Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

Sabbath as Consciousness, Practice, Relationship and Journey

The last publication of Oliver Sacks, a man I deeply admired who died early this morning, was an essay in The New York Times on "Sabbath." While I had read his memoir, On the Move, and was thus familiar with the significance of shabbos (or shabbat) in his parents' families and his own childhood, I was struck that, knowing the imminence of his death, he chose that subject for what he must have realized was to be his last published essay. Toward the essay's end, I began to understand. In June of 2014 he had been moved by a visit with many of his family who lived in Israel, and were gathered to celebrate the 100th birthday of his cousin Marjorie, who lived in Jerusalem.

"I felt embraced by my family in a way I had not known since childhood..... The peace of the Sabbath, of a stopped world, a time outside time, was palpable, infused everything, and I found myself drenched with a wistfulness, something akin to nostalgia, wondering what if: What if A and B and C had been different? What sort of person might I have been? What sort of a life might I have lived?"

"And now, weak, short of breath, my once-firm muscles melted away by cancer, I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual, but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life − achieving a sense of peace within oneself. I find my thoughts drifting to the Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week, and perhaps the seventh day of one's life as well, when one can feel that one's work is done, and one may, in good conscience, rest."

Reading today Oliver Sacks' thoughts about the meaning of Sabbath returned me to a time, ten years ago, when my own reflections found a similar focus. I found and reread the texts of three talks I had given about Sabbath, when my wife Leigh and I taught and researched for several years at Modum Bad, a psychiatric hospital and community in southern Norway.

I can't describe the effect of discovering the similarity of our attention to Sabbath − and it is similarity, not identity. It was a different time in my life. Sacks' personal history and mine are not alike, nor our professional lives. I have none of his prominence as a writer. I've admired and felt an intimacy with his books, especially his devotion to narrative and to his patients. I've never met him, and now of course never will. I do wish we had had occasion to share our writing about Sabbath; for there, I imagine, was − and remains − ground for good conversation. 

So here is the first of my three talks about Sabbath from 2005. Help me imagine the conversation with Oliver Sacks.

 

The bud
stands for all things,
even those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing.

        − Galway Kinnell, “St. Francis and the Sow”

 

Preamble

We need conceptions of healing and renewal that embrace the whole human being. We need conceptions of human being and of physical and emotional health that embrace human experience more fully than we are accustomed to imagine. Such exploration requires an expansion of our accustomed ways of knowing, our practical epistemology.

In that adventure there are several paths to follow, some worn by many feet, some freshly made.  The one suggested and illustrated here echoes the values upon which Modum Bad was founded. It may be appropriate, in this 50th anniversary year of Modum Bad's rebirth, to assess their significance and their presence in our midst today.

Re-imagining

Whatever one's healthy, toxic or nominal religious history and convictions about religious practice and belief, the experience of suffering, recovery and renewal is usefully conceived integrally as spiritual journey as well as psychological transformation. Human development and spiritual development are one story, one path, not two. Psyche and soul are descriptive of the same reality (they are, after all, the same words in the original Greek).

In this inquiry it is useful to turn to religious thought and practice with a fresh eye free of jaundice. These days, in the thin air of secular ascendancy, such wisdom is more often latent than manifest. Its relevance to a re-visioning or re-imagination of human development, suffering, healing and clinical practice, can hardly be taken for granted.

We may have to formulate a new language to quicken our hearts and minds. To do that responsibly and with care, we should start with a re-examination and reinterpretation of the old language. Such language will be unfamiliar to some, and may seem dauntingly archaic to others, irrelevant to our current challenges of growing, healing and living well with one another and with our patients.

The old wisdom, however, stands ready to be reawakened and drawn into our daily lives—even those of us determinedly secular in our sense of the world. We have only to suspend disbelief and imagine anew the stories and songs, the rituals and symbols, the praxis of religious life. We will need to contemplate and re-imagine words and concepts we have known and to which we may have become averse – God, soul, prayer, the sacred and the profane, ministry, the cycle of life, death and rebirth or resurrection, holiness and redemption, immanence and transcendence.

