a mind
at ease with itself, and the generous
sunlight on pen, page, ink,
the few chairs, the vellum-bound books,
the skull on the windowsill that keeps you
honest (memento mori).
What you are concerned with
in your subtle craft is not simply
the life of language—to take
those boulder-like nouns of the Hebrew
text, those torrential verbs,
into your ear and remake them
in the hic-haec-hoc of your time—
but an innermost truth. For years
you listened when the Spirit was
the faintest breeze, not even the
breath of a sound. And wondered
how the word of God could be clasped
between the covers of a book.
Now, by the latticed window,
absorbed in your work,
the word becomes flesh, becomes sunlight
and leaf-mold, the smell of fresh bread
from the bakery down the lane,
the rumble of an ox-cart, the unconscious
ritual of a young woman
combing her hair, the bray
of a mule, an infant crying:
the whole vibrant life
of Bethlehem, outside your door.
None of it is an intrusion.
You are sitting in the magic circle
of yourself. In a corner, the small
watchdog is curled up, dreaming,
and beside it, on the threshold, the lion
dozes, with half-closed eyes.

- Stephen Mitchell


Literally, yes, "the word becomes flesh," the sacred language comes alive, bursts from the text into life.  "Flesh" is descriptive of more than human being, of mule and leaf-mold and sunlight, of all the earth.

If Jerome was the man evoked by Stephen Mitchell, and heard his words, I can imagine him at such a moment taking up his quill pen and writing his own poem in response, something in the spirit of these lines by Robinson Jeffers:


..... I entered the life of the brown forest,
And the great lfe of the ancient peaks, the patience of stone, I felt the
     changes in the veins
In the throat of the mountain... and, I was the stream
Draining the mountain wood; and I the stag drinking; and I was the stars
Boiling with light, wandering alone, each one the lord of his own summit;
    and I was the darkness
Outside the stars, I included them, they were a part of me. I was mankind
    also, a moving lichen
On the cheek of the round stone...

_______________________

"I was mankind also, a moving lichen on the cheek of the round stone..." That is as lovely an image of homo sapiens as I know--as lovely and as necessary to absorb into our hearts, that we might renew ourselves and restore the earth we continue to destroy.

I am indebted to Leslie J. Hoppe, O.F.M., for his account of Jerome's life in the Church and the character of his translations, and to Joanna Macy's book, Coming Back to Life, for the gift of Robinson Jeffers' poem embodying earth consciousness. It is an excerpt from "The Tower Beyond Tragedy," The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, ed. Tim Hunt (Stanford University Press, 1988).

_______________________________

The Holy Fool

The holy fool, or the fool as wise soul, is a figure in many wisdom traditions, including notably those of the Sufis of Islam, Zen Buddhism, Christianity and the inheritors of the Hasidic movement of Judaism, as well as folklore that is not specifically religious, like some of the tales collected by the brothers Grimm. Fools in the courts of kings in the plays of Shakespeare are typically wise men who cloak their wisdom in a mask of foolishness, thereby reaching their master as straight men cannot.

Such fools amuse, confuse, sometimes speak in simile or circuitous riddles, are often ridiculed--they are, after all, intentionally ridiculous, sometimes insulting or scatological--but can succeed by that very character in breaking through a crust of resistance or disbelief. There is an enigmatic quality to the fool's cloak of madness or nonsense that provokes attention, response, reflection, as well as laughter. The fool's inherent humility, too, may loosen the defensive, ego-inflated character of those who make too much of themselves and thus lose touch with a deeper reality.

Finally, there is another sense of the holy fool, less a matter of conscious and intentional disguise, more a matter of guilelessness, transparency, embrace of wonder and mystery. "The path of soul, writes Thomas Moore, "is also the path of the fool, the one without pretense of self-knowledge or individuation or certainly perfection. If on this path we have achieved anything, it is the absolute unknowing Cusanus and other mystics write about, or it is the 'negative capability' of John Keats--'being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.'" (Care of the Soul, p. 261-262)

Here are a few illustrative stories:

Saint Symeon

Saint Symeon, for those who know of his existence at all, probably would be viewed as a curious candidate for canonization by the Catholic Church. He came to the Syrian city of Emesa in the sixth century. On his arrival, he tied a dead dog he found on a dunghill to his belt and entered the city gate, dragging the dog behind him. Schoolchildren saw him and called out, “Hey, a crazy abba [father].” For he was dressed in the habit of the ascetic Desert Fathers (indeed, that is the community from which he came), but behaved in Emesa quite otherwise. The next morning, a Sunday, he entered the church, put out the lights, and threw nuts at the women. On the way out of the church, he overturned the tables of the pastry chefs.

In Emesa, Symeon quickly consolidated his reputation as "a crazy abba." He walked about naked, ate enormous quantities of beans, farted prolifically, defecated in the streets, gorged himself on raw meat, pastries, virtually anything at hand, kept company with dancing girls and prostitutes, all without the slightest shame. On one occasion, having been invited to join the men in the public bath, he stripped off his clothing and wrapped it around his head like a turban. With his sexuality starkly apparent, he walked past the men’s bath and rushed into the women’s. When there was a new moon, “he looked at the sky and fell down and thrashed about.” In short, he violated virtually every norm of civilized urban behavior, and the citizens of Emesa responded with righteous indignation and not uncommonly with beatings. They were outraged: the most common word used to describe their reaction is "scandalized." That is our first hint of secret sainthood, for the same word was commonly used in the Bible to describe people's response to the behavior of Jesus.

Symeon left the desert for the city, having mastered the practice of the ascetic life of the Desert Fathers, with the purpose of saving souls and "mocking the world." He drew attention to the spiritual pollution of urban life in Emesa by exaggerating its expression. He maintained his spiritual practices in private, and his intimacy with the untouchables, the outcasts of Emesa, like that of Jesus, is full of loving kindness and the spirit of conversion, turning, metanoia.

In playing the fool, Symeon demonstrated that spiritual truth is obstructed, lost by the more dangerous pretenders: those upright, worldly and proper souls whose reputable lives hide an inner emptiness of spirit. In the phrase of St. Paul from First Corinthians, Symeon is "a fool for Christ's sake."

(I am indebted in this brief portrait of Symeon to Derek Krueger's scholarly study, Symeon the Holy Fool: Leontius' Life and the Late Antique City, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966. Krueger demonstrates that the later Church, although recognizing a tradition of the holy fool, had difficulty with some of the more colorful of Symeon's antics.)

Sufi Stories: Mulla Nasrudin

Probably the best known of the holy fools is Mulla Nasrudin, at once a central figure of the esoteric tradition of Sufism within Islam, and a popular folkloric figure from the Middle East to East Asia. The person who, above all, made Nasrudin accessible to readers of the Western world was the Afghan writer and Sufi scholar, Idries Shah (1924-1996), who wrote or compiled over thirty books on the Sufi way of life and Sufi stories. The way of the Sufis, in fact, antedates Islam, and has thrived in many cultures and wisdom traditions. That may be why so many people, in such diverse parts of the world, grew up hearing stories of the marvelous Mulla. Evidence of the interpenetration of stories in diverse traditions includes their reappearance in different cultural guises. That is true of several of several Sufi stories, including those of Mulla Nasrudin, as I shall illustrate and you may recognize below.

Unsentimental teaching stories are a staple of Sufi practice. They are intended lightly to provoke--laughter, mostly--then contemplation and insight. Some are longer, and some are very short. There are examples of both below.

A tortoise carries a stranded scorpion across a river. The scorpion stings the tortoise, who demands indignantly: "My nature is to be helpful. I have helped you and now you sting me." "My friend," says the scorpion, "your nature is to be helpful. Mine is to sting. Why do you seek to transform your nature into a virtue and mine into villainy?"

An elephant and a mouse fell in love. On the wedding night the elephant keeled over and died. The mouse said, "Oh Fate! I have unknowingly bartered one moment of pleasure and tons of imagination for a lifetime of digging a grave."

Stories of Nasrudin:

My beloveds, I remember a time long ago when I was still a Mulla. I lived in a small town, just big enough for a real mosque, with a beautiful mosaic wall. I remember one evening, we had finished our prayers. The stars were clear and bright, and seemed to fill the sky solidly with lights. I stood at the window, gazing at the lights so far away, each one bigger than our world, and so distant from us across vast reaches of space. I thought of how we walk this earth, filled with our own importance, when we are just specks of dust. If you walk out to the cliffs outside the town, a walk of half an hour at most, you look back and you can see the town, but the people are too small to see, even at that meager distance. When I think of the immensity of the universe, I am filled with awe and reverence for power so great.

I was thinking such thoughts, looking out the window of the mosque, and I realized I had fallen to my knees. "I am nothing, nothing!" I cried, amazed and awestruck.

There was a certain well-to-do man of the town, a kind man who wished to be thought very devout. He cared more for what people thought of him than for what he actually was. He happened to walk in and he saw and heard what passed. My beloveds, I was a little shy at being caught in such a moment, but he rushed down, looking around in the obvious hope someone was there to see him. He knelt beside me, and with a final hopeful glance at the door through which he had just come, he cried,

"I am nothing! I am nothing!"

It appears that the man who sweeps, a poor man from the edge of the village, had entered the side door with his broom to begin his night's work. He had seen us, and being a man of true faith and honest simplicity, his face showed that he entertained some of the same thoughts that had been laid on me by the hand of Allah (wonderful is He). He dropped his broom and fell to his knees up there in a shadowed corner, and said softly,

"I am nothing...I am nothing!"

The well-to-do man next to me nudged me with his elbow and said out of the side of his mouth,

"Look who thinks he's nothing!"

_______________________

Late one moonlit night a friend came upon Nasrudin stooped, walking back and forth in the street in front of his house. "What are you doing, Mulla?" said the friend. "I have lost my keys and am looking for them," replied Nasrudin. The friend agreed to help, and they both continued to comb the ground. Finally the friend asked, "Where did you lose them?" "I lost them in the house," said Nasrudin, "but there's more light out here."

_______________________

My beloveds, I travelled again to the village of my friend Tekka, after years away. He had become very devout in his ways, sometimes a little pompous, but still the kind soul I had loved for years.

