Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

Basho

Matsuo Basho is the universally acknowledged master of the Japanese form of poetry called haiku. He lived from 1644 to 1694, studied Chinese poetry, Taoism and Zen Buddhism, and for a time practiced Zen meditation. In his forties he began to travel, and set down his experiences in journals, the most well known of which is the classic of Japanese literature, Narrow Road to the Far North.

There is linear time and cyclical time, and then there is the no time of Zen Buddhism. While the haiku poetry of Basho and other masters of the form may not be Zen Buddhist in the sense that the poet was a practitioner of Zen--Basho is known to have studied Zen for a short time only--there is a deep affinity between the haiku form and the quality of consciousness or habit of mind associated with the Zen tradition. Robert Haas, who edited The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, & Issa (New York: Harper Collins, 1994), and translated most of the poems in that volume, wrote in a vein that is likely be more helpful to some of us than others:

In Basho's best poems, each individual moment of perception is all there is--or what there is, and at the same time, it isn't anything at all. There are different ways to say this, or parts of it--the world really seen is the world; every moment is eternal; or, every moment of time is all time; therefore time doesn't exist. In any case, after Basho, the genius of the form is the way in which through trained perception, it compresses the experiences of cyclical time, linear time, and the all time-no time of Zen into seventeen syllables.

Thus time (or no time) is of the essence in haiku: a single, evanescent moment of perception, of being, that also has its home in a traditional season of the year, and thus in the yearly cycle and its rituals: spring, summer, fall and winter. Collections of haiku--R.H. Blythe's is the classical four-volume set in English--are traditionally organized seasonally. I like Haas's speculation about the origin of this pattern:

My personal theory, not especially well-informed, about kigo [seasonal phrases] is that their origin is shamanic, animist, and ritualistic, that the words for "winter blast" and "spring blossoms" and "summer shower" were intended at one time to call forth the living spirits manifested in those natural phenomena.... The Chippewa's hunter's song, soliciting the spirit of the deer, is not very different from the Japanese poet soliciting the spirit of the cherry blossoms.

There are probably many published suggestions for reading haiku. Robert Haas writes with an erudition somewhat beyond my own, "Perhaps the best way . . . after one has familiarized oneself with the symbolism of the seasons and the Japanese habit of mind, is to read them as plainly and literally as possible."

To my mind, the most plausible idea is to approach haiku poems as nearly as possible in the spirit in which they were written. Linger. Haiku, perhaps more than any other literary form, asks for quiet attention. Here are some of the master Basho's own words, most of which, reflected upon, are as useful for living as for reading or writing poetry. (I repeat here the passage that summarizes better than anything I know the quality of mind I have called "earth consciousness." Some examples of Basho's haiku are included in my entry "Preliminary Notes on Earth Consciousness.")

Learn about pines from the pine, and about bamboo from the bamboo. In doing so, you must leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself. Otherwise you impose yourself on the object and do not learn. Your poetry issues of its own accord when you and the object have become one - when you have plunged deep enough into the object to see something like a hidden glimmering there. However well phrased your poetry may be, if your feeling is not natural - if the object and you are separate - then your poetry is not true poetry but merely your subjective counterfeit.

One must first of all concentrate one's thoughts on an object. Once one's mind achieves a state of concentration and the space between oneself and the object has disappeared, the essential nature of the object can be perceived...When you are composing a verse, let there not be a hair's breadth separating your mind from what you write.

The style I have is a light one both in form and in structure, like the impression of looking at the sandy bed of a shallow river.

The trouble with most poetry is that it is either subjective or objective.

Eat vegetable soup rather than duck stew.

Preliminary Notes on Earth Consciousness

"Earth consciousness" is my current phrase for a subject that is at the heart of Reckonings, a subject I look forward to unpacking and exploring further in days to come. Alternative phrases do not roll off the tongue or catch the mind's eye more easily. Joanna Macy, one of the preeminent students of earth consciousness, speaks of "radical interconnectedness." The traditional Buddhist concept translates roughly as "interbeing," and is wonderfully described in the many writings of the monks Thich Nhat Hanh and Peme Chodron.