Such words, for most of us, have not lost their emotional potency, however much we have set them aside. Re-visioning can offer us – and those for whom we bear responsibility – freedom from constraint and a shedding of armor – relief, awakening and inspiration.

Re-imagining can be demanding, and may ask of us a full measure of empathic compassion – first toward ourselves. We shall have to shed at least some – and perhaps many – of our preconceptions and habits, and bring only our full presence—body, mind, heart and soul.

Let’s say that soul is the whole—our embracing integrity, our most capacious and harmonious identity, never fully manifest in consciousness. The instruments of soul are imagination and memory, soul’s emotional tone typically one of pathos and joy. In our partial awareness of soul we yearn (Senshucht is the manifold German word) for the wholeness that is already ours. We might say, then, that soul at once embodies and searches for presence. It is both dwelling and seeking.

The Norwegian word for pastoral counseling is sjelesorg, soul-work, soul healing. It should describe psychotherapy as an integrated whole.

For what, for who does soul long? For what do we engage in soul-work?  For relief from suffering. To be seen and known. For reconciliation. For joy. For wholeness. For home among "all creatures great and small."

Consider the remarks of UCLA psychiatrist and neurobiologist Dan Siegel:

Elucidating the links between the physical brain and the processes of the mind has shed light on the deepest nature of the self. When we examine the deep layers of our neural selves, we come to glimpse not only the roots of our mental and social lives, but the essential reality of our selves as part of an integrated whole across the span of time.

It may be that our work as human beings is not only to seek meaning and satisfaction in our lives and to dedicate ourselves to alleviating suffering in others but to be a part of a larger effort to bring integration and healing into the many layers of our interconnections with each other.

As we explore and incorporate the many domains of integration, what seems to evolve naturally is the sense of being connected to a larger whole, something more than just our bodily defined sense of self in this time we call our "life." This [integration] enables us to become more fully aware of our interconnected belonging as we, in Albert Einstein’s words, "widen our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

 The experience of Sabbbath: an example of re-imagining

The word “Sabbath” may evoke vague memories of onerous obligation and inconvenience. In all but a few marginal instances, Sabbath remains in Christian practice a small stub of its former self. We must dig deeper into the layers if we are to find suggestive meaning and value for our everyday lives.

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 verb translated as "rested" is shabbat, corresponding to the English noun sabbath: Friday sundown through Saturday sundown for Jews, Sunday for Christians.

To plumb the reality of Sabbath more deeply, we must consider not only the character of that day and the meaning of shabbat, but inquire into the nature of Sabbath time, keeping in mind a useful distinction between sacred and profane.  "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.

There is wisdom in setting aside a common day once a week as Sabbath time, a wisdom we may carry with us, within our souls. The Biblical injunction 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 knew but have forgotten. The purpose of ritual and regular practice – often itself in need of renewal – is to refresh our experience of the sacred.

If Sabbath is a realm of time, a way of being in time, Sabbath is also a dimension of consciousness and a way of being in relationship.

In a small book of meditation on Sabbath, Heschel conveys 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 word shabbat in Hebrew, in addition to the correspondence noted above, is one of the names of God; thus the intriguing suggestion, not quite explicitly drawn by Heschel, that God is both verb and 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 and redemption, the return of light and life. “All week—in profane time—there is only the hope of redemption. But when Sabbath enters 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.

If Sabbath is soul in time, spirituality may be conceived as soul in motion, at once

• craft or practice

• sustained and evolving relationship

• lifelong journey

My friend Leif Gunnar Engedal speaks of “the root-metaphor of journey” in religious conceptions of human and spiritual development, and man or woman as pilgrim, living “within the eschatological perspective of ‘becoming,’…in a permanent exodus.”  “All joy,” wrote the Christian medievalist C.S. Lewis, “emphasizes our pilgrim status; always reminds, beckons, awakens desire.”

