Too many days in the city, and I am restless, hungry for quiet. My head is filled with "stuff." The greatest temptation of city life, when you are working on a book or your own art work, is to allow "what other people are doing" to fill your head. And numerically speaking, there are just so many "other people" here.
It is the difference between being the subject, or the object, of your own life. Here in the city, information and activity come tumbling over you, whether you like it or not. Someone has the radio on, or the TV on, people are talking talking talking, all the news--gossip especially--fills every space in which you move. You want to walk down the street and pick up a carton of milk, or take the subway to the library or post office, and all of it--in the space of four, five, ten blocks--assaults you. Suddenly, your head is full.
The battle of the city--I am finding, I am recognizing recently--is a battle of valve-control. You are trying to write something, to think something, to make something; your brain must be active, alert, clear, able to move in multiple directions as you work. Once city noise has cluttered the space--if the valve is wide open, information overload has already tumbled in--your mind, your imagination, are boxed in--like alternate side of the street parking days, when people double park and trap you in your space.
If you love city life, you don't experience it as noise or clutter or a trap, but as energy. Wondrous diversity. The world alive and vibrant in one city block, one subway car. Yes. True. But valve-control may be the secret here, too. Or maybe it's more like a Rorschach inkblot test, beauty and chaos moving in and out of relief. There is a zen to this, regardless. It takes work.
Today, it takes a lot of work. Between Mumbai, industry bail outs, and close-out sales on Senate seats... I'm struggling to get out of my parking spot.
Showing posts with label Literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Literature. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Guerrilla Poetry and Fawning Over Fauns
It's hard to know what to make of the upcoming reading/performance which will be taking place at my local library here in the country. Alix Olson, described as a queer-artist-activist-spoken word-revolutionary, will be appearing at the Tusten-Cochecton Branch Library. Is this city and country colliding in full glory?
I suppose not. We are but 15 miles from the site of Woodstock, after all. But I wonder what Norma, the octagenarian librarian with whom I've recently become friendly, will think of Alix.
At any rate, I am glad to have renewed my library membership, which I let lapse into delinquency over the last six months. It's good to be back. Wi-fi has also come to Tusten-Cochecton (no cell service still--No Towers! they cry).
The hunters are out. Yesterday, I believe, was the opening of deer hunting season. I assume this because trucks full of men in camouflage and orange vests drove up and down my road all day. The pup and I walked sheepishly along, and every time I saw a deer--they're everywhere, travelling in families--I'd psst, psst and whisper-shout Run for your lives. Shoot anything, I say--but the deer? Innocence incarnate.
Heading back to the Bx today after a productive two weeks here. Rumor has it a new bookstore has opened in the 'hood.
I suppose not. We are but 15 miles from the site of Woodstock, after all. But I wonder what Norma, the octagenarian librarian with whom I've recently become friendly, will think of Alix.
At any rate, I am glad to have renewed my library membership, which I let lapse into delinquency over the last six months. It's good to be back. Wi-fi has also come to Tusten-Cochecton (no cell service still--No Towers! they cry).
The hunters are out. Yesterday, I believe, was the opening of deer hunting season. I assume this because trucks full of men in camouflage and orange vests drove up and down my road all day. The pup and I walked sheepishly along, and every time I saw a deer--they're everywhere, travelling in families--I'd psst, psst and whisper-shout Run for your lives. Shoot anything, I say--but the deer? Innocence incarnate.
Heading back to the Bx today after a productive two weeks here. Rumor has it a new bookstore has opened in the 'hood.
Monday, February 25, 2008
Chekhov's Humanity... City and Country
Chekhov generally refrained from passing judgment on his characters, playing more the role of objective "witness." Well, sort of. "Man will become better when you show him what he is like," he wrote in one of his notebooks. Often his moral pronouncements are put into the mouths of characters with a deceptive simplicity; as readers, we recognize that the speaker is often both impassioned and hypocritical, sincere and ignorant. And because Chekhov always approached and drew his characters humanely, we can never look at a character and say, "What a hypocrite" or "How ignorant" - because they are too recognizable, too much like ourselves.
Anyway. A couple of stories I recently read with bits of this layered commentary, on city and country life. In Russia, of course, city and country have always been code words for social class - peasants, landed gentry, sophisticated intelligentsia, etc. Many of Chekhov's characters, however, are often in fluid social positions, which allows him to comment on class positions in a more dynamic way.
From "Gooseberries": The narrator is speaking about his brother. Their father was a military man who rose to the rank of officer and came to own a small country estate. As children the two brothers thus lived in the country; after their father's death, all property was lost to creditors, and so they became white-collar professionals.
He was a kind and gentle soul and I loved him, but I never sympathized with his desire to shut himself up for the rest of his life on a little property of his own. It is a common saying that a man needs only six feet of earth. But six feet is what a corpse needs, not a man. It is also asserted that if our educated class is drawn to the land and seeks to settle on farms, that's a good thing. But these farms amount to the same six feet of earth. To retire from the city, from the struggle, from the hubbub, to go off and hide on one's own farm - that's not life, it is selfishness, sloth, it is a kind of monasticism, but monasticism without works. Man needs not six feet of earth, not a farm, but the whole globe, all of Nature, where unhindered he can display all the capacities and peculiarities of his free spirit.
From "On Official Business": The main character here is a magistrate, young and ambitious for a career and lifestyle in Moscow but paying his dues in the provinces.
The fatherland, the real Russia, was Moscow, Petersburg; but these were the provinces, the colonies. When you dream of playing a part, of becoming known, of being, for instance, examining magistrate in important cases or prosecutor in a circuit court, of being a social lion, you inevitably think of Moscow. If you are to live, then it must be in Moscow; here, nothing matters to you; you get reconciled readily to your insignificant role, and only look for one thing in life - to get away, to get away as quickly as possible... and he kept thinking that all about him was not life but scraps of life, fragments, that everything here was accidental, that one could draw no conclusion from it... It occurred to him that since the life about him here in the wilds was unintelligible to him, and since he did not see it, it meant that it was nonexistent.
Both passages express the superiority of city life; and yet both characters are limited in their experiences and understanding. Each bring their prejudices. Chekhov himself summered in the country and eventually settled down on a rural estate; but seemed throughout his life to be dogged by a consciousness of the poor upon whose backs the wealthy and comfortable lived. "As though someone were knocking with a little hammer on his temples," he writes of the young magistrate, who ultimately has nightmares about how the poor "shouldered all that was darkest and most burdensome in life" and how "to wish for oneself a bright and active life among happy, contented people, and constantly to dream of such a life, that meant dreaming of new suicides of men crushed by toil and care..."
As for the man who criticizes his brother for "escaping" to the country, he has similar thoughts as the magistrate after seeing the life of comfort and satiation his brother made for himself (Chekhov even repeats the use of the phrase "a little hammer" in reference to one's conscience), that "obviously the happy man is at ease only because the unhappy ones bear their burdens in silence." But in this story, Chekhov bears "witness" to something perhaps even more implicating: the man's audience, the two other men who listen to him speak of his brother and the revelations he had with regard to happiness and the poor, don't care to hear him speak of it. "...it was tedious to listen to the story of the poor devil of a clerk who ate gooseberries. One felt like talking about elegant people, about women."
Anyway. A couple of stories I recently read with bits of this layered commentary, on city and country life. In Russia, of course, city and country have always been code words for social class - peasants, landed gentry, sophisticated intelligentsia, etc. Many of Chekhov's characters, however, are often in fluid social positions, which allows him to comment on class positions in a more dynamic way.
From "Gooseberries": The narrator is speaking about his brother. Their father was a military man who rose to the rank of officer and came to own a small country estate. As children the two brothers thus lived in the country; after their father's death, all property was lost to creditors, and so they became white-collar professionals.