However much we have been conditioned by our Cartesian dualistic tutors to think otherwise, each of our lives is fundamentally, inextricably, of one systemic piece with all life. It is often convenient and perhaps reassuring to explore human nature as if it were a discrete phenomenon--subject standing over against object. But we lose something essential of ourselves if we abandon or ignore--or, heavily conditioned to our uniqueness as we are, fail to reabsorb into consciousness--our oneness with nature at large.

The language and experience of relationship with friend, animal, tree, stone melds, as earth consciousness develops, into unity:

The birds have
vanished into the sky,

and now the last
cloud drains away.

We sit together, the
mountain and me,

until only the
mountain remains.

            - Li Po

The poet David Ignatow may have had Li Po's lines in mind when he wrote "I should be content to look at a mountain for what it is and not as a comment on my life."

Li Po's poem is not an example of the classical Japanese form known as haiku. But it is perhaps in haiku, of all poetic forms, that earth consciousness is most manifest. In the introduction to his collection, The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa (New York: Ecco, 1994), Robert Haas writes of haiku's "quality of actuality, of the moment seized on and rendered purely, and because of this they seem to elude being either traditional images of nature or ideas about it...." Basho remains Basho, and the momentary natural world in which he finds himself retains its particularity; the intimacy between them has become so close as to represent one ordinary and mysterious reality.

I've written elsewhere in Reckonings (under the category "Stories and Poems") of Basho's life and writing, and the haiku form, perhaps shedding a little further light on the subject of earth consciousness and one who practiced it.

Before offering some examples of Basho's haiku, I want to repeat here his description of the art of haiku, which is as clear and crystalline a description of earth consciousness as any I could imagine:

Learn about pines from the pine, and about bamboo from the bamboo. In doing so, you must leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself. Otherwise you impose yourself on the object and do not learn. Your poetry issues of its own accord when you and the object have become one - when you have plunged deep enough into the object to see something like a hidden glimmering there. However well phrased your poetry may be, if your feeling is not natural - if the object and you are separate - then your poetry is not true poetry but merely your subjective counterfeit.

One must first of all concentrate one's thoughts on an object. Once one's mind achieves a state of concentration and the space between oneself and the object has disappeared, the essential nature of the object can be perceived...When you are composing a verse, let there not be a hair's breadth separating your mind from what you write.

The style I have is a light one both in form and in structure, like the impression of looking at the sandy bed of a shallow river.

The trouble with most poetry is that it is either subjective or objective.

Eat vegetable soup rather than duck stew.

Basho

BASHO'S HAIKU


            A crow
has settled on a bare branch—
            autumn evening.


            Plates and bowls
dim in the twilight—
            the evening cool.


At a hermitage:

            A cool fall night—
getting dinner, we peeled
            eggplants, cucumbers.


            Taking a nap,
feet planted
            against a cool wall.


            The old pond—a
a frog jumps in,
            sound of water.


            Tired,
looking for a place to stay;
            hanging wisteria.



            Fleas, lice,
a horse peeing
            near my pillow.


His death poem:


            Sick on a journey,
my dreams wander
            the withered fields.

Toward the Solstice

I have no reason to believe that the following poem of Adrienne Rich retained its significance to her in the years since its writing over thirty years ago. It was published in her volume, The Dream of a Common Language, containing poems written between 1974 and 1977, when she was in her mid-40s. She has not chosen subsequently to include it in collections of her work spanning over a half-century of writing.

