What Matters Most

 

As promised, here is Antonio MacHado's answer to the riddle:

Beyond living and dreaming

what matters most

is waking up.

Antonio MacHado

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A related observation:

A young man asked Buddha: ‘What are you? Are you a god?’

‘No,’ replied Buddha.

‘Well, are you a prophet?’ he further queries.

‘No,’ Buddha says.

‘Well, what are you?’ he pleads.

‘I am awake.’ Buddha replies.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

And another:

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.

I learn by going where I have to go.

 

We think by feeling.  What is there to know?

I hear my being dance from ear to ear.

I wake to sleep, and taking my waking slow.

 

Of those so close beside me, which are you?

God bless the Ground!  I shall walk softly there,

And learn by going whereI have to go.

 

Light takes the Tree, but who can tell us how?

The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

 

Great Nature has another thing to do

To you and me; so take the lively air,

And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

 

This shaking keeps me steady.  I should know.

What falls away is always.  And is near.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

I learn by going where I have to go.

--Theodore Roethke

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Telling our stories is telling about our awakenings, for life is full of them.  We awaken to the wonderful and the ill, each awakening baptizing us in our new life.  As Roethke wrote in "Journey to the Interior": 

In the long journey out of the self,

There are many detours, washed-out interrupted raw places

...

When we write our stories, we help readers find their way through thelabyrinth of life.

This World of Woe

David Budbill

I promise to address the answer to the MacHado riddle in my next entry.  But I found this poem recently, and I thought it captured my response to winter so perfectly that I had to include it in my journal.  It is such a clear, clean, simple, true poem.  That's the writer's job:  to simplify.  The author Raymond Carver pointed out in his essay, "On Writing":

It's possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things--a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring--with immense, even startling power.  It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader's spine--the source of artistic delight, as Nabokov would have it.

And there it is--one of the great secrets of writing.  Easy to say, but this kind of writing can only happen when we prepare ourselves carefully:  through our study, our contemplation, our reading, our experience. 

I think David Budbill's poem fits Carver's description:

The Sixth of January

by David Budbill

The cat sits on the back of the sofa looking

out the window through the softly falling snow

at the last bit of gray light.

 

I can't say the sun is going down.

We haven't seen the sun for two months.

Who cares?

 

I am sitting in the blue chair listening to this stillness.

The only sound:  the occasional gurgle of tea

coming out of the pot and into the cup.

 

How can this be?

Such calm, such peace, such solitude

in this world of woe.

Between living and dreaming

Antonio MacHado

1875-1939

I.

In Midlife Matters, oceanmrc writes of an article suggesting that people who participate in online communities might forget how to interact in face-to-face social situations.   She disagrees with the article; so do others who posted to her journal.  Something that the Spanish poet, Antonio MacHado wrote seems relevant:

When I'm alone

my friends are with me;

when I'm with them,

they seem so distant!

I submit that when we are alone, corresponding with online friends, those friends can feel more real to us than people who are physically in our presence. 

II.

Here is a sort of riddle posed by Antonio MacHado:

Between living and dreaming

there is something else.

Guess what it is.

What do you think is the answer to the riddle?

Art of Redemption

John Gardner

John Gardner's Art of Fiction was required reading when I came through the university writing system.  I also read his marvelous novel, Grendel as an undergraduate and as a graduate student.  I rank Grendel as one of my all-time favorite novels.  It is the story of Beowulf from the monster's point of view. 

In another book called On Moral Fiction, Gardner asserted that all artists work from a psychic "wound."  I mention this now because several people have stated recently that they find writing to be theraputic.  (And indeed, all the arts are theraputic.) 

I know that every poem or story I have written has alleviated some kind of burden, helped me to endure various dilemmas.  For some reason, though, this fact has been somewhat embarrassing for me to admit.  Not to my writer-friends, certainly.  But within the academic world, something seems unseemly, downright weak, about writing to heal.  Reading in an article recently that Gardner, a magnificent novelist and scholar, equated writing and healing, has made me feel bolder.