He was a kind and gentle soul and I loved him, but I never sympathized with his desire to shut himself up for the rest of his life on a little property of his own. It is a common saying that a man needs only six feet of earth. But six feet is what a corpse needs, not a man. It is also asserted that if our educated class is drawn to the land and seeks to settle on farms, that's a good thing. But these farms amount to the same six feet of earth. To retire from the city, from the struggle, from the hubbub, to go off and hide on one's own farm - that's not life, it is selfishness, sloth, it is a kind of monasticism, but monasticism without works. Man needs not six feet of earth, not a farm, but the whole globe, all of Nature, where unhindered he can display all the capacities and peculiarities of his free spirit.
From "On Official Business": The main character here is a magistrate, young and ambitious for a career and lifestyle in Moscow but paying his dues in the provinces.
The fatherland, the real Russia, was Moscow, Petersburg; but these were the provinces, the colonies. When you dream of playing a part, of becoming known, of being, for instance, examining magistrate in important cases or prosecutor in a circuit court, of being a social lion, you inevitably think of Moscow. If you are to live, then it must be in Moscow; here, nothing matters to you; you get reconciled readily to your insignificant role, and only look for one thing in life - to get away, to get away as quickly as possible... and he kept thinking that all about him was not life but scraps of life, fragments, that everything here was accidental, that one could draw no conclusion from it... It occurred to him that since the life about him here in the wilds was unintelligible to him, and since he did not see it, it meant that it was nonexistent.
Both passages express the superiority of city life; and yet both characters are limited in their experiences and understanding. Each bring their prejudices. Chekhov himself summered in the country and eventually settled down on a rural estate; but seemed throughout his life to be dogged by a consciousness of the poor upon whose backs the wealthy and comfortable lived. "As though someone were knocking with a little hammer on his temples," he writes of the young magistrate, who ultimately has nightmares about how the poor "shouldered all that was darkest and most burdensome in life" and how "to wish for oneself a bright and active life among happy, contented people, and constantly to dream of such a life, that meant dreaming of new suicides of men crushed by toil and care..."
As for the man who criticizes his brother for "escaping" to the country, he has similar thoughts as the magistrate after seeing the life of comfort and satiation his brother made for himself (Chekhov even repeats the use of the phrase "a little hammer" in reference to one's conscience), that "obviously the happy man is at ease only because the unhappy ones bear their burdens in silence." But in this story, Chekhov bears "witness" to something perhaps even more implicating: the man's audience, the two other men who listen to him speak of his brother and the revelations he had with regard to happiness and the poor, don't care to hear him speak of it. "...it was tedious to listen to the story of the poor devil of a clerk who ate gooseberries. One felt like talking about elegant people, about women."
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Pilgrim in Provincetown
Boston or New York embodies our condition in one aspect: We are strangers among millions living in cubes like Anasazi in a world we fashioned. And Provincetown shows, by contrast, that we live on a strand between sea and sky. Here are protoplasmic, peeled people in wind against crystal skies. Our soft tissues are outside, like unearthed and drying worms'. The people in cities are like Mexican jumping beans, like larvae in tequila bottles, soft bits in hard boxes. And so forth. The length to which we as people go to hide our nakedness by blocking sky!
There was a fatal problem. There always is. Provincetown people too, and all people worldwide who could swing it, were also bare tissues living under roofs. An honest way through, all but changing the whole idea, would be a set of interleaved narratives, Boston people and desert villagers. -from The Maytrees, by Annie Dillard
It's been a while. City and country somehow receding as main characters in this day-to-day. But I've just finished The Maytrees, Annie Dillard's new novel (and her last book, she says: "This one just about killed me... I want to change and grow."), and made note of the above for OITB (that's Orchid in the Bronx): Toby Maytree, a Provincetown poet, is thinking about a book-length poem which he will start writing shortly.
Anasazi: "The ancestors of modern Pueblo Indians, about 20 separate tribes living in New Mexico and Arizona. There never was an 'Anasazi' tribe, nor did any group of people call themselves by that name. Anasazi is a descriptive term of Navajo origin. Archaeologists applied the term to villagers who lived and farmed in the Four Corners between the years 1 and 1300 AD." One of many things/words I had to look up throughout the reading of The Maytrees. Along with hoyden, folderol, lagniappe, albedo, howitzer, Algreba, skeg, chert. (Any idea? You are much smarter than I.)
AD's story of love found, lost, found, pondered upon, redefined, undefined is as dense as it is earthy, heady as it is moving. Like everything of hers, it hurt my head to read; she's so damn smart, it actually grinds the brain. But in this one, you can feel her heart fighting for space next to - or at least somewhere near - her mind. As a reader, it's a unique experience - feeling something in your chest swell and tighten as you reach for the dictionary. Bare tissues living under roofs.
And it's definitely a country story. AD has come home to Tinker Creek in a way; this time it's the dunes and the starry skies of Cape Cod. The wind, the sand, the "green sea," "black cordgrass, " "parabolic dunes," "low swale," and "shack gulls" - all constantly in motion, ebbing and flowing like the tide throughout the story. On the one hand, I'm sad AD says she's "done." On the other hand, she's earned it, and I've barely understood everything she's written to date, so it's not like I won't have her work to re-read for many years to come.
There was a fatal problem. There always is. Provincetown people too, and all people worldwide who could swing it, were also bare tissues living under roofs. An honest way through, all but changing the whole idea, would be a set of interleaved narratives, Boston people and desert villagers. -from The Maytrees, by Annie Dillard
It's been a while. City and country somehow receding as main characters in this day-to-day. But I've just finished The Maytrees, Annie Dillard's new novel (and her last book, she says: "This one just about killed me... I want to change and grow."), and made note of the above for OITB (that's Orchid in the Bronx): Toby Maytree, a Provincetown poet, is thinking about a book-length poem which he will start writing shortly.
Anasazi: "The ancestors of modern Pueblo Indians, about 20 separate tribes living in New Mexico and Arizona. There never was an 'Anasazi' tribe, nor did any group of people call themselves by that name. Anasazi is a descriptive term of Navajo origin. Archaeologists applied the term to villagers who lived and farmed in the Four Corners between the years 1 and 1300 AD." One of many things/words I had to look up throughout the reading of The Maytrees. Along with hoyden, folderol, lagniappe, albedo, howitzer, Algreba, skeg, chert. (Any idea? You are much smarter than I.)
AD's story of love found, lost, found, pondered upon, redefined, undefined is as dense as it is earthy, heady as it is moving. Like everything of hers, it hurt my head to read; she's so damn smart, it actually grinds the brain. But in this one, you can feel her heart fighting for space next to - or at least somewhere near - her mind. As a reader, it's a unique experience - feeling something in your chest swell and tighten as you reach for the dictionary. Bare tissues living under roofs.
And it's definitely a country story. AD has come home to Tinker Creek in a way; this time it's the dunes and the starry skies of Cape Cod. The wind, the sand, the "green sea," "black cordgrass, " "parabolic dunes," "low swale," and "shack gulls" - all constantly in motion, ebbing and flowing like the tide throughout the story. On the one hand, I'm sad AD says she's "done." On the other hand, she's earned it, and I've barely understood everything she's written to date, so it's not like I won't have her work to re-read for many years to come.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Me in The Lion's Den
A long stretch in the city, and an even longer stretch away from this blog (and draft 3 of my novel as well). I'm not sure what other writers mean - really mean - when they refer to "writer's block," and I'm not sure if that's what I have. I do know that what Annie Dillard said about being master of your work - you are either master or slave - is true. Here is a quote I come back to, over and over:
I do not so much write a book as sit with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.
This tender process can change in a twinkling. If you skip a visit or two, a work in progress will turn on you.
A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fastened a halter, but which now you cannot catch. It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the doors to its room. You enter its room with bravura, holding a chair at the thing and shouting, 'Simba!'
That fear and dread are a regular part of the writing life is something people don't like to talk about so much. A dying friend, indeed. But it's that sympathy, along with a trance-like drive, pushing forth from deeper levels of consciousness and intellect than what you engage in your regular life - your life of society (urban, suburban, rural) and problem-solving and grocery shopping and bill-paying - it's that concoction of positive (and dare I say mystical) forces that completes the brew. It's a ridiculously impossible balance to maintain, let alone deepen and fortify. And when fear and dread win the day, paralysis ensues.