But "Toward the Solstice" was of enduring importance to me as I grew awkwardly and circuitously  through the middle years of my life, and I often shared it with my students. It was written shortly after Rich's well-known and frequently anthologized poem, "Diving Into the Wreck," which I have included in the Journeys section of Reckonings. To read the two poems together is to recognize their kinship, the need to identify and seek reconciliation with the ghosts of our past, that we may continue the birthing of our lives. In another poem from the same period, "From an Old House in America," Rich writes:

Yet something hangs between us
Older and stranger than ourselves

Like a translucent curtain, a sheet of water
A dusty window

the irreducible, incomplete connection
between the dead and living
……
All my energy reaches out tonight
To comprehend a miracle beyond

raising the dead: the undead to watch
back on the road of birth.


I should add a brief note about the solstice, those two days in the cycle of the year for which the poet waits—summer and winter, the longest and shortest days of the year, marked immemorially by our ancestors as times of transition, awareness of naturally recurrent cycles, occasions for stock taking, heightened awareness, turning respectively toward the darkness and the light. In this poem, reflecting the poet’s consciousness of unfinished work, the imagery of the one tumbles repeatedly, cumulatively into that of the other.

Imagine:

Annie Leibovitz: Life and Death Examined

I want to share the following story (from The New York Times, October 6, 2006, by Janny Scott) because I believe it is lovely as a personal and family portrait, as unusually sensitive journalism, as an account of an artist's struggle for, and exquisite, often painful awareness of authenticity. I know of Annie Leibovitz's and Susan Sontag's work, but not enough, not deeply enough. In reading Leibovitz's words in this interview, I came to feel close to her, to say to myself, if I was her, that's what I hope I would have done and said. I want to spend time with her book, A Photographer's Life, 1990-2005 (Random House, 2006), evoking the years she and Susan Sontag spent together. It's creation "turned into what [Leibovitz] has described as an archeological dig: an unearthing and sifting of a decade and a half of work, love, family life, illness, deaths and births, adding up to 'my most important work... It's the most intimate, it tells the best story, and I care about it."

Sabbath

Wendell Berry, chronicler of the Port William membership, novelist, poet and essayist, has a habit of writing a contemplative poem on the Sabbath. I have reprinted one in the "Stories and Poems" part of Reckonings. There is an almost forgotten but deep wisdom in the Sabbath tradition. Those who still live the faith cycles of the Jewish and Christian traditions know it in their bones, and there may be some small remnant in our secular culture's day-off that has not been wholly consumed by the weekend. I'll be writing more on the Sabbath theme, following the lead of Abraham Joshua Heschel and others.

It is a tradition grounded in mystery, like all deep wisdom traditions. Setting a day aside, an extraordinary, contemplative day for rest and re-creation, without the normal round of work--God's rest on the seventh day of Creation; a day for remembrance of the gifts one has been given, particularly the gift of deliverance from whatever bondage one has suffered and from which one is--more and more-- free; a day of recognizing and passing on the gifts themselves (for the gift that is not passed on, given in turn, does not continue to live).

Before the Sabbath tradition came to the Hebrews, it was alive in Babylonia, the fertile cradle of civilization, shabattu, and there is suggestive evidence of its association with "the day of the appeasement of the heart." It is a lovely phrase. Once we have freed appeasement from the shadow of 1938, from well-meaning but terrible misjudgment, we are free to embrace its older richer associations of peace, soothing, calm, reconciliation. "Appeasement of the heart," then, is both a turning toward and an emanation from the heart, the source of love and forgiveness: "beloved, then, now, and always."

Out of that rich and mysterious tradition of reflection upon the deepest cycle we apprehend, that of life and death and life and death, still through a glass darkly but--as we allow ourselves to be moved--face to face, knowing as we are known,  free to pass on the treasure that is ours:

Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.

Not Ideas About The Thing, But The Thing Itself

I've asked myself what to do with this poem of Wallace Stevens that so draws me. Where do I most find its companionship? Not pinned beside my writing desk surely, where its mockery would quietly burn. As I wake and before I sleep; standing in a snowfall; letting go. Now that my imagination has awakened, why not beside my writing desk, so long as the pinning was in the spirit of vitality rather than stasis, fraternity rather than taxonomy?

NOT IDEAS ABOUT THE THING
BUT THE THING ITSELF

At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it,
A bird’s cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.