Our hope and our practice may bring us more and more Sabbath time, closer to the experience of life as Sabbath. A thoughtful man of my acquaintance 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.

Yet our experience of sacred time must also be among our conscious and chosen reckonings, our craft as well as our gift, if we are to make the most of Sabbath. We need to learn and practice Sabbath, to tend Sabbath as a loving mother tends her child.

Otherwise sacred time may fade – as indeed it has – into the vagaries and shadows of memory and forgetting. Traditional prescriptions and proscriptions of Sabbath, when they remain alive and have not sunk, like dogma tends to do, into desiccated formalism and legalism, were designed to assist us in that task.

The more we measure and divide time, the less we allow its consecration. Heschel's language is vivid and sharp. The more we pursue "the profanity of clattering commerce, the screech 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 are drawn into Sabbath time—rest quietly and peacefully into stillness; find accord among body, mind and imagination; harmony, love and delight with one another and with the natural world—the less anger, agitation, tension, conflict and fear we feel.

That is why we are wise, sometimes, to turn off the computer, the television and the telephone and cell phone; avoid money and shopping; walk instead of drive; make love instead of work, fuss or war; play softly and cooperatively rather than competitively and hard; listen more than talk – welcoming, offering compassion, giving thanks. All these are contemporary examples of traditional Sabbath injunctions.

Thomas Merton was writing about most of us 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 that makes work fruitful.

Sabbath time is not otherworldly; it penetrates our everyday. We distinguish between sacred and profane, not sacred and mundane.  Nor are sacred and secular antithetical.

Profanity, in its deeper sense, implies violence against self or others. It suggests falseness rather than truth, withdrawal rather than turning towards, fragmentation rather than wholeness, absence more than presence, seeming rather than being; mask (persona) or semblance instead of authenticity, withholding rather than giving, monologue instead of dialogue, collectivity rather than community.

Consider the scandalous question the Bal Shem Tov (founder in 18th century eastern Europe of the rich tradition known as Hasidism) put to his disciples: “Where does God live?” And his answer: “God lives wherever man lets him in.” Martin Buber adds,

Each of us is encased in an armor which we soon, out of familiarity, no longer notice. There are only moments which penetrate it and stir it to sensibility. And when such a moment has imposed itself on us and we then take notice and ask ourselves, ‘Has anything particular taken place? Was it not of the kind I meet every day?’ then we may reply to ourselves, ‘Nothing particular; indeed, it is like this every day, only we are not there every day.

When we are all there in the way Buber suggests, we experience ourselves more wholly and are more capable of dialogue with another – a spouse or friend, a child or parent, a co-worker or patient – dialogue that is attentive and coherent, sensitive and perceptive, nourishing and loving. We are mindful, caring. We see and are seen.

When we are not there, not present to another, or when someone we value or depend upon is not present to us, we “miss” and are missed. In extremity, if such absence is sustained and sufficiently comprehensive, particularly in childhood, we die.  “Missing” in English has two complementary meanings: it is an expression of disconnection from another, and also an emotional response to that disconnection. Such missing, especially if sustained in childhood and not repaired, can be very costly. It is an emotional and even neurobiological ground of our experience of shame and depression.

When we bring what Buddhists call lovingkindness into our lives with others, into the workplace as well as the home, when we are empathic and compassionate with ourselves and those we meet, we are living in Sabbath time.

Return – full circle − 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—“tranquility, serenity, peace and repose—rest, in the deepest sense of fertile, healing stillness. Until the Sabbath, creation was unfinished. Only after the birth of menuha, only with tranquility and rest, was the circle of creation made full and complete.

The Book of Genesis tells us that Sabbath is both part of creation and a rest from creation. So it may be for us.

We are beset by diverse demands and temptations. We hurry, we “multitask,” we leap among objects of our fleeting attention, too seldom giving any our full devotion. Like the Persian mystic Rumi, we may yearn for another kind of leap, a Sabbath leap:

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 understood, of course, that such a leap was the first in a two-leap sequence. The second is the leap of return, the leap back into fuller consciousness, more reflective and collaborative dialogue, nourishing of mind, body, heart and soul.