I visited him, and we picked up our friendship as if we had never been apart.

"Nasrudin, you are a light to the eyes," said Tekka, "Please stay with me. I insist."

I accepted his kind invitation. He showed me my sleeping room, with a window to the east, and the bed made up. "I have arranged it so your head faces toward Mecca," he said proudly. "You must always sleep with your head toward Mecca, out of respect for the Prophet, on whom be peace."

My first night, I tossed and turned, and finally fell asleep. I am apparently an active sleeper, for when Tekka shook me awake the next morning, he was very agitated.

"Nasrudin, I am disappointed in you!" I looked at myself, and said, "I am often disappointed in myself, Tekka, what seems to be today's problem?"

"You have slept with your feet toward Mecca! This is most disrespectful!"

"My apologies, Tekka, it was unintentional. I am a very active sleeper."

Tekka was mollified, but insisted that the next night I must do better. I promised I would.

The next night resembled the first. I slept well, after some tossing and turning, but awoke to find my feet on my pillow and my head resting on the floor at the end of the sleeping mat. Just as I realized my predicament, Tekka stood in the door and clucked in concern.

"This will never do, Nasrudin. I am a good citizen and a good Muslim. You must sleep with your feet pointing the opposite way from Mecca, and your head pointing toward Mecca, out of respect for the Prophet and devotion to Allah."

"What is your reason for insisting on this, my friend?" I asked.

"You must point your head toward God!" he said, and repeated it, "You must point your head toward God and your feet away from Him."

I thought about this. We spent the day together, and that night Tekka was most emphatic. "Nasrudin," he said, "If you cannot sleep with your head toward God, I regret to say I cannot have you in my house. It pains me to say this to an old friend, but my devotion is to Allah."

The third night was much like the other two, except that this time I awoke with my nose pressed against the floor at the foot of the sleeping mat. It was pushed out of shape, and I was rubbing it when Tekka appeared. His face was clouded with anger and sadness.

"Before you speak, Tekka, answer me this," I said, springing up. "Does Allah rule over everything, even the fate of men?"

"You know he does," replied Tekka, puzzled.

"Is Allah there in every part of His creation?"

"Of course he does."

I pointed out the window at the birds rising from the edge of the well. "Does he live in the birds of the air?"

"Yes," said Tekka. "Why are you asking these questions?"

"Please have patience with an old friend," I replied. "Is Allah everywhere, even across the desert and the mountains?"

"Allah is the creation. Allah is in the creation, and is the lord over the creation!" exclaimed Tekka.

"So, Tekka," I said, holding out my feet. "Point my feet where God is not!"

_________________________

Nasrudin was invited to give a sermon.
When the people had assembled, Nasrudin asked:
"Do you know what I'm going to tell you?"
"No", they answered.
"In that case", said Nasrudin, "there's no point in telling you anything. You're too ignorant to start with. I'd be wasting my time."
The people were disappointed. They asked Nasrudin to come back the following week.
When he did, he started his sermon by asking the same question.
"Yes!", they shouted.
"Very well", said Nasrudin, "then I see no reason to speak."
And he left.
But Nasrudin was persuaded to come back a third time.
"Do you know, or don't you?", he asked the people.
"Some of us do, and some of us don't."
"Great!", said Nasrudin. "Those who know can share their knowledge with those who don't."
Having said that, he went home.

______________________

Nasrudin used to stand in the street on market-days, to be pointed out as an idiot. No matter how often people offered him a large and a small coin, he always chose the smaller piece.

One day a kindly man said to him, "Mulla, you should take the bigger coin. Then you will have more money and people will no longer be able to make a laughingstock of you."

"That might be true," said Nasrudin. "but if I always take the larger, people will stop offering me money to prove that I am more idiotic than they are. Then I would have no money at all."

_________________________

Consider this one in relation to the meaning of Sabbath time:

Mulla Nasrudin was eating a poor man's diet of chickpeas and bread. His neighbor, who also claimed to be a wise man, was living in a grand house and dining upon sumptuous meals provided by the emperor himself.

His neighbor told Nasrudin, "If only you would learn to flatter the emperor and be subservient as I do, you would not have to live on chickpeas and bread."

Nasrudin replied, "And if only you would learn to live on chickpeas and bread, as I do, you would not have to flatter and live subservient to the emperor."

_______________________

Nasrudin sat on a river bank when someone shouted to him from the opposite side:
    - "Hey! how do I get across?"
    - "You are across!" Nasrudin shouted back.

_______________________

Since we began this venture with one saint, Symeon, let's end it with another, this one an imaginative creation of the translator and poet Stephen Mitchell, leaving us with the valuable conclusion that one need not be wise to be a holy fool.

Saint Ineptus

Born in third-century Illyria, he soon established a reputation for spilling his food, bruising himself, and tripping over non-existent objects in the street. His parents wanted him to become a doctor, in the hope that the rigorous training would make him more attentive. But he refused. Instead, he spent his time looking for angels in the dark alleyways of his native town, and feeding the stray cats. Even his martyrdom was botched. He felt so terrified, as the wild beasts approached him in the amphitheater, that he forgot the words of the Lord's Prayer.

He has become the patron saint of the clumsy, the tactless and the unqualified. They are instructed to leave a candle burning for him once a month (making sure there is nothing flammable in the vicinity). His intercession is said to do more good than harm.
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Whatever Happened to the Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County?

Reprinting an entire newspaper article is hardly the ordinary style of Reckonings, much less one two-and-a-half years old. My excuse in this event is that the article is drawn from the archives of The Daily Reprobate, the sister publication of Reckonings for several years but with much more distinguished pedigree, having been (allegedly) founded in 1866 by Mark Twain when he was working as a journalist in San Francisco.

If there was a single piece of short fiction which launched Mark Twain's career as a writer, it was surely "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." In the spring of 2003 the chief (and only) roving correspondent of The Reprobate proposed to its editor that an investigative article was in order to reveal the fate of jumping frogs in Calaveras County. Despite his reporter's incurable habit of profligacy with his expense account, the editor responded with enthusiasm, hoping I imagine for a small boost in circulation. His judgment was not off the mark; the boost, in fact, was not small. Readers of The Reprobate have asked that I reprint the article here, partially to draw a little more attention to Mr. Twain and the journal to which those readers remain so loyal, but mostly because they found the story such a representative piece of Americana. So here it is in its entirety.

 

Pogo Possum

Pogo and the other inhabitants of the Okefenokee Swamp* disappeared from the newspapers' comic strip pages shortly after their maker, Walt Kelly, died in 1973. I grew up with his world in the 50s and 60s.

I still tune in to Doonesbury now and then. I have been devoted to Calvin and Hobbes, Opus, and Gary Larson's wonderful upside down and sideways view of the world. For a time, as a child, the thoroughgoing loving kindness of Al Capp's shmoos captivated me. But Kelly's way with character, setting and especially language  were satisfying as no other comic strip. As Brad Leithauser writes, "Pogo was different. It had depth, a madcap unpredictability, and a restive verbal playfulness; it was, in short, the only comic strip spun through the mind of a poet."

The denizens of the Swamp--Pogo, Albert the alligator, Beauregard the hound, Owl, Porky Pine, the ominous wildcat Simple J. Malarkey (modeled on Senator Joseph McCarthy), the blowhard bear P.T. Bridgeport, Miz Beaver and the fetching French skunk, Ma'm'selle Hepzibah, with whom Pogo is shyly enchanted--lent the strip a wonderful range of linguistic warp and woof, lyricism, affection and (mostly) friendly dissension the likes of which we have not seen since.

The pace of life in the Swamp is... well, like a swamp should be: comfortable, slow, yet with unpredictable depth and color.

There are some genuine bad guys among the residents of the swamp--Mole with his omnipresent shades, and his sidekick The Deacon, for example--but they are more like literate rednecks than real evil. The only source of threatened (never realized) violence is the manifestly malignant Malarkey.

Some of Kelly's lines remain with me well over a quarter century after they were uttered. "We have met the enemy and he is us." Whenever I hear "Deck the Halls" at Christmas time, I find myself quietly singing, "Deck us all with Boston Charlie..." And when I tend to go on longer than I should--a common professorial malady--I recall one of Pogo's rhymes:

Riddle you the little dew
And little do you do?
Little did is little done,
Tho' little did'll do.

I hope to weave into these pages at least a little did'll of Pogo's gentleness, kindness, exuberance and nonsense.

For those interested in a contemporary tribute to Kelly and his creation, and a sample of some of his characters' antics, I recommend Brad Leithauser's essay, "Lyrics in the Swamp," in the April 25, 2002 issue of The New York Review of Books. There are several collections of Pogo still available in paperback.

* The real Okefenokee Swamp, thankfully, is still with us, and is a heartening story of environmental intelligence at work.  Covering approximately 700 square miles of South Georgia and North Florida, it is a primitive wetland which harbors thousands of birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians, many of which are endangered or threatened. The north end of the swamp is bordered by pine forests and thick tangles of vegetation. Small water trails lead south to the open prairies and west to the Suwannee River. Nearly 400,000 acres of the Okefenokee were designated as the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge in 1937, protecting the headwaters of the Suwannee and St. Marys Rivers from further human development. For that, Pogo would be proud.

Reprobates and Curmudgeons

I had the great privilege, for several years around the recent turn of the century, of editing an online journal, The Daily Reprobate, that in its original print version was founded by Mark Twain in 1866. (There is some scholarly controversy about the details, even the veracity, of that founding legend, but such controversy in general can be safely ignored.) Some articles and snippits from The Reprobate will inevitably find their way into Reckonings, if only to lend it a much-needed antidote to its insufferable seriousness. Most of those posts will be lodged in the category I've called "Words and Whimsey," whose character will be described shortly in another post. In the meantime, here is a brief description of The Daily Reprobate, a reasonable definition of its operative word, and a similarly felicitous description of its close sibling, "curmudgeon."

