Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

What comes after fossil fuels?

What comes after fossil fuels?

By Bill McKibben, in The New Yorker, March 11, 2020

The fossil-fuel industry is slowly dying. It’s not just because of the transitory effect of the coronavirus, which has temporarily cut demand; it’s secular, as the economists say. Justlast week, Bloomberg reported that even natural-gas utilities are feeling the scorn of investors, who want to put their money in renewable electricity. The key question, of course, is how slowly the industry is dying—we badly need to speed up the current trajectory to catch up with the physics of climate change.

But it’s not too early to start asking what the industry will leave behind, beyond a badly overheated planet. And one answer, apparently, is a huge number of holes in the ground, not to mention a huge number of holes in government budgets. It turns out that, in jurisdictions around the planet, oil and gas companies have been failing to reclaim, or even plug, old wells that are no longer producing in commercial quantities. These unfunded liabilities are truly enormous.

Take Alberta, Canada, for example: the Alberta Energy Regulator has publicly estimated that the province faces $18.5 billion in costs for oil and gas wells that need to be decommissioned. But the A.E.R.’s internal review shows that the estimated cost could be up to forty billion to seventy billion. It has a hundred and seven thousand wells that are depleted past the point of profitability. Another ninety-three thousand wells are inactive, and seventy-seven thousand have been plugged but are awaiting the more expensive part of cleaning up the site. Many of those are “orphaned”—the companies that owned them have gone bankrupt—and some, in addition to leaving scars in the landscape, are still leaking greenhouse gases, such as methane, into the atmosphere, making life hard for the farmers who must work around them. The Alberta authorities have on hand about two hundred and twenty-six million dollars “in security deposits to pay for cleanup if companies declare bankruptcy.”

The picture looks much the same around the world. The Carbon Tracker Initiative, a London-based think tank, published a paper last month pointing out that “asset retirement obligations,” the term for what oil companies will have to pay to decommission their old wells, are significant, though hard to quantify, since “companies are not required to disclose the relevant information and rarely do.” But, in Europe, for instance, in 2006, these environmental liabilities amount to half of the companies’ reported debt obligations. The working assumption has always been that the costs would be paid by the proceeds from future operations: drill a new well, and part of the profit will go to pay for capping the last one. But that assumption no longer makes sense: since climate change is forcing us to keep oil and gas in the ground, the revenue stream for that cleanup is likely to disappear.

“The risk that the taxpayers will be left holding the bag is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore,” the report concludes. “Moreover, industry’s argument calls into question why you would allow the oil and gas activity in the first place, if the project cannot pay for its eventual retirement.” A good point, and one that will be a drag on the already lagging fossil-fuel sector, as investors begin to ask more probing questions.

Mark Olalde and Ryan Menezes, in the Los Angeles Times, provided a really powerful closeup of one city last week: Los Angeles, it turns out, has nearly a thousand abandoned wells. “If not plugged and cleaned up, many of these orphaned wells will continue to expose people to toxic gases, complicate redevelopment and pose rare but serious threats of explosions. If the state were to tackle the cleanup, it would cost tens of millions of dollars.” Oh, and the city’s fire department has just one full-time well inspector.

If there’s a bright spot in all of this, it’s that the need to clean up these wells could provide ongoing work for precisely the workers who drilled them, allowing them an easier transition to the future. Two Canadian activists—Regan Boychuk, a founder of Reclaim Alberta and the Alberta Liabilities Disclosure Project, and Avi Lewis, the co-founder and strategic director of the Leap—outlined in the Toronto Star what they call an “epic opportunity.” A government “serious about sparking the next boom in the oil patch,” they write, would force the companies that have extracted hundreds of billions in profits from Canada’s prairies to use the revenues from their mature and declining wells to underwrite the cleanup, creating “decades of full employment” in Alberta. That would be the closest thing to a happy ending the oil industry can still provide the planet.