 

Oliver Sacks, 1933-2015

Oliver Sacks, Casting Light on the Interconnectedness of Life

by Michiko Kakutani, in The New York Times, August 30, 2015

It’s no coincidence that so many of the qualities that made Oliver Sacks such a brilliant writer are the same qualities that made him an ideal doctor: keen powers of observation and a devotion to detail, deep reservoirs of sympathy, and an intuitive understanding of the fathomless mysteries of the human brain and the intricate connections between the body and the mind.

 

Dr. Sacks, who died on Sunday at 82, was a polymath and an ardent humanist, and whether he was writing about his patients, or his love of chemistry or the power of music, he leapfrogged among disciplines, shedding light on the strange and wonderful interconnectedness of life — the connections between science and art, physiology and psychology, the beauty and economy of the natural world and the magic of the human imagination.

In his writings, as he once said of his mentor, the great Soviet neuropsychologist and author A. R. Luria, “science became poetry.”

In books like “Awakenings,” “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” and “An Anthropologist on Mars,” Dr. Sacks — a longtime practicing doctor and a professor of neurology at the New York University School of Medicine — gave us case studies of patients whose stories were so odd, so anomalous, so resonant that they read like tales by Borges or Calvino. A man, with acute amnesia, who loses three decades of his life and lives wholly in the immediate present, unable to remember anything for more than a minute or two. Idiot savant twins, who can’t deal with the most mundane tasks of daily life but can perform astonishing numerical tricks, like memorizing 300-digit numbers or rattling off 20-digit primes. A blind poet who suffers from — or is gifted with — extraordinarily complex hallucinations: a milkman in an azure cart with a golden horse; small flocks of birds wearing shoes that metamorphose into men and women in medieval clothes.

Dr. Sacks depicted such people not as scientific curiosities but as individuals who become as real to us as characters by Chekhov (another doctor who wrote with uncommon empathy and insight). He was concerned with the impact that his patients’ neurological disorders had on their day-to-day routines, their relationships and their inner lives. His case studies became literary narratives as dramatic, richly detailed and compelling as those by Freud and Luria — stories that underscored not the marginality of his patients’ experiences, but their part in the shared human endeavor and the flux and contingencies of life.

Those case studies captured the emotional and metaphysical, as well as physiological, dimensions of his patients’ conditions. While they tracked the costs and isolation these individuals often endured, they also emphasized people’s resilience — their ability to adapt to their “deficits,” enabling them to hold onto a sense of identity and agency. Some even find that their conditions spur them to startling creative achievement.

In fact, Dr. Sacks wrote in “An Anthropologist on Mars,” illnesses and disorders “can play a paradoxical role in bringing out latent powers, developments, evolutions, forms of life that might never be seen or even be imaginable in their absence.” A young woman with a low I.Q. learns to sing arias in more than 30 languages, and a Canadian physician with Tourette’s syndrome learns to perform long, complicated surgical procedures without a single tic or twitch. Some scholars believe, Dr. Sacks once wrote, that Dostoyevsky and van Gogh may have had temporal lobe epilepsy, that Bartok and Wittgenstein may have been autistic, and that Mozart and Samuel Johnson could have had Tourette’s syndrome.

In his later books, Dr. Sacks increasingly turned to chronicling his own life — from his deep love of chemistry as a boy in “Uncle Tungsten,” to his experiments with L.S.D. and amphetamines in “Hallucinations,” to his coming of age as a young man and as a doctor in “On the Move.” It was a life as eclectic and adventurous as his intellectual pursuits, taking him from medical school in England to a stint as a forest firefighter in British Columbia to medical residencies and fellowship work in San Francisco and Los Angeles. He held a weight-lifting record in California, and on weekends, sometimes drove hundreds of miles on his motorcycle, from California to Las Vegas or Death Valley or the Grand Canyon.