But enough of that. We get up off the mat. Things are not looking good in draft 3, the disorders seem awfully terminal. Fear and dread. But here is Dillard again, on writing as process, on the work of writing as life:
Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex that it engages all of your intelligence. It is life at its most free.
And a good word from Melanie Rae Thon:
The blank page is a mysterious place where we learn through joy to pay attention.
In a recent interview, artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel was asked which he would choose, painting or filmmaking, if he could only do one. He answered (I paraphrase): "Painting. I paint outside most of the time. I paint alone. Painting is pure freedom."
Ultimately, I am in there with the lion by my own doing. The blank page is the artist's privilege - a glorious, terrible gift.
I do not so much write a book as sit with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.
This tender process can change in a twinkling. If you skip a visit or two, a work in progress will turn on you.
A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fastened a halter, but which now you cannot catch. It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the doors to its room. You enter its room with bravura, holding a chair at the thing and shouting, 'Simba!'
That fear and dread are a regular part of the writing life is something people don't like to talk about so much. A dying friend, indeed. But it's that sympathy, along with a trance-like drive, pushing forth from deeper levels of consciousness and intellect than what you engage in your regular life - your life of society (urban, suburban, rural) and problem-solving and grocery shopping and bill-paying - it's that concoction of positive (and dare I say mystical) forces that completes the brew. It's a ridiculously impossible balance to maintain, let alone deepen and fortify. And when fear and dread win the day, paralysis ensues.
But enough of that. We get up off the mat. Things are not looking good in draft 3, the disorders seem awfully terminal. Fear and dread. But here is Dillard again, on writing as process, on the work of writing as life:
Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex that it engages all of your intelligence. It is life at its most free.
And a good word from Melanie Rae Thon:
The blank page is a mysterious place where we learn through joy to pay attention.
In a recent interview, artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel was asked which he would choose, painting or filmmaking, if he could only do one. He answered (I paraphrase): "Painting. I paint outside most of the time. I paint alone. Painting is pure freedom."
Ultimately, I am in there with the lion by my own doing. The blank page is the artist's privilege - a glorious, terrible gift.
Monday, November 26, 2007
The (Heart is a Lonely) Hunter
I'm writing about hunting here, but it seemed a good excuse to plug Carson McCullers' novel - which, besides being a great work, has one of the best titles for a literary work ever. It (the title) somehow captures the feel of a pop-song and very dark poetry all at once.
It's hunting season in the country. PA hunters are serious about their guns, and serious about their game. It's survival of the fittest, in absolute terms. I'm scrambling to make sure my pup is protected: C. the Postmistress tells me that the hunters in our area are notorious for shooting dogs. They will shoot whatever moves in their line of sight, and they won't feel bad about it. Apparently, if your dog does not have the wilderness savvy to protect himself, he doesn't deserve to live. Many have been shot, and they pretty much just get left for dead. There is also a legendary story about an old woman who got shot while hanging her clothes outside. She was wearing white gloves, and the hunter mistook her hands for a deer's tail.
Eek.
So the pup will be wearing a reflective orange safety vest from now on.
The law prohibits hunting on Sundays (because of God, I guess). And the immediate acreage around my house is "Posted," meaning it's private property where hunting is prohibited. Still, you hear the gunshots as if they are right there. I think one of the neighbors set up a shooting range for target practice.
I don't know what to say. Is hunting cruel? Barbaric? Or is it - as one of the Republican candidates said in the YouTube debates last night (was it Ron Paul?), boasting about getting his first hunting license at age 9 - "an important American family tradition." The right to bear arms. Interesting that John McCain, the candidate with the most direct experience with horrific violence, is the only one who does not own a gun (but don't get me started about what an asinine question that was).
It seems to me a classic example of "A Divided America," i.e. the challenges of a society which is both democratic and highly-diverse. For some, guns may well represent a cherished family tradition; for others, it's nothing but death and destruction. Not surprisingly, I'd come down on the side of gun control laws; if the tradition is really that cherished, then having to get a license or take an exam or go through some other qualification process is a small inconvenience to incur - especially when the larger benefit is enjoying a truly free, democratic, and safe society. For gun-lovers to make a claim on full license to do whatever and whenever with their guns is just plain anachronistic - what they want is secession, what they want is not to have to participate in a complex, pluralistic society. Do libertarians really not see the chaos that would ensue if government did disappear?
At any rate, gun control is not likely to go over any time soon in this neck o' the woods. It reminds me that I am a visitor here - for now, anyway - definitely not a true resident. (I in fact still vote in NY.) The same goes for the Bronx, really. Not quite at home in either place. A woman with no country...
The heart is a lonely hunter. Yup.
It's hunting season in the country. PA hunters are serious about their guns, and serious about their game. It's survival of the fittest, in absolute terms. I'm scrambling to make sure my pup is protected: C. the Postmistress tells me that the hunters in our area are notorious for shooting dogs. They will shoot whatever moves in their line of sight, and they won't feel bad about it. Apparently, if your dog does not have the wilderness savvy to protect himself, he doesn't deserve to live. Many have been shot, and they pretty much just get left for dead. There is also a legendary story about an old woman who got shot while hanging her clothes outside. She was wearing white gloves, and the hunter mistook her hands for a deer's tail.
Eek.
So the pup will be wearing a reflective orange safety vest from now on.
The law prohibits hunting on Sundays (because of God, I guess). And the immediate acreage around my house is "Posted," meaning it's private property where hunting is prohibited. Still, you hear the gunshots as if they are right there. I think one of the neighbors set up a shooting range for target practice.
I don't know what to say. Is hunting cruel? Barbaric? Or is it - as one of the Republican candidates said in the YouTube debates last night (was it Ron Paul?), boasting about getting his first hunting license at age 9 - "an important American family tradition." The right to bear arms. Interesting that John McCain, the candidate with the most direct experience with horrific violence, is the only one who does not own a gun (but don't get me started about what an asinine question that was).
It seems to me a classic example of "A Divided America," i.e. the challenges of a society which is both democratic and highly-diverse. For some, guns may well represent a cherished family tradition; for others, it's nothing but death and destruction. Not surprisingly, I'd come down on the side of gun control laws; if the tradition is really that cherished, then having to get a license or take an exam or go through some other qualification process is a small inconvenience to incur - especially when the larger benefit is enjoying a truly free, democratic, and safe society. For gun-lovers to make a claim on full license to do whatever and whenever with their guns is just plain anachronistic - what they want is secession, what they want is not to have to participate in a complex, pluralistic society. Do libertarians really not see the chaos that would ensue if government did disappear?
At any rate, gun control is not likely to go over any time soon in this neck o' the woods. It reminds me that I am a visitor here - for now, anyway - definitely not a true resident. (I in fact still vote in NY.) The same goes for the Bronx, really. Not quite at home in either place. A woman with no country...
The heart is a lonely hunter. Yup.
Monday, November 19, 2007
First Snow, and Rilke on Ambition
The snow is falling fast here this morning - it's lovely. About a foot I'd say. Should taper off this afternoon. The wood pile is almost all stacked in the shed (yesterday's labor), and the new furnace is humming along. We discovered a mystery electrical cord emerging from the crawl space in the basement and realized that it's heating tape for the kitchen and bathroom pipes - the ones that froze last winter. C. the Postmistress told me about heating tape - you attach it to your pipes, plug it in, and it (safely) heats the pipes when temps fall below freezing. I was planning on researching and trying to install, so what a relief - one of those gifts from above - that it's already done. My second winter, and I'm just a little more prepared, which is a good thing.