 Climate School

• An ominous new report helps us understand the basic math of climate change. Scientists who, for the past thirty years, have studied three hundred thousand trees in tropical rain forests, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Amazon, report that the trees’ ability to soak up carbon from the atmosphere is, apparently, flagging. “We’ve found that one of the most worrying impacts of climate change has already begun,” Simon Lewis, a professor in the school of geography at the University of Leeds, in England, and one of the senior authors of the research, told the Guardian. “This is decades ahead of even the most pessimistic climate models.”
  
  
• A report along the same lines but more hopeful: Can large-scale plantings of a South African shrub help soak up lots of carbon dioxide? “Because of spekboom’s remarkable growth rate, its rate of carbon capture can rival that of tropical forests,” a scientist who has studied the plant for years told the BBC.

Passing the Mic

This week, I interviewed Vann R. Newkirk, II, a staff writer at The Atlantic, about his new podcast series “Floodlines,” which débuts this week. It’s an eight-part look at the legacy of Hurricane Katrina, which means, of course, that it’s also a look at the moment when both climate change and inequality emerged as concerns for many Americans.

 

Katrina felt revelatory—about climate change but also about who counts and who doesn’t in our country. I think a fair number of Americans were shocked to discover that lots of their fellow-citizens didn’t have cars, so they couldn’t simply flee. Was it a significant moment in the wider discovery of inequality in America?

I think Katrina and the levees breaking were a moment comparable to, say, the Dust Bowl, in terms of reorienting people to the shape of inequality in America. Some of the critiques of white supremacy (and environmental racism) that we consider almost standard today were considered fringe or conspiratorial before Katrina. 

The United Nations estimates that we could see a billion climate refugees this century. Given the lessons of the Katrina diaspora, what should we be thinking about when we read numbers like that?

The lesson of Katrina is that we already are seeing mass movements of people within the United States at the leading edges of climate disasters. Hurricane Maria, in 2017, reiterated that point, and state leaders should already be planning for large, permanent population shifts—both due to sudden disasters and to long-term attrition. Lots of people will be rethinking what “home” means. But another thing that Katrina should teach us is that maybe it’s time to also rethink the “refugee” framework. The American obligation to victims of climate change shouldn’t be motivated solely by altruism or charity. Rather, those victims have a claim against the rest of us—against U.S. government policy, against those who might profit off their displacement, and against those of us who warm and degrade the world—that we are morally bound to settle. This was the case during Katrina, and it will be for every climate-linked catastrophe down the road. 

I’ve stood under that new levee wall in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward at commemorations of the disaster and felt a welter of different emotions, from sadness and anger at the history behind it to a fear that it was, at best, a stopgap against a still-rising tide. What do you feel when you’re there, and what do you think longtime residents of that neighborhood feel?

I’ve spent a lot of time in the past year around the Lower Ninth Ward and with people who have roots there, and in my mind it’s become something like a Black Atlantis. The depths of pride and nostalgia people have for it feel, somehow, even more powerful than most folks’ memory of home. It’s a place defined by precariousness but also by the pride of building something of your own, for a community that hasn’t often been allowed to have things of their own. Standing by the wall, thinking about the power of their memory and the depths of loss, I’ve been overwhelmed at times.

Scoreboard

🔄It’s hard to call this a win or a loss, but it’s certainly wild: Saudi Arabia announced that it would open the spigots and cut its oil prices by nearly ten per cent. The news—part of a fight with the Russians for market share amid falling demand—led to the most dramatic single-day decline in world crude prices in at least three decades. For motorists, it may mean paying two dollars or less for a gallon of gas, but for people worried about the climate it cuts two ways. Cheap oil means we’ll use more: expect the already robust demand for S.U.V.s to continue. On the other hand, the lower price makes it hard for many producers to drill new wells—in particular, high-cost producers, such as those in Canada’s tar sands.

⬆️ The Ivies have been the last redoubt for the oil industry, as they fight against the divestment movement—but last week Brown University announced the league’s first total divestment from funds that focus on fossil fuels. “People know that this sector is dying . . . and it’s just not a good long-term investment,” Brown’s president, Christina Paxson, told the student newspaper. “It carries too much risk for the endowment.” The announcement was followed a few days later by a similar pledge from Wesleyan—but, whereas Brown is already in the process of selling ninety per cent of its stock, Wesleyan said that the process could take until 2030, drawing a mixed reaction from student activists who point out that the climate crisis is now.