Animated by a self-deprecating sense of humor and set down in limber, pointillist prose, Dr. Sacks’s autobiographical accounts are as candid and searching as his writings about his patients, and they suggest just how rooted his compassion and intuitive understanding — as a doctor and a writer — were in his youthful feelings of fear and dislocation. He tells us about the lasting shock of being evacuated from London as a boy during the war, and being beaten and bullied at boarding school. The rest of his life, he writes, he would have trouble with the 3 B’s: “bonding, belonging, and believing.”

He also writes about the frightening psychotic episodes of his schizophrenic brother, Michael, and his own feelings of shame for not spending more time with him — and his simultaneous need to get away. Science, with its promise of order and logic, provided a refuge for young Oliver from the chaos of his brother’s madness, and medicine promised both family continuity (his father was a general practitioner; his mother, a surgeon) and a way to study and try to understand brain disorders like Michael’s.

Dr. Sacks once described himself as a man with an “extreme immoderation in all my passions,” and his books pulsate with his “violent enthusiasms” and endless curiosity: his fascination with ferns, cephalopods, jellyfish, volcanoes, the periodic table — for all the marvels of the natural world; as well as his passion for swimming, chemistry, photography and perhaps most of all, writing. Known as Inky as a child, he began keeping journals at the age of 14. For the shy boy, writing was a way to connect with the world, a way to order his thoughts; and he kept up the habit throughout his life, amassing nearly a thousand journals, while using his books and essays to communicate to readers the romance of science and the creative and creaturely blessings of being alive.

Inclined to living “at a certain distance from life,” Dr. Sacks writes that he unexpectedly fell in love — “(for God’s sake!) I was in my 77th year” — with the writer Bill Hayes, which meant relinquishing “the habits of a lifetime’s solitude,” like decades of meals that consisted mostly of cereal or sardines, eaten “out of the tin, standing up, in 30 seconds.”

In February, Dr. Sacks wrote in an Op-Ed essay in The New York Times about learning that he had terminal cancer and had just months to live. “I cannot pretend I am without fear,” he wrote. “But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.

“Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.” His patients have lost an erudite and compassionate doctor. The world has lost a writer of immense talent and heart, a writer who helped illuminate the wonders, losses and consolations of the human condition.

 

The Peace of Wild Things

I awoke this morning and did what I have often enough said to myself and others that I do not do: I took up The New York Times and browsed the front page, before I'd even brushed my teeth.

Perhaps I needed a reminder of the wisdom of my common practice: put off the news until the peaceful vulnerability of sleep had well receded. Perhaps I was still living with last night's regret that my evening's reading to sight-impaired folks was so unrelievedly full of darknesss, and I hadn't wanted to leave them with that experience to sleep upon.

In any event, the first page this morning was uniformly, unforgivably grim.

"Migrant Crisis Escalates, with Disasters on Land and Sea"

"Iran Deal Opens a Vitriolic Divide Among U.S. Jews"

"A Life of Grievances, Then a Final Homicidal Explosion"

"Trash and Contempt Pile Up in Lebanon"

and other headlines comparably dark.

 

By the time I'd had my coffee and lived a while with the growing light, I realized that a walk was in order, through the marsh, up into the hills. And without bidding I thought of a companion whose wisdom would walk with me, even a particular poem I knew by heart.

 

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

 

 

                        − Wendell Berry

"Monet Refuses the Operation " - Liesel Mueller

I've been reading Liesel Mueller's poems again these last few days, and was prompted to search for one I particularly admired and discussed in Reckonings about four years ago. Mueller's book of poems, The Need to Hold Still (1980), won the National Book Award, and her Alive Together: New & Selected Poems received the Pulitzer Prize in 1997.

