Who was Cassandra?
In the Iliad, she is described as the loveliest of the daughters
of Priam (King of Troy), and gifted with prophecy. The god Apollo
loved her, but she spurned him. As a punishment, he decreed
that no one would ever believe her. So when she told her fellow
Trojans that the Greeks were hiding inside the wooden horse...well,
you know what happened.
We've see a lot of movies, but two lately were so good I want to recommend them.
The first is Baran, the latest feature by Iran's Majid Majidi, the director of Children of Heaven and The Color of Paradise. I loved both of those, but felt that Baran was on an even higher level, a masterpiece. Not only are the performances (many by untrained actors) uniformly outstanding and believable, the cinematography masterful and often breathtaking (as those of us who are Iranian film buffs have come to expect), the story poignant and human -- it also presents a window into the plight of Afghan refugees trying to scrape by in Iran. (Most of the refugees pictured in this film came to Iran during the Soviet invasion). It's a film about racism and compassion, about male-female relationships within Islam, and about transformation. It's also, like Majidi's other films, about seeing and finding beauty amid dire poverty and desperation.
The second terrific movie is Y Tu Mama Tambien, a Mexican production directed by
Alfonso Cuar?n, that knocked us off our feet. It's the story of two boys uncomfortable on the cusp of manhood - are they ever - and a slightly older woman with whom they go on a road trip. The film's advertising quotes the Washington Post as saying this is "the best road trip movie ever". Well, maybe, it's right up there. Beautifully made on a low budget, excellent screenplay, great direction, many surprises, and fine performances by everyone, especially the Spanish actress Maribel Verdu.
Both movies are available for rent from NetFlicks.com
By the way, I'm sorry and annoyed that HaloScan's comments have been down lately - please keep trying.
5:05 PM
|
Monday, August 11, 2003
FEVER-TREES
Following up on those trees on the banks of the great, grey-green, greasy Limpopo: fever-trees are cichona, the tree that gave quinine its name. An article in today's New York Times, "The Miraculous Fever-Tree", gives the details (Joel, this is for you!):
Ms. Rocco, who is the literary editor of The Economist, makes the pursuit of quinine (an ingredient in tonic water) her book's primary focus. She cites early discoveries of the title tree, which would be named cinchona (with a bark that yields quinine) in Peru, where early Jesuit missionaries understood its importance. She also discusses how valuable this substance would have been in Rome, which at one time was "the most malarious city on earth..." 7:29 PM
|
Yesterday was a feast for my eyes, ears, and spirit. Generous, dear friends had invited me to travel with them to Massachussetts to visit an exhibition of the late seascapes of J.M.W. Turner at the Clark Institute in Williamstown, Mass. , have a picnic lunch, and then go to Tanglewood for an afternoon concert .
I’d seen many of the Turners before, at the Tate, but while in London (despite my liking Turner very much) I felt overwhelemed by the sheer number of canvases and the yellow-ness of the paintings against the Tate’s light-colored walls, here the exhibition was focussed, manageable, and hung against a calming and complementary deep marine blue. I like the most abstract paintings the best, but I was struck by two of his very last seascapes that depicted whaling – one with a giant harpooned sperm whale about to overturn one of the chase boats, and the other a much more ethereal, even allegorical painting of a whaling boat putting in to an arctic port, with the severed head of a sperm whale hanging from the rigging, barely visible through fog. Yet for all the intensity and energy of Turner’s oils, I sometimes think my favorites are his small watercolors, painted on location – maybe because in them I can sense his spirit and even look over his shoulder as he moves his brush.
After the visual banquet, we ate our picnic of rosemary bread, fresh tomatoes and basil, Boston lettuce, cold chicken breasts, and cherries under a canopy while teeming rain fell through the tall tamaracks and oaks that flank the Clark’s pink marble exterior.
Then – on to Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony, in the beautiful open hills of the Berkshires. The centerpiece of the afternoon was Renee Fleming, resplendently glowing in a copper satin dress with fitted waist, vast skirt, and plunging neckline, singing Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs – the final songs he ever wrote, set to poems by Herman Hesse. I know these songs well; I’ve loved them for a long time, listened to my old LP of Elisabeth Schwartzkopf until it skips, and even sung through them myself back when I was studying voice.
Just as Fleming began, one of the strongest thunderstorms I can remember let loose and sheets of water literally cascaded off the roof of the Serge Koussevitsky Shed, Tanglewood’s big venue, which is open on three sides. Somehow, though, the storm was fitting, and it kept the 2000-person audience riveted to the stage. Fleming’s concentration never faltered, and her voice was limpid, searching, tender and strong: the perfect vehicle for Strauss’s final commentary. I wasn’t the only one wiping tears from my cheeks at the end.
Upon Going to Sleep (Song #3)
Now the day has made me weary
let the starry night gather up
my ardent longings, lovingly,
as it would a tired child.
Hands, leave off all your toil,
mind, put aside all your thoughts:
all ym senses long
to settle, now, into slumber.
And the soul, unencumbered,
wants to soar in free flight
into the night’s magic realm,
to live deeply, a thousandfold. Hermann Hesse
You can listen to Renee Fleming singing excerpts from her all-Strauss CD here.
4:35 PM
|
Saturday, August 09, 2003
THE ELEPHANT'S CHILD
Awake in the middle of the night, I got up and worked on some knitting, and then decided to have a cup of chamomile tea and read a little. My hand fell on a dark green book with a fragile binding that J. had been reading a few nights ago, under similar circumstances. It was Kipling's Just So Stories, a copy given to my mother in 1928 by one of her aunts. This was, I'm sure, the copy that was read to me when I was young as well.
J. had asked me about the book because, like me, he hadn't heard the stories since he was a child, and was highly amused to encounter them again. I looked through the contents, and chose the one that had been my favorite: The Elephant's Child. Soon I was accompanying our hero along the banks of the great grey-green, greasy, Limpopo River to his showdown with the Crocodile. Forty-plus years hadn't erased the basic story, but I didn't remember the tall aunt (it was my tall aunt who loved to read this story to me), and the broad aunt, and I certainly didn't remember the stellar and singular character of the Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake (who always talks like that).
J. came stumbling out of the bedroom about then, and I offered to make him a cup of tea and read him the story. Since I'd already had a once-through, I was prepared with an array of animal voices and even stuffed-and-stretched noses. We laughed together, cheered the Elephant's Child, admired Mr. Kipling, and went back to sleep.
7:44 PM
|
Tadeaus Rosewicz continually revisits the haunting questions posed by his early experiences, but he also wrote some poems that contain luminous, beautiful images and that are, for him, almost extravagant in their language. There’s always a certain lurking darkness, and the enormously effective portrayal of a stranger’s aloneness in a foreign city, but there are also moments when the poet, perhaps in spite of himself, gets caught up in what he’s seeing.
“Et in Arcadia Ego” is a long poem, in three parts, written in the early 1960s, about a trip Rosewicz took to Italy. It surprised me, both by its length (in my copy it runs to some 22 pages) and in the way the poet’s normal reticence and spareness imbue his descriptions with heightened sensuality, vividness, and metaphorical power that simply don’t come across in more florid verse. As the poem proceeds, he describes wandering the streets of Naples, a trip to the Sistine Chapel, and a military parade.