The Reprobate's founder, Mark Twain, once remarked aptly, "Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense." Edward Abbey, a modern inheritor of Twain's spirit, added the companion truth, "The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny." The Daily Reprobate has honored that wisdom since its founding 140 years ago as "a congenial companion for the intelligent and irascible reader gifted with a sense of humor and a love of language." The origins of The Reprobate will be further discussed later. Here I'll just draw from its archives a concise description of two words that suggest the enduring importance of its mission.

Reprobate

For the linguistically challenged,  we provide a short definition of our operative word, reprobate. It has a distinguished pedigree, having risen over the last 3000 years or so from its wretched beginnings when reprobates were lost souls rejected by God, wicked Sabbath-breaking sons of Belial, fallen angels, Israelites in the desert when Moses wasn't around. A small residue of that early meaning is preserved in the forbidding language of Calvinism, and in that of evangelical Christians intent upon their own virtue and others' salvation even if it kills them.

More currently, and for our own guidance over our many years of publication, reprobates are shameless rascals. Often reproved as unrepentant scalawags by the Authorities (the bearers of cultural, moral and political orthodoxy) they in fact stand as bastions, fonts of discriminating disapproval. Sometimes they are wily and subtle, coyote shape-shifters resorting to irony and satire, at others straightforward firebrands. In whatever guise, they are pungent critics of deceit and abuse in the established order.

Curmudgeon

We take a moment's opportunity to enjoy a word lover's delight (and no doubt someone else's sheer boredom): contemplation of the relationship between reprobates and curmudgeons. We are, by blood, title and persuasion, the former. But we offer a congenial home to curmudgeons, who are, in a roundabout way, the closest of kin. On a good day, we can find the two spirits commingling in our hearts. Repromudgeon.

Purely as a pedigreed word, curmudgeon is a poor relative. No one appears to know where it came from. There's been speculation about its connection to Middle English and Old French words relating to stealing and hoarding; and it is said that a correspondent of Dr. Johnson attempted to assign an etymology to it based on the fusion of coeur (heart) and méchant (malicious, spiteful). Mischievous souls, these amateur etymologists.

"Curmudgeon seems, vexedly, just to appear sometime in the latter half of the 16th century, a nonce-word, made up. There is little doubt that a curmudgeon is a churlish fellow of independent mind, and tolerates neither fools nor those who provoke others' suffering for their own advantage. His critics call him greedy, a muckworm and pinchgut, a lickpenny. In truth he is none of those. Like Robin of the Hood, he steals and hoards only in the interest of equity, and knows more than most that gifts remain gifts only by passing them on. The reprobate is marginally more consistent; his reprobacy is likely to be characterological. The curmudgeon's totem animals are the chameleon and the lion. He commonly pads among soberly collected wisdom, fulmination, frothing outrage, depression, and sleepy abandonment to the muse.

Both are formidable critics, both shape-shifters.

It is intriguing that reprobates and curmudgeons are typically identified as men rather than women. Current explanations are unsatisfactory, and the truth belies the myth. A plausible but untested hypothesis rests upon a curious transposition of subject and object. It is not that there are fewer female than male reprobates and curmudgeons. The people whose lives and works they deflate and disarm, however, are far more often men than women, for a simple reason: men have thus far been the world's destroyers.

Edward Abbey's reflections in A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (1989) are fitting here: "I have been called a curmudgeon, which my obsolescent dictionary defines as 'a surly, ill-mannered, bad-tempered fellow.' ...But through frequent recent usage, the term is acquiring a broader meaning, which our dictionaries have not yet caught up to. Nowadays, curmudgeon is likely to refer to anyone who hates hypocrisy, cant, sham, dogmatic ideologies, the pretenses and evasions of euphemism, and has the nerve to point out unpleasant facts and takes the trouble to impale these sins on the skewer of humor and roast them over the fires of empiric fact, common sense, and native intelligence. In this nation of bleating sheep and braying jackasses, it then becomes an honor to be labeled curmudgeon."

The last word should be given, in justice, to an inspired taxonomist. John Winokur, in his introduction to The Portable Curmudgeon Redux (a successor to The Portable Curmudgeon, and predecessor of A Curmudgeon's Garden of Love and Return of the Portable Curmudgeon), writes:

I remain convinced that there is no hope for the human race and that we are in the terminal stages of Life As We Know It. This book is an attempt to amuse myself and others while we're waiting for the last lug nut to fly off the last wheel of civilization.

__________________________________

Reflections on Soul: Loss and Redemption

More than a decade ago, Thomas Moore suggested that the greatest malady of our time was neither heart disease nor cancer, but loss of soul: loss of wisdom about it, loss of interest in it. "When soul is neglected," he wrote, "it doesn't just go away; it appears symptomatically in obsessions, addictions, violence, and loss of meaning."

While Moore (in Care of the Soul) warns against efforts at precise definition, he associates the word soul with recognition of depth and genuineness or authenticity in our lives. As such it is no less present or absent in our ordinary daily rounds--work and love, play, active and contemplative times--than it is in rare moments of dramatic crisis, insight or vision. He argues, I think persuasively but less capaciously than is justified, that the instrument of soul is imagination. That is so if we understand imagination to include experience of all of our sensory, emotional and intuitive faculties, including the enormous range of bodily sensations in movement and at rest.

But, with that caveat, imagination is a useful word, because it conveys the important sense that soul is not merely more or less present or absent in our lives, but that there are crafts available for its cultivation, renewal and redemption. One further limitation of the term, however, is that it encourages us to conceive of soul as an exclusively human phenomenon. More classical notions of soul acknowledge that it is present in all animate creatures; indeed, it may be most usefully understood as the very principle of animation or vitality, and care of the soul as the craft of reanimation. Anima mundi, Moore reminds us, refers not to some abstract concept of  world soul or organizing divinity, but to "the soul in each thing," and our capacity truly to tend with lingering and loving attention.

Paradoxically, as spiritual traditions have commonly recognized, soul is more accessible, more nourished, when we are simply attentive and mindful, rather than when we deliberately seek. One of the most beautiful expressions is found in the Taoist classic, the Tao Te Ching (here in my own adaptation from several versions; I don't speak or read or write Chinese, but this book has been a treasured companion.)

Of old, he who was well versed in the way
was subtle, mysteriously comprehending,
and too profound to be known.
Just because he is unknowable,
The best one can do is describe him.

His alertness was as that of one crossing
        a river in winter.
His caution was as that of one who must meet danger on every side.
His gravity was as that of a guest.
He was fluid as melting ice,
simple as uncarved wood,
open as a valley.
inscrutable as murky water.

Who can be muddy and yet, settling,
        slowly  become limpid?
Who can be at rest
till the right action arises by itself?

He who preserves this way
does not seek fulfillment.
Not seeking, not expecting,
he is present, and can welcome all things.

When we think of ways of caring for soul, tradition often suggests, rightly, that we think of the liturgies,  the music and other practices of our religious traditions, including prayer and meditation. For all of us, though--and especially for those who have lost effective connection with those traditions, it is worth recalling that soul makes no hard and fast division between sacred and secular. Reckonings time and again recognizes poetry as a deep well of imagining, reimagining, evoking soul.

One of the oldest and most treasured ways of gaining access to soul is through the ancient craft of storytelling. Many traditional tales, if written--or preferably spoken, sung or enacted--by a genuine artist, bring soul to life in ways that are both moving and profound. A contemporary example is the work of an old friend, Gioia Timpanelli, who, in her writing and (best) in the full presence of her telling before an evening fire, breathes new life into old tales in ways that reveal both the depth of their familiarity and their ineluctable mystery.

In her novella, Rusina, Not Quite in Love, a retelling of the Beauty and the Beast fable in Sicilian guise, she weaves a tapestry of mutual awakening, that of the young woman Rusina and that of the reclusive Master Gardener, Sebastian, whom Rusina initially knows as both gentle and "the ugliest man I had ever seen." The story, of course, is that of their coming to know each other more deeply, and particularly that of Rusina's awakening, through kindness, care and love, to Sebastian's true nature. At story's end, when they are talking, Sebastian says, "My favorite part of the story, Rusina, is when you take my hand and look into my eyes and see me." Rusina replies, "As always, mine, Sebastian, is now when you will say for the first time and again, 'This has happened not because we have loved beauty but because it has loved us.'" (Gioia Timpanelli, Sometimes the Soul, NY: W.W. Norton, 1998)

Care of the soul, writes Moore, "appreciates the mystery of human suffering and does not offer the illusion of a problem-free life. It sees every fall into ignorance and confusion as an opportunity to discover that the beast residing at the center of the labyrinth is also an angel."

I spent my professional life (as well as much of my childhood and adolescence) in schools, colleges and universities, which--particularly as one moves from high school to college and on to graduate study--pay too little attention to recognizing and developing the crafts of soul. The very pace and fragmentation of the school day, as well as preoccupation with information, cognition and skill, have more to do with socialization and functionality in the marketplace than with human development. Intellect and soul are not antithetical; at best, they complement and nourish each other. When they are out of balance, when intellectual accomplishment and physical prowess are rewarded in service to a narrow or superficial sense of vocation, soulfulness--a more capacious identity--withers.

Nature and God—I neither knew
Yet Both so well knew me
They startled, like Executors
of My identity.

        - Emily Dickinson

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A Brief Reflection on T.S. Eliot's "Ash Wednesday"

Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit
of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.


Every day as I climb the stairs to our second floor I pass those lines framed on the wall. More often than not, used as I am to them, they register obliquely, with little consciousness. But I always know they are there. Less often, but sometimes, I stop and say them again, as prayer, breviary. The calligraphy in which they were written is sun- and time-faded now. The words and their plea will outlast us all.

They are the last eleven lines of T.S. Eliot's poem, "Ash Wednesday." Less widely celebrated and anthologized than his earlier and later work--especially "The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock," "The Waste Land," and, incomparably, "The Four Quartets"--"Ash Wednesday" is a poem of midlife, both chronologically and spiritually. It was completed when the poet was 42 years old, three years after he was confirmed in the Church of England: his first major poem after that formal turning.