⬆️ For those keeping track of efforts to stop the financing of fossil fuels, an increasingly common note was struck by the Swiss bank UBS, which said that it was joining other institutions no longer interested in financing thermal coal, tar sands, or Arctic offshore oil projects—notably Trump Administration plans to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. An increasingly fascinating question: Exactly who will be willing to underwrite drilling in what’s been called America’s Serengeti.

Warming Up

Two pieces of music I’ve had on repeat lately: Dreams to Be Born, by Rebecca Foon, and Legacies, by Jesse Paris Smith. Both are meditative, absorbing, masterly; and they come from a pair of musical activists whose Pathway to Paris concert series has turned into an adroit nonprofit that spurs worldwide climate action.

—Bill McKibben

Touch the hand of love

Download Touch the Hand of Love

 

 

Touch the Hand of Love

 

Renée Fleming and Yo-Yo Ma

 

Touch the hand of love.

Let it calm your troubled mind

and caress your tender sorrow.

Know the hand of love

as you walk that weary road,

as you travel your tomorrows alone.

 

You may have to wander far

over thorns that bleed and scar you,

and those rocky mountains you must climb

will try to blind you.

 

Touch the hand of love.

Let it calm your troubled mind

and caress your tender sorrow.

Know the hand of love

as you walk that weary road,

as you travel your tomorrows alone.

 

You may have to wander far

over thorns that bleed and scar you,

and those rocky mountains you must climb

will try to blind you.

 

Touch the hand of love

as you walk that weary road.

Let it hold your tender sorrows

as you travel your tomorrows alone.

 

Sharing silence

Last week, as I wrote here on Sunday, March 5th, our meditation together focused on the meaning of sanctuary. I've always loved, as I remember writing here many moons ago, the deeply intimate resonance, the sense of safety and nourishment, the diversity of experiences and places, that word evokes. I recall my wise age-mate Parker Palmer movingly capturing its evolution, nuance and importance in his own life. "Sanctuary," he wrote, "is wherever I find safe space to regain my bearings, reclaim my soul, heal my wounds, and return to the world as a wounded healer. It’s not merely about finding shelter from the storm: it’s about spiritual survival... [The sanctuary] I need may not be in a church, but in the silence, in the woods, in a friendship, in a poem, or in a song [like that of Carrie Newcomer in her album "The Beautiful Not Yet."]

Used as a noun most commonly, derived from the Latin sanctum, sanctuary typically describes a sacred or holy place, a refuge. Although I find that quality in church and temple services, I like also to sit in churches when no service is occurring, treasuring in silence just those qualities of refuge. And like Palmer, I've found sanctuary among trees, along barely perceptible trails, and in shorelines.

When I first thought about vocation as a child, my two ambitions were forest ranger and architect. In the first, I imagined inhabiting a tower, a simple square room above the forest, and caretaking for the silent arboreal surround, requiring both a soft alertness and a keen eye. In the second, thinking of what I would draw − and later working with board, drawing paper, T-square and triangles − I had most in mind homes, open and U-shaped like a three-sided square or rectangle, with the fourth side a courtyard or patio open to the natural world beyond.

My current home, an apartment in a community of folks sharing with me the later stages of adult life, has close kinship with both of those early images. I look out − through sliding glass doors − upon greensward, a courtyard with trees now in early spring coming into leaf and flower. The courtyard, in turn, leads into marshland with circuitous tidal streams, trails and walking bridges made of salvaged redwood, and hills beyond.

The community part of my circumstances is a relatively new experience for me: starting in Norway at Modum Bad, the last home that Leigh and I shared before her final illness; and then, fortified by the gift of those years and guided by the wisdom of my family, I came to The Redwoods. I occasionally say to others that I taught about community for thirty years before I knew what I was talking about. I wasn't way off the mark, thankfully: a gift of God.

