Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

W.S. Merwin in memorium, on his fellow poet and teacher John Berryman

One of my most beloved poets, W. S. Merwin, died on March 15 of this year in his sleep at his lovely tree-filled home on the island of Maui.

I have written of Merwin, and quoted often from his poems, over the years in Reckonings. I remember particularly "West Wall" and "Alba." He was always deeply moved by his natural surroundings. As his portrait in Wikipedia notes, "In 2010, with his wife Paula, he co-founded The Merwin Conservancy, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving his hand-built, off-the-grid poet's home and 18-acre restored property in Haiku, which has been transformed from an 'agricultural wasteland' to a 'Noah's Ark' for rare palm trees, one of the largest and most biodiverse collections of palms in the world."

One of his early and influential teachers, when he was a student at Princeton, was his fellow poet John Berryman. Maria Popova drew our attention today to Merwin's poem, "Berryman," so expressive of both Merwin's and Berryman's understanding of the heart of the artist's life. Popova writes:

"Berryman had co-founded Princeton’s creative writing program and was teaching there when Merwin enrolled as a freshman in 1944. The thirty-year-old professor immediately recognized an uncommon genius in the seventeen-year-old aspiring poet, who would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award — 'the real thing,' Berryman’s then-wife would later recall his sentiment. Merwin himself would remember his mentor as 'absolutely ruthless' — a quality he cherished. That constructive, edifying ruthlessness, for which Merwin was forever indebted, comes alive with unsentimental tenderness in this poem commemorating his formative teacher."

I think, as well, of Merwin's final book of poems, Garden Time (Copper Canyon Press, 2016). It was composed during the difficult process of losing his eyesight. When he could no longer see well enough to write, he dictated poems to his wife, Paula. It is a book about aging and the practice of living one's life in the present. For me, that is reminiscent of my own experience of transcribing the last poems of my dear poet friend Richard O. Moore, blind in his last months.

 

BERRYMAN
by W.S. Merwin

I will tell you what he told me
in the years just after the war
as we then called
the second world war

don’t lose your arrogance yet he said
you can do that when you’re older
lose it too soon and you may
merely replace it with vanity

just one time he suggested
changing the usual order
of the same words in a line of verse
why point out a thing twice

he suggested I pray to the Muse
get down on my knees and pray
right there in the corner and he
said he meant it literally

it was in the days before the beard
and the drink but he was deep
in tides of his own through which he sailed
chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloop

he was far older than the dates allowed for
much older than I was he was in his thirties
he snapped down his nose with an accent
I think he had affected in England

as for publishing he advised me
to paper my wall with rejection slips
his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled
with the vehemence of his views about poetry

he said the great presence
that permitted everything and transmuted it
in poetry was passion
passion was genius and he praised movement and invention

I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can’t

you can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t write

 

St. Patrick's eve celebration of Celtic spirituality

I spoke briefly to a standing-room-only auditorium last evening as we celebrated St. Patrick's Day a few hours early.

I co-lead (with Carol Saysette and George Wilson) a large seminar of Redwoods folks who are exploring the many dimensions of the Celtic spiritual tradition. I wanted to give those assembled some context about our seminar, which sponsored last evening's wonderful music, song and dance:

St. Patrick’s Eve, March 16, 2019.

"I wrote these brief remarks this afternoon. I hope they evoke some still, small voice in you, as they did and do in me.

"The seeds of this evening are in the hardy band of forest folk, our ‘red-woods-hood’ we call Celtic Spirituality, and earlier in a three-day retreat with John Patrick Newell. I speak of us. We are always in motion and always still, always constant and always changing. The mysteries of this evening, the music, song, dance and drama, the poetry and stories we remember and have forgotten but can recall, and those for which we can as yet only listen. Our celebration of Patrick, the ur-saint if you will, of Celtic spirituality, the weave of the ancient traditions, the druids in Ireland, Scotland and Wales, the gifts we know and are still learning and as yet barely glimpse or intuit from the traditions, the stories and the practices—I think especially the practices—of Buddhism, Islam, Judaism and Christianity.

"All that is part of our inheritance, our foremothers and forefathers, our birth, life, death and rebirth, the legacies we’ve left, still leave, have yet to leave, will never finally leave, for our children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren… and they in turn for us and for their children. At our Celtic heart is the earth, the precarious, precious, terribly endangered earth, and our fellow sentient beings, that sustain us as we awaken to them and still destroy them, so often before we even know them, much less their place in the family of life.