And "Ash Wednesday"—like and unlike its great successor “The Four Quartets”—is a poem of spiritual turning, purgatorial and penitential, as is the day, the changing season, the cyclical movement of its meditation: life, death, and rebirth. Turning (which I'll discuss elsewhere in Reckonings) is explicit in the poet's language, in the poem's structure, its circling, moving refrain.

It is liminal time, between time, dream time.

Here are the years that walk between, bearing
Away the fiddles and the flutes, restoring
One who moves in the time between sleep and waking…

The right time and the right place are not here
No place of grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice

….....


Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying

The absence of hope is not foregone, but turns from loss, mourning, mimetic hunger for worldly things, turns slowly, with many a backward, suffering slip—is one "between birth and dying" or "between dying and birth" or both?—to sitting still, silent, listening, waiting for new life.

The poem begins,

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?

The poem is full of repetition, cadence, circularity in its journey like that of Dante as he rises through the circles of Inferno and Purgatory. Near the end of the poem there is, of course, no resolution, no final synthesis. There is prayer. It is still

….the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

Always dialogue, even in solitude. The yew-trees: aged, ageless, often planted in churchyards, associated with loss, grief and strength, an ancient symbol of the tree of life.

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Living and Dying: Jane Kenyon

I wrote recently that I'd sidetracked myself while planning to write a short piece on Jane Kenyon.  Sidetracking in my experience is more often a good thing than a source only of distraction: I like to think that the sideways skittle of crabs is the product of eons of natural selection. They got the hang of it before the rest of us did. In the instance at hand, the day before yesterday, I wrote about companionship and solitude, and included a Kenyon poem that memorably expressed her love of peonies.

In the darkening June evening
I draw a blossom near, and bending close
search it as a woman searches
a loved one’s face.

There is a world of difference between this experience and, say, looking admiringly during a stroll in one's garden--or even more, not looking, or looking but not seeing. Mr. Ramsey, in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, is vaguely aware of color in some periphery of his vision but he neither looks nor sees while walking with Mrs. Ramsey in her summer garden. In Kenyon's poem the experience is one of genuine intimacy, bending close, searching "as a woman searches a loved one's face." It is a kind of consciousness, an identity, a dimension of relationship that Mrs. Ramsey has--with her children and other people, as well as with the natural world. One can't imagine Mr. Ramsey, who has eight children and is devotedly dependent upon his wife, searching a loved one's face, except to determine if it can be turned to his own needs.

It is too much to identify this quality of consciousness with life and its absence with death-in-life. But not a great deal too much, for it is a quality of consciousness that is critical to nourishing life. It's absence does not necessarily destroy, abuse or deplete life, but without it life lacks, I'm convinced, a crucial depth of perception, of imagination, that has profound consequences for our capacities to care for ourselves, each other, the earth around us, and other people and creatures whose well-being depends on our capacity and will to attend to them.

In that context I want today to circle back on the writing of Jane Kenyon.

Companionship

One of the pleasures of keeping a journal like this is the fairly frequent experience of a certain kind of felicitous serendipity. (Jung would have called it synchronicity.) I set out this morning to find some old notes about the life and work of the poet Jane Kenyon, having in mind stimulus to a new piece of writing about her gifts. I couldn't find those notes, but instead ran across a journal entry I wrote over three years ago while on a solo kayaking expedition in the Canadian wilderness. Despite its largely waterborne character, I called that journey a walkabout, because it seemed to share with that Australian aboriginal practice a sense of going where one is moved to go, without preconceived itinerary or pace or even conscious direction.

In the days of that trip I frequently returned in my journal thoughts to discoveries I was making, or that my travels were reawakening, about the character of walkabout. In one of them, devoted to solitude and companionship, I found myself returning to an earlier reading of a poem by Jane Kenyon. That I could have written those lines today was both reassuring and humbling--the latter because it brought to mind how few original thoughts I appear to have had in a lifetime, the former because those few seem, on the whole, to suffice. Their marination over the years has revealed dimension I'd earlier neglected, and sustained an experience of adventure. That marination continues as I circle back now upon the core themes I am slowly unpacking in these new Reckonings.

Here is what I wrote very early in that time of discovery, on Thursday, August 28, 2003, from the village of Bartlett, New Hampshire:

Walkabout as Companionship

When I first began to learn about the tradition and meaning of walkabout, I understood it as a solitary experience. I imagined a single person, laying down his ordinary, accustomed, everyday rounds to follow a mysterious calling; walking into some wilderness with no other guide than inspiration, care and alertness would provide.

There is truth in that image, especially if “wilderness” is regarded as a wide array of inner and outer territory that is unaccustomed and unpredictable. But it is the singularity about which I’ve come to have second thoughts, and the romantic notion of abandoning the everyday elements of our lives. Yes, walkabout entails the giving of oneself, the release of a self-imposed order that has gradually, over time, dug a narrow confining channel within which I’d grown used to living. And it’s already brought more sustained experience of solitude than I’ve ever known before.

But I’m coming to understand again (in my heart and bones, not just in my head) that solitude and aloneness are not the same, that walkabout, like authentic and wholehearted living under any circumstances, is essentially relational. I walk, to borrow Thoreau’s now hackneyed phrase, to a different drummer, more slowly, over less familiar terrain—but it is the character and quality of my consciousness, my open invitation to linger, the following of tracks I have not laid down, nor even anticipated, that make the difference. Like Thoreau during the time he recounted in Walden, I can return to my own Concord, to friendships and meals and gardens I have tended, and remain on walkabout.

More and more I’m realizing that walkabout is of its nature companionable. When I think of our own culture’s Songlines, I keep hearing the embracing, wonderfully extravagant voice of Walt Whitman, and of contemporary voices who sing of the compelling, astonishing intimacy of everyday.

A good friend, reading of my ventures, perhaps noting how deeply I was moved by the film, “Winged Migration,” sent me a poem of Mary Oliver:

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Speaking in another vein of such companionship in “the family of things,” I hear Stanley Kunitz talking with Bill Moyers about his and others’ life and work: “The echo that mocks us comes from the Stone Age caves. The poem on the page is only a shadow of the poetry and the mystery of the things of this world. So we must try again, for the work is never finished. I don’t think it’s absurd to believe that the chain of being, our indelible genetic code, holds memories of the ancient world that are passed down from generation to generation. Heraclitus speaks of ‘mortals and immortals living in their death, dying into each other’s lives.’”

Jane Kenyon

Jane Kenyon, who lived with the excruciating, immobilizing isolation of depression her whole life, knew as deeply as anyone the redemptive walkabout in her own garden, especially with her beloved peonies:

Peonies at Dusk

White peonies blooming along the porch
send out light
while the rest of the yard grows dim.

Outrageous flowers as big as human
heads! They’re staggered
by their own luxuriance: I had
to prop them up with stakes and twine.

The moist air intensifies their scent,
and the moon moves around the barn
to find out what it’s coming from.

In the darkening June evening
I draw a blossom near, and bending close
search it as a woman searches
a loved one’s face.

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Keepers: a new photo album

I added a new photo album to Reckonings today which I'm calling "Keepers." I've been reorganizing and culling my photo files, being sure I've securely backed up those I know I want to keep. A natural outgrowth of that review was to keep a small folder of favorite pictures, and that's "Keepers." I was reviewing pictures taken, for the most part, during the last three or four years. So far I've only posted 18 photos to "Keepers," as I think there's a useful distinction between those I want to tuck away for future work, for family and close friends, and those that may be of some interest to others, readers of Reckonings.

It's a diverse collection--"motley" was the word that first came to mind, but each of those images reminds me of a memorable experience and continues to stir the pot of my intrigue with seeing and responding more clearly and surely to that which quickens the imagination.

There are evocations of home, of my beloved White Mountains of New Hampshire, a month's trek through Provence in 2005, another visit to the F.D.R. Memorial in Washington, and a few precious moments of dawn and dusk spent with snow geese and sandhill cranes at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in southwestern New Mexico. I'll add carefully to "Keepers" over the next weeks, months and years, and perhaps include some annotation to individual photos.

Now it is the summer of 2016, almost a full decade after offering the initial iteration of "Keepers," and I realize I have neglected it. There have been, over the years, many more photos, and my ways of composition and editing have changed a good deal. I think there is more intimacy in my work as photographer, more lingering with the images after their transfer from largely outdoor shots to editing at the computer, and of course recognition and comfortable use of far more sophisticated editing programs including Apple's new Photos, Adobe's more versatile Photoshop Elements, Acorn and Pixelmator. And yes, I think, more keepers to add to this collection.

Friends for Life

I know a little more than the barest sketch of the circumstances of my birth. My mother and I--and surely my father, waiting anxiously a few rooms away--were in Swedish Hospital, in Seattle, Washington. I emerged at 12:43 PM on Thursday, March 30th, 1939. The experience of those primal hours during which I moved from my mother's womb through her birth canal and into the bright lights of a wider world, is a living part of my body's legacy and has its place among the determinants of the person I became. It has a persuasive claim to being the most formative event of my life, as for us all, and remains forever, I assume, beyond my conscious memory.

Whoever else kept my mother company during those hours--her family doctor Richard  O'Shea, attending nurses--I've always been glad to know that my mother's mother, the only grandmother I ever knew, was there, and held her daughter's hand. I have a photograph of my grandmother holding me aloft not long thereafter. Both of us appear happy to be together, to begin what was to be another twenty-three years of one of the most nourishing relationships of my life. (I can't lay my hands on that photo at the moment, but I found a contemporaneous one in which my mother joined the two of us.)

Why the evocation of this memory these many years later? I have been reading and thinking about a short and important essay by Daniel Goleman that appeared in The New York Times two days ago (October 10th). He called it "Friends for Life: An Emerging Biology of Emotional Healing." I'll reprint it below, for it has important connections, I think, with themes that lie at the heart of Reckonings, themes that I'll call the determinants and consequences of kinship.