Which brings me finally to my subject, sharing silence. As I recall, The Buddha himself is said to have said that of the triad central to Buddhism − the sangha, the Buddha, and the dharma, the first among equals is sangha: the community of practice.

Gunilla Norris − to whom my teacher sent me − puts it well: "Sharing silence with others is a profound act of trust, love and courtesy. It is a gift, a necessity, a helping hand, a path, and a discipline." I've wished since childhood, in my heart, that I had been raised a Quaker, because its tradition embodies shared silence in community, and is deeply, compassionately political. As Parker Palmer writes, "For centuries Quakers — though few in number — have been disproportionately represented in movements for peace, truth, and justice." Norris says, in words worthy of careful meditation (read contemplatively, as one would a fine poem, more than once):

Within each of us there is a silence
—a silence as vast as a universe.
We are afraid of it…and we long for it.

When we experience that silence, we remember
who we are: creatures of the stars, created
from the cooling of this planet, created
from dust and gas, created
from the elements, created
from time and space…created
from silence.

In our present culture,
silence is something like an endangered species…
an endangered fundamental.

The experience of silence is now so rare
that we must cultivate it and treasure it.
This is especially true for shared silence.

Sharing silence is, in fact, a political act.
When we can stand aside from the usual and
perceive the fundamental, change begins to happen.
Our lives align with deeper values
and the lives of others are touched and influenced.

Silence brings us back to basics, to our senses,
to our selves. It locates us. Without that return
we can go so far away from our true natures
that we end up, quite literally, beside ourselves.

We live blindly and act thoughtlessly.
We endanger the delicate balance which sustains
our lives, our communities, and our planet.

Each of us can make a difference.
Politicians and visionaries will not return us
to the sacredness of life.

That will be done by ordinary men and women
who together or alone can say,
“Remember to breathe, remember to feel,
remember to care,
let us do this for our children and ourselves
and our children’s children.
Let us practice for life’s sake."

 

 

I Awake

Mark Nepo is a poet, teacher, philosopher and storyteller, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Book of Awakening. His new book is The One Life We’re Given: Finding the Wisdom that Waits in Your Heart (Atria, July 2016). In fall of 2016, he will have a new book of poetry, The Way Under the Way. For more, visit: MarkNepo.com

I Awake

by Mark Nepo| September 21, 2016

Like Django Reinhardt playing jazz, Monet painting Water Lilies, or a tulip germinating, says Mark Nepo, often we don’t know what we’re creating until it’s done.

I discovered the poetry of the medieval Zen Buddhist monk Dōgen by following voices through time. I was reading a heartfelt poem by Ryōkan, an eighteenth-century poet, in which he recounts discovering a six hundred-year-old manuscript, written in the hand of Dōgen, the founder of the Sōtō school of Zen in Japan. Ryōkan admits to being so moved that his tears fell on the worn page. Ashamed that he’d marred the manuscript, he put it back where he found it and told the others it was caught in the rain.

Before this, I hadn’t heard of Dōgen, but Ryōkan’s poem compelled me to “meet” him. Likewise, it was hearing the Miles Davis version of John Lewis’s song “Django” that moved me to want to “meet” Django Reinhardt and his music.

Like Miles Davis, Django Reinhardt was an astounding innovator. He redefined jazz guitar in the 1930s with complex, fiery solos that were unprecedented. Born in 1910 in France, Jean Reinhardt, whose gypsy name Django means I awake, lived in a caravan. By the time he was five, his father had abandoned the family. Django spent most of his youth in gypsy encampments close to Paris, playing the violin by ear. He became fascinated with the banjo and by twelve was a precocious professional. By fourteen, he was a star. But at the age of eighteen, he was maimed and almost killed in a caravan fire. His left leg and hand were horribly burned. The third and fourth fingers of his left hand had to be burned again with silver nitrate, so they could heal and be usable. The burns on his leg were so bad that doctors wanted to amputate it. Reinhardt refused the surgery. He left the hospital a short time later and within a year was able to walk with the aid of a cane.