Obviously I can’t quote all of it, but here is a favorite section. The poet is in Naples.
from Et in Arcadia Ego by Tadeaus Rosewicz
streets converged
and diverged in the twinkling of an eye
he stood paralyzed asking for a name
was shown many streets
was shown the way
people smiled hurried on
hurried on were polite
two girls
with two tongues licked
heaps of ice-cream with warm
tangues they licked white and pink
ices
bunches of lemons hung
with rigid lacquered leaves
bananas lay curved
patched with black
brown figs
pink melons moons
of water and light in a hippo skin
with rows of pips in the mouth
next to that lay a second head
head on top of head and head next to head
a pyramid of heads rose
up to the whitened sky
blind heads of coconuts
covered with tawny hair
crushed with saliva in a white interior
the dented rim of a stone vessel
of an extinct volcano
a dark mountain over a transparent bay
stirred and came to him
came to his feet
the bay threw an arc
he was motionless
4:05 PM
|
Thursday, August 07, 2003
ANGLICAN, BUDDHIST, OTHER...
To all who have been following the recent discussions on religion here and elsewhere, I'd like to commend the current post at The Coffee Sutras. Kurt has an explanation of his Episcopaliansim that could have been mine: the rich liturgy, the music, the openness, the social conscience, with the absence of the most objectionable Catholic doctrines.
I have to add, however, that when you are in a church led by a conservative priest, it can be very hard to find that openness. Our former priest, who was of that ilk, recently left, but not until the parish had been wracked with division and underhanded dealing of the most un-Christian kind. We are still reeling.
I'm astounded by the arrogance of human judgmentalism, and the way this judgement, and need to feel "right" and "inside" has given rise to so many other -isms, responsible in turn for so much suffering. Scripture has been used, and abused, for any purpose under heaven. Christians bent on clinging to exclusionary ideas so conveniently forget that the New Testament was transmitted as a reformation of the Old, and that the "new commandment", simple and ultimately challenging -- "love one another as I have loved you" -- superceded all the old laws. I think we can be pretty sure that this was the central message of Jesus' ministry. It appears in several different forms in all the Gospels, and his life was a testament to that belief in action, to the shock of all who observed and accompanied him. When he added, "on this commandment hang all the Law and the Prophets" he was making the priorities clear: when faced with the humanity of another -- your neighbor, whoever he or she may be: Gentile or Jew, rich or poor, man or woman, sinner or saint -- choose love rather than the kinds of judgement that formerly excluded that person.
"Love your neighbor as you would love yourself." Whenever I'm unsure how to act or react in my own life, I try to ask this question: "Does this action (or thought) lead me toward greater love, or away from it?" If I can't answer, then I do nothing until the path is clarified. But usually I can. We can usually determine if the action we're contemplating is a loving one, or an unloving one, and the more we examine our thoughts, the faster and more easily we can know ourselves and where we're headed. I figure if I do this as much as possible, I can't go too far wrong - and if I do, forgiveness will be there. That's the "love yourself" part - another great spiritual difficulty!
The concept of unconditional love may be Christian, but I learned how to know myself from Buddhism.
Wednesday, August 06, 2003
Thanks to all of you who have been commenting on yesterday's post. My mother told me a young Catholic friend recently asked her, "Who are the Episcopalians, anyway? And what makes them different from Catholics or Methodists, for example?" He also asked her to explain about bishops, and she told him that bishops had the difficult task of being spiritual leaders and also being the administrative heads of large organizations - the dioceses (groupings of churches by region or state) they're in charge of. (Bishops also representing the Church-at-large -- although Episcopal bishops have great freedom to express themselves, far more than Catholics who have to answer to the Vatican.)
These are all significant questions that I'm willing to go into in more detail if people are interested, but today I wanted to speak about the inherent tension that exists between the Church as an institution, and the religion itself as set out in the teachings of Jesus as we know them, along with the example of the earliest Christians. Sometimes that tension is so extreme that the two are actually opposed to one another. For those of us "within" the church, this is not always as apparent as it is to people "outside", who like the boy watching the naked Emperor, see through the hypocrisy and excuses quite easily.
The problem is one of self-preservation: institutions, the more organized and wealthy and hierarchical they become, begin to exist in order to perpetuate themselves, rather than the noble idea that began them. The original idea often needs no structure at all: it exists in the hearts, lives, and acts of ordinary, simple people motiviated as individuals and often, though not always, encouraged through community. The early Christians forbade priestly robes and trappings; they pooled their possessions, served the poor, the widowed, the sick, and the orphaned; and worshipped in "house churches" that moved from one dwelling to another, often to avoid persecution. The "Church" as we know it began only after secular rulers finally accepted Christianity, and the religion became intertwined with state power and invested with all the trappings of royal office. Once you head down that slippery slope, memory fades quickly.
I served for three years on the board ('vestry") of my own local parish, and during that time we undertook a capital campaign to renovate and enlarge our buildings. I was opposed, feeling that in today's world, there are many uses for that kind of money that are more appropriate and certainly more "spiritual" justifiable." Although a number of people in the parish agreed with me, the "powers" in the church adamantly wanted the building and justified it on the grounds that it would "help our mission". Poppycock. Well, I lost, they won, and there's going to be a big fancy new facility. That's how the Vatican got built, too, while peasants all over the world starved.
I'm disappointed with Rowan Williams, the new Archbishop of Canterbury. He's known as a liberal on gay issues, and has written sensitively on the subject. But he's now the head of a worldwide communion of Anglicans, and when faced with the difficult choice of courageous spiritual leadership, or the need to preserve the institution, he seems to be choosing the latter. The pressure must be enormous. There is the very real possibility of a split, with conservative African and Asian congregations walking out. Also, homosexuality is such a closet-issue in England, still, and the British seem fraught with fears that American liberalism could force open some of those closet doors at home. British Anglicans are still hotly contesting the issue of women priests, although a few have been ordained, while female priests and bishops are becoming a non-issue in the United States.
Without strong and courageous spiritual leadership, I think a split is even more likely. Sadly, fundamentalist interpretations are only strengthened when the institution appears frightened and weak. Likewise, those on the outside who might be encouraged by a strong message of inclusivity and love tend instead to see the weaknesses and the hypocrisy. I'm grateful that the Episcopal Church in the United States is organized as an autonomous body and that we're free to vote and act as we see fit; the courage right now is coming from this side of the ocean, but we may soon find ourselves on more of an island than we thought.
9:39 PM
|
Tuesday, August 05, 2003
"Weather": one of 26 Things by jmcolberg at conscientious
26 THINGS
I'm liking the concept and the various entries I've seen in 26 THINGS: 26 specified subjects that people interpret photographically and post on their own blogs. Here are a few from people I visit:
BEYOND BELIEF
When I started blogging in April of this year, I was coming off two years of writing about almost nothing but politics and religion; TheCassandraPages has been an attempt to find some peace and sanity for myself as well as kind of coming at what I view as a basic problem - cultural fear and indifference - from a different angle.
(!*#@*!DAMN! There's a bat in the house. Back in a bit...10 minutes: a record capture-and-release. We have a new fishing net technique that seems to work well, with little trauma to either bat or humans. These are regular visitors in the summer, and we let them fly around, with the lights on, until they decide to hang upside down from a track light or some such place, and go to sleep. Then the fishing net goes over the bat, a little nudge to get it to fall down into the net, and out the door. This one allowed itself to be captured without even the usual "eek-eek-eek" or trembling, and I got to watch its amazing flight as it seemed to "map" the room.)