The article reveals that Gardner's deep personal wound was probably the death of his younger brother in a childhood accident.  Gardner blamed himself for the brother's death (the brother fell from a tractor that 11 year old Gardner was driving).

Just after I read the article about Gardner, I was flipping though a book of poetry recently sent to me by a former student, and one of the poems is "Hoeing," by John Updike.  The poem can have many interpretations, of course, but as I was reading it, I was struck by how similar the act of hoeing in the poem seems to the act of writing:

I sometimes fear the younger generation will be deprived

     of the pleasures of hoeing;

     there is no knowing

how many souls have been formed by this simple exercise.

 

The dry earth like a great scab breaks, revealing

     moist-dark loam--

     the pea-root's home,

a fertile wound perpetually healing.

 

How neatly the green weeds go under!

     The blade chops the earth new.

     Ignorant the wise boy who

has never performed this simple, stupid, and useful wonder.

 

I like to think of the human mind as earth, a place of fertility, creativity.  The hoeing in Updike's poem is the mental task of breaking through the crust of our numbed existence.  It is also the process of making choices in our writing about what stays and what goes.  What we "discard" is not destroyed but simply turned under.  The ideas we don't "use," continue to fertilize our thoughts.

When Updike says "stupid," I believe he is not being derogatory.  Rather I think he is being modest.  Certainly, neither gardeners nor writers can afford to let their heads swell too much.  For neither gardening nor writing can be fully controlled. 

The article about John Gardner suggested that through his prolific writing, he was somehow trying to atone for his brother's death.  No one can be sure if Gardner himself understood this.  We can't be sure, either, why we are driven to write.  But through our writing, we may find ourselves ever closer to the truth. 

 

 

For Vicky

Russell Banks

Thanks so much to Midlife Matters for dedicating the beautiful winter photograph to me.

In contemplating this act of dedicating entries to one another, I realize that I haven't dedicated an entry as yet to my friend, Vicky (My Incentive), whom I met online just this past August.  Since, we've had many fine conversations.  We recently wrote to each other of the pleasures and perils of talking, and so this poem from the Writer's Almanac reminds me of our discussion:

"About Friends" by Brian Jones, from Spitfire on the Northern Line © Chatto and Windus.  

About Friends

The good thing about friends
is not having to finish sentences.

I sat a whole summer afternoon with my friend once
on a river bank, bashing heels on the baked mud
and watching the small chunks slide into the water
and listening to them - plop plop plop.
He said, 'I like the twigs when they...you know...
like that.' I said, 'There's that branch...'
We both said, 'Mmmm'. The river flowed and flowed
and there were lots of butterflies, that afternoon.

I first thought there was a sad thing about friends
when we met twenty years later.
We both talked hundreds of sentences,
taking care to finish all we said,
and explain it all very carefully,
as if we'd been discovered in places
we should not be, and were somehow ashamed.

I understood then what the river meant by flowing.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This poem just works on so many levels.  Here are the three that interest me now:

1--  It reminds me of Vicky because I think if we met in person, we would not have to speak to each other in complete sentences. 

2--I think the poem also says something about the way we grow away from ourselves (The Bush people of Australia call this being "far hearted") as we get older, and so lose our  connections to people and to the very rhythm of the earth on which we live.

3--The poem says something about storytelling because sometimes what we DON'T say in a story is as important as what we DO say.  My own writing process is a matter of constantly taking out unneeded material.  I am reminded of an example that the novelist Russell Banks once told about sending one of his manuscripts to his editor.  His editor told him he needed to cut several pages from his manuscript.  He did cut the pages.  However, by cutting the fat out of his manuscript, he discovered new intriguing details and scenes that he now wanted to add.  He added the new material and the manuscript swelled and ended up being longer than the manuscript he originally sent to his publisher.  The publisher called Banks and said, "Good, it's much shorter now."