So winter is officially here, and in the quiet of the world going dormant, laying itself down to sleep, I have been reading Rilke's early poems and some biography. The poet's realm was that of the soul, the deep inner life. In Robert Bly's intro to his translations of selected poems, he writes:
When I first read Rilke in my twenties, I felt a deep shock upon realizing the amount of introversion he had achieved, and the adult attention he paid to inner states. From the pragmatist or objectivist point of view, Rilke goes too far in this attention; he goes over the line. The American, in Latin America or North America, is willing to accept some introversion, but when it goes this far, he may dismiss the whole thing as solipsism, or as an evasion of political responsibility... Rilke knows what Tolstoy knows in The Death of Ivan Ilych: that our day-to-day life, with its patterns and familiar objects, can become a husk that blocks anything fresh from coming in. Before the industrial revolution brought its various creature comforts, it is conceivable that the shocks of winter cold, sudden poverties, plague, brutal invasions, abrupt unexplainable deaths, regularly broke the husk. In our time the husk is strong, and Rilke turns to look at it.
Here in the country, in solitude, I find that the husk falls away. The soul, the spirit, unfolds:
I want to unfold.
I don't want to stay folded anywhere,
because where I am folded, there I am a lie.
The spareness and the stillness of a country road, farmlands minding their own seasons and work in good time, big sky, snow falling... the slow, deep work of fruitfulness that is born of nature, as opposed to human-driven competition or ambition. And yet Rilke, like Donald Hall, has a very clear idea of his ambition:
You see, I want a lot.
Perhaps I want everything:
the darkness that comes with every infinite fall
and the shivering blaze of every step up.
So many live on and want nothing,
and are raised to the rank of prince
by the slippery ease of their light judgments.
But what you love to see are faces
that do work and feel thirst....
You have not grown old, and it is not too late
to dive into your increasing depths
where life calmly gives out its own secret.
Calmly. As Denise Levertov reminded us, "Much happens when we're not there." And much happens when we do nothing. We unfold... and we hear things. We may even hear the snow falling.
So winter is officially here, and in the quiet of the world going dormant, laying itself down to sleep, I have been reading Rilke's early poems and some biography. The poet's realm was that of the soul, the deep inner life. In Robert Bly's intro to his translations of selected poems, he writes:
When I first read Rilke in my twenties, I felt a deep shock upon realizing the amount of introversion he had achieved, and the adult attention he paid to inner states. From the pragmatist or objectivist point of view, Rilke goes too far in this attention; he goes over the line. The American, in Latin America or North America, is willing to accept some introversion, but when it goes this far, he may dismiss the whole thing as solipsism, or as an evasion of political responsibility... Rilke knows what Tolstoy knows in The Death of Ivan Ilych: that our day-to-day life, with its patterns and familiar objects, can become a husk that blocks anything fresh from coming in. Before the industrial revolution brought its various creature comforts, it is conceivable that the shocks of winter cold, sudden poverties, plague, brutal invasions, abrupt unexplainable deaths, regularly broke the husk. In our time the husk is strong, and Rilke turns to look at it.
Here in the country, in solitude, I find that the husk falls away. The soul, the spirit, unfolds:
I want to unfold.
I don't want to stay folded anywhere,
because where I am folded, there I am a lie.
The spareness and the stillness of a country road, farmlands minding their own seasons and work in good time, big sky, snow falling... the slow, deep work of fruitfulness that is born of nature, as opposed to human-driven competition or ambition. And yet Rilke, like Donald Hall, has a very clear idea of his ambition:
You see, I want a lot.
Perhaps I want everything:
the darkness that comes with every infinite fall
and the shivering blaze of every step up.
So many live on and want nothing,
and are raised to the rank of prince
by the slippery ease of their light judgments.
But what you love to see are faces
that do work and feel thirst....
You have not grown old, and it is not too late
to dive into your increasing depths
where life calmly gives out its own secret.
Calmly. As Denise Levertov reminded us, "Much happens when we're not there." And much happens when we do nothing. We unfold... and we hear things. We may even hear the snow falling.
Monday, November 12, 2007
Poem for a Quiet Morning / a Quiet Life
Much happens when we're not there.
Many trees, not only that famous one, over and over,
fall in the forest. We don't see, but something sees,
or someone, a different kind of someone,
a different molecular model, or entities
not made of molecules anyway; or nothing, no one:
but something has taken place, taken space,
been present, absent,*
returned. Much moves in and out of open windows
when our attention is somewhere else,
just as our souls move in and out of our bodies sometimes.
Everyone used to know this,
but for a hundred years or more
we've been losing our memories, moulting, shedding,
like animals or plants that are not well...
And though it may have nothing at all to do with us,
and though we can't fathom its designs,
nevertheless our condition thereby changes:
cells shift, a rustling barely audible as of tarlatan
flickers through closed books, one or two leaves
fall, and when we read them we can perceive,
if we are truthful, that we are not dreaming,
not dreaming but once more witnessing.
*This line should be indented, blogger's formatting not cooperating.
Many trees, not only that famous one, over and over,
fall in the forest. We don't see, but something sees,
or someone, a different kind of someone,
a different molecular model, or entities
not made of molecules anyway; or nothing, no one:
but something has taken place, taken space,
been present, absent,*
returned. Much moves in and out of open windows
when our attention is somewhere else,
just as our souls move in and out of our bodies sometimes.
Everyone used to know this,
but for a hundred years or more
we've been losing our memories, moulting, shedding,
like animals or plants that are not well...
And though it may have nothing at all to do with us,
and though we can't fathom its designs,
nevertheless our condition thereby changes:
cells shift, a rustling barely audible as of tarlatan
flickers through closed books, one or two leaves
fall, and when we read them we can perceive,
if we are truthful, that we are not dreaming,
not dreaming but once more witnessing.
-Denise Levertov, from "Window-Blind"
*This line should be indented, blogger's formatting not cooperating.
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Only Let Me Be...
Dear God,
Let me be something every minute of every hour of my life.
Let me be gay
Let me be sad
Let me be cold
Let me be warm
Let me be hungry, have too much to eat
Let me be ragged or well dressed
Let me be sincere, be deceitful
Let me be truthful
Let me be a liar
Let me be honorable and let me sin
Only let me be something every blessed minute.
And when I sleep, let me dream all the time,
so that not one little piece of living is ever lost.
-Francie Nolan, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Listening to the last of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn on my way out to the country today, the above passage struck me. It reminded me, I think, of why this crazy life of extremes – often disorienting (and very inefficient) – of city and country.
By the time of the above passage, it’s 1917, and Francie is 15 years old. She has been forced to quit school – her only joy – to work a full-time office job (pretending to be 17) and be the primary bread-winner for her family. She’s known poverty and hunger her whole life, her beloved father died a drunkard, and her proud mother loves her brother better than her. So much day-to-day struggle, and yet still, she says: Let me be hungry, have too much to eat / Let me be ragged or well dressed. Not: Let me be stable, let me be secure, let me be middle-of-the-road. Let me be something.
War has just been declared, and upon learning this, Francie is having a kind of visionary moment – of seeing herself in history, of recognizing the profundity of her existence in that moment. She is a young woman, hungry for life and love and beauty, reading for the first time that the world is officially on fire. She consciously seizes the moment, tries to capture it – by taking the time to notice every detail about herself and her environment, and then sealing some things in an envelope (a lock of hair, a penny, a Whitman poem, the news clipping about the war). She writes her name, her age, and the date on the envelope and imagines herself opening it in 50 years. I don’t want to remember, she says. I want to live. I don’t want to reminisce, I want to re-live.
I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise
Regardless of others, ever regardful of others
Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man
Stuffed with the stuff that is course, and stuffed with the stuff that is fine...
Francie’s spirit is clearly that of a romantic – Emersonian, Whitmanesque, Proustian. At such a young age, she understands something that only a young person who has had a very short youth could understand: that the passage of time is an utter tragedy. And that every moment we are alive on this earth is a miracle worth bottling for eternity (in Francie’s case, sealing in an envelope) - a living phenomenon bursting with beauty and possibility. On some level, Francie, who at 15 is both still a child and more adult than most adults, understands her mortality.
Let me be something.