The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow…
It would have been outside.

It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep’s faded papier-maché…
The sun was coming from outside.

That scrawny cry—it was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.


- Wallace Stevens

Try to Praise the Mutilated World

Philoctetes, the central figure of Sophocles' play from which the subtitle of Reckonings is drawn, suffers from a kind of mutilation: a chronically suppurating wound that will not heal. Elsewhere in Reckonings I will write about the significance of Philoctetes's wound, its role in his life and in bringing to a close the long and bloody Trojan War. Here I want simply to note that woundedness is a part of being human and an increasingly evident characteristic of the earth itself. How we recognize those wounds, our own and those of the earth, how we bear them, experience the relationships between them and seek their healing, is critical to the character of our living and its effect on others. It is for good reason that the figure of "the wounded healer" is so resonant in the lives of physicians, psychotherapists, parents and others who bear responsibility for others' lives. W.H. Auden writes of loving with "a crooked heart." The chorus at the end of Philoctetes is

Half-ready to believe
That a crippled trust might walk.



The refrain of Adam Zagajewski's poem, "Try to Praise the Mutilated World," moves me in the same spirit:

Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June's long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You've seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.


(translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh)

Thoughts on a Zen Buddhist Parable

Here is a well-known parable told by the Buddha:

 

A man, crossing a field, encounters a tiger. The man flees, the tiger pursues. Coming to a cliff top, the man grabs the root of a vine and swings  himself down below the tiger's reach. The tiger waits. Looking down the precipice upon which he precariously swings, the man sees another tiger looking expectantly upwards at him. As if this were not sufficient cause for peril, two mice begin to chew the root from which he hangs. As he digests his unenviable condition, the man sees a ripe strawberry within his reach. Releasing the vine with one hand, he gently picks the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!

 

______________________________

 

 

Teaching tales are a wonderful part of many other wisdom traditions, including Sufism, Taoism, Hasidic Judaism, the life of Jesus in the New Testament, and the stories of the desert fathers of early Christianity. Like this Zen parable, they lend themselves to meditation and revisiting.

When I first read this story, in my twenties, I took it at reasonable face value: a doomed man's capacity to pluck a last moment of pleasure before imminent and certain death. Having no experience of such, I nonetheless imagined that there was nothing like such inevitability to focus and heighten one's sensibilities.

Years later, ruminating on the story again while preparing to discuss it with a group of students, I wrote in my journal, "Can I, in the midst of all that distracts and destroys, with no hope of release from such circumstances, reach out to taste the fruit of life? I have a fierce and, I think, irredeemable tendency to hold on tighter to what I've learned to know as dear life. Perhaps, if I will not let go, I can at least learn to grasp with only one hand, leaving the other to reach out freely."

Now, later in life, I am more inclined to hear the tale as a nudge towards recognition of the evanescence of time in contrast to a world more and more compelled by the tyranny of time's presence and precision. None of my readings is lost. I live, as Stanley Kunitz writes elsewhere, "in the layers," and I too am not done with my changes.

There is a brief Sufi tale whose characters are not unlike those of this Zen parable:

A man being followed by a hungry tiger turned in desperation to face it, and cried: "Why don't you leave me alone?" The tiger answered: "Why don't you stop being so appetizing?""

 

Telling Stories, Saying Poems

I believe in parables. I navigate life using stories where I find them, and I hold tight to the ones that tell me new kinds of truth.

- Barbara Kingsolver


The impulse to tell and listen to stories, the poetic pattern of cycle, repetition, movement and simile, is one with that of image-making, and surely is as old as humankind. Witness the Neolithic picture writing, at once familiar and mysterious, on cave walls at Lascaux in France and Altamira in northern Spain. The stuff of our imagination, we sometimes think, was laid down in early childhood, or drawn forth as sensibility matures, and there is truth in both of those convictions. But imagination is also older and more profound, and we come upon it, are moved by it and find new meaning in it, if we are open to a gift that is more primordial than our conscious minds can encompass.