Goleman's essay describes a phenomenon he calls "emotional contagion"--"the tendency of one person to catch the feelings of another," to experience rapport--evidence for which has emerged from the discovery of a class of brain cells called "mirror neurons."  The emergent field of social neuroscience, Goleman reports, is demonstrating the physiological -- cardiovascular and neuronal -- paths by which two persons, two psychobiologies, as it were, coordinate and merge. An example reminded me of that long ago event of a mother and a daughter holding hands as I was being born, and even suggested something of why the memory continues to give me pleasure:

"A case in point is a functional magnetic resonance imaging study of women awaiting an electric shock. When the women endured their apprehension alone, activity in neural regions that incite stress hormones and anxiety was heightened. As James A. Coan reported last year in an article in Psychophysiology, when a stranger held the subject’s hand as she waited, she found little relief. When her husband held her hand, she not only felt calm, but her brain circuitry quieted, revealing the biology of emotional rescue."

It is a new way of thinking about old subjects literally at the heart of our lives and our relationships with the rest of the world: love, happiness, alienation, neglect, illness and healing, wholeheartedness and broken-heartedness.

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Wounding and Cure

Seamus Heaney's The Cure at Troy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991) is an adaptation of Sophocles' play, Philoctetes, written in the 5th century B.C. In Heaney's version, it was first performed at the Guildhall, Derry, Ireland, on October 1, 1990.

Philoctetes, by James Berry

Philoctetes was a Greek hero of the Trojan War renowned as an archer, having inherited the great bow of Hercules, which was known never to miss its mark. Maimed with a foul, suppurating wound to his foot, Philoctetes was marooned by his Greek compatriots on the small island of Lemnos ten years before the play opens. Now, still battling the Trojans, the Greeks have heard a prophecy that only Philoctetes and his bow can lead them to a final victory. So they have sent the cunning Odysseus and the youthful son of Achilles, Neoptolemus, to Lemnos to persuade the bitter Philoctetes to return and lead them in battle.

The Chorus, when not doubling as Odysseus's ship's crew, serves the common role in ancient Greek drama of greater wisdom or foresight than that of the protagonists. They set the first scene by noting, unflatteringly but with an eye to their own complicity, the self-regard and overbearing pride of the heroes, Philoctetes, Hercules and Odysseus:

All throwing shapes, every one of them
Convinced he’s in the right, all of them glad
To repeat themselves and their every last mistake,
No matter what.

People so deep into
Their own self-pity, self-pity buoys them up.
People so staunch and true, they’re fixated,
Shining with self-regard like polished stones.
And their whole life spent admiring themselves
For their own long-suffering.

 

The young Neoptolemus is exempted from this critique, and it is his growth into mature manhood, generous and kind in true friendship, and without duplicity or guile, that constitutes one of the play's two central themes. The other, linked to the first, is Philoctetes' ultimately successful struggle to give up his self-pity and rage at the comrades who betrayed him, rejoin the Greek cause, and thus be cured of his wound. The interweaving of these two themes, the vicissitudes of developing trust and friendship between these two, is the heart of the play, as it moves from a kind of death-in-life to a genuine change of heart, emergence from a life dictated by past suffering to one embracing  greater authenticity and a still wounded but more capacious, honest and forgiving  justice.

It is in this context, in a penultimate but not final moment, that the Chorus utters the lines adopted as the subtitle of Reckonings. Its moving speech is worth recording in full, as it speaks of  our own struggle, too, and echoes through every page and thought of this journal:

Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.

The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker’s father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.

History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.

 

None of us is without wounds. None of us escapes the wounding of others. We all speak sweet double-talk, lose hope, sleep when we should wake, fail to see, bear, hurt, betrayal and their armor of body and heart.

We can, as well, join others in healing and forgiveness, that "utter, self-revealing double-take of feeling." That sea-change, giving and receiving, that change of heart, is what we call grace, and it can happen not only once in a lifetime but over and again through a lifetime. Not often, perhaps, with whole heart and full-fledged trust, nor without distress, but still "someone is hearing the outcry and the birth-cry of new life at its term."

"I leave," says Philoctetes at the very end of the play, "half-ready to believe that a crippled trust might walk, and the half-true rhyme is love."

Full circle. For the poet-translator Seamus Heaney has begun his play with an epigram, these hard and beautiful lines of W.H. Auden:

‘O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress;
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbor
With your crooked heart.’

 

Seamus Heaney (1939 - 2013)

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Pigs as Angels?

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 for 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 Saint 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 sheer 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.

On Sabbath

We commonly know Sabbath as a day of rest corresponding to the Biblical seventh day of creation, in which "God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation." (Genesis 2:1-3) The Hebrew word translated as "rested" is shabat, corresponding to the noun sabbath: Sunday for Christians, Friday sundown through Saturday sundown for Jews.

To understand the reality of Sabbath more deeply, we must consider not only the character of that day and the meaning of shabat, but inquire into the nature of Sabbath time, keeping in mind the distinction between sacred and profane discussed elsewhere in Reckonings. "There is a realm of time," writes the great scholar of Jewish ethics and mysticism, Abraham Joshua Heschel, "where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord." That is Sabbath time. While there is great wisdom in setting aside a common day once a week as Sabbath time, a wisdom that may reside within our souls--the Biblical command to keep the Sabbath is the only one of the Ten Commandments to begin with the word "Remember," as if it refers to something we already knew, but may have forgotten--Sabbath time is not limited to that day, but is a way of being in time. If it is not a familiar practice, one might start with an hour--in which one is less likely, in any event, to be interrupted.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Heschel, in his small book of meditation on Sabbath, first seeks to convey an understanding that may not coincide with our common intuition: Sabbath, wisdom, holiness, life in its most vivid authenticity, has to do essentially with the sanctification of time. The verb shabat in Hebrew, in addition to the correspondence noted above, is one of the names of God; thus the intriguing conclusion, not quite explicitly drawn by Heschel, that God is a verb, not a noun. ("Even God," writes Heschel, as if we should know better, "is conceived by most of us as a thing.")

The essential spirit of Sabbath is that of reanimation, redemption and resurrection. All week--in profane time--"there is only hope of redemption. But when the Sabbath is entering the world"--in sacred time--"man is touched by a moment of actual redemption; as if for a moment the spirit of the Messiah moved over the face of the Earth." Sabbath is the soul in time, and time is full of such moments, if we have eyes to see and ears to hear.

Indeed, our hope and our practice may bring us more and more Sabbath time, even to the experience of life as Sabbath. As one wise soul recently wrote to a dying friend,

"This sacred time is not about convenience or inconvenience; it isn't about meeting deadlines. It isn't about you (or anyone else) being in control. This sacred time is about learning to trust the eddies and shoals of the River. It is... about mystery. It is a broader, deeper, infinitely more significant agenda that is beyond our charting. It is singularly about you and your union with the Other. It is beyond our reckoning."

It is our choice and our gift, then, our craft and our practice, if you will, to make the most of Sabbath. The traditional prescriptions and proscriptions of Sabbath, when not sinking like all dogma into formalism and legalism, are designed to assist us in that task. The more we measure and divide time, the less we allow its consecration. (Think, in mundane terms, of the difference between digital and analog watches.) Heschel's language is particularly vivid. The more we pursue "the profanity of clattering commerce..., the screetch of dissonant days,... the nervousness and fury of acquisitiveness and the betrayal in embezzling [our own lives,]" the farther we move from Sabbath.

The more we rest quietly and peacefully into stillness; find accord among body, mind and imagination; harmony, love and delight among one another and with the natural world; the less anger, agitation, tension, conflict and fear we feel; we are the more drawn into Sabbath time. That is why we are wise to turn off the computer, the television and the telephone; avoid money and shopping; walk instead of drive; make love instead of fuss (or war); play softly rather than hard, and without competition; listen more than talk, be quiet, let it be. If prayer is familiar, let it be prayer of thanksgiving, not petition or repentance.

Thomas Merton was writing about good folks when he said, "There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence [that is] activism and overwork... To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence... It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful."

To return to the Biblical roots of Sabbath time, through the words of Wayne Muller, "The ancient rabbis teach that on the seventh day, God created menuha--tranquillity, serenity, peace and repose--rest, in the deepest possible sense of fertile, healing stillness. Until the Sabbath, creation was unfinished. Only after the birth of menuha, only with tranquillity and rest, was the circle of creation made full and complete." (Sabbath: Restoring the Sacred Rhythm of Rest, NY: Bantam Books, 1999) The Book of Genesis tells us that the Sabbath is both part of creation and a rest from creation.

What I want is to leap out of this personality   
And then sit apart from that leaping--
I've lived too long where I can be reached.

- Rumi

Wendell Berry's Sabbath poems written between 1979 and 1997 are gathered in a volume he called A Timbered Choir (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1998). Here is one from 1996:

Some Sunday afternoon, it may be,
you are sitting under your porch roof,
looking down through the trees
to the river, watching the rain. The circles
made by the raindrops’ striking
expand, intersect, dissolve,

and suddenly (for you are getting on
now, and much of your life is memory)
the hands of the dead, who have been here
with you, rest upon you tenderly
as the rain rests shining
upon the leaves. And you think then

(for thought will come) of the strangeness
of the thought of Heaven, for now
you have imagined yourself there,
remembering with longing this
happiness, this rain. Sometimes here
we are there, and there is no death.

Three poems of Denise Levertov

(for Gil and Liz Bailie)

Denise Levertov, photo by David Geier

Denise Levertov's last volume of poems, This Great Unknowing: Last Poems, was posthumously published by New Directions in 1999. She died from complications of lymphoma two years before at the age of 74. Her father was a Hasidic Jew who converted to Christianity and became an Anglican parson in England. Levertov came to the U.S. in 1948 at the age of 25. She was a major voice in American poetry for over forty years. Among her persistent themes, as Robert Haas has written, were "the brokenness of the world, its violence and injustice, and her longing for wholeness, the longing that sent her back to her Christian roots at the end of her life." The first poem reproduced below, "Aware," is the last she wrote. "The Fountain" was written in the 1960s, "I learned that her name was Proverb" twenty years later, so these three poems span some thirty years of writing.

In a final interview only two months before her death, Levertov said, "There's a lot of dependence on technology today, and a willful ignorance that it's messing up resources, may end up destroying life on this planet, and then we'll have to start over without it. Our ethical development does not match our technological development. This sense of spiritual hunger is something of a counterforce or unconscious reaction to all that technological euphoria....When you're really caught up in writing a poem, it can be a form of prayer. I'm not very good at praying, but what I experience when I'm writing a poem is close to prayer. I feel it in different degrees and not with every poem. But in certain ways writing is a form of prayer."