Let me share the silence of first snow with no one but the doe
Let me wake to the sound of city garbage trucks and car alarms
Let me burn the wood I’ve chopped and stacked, and warm my hands by the fire
Let me rebel against urban radiators, strip naked and open all the windows in January
Let me see and hear no one but God for days
Let me see and hear all the peoples of the world in a subway car
Let me smell the sweetness of grass and damp tree bark
Let me smell the smells of the street - fancy downtown bakeries, Puerto Rican oxtails, urine, and all
Let the stars show me how black is the night sky
Let the city lights own the skyline and the heavens
Let me till the earth and bring forth fruits
Let an orchid grow in the Bronx.
Let me be something.
Let me be something every minute of every hour of my life.
Let me be gay
Let me be sad
Let me be cold
Let me be warm
Let me be hungry, have too much to eat
Let me be ragged or well dressed
Let me be sincere, be deceitful
Let me be truthful
Let me be a liar
Let me be honorable and let me sin
Only let me be something every blessed minute.
And when I sleep, let me dream all the time,
so that not one little piece of living is ever lost.
-Francie Nolan, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Listening to the last of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn on my way out to the country today, the above passage struck me. It reminded me, I think, of why this crazy life of extremes – often disorienting (and very inefficient) – of city and country.
By the time of the above passage, it’s 1917, and Francie is 15 years old. She has been forced to quit school – her only joy – to work a full-time office job (pretending to be 17) and be the primary bread-winner for her family. She’s known poverty and hunger her whole life, her beloved father died a drunkard, and her proud mother loves her brother better than her. So much day-to-day struggle, and yet still, she says: Let me be hungry, have too much to eat / Let me be ragged or well dressed. Not: Let me be stable, let me be secure, let me be middle-of-the-road. Let me be something.
War has just been declared, and upon learning this, Francie is having a kind of visionary moment – of seeing herself in history, of recognizing the profundity of her existence in that moment. She is a young woman, hungry for life and love and beauty, reading for the first time that the world is officially on fire. She consciously seizes the moment, tries to capture it – by taking the time to notice every detail about herself and her environment, and then sealing some things in an envelope (a lock of hair, a penny, a Whitman poem, the news clipping about the war). She writes her name, her age, and the date on the envelope and imagines herself opening it in 50 years. I don’t want to remember, she says. I want to live. I don’t want to reminisce, I want to re-live.
I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise
Regardless of others, ever regardful of others
Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man
Stuffed with the stuff that is course, and stuffed with the stuff that is fine...
(from "Leaves of Grass")
Francie’s spirit is clearly that of a romantic – Emersonian, Whitmanesque, Proustian. At such a young age, she understands something that only a young person who has had a very short youth could understand: that the passage of time is an utter tragedy. And that every moment we are alive on this earth is a miracle worth bottling for eternity (in Francie’s case, sealing in an envelope) - a living phenomenon bursting with beauty and possibility. On some level, Francie, who at 15 is both still a child and more adult than most adults, understands her mortality.
Let me be something.
Let me share the silence of first snow with no one but the doe
Let me wake to the sound of city garbage trucks and car alarms
Let me burn the wood I’ve chopped and stacked, and warm my hands by the fire
Let me rebel against urban radiators, strip naked and open all the windows in January
Let me see and hear no one but God for days
Let me see and hear all the peoples of the world in a subway car
Let me smell the sweetness of grass and damp tree bark
Let me smell the smells of the street - fancy downtown bakeries, Puerto Rican oxtails, urine, and all
Let the stars show me how black is the night sky
Let the city lights own the skyline and the heavens
Let me till the earth and bring forth fruits
Let an orchid grow in the Bronx.
Let me be something.
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
The Rustle of Autumn
More richly and more recklessly,
Leaves, leaves, give tongue and whirl away,
Fill yesterday's cup of bitterness
With the sadness of today.
Impulse, enchantment, beauty!
Let's dissolve in September wind
And enter the rustle of autumn.
Be still, or go out of your mind!
-From "Autumn," by Boris Pasternak
I spent part of the country weekend with the Russians - Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova. Random? Even more so: after a day of Russian poetry, I sat down to watch OLD SCHOOL - an adult(ish) frat movie starring Will Ferrell, Vince Vaughn, and Luke Wilson.
A strange stretch in the country. Quiet and unbothered, yet work-ful. Not particularly restful. If I were to oversimplify the city-country dichotomy, I would say city=intellect, country=body. Lawn & yard, cooking, cleaning, laundry, hauling fire wood, climbing the hill with the dog, car maintenance... in the country, I mysteriously turn into a farm woman. The Russians were I guess a mini-antidote to all that. (OLD SCHOOL a mini-antidote to the Russians.)
The physical work is how we get ready for the change of seasons, I suppose. Putting away summer things, getting out sweaters and wool socks and space heaters, the last mowing of the season, the final harvest of lettuce and spinach, raking the leaves and covering the garden with them...and changing the clocks, of course. We enter the dark of winter. Everything smells of burning wood (hair, clothes, dog).
I am not sure if I have quite yet entered the rustle of autumn. Be still, or go out of your mind! We are facing translation issues here, I would imagine. And yet, the sentiment speaks to me - be still, be still. The chores will always be there. More richly, and more recklessly...
Leaves, leaves, give tongue and whirl away,
Fill yesterday's cup of bitterness
With the sadness of today.
Impulse, enchantment, beauty!
Let's dissolve in September wind
And enter the rustle of autumn.
Be still, or go out of your mind!
-From "Autumn," by Boris Pasternak
I spent part of the country weekend with the Russians - Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova. Random? Even more so: after a day of Russian poetry, I sat down to watch OLD SCHOOL - an adult(ish) frat movie starring Will Ferrell, Vince Vaughn, and Luke Wilson.
A strange stretch in the country. Quiet and unbothered, yet work-ful. Not particularly restful. If I were to oversimplify the city-country dichotomy, I would say city=intellect, country=body. Lawn & yard, cooking, cleaning, laundry, hauling fire wood, climbing the hill with the dog, car maintenance... in the country, I mysteriously turn into a farm woman. The Russians were I guess a mini-antidote to all that. (OLD SCHOOL a mini-antidote to the Russians.)
The physical work is how we get ready for the change of seasons, I suppose. Putting away summer things, getting out sweaters and wool socks and space heaters, the last mowing of the season, the final harvest of lettuce and spinach, raking the leaves and covering the garden with them...and changing the clocks, of course. We enter the dark of winter. Everything smells of burning wood (hair, clothes, dog).
I am not sure if I have quite yet entered the rustle of autumn. Be still, or go out of your mind! We are facing translation issues here, I would imagine. And yet, the sentiment speaks to me - be still, be still. The chores will always be there. More richly, and more recklessly...
Thursday, October 4, 2007
Room for the Weak Ones
You'll never raise that one; her color ain't good. If the good Lord takes her it'll be for the best. There's too many poor children on this earth already; and no room for the weak ones.
Don't say that. It's not better to die; who wants to die? Everything struggles to live. Look at that tree growing up there out of that grating... it gets no sun and water only when it rains. It's growing out of sour earth; and it's strong. Its hard struggle to live is making it strong. -Katie Nolan, from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
I'm about halfway through the audio book of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - this blog's namesake. There's a relief in listening to it - an earnest, heartfelt tale of a young girl (whose color ain't good) growing up poor in Brooklyn in the early 1900s. Nothing ironic or clever about it, no metafictions or cynical self-awareness, no multimedia, no armoured satire. Just a story, about a girl and her family, trying to survive, seeing the world from the bottom up, and finding beauty - hard-earned - wherever she can.
Somerset Maugham's Willie Ashenden said it so well, so painfully well, in the quote from Cakes and Ale (see the sidebar on this page). Sincerity is surely a liability in a world governed and shaped by clever and powerful hustlers. We admire people for their savvy, almost as if savvy were the new good. I find myself, in considering the best man or woman for the Presidency of the United States, worried for my preferred candidate, Barack Obama - that he is too idealistic, not seasoned enough (i.e. can he play the game?). Poor fella, he is awfully, awfully sincere. In a current-day thesaurus (hey, someone should do this, now that would be marketable), it might say SINCERE: antonym ELECTABLE.