The great German scholar of India's history, Heinrich Zimmer, reminded us that the disparaging word "dilettante" is derived from the Italian verb dilettare, "to take delight in." Coleridge's phrase, "willing suspension of disbelief," suggests something of that life-giving spirit. The world of soul and imagination is at once illimitable and inexhaustible, like the gift of manna, the casks of wine at Cana, like the perennial imp and shape-shifter, Coyote. In that spirit, consciousness is most truly nourished, the old stories and the new are most truly received, transformed, passed on afresh, the seeds, in Zimmer's words, "waiting to be touched.... reappear.... as fresh and green as before."

I want to initiate this section of Reckonings with one of Stanley Kunitz's poems, so it is appropriate to end this introduction with his own words: "Poetry is ultimately mythology, the telling of the stories of the soul. The old myths, the old gods, the old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our minds, waiting for our call. We have need of them, never more desperately than now, for in their sum they epitomize the wisdom and experience of the race. At every true act of the imagination, whether in art or science, they stir fitfully."

These pages will come to harbor other poems, brief stories and other short prose, juxtaposed with images that may in turn suggest a stream of association, a poetic or narrative response. The fragment of jack pine in my photograph here, shaped by age and weather into such intriguing form, rests on a hospitable granite shelf, itself cracked, rounded and molded by ice, rain, wind and sun. Jack pine exposed at high altitude in the mountains of New England grows slowly. Its shapes bear the marks of its home and history, much like the coastal cypress of northern California.

We begin, then--not only for the sake of its title--with Stanley Kunitz's loving and painful response to a child's hard question, a tender plea for forgiveness and an evocation of the inextricability of life, love, art and language.

Kunitz died last spring, 100 years old. He served some time ago as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a position that until recently was known as U.S. Poet Laureate, and he won virtually every prize in the literary pantheon, from the arbiters of prosody and from his fellow poets. His poems have been my close companions for thirty years.



THE RECKONING

"What have you done?"

Pigeon, who are to me
Language and light
And the long flight home,
Your question comes with coils
Like years behind,
Which I am crawling from.
Be patient with my wound:
Too long I lay
In the folds of my preparation,
Sinuous in the sun,
A golden skin,
All pride, sores, excretion,
Blazing with death. O child,
From my angry side
Tumbles this agate heart,
Your prize, veined with the root
Of guilty life,
From which flow love and art.

Four Poems of the Journey

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do-
determined to save
the only life you could save.

              -Mary Oliver

The Layers

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
"Live in the layers,
not on the litter."
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.

             - Stanley Kunitz

Diving into the Wreck

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and away into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

          - Adrienne Rich

No, no there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.
More and more you have become
those lives and deaths
that have belonged to you.
You have become a sort of grave
containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved
then, now, and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree
standing over a grave.
Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.

 
- Wendell Berry

Thoughts on Abiding

I linger beside a familiar granite boulder and small juniper in a pasture. I am drawn to their simplicity, common juniper (even in Latin: Juniperus communis) and common granite, united in lasting companionship. They aren't rare. We will find them on many of our walks. They thrive everywhere in our landscapes. Even after suburbia has invaded and overrun,  a keen and patient eye can see evidence of pastures, old fields, rocky slopes. There's strength in these two fellow creatures, a sense of lasting through whatever elements they meet. The granite boulder isn't especially dramatic or remarkable, but it was too large for the farmer to move aside when he cleared the pasture. So it was left, perhaps just where a receding glacier dropped it ten thousand years ago. The juniper, of course, came later, but its gnarled tenaciousness—like its cousin cypresses on the California coast—makes for fitting fellowship. These two rough textured green gray souls live together in satisfying complementarity. One can't imagine them losing each other.