The Private Life, a book of 73 short poems in which "Monet Refuses the Operation" first appeared,  was Liesel Mueller's second book of poems, published in 1976. That collection, which was the 1975 Lamont Poetry Selection, is filled with poems exploring the character of human lives with wonderful insight and power. Dick Allen wrote of those poems that he experienced "shocks of recognition.... She goes after our secrets, this poet; often, she finds them." Russell Brignano added that "her verses are filled with captivating figures and metaphors, projecting an imaginative, deeply reflective, subtle intelligence."

 "Monet Refuses the Operation" is written in the voice of Claude Monet as an elderly man speaking to his physician. He has returned from a visit with the doctor in which the doctor has advised him to have surgery for an undisclosed ailment. The doctor has also advised his patient to abandon his gift of metaphoric imagination - the center of his life personally and as an artist - and return to a more literal, as the doctor would have it, more realistic view of the world. Monet, thankfully, refuses both the operation and the gratuitous and insensitive advice.

 

Sadly, that doctor's comments are still not unusual in our day. A friend recently told me she had been to her doctor recently: he came bustling into the examining room, his hands full of papers, saying "Now, here are the lab reports..." My friend, like Monet, stopped him and said, "You must ask me first, "How are you?" Fortunately the doctor complied, and I hope learned a lesson about human relationships that is not commonly taught in medical schools.

Perhaps returning home after that unsettling visit, Monet sits at his desk and puts into words the truth of experience the doctor does not understand. He does so clearly and beautifully, not in anger but eloquently and in a kind of wistful sympathy for the doctor's lack of imagination. He wishes his doctor might have something of the gift he has taken most of a lifetime to acquire.

 

Monet Refuses the Operation

 

Doctor, you say there are no haloes

around the streetlights in Paris

and what I see is an aberration

caused by old age, an affliction.

I tell you it has taken me all my life

to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,

to soften and blur and finally banish

the edges you regret I don’t see,

to learn that the line I called the horizon

does not exist and sky and water,

so long apart, are the same state of being.

Fifty-four years before I could see

Rouen cathedral is built

of parallel shafts of sun,

and now you want to restore

my youthful errors: fixed

notions of top and bottom,

the illusion of three-dimensional space,

wisteria separate

from the bridge it covers.

What can I say to convince you

the Houses of Parliament dissolve

night after night to become

the fluid dream of the Thames?

I will not return to a universe

of objects that don’t know each other,

as if islands were not the lost children

of one great continent.  The world

is flux, and light becomes what it touches,

becomes water, lilies on water,

above and below water,

becomes lilac and mauve and yellow

and white and cerulean lamps,

small fists passing sunlight

so quickly to one another

that it would take long, streaming hair

inside my brush to catch it.

To paint the speed of light!

Our weighted shapes, these verticals,

burn to mix with air

and changes our bones, skin, clothes

to gases.  Doctor,

if only you could see

how heaven pulls earth into its arms

and how infinitely the heart expands

to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

 

 

 

The last triptych of Monet's paintings of water lilies on his pond at Giverny was painted near the end of his life, during the years 1920 to 1922. He was going blind, and many early critics found these paintings obscure and ill-made because his eyesight was failing, reflecting an alleged realism kin to that of Monet's doctor in Liesl Mueller's poem. The triptych lay in Monet's studio for twenty years after his death. Now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, they were the subject of a special MOMA exhibition in late 2010 and early 2011. (Mueller herself was growing blind when she wrote the poem.) MOMA's curator on that occasion spoke revealingly of their character in contrast to Monet's paintings of the same water lilies 25 years earlier:

 

"The Japanese Footbridge is among Monet's last paintings of this subject, made between 1920 and 1922. Twenty-five years earlier, in the late 1890s, the footbridge provided the subject of Monet's first series of paintings of his pond at Giverny. While the paintings in the earlier series are more naturalistic in style, the later works feature dense swirls and loose strokes of color that almost obscure the form of the bridge. These later paintings also feature a fiery palette of maroons, rusts, and oranges unique within Monet's body of work.... The aim of his large Water Lilies paintings, Monet said, was to supply 'the illusion of an endless whole, of water without horizon or bank.'  In the attempt to capture the constantly changing qualities of natural light and color, spatial cues all but dissolve; above and below, near and far, water and sky all commingle. In his enveloping, large-scale canvases Monet sought to create 'the refuge of a peaceful meditation in the center of a flowering aquarium.'"