All right. So I've resisted writing about the writhings of my (Anglican) church about electing and approving an openly gay bishop - until today, when I feel like I have to say something. As it happens, I know Gene Robinson a bit. I've worked with him on committees and have nothing but admiration for the man. The last-minute allegations of sexual wrong-doing by Rev. Robinson struck me as preposterous, but certainly had to be taken seriously - which they were. Word just came through that he has been approved - but it's clear to everyone that the opposition won't stop here. This editorial in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune lays it out pretty well.
There's been a good discussion over at In a Dark Time about Elaine Pagel's book on Gnosticism, "Beyond Belief", and it touched on some of the issues that these current political struggles within Christianity point out - particularly the way so many people feel excluded (by the legacy of centuries of patriarchy, by racism, by sexual orientation or marital status, by poverty or wealth, and especially by scepticism and doubt) from a religion that is supposed to be inclusive and love-centered. I am saddened by this, but I think I understand it well, having spent at least twenty years of my life as an agnostic, out of the church, or considering spirituality outside organized religion and through the study of Buddhism. Now that I am "back in" the church of my birth, so to speak, I'm proud of the Episcopal Church and especially the Diocese of New Hampshire for electing Gene Robinson and for standing up for what I think Jesus Christ's message really was - to love one another and leave judgement to God. I'm proud that we ordained women priests. I'm proud of the church's stance on peace and justice issues, and particularly proud that there is room in my tradition for doubt, discussion, and change. But I also find myself alienated from the Church at large, and from the political wrangling that has consumed it from the very beginning. Organized religion unfortunately tends not to be very much about God, but about men (and women) and power. Jesus said it himself.
So the conservatives and liberals will continue to duke it out. These days many of us find it hard to even admit we're Christian, when the word has taken on so many unpalatable connotations: Franklin Graham's evangelical mission "armies" poised on the borders of Iraq, for one; the hypocrisy and sad retrenchment of the Catholic Church for another. Meanwhile, I prefer to think of the individuals who quietly take the teachings of Christianity and other religions seriously- and keep right on praying for the world, trying to alleviate suffering, and growing in compassion.
7:52 PM
|
Monday, August 04, 2003
TREES, IN PICTURES
My husband Jonathan, known here as "J", has been a professional photographer for, well, longer than either of us would like to admit. He recently put together a portfolio of tree pictures and I've put them on a photoblog; please take a look. As he will tell you, he's not the verbal member of the family, but there are other equally valid methods of communicating. I'm hoping he'll post here a little more often and share his work with you.
7:02 PM
|
Peasant with Samovar, from the exhibition St Petersburg: A 300th Birthday Tribute
People and Palaces in Photographs around 1900
Somerset House, London, 14th June - 10th August 2003
In her comment on my Trees post from August 1, Elena (who is to be congratulated on her new blog – don’t miss the Modigliani/Loretta Lux comparison!) quoted Anna Akhmatova’s poem “Willow”, and I think it bears repeating here:
I was raised in checkered silence
in the cool nursery of the young century.
Human voices did not touch me.
It was the wind whose voice I heard.
I favoured burdocks and nettles,
but dearest to me was the silver willow,
my long companion through the years,
whose weeping branches
fanned my insomnia with dreams
Oddly, I have survived it::
out there a stump remains. Now other willows
with alien voices intone
under our skies.
And I am silent ... as though a brother had died. (1940)
Translated by Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward
Although I love Akhmatova, I’m not sure I had read this poem before writing that essay, but I did remember one of my favorite Tolstoy short works, Hadji Murad, in which the recollection of the story is prompted by Tolstoy seeing a mangled but still heroically-living thistle in a field. In spite of Akhmatova’s supposed disdain for Tolstoy, I now wonder if she remembered that work as well.
While we're on the subject of famous St. Petersburg-ites, there may be those who, like me, were underwhelmed or even annoyed by Ian Frazier’s sniveling New Yorker article about St. Petersburg’s 300th anniversary. This brief and much less self-absorbed comment may be closer to reality as well as literature. It’s from the BBC’s current series on “cities that inspired literature”, and is written by Ingrid Bengis, the daughter of Russian emigres, who grew up in the US but moved to St Petersburg in 1991. She’s the author of Metro Stop Dostoevsky.
It's terrible and it's beautiful. It's exciting and it's boring. It's trashy and it's elegant. And it's everything. Everything that has affected me at least - all the literature connected with St Petersburg - has a somewhat hallucinatory quality.
The sense of something glorious but something not stable on its feet. I think the fact that the city is built on a swamp really has an effect on that. The sense that the whole city could disappear in a second.
There is also that sense of discordant elements constantly clashing against each other, of this society that is kind of whirling around at tremendous speed.
So I think a major theme of this city, if you're going to choose only one, would have to do with destiny, a sense of destiny. And what is that destiny - trying to define that destiny, and running from that destiny, trying to escape from it and then being caught by it again.
In a comment on the last post, Miguel points out the comforting fact that, while the New England forests were clearcut in the 1800s, these forests are now coming back. He's right. In all but the most populated areas, you rarely see a clearcut hillside. It is true, though, that where development has occurred there is no going back - at least not in the forseeable future. Of course, in the very long run, that may well be different. What we're experiencing now is an intensification and concentration of development in particular areas, and an abandonment of formerly-tilled and habitated land in the more remote regions, as people move closer to population centers for employment.
I don't have photographs of the hill in back of our house before it was cleared for farming, because that was before photography. We do have pictures showing it at before the turn of the 20th century, and there is barely a tree in sight. The scrubby second- or third-growth woods at the top and down the hill to the north are being cut now for more housing, but further up, and farther away from the commercial and population centers - within walking distance from my house - there is real second-growth forest with large trees: white pine, maple, cherry -- much like what you see in the first picture above. Walking in a woods like that never fails to renew me.
In colonial times, nearly all the straight, virgin white pines up and down the Connecticut were cut and floated down the river to become masts for His Majesty's ships. There are still a few virgin white pines left, and they are magnificent - Eastern cousins in spirit and inscrutibility to the conifers of the Northwest coast. The picture above is still pretty typical on th edges of farmland, but the totally-white pine second-growth forest has given way to a mixed forest dominated by hardwoods.
The pictures here are from some famous dioramas depicting the stages of the northestern forest at Fisher Museum Harvard Forest, where you can see the whole series and read this chapter of American history.
4:36 PM
|
Friday, August 01, 2003
TREES: Ecotone Topic for August 1
Birches. Photograph by J.
I live in a forest. Anyone who doubts that should fly over northern New England: you can’t see the people for the trees. When visitors arrive from un-woody places, like England, or our new neighbors from virtually tree-less Iceland, they are overwhelmed by the omnipresence of trees, and the way the forest dominates not only landscape but life. We heat with wood, build with wood, boil tree sap into syrup; smell wood being cooked into paper and sawn into boards, wait for lumber trucks and trees being skidded out of the forests, watch rivers of yellow tree pollen flow in the streets after rain, see trees breathing their oxygen back into the clouds. Our world here is green, and blue, and more green: Ver-mont was aptly named.
In a city we find ourselves one among many, and so the woman in the red dress, or the man who sings out from his newstand as you pass it each day becomes a focus. Here there are too many trees to comprehend, and so it’s the white pine standing taller than all the rest that captures your attention; or the grove of thorny locusts above the riverbank, knarled and conversant like old souls. I could write in a dozen directions about trees, but for today’s topic I’m just going to offer an essay I wrote several years ago about a tree that shared my place on earth for many years.