Images in Poems

Sometimes a poem will offer an image that is so striking, so simple and ordinary, and yet so powerful and beautiful, that it finds its way into a permanent corner of one's mind, coming out now and then, as one might without conscious intent draw a favorite book from the shelf, find it opening to a page so familiar that the binding itself has become accustomed to the place. So it has been for me with two poems I recall (more, but these will serve), the first by W.B.Yeats, the second by Jane Kenyon. It is interesting to me that the two are alike in place and theme.  Yeats's lines are untitled, being a self-contained part of a longer poem, a poem of memory ("Vacillation") looking back when the poet was 67 (my own age as I write these lines) :

My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.

While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessèd and could bless.



MAN EATING
by Jane Kenyon

The man at the table across from mine
is eating yogurt. His eyes, following
the progress of the spoon, cross briefly
each time it nears his face. Time,

and the world with all its principalities,
might come to an end as prophesied
by the Apostle John, but what about
this man, so completely present

to the little carton with its cool,
sweet food, which has caused no animal
to suffer, and which he is eating
with a pearl-white plastic spoon.

An Old Barn

A barn, the last building one encounters before entering the woods on the way up Dicey's Mill Trail towards Mt. Passaconaway in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. I recall taking this picture. For no reason other than the wonder of a fine spring day I lingered, sat for a few minutes on a stone beside barn and trail. I was struck by the beauty of the old weathered and warped shingles, the contrasting deep red of the small window frame and sill, and the young balsam fir beside them. Composition, I thought, was less something one made than something one found, and took pleasure in.

The Cracked Sphere

(For Paul and Joshua)

It is an image that has been a recurrent part of my imagination from the prehistory of early childhood: a globe, the world, perhaps as seen and so memorably photographed from the reaches of space. I do not have to look closely, so intimate is its companionship, to know that jagged cracks run from surface to core.

In my youth I took it for my own fractured world, ominous and mysterious, and I wondered how an indelibly broken life could still offer so many occasions for love, intrigue, discovery, laughter. As if in response, I came upon a resonant phrase, "the crack in the cosmic egg." [Joseph Chilton Pearce,  The Crack in the Cosmic Egg: New Constructs of Mind and Reality (1971)]. All along, it appeared, I had been patiently accompanied by an ageless image that has echoed through time and across cultures. Dying and giving birth are like the moon's shadow and light, going and coming not in linear sequence but as one uroboric whole.

On the plaza outside the United Nations in New York there is a remarkable sculpture. I didn't know of its existence until I read this description:

"It consists of an enormous sphere of burnished bronze, suggesting a globe. The sphere is pleasing to behold, even though it startles with its imperfection. There are deep, jagged cracks in its golden-hued surface, cracks too large ever to be repaired. Perhaps it's cracked because it's defective (like the broken world), one thinks. Or maybe (like an egg) it has to break in order for something else to emerge. Perhaps both. Sure enough, when one peers into the gashes on its surface, there is another brightly shining sphere coming along inside. But that one is already cracked, too!"

So wrote Mary Ann Glendon in her book, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001, p. 240).

The charcoal drawing on the left was made by my son Paul at the kitchen table one morning, in his sketch pad. It literally took my breath away. I'd never before told him about cracked spheres in his father's imagination or the experience of the world.

A few years later, reading a collection of poems by Joshua, another of my sons, I found the following prayer:

"Help me to build that which will break."

Sphere on UN Plaza

Memories: Introduction

Memory's intricate idiosyncrasies are fascinating, endless sources of study, experiment and rumination, as is the sub-specie of images from memory, not least because they will not remain still but are in more or less continuous movement, accompanied as in a dance by sound, smell, taste, embodiment and emotion. The cracked sphere (in Images) was drawn from memory and redrawn by another. It is a related but distinct accomplishment entirely to create such an image in prose, and in such a way that it quickens in the sensuous imagination of a reader,  and adds, as well, to the fundament of our understanding of memory itself.