The "fat" in the manuscript kept him from seeing the possibilities in his story.  Also, the "fat" in the manuscript is a lot like the "fat" in some of our friendly conversations.  We often use it to pad our nervousness, our perceived inadequacies, or our lack of connection.

The connection that I feel to Vicky is a lot like the one I feel to my writing.  Both quicken the blood.  Both bring purpose and meaning to my life.

Last Poems

 

Lawrence Memorial Altar

This entry is a continuation of the previous entry.  I wanted to include two stanzas from D. H. Lawrence's poem, "The Ship of Death" as a further illustration of the death-life-death concept.  --Theresa

from THE SHIP OF DEATH

by D. H. Lawrence

I.

Now it is autumn and the falling fruit

and the long journey towards oblivion.

 

The apples falling like great drops of dew

to bruise themselves an exit from themselves.

 

And it is time to go, to bid farewell

to one's own self, and find an exit

from the fallen self.

...

V

Build then the ship of death, for you must take

the longest journey, to oblivion.

 

And die the death, the long and painful death

that lies between the old self and the new.

 

Already our bodies are fallen, bruised, badly bruised,

already our souls are oozing through the exit

of the cruel bruise.

 

Already the dark and endless ocean of the end

is washing in through the breaches of our wounds,

alreadythe flood is upon us.

 

Oh build your ship of death, your little ark

and furnish it with food, with little cakes, and wine

for the dark flight down oblivion.

...

 

 

Where Death and Life Embrace

D. H. Lawrence

I've already devoted at least two entries to Persephone and Demeter.  Cynthia from "Sorting the Pieces" has also written of Persephone.  Vicky  (My Incentive) and I  have been exploring the Thumbelina fairytale and discussing its similarities to the Persephone Myth.  Yesterday in my reading, I ran across a beautiful poem by D. H. Lawrence called "Bavarian Gentians" (a gentian is a kind of herb).  The poem was written close to Lawrence's death.  It is a poem that relates the gentian to the Persephone myth:

BAVARIAN GENTIANS

Not every man has gentians in his house
in soft September, at slow, sad Michaelmas.

Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark
darkening the daytime, torch-like, with the smoking blueness of Pluto's
gloom,
ribbed and torch-like, with their blaze of darkness spread blue
down flattening into points, flattened under the sweep of white day
torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto's dark-blue daze,
black lamps from the halls of Dis, burning dark blue,
giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter's pale lamps give off
light,
lead me then, lead the way.

Reach me a gentian, give me a torch!
let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower
down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness
even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September
to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark
and Persephone herself is but a voice
or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark
of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom,
among the splendor of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on
the lost bride and her groom.

D. H. Lawrence wrote:  "My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle."

I believe this is a wonderful thing for the writer of fiction or poems to remember.  Lawrence's words connect with those of Tim O'Brien, novelist, with the idea that you feel stories not in your head but in your whole body.  When you're writing fiction or poetry, you need to feel what you're writing in your whole body.  It can't just be an intellectual exercise.  We use the intellect later to compare the gentian to the Persephone Myth, and that's a useful exercise.  But we FEEL the poem first (then we analyze it).

The blue gentian is our body, which will, like the plant, die.  Not everyone has gentians in "his house in soft September"  because not everyone knows how to be oneself, the way flowers do.  In 1913, Lawrence wrote in a letter:  "I conceive a man's body as a kind of flame, like a candle flame,
forever upright and yet flowing: and the intellect is just the light that is shed on to the things around. And I am not so much concerned with the things around -- which is really mind--but with the mystery of the flame forever flowing, coming God knows how from out of practically nowhere, and being itself, whatever there is around it, that it lights
up. We have got so ridiculously mindful, that we never know that we ourselves are anything--we think there are only the objects we shine upon. And there the poor flame goes on burning ignored, to produce this light. And instead of chasing the mystery in the fugitive, half-lighted things outside us, we ought to look at ourselves, and say 'My God, I am myself!'"