Django Reinhardt. Photo by William Gottlieb.

During a painful rehabilitation, he found it almost impossible to play the banjo. His brother Joseph bought him a guitar. Forced to try different things in order to go on, Django relearned his craft in a completely new way. He played all his guitar solos with only two fingers, forming new chords. As Reinhardt biographer Michael Dregni says:

Instead of playing scales and arpeggios horizontally across the fretboard, as was the norm, he searched out fingerings that ran vertically up and down the frets, as they were easier to play with just two fingers. He created new chord forms. . . . He pushed his paralyzed fingers to grip the guitar as well. . . . Employing these chord forms, he began to craft [an unprecedented and] fluent vocabulary [on the guitar].

Would Django Reinhardt have discovered a new way to play jazz guitar, if he hadn’t been transformed in that fire? Would Claude Monet have discovered his masterful Water Lilies, if his vision hadn’t been undone by the onset of cataracts? Would Beethoven have discovered the Ninth Symphony, if his deafness hadn’t opened him to the deepest music of all, blossoming out of silence? Perhaps all this would have happened anyway, in a different manner, at a different pace.....

Often, when we think we’re building one thing, we’re building another, or we’re the ones being built. When we think we’re giving one thing, we’re often giving another, or we’re the ones being given to. When we think we’re enduring one thing, we’re often being undone by life into the birth of a gift we’ve been carrying for just this opening. The point is, we’re challenged to follow our heart beyond our intentions in order to find our quiet destiny.

Creativity, Concentration and Poetry

The Effortless Effort of Creativity

--by Maria Popova, in dailygood.org, syndicated from brainpickings.org, Sep 06, 2016                                                                

“The poets (by which I mean all artists) are finally the only people who know the truth about us,” James Baldwin wrote in lamenting the artist’s struggle at a time “when something awful is happening to a civilization, when it ceases to produce poets, and, what is even more crucial, when it ceases in any way whatever to believe in the report that only the poets can make.” We no longer have Baldwin to awaken us to the gravest perils of our own era — one in which the poetic spirit isn’t merely neglected but is being forced to surrender at gunpoint. To produce poets, in this largest Baldwinian sense of creative seers of human truth, seems to be among the most urgent tasks of our time.

The mastery of that task is what the poet Jane Hirshfield examines in her 1997 essay collection Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry.

Defining poetry as “the clarification and magnification of being,” she writes: “Here, as elsewhere in life, attentiveness only deepens what it regards.” In the superb opening essay, titled “Poetry and the Mind of Concentration,” Hirshfield examines the nature of this clarified, magnified deepening of being — concentration as consecration — by probing its six main components: music, rhetoric, image, emotion, story, and voice. Although focused on the reading and writing of poetry, her insight ripples outward in widening circles (as Rilke might say) to encompass every kind of writing, all art, and even the art of living itself.

Hirshfield writes:

Every good poem begins in language awake to its own connections — language that hears itself and what is around it, sees itself and what is around it, looks back at those who look into its gaze and knows more perhaps even than we do about who we are, what we are. It begins, that is, in the mind and body of concentration.

By concentration, I mean a particular state of awareness: penetrating, unified, and focused, yet also permeable and open. This quality of consciousness, though not easily put into words, is instantly recognizable. Aldous Huxley described it as the moment the doors of perception open; James Joyce called it epiphany. The experience of concentration may be quietly physical — a simple, unexpected sense of deep accord between yourself and everything. It may come as the harvest of long looking and leave us, as it did Wordsworth, a mind thought “too deep for tears.” Within action, it is felt as a grace state: time slows and extends, and a person’s every movement and decision seem to partake of perfection. Concentration can also be placed into things — it radiates undimmed from Vermeer’s paintings, from the small marble figure of a lyre-player from ancient Greece, from a Chinese three-footed bowl — and into musical notes, words, ideas. In the wholeheartedness of concentration, world and self begin to cohere. With that state comes an enlarging: of what may be known, what may be felt, what may be done.