AN IMAGE FROM MEMORY

One who does so is Vladimir Nabokov in Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. Here is a favorite example of reflection from his Russian childhood, around 1912:

I witness with pleasure the supreme achievement of memory, which is the masterly use it makes of innate harmonies when gathering to its fold the suspended and wandering tonalities of the past. I like to imagine, in consummation and resolution of those jangling chords, something as enduring, in retrospect, as the long table that on summer birthdays and namedays used to be laid for afternoon chocolate out of doors, in an alley of birches, limes and maples at its debouchment on the smooth sanded space of the garden proper that separated the park and the house. I see the tablecloth and the faces of seated people sharing in the animation of light and shade beneath a moving, a fabulous foliage, exaggerated, no doubt, by the same faculty of impassioned commemoration, of ceaseless return, that makes me always approach that banquet table from the outside, from the depth of the park--as if the mind, in order to go back thither, had to do so with the silent steps of a prodigal, faint with excitement. Through a tremulous prism, I distinguish the features of relatives and familiars, mute lips serenely moving in forgotten speech. I see the steam of the chocolate and the plates of blueberry tarts. I note the small helicopter of a revolving samara that gently descends upon the tablecloth, and, lying across the table, an adolescent girl's bare arm indolently extended as far as it will go, with its turquoise-veined underside turned up to the flaky sunlight, the palm open in lazy expectancy of something--perhaps the nutcracker. In the place where my current tutor sits, there is a changeful image, a succession of fade-ins and fade-outs; the pulsation of my thought mingles with that of the leaf shadows and turns Ordo into Max and Max into Lenski and Lenski into the schoolmaster, and the whole array of trembling, transformations is repeated. And then, suddenly, just when the colors and outlines settle at last to their various duties--smiling, frivolous duties--some knob is touched and a torrent of sounds comes to life: voices speaking all together, a walnut cracked, the click of a nutcracker carelessly passed, thirty human hearts drowning mine with their regular beats; the sough and sigh of a thousand trees, the local concord of loud summer birds, and, beyond the river, behind the rhythmic trees, the confused and enthusiastic hullabaloo of bathing young villagers, like a background of wild applause.




Memories of one's children and grandchildren are among the most precious of all. Their particularity reminds one of a given time, as well: in the instance below, my daughter and her first child, my first grandchild, safe and together after an adventure that both they and I  will remember as a dramatic and traumatic part of our lives.






A Flower Given to my Daughter

  Frail the white rose and frail are
  Her hands that gave
  Whose soul is sere and paler
  Than time's wan wave.

  Rosefrail and fair — yet frailest
  A wonder wild
  In gentle eyes thou veilest,
  My blueveined child.

                        -  James Joyce

The Parable of the Mountain

I have been moved over the years by the writing of John S. Dunne, a theologian at the University of Notre Dame. In his many books (perhaps most richly in The Way of All the Earth), Dunne has been engaged in what he has called "passing over" and "coming back," passing over into the lives, the spiritual stories and traditions, of others, and then coming back again, with new insight, into one's own. The spirit of such journeying is that of pilgrimage, and, less obviously, that of Sabbath. For it is in the natural rhythms of movement and rest, speech and silence, action and contemplation, that one finds (and gives) the greatest nourishment. Dunne writes of "the homing spirit," of his own pilgrimage: "I realized I had to find a point of rest in myself where I could rest in God, where God dwells in me, and let that be my point of origin and of return. I had to pass over to God in others and come back again to God in myself."

In the following parable, Dunne is contemplating a related pair of journeys, ours toward God and God's toward us. In doing so, he helps us to understand the inescapability and the holiness of the mundane world.

Man, let us say, is climbing a mountain. At the top of the mountain, he thinks, is God. Down in the valley are the cares and concerns of human life, all the troubles of love and war. By climbing the mountain and reaching the top, man hopes to escape from all these miseries. God, on the other hand, is coming down the mountain, let us say, his desire being to plunge himself into the very things that man wishes to escape. Man's desire is to be God, God's is to be man. God and man pass one another going in opposite directions. When man reaches the top of the mountain he is going to find nothing. God is not there. Let us suppose that man does reach the top and does make this discovery. Or suppose that that he passes God on the way, or finds God's tracks leading downwards, or hears a rumor that God is descending the mountain. One way or another, man learns that climbing was a mistake and that what he seeks is to be found only by going down into the valley. He turns around, therefore, and starts going down the mountain. He sets his face towards love and war, where before he had turned his back upon them.