She once wrote that she found "certain analogies, and also interaction, between the journey of art and the journey of faith," and in an essay written in 1984, "A Poet's View," she said that the "acknowledgement and celebration of mystery probably constitutes the most consistent theme of my poetry ..."

"Because it is a matter of which I am conscious, it is possible, however imprecisely, to call it an intellectual position; but it is one which emphasizes the incapacity of reason alone (much though I delight in elegant logic) to comprehend experience, and considers Imagination the chief of human faculties. It must therefore be by the exercise of that faculty that one moves toward faith, and possibly by its failure that one rejects it as delusion. Poems present their testimony as circumstantial evidence, not as closing argument. Where Wallace Stevens says, "God and the imagination are one," I would say that the imagination, which synergizes intellect, emotion and instinct, is the perceptive organ through which it is possible, though not inevitable, to experience God."

I believe that is an important statement about the centrality of imagination in spiritual life, in our capacity as artists, scientists or parents--as human beings--to realize ourselves and truly to embrace our fellowship with creation. Imagination, as Levertov uncommonly recognizes, is a faculty of perception. It can be terribly misused--think, after all, of the inhumane ways we have synthesized "intellect, emotion and instinct"--but without its creative exercise we remain, as Hasidic legend has it, imprisoned "as in a block, so that [our] hands and feet cannot stretch themselves and the head lies on the knees." That is suffering, and that is a posture of prayer.

Aware

When I found the door

I found the vine leaves

speaking among themselves in abundant

whispers.

My presence made them

hush their green breath,

embarrassed, the way

humans stand up, buttoning their jackets,

acting as if they were leaving anyway, as if

the conversation had ended

just before you arrived.

I liked

the glimpse I had, though,

of their obscure

gestures. I liked the sound

of such private voices. Next time

I'll move like cautious sunlight, open

the door by fractions, eavesdrop

peacefully.

The Fountain

Don’t say, don’t say there is no water
to solace the dryness at our hearts.
I have seen

the fountain springing out of the rock wall
and you drinking there. And I too
before your eyes

found footholds and climbed
to drink the cool water.

The woman of that place, shading her eyes,
frowned as she watched—but not because
she grudged the water,

only because she was waiting
to see we drank our fill and were
refreshed.

Don’t say, don’t say there is no water.
That fountain is there among its scalloped
green and gray stones,

it is still there and always there
with its quiet song and strange power
to spring in us,
up and out through the rock.

'I learned that her name was Proverb'

And the secret names
of all we meet who lead us deeper
into our labyrinth
of valleys and mountains, twisting valleys
and steeper mountains—
their hidden names are always,
like Proverb, promises.
Rune, Omen, Fable, Parable,
those we meet for only
one crucial moment, gaze to gaze,
or for years know and don’t recognize

but of whom later a word
sings back to us
as if from high among leaves,
still near but beyond sight

drawing us from tree to tree
towards the time and the unknown place
where we shall know
what it is to arrive.

Annie Dillard on Silence

Preface: This is a small and treasured collection saved from the earlier incarnation of Reckonings. Annie Dillard's work, as much as any with which I'm familiar, shatters efforts to categorize. Our habits of dividing our lives into manageable pieces are often useful, but it's necessary--regularly, I believe--to be reminded that the membranes separating those pieces are fragile and permeable, that such categories can be mischievous as well as helpful and possess surprising arbitrariness-- and indeed that those pieces are ultimately fragments of a whole embracing more than we can know, but perhaps not more than we can apprehend. Such are the kind of thoughts that time with Annie Dillard inspires.


I. Introduction


It is raining. A soft, warm June rain, the kind I know will pause now and then but last all day. The stream is high, the mountains hidden in mist. I am quiet in this old house. The silence is complete except for the sound of the stream. My dog sleeps behind me, at the head of the stairs, so I won't leave without her noticing and coming along. There are also two Maine coon cats somewhere. When they're in a playful mood they sound like thunder ricocheting off the walls, but it's evidently nap time.

I've taken my collection of Annie Dillard's books from the shelf, and have been looking through them: partly, I suppose, because I think she too would enjoy this place and its quiet. At the top of the pile is the collection of story-essays whose title has remained most vividly in my memory over the years, Teaching a Stone to Talk. I notice on the flyleaf, with affectionate memory, that it was given to me on my birthday in 1984 by an old friend in Vermont's northland. The pages have begun to turn brown, and bear the usual underlinings and marginalia (even, I admit, a few dog-ears) of most of the books that have engaged me in conversation. The cover has lost its paste and, like a manila folder, only loosely embraces the text.

Dillard wrote the title essay and perhaps others in the volume, including the third I include here, "A Field of Silence," while living alone on an island in the Pacific Northwest. "Living Like Weasels" was the first of her essays to cast its spell upon me. Eighteen years later I saw my first weasel in the wild. The wait was worth it.

Here is the beginning of "Teaching a Stone to Talk."


II. Teaching a Stone to Talk


(excerpt)


The island where I live is peopled with cranks like myself. In a cedar-shake shack on a cliff--but we all live like this--is a man in his thirties who lives alone with a stone he is trying to teach to talk.

Wisecracks on the topic abound, as you might expect, but they are made as it were perfunctorily, and mostly by the young. For in fact, almost everyone here respects what Larry is doing, as do I, which is why I am protecting his (or her) privacy, and confusing for you the details. It could be, for instance, a pinch of sand he is teaching to talk, or a prolonged northerly, or any one of a number of waves. But it is, in fact, I assure you, a stone. It is--for I have seen it--a palm sized oval beach cobble whose dark gray is cut by a band of white which runs around and, presumably, through it; such stones we call "wishing stones," for reasons obscure but not, I think, unimaginable.

He keeps it on a shelf. Usually the stone lies protected by a square of untanned leather, like a canary asleep under its cloth. Larry removes the cover for the stone's lessons, or more accurately, I should say, for the ritual or rituals which they perform together several times a day.

No one knows what goes on at these sessions, least of all myself, for I know Larry but slightly, and that owing only to a mix-up in our mail. I assume that like any other meaningful effort, the ritual involves sacrifice, the suppression of self-consciousness, and a certain tilt of the will, so that the will becomes transparent and hollow, a channel for the work. I wish him well. It is a noble work, and beats, from any angle, selling shoes.

Reports differ on precisely what he expects or wants the stone to say. I do not think he expects the stone to speak as we do, and describe for us its long life and many, or few, sensations. I think instead that he is trying to teach it to say a single word, such as "cup," or "uncle." For this purpose he has not, as some have seriously suggested, carved the stone a little mouth, or furnished it in any way with a pocket of air which it might then expel. Rather--and I think he is wise in this--he plans to initiate his son, who is now an infant living with Larry's estranged wife, into the work, so that it may continue and bear fruit after his death.


With that perhaps improbable beginning, Dillard embarks on a meditation about nature's silence. It is, she says, "its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block." It is not that she ignores the manifold sounds of the natural world; she calls them silence because we do not hear. "We are here to witness....The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega. It is God's brooding over the face of the waters; it is the blended note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. You take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence, and even to address the prayer to 'World.' Distinctions blur. Quit your tents. Pray without ceasing."


III. Living Like Weasels


(excerpt)


A weasel is wild. Who knows what he thinks? He sleeps in his underground den, his tail draped over his nose. Sometimes he lives in his den for two days without leaving. Outside, he stalks rabbits, mice, muskrats, and birds, killing more bodies than he can eat warm, and often dragging the carcasses home. Obedient to instinct, he bites his prey at the neck, either splitting the jugular vein at the throat or crunching the brain at the base of the skull, and he does not let go. One naturalist refused to kill a weasel who was socketed into his hand deeply as a rattlesnake. The man could in no way pry the tiny weasel off, and he had to walk half a mile to water, the weasel dangling from his palm, and soak him off like a stubborn label.

And once, says Ernest Thompson Seton--once, a man shot an eagle out of the sky. He examined the eagle and found the dry skull of a weasel fixed by the jaws to his throat. The supposition is that the eagle had pounced on the weasel and the weasel swiveled and bit as instinct taught him, tooth to neck, and nearly won. I would like to have seen that eagle from the air a few weeks or months before he was shot: was the whole weasel still attached to his feathered throat, a fur pendant? Or did the eagle eat what he could reach, gutting the living weasel with his talons before his breast, bending his beak, cleaning the beautiful airborne bones?

I have been reading about weasels because I saw one last week. I startled a weasel who startled me, and we exchanged a long glance.

Twenty minutes from my house, through the woods by the quarry and across the highway, is Hollins Pond, a remarkable piece of shallowness, where I like to go at sunset and sit on a tree trunk. Hollins Pond is also called Murray's Pond; it covers two acres of bottomland near Tinker Creek with six inches of water and six thousand  lily pads. In winter, brown-and-white steers stand in the middle of it, merely dampening their hooves; from the distant shore they look like miracle itself, complete with miracle's nonchalance. Now, in summer, the steers are gone. The water lilies have blossomed and spread to a green horizontal plane that is terra firma to plodding blackbirds, and tremulous ceiling to black leeches, crayfish, and carp.

This is, mind you, suburbia. It is a five-minute walk in three directions to rows of houses, though none is visible here. There's a 55 mph highway at one end of the pond, and a nesting pair of wood ducks at the other. Under every bush is a muskrat hole or a beer can. The far end is an alternating series of fields and woods, fields and woods, threaded everywhere with motorcycle tracks--in whose bare clay wild turtles lay eggs.

So. I had crossed the highway, stepped over two low barbed-wire fences, and traced the motorcycle path in all gratitude through the wild rose and poison ivy of the pond's shoreline up into high grassy fields. Then I cut down through the woods to the mossy fallen tree where I sit. This tree is excellent. It makes a dry, upholstered bench at the upper, marshy end of the pond, a plush jetty raised from the thorny shore between a shallow blue body of water and a deep blue body of sky.