A tree grows in Brooklyn. Francie makes her way. Ella the orchid died. The red light just went on on the HEPA air filter in the apartment here in the Bronx; we took it apart and cleaned the filter (filthy!), but the light won't go off. Where is that owner's manual?
Baby Francie's color ain't good, but she survives, against the odds. Francie's mother Katie has her own ambitions: to raise her children for a different life, a life beyond the poor, dead-end life she's known. Katie's mother, a German immigrant and a kind of old-world sage, tells her the secret: books (Shakespeare and the Bible, specifically); learning, cultivating the mind, the imagination. Being able to see through and beyond the material facts of one's circumstances. A mind and a soul for beauty - this is the one thing that can raise a person up and out of circumstances which seem, to the physical eye, insurmountable.
Sincerely, I live this every day. Here in the Bronx, I see garbage, I see hustling and drug-dealing, I see the dirty poor, I see environmental injustice like you wouldn't believe. But what else? What else do I see? The pansies are weak and floppy. Lavendar and butterfly bush are holding on. Some people are recycling, some people are throwing banana peels and dog shit in with the mixed paper. J. from upstairs, who first took in the stray pup who now belongs to G., asked sincerely yesterday how she (the pup) is doing. K. the Bird Man came around the other night, sheepish but seemingly conciliatory. The backyard is taking shape, on the cheap, kind of ugly, but it's something. We are, as of this week, overrun with (small, black) mice.
If I am laughable, if I am absurd and ephemeral and a jest... then along with this struggle, I suppose I must learn to laugh at myself as well. Or else get thick-skinned. But like Francie, and like Ella, my temperament is ultimately more the delicate orchid than the steel magnolia. "Writers are missing a layer of skin," my poet-friend B. says. As many-a- hard-nosed-NewYorker might quip: it's the cost of doing business.
Don't say that. It's not better to die; who wants to die? Everything struggles to live. Look at that tree growing up there out of that grating... it gets no sun and water only when it rains. It's growing out of sour earth; and it's strong. Its hard struggle to live is making it strong. -Katie Nolan, from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
I'm about halfway through the audio book of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - this blog's namesake. There's a relief in listening to it - an earnest, heartfelt tale of a young girl (whose color ain't good) growing up poor in Brooklyn in the early 1900s. Nothing ironic or clever about it, no metafictions or cynical self-awareness, no multimedia, no armoured satire. Just a story, about a girl and her family, trying to survive, seeing the world from the bottom up, and finding beauty - hard-earned - wherever she can.
Somerset Maugham's Willie Ashenden said it so well, so painfully well, in the quote from Cakes and Ale (see the sidebar on this page). Sincerity is surely a liability in a world governed and shaped by clever and powerful hustlers. We admire people for their savvy, almost as if savvy were the new good. I find myself, in considering the best man or woman for the Presidency of the United States, worried for my preferred candidate, Barack Obama - that he is too idealistic, not seasoned enough (i.e. can he play the game?). Poor fella, he is awfully, awfully sincere. In a current-day thesaurus (hey, someone should do this, now that would be marketable), it might say SINCERE: antonym ELECTABLE.
A tree grows in Brooklyn. Francie makes her way. Ella the orchid died. The red light just went on on the HEPA air filter in the apartment here in the Bronx; we took it apart and cleaned the filter (filthy!), but the light won't go off. Where is that owner's manual?
Baby Francie's color ain't good, but she survives, against the odds. Francie's mother Katie has her own ambitions: to raise her children for a different life, a life beyond the poor, dead-end life she's known. Katie's mother, a German immigrant and a kind of old-world sage, tells her the secret: books (Shakespeare and the Bible, specifically); learning, cultivating the mind, the imagination. Being able to see through and beyond the material facts of one's circumstances. A mind and a soul for beauty - this is the one thing that can raise a person up and out of circumstances which seem, to the physical eye, insurmountable.
Sincerely, I live this every day. Here in the Bronx, I see garbage, I see hustling and drug-dealing, I see the dirty poor, I see environmental injustice like you wouldn't believe. But what else? What else do I see? The pansies are weak and floppy. Lavendar and butterfly bush are holding on. Some people are recycling, some people are throwing banana peels and dog shit in with the mixed paper. J. from upstairs, who first took in the stray pup who now belongs to G., asked sincerely yesterday how she (the pup) is doing. K. the Bird Man came around the other night, sheepish but seemingly conciliatory. The backyard is taking shape, on the cheap, kind of ugly, but it's something. We are, as of this week, overrun with (small, black) mice.
If I am laughable, if I am absurd and ephemeral and a jest... then along with this struggle, I suppose I must learn to laugh at myself as well. Or else get thick-skinned. But like Francie, and like Ella, my temperament is ultimately more the delicate orchid than the steel magnolia. "Writers are missing a layer of skin," my poet-friend B. says. As many-a- hard-nosed-NewYorker might quip: it's the cost of doing business.
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
The Claims of Reasonable Gloom (In Refusal of)
Time for a poem, no doubt. Less words, greater beauty, deeper meaning (than all my yadda yadda).
This from Denise Levertov, writing about a place which is a kind of "country city" - Seattle - and where I lived for eight years. (This goes out to Seattle compadres BMD, LN-R, and, if you're reading, TPN.)
Celebration
Brilliant, this day - a young virtuoso of a day.
Morning shadows cut by sharpest scissors,
deft hands. And every prodigy of green -
whether it's ferns or lichen or needles
or impatient points of bud on spindly bushes -
greener than ever before.
And the way the conifers
hold new cones to the light for blessing,
a festive rite, and sing the oceanic chant the wind
transcribes for them!
A day that shines in the cold
like a first-prize brass band swinging along the street
of a coal-dusty village, wholly at odds
with the claims of reasonable gloom.
This from Denise Levertov, writing about a place which is a kind of "country city" - Seattle - and where I lived for eight years. (This goes out to Seattle compadres BMD, LN-R, and, if you're reading, TPN.)
Celebration
Brilliant, this day - a young virtuoso of a day.
Morning shadows cut by sharpest scissors,
deft hands. And every prodigy of green -
whether it's ferns or lichen or needles
or impatient points of bud on spindly bushes -
greener than ever before.
And the way the conifers
hold new cones to the light for blessing,
a festive rite, and sing the oceanic chant the wind
transcribes for them!
A day that shines in the cold
like a first-prize brass band swinging along the street
of a coal-dusty village, wholly at odds
with the claims of reasonable gloom.
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Let Evening Come
I'm in the city today, but it's one of those days... when I'm hating being here.
"Let Evening Come," fall poem, a country poem, by Jane Kenyon... about letting go of summer, letting go of daylight; fearing not the cold nor the dark, knowing that we are never without comfort.
Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.
Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes us her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.
Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.
Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.
To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.
Let it come, as it will, and don't
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.
"Let Evening Come," fall poem, a country poem, by Jane Kenyon... about letting go of summer, letting go of daylight; fearing not the cold nor the dark, knowing that we are never without comfort.
Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.
Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes us her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.
Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.
Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.
To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.
Let it come, as it will, and don't
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Roses, Late Summer
Here's one - a poem about the coming of autumn, that is. Which is a poem about many things, big and small, arrival and departure, the coming of going. By Mary Oliver, one of my favorites.
What happens
to the leaves after
they turn red and golden and fall
away? What happens
to the singing birds
when they can't sing
any longer? What happens
to their quick wings?
Do you think there is any
personal heaven
for any of us?
Do you think anyone,
the other side of that darkness,
will call to us, meaning us?
Beyond the trees
the foxes keep teaching their children
to live in the valley,
so they never seem to vanish, they are always there
in the blossom of light
that stands up every morning
in the dark sky.