"I’m grateful for—and only a little embarrassed by—the number of Johns in our Celtic heritage and in the voices to which we listen: There is John the Evangelist also known as John the Beloved, who listened to the heartbeat of God. We’ve had the companionship of John Patrick Newell and John O’Donohue. Those to whom we—our band of Celtic folks here at The Redwoods—return again and again, growing, deepening our practices, returning, reconnecting, following an invitation. In Newell’s words, 'The invitation is to recover an inner stance of listening that will equip us to move forward into new beginnings we may not yet even be able to imagine. This is my prayer,' John Patrick said to us—'that we may grow in such awareness and commitment. Together they—and we—hold the promise of rebirth.'

"Our spirit is one of pilgrimage, with Patrick and Columba, Brigid and Brendan, and in the green shamrock, the walking stick, the living tree, the bell. Patrick described a vision he had: 'I saw a man [or was it a woman?] coming, as it were from Ireland. He [or she] carried many letters, and gave me one. I read the heading: ‘The voice of the Irish.’ As I began the letter, I imagined in that moment that I heard the voice of those very people who were near the wood which is beside the western sea—and they cried out, as with one voice: ‘We appeal to you, holy servant boy, to come and walk among us.’ So he did; so he does this evening. Welcome, dear brother Patrick."

 

The symbolism of the Celtic cross: heart for love, two hands for friendship, crown for loyalty.

 

 

Individuation, C.G. Jung, and W.H. Auden's poem, "The More Loving One"

I am grateful in manifold ways for C.G. Jung's wonderful enlargement of my chosen field of psychology. That gratitude had its fortuitous, unsought birth in the first of my many years as an analysand, a patient in psychotherapy. The first of my two Jungian therapists was Edward F. Edinger, whose office in those years was on Central Park West in New York City. I was young, in my 20s, newly married, a graduate student of political science at Columbia University.

My understanding of psychology, particularly of the dynamics of human development in its social, historical, and cultural context, which would become the calling of a lifetime of practice, had hardly begun to emerge, so it appeared wholly accidental that, in my search for a therapist, a friend urged me to seek out Dr. Edinger, a psychiatrist and analytical psychologist who was prominent among what I came later to understand as the second generation of American students of C.G. Jung.

Our weekly sessions together over the better part of three years were revelatory and transformative, even if I began them imagining myself as the student I remained. At first, I would characteristically arrive early, sit for a half-hour or so on the greensward of Central Park, consciously preparing myself for what I anticipated as kin to an hour with one of my professors at Columbia. In fact, I was beginning, with Dr. Edinger, a lifelong journey of absorption in a deeply meaningful process of what Jung called individuation, the achievement of self-actualization through a process of integrating the conscious and the unconscious, with central attention to human relations, family dynamics across generations, and the central integrative function of dreams. For a thoughtful interview with Edward Edinger, read here in Psychology Today.

I recall that early work now, a full half-century later, as I contemplate a remarkable short poem by W.H. Auden called "The More Loving One." Auden's poem was drawn to my attention today in reading the current issue of Maria Popova's online journal, Brain Pickings. Listen to the poem as read on Brain Pickings or SoundCloud by astrophysicist Janna Levin. The image that comes to mind in reading this particular Auden poem is the night sky, particularly when we are blessed with clarity of vision, so the stars are not obscured by clouds or by a plethora of more earthly and proximate lights. Here is Auden's beautiful, almost whimsical poem.

 

THE MORE LOVING ONE

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

 

Once more, Wendell Berry

Over the years in Reckonings, more times than I can recall, I have drawn upon the wisdom of Wendell Berry, expressed with wonderful depth and variety in his many novels, essays, and perhaps most essentially, his poetry, in which his contemplative character emerges with dialogical richness. I say dialogical in part because all fine writing provokes and inspires diverse response from readers' experience, but more specifically because Berry is a true master of dialogue, of meaningful conversation. In his poems that mastery is especially suggestive.  For example, in any of his Sabbath poems I find invitation and companionship. Yesterday, for example, I had good reason to remember and employ these lines as a kind of lifeboat. Deep thanks to a dear friend, Andrea, for reminding me of them.

 

It may be that when we no longer know what to do

we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go,

we have begun our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

 

       --Wendell Berry