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things. Wordsworth, “Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey”
The big willow is being cut. I’m upset about it, know it has to be done, but it’s such a great and beautiful tree, worthy of being mourned. I’ve looked up into its branches for twenty years now, especially on summer evenings, when the only light was from the moon, to see stars shining through the leaves so far above my head, and fireflies dancing among them. It always felt like its own world, up there, in the bowls formed by those great dark branches, populated by things of the air and heights. A pair of orioles nested in the tree each spring, serenading me as I turned over the first soil in the garden; later their purse-like nest swayed above me. And it was home to many smaller birds: chickadees, nuthatches, warblers, feeding no doubt on a vast colony of insects. Kneeling next to the garden beds I’d feel drips of water raining down on me all summer, even during dry weather, and wonder whether willows really wept, if that was how they got their name.
Branches fell continually, especially in spring storms, and I used the long supple tender ones to make woven fences and supports for herbs and other plants. It was a high-maintenance tree for us, and we didn’t even own it, but I never minded. I drew it many times, painted a watercolor, wrote a poem --trying unsuccessfully to capture that mysterious, secret world suspended in the sky.
When this hill was a pasture, a stream flowed between our property and the neighbors’, and along its banks a line of willows grew up. Ours was the first house cut out of the farm proper, near the turn of the century. Over the last twenty years, the hillside, divided and subdivided, became house lots. The willows -- streambank trees, never intended for shade -- were left in one back yard or another, sending their shallow roots into basement walls and dropping branches each spring. Homeowners, sympathetic at first, grew tired of taking care of the trees and worried when major damage occurred in thunderstorms. It’s understandable. But as is always the case, it doesn’t matter that the trees were here first, that we are, in fact, the ones who have encroached on them.
Last night, after dinner, the chain saws in the neighbors’ yard were finally silent. I went out on the back porch and looked over at the willow. The tree stood there still, its great wide crown shorn, one main trunk remaining with all its branches and leaves, the others amputated into huge logs that lay around the base. It was a horrible sight but heroic in a way; the tree, still alive, retaining something of its nobility and the strength emanating from that huge solid trunk, easily five feet in diameter at chest height. Yet it was doomed; this would be its final night, the last time those branches reached toward sunlight, leaves stretching a few new millimeters in length. I came back upstairs, drew a basin of water for the dishes, and started to cry, filled with sorrow for mankind, for being alive at a time and in a culture which values the safe, the cheap, the fast solution: whatever fits easily into our lives and causes the least inconvenience. I cried rueful tears for myself, made so sad by a tree -- how out of step I am, and how painful it is to stubbornly refuse the cries of a culture that would gladly give up Bach for the sitcom-of-the-moment; where artists, musicians and poets eek out a living and developers get rich.
I’ll remember the willow best on those nights, years ago, when I was trying to figure out if God existed. After I’d meditated for an hour, the incense burned down to ash, candle extinguished, I’d come out into the night, and to my polished mind, open, newly innocent, every sensation appeared fresh, important, astonishing. The Milky Way had never seemed so vast, the air so exhilarating, the snow under my feet so white. And there the willow loomed: hugely alive, pulsating with being-ness and a quality of home that strangely did not feel closed to me. I stopped trying to paint it or write about it, but just stood there, night after night, as if it were part of the meditation ritual; looking up, not thinking, I let it tell me whatever it had to say.
7:43 PM
|
Thursday, July 31, 2003
The ECOTONE topic for tomorrow, August 1st, is "Trees" (or "Trees and Place"). Please consider writing an entry on your blog and posting a link at the Ecotone Wiki.
7:25 PM
|
A raznochinets* needs no memory – it is enough for him to tell of the books he has read, and his biography is done.
Osip Mandelstam, The Noise of Time
It’s been fascinating to read everyone’s comments and advice about book accumulating… er, collecting. And if anyone wants to know why keeping a journal is worthwhile, this is an example of how it forces the real issues into the light. Underneath the stories of my father-in-law, and my friend and his painful book divestment ordeal, lurk my own conflicted feelings about being 50 and facing two potential paths: getting rid of “things” in order to be more free, to travel light…and wanting to collect certain things I haven’t had until now. So I’m thinking today about what that really means to me: whether those two paths are incompatible or not, and what choices are right for my heart and spirit even if they aren’t necessarily practical, or even particularly logical.
It’s true that I don’t want to be burdened with material possessions; we’ve made conscious efforts to get rid of things that we don’t need. A major hoe-ing out of our attic and closets two years ago was a big step in that direction. Our house is fairly large but lacks efficient storage space, which contributes to clutter…but I sort of like a semi-planned, aesthetic clutter and find it much more comforting and liveable than a minimalistic living space.
But when it comes to actual things, what do I care about? Paintings, photographs, certain talismanic possessions – a cup, a chair, a textile - that remind me of family or friends, or places we’ve been. And books. I’ve sometimes made myself think, “If there were a fire, what would I save? If I had to move to just a room or two, what would I want with me?” And as hard as it is to weed through these things – the bed you’ve slept and loved in; the furniture that reminds you of your childhood; the curtains that have shed their soft rose glow to countless mornings – it’s the art we’ve made ourselves and the little quirky, often value-less but irreplaceable reminders of other times and other people that I’d most want to have.
Books can be bought again, I suppose, but what makes them special to me is the way they mark out my entire life – the life that is really me. Books tell far more than an array of clothes or music or credit-card receipts: no wonder the government wants to access our library records. If a perceptive, patient person were to study my shelves I think they could reconstruct my identity with considerable accuracy, odd as it is: all the twists and turns are there, the hopes, the passions, the origins and detours as well as the constant threads.
Cull? What exactly are we excising when we cull, oh, James Watson's Molecular Biology of the Gene, or The Leonard Cohen Songbook, from 1970, or Charles Goren's Point Count Bidding, even though I might never open any of them again? There's Aristotle's Physics, and nearby,The Tao of Physics, and Calculus and Analytic Geometry, and a copy of Heidi given to my mother by her grandfather in 1931 that I can remember being read aloud to me. One story follows another: a month, a week, a year out of a life. Faces, tears, caresses.
There aren’t that many volumes in the house right now – maybe two thousand – we’ve been frugal and kept a lid on our tendency to buy books before anything else – although I’d hate to say how many times we’ve come home from a trip with suitcases filled with exactly that. The reason I’m thinking and writing about this is that right now, I want to buy more, at the same time as I’m trying to relinquish other kinds of things. I guess I needed to admit it.
Maybe the thing to do is put up some more shelves.
*raznochinets - an intellectual who is not associated with any of the principle social classes, such as the nobility, priesthood, merchants, etc.
5:07 PM
|
Wednesday, July 30, 2003
From the exhibition On the Ground by Galina Lukianova,
Krasnogorsk, Russia
BOOKS
We had new friends over for dinner last night, and as we walked around the house I was noticing how there are books…everywhere. And what’s strange about that is that I’m not a book-collector, really, not the way some people are. Although J. and I both love books we try to buy only the ones we really want to have, for keeps, or books we need professionally or for reference. The trouble is that we still have nearly every book either one of us has ever owned, and the shelves are full, so the overflow has gone onto tables…beside the bed…well, I’m sure this is nothing new to most of you. The question in my mind today is how to manage it.