And over one more set of hills,
along the sea,
the last roses have opened their factories of sweetness
and are giving it back to the world.
If I had another life
I would want to spend it all on some
unstinting happiness.
I would be a fox, or a tree
full of waving branches.
I wouldn't mind being a rose
in a field full of roses.
Fear has not yet occurred to them, nor ambition.
Reason they have not yet thought of.
Neither do they ask how long they must be roses, and then what.
Or any other foolish question.
What happens
to the leaves after
they turn red and golden and fall
away? What happens
to the singing birds
when they can't sing
any longer? What happens
to their quick wings?
Do you think there is any
personal heaven
for any of us?
Do you think anyone,
the other side of that darkness,
will call to us, meaning us?
Beyond the trees
the foxes keep teaching their children
to live in the valley,
so they never seem to vanish, they are always there
in the blossom of light
that stands up every morning
in the dark sky.
And over one more set of hills,
along the sea,
the last roses have opened their factories of sweetness
and are giving it back to the world.
If I had another life
I would want to spend it all on some
unstinting happiness.
I would be a fox, or a tree
full of waving branches.
I wouldn't mind being a rose
in a field full of roses.
Fear has not yet occurred to them, nor ambition.
Reason they have not yet thought of.
Neither do they ask how long they must be roses, and then what.
Or any other foolish question.
Monday, September 3, 2007
Monday with the Sunday Times
Kind of like Tuesdays With Morrie?
There is no delivery on my road (mail, newspaper, etc.), so the acquisition of print media requires a 3-mile excursion to the general store. During the summer months, we are advised to call ahead on Saturday (weekenders buy 'em up fast) and reserve one. Rocky kindly obliges.
It's the quintessential city-people ritual out here, no one else is buying it (no City section, however; we get the Westchester Edition up here). What can I say. I have pangs about it, especially as it takes me a good 2-3 days to get through it, and it's my primary source of news; surely I am missing something, missing everything, in terms of the gamut of valid media perspectives. I have the sort of brain that has a small hard-drive, i.e. I cannot, like some I know, accumulate mounds upon tons of information (J. reads a million different newspapers and periodicals, plus TV news and morning shows and news blogs and Charlie Rose and...). I just can't. Media stresses me out, frankly, the sheer volume. I used to read 3-4 different print sources (plus a couple online sources), but it all just piled up and I couldn't keep up. So now: the Sunday Times it is (and radio; radio I can do).
Anyway, here's a gem from the Book Review: Jim Lewis reviewed Denis Johnson's new novel, Tree of Smoke. I will be reading Tree of Smoke, without a doubt, as I have been a DJ fan since his early books of poetry. But read the review: it's one of the most compelling, invested book reviews I've read in a long time. It tells us as much about the reviewer as the reviewed, but not in a solipsistic way, not in that I'm-writing-about-someone-else-but-really-I-want-to-point-the- attention-on-myself kind of way. Lewis's enthusiasm is an enthusiasm for the deep pleasure, the wonder, of strange, original, "inescapable" writing - major works that matter.
There is no delivery on my road (mail, newspaper, etc.), so the acquisition of print media requires a 3-mile excursion to the general store. During the summer months, we are advised to call ahead on Saturday (weekenders buy 'em up fast) and reserve one. Rocky kindly obliges.
It's the quintessential city-people ritual out here, no one else is buying it (no City section, however; we get the Westchester Edition up here). What can I say. I have pangs about it, especially as it takes me a good 2-3 days to get through it, and it's my primary source of news; surely I am missing something, missing everything, in terms of the gamut of valid media perspectives. I have the sort of brain that has a small hard-drive, i.e. I cannot, like some I know, accumulate mounds upon tons of information (J. reads a million different newspapers and periodicals, plus TV news and morning shows and news blogs and Charlie Rose and...). I just can't. Media stresses me out, frankly, the sheer volume. I used to read 3-4 different print sources (plus a couple online sources), but it all just piled up and I couldn't keep up. So now: the Sunday Times it is (and radio; radio I can do).
Anyway, here's a gem from the Book Review: Jim Lewis reviewed Denis Johnson's new novel, Tree of Smoke. I will be reading Tree of Smoke, without a doubt, as I have been a DJ fan since his early books of poetry. But read the review: it's one of the most compelling, invested book reviews I've read in a long time. It tells us as much about the reviewer as the reviewed, but not in a solipsistic way, not in that I'm-writing-about-someone-else-but-really-I-want-to-point-the- attention-on-myself kind of way. Lewis's enthusiasm is an enthusiasm for the deep pleasure, the wonder, of strange, original, "inescapable" writing - major works that matter.
Saturday, August 18, 2007
Cased in Clean Bark You Drift
The darkness lifts, imagine, in your lifetime.
There you are - cased in clean bark you drift
through weaving rushes, fields flooded with cotton.
You are free. The river films with lilies,
shrubs appear, shoots thicken into palm. And now
all fear gives way: the light
looks after you, you feel the waves' goodwill
as arms widen over the water; Love,
the key is turned. Extend yourself -
it is the Nile, the sun is shining,
everywhere you turn is luck.
-Louis Gluck, "The Undertaking"
It was only a matter of time before I began invoking poetry into these posts. Hence, a new blog category. It was only a matter of time before I began invoking Louise Gluck. I am told she is the most popular poet among New Yorker magazine readers, young and old. Hmm... The excerpt in my last post was published recently in the New Yorker; "The Undertaking" is from her collection The House on Marshland, published in 1975. Her later poems are very much death/mortality-focused, (emotionally) spare to the point of near-desolation (it is the "near" that is significant here...). The above is brimming with the warm hope of a woman 30 years less worn, less lived.
Autumn is in the air here in the farm lands. It was chilly last night, and windy. Today, the chill remains. The second crop of cool-weather greens is starting to sprout (lettuce, spinach, snap peas). The tomatoes and squash are struggling to turn color. J. has gone fishin', I am here with my words.
Autumn and Louise Gluck - they go together for me. Perhaps because the first poem of hers which struck me, from her recent collection Averno, is called "October." These are the lines that somehow stopped me in my tracks:
It is true there is not enough beauty in the world.
It is also true that I am not competent to restore it.
Neither is there candor, and here I may be of some use.
Something about the artist's deep sense of uselessness, of ultimate incompetence, at the end of the day, amidst all the world's troubles. And yet, wanting to be useful, seeking those tiny opportunities, to make offerings. And now/all fear gives way... It's not much, it's not much. But it's something.
There you are - cased in clean bark you drift
through weaving rushes, fields flooded with cotton.
You are free. The river films with lilies,
shrubs appear, shoots thicken into palm. And now
all fear gives way: the light
looks after you, you feel the waves' goodwill
as arms widen over the water; Love,
the key is turned. Extend yourself -
it is the Nile, the sun is shining,
everywhere you turn is luck.
-Louis Gluck, "The Undertaking"
It was only a matter of time before I began invoking poetry into these posts. Hence, a new blog category. It was only a matter of time before I began invoking Louise Gluck. I am told she is the most popular poet among New Yorker magazine readers, young and old. Hmm... The excerpt in my last post was published recently in the New Yorker; "The Undertaking" is from her collection The House on Marshland, published in 1975. Her later poems are very much death/mortality-focused, (emotionally) spare to the point of near-desolation (it is the "near" that is significant here...). The above is brimming with the warm hope of a woman 30 years less worn, less lived.
Autumn is in the air here in the farm lands. It was chilly last night, and windy. Today, the chill remains. The second crop of cool-weather greens is starting to sprout (lettuce, spinach, snap peas). The tomatoes and squash are struggling to turn color. J. has gone fishin', I am here with my words.
Autumn and Louise Gluck - they go together for me. Perhaps because the first poem of hers which struck me, from her recent collection Averno, is called "October." These are the lines that somehow stopped me in my tracks:
It is true there is not enough beauty in the world.
It is also true that I am not competent to restore it.
Neither is there candor, and here I may be of some use.