To not recognizeyour true self is a kind of living-death.  Indeed,Lawrence wrotea great deal about the marriage of opposites, life and death, light and dark.  And that is what Persephone represents, the marriage of life and death, of light and dark.  Persephone's love for Pluto represents our own return to our origins, the womb of the Earth, where death and life embrace.  As Octavio Paz writes:  "the return to the Great Whole is the descent to the depths, to the underground palace of Pluto and Persephone."

Note: 

Not every man has gentians in his house
in soft September, at slow, sad Michaelmas.

The feast of St. Michael and All Angels or Michaelmas fell about the time of the autumnal equinox. The equinox marked the period when the nights would be getting longer and the earth would begin to die. St. Michael came to be seen as the protector against the forces of the dark and so became very popular in the Middle Ages. 

 

Addendum to The Rose

January 2005 issue of The Sun

I forgot that very recently I ran across this quote from Rumi, one of my favorite poets, on another blog (April's Yoni Blog):

 

~.~~.~~.~~.~~.~~.~~.~~.~~.~

"That which God said to the rose, and caused it to laugh in full-blown beauty, he said to my heart, and made it a hundred times more beautiful." - Rumi, translated by Kabir Helminski

The Rose

I have run across references to

roses several times in the last

few weeks.  Three of the references

came to me in the last few days: 

1)  A reference in Judith Heartsong's

journal and 2) A link sent to me by

someone who reads my journal but who

does not know me.  Nor does this person

presently post to my journal frequently. 

Thus, the person has no knowledge of my

interest in roses or rose imagery.  The

link was to an e.e. cummings poem and

3) A random search for something else

brought up William Blake's poem,

"The Sick Rose, which

I hadn't read in years.

 

Why this is relevant:  This month,

a short story of mine is published in

The Sun.  It is called "Rose's."  The

story is about two young teenage girls

who have a bad encounter with two men,

leading to a reassessment of their

attitudes about their bodies, their

sexuality, themselves.  The story

is called "Rose's" for the store the

girls like to visit, but symbolically,

the rose emphasizes the girls' budding

sexuality:

From The Woman's Dictionary of Symbols

and Sacred Objects by Barbara G. Walker:

ROSE WINDOW

The rose window of a Christian cathedral typically

faced west, the direction of the Goddess's paradise

 in ancient pagan tradition:  that mysterious sunset

land that medieval mystics converted into the land

of faery, ruled by its divine queen.  The Gothic

cathedral opposed this primordial female symbol

in the west to its male symbol (cross) in the east,

that is, in the apse.  Christian congregations turned

their backs on the great female rose, yet they were

bathed in her multicolored light.  A rose window was

generally dedicated to the Virgin Queen of Heaven,

and the whole cathedral was described as her "palace." 

The rose window was essentially a female-symbolic

mandala, expressive of the spirit of Mary as mystic

rose, Wreath of Roses, Mother of the Rosary, or Queen

of the Most Holy Rose-Garden.

Roses, rosaries, and rose-shaped mandalas had represented

the ancient Goddess in Oriental countries from time

immemorial.  Her Rose-Apple Tree in the western paradise

had been the sourceof the fruit of eternal life from India

to Ireland in the oldest myths.  Worshipers of Aphrodite

used to call their ceremones the Mysteries of the Rose. 

Even medieval churchmen understood that the rose

was a female sexual symbol expressing the mystery

of Mary's physical gateway, source of the Redeemer's life.  

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

Here is Blake's poem, "The Sick

Rose."  The poem is never mentioned

in "Rose's"; however, I think this

poem describes the girls' dilemma well;

that is, the fact that their innocence,

their confidence in themselves as

sexual beings has been violated:   

"The Sick Rose," William Blake

O Rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

That brings me to the e.e.cummings

poem, which illustrates the beauty

and the power of the feminine in a

most intriguing way:

"somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond,"  e.e. cummings

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond

any experience,your eyes have their silence:

in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,

or which i cannot touch because they are too near

 

your slightest look will easily unclose me

though i have closed myself as fingers,

you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens

(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

 

or if your wish be to close me, i and

my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,

as when the heart of this flower imagines

the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals

the power of your intense fragility:whose texture

compels me with the color of its countries,

rendering death and forever with each breathing

 

(i do not know what it is about you that closes

and opens;only something in me understands

the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)

nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This poem seems to me a powerful

evocation of female power.  It is

the kind of power the narrator of

the story clearly thinks she has

lost.  The poem is sensual, spiritual,

and profound.