Considering the unparalleled pleasures of practicing familiar to all who endeavor in the “absorbing errand” of creative work, particularly to those who attain mastery, Hirshfield points to deliberate practice as an essential aspect of concentration — one that transcends mechanical skill and reaches into the psychological, even the spiritual:

Violinists practicing scales and dancers repeating the same movements over decades are not simply warming up or mechanically training their muscles. They are learning how to attend unswervingly, moment by moment, to themselves and their art; learning to come into steady presence, free from the distractions of interest or boredom.

With an eye to the obsessive daily routines and strange creative rituals of many writers, and to the state of intense focus in the creative act known as “flow,”Hirshfield explores the path to concentration:

Immersion in art itself can be the place of entry… Yet however it is brought into being, true concentration appears — paradoxically — at the moment willed effort drops away… At such moments, there may be some strong emotion present — a feeling of joy, or even grief — but as often, in deep concentration, the self disappears. We seem to fall utterly into the object of our attention, or else vanish into attentiveness itself.

This may explain why the creative is so often described as impersonal and beyond self, as if inspiration were literally what its etymology implies, something “breathed in.” We refer, however metaphorically, to the Muse, and speak of profound artistic discovery and revelation. And however much we may come to believe that “the real” is subjective and constructed, we still feel art is a path not just to beauty, but to truth: if “truth” is a chosen narrative, then new stories, new aesthetics, are also new truths.

A century after Rilke extolled the soul-expanding power of difficulty and urged us to “arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult,” Hirshfield writes:

Difficulty itself may be a path toward concentration — expended effort weaves us into a task, and successful engagement, however laborious, becomes also a labor of love. The work of writing brings replenishment even to the writer dealing with painful subjects or working out formal problems, and there are times when suffering’s only open path is through an immersion in what is. The eighteenth-century Urdu poet Ghalib described the principle this way: “For the raindrop, joy is in entering the river — / Unbearable pain becomes its own cure.”

Echoing Nietzsche’s insistence that a full life requires embracing rather than running from difficulty and Alfred Kazin’s beautiful case for the reality-enlarging quality of contradiction, Hirshfield adds:

Difficulty then, whether of life or of craft, is not a hindrance to an artist. Sartre called genius “not a gift, but the way a person invents in desperate circumstances.” Just as geological pressure transforms ocean sediment into limestone, the pressure of an artist’s concentration goes into the making of any fully realized work. Much of beauty, both in art and in life, is a balancing of the lines of forward-flowing desire with those of resistance — a gnarled tree, the flow of a statue’s draped cloth. Through such tensions, physical or mental, the world in which we exist becomes itself. Great art, we might say, is thought that has been concentrated in just this way: honed and shaped by a silky attention brought to bear on the recalcitrant matter of earth and of life. We seek in art the elusive intensity by which it knows.

Hirshfield turns to the role of language in concentration and the role of concentration in language, in writing, in poetry itself:

Great sweeps of thought, emotion, and perception are compressed to forms the mind is able to hold — into images, sentences, and stories that serve as entrance tokens to large and often slippery realms of being… Words hold fast in the mind, seeded with the surplus of beauty and meaning that is concentration’s mark.

More than a century after William James asserted that “a purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity” in his seminal theory of how our bodies affect our feelings, Hirshfield examines the dimensions of time and space in language through the focusing lens of the body:

Shaped language is strangely immortal, living in a meadowy freshness outside of time.

But it also lives in the moment, in us. Emotion, intellect, and physiology are inseparably connected in the links of a poem’s sound. It is difficult to feel intimacy while shouting, to rage in a low whisper, to skip and weep at the same time.

Well before scientists came to study how repetition beguiles the brain, Hirshfield considers the enchantment of rhythmic regularity. In a passage that calls to mind pioneering Harvard psychologist Jerome Bruner’s notion of “effective surprise” as the pillar of creativity, she describes the affective surprise at the heart of every great work of art:

A regular returning in one dimension can bring unexpected turns in another: hunting a rhyme, the mind falls on a wholly surprising idea. This balancing between expected and unforeseen, both in aesthetic and cognitive structures, is near the center of every work of art. Through the gate of concentration, defining yet open, both aspects enter.