For quite a few years we’ve had a feebly-enforced policy of one-book-in, one-book-out. We did a one-over-lightly shelf-purge, and that helped, but we need to be much more ruthless. J. built me two beautiful bookshelves for my office, and they’re full now too – how did that happen? – beside me here are my references books: foreign language dictionaries, annotated Bibles and parallel New Testament, style guides, and above and beside them the books on spirituality and religion, histories of Christian Europe and the Middle East, my small collection of Thomas Merton. On the other office bookshelf are poetry books, essays, and philosophy, mythology, my old Greek books, and Shakespeare, along with the book arts, design and calligraphy. There’s a pile of books I’ve borrowed from friends, and another pile – the Polish one – from the university library. I’d like to own at least half of these last – but there’s no room on the poetry shelves. The rest of my books, far more numerous than these, are upstairs.
I remember talking about German philosophers with my father-in-law one afternoon in his second-floor study. His library was arranged in tall bookshelves on two sides of the room, and we sat on a blue velveteen sofa with the afternoon light spilling in over our shoulders onto the gold-and-blue oriental carpet in the center. “Sometimes I just come up here and sit with them,” he said, gesturing with a smile toward his books. “I don’t know what it is, this contentment. I don’t even need to take down a volume, I know them all by their bindings.”
When he moved to a retirement home at age 92, there was no question of priorities: furniture was expendable, the books were going with him. My sister-in-law bought matching bookshelves and lined his new living room and study; the carpet went back into the center of one room along with the velveteen loveseat and the bust of Socrates. Today when we visited him, he was sitting amid his books, many strewn on the floor or on tables, with the door to the balcony open so he could see his tomato and parsley plants, and the hummingbirds buzzing in and out of his feeder.
Another friend of mine is getting ready for such a move, at a considerably younger age, and the other day he wrote: “I got talking with an old book dealer and agreed to show him my first editions, so I'm hauling them off the shelves and feeling I'm amputating myself at the knees.”
I wrote back, in alarmed capitals, “DON’T DO IT!!” He didn’t sell much, but the visit from the dealer left him shaken and depressed. I can well imagine why.
With all this in mind I look around and wonder what should stay, and what should go… or whether, maybe, I could fit one more shelf in somewhere.
Tuesday, July 29, 2003
I'm preparing this morning for a monthly interfaith service for peace that I lead - it will be today at noon - and came across a few quotations that I'd like to share:
It is clear that peace is as fragile as the human condition of which it is a part. temptations abound to lessen its realization. Not least of which is the ego that seeks its own power, and the greed hidden in its shadows. Albert Huerta, S.J.
If you want peace, work for justice. Pope Paul VI
Time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of people willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of stagnation. Martin Luther King
Elizabeth, Elspeth, Betsy and Bess,
All went together to seek a bird's nest.
They found a bird's nest with five eggs in,
They all took one, and left four in.
I grew up as an Elizabeth in a household of Elizabeths. For four generations, women in my direct maternal ancestry had been named either Mary Elizabeth or Martha Elizabeth, and given variations of the middle name as nicknames, so the nursery rhyme above was very familiar to me. I was always "Beth", but I got called "Elspeth" and "Bess" on occasion, and formally always used "Elizabeth". My mother remained "Martha" ; my grandmother was "Beth", and my great-grandmother had been "Libby" or "Lib".
Although this part of the family had been in America for generations, there was a definite anglophilic streak, and it gave me an affection for Elizabeth I, for whom I think we were all indirectly named. My own grandmother was a true matriarch and a determined feminist, and often got called "The Queen" for the imperial manner in which she wielded her thimble and needle while expounding on some subject, or the more subtle but very effective ways she kept the family in line. In her bookshelves I found echoes of Tudor England: the wives of Henry VIII, biographies of Anne Boleyn and Catherine of Aragon, as well as Shakespeare's tragedies, sonnets, and histories. We weren't latter-day royalists - far from it. But there were definite ties: we were Anglican, England was a touchstone, and there was always tea and a tin of biscuits at 4:00 pm.
I found out today, through mysterium, that this year is the 400th anniversary of the death of Elizabeth I, and spent a little time looking through the exhibitions surrounding that commemoration. I was struck by these two depictions of the beginning and end of Elizabeth's long and remarkable reign, and by some of her own words that have survived:
WRITTEN IN HER FRENCH PSALTER, 1554-5
No crooked leg, no bleared eye,
No part deformed out of kind,
Nor yet so ugly half can be
As is the inward suspicious mind.
and these lines from her speech to Parliament (1559), when they challenged her about remaining unmarried and childless:
I have already joyned my self in Marriage to an Husband, namely, the Kingdom of England...And do not (saith she) upbraid me with miserable lack of Children: for every one of you, and as many as are Englishmen, are Children and Kinsmen to me; of whom if God deprive me not, (which God forbid) I cannot without injury be accounted Barren. ..And to me it shall be a full satisfaction, both for the memorial of my Name, and for my Glory also, if when I shall let my last breath, it be ingraven upon my Marble Tomb, Here lieth Elizabeth, which Reigned a Virgin, and died a Virgin. (from Primary Sources: Tudor England)
Comments "Please do!" is what I most want to say. Visits to this site have increased dramatically over the past three or four weeks, so I know there are a number of people reading it regularly. I'd love to hear from you, either in comments or by e-mail (click "write to me" at left). We've had some very interesting discussions in the comments threads since I added them to the site, so I simply want to encourage people to read them, and invite everyone to participate. My interest in blogging really comes out of a desire to encourage conversation, and to keep learning as well as writing. I'd also especially like to hear what you find interesting (or not) among the subjects talked about here. A big thank you to everyone who has been commenting, and to those who haven't -- please add your voice!
Polish Poetry Bibliography There's an updated, growing, decidedly incomplete bibliography of books of and about Polish poetry on the "book notes" page (see link at left). Suggestions for additions are most welcome.
Blogroll Additions Please be sure to visit the three blogs that are new to my blogroll (but not to my reading - I'm just slow at getting them up there): Creek Running North, the beautifully-written, wide-ranging journal of Chris Clarke, editor of Faultline, an environmental journal in California; London and the North, the photoblog/journal of "Coup de Vent", who divides her time between London and Yorkshire; and Soul Food Cafe, an exciting and encouraging site for writers, and about writing, that is the labor of love of Australian Heather Blakey.
4:55 PM
|
Saturday, July 26, 2003 Sphagnum Moss on Granite (by J.)
This afternoon, a little stir-crazy, we took a drive out along the river and through some of the small towns, ending up at a roadside family diner where we probably eat once a summer. It’s a vintage place, with window-service by a local teenager, falling out of her lowcut tank top behind the sliding fly-screen, and hand-painted signs: “clam roll, $4.50”, “chicken basket, 6.95”. The picnic tables are patrolled by the resident scavenging chipmunk, and the outdoor bathrooms with their swinging white-and-green painted plywood doors smell faintly of mildew. The family lives in an adjoining house, and there’s nothing else on this curving, narrow stretch of road but tall overgrown maples on the right, and thick white-pine-and maple forest stretching darkly up the hill on the left.
When you place your order you’re given a small handwritten number on a little white slip of cardboard, and even though there are only two or three cars in the parking lot, a loudspeaker announces: “Number twenty-three, your order is ready for pick-up! Number five, please come to the window!” We sat and ate our sandwiches and fries at one of the picnic tables. “This place is right out of the 1950s,” I said. “Same vintage as drive-in movies.”