 

The last lines of Mueller's poem, again expressly addressing the doctor, speak of an opportunity awaiting any of us. To know how "the heart expands to claim this world," how any and all of our experience of the myraid things of this world can be transformed into the bright gift of a thousand suns, we have only to wait, to find "the refuge of a peaceful meditation." To gain some inkling of what is suggested by heaven pulling earth into its arms, we have only to disenthrall ourselves, to exercise our common gift of metaphoric imagination, to wait and yearn, to meditate or pray,  so we are in time — in a lifetime and in a moment — drawn into a larger consciousness of that which moves mysteriously and in silence behind, above and beyond us.  

Barack Obama's letter to the editor

I haven't often thought of the 22nd amendment to the US Constitution, adopted in 1951. The 22nd amendment states that no president be elected more than twice, effectively limiting presidents to two terms of office. Barack Obama said recently, "“I actually think I’m a pretty good president. I think if I ran, I could win. But I can’t. So there’s a lot that I’d like to do to keep America moving, but the law is the law.”

We have more than one able candidate for the presidency in 2016. All of those whose policies I admire (no surprise) are Democrats. The Republicans, in large measure, remind me of a bevy of clowns emerging from a VW Beetle at the circus. But I've found myself wondering about that comment of President Obama, especially when he said there's a lot he'd like to do to keep America moving. Following the example of Jimmy Carter, he'll be able to work to that end as a remarkably young ex-president. I think I reimagine the 22nd amendment not because there is a ghost of a chance to change it, nor that I think it should be changed, but because I believe there is impressive evidence that Obama is really coming into his own in the second half of his second term.

Rather than argue the case, I can refer the reader to an earlier post on Reckonings, "Barack Obama's Long Game," a fine essay by Todd S. Purdum that appeared first in Politico magazine. But to make the case in his own words, I can think of nothing better than Obama's letter to the editor of The New York Times on the subject of voting rights, published today and reprinted below.

_____________________________

 

BARACK OBAMA'S LETTER TO THE EDITOR

August 12, 2015

I was inspired to read about unsung American heroes like Rosanell Eaton in Jim Rutenberg’s ‘‘A Dream Undone: Inside the 50-year campaign to roll back the Voting Rights Act.’’

‘‘We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union. ...’’ It’s a cruel irony that the words that set our democracy in motion were used as part of the so-called literacy test designed to deny Rosanell and so many other African-Americans the right to vote. Yet more than 70 years ago, as she defiantly delivered the Preamble to our Constitution, Rosanell also reaffirmed its fundamental truth. What makes our country great is not that we are perfect, but that with time, courage and effort, we can become more perfect. What makes America special is our capacity to change.

Nearly three decades after Rosanell testified to her unbroken faith in this country, that faith was vindicated. The Voting Rights Act put an end to literacy tests and other forms of discrimination, helping to close the gap between our promise that all of us are created equal and our long history of denying some of us the right to vote. The impact was immediate, and profound — the percentage of African-Americans registered to vote skyrocketed in the years after the Voting Rights Act was passed.

But as Rutenberg chronicles, from the moment the ink was dry on the Voting Rights Act, there has been a concentrated effort to undermine this historic law and turn back the clock on its progress. His article puts the recent push to restrict Americans’ voting rights in its proper context. These efforts are not a sign that we have moved past the shameful history that led to the Voting Rights Act. Too often, they are rooted in that history. They remind us that progress does not come easy, but that it must be vigorously defended and built upon for ourselves and future generations.

I am where I am today only because men and women like Rosanell Eaton refused to accept anything less than a full measure of equality. Their efforts made our country a better place. It is now up to us to continue those efforts. Congress must restore the Voting Rights Act. Our state leaders and legislatures must make it easier — not harder — for more Americans to have their voices heard. Above all, we must exercise our right as citizens to vote, for the truth is that too often we disenfranchise ourselves.