Something about the artist's deep sense of uselessness, of ultimate incompetence, at the end of the day, amidst all the world's troubles. And yet, wanting to be useful, seeking those tiny opportunities, to make offerings. And now/all fear gives way... It's not much, it's not much. But it's something.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Lettuces, Lettuces
K. from down the block (aka "The Bird Man") came by to look over the back yard here in the Bronx. Initially he was all "volunteer" about it; yesterday, it was clear he was hustling for paid work (and being skeazy about it). How silly of me - to think that someone would actually do something for nothing. But seriously, I understand, we all need to make ends meet, we all need to do what we need to do. It's the misleading part that bugs me.
So the backyard project may go slower than we thought. Which is fine... "slow and steady wins the race," as they say. In the meantime, I've gone ahead, with our landlord's approval (and funding) on a few plants for the stoop and fire escape: two butterfly bushes, a couple of lavenders (hardy Grappenhall), and wild lettuces. We did the supplies shopping last night (pots, trowel, potting soil) and picked up the plants from Trina at Union Square Market today. Trina's nursery is the one out in the country; my butterfly bushes were labeled and ready for me.
Lettuces, lettuces. From Louise Gluck's poem "A Village Life," recently published in The New Yorker:
I move through the dark as though it were natural to me,
as though I were already a factor in it.
Tranquil and still, the day dawns.
On market day, I go to the market with my lettuces.
So the backyard project may go slower than we thought. Which is fine... "slow and steady wins the race," as they say. In the meantime, I've gone ahead, with our landlord's approval (and funding) on a few plants for the stoop and fire escape: two butterfly bushes, a couple of lavenders (hardy Grappenhall), and wild lettuces. We did the supplies shopping last night (pots, trowel, potting soil) and picked up the plants from Trina at Union Square Market today. Trina's nursery is the one out in the country; my butterfly bushes were labeled and ready for me.
Lettuces, lettuces. From Louise Gluck's poem "A Village Life," recently published in The New Yorker:
I move through the dark as though it were natural to me,
as though I were already a factor in it.
Tranquil and still, the day dawns.
On market day, I go to the market with my lettuces.
Thursday, August 2, 2007
Ella, Meet Francie
It's sad, watching Ella suffer like this. Especially when the cause is likely too much of this, or too much of that (as opposed to too little of this, or too little of that) - which means there is nothing to do but wait and hope that her new location is a better one.
Other members of the "family" are doing better. J. re-potted the basil to make room for the rosemary and oregano - they were all squished in together. The cuban oregano is next for re-potting. One of the "Little Men" is now installed in the bathroom, which J. says is "so gay." I have no experience with this, so I have no comment.
So with nothing to do but wait and hope - with regards to Ella - I'm thinking about this blog's namesake, i.e. Betty Smith's 1943 novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I read it as a child - maybe 4th or 5th grade - so I remember it little, except that it's about a young girl growing up in Brooklyn facing hard times, coming of age as a romantic in lonely and difficult circumstances. I read that there is an excellent audio version, read by Bernadette Dunne. I'm all over it.
Other members of the "family" are doing better. J. re-potted the basil to make room for the rosemary and oregano - they were all squished in together. The cuban oregano is next for re-potting. One of the "Little Men" is now installed in the bathroom, which J. says is "so gay." I have no experience with this, so I have no comment.
So with nothing to do but wait and hope - with regards to Ella - I'm thinking about this blog's namesake, i.e. Betty Smith's 1943 novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I read it as a child - maybe 4th or 5th grade - so I remember it little, except that it's about a young girl growing up in Brooklyn facing hard times, coming of age as a romantic in lonely and difficult circumstances. I read that there is an excellent audio version, read by Bernadette Dunne. I'm all over it.
Monday, July 16, 2007
Like Any Immolating Monk
Here is the moth passage, from Holy the Firm. I think perhaps it deserves its own post.
Two years ago, I was camping alone in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia...I read every night by candlelight, while barred owls called in the forest and pale moths massed round my head in the clearing, where my light made a ring.
Moths kept flying into the candle. They hissed and recoiled, lost upside down in the shadows among my cooking pans. Or they singed their wings and fell, and their hot wings, as if melted, stuck to the first thing they touched - a pan, a lid, a spoon - so that the snagged moths could flutter only in tiny arcs, unable to struggle free. These I could release by a quick flip with a stick; in the morning I would find my cooking stuff gilded with torn flecks of moth wings, triangles of shiny dust held here and there on the aluminum. So I read, and boiled water, and replenished candles, and read on.
One night, a moth flew into the candle, was caught, burned dry, and held. I must have been staring at the candle, or maybe I looked up when a shadow crossed my page; at any rate, I saw it all. A golden female moth, a biggish one with a two-inch wingspan, flapped into the fire, dropped her abdomen into the wet wax, stuck, flamed, frazzled, and fried in a second. Her moving wings ignited like tissue paper, enlarging the circle of light in the clearing and creating out of the darkness the sudden blue sleeves of my sweater, the green leaves of jewelweed by my side, the ragged red trunk of a pine. At once, the light contracted again and the moth's wings vanished in a fine, foul smoke. At the same time her six legs clawed, curled, blackened, and ceased, disappearing utterly. And her head jerked in spasms, making a spattering noise; her antennae crisped and burned away, and her heaving parts crackled like pistol fire. When it was all over, her head was, so far as I could determine, gone, gone the long way of her wings and legs. Had she been new, or old? Had she mated and laid her eggs, had she done her work? All that was left was the glowing horn shell of her abdomen and thorax - a fraying, partially collapsed gold tube jammed upright in the candle's round pool.
And then this moth essence, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a wick. She kept burning. The wax rose in the moth's body from her soaking abdomen to her thorax to the jagged hole where her head should be, and widened into flame, a saffron-yellow flame that robed her to the ground like any immolating monk. That candle had two wicks, two flames of identical height, side by side. The moth's head was fire. She burned for two hours, until I blew her out.
Two years ago, I was camping alone in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia...I read every night by candlelight, while barred owls called in the forest and pale moths massed round my head in the clearing, where my light made a ring.
Moths kept flying into the candle. They hissed and recoiled, lost upside down in the shadows among my cooking pans. Or they singed their wings and fell, and their hot wings, as if melted, stuck to the first thing they touched - a pan, a lid, a spoon - so that the snagged moths could flutter only in tiny arcs, unable to struggle free. These I could release by a quick flip with a stick; in the morning I would find my cooking stuff gilded with torn flecks of moth wings, triangles of shiny dust held here and there on the aluminum. So I read, and boiled water, and replenished candles, and read on.
One night, a moth flew into the candle, was caught, burned dry, and held. I must have been staring at the candle, or maybe I looked up when a shadow crossed my page; at any rate, I saw it all. A golden female moth, a biggish one with a two-inch wingspan, flapped into the fire, dropped her abdomen into the wet wax, stuck, flamed, frazzled, and fried in a second. Her moving wings ignited like tissue paper, enlarging the circle of light in the clearing and creating out of the darkness the sudden blue sleeves of my sweater, the green leaves of jewelweed by my side, the ragged red trunk of a pine. At once, the light contracted again and the moth's wings vanished in a fine, foul smoke. At the same time her six legs clawed, curled, blackened, and ceased, disappearing utterly. And her head jerked in spasms, making a spattering noise; her antennae crisped and burned away, and her heaving parts crackled like pistol fire. When it was all over, her head was, so far as I could determine, gone, gone the long way of her wings and legs. Had she been new, or old? Had she mated and laid her eggs, had she done her work? All that was left was the glowing horn shell of her abdomen and thorax - a fraying, partially collapsed gold tube jammed upright in the candle's round pool.
And then this moth essence, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a wick. She kept burning. The wax rose in the moth's body from her soaking abdomen to her thorax to the jagged hole where her head should be, and widened into flame, a saffron-yellow flame that robed her to the ground like any immolating monk. That candle had two wicks, two flames of identical height, side by side. The moth's head was fire. She burned for two hours, until I blew her out.
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