“No,” J. said, “a little later, if it were 50s there would be one of those heavy grey metal swing sets.”
“Look behind you,” I said. “There it is.”
On the way back we stopped at a used-book store in a small town, where the elderly proprietor sat eating a plate of dark maroon cherries with her daughter and listening to public radio. J. looked at the regional history section, while I rummaged through the poetry shelves. I found a small first-edition of Galway Kinnell’s second book of poetry, Flower Herding on Mt. Monadnock, published in 1964. It’s hard to recognize the now thickset and tweedy Kinnell in the Kennedy-esque, white-shirt-thin-black-tie photograph on the endflap. The book cost $4.00, a dollar more than the original price on the dust jacket.
I heard Kinnell read (very well) earlier this year, at a ceremony at the Vermont State House for the installation of Grace Paley as State Poet. Most of the former laureates of Vermont, including Kinnell, were there… except for Frost.
The title poem of Flower Herding on Mt. Monadnock is in ten parts; here is the ninth section, describing in a few words the ascent up an eastern mountain: dripping water, moss, and big granite rocks.
From a rock
A waterfall
A single trickle like a strand of wire
Breaks into beads halfway down.
I know
The birds fly off
But the hug of the earth wraps
With moss their graves and the giant boulders.
Some Kinnell links on the web: poems here and here, an interview, and a bio with more links and a recent photograph.
I found myself at The Moscow Times today, following a link from LanguageHat about the "small muttered words" Russians use to express various emotions. In case it isn't already obvious, I'm fascinated by these differences between cultures, so I loved learning, for example, that "tsk tsk" in Russian is a wag of the head and the syllables "ai-ai-ai".
From The Moscow Times I went to The St. Petersburg Times, and discovered an avant-garde exhibition of video and audio installations exploring "the dividing line between history and memory" at the Anna Akhmatova Museum:
The aspiration towards catching and depicting the shadows of the past is natural to the museum - the main organizer of both projects - as true and false scents of the past are among the chief motifs of Akhmatova's poetry.
Every monument is already linked to a particular location, with most of them being on Vasilievsky Island. The choice was inspired by the famous line: "I will come to die on Vasilievsky Island," from one of Brodsky's untitled verses. The idea has been widely criticized for its banality and for telling nothing about Brodsky's personality, but no convincing alternative has been proposed, with the exception of Preobrazhenskaya Square, very near to Brodsky's former apartment on Ulitsa Pestelya...
Several members of the jury didn't give their support to any of the projects that reached the final round, on the grounds that they all lacked original ideas. "I was disappointed," said jury member and art critic Arkady Ippolitov. "The poet doesn't deserve to return to St. Petersburg in the shape of an iron-cast doll reminiscent of a turn-of the century policeman. When I look at these works, I want to ask if the authors wanted to create a monument or to win the contest."
One has to wonder what Akhmatova and Brodsky would have thought.
After the previous post on this topic, Chris left a thoughtful comment about Adorno’s challenge about whether there can be poetry after Auschwitz:
“I understand that he meant by "poetry" a certain kind of disconnected, apolitical verse, but even so. I spoke a long time ago with a survivor of one of the camps, who told me that her will to live was sustained by a small bird she'd see on the other side of the wire. Even if a poem isn't some grand angry statement of opposition to evil... who's to say which verse will be someone's bird?”
All witnesses and survivors of horrors have to decide what that bird is for them – what it mean to be alive in the aftermath -- and of course some never recover. As Stalinism began to strangle free expression, artists in particular faced Faustian bargains: keep writing, but write for the State; keep writing, but write banal or traditional poems as if nothing has changed; if you can, go into exile so you can write freely, at the potential price of forfeiting your mother tongue and your home; write, invent, create, but for the drawer, or at risk of censorship, imprisonment, torture, and death.
Rozewicz was not a writer who decided to go head-to-head with the authorities, and so far as I’ve been able to determine, he was not overtly political after the war. He certainly did not give up on poetry, but he decried those who sold out, and he also decried those who wrote as if nothing had happened, calling this “Ham acting. The illness of literature,” and commenting that some poets “perform their ‘poetry dance’ resolutely to the end without reference to the state of humanity, their country, or even their own condition.”
“The dance of poetry came to an end during the Second World War in concentration camps created by totalitarian systems. The departure in such Grenzsituationen from such special ‘poetic’ language has produced poems which I call stripped of masks and costumes…it is precisely the poems written in Grensituationen, in ultimate situations, ‘prosaicized’ works, which created the conditions for poetry’s subsistence and even survival. In the works of every writer, even the greatest, such poems are very rare…”
Writing about another poet, Leopold Staff, Rozewicz admired a poem that he said was “not a poem, but rather a description of a situation the poet had found himself in…a piece of information passed by the poet to other people…which one might also call a poem.”
Rozewicz’s own poetry is reductionist, or perhaps more accurately, it proceeds from a kind of via negativa: what is left after nothing?
After the end of the world
after death
I found myself in the midst of life
creating myself
building life
people animals landscape
this is a table I said
this is a table
there is bread and a knife on the table
knife serves to cut bread
people are nourished by bread…
When the nearly-drowned man comes to the surface, what is the scrap to which he can cling? In Rozewicz’s case, especially in these early poems, the answer is “not much”. But out of that nearly-nothing: an egg, a grain of salt, an old woman – he creates poems not out of adjective-encrusted rooms, but rather from what one critic calls “a rather desperate humanism” that refuses to pretend anything.
The Door
Builders
had left a vertical opening in the wall
I sometimes think
my home is too conventional
all sorts of people
can easily get in
had the builders not left
that opening in the wall
I would have become a hermit
alas
I waste my time
coming in and going out
a revolving door has lately been installed
through it
enter the affairs of the world
but neither a blossoming apple-tree
nor a little
moist-eyed pony
neither a star nor a golden hive
neither a stream
teeming with fish nor buttercups
have ever appeared in it
and yet I shan’t wall up this door
maybe a good man
will appear in it
and tell me who I am
(From Tadeusz Rozewicz, “They Came to See a Poet”, transl. Adam Czerniawski, Anvil Press Poetry , 1991)
My 94-year-old father-in-law has always loved to eat, until the past year or so. “I’ve lost my sense of taste,” he says, shaking his head mournfully, every time we sit down to eat. “Nothing tastes good. Even those little Moroccan olives you brought me – I love them! – but no taste!” Some of this seems to be physiological, but I also think it’s a way of saying he misses his wife’s Middle Eastern cooking. Nothing made by me or my sister-in-law quite measures up. Something strong-tasting, I thought. Maybe pickles?
Over the weekend I made two jars of torshi left – pickled turnips. These are a great Middle Eastern delicacy, along with many other kinds of torshi, but I had never made them before, since my husband has historically made one of those scrunched-up, “I’ll throw up first” faces whenever I mention turnips. In Montreal we ate at a restaurant where a plate of these pickles, crisp, pungent, and pink with beet juice, came to the table with some small delicious olives as an appetizer. Crunching one of the pickles and making pleased sounds, J. asked, “What are these, anyway?”
“Turnips,” I said, deadpan.
Up go the eyebrows. “No kidding! Can we make some?”
I used Claudia Roden’s recipe; it was very easy. Her New Book of Middle Eastern Food (Penguin) is an even greater treasure than the original, and it includes some lovely drawings and stories about the foods she’s describing.