Rosanell is now 94 years old. She has not given up. She’s still marching. She’s still fighting to make real the promise of America. She still believes that We the People have the awesome power to make our union more perfect. And if we join her, we, too, can reaffirm the fundamental truth of the words Rosanell recited.

President Barack Obama, Washington

An anniversary to remember

It is indeed an anniversary to remember, or to learn and reflect upon for the increasing majority of people alive in the world who have not such memory at hand, since they were born well after 1945. I myself was only six years old on August 6, 1945, so my own learning was later, second hand. But I grew up in the years when the memory of the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was still vivid, when we learned to crouch under our desks at school (as if that would make a difference), when people built bomb shelters in their backyards, or at least did not regard such construction as unnatural.

The three paragraphs below are drawn from Garrison Keillor's "Writer's Almanac." It occurs to me that John Hersey's Hiroshima should be in required high school curricula today as it may once have been decades ago. (The New Yorker has put on its website the full text of Hersey's book, which first appeared in the magazine.) Although "Little Boy" - what a name for an atomic bomb that crushed a city and over 100,000 of its people - was puny compared to the thermonuclear weapons that became commonplace, the dangers of nuclear proliferation and of another use of such weapons in wartime remains a danger too often unrecognized or disbelieved. Witness the current unlikelihood of Congressional approval of the deal negotiated to prevent development of an Iranian nuclear weapons program.

 

Seventy years ago today, in 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The American B-29 bomber Enola Gay released the bomb, which was nicknamed "Little Boy," at 8:16 in the morning, local time. Sixty-two thousand buildings were destroyed by the blast, which was equivalent to more than 12,000 tons of TNT. Eighty thousand people were killed on impact, and 35,000 died over the next week of their injuries or radiation poisoning. Sixty thousand more died over the next year. The bomb exploded over a hospital, and 90 percent of the city's doctors were killed in the blast. It was the beginning of the end of World War II; Germany had already surrendered and Japan would follow after the U.S. dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki three days later.

A year later, The New Yorker devoted an entire issue to the publication of an article by John Hersey. The article, called simply "Hiroshima," followed the lives of six survivors of the blast. The magazine's founder and editor Harold Ross wrote to E.B. White: "Hersey has written thirty thousand words on the bombing of Hiroshima [...] one hell of a story, and we are wondering what to do about it [...] [William Shawn, managing editor] wants to wake people up, and says we are the people with a chance to do it, and probably the only people that will do it, if it is done."

Hiroshima begins: "At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6th, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department at the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk."

 

And from an article in today's New York Times:

HIROSHIMA, Japan — Hiromi Hasai was being trained to make machine gun bullets when the flash from the atomic bomb that destroyed his city lit up the already bright morning sky. Just 14, he had been pulled from school a week before to help Japan’s failing war effort.

Mr. Hasai, now 84, has often talked publicly of his experiences that day, 70 years ago Thursday, when the first of the only two nuclear weapons ever used in war ultimately killed more than 100,000 people. The victims included hundreds of his classmates, who were still at their school near the blast’s epicenter. The bullet factory, 10 miles out of town, was paradoxically a haven.

Yet the things that Mr. Hasai saw and felt that day are not recounted by him alone. The person who knows his story best, after Mr. Hasai himself, is Ritsuko Kinoshita, a woman 25 years his junior who is serving as his “denshosha” — the designated transmitter of his memories. It is part of an unusual and highly personal project to preserve and pass on the experiences of atomic bomb survivors, whose numbers are dwindling rapidly.

There was, of course, the second bomb, that dropped three days later, on August 9, upon the smaller city of Nagasaki. I suggest reading an article in The New Yorker, hopefully entitled "Nagasaki: The Last Bomb," by Alex Wellerstein.

 

Monument marking Ground Zero of the atomic bomb dropped over Nagasaki