Hirshfield examines the role of rhetoric as a gatekeeper of concentration:

Before we can concentrate easily, we need to know where we stand. This is the work of rhetoric… Traditionally defined as the art of choosing the words that will best convey the speaker’s intent, rhetoric’s concern is the precise and beautiful movement of mind in language.

In a sentiment of exceeding timeliness today — one that calls to mind Hannah Arendt’s masterwork on lying in politics and Aldous Huxley’s lamentation of our mistrust of sincerity — Hirshfield adds:

Americans distrust artful speech, believing that sincerity and deliberation cannot coexist… Romantic temperament … equates spontaneity and truth. But the word art is neighbor to artifice, and in human culture, as in the animal and vegetable worlds, desirability entails not only the impulse of the moment but also enchantment, exaggeration, rearrangement, and deception. We don’t find the fragrance of night-scented flowering tobacco or the display of a peacock’s tail insincere — by such ruses this world conducts its erotic business. To acknowledge rhetoric’s presence in the beauty of poems, or any other form of speech, is only to agree to what already is.

In another thought cast at poetry but ablaze with truth about all art and about life itself, Hirshfield observes:

To be aware of a poem’s effects … requires only our alert responsiveness, our presence to each shift in the currents of language with an answering shift in our being… at a level closer to daydream. But daydream with an added intensity: while writing, the mind moves between consciousness and the unconscious in the effortless effort of concentration. The result, if the poet’s intensity of attention is sufficient, will be a poem that brims with its own knowledge, water trembling as if miraculously above the edge of a cup. Such a poem will be perfect in the root sense of the word: “thoroughly done.”

Daydreaming is indeed an apt analogy, for the making of poetry — as, again, the making of all art — radiates from a communion of the conscious and the unconscious, a more wakeful counterpart to that “something nameless” which Mark Strand elegized in his sublime ode to dreams. Hirshfield captures this beautifully:

Making a poem is neither a wholly conscious activity nor an act of unconscious transcription — it is a way for new thinking and feeling to come into existence, a way in which disparate modes of meaning and being may join. This is why the process of revising a poem is no arbitrary tinkering, but a continued honing of the self at the deepest level.

This dreamlike aspect comes most fully alive in one of poetry’s great powers —phanopoeia, the making of images. Hirshfield writes of the poetic image:

The deepest of image’s meanings is its recognition of our continuity with the rest of existence: within a good image, outer and subjective worlds illuminate one another, break bread together, converse. In this way, image increases both vision and what is seen. Keeping one foot braced in the physical and the other in the realm of inner experience, image enlivens both.

But in bridging inner reality with the outer world, Hirshfield argues, this halfway house of transcendence brings home something even larger, even more monumental:

Poetry moves consciousness toward empathy.

Intelligence and receptivity are connected — human meaning is made by seeing what is… The outer world can be transformed by a subjectively infused vision; inner event placed into the language of the physical takes on an equally mysterious addition.

A powerful poetic image, Hirshfield suggests, both wrests truth out of reality and confers truth upon it:

In a good image, something previously unformulated (in the most literal sense) comes into the realm of the expressed. Without precisely this image, we feel, the world’s store of truth would be diminished; and conversely, when a writer brings into language a new image that is fully right, what is knowable of existence expands.

[…]

Thinking within the fields of image, the mind crosses also into the knowledge the unconscious holds — into the shape-shifting wisdom of dream. Poetic concentration allows us to bring the dream-mind’s compression, displacement, wit, depth, and surprise into our waking minds. It is within dreamlife we first learn to read rain as grief, or the may that a turtle’s walking may speak of containment and an awkward, impeccable fortitude.