The sun had just set. I was relaxed on the tree trunk, ensconced in the lap of lichen, watching the lily pads at my feet tremble and part dreamily over the thrusting path of a carp. A yellow bird appeared to my right and flew behind me. It caught my eye; I swiveled around--and the next instant, inexplicably, I was looking down at a weasel, who was looking up at me.

Weasel! I'd never seen one wild before. He was ten inches long, thin as a curve, a muscled ribbon, brown as fruitwood, soft-furred, alert. His face was fierce, small and pointed as a lizard's; he would have made a good arrowhead. There was just a dot of chin, maybe two brown hairs' worth, and then the pure white fur began that spread down his underside. He had two black eyes I didn't see, any more than you see a window.

The weasel was stunned into stillness as he was emerging from beneath an enormous shaggy wild rose bush four feet away. I was stunned into stillness twisted backward on the tree trunk. Our eyes locked, and someone threw away the key....

He disappeared. This was only last week, and already I don't remember what shattered the enchantment. I think I blinked, I think I retrieved my brain from the weasel's brain, and tried to memorize what I was seeing, and the weasel felt the yank of separation, the careening splashdown into real life and the urgent current of instinct. He vanished under the wild rose. I waited motionless, my mind suddenly full of data and my spirit with pleadings, but he didn't return.

I would like to learn, or remember, how to live. I come to Hollins Pond not so much to learn how to live as, frankly, to forget about it. That is, I don't think I can learn from a wild animal how to live in particular--shall I such warm blood, hold my tail high, walk with my footprints precisely over the prints of my hands?--but I might learn something of mindlessness, something of the purity of living in the physical senses and the dignity of living without bias or motive. The weasel lives in necessity and we live in choice, hating necessity and dying at the last ignobly in its talons. I would like to live as I should, as the weasel lives as he should. And I suspect that for me the way is like the weasel's: open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will....

We could, you know. We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience--even of silence--by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn't "attack" anything; a weasel lives as he's meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity....



IV. A Field of Silence


There is a place called "the farm" where I lived once, in a time that was very lonely. Fortunately I was unconscious of my loneliness then, and felt it only deeply, bewildered, in the half-bright way that a puppy feels pain.

I loved the place, and still do. It was an ordinary farm, a calf-raising, haymaking farm, and very beautiful. Its flat, messy pastures ran along one side of the central portion of a quarter-mile road in the 'central part of an island, an island in Puget Sound, on the Washington coast, so that from the high end of the road you could look west toward the Pacific, to the sound and its hundred islands, and from the other end--and from the farm--you could see east to the water between you and the mainland, and beyond it the mainland's mountains slicked with snow.

I liked the clutter about the place, the way everything blossomed or seeded or rusted; I liked the hundred half-finished projects, the smells, and the way the animals always broke loose. It is calming to herd animals. Often a regular rodeo breaks out--two people and a clever cow can kill a morning--but still, it is calming. You laugh for a while, exhausted, and silence is restored; the beasts are back in their pastures, the fences are not fixed but disguised as if they were fixed, ensuring the animals' temporary resignation; and a great calm descends, a lack of urgency, a sense of having to invent something to do until the next time you must run and chase cattle.
The farm seemed eternal in the crude way the earth does--extending, that is, a very long time. The farm was as old as earth, always there, as old as the island, the Platonic form of "farm," of human society itself, a piece of land eaten and replenished a billion summers, a piece of land worked on, lived on, grown over, plowed under, and stitched again and again, with fingers or with leaves, in and out and into human life's thin weave. I lived there once.

I lived there once and I have seen, from behind the barn, the long roadside pastures heaped with silence. Behind the rooster, suddenly, I saw the silence heaped on the fields like trays. That day the green hayfields supported silence evenly sown; the fields bent just so under the even pressure of silence, bearing it, palming it aloft: cleared fields, part of a land, a planet, that did not buckle beneath the heel of silence, nor split up scattered to bits, but instead lay secret, disguised as time and matter as though that were nothing, ordinary-disguised as fields like those which bear the silence only because they are spread, and the silence spreads over them, great in size.

I do not want, I think, ever to see such a sight again. That there is loneliness here I had granted, in the abstract-but not, I thought, inside the light of God's presence, inside his sanction, and signed by his name.

I lived alone in the farmhouse and rented; the owners, in their twenties, lived in another building just over the yard. I had been reading and restless for two or three days. It was morning. I had just read at breakfast an Updike story, "Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, A Dying Cat, A Traded Car," which moved me. I heard our own farmyard rooster and two or three roosters across the street screeching. I quit the house, hoping at heart to see either of the owners, but immediately to watch our rooster as he crowed.

It was Saturday morning late in the summer, in early September, clear-aired and still. I climbed the barnyard fence between the poultry and the pastures; I watched the red rooster, and the rooster, reptilian, kept one alert and alien eye on me. He pulled his extravagant neck to its maximum length, hauled himself high on his legs, stretched his beak as if he were gagging, screamed, and blinked. It was a ruckus. The din came from everywhere, and only the most rigorous application of reason could persuade me that it proceeded in its entirety from this lone and maniac bird.

After a pause, the roosters across the street started, answering the proclamation, or cranking out another round, arhythmically, interrupting. In the same way there is no pattern nor sense to the massed stridulations of cicadas; their skipped beats, enjambments, and failed alterations jangle your spirits, as though each of those thousand insects, each with identical feelings, were stubbornly deaf to the others, and loudly alone.

I shifted along the fence to see if either of the owners was coming or going. To the rooster I said nothing, but only stared. And he stared at me; we were both careful to keep the wooden fence slat from our line of sight, so that his profiled eye and my two eyes could meet. From time to time I looked beyond the pastures to learn if anyone might be seen on the road.
When I was turned away in this manner, the silence gathered and struck me. It bashed me broadside from the heavens above me like yard goods; ten acres of fallen, invisible sky choked the fields. The pastures on either side of the road turned green in a surrealistic fashion, monstrous, impeccable, as if they were holding their breaths. The roosters stopped. All the things of the world--the fields and the fencing, the road, a parked orange truck--were stricken and self-conscious. A world pressed down on their surfaces, a world battered just within their surfaces, and that real world, so near to emerging, had got stuck.

There was only silence. It was the silence of matter caught in the act and embarrassed. There were no cells moving, and yet there were cells. I could see the shape of the land, how it lay holding silence. Its poise and its stillness were unendurable, like the ring of the silence you hear in your skull when you're little and notice you're living, the ring which resumes later in life when you're sick.

There were flies buzzing over the dirt by the henhouse, moving in circles and buzzing, black dreams in chips off the one long dream, the dream of the regular world. But the silent fields were the real world, eternity's outpost in time, whose look I remembered but never like this, this God-blasted, paralyzed day. I felt myself tall and vertical, in a blue shirt, self-conscious, and wishing to die. I heard the flies again; I looked at the rooster who was frozen looking at me.

Then at last I heard whistling, human whistling far on the air, and I was not able to bear it. I looked around, heartbroken; only at the big yellow Charolais farm far up the road was there motion—a woman, I think, dressed in pink, and pushing a wheelbarrow easily over the grass. It must have been she who was whistling and heaping on top of the silence those hollow notes of song. But the slow sound of the music--the beautiful sound of the music ringing the air like a stone bell--was isolate and detached. The notes spread into the general air and became the weightier part of silence, silence's last straw. The distant woman and her wheelbarrow were flat and detached, like mechanized and pink-painted properties for a stage. I stood in pieces, afraid I was unable to move. Something had unhinged the world. The houses and roadsides and pastures were buckling under the silence. Then a Labrador, black, loped up the distant driveway, fluid and cartoonlike, toward the .pink woman. I had to try to turn away. Holiness is a force, and like the others can be resisted. It was given, but I didn't want to  see it, God or no God. It was as if God had said, "I am here, but not as you have known me. This is the look of silence, and of loneliness unendurable; it too has always been mine, and now will be yours." I was not ready for a life of sorrow, sorrow deriving from knowledge I could just as well stop at the gate.

I turned away, willful, and the whole show vanished. The realness of things disassembled. The whistling became ordinary, familiar; the air above the fields released its pressure and the fields lay hooded as before. I myself could act. Looking to the rooster I whistled to him myself, softly, and some hens appeared at the chicken house window, greeted the day, and fluttered down.

Several months later, walking past the farm on the way to a volleyball game, I remarked to a friend, by way of information, "There are angels in those fields." Angels! That silence so grave and so stricken, that choked and unbearable green! I have rarely been so surprised at something I've said. Angels! What are angels? I had never thought of angels, in any way at all.

From that time I began to think of angels. I considered that sights such as I had seen of the silence must have been shared by the people who said they saw angels. I began to review the thing I had seen that morning. My impression now of those fields is of thousands of spirits—spirits trapped, perhaps, by my refusal to call them more fully, or by the paralysis of my own spirit at that time—thousands of spirits, angels in fact, almost discernible to the eye, and whirling. If pressed I would say they were three or four feet from the ground. Only their motion was clear (clockwise, if you insist); that, and their beauty unspeakable.

There are angels in those fields, and, I presume, in all fields, and everywhere else. I would go to the lions for this conviction, to witness this fact. What all this means about perception, or language, or angels, or my own sanity, I have no idea.

Forgiveness

This brief note is an extension of my longer series of reflections on the theme of turning in human development and in the Judeo-Christian tradition. At the end of the third of those notes, devoted in part to Stephen Mitchell's refreshingly unorthodox reading of Jesus's parable of the prodigal son, I started to think about forgiveness, especially in a Christian context. I want here simply to extend those thoughts. Later I expect to write more about forgiveness in different circumstances and traditions.

Reading what Jesus is said to have said about forgiveness, I sometimes found myself puzzled that he sounded like he was describing a bargain, or weighing with one of those scales held by the statuesque and blind figure of justice.

“If you forgive others their offenses, your heavenly Father will forgive you.” “If you don’t judge, you will not be judged; if you don’t condemn you will not be condemned; if you forgive, you will be forgiven.” Why did that language distress me?