Squatting on the pavements of busy streets, vendors sell home-made pickled turnips swimming in a pink solution, or aubergines looking fiercely black and shiny in enormous jars. passers-by dip their hands in the liquor, searching for the tastiest and largest pieces, and savour them with Arab bread provided by the vendor, soaking it in the pink salt and vinegar solution or seasoned with oil.
I haven't been playing the piano much lately. Actually, I stopped taking lessons a few years ago and it's been harder, without the pressure (some might say, "terror") of a regular lesson to really make myself practice. And somehow, after September 11th and the subsequent months of politics and war, it's been difficult to play. Music has always been a way for me to deal with my emotions. I've always been able to find some composer whose works seemed to express what I was feeling or thinking, and even with the limitations of my technique I could find satisfaction and release through playing. But it's interesting - these past couple of years I haven't been able to figure out what to play. Even Bach, the reliable fall-back when all else fails, hasn't done it for me. I'd turn to something for a few days, and then stop, still hungry, dissatisfied, frustrated.
But in the past week I've felt a renewal of interest, and even though my playing has really suffered through neglect and the piano is out of tune in the summer heat and humidity, I've been putting in some time at the keyboard. Last night I sat down, quite late, while thunder rumbled outside and rain began to fall in a steady rhythm. The window to the street was open, and I took the second volume of Mozaret sonatas off the shelf, turned to one at random, and began to play.
45 minutes or an hour later, I don't know, I stopped. I went out onto the porch and stood there in the dark. The air was dense, thick, and in the darkness the streetlights spread on the wet pavement. It was 10:00 pm. The phone rang. It was our neighbor, who's here for a few years from Iceland while his wife does some medical training. He was a pianist himself at one point in his life.
"Thank you for the music," he said.
"Oh my God, you could hear me?" I said. Our houses are close together. They've just had a baby, and yesterday evening I heard her crying, but I also heard the air conditioner in their bedroom, and thought it probably drowned out all sounds from the neighborhood. "My playing is so bad, I'm really out of practice."
"I couldn't hear that, I couldn't even tell what it was...we had drifted off to sleep with the baby, and then we woke up to the thunder and rain, and these faint sounds of piano music. And it was so wonderful. What were you playing?"
"Mozart."
"Ah," he said. "You know, I haven't felt like playing for years. But since our daughter was born, I've felt an urge to perhaps play again. Just - what do you say - not seriously -?"
"We call it 'noodling around'."
"Ok! Noodling around. Yes. It's funny, when I used to play I was very involved in technique, in playing fast - it was almost a geeky thing, I felt sort of the way I do when I go out and ride my bike hard. But it's odd - the music that has stayed with me and that I find myself thinking about now is more romantic - Chopin nocturnes, things like that. I just wanted to tell you that it was so nice to wake up in the dark and hear this - faint notes - and the thunder, and the rain."
Poetry in Poland, as in Russia, is given the status of national voice. Ordinary people read and memorize poetry, and poets, once they are accorded the laurel wreath of national recognition, are greatly respected and viewed with high expectations. In his overview of the last 20 years in Polish poetry, Jaroslaw Klejnocki mentions a joke that he says isn’t far from the truth: “The difference between French and Polish literature is that 300 novels and 30 books of poetry are published in France each year, and the reverse is true in Poland.” He goes on to say that, to use a simplification, Poles “have almost always preferred poetry to prose as in poems they looked for explanations and, more importantly, for emotions.”
Mid-to-late twentieth-century poetry in Poland has been dominated by four great writers: the Nobel winners Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska, and their fellow poets Zbigniew Herbert and Tadeusz Rozewicz. Except for Herbert, who died in 1998, all are still writing. Adam Zagajewski, born in 1945, has more recently gained international stature. The so-called “brulion generation”, (named after a late 1990’s Cracow and Warsaw literary magazine) are even younger writers who, Klejnocki says, are still considered too young to be taken really seriously. I hope I can get to them eventually.
I wanted to start with Rozewicz because I think he’s the least known, certainly to me, and because I’ve been stunned by his poems. He was born in Radomsko in 1921, studied art history, and is a poet, playwright and novelist. He’s lived in Wroclaw (formerly Breslau), in Lower Silesia (SW Poland) for the past thirty years.
His first book of poems, Niepokoj (Anxiety), came out in 1947, and his second Czerwona rekawiczka (The Red Glove) in 1948. The poems I’ve read from this period have a matter-of-fact, observational quality that reflects a person who has lifted his body from the rubble and looks around clearly, alertly, intelligently. Even this early in his career, the poems seem masterful in the way they convey both the poet’s mind and emotions with control, economy, and great integrity. Rosewicz is already making deliberate choices. Speaking about that period of his life, he wrote about studying art history “in order to reconstruct man bit by bit”, and continued:
“I was full of reverential wonder at works of art (the aesthetic experience replaced religious experience) but simultaneously I felt a growing contempt for all ‘aesthetic’ values. I felt that something had come to an end for ever for me and for humanity…so I tried to rebuild what seemed most important for life and for the life of poetry: ethics.”
Here are two poems, the first from Anxiety and the second from The Red Glove:
THE SURVIVOR
I am twenty-four
led to slaughter
I survived.
The following are empty synonyms:
man and beast
love and hate
friend and foe
darkness and light.
The way of killing men and beasts is the same
I’ve seen it:
truckloads of chopped-up men
who will not be saved.
Ideas are mere words:
virtue and crime
truth and lies
beauty and ugliness
courage and cowardice.
Virtue and crime weigh the same
I’ve seen it:
in a man who was both
criminal and virtuous.
I seek a teacher and a master
may he restore my sight hearing and speech
may he again name objects and ideas
may he separate darkness from light.
I am twenty-four
led to slaughter
I survived.
CHESTNUT
Saddest of all is leaving
home on an autumn morning
when there is no hope of an early return
The chestnut father planted in front
of the house grows in our eyes
mother is tiny
you could carry her in your arms
On the shelf
jars of preserves
like sweet-lipped goddesses
have retained the flavour
of eternal youth
soldiers at the back of the drawer
will stay leaden till the end of the world
while God almighty who mixed in
bitterness with the sweetness
hangs on the wall helpless
and badly painted
childhood is like the worn face
on a golden coin that rings
true.
(From Tadeusz Rozewicz, “They Came to See a Poet”, transl. Adam Czerniawski, Anvil Press Poetry , 1991)
More in a few days; something different (and shorter!) tomorrow.
A Blog for Everyone: a front page BBC story today, spurred by AOL's decision to bundle blogging software with AOL9 - but they'll be called "journals" because "too many people find the term 'blog' confusing."
Afghans flout fur ban: Snow leopard coats? Sounds too horrible for words, but apparently there is a growing trade in illegal furs in war-ravaged Afghanistan. The main market: international peacekeeping troops.
Sunday, July 20, 2003
If anyone were to ask us what we struggle toward the most in human life, I am guessing the most common and most general answer would be “happiness” (with “love” as its subset?) I decided a while ago that “happiness” is a very relative term, and that basing my life on trying to find it, seize it, and keep it is not unlike trying to grasp handfuls of water. The more we allow our eyes to be open, the less (in my opinion) we are able to hold onto a naive sort of happiness, especially if we see it as something we somehow “deserve”: the inequities in our world are far too apparent. Happiness in our culture seems to be commensurate with “having”, and is therefore a moving target: we are a society of little Midases, tallying up our hoard far more often than we might like to admit, and addicted to comparing ourselves with anyone who jostles our elbow. But if we look up from our storeroom, we may notice the paradox that people who have far less than most of us in the West often seem to have greater equanimity.