 

I'm a believer in meaningful

coincidences, and I believe this

pile up of rose imagery is an

occurrence of a meaningful coincidence. 

I felt that not to do an entry on it

would be to deny some mysterious

power in the universe at work in my life.

 

Exile II

Back in August I did the following entry about the concept of exile:

This is a journal entry from the writings of Mircea Eliade.  He kept a journal between 1945 and 1969.  This entry was written 1 January 1960:

Every exile is a Ulysses traveling toward Ithaca.  Every real existence reproduces the Odyssey.  The path toward Ithaca, toward the center.  I had known all that for a long time.  What I have just discovered is that the chance to become a new Ulysses is given to any exile whatsoever (precisely because he has been condemned by the gods, that is, by the "powers" which decide historical, earthly destinies).  But to realize this, the exile must be capable of penetrating the hidden meaning of his wanderings, and of understanding them as a long series of initiation trials (willed by the gods) and as so many obstacles on the path which brings him back to the hearth (toward the center).  That means:  seeing signs, hidden meanings, symbols, in the sufferings, the depressions, the dry periods in everyday life.

The image of oneself as an exile is useful on many levels.  Spiritual teachings suggest that we are exiled from our original unity, a unity symbolized by the Garden of Eden and also the cosmic egg.  I think in our "modern," technological age, we can come to feel we are exiles in our own lives.  We have lost many of the rituals and ceremonies that once bound us to the greater whole of the earth and the universe.  So we often find ourselves searching.  This search can be lonely and painful.  But even so, there are meanings we are meant to glean.  Even in the "depressions," even in "the dry periods of everyday life."

I think it's intriguing that Mircea Eliade wrote this entry on the first day of the new year.  I think I want to read this entry every year on January 1st from now on.

Entry excerpted from No Souvenirs:  Journal 1957-1969, Mircea Eliade.  (Harper, 1977).

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At that time, 2005 felt far away.  Yet I did file my promise away in my memory, my promise to look at Eliade's entry each year when the new year came.  If I could say that I've made any New Year's resolution, it is this:  to read this entry from Eliade's journal every time I meet a new year.

So...exile.

I tried very hard to watch the New Year's Celebration on television.  I used to enjoy it.  This year, Dick Clark is recovering from a stroke and he was replaced by Regis Filban, and all anyone seemed to want to talk about was what was popular, what was "hot," what had sold the most tickets, what had sold the most CD's, DVD's and so on.  For the short time I watched, I truly felt like an exile in this modern life.  I looked at the people at Times Square, all penned up, like cattle (for safety purposes, I'm sure), and I shivvered at the thought of how tame modern life is becoming.  According to the Writers Almanac:  The idea of making a lot of noise exactly at midnight dates back to early pagan rituals. People believed that deafening noise would drive away evil spirits who flocked to the living at the start of the new year.

But now, the noise is just noise, and people don't seem to be able to truly reflect on evil anymore.  What is evil?  Who is evil?  What about the evil existing within each of us?  Each individual's capacity for evil?

By 11:00, I was so bored and disenchanted that I shut off the television and went to bed, NPR radio playing in the background.  But not before I heard the big news story of the night was:  "Don't drive drunk."  The next morning the big news story:  "What to do for a hangover."  NOT, may I point out, the Tsunami.

And although I'm happy I don't let such popular culture concerns drive me, it is also a little lonely-making, this situation I find myself in.  I am an exile in my own culture.

This is but one side of the multi-sided gem that exile is.