Martin Buber, in a small gem of a book called The Way of Man, writes in a complementary vein of the teachings of the Baal-Shem Tov, legendary founder of the 18th century Hasidic movement in Eastern European Jewry. The Baal-Shem Tov taught about "the cares and concerns of human life" that

...no encounter with a being or a thing in the course of our life lacks a hidden significance. The people we live with or meet with, the animals that help us with our farmwork, the soil we till, the materials we shape, the tools we use, they all contain a mysterious spiritual substance which depends on us for helping it towards its pure form, its perfection. If we neglect this spiritual substance sent across our path, if we think only in terms of momentary purposes, without developing a genuine relationship to the beings and things in whose life we ought to take part, as they in ours, then we shall ourselves be debarred from true, fulfilled existence. It is my conviction that this doctrine is essentially true. The highest culture of the soul remains basically arid and barren unless, day by day, waters of life pour forth into the soul from those little encounters to which we give their due; the most formidable power is intrinsically powerlessness until it maintains a secret covenant with these contacts, both humble and helpful, with strange, yet near, being.

Psyche and spirit: a preface

When I was creating Reckonings some 15 years ago, I sought a name for one of the subjects I wanted most to explore, the relationship between psychology and spirituality, which I had come, in earlier years, to conceive as deeply and intimately twined − virtually to the point of a single integral experience. And since I was more intrigued by practice and lived life than by conceptual formulations, I chose the phrase "psyche and spirit," and began to explore their meaning in the introduction that follows below. This is the first instance, then, of my circling back upon writing that represents Reckonings in its earliest formative years. As I continue with that retrospective project, interweaving its pieces with attention to more current themes, I realize, without surprise, that I live now much as I lived then, only a little more awake, a little more knowing, thoughtful and caring of others; there is humility, sorrow and pleasure in that recognition.

 

At the outset, then: psyche and soul, human development and spiritual development, are one being, one path, not two. It took me well into the presumptive years of adulthood to encounter either of them seriously. But when I did, I had the good fortune to be introduced to them together, in their commonality.

Rudolf Otto’s Das Heilige (The Sacred [1917]), is usually translated now as The Idea of the Holy. Otto drew from the words of those who sought to find some way of describing the inexpressible. Doing so, he characterized religious experience as numinous: experience of a reality that is overwhelming, awe-inspiring, at once (or on different occasions) terrifying and ecstatic, always permeated by mystery, “wholly other,” not in the sense of alien but rather different, extraordinary if one can imagine the full resonance, the furthest reaches of that word. His summary Latin phrase was mysterium tremendum et fascinans, which means in English about what one would imagine it to mean. (The Latin word numen became associated in ancient Rome with divine will, but it literally describes a nod of the head, as an expression of will or consent. I am fond of that ambiguity.)        

In the wake of Otto’s work, it became common to distinguish between the sacred and the profane, experience possessed of that numinous quality and experience that is not: the dogged reality of every day. The interesting thing about this distinction, however, is that it is never at rest, neither hard nor fast. Any object, for example—a stone, a tree, a sip of wine, a breath of air, an apricot—can reveal itself as sacred or profane, so that its sacredness is not inherent in the object itself, but in the character or quality of relationship between knower and known, a reality requiring both an “I” and an “Other.” 

That is why the distinction is between sacred and profane, and not sacred and mundane. Profanity, in its deeper sense, implies impersonality, turning away, withdrawal, rather than turning towards, fragmentation or partiality rather than wholeness, absence more than presence, seeming rather than being; mask (persona) or semblance instead of authenticity, withholding rather than giving, monologue rather than dialogue, collectivity rather than community.