Because I’m afraid I’m going to lose in the forgiveness sweepstakes, and end up judged, condemned and unforgiven. Because I secretly decided longer ago than I can remember that it was irredeemably my fault, and therefore unforgivable. Because I wanted, sometimes, to feel good about trespassing, holding that weasely wretch to his debt, judging the fool who tried to climb Mt. Washington in winter in sneakers, and endangered not only his own life but others too; condemning a murderer without compunction to the death he inflicted on others; retaliating in kind for an unimaginably grievous wrong.

I’ll never forget the moment of ringing clarity with which Stephen Mitchell, unbeknownst to him, found me figuratively in the bushes—deep in that hedge surrounded by a moldy, wet igloo of abandoned paper—and set me gently back on my path. What he wrote wasn’t entirely welcome—in fact, there are days when I have wished his words away. It’s irritating that one can’t do that with insight that is so palpably true. Here’s are his words:

“Jesus doesn’t mean that if you do condemn, God will condemn you; or that if you don’t forgive, God won’t forgive you. He is pointing to a spiritual fact: when we condemn it’s like sticky fly paper, but worse: we create a world of condemnation for ourselves, and we attract the condemnation of others; when we cling to an offense, we are clinging to precisely what separates us from our own fulfillment. Letting go means not only releasing the person who has wronged us, but releasing ourselves. A place opens up inside us where that person is always welcome, and where we can always meet her again, face to face. In these sayings of Jesus, God is a mirror reflecting back to us our own state of being or moving in the world. We receive exactly as we give. The more open hearted  we are, the more we can experience the whole universe as God’s grace. Forgiveness is essentially openness of heart.”

The last lines of T.S. Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” are below. May they serve as a kind of concluding benediction to this collection of thoughts on turning. I asked a calligrapher friend many years ago to write them on parchment. They've greeted me on the wall of the steps I tread daily ever since.

Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit
of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.

Turning III: Turning and Following

Prefatory note: In much of what I write below--in this post's continuation or "extended body"--I owe so much to my reading and re-reading of Stephen Mitchell's inspired reflections on Jesus's tale of the prodigal son (in his Jeffersonian Gospel According to Jesus Christ, Harper, 1993) that it's hard, in retrospect, to pick all his thinking, his examples and imagery, from my own. I hope I've given him sufficient credit in the text as well as here. In the interest of narrative continuity, I have chosen not to clutter that portion of the text with as many quotation marks as it technically deserves. The story at its heart belongs to him, to me, and to neither of us.

When I was eleven years old I had a beast of a paper route. It was the kind of beast that had red, predatory eyes even in the soft dawn of morning. I was folding and carrying on my bike and heaving toward peoples’ front porches a free shopping news filled from front to back with ads. That paper made up in weight for what it lacked in content. It was as if half the world had something to sell, and had chosen this particular paper to convey the news, in bold print and big colored pictures, to the other half of the world.

The bale of papers left on the corner for me to distribute was the size of a bale that might have been left for an elephant who hadn’t eaten in a week. And my route seemed to cover roughly the United States west of the Mississippi: including both the Sierras and the Rockies, if you can imagine them with tract houses cheek by cheek.

In short, if it had occurred to me to put my situation into church language—which it actually did, if you can believe it of a boy raised in a minimally observant Episcopal household—I didn’t exactly feel that I was doing God’s work.

I happened to notice one morning when my rebelliousness was reaching an intolerable pitch, that the truck which dropped off my elephantine bale of papers did so beside a long, tall and dense evergreen hedge. I realized that those six feet of dense evergreen provided adequate cover, in a large number of places, for bales even as big as mine. I convinced myself that I was doing virtually everyone a favor by depositing the bales in the hedge, and conveniently forgot that I was continuing to be paid for my labors. My freedom lasted about two weeks before somebody missed his shopping news, and I had to pull every waterlogged bale out of the hedge, and return my ill-gotten wages. My mother let me know that I was headed down the slippery slope to a life of crime.

But it’s the other part of my solution to this paper route from the Underworld that I want more to describe. Before I discovered the irresistible hedge—while I was still trudging my rounds—I began to talk with God. At least I assumed it was God, before I later reflected on how the whole misadventure concluded. These talks were not aloud. I was too shy for that. These were silent conversations in which I mostly put questions and waited for answers. I was old enough to realize that my active imagination may have been at work, so we agreed on a secret word that only He could speak.

I have tried, but I don’t remember much of the content of those talks, of that listening for the voice of God, that search, on ground I suppose as likely as any, for His Kingdom. I don’t think the talks had anything to do with my paper route. They touched upon the subject of fathers, present and absent (my own had died only a few months before), on fear in the nighttime, on anger and what only later I came to understand as forgiveness. I remember that we spoke of loneliness, and the kind of companionship one might experience even when one thought oneself alone. We spoke more than a little about Jesus, I think partly because I was preoccupied with fathers and sons, and because some of the stories of Jesus’s life, and the stories he told to others, had begun to exercise their mysterious hold on me.

It’s been a very long time since those talks, a lot of time for puzzlement, disbelief, interpretation—too much time for interpretation. I’ve come to think of much that I call interpretation as close kin to whatever it was that led me into that thicket of a hedge. I’ve never lost the love of asking questions, or listening for answers, or of Jesus’s stories.

I can talk and write more clearly now than I could at the age of eleven. For example, when I was eleven I was sure than God was a noun; now I’m more inclined to think of God as a verb, and the Kingdom of God as a path rather than a destination.

_____________________________

When Andrew and Peter first encountered Jesus, they asked him, “Rabbi, where are you going?”; and he answered, “Follow me.” That has always been for me one of the simplest, hardest and most moving exchanges in the Gospels. Andrew and Peter meant the question simply and literally enough. Jesus's response dramatically raised the stakes. There was no way to tell them where he was going.

There is another simple exchange: another touchingly straightforward question, and another answer that continues to echo long after it is spoken, maybe the essence of gospel, of the good news.

“....someone asked Jesus, ‘When will the kingdom of God come?’ [there’s the noun]
“Jesus said, ‘The kingdom of God will not come if you watch for it. Nor will anyone be able to say, ‘It is here’ or ‘It is there.’ For the kingdom of God is within you.” [listen: there’s the verb]

Turning II: Dance of the Dervishes

There is another embodiment of turning in the spiritual literature of human development that bears a deep kinship to the Judeo-Christian tradition. It is from the Sufis, usually described as an esoteric or mystical domain of Islam, perhaps having its origins in central Asia, but in fact at home throughout the Near and Far East and beyond. Sufism has been represented in Reckonings both in the tales of Mulla Nasrudin and in the incomparable stories and poems of Rumi. The Sufis gave birth to those we describe but little know as "whirling dervishes." Here the turning of their movement is evoked by Coleman Barks:

"The 'turn,' the moving meditation done by Mevlevi dervishes, originated with Rumi. The story goes that he was walking in the goldsmithing section of Konya [in what is now Turkey] when he heard a beautiful music in their hammering. He began turning in harmony with it, an ecstatic dance of surrender and yet with great centered discipline. He arrived at a place where ego dissolves and a resonance with universal soul comes in. Dervish literally means 'doorway.' ... Turning is an image of how the dervish becomes an empty place where human and divine can meet. To approach the whole the part must become mad, by conventional standards at least. These ecstatic holy people, called matzubs in the sufi tradition, redefine this sort of madness as true health.

Daniel Libert adds in the preface to his lovely small book, Rumi: Fragments,Ecstasies, (Santa Fe, NM, 1981): "In the ecstatic trance of the 'Sema,' this dance to wailing flute and pacing drum, Rumi extemporaneously recited thousands of odes which students hastily transcribed."


The weeping flute
remembers
the riverbed

the stick beats the drum,
“I was once green,
a living branch.”

the skin of the lute
trembles
like living flesh

the lovers turn
bewildered
like Jacob seeking Joseph

if you heard their cries
your heart would shatter
like glass

             - Rumi

 

Turning I: A Bach Cantata

 
Spiral Shell, photograph by Edward Steichen

A Note after Listening to Cantata No. 104 by Johann Sebastian Bach

The initial choral passage of Bach’s cantata is drawn from the haunting 80th Psalm, which portrays a deeply troubled time for the people of Israel. The growing vine—the tree of life—which once bore so plentifully has been destroyed.  Once nourished in its shade and by its fruit, the people of Israel feel confused, fearful, betrayed. The haunting quality is found most poignantly in the psalmist’s refrain, repeated three times: “Turn us again, O God, and cause Thy face to shine…” The mid-passages of the cantata—the four recitatives and arias—are a facing and working through of the tensions between fear and trust, and faith is painfully and movingly reborn. Bach can then turn to those magnificent and familiar words of the 23rd Psalm: “The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul…” The movement of the cantata—from the distressed, even anguished plea of the 80th Psalm to the peace and affirmation of the 23rd—is a dramatic turning.

The theme of turning or redemption is central to our Jewish-Christian tradition. The movement is that from life to death to rebirth, from one level of consciousness to a transition that is nothing short of death, thence to an experience of rebirth or renewal that is qualitatively other—larger, more capacious—than the life previously known. One unity of being and purpose is broken, undone; the soul, in effect, impounded. It cannot be redeemed, or even held beyond its time, without becoming some poor, hapless shadow of itself. We talk of the puer aeternus, of zombies, of the walking wounded, indeed, of the man in the gray flannel suit. Someplace in his reflections on the Gospels, Stephen Mitchell writes, “Only when we realize that we are lost can we begin to be found.”

The panic and shame of that awareness can be awful in its purgative clarity:

                        …The rending pain of re-enactment
                            Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
                            Of motives late revealed, and the awareness
                        Of things ill done and done to others’ harm
                            Which once you took for exercise of virtue.

                                                      - T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

There is imagery from Hasidic legend that vividly conveys a sense of the soul’s impoundment and of its release:

The spark in a stone or a plant or another creature is like a complete figure which sits in the middle of a thing as in a block, so that its hands and feet cannot stretch themselves and the head lies on the knees. He who is able to lift the holy spark leads this figure into freedom, and no setting free of captives is greater than this.