But the aspect of concentration perhaps most widely relevant beyond poetry is that of narrative — our supreme hedge against the entropy of existence. Hirshfield writes:

Storytelling, like rhetoric, pulls us in through the cognitive mind as much as through the emotions. It answers both our curiosity and our longing for shapely forms: our profound desire to know what happens, and our persistent hope that what happens will somehow make sense. Narrative instructs us in both these hungers and their satisfaction, teaching us to perceive and to relish the arc of moments and the arc of lives. If shapeliness is an illusion, it is one we require — it shields against arbitrariness and against chaos’s companion, despair. And story, like all the forms of concentration, connects. It brings us to a deepened coherence with the world of others and also within the many levels of the self.

[…]

Story remains a basic human path toward the discovery and ordering of meaning and beauty.

Echoing Ursula K. Le Guin’s abiding wisdom on how imaginative storytelling expands our repertoire of possibilities, Hirshfield adds:

Story, at its best, becomes a canvas to which the reader as well as the writer must bring the full range of memory, intellect, and imaginative response. The best stories are almost mythlike in their ability to support alternative readings, different conclusions.

[…]

Narrative carries the knowledge of our alteration through the shifting currents of circumstance and time.

Narrative’s essential counterpart is voice — the waveform of the soul in writing. Hirshfield writes:

A person’s heard voice is replete with information. So it is with the voice of a poem.

[…]

Voice … is the body language of a poem — the part that cannot help but reveal what it is. Everything that has gone into making us who we are is held there. Yet we also speak of writers “finding their voice.” The phrase is both meaningful and odd, a perennial puzzle: how can we “find” what we already use? The answer lies, paradoxically, in the quality of listening that accompanies self-aware speech: singers, to stay in tune, must hear not only the orchestral music they sing with, but also themselves. Similarly, writers who have “found a voice” are those whose ears turn at once inward and outward, both toward their own nature, thought patterns, and rhythms, and toward those of the culture at large.

In the essay’s closing passages, Hirshfield once again captures a central truth about poetry that sets free a larger truth about life itself — about the limits of attention, about the relationship between what is known and what is knowable, about the nature of transformation, about the perennial incompleteness of being. She writes:

No matter how carefully we read or how much attention we bring to bear, a good poem can never be completely entered, completely known. If it is the harvest of true concentration, it will know more than can be said in any other way. And because it thinks by music and image, by story and passion and voice, poetry can do what other forms of thinking cannot: approximate the actual flavor of life, in which subjective and objective become one, in which conceptual mind and the inexpressible presence of things become one.

Letting this wideness of being into ourselves, as readers or as writers, while staying close to the words themselves, we begin to find in poems a way of entering both language and being on their own terms. Poetry leads us into the self, but also away from it. Transparency is both capacious and focused. Free to turn inward and outward, free to remain still and wondering amid the mysteries of mind and world, we arrive, for a moment, at a kind of fullness that overspills into everything. One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read — in such a moment, anything can happen. The pressed oil of words can blaze up into music, into image, into the heart and mind’s knowledge. The lit and shadowed placed within us can be warmed.

Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry is a small but immensely largehearted book, replete with radiant wisdom on the creative act of composing a life, in poetry or in pulse. Complement it with Hirshfield’s beautiful ode to the leap day, then revisit Mary Oliver on what attention really means, Elizabeth Alexander on what poetry does for the human spirit, and great writers’ collected wisdom on the craft.

Divna Ljubojević

    Divna Ljubojević

 

My son Paul introduced me this week to the extraordinarily pure and lovely voice of Divna Ljubojević, who as vocalist and conductor is much more familiar on concert stages in Europe than in the United States. Often known more simply by her first name—Divna—she is Serbian, born (1970) and trained in Belgrade, an interpreter with her ensemble Melodi of traditional Orthodox sacred chant and song. Readers of Reckonings who have discovered Spotify and its capacity for expanding and deepening one's experience of music will find Divna's work well represented. Divna & Melόdi also have a Facebook page particularily rich in photographic imagery. (Its text is in Serbian.)

 

 

 

 

Turning I: A Bach Cantata

 
Spiral Shell, photograph by Edward Steichen

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

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

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

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

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

                                                      - T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

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

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