One of the most common and deserved charges leveled against Americans, not only by Third World residents but by Europeans, is that we are so naïve, living with an immature outlook on life because of our country’s prolonged, privileged, largely unscathed adolescence and myopic ability to distance ourselves from suffering elsewhere, even when we are deeply implicated or the direct cause of it.
I’ve been wondering if this is partly due to how we define “happiness”: isn’t our goal often quite far from “self-knowledge” or “wisdom” or “truth”, or even “the capacity to give and receive love”, but closer to, if we’re honest, “getting what I think I want when I want it”? or even, more psychologically revealing perhaps, “feeling safe from anxiety?” If that’s the case, then it’s no wonder so many marriages end in divorce, or that our health care system is out of control. No wonder we went crazy when Sept 11th happened, and went to war in Iraq so that we could keep filling our oil tanks and tilting at imaginary nuclear windmills.
What I seem to be particularly interested in is how people find beauty, serenity, equanimity, and purpose even in the midst of suffering, war, violence, destruction, anxiety and loss, because that is a far better description of how our world actually is than the fairyland we often pretend it is from this side of the moat – ignoring, of course, the kind of life led by millions of unprivileged Americans. That’s what drew me a few years ago, I think, to reading a lot of Russian literature and poetry written before and during the Revolution and Stalin years, and more recently to reading post-war Polish poetry, all of it haunted by a Polish* critic’s challenge, “Can there be poetry after Auschwitz?”
I’m going to try to write here, off and on, about some of that in next weeks, hoping to share with you the grit and transcendence and inspiration I’m finding in some of this work.
To whet your appetite (I hope!) here is a quote from the Polish poet Tadeauz Rozewicz, who was born in 1921, participated in the Resistance, survived the war, entered Krakow University and in 1947 published his first book of poems:
It was no accident that I chose to study history of art. I did it in order to rebuild the Gothic temple, to raise inside myself that church brick by brick, in order to reconstruct man bit by bit…
Too good to leave in the Comments thread: read Chris's story of a raven here.
7:55 PM
|
Woman on the beach at Chabahar (a port in the south-east of Iran) by Soosan Zahedi, a member of "Sheednegar", Society of Iranian Women Photographers
from Kargah, Iranian Artists' Site
Today I was at the high-priced local grocery store. I go to buy shade-grown coffee and a few other things that I can't get elsewhere, but now that I go infrequently, it's a shock. The parking lot was filled with the de rigeur cars for upscale New England: Subaru Outbacks, Saabs, Volvos, and SUVs of every type and description. Each vegetable is shiny and perfect, and so are the shoppers: well-dressed, well-fed, tanned, white-skinned, and totally absorbed in their own little worlds. Oh, gosh, today it made me so tired. I've been thinking about the rest of the world, the poor world, and a quote I heard again, not long ago, from the minister of Riverside Church in New York: "We need to remember that our having has a great deal to do with others not having." I'm so idealistic and optimistic sometimes, but this scene really hit me today, and I was left with the recurrent question: How do you get through to people of such privilege and such entitlement, that it's all interconnected? How can you tell someone like this that it may not last forever, or, at the very least, that they ought to be grateful for every mouthful of food, let alone the immense freedom we have?
3:56 PM
|
" Not being alienated from one's own essential nature is itself a field of blessings." - Hui-Neng
via whiskey river
There's a lot of longing going on in the blogosphere lately. A number of the recent Ecotone posts about suburbs longed for things we've lost, for connections made difficult by time and distance, for a kind of childhood that seems impossible today. Lisa's post at field notes and Butuki's both for July 15th and 16th at Laughing Knees were especially poignant, and beautifully written - both of these bloggers are excellent, sensitive writers day after day. Carlos at Mysterium just posted a fine poem of his own composition. And Kurt, over at The Coffee Sutras, is hosting a full-fledged discussion on longing spurred by his own, as usual, very searching reflections.
I could go on for pages about this subject...it feels like I spent an entire decade, from 35 to 45, more or less consumed by trying to figure it out. I don't think we ever arrive at a place of non-longing, but we can better understand its nature - and through that, our own "essential nature" that Hui-Neng speaks about. For me, studying the mystic traditions of many faiths has been a key. All point in the same general direction - toward a God or sense of the divine, the limitless, the unknowable that is also at times absolutely immediate and non-separate from us. They tell us that glimpses of this unifying reality are possible in this life and we all have them, we just may not recognize it (I think the notion of God most of us grew up with makes this vastness hard to conceive). We also hear that insight into the nature of this reality is to be gained not by grasping and wanting, but by letting go, even "dying to self". The paradox is that you can't get onto the path without longing, but at some point, when all your human efforts to find what you desire have proved futile, you totally give up -- and there it is, a piece of the puzzle, enough to keep you going.
"You must lose your life to save it," say the Gospels. This isn't a literal statement at all, but I think it means that solving the enigma of longing actually involves giving rather than wanting and getting - giving one's old self; surrender; giving up one's myth of having the answers. We long so desperately for something or someone to complete and affirm us, without actually realizing that IT is longing for US.
Maybe longing is the sand in the oyster. Irritating us to form hearts of more perfect beauty. Maybe it’s never suppose to be fulfilled. It’s supposed to push the process. Maybe. Somehow. 8:29 PM
|
Thank you all so much for all the comments on "Suburbs"! After all the writing and talk about "place" yesterday, today felt like a day for thinking and being quiet.
Zazen on Ching-t’ing Mountain
The birds have vanished down the sky.
Now the last cloud drains away.
We sit together, the mountain and me,
until only the mountain remains.
My neighbor wears wild grapevines wreathed about his shoulders. He wrestles and pulls, wrenching the honeysuckle from the earth, and vines from the trees where they once hung in wild joyful loops.
Angry, hot, sweating, he sits now and wipes his forehead with the back of a wrist, sets his face and begins hacking again, reducing the terrible invasion to something he can comb and smile at, satisfied, before turning toward his day.
He sees me looking up and tells me what he’s doing, as if I too might like to relocate the brambles and their kin which lie between my feet and his to some other neighborhood.
I smile politely and tell him that I like to see the birds that live there.
“Oh!” he says, surprised. “Are there birds?”
--
Twenty-five years ago, when I moved to this small village, the hill in back of our property was filled with goldenrod and woodchuck holes, dotted with a few houses above. This whole hillside was orginally a farm; we planted our garden where the chicken coop had stood. Deer regularly came down to eat apples underneath the old trees in our yard, and in the evenings a reclusive hermit thrush sang in the underbrush.
By the same token, back then you couldn’t buy a decent head of lettuce – other than iceberg – from October through June, let alone fresh herbs for your pasta, or a mango, or twenty different kinds of shade-grown organic coffee. You certainly couldn’t spend an afternoon browsing the bookshelves and drinking cappuchino at Borders; there weren’t art galleries or repertory theater companies; and there was a lot less choice about almost everything, from housing to housecoats.
The coming of suburbia to rural northern New England is both blight and blessing, and I find myself participating in both. As often as I cry, “I don’t want to live in Connecticut!” when I see yet another giant concrete-block box store extending the horrible strip mall further into the countryside, emptying not only the original downtowns but the earlier, now-unfashionable malls, I do go there on occasion and am grateful for some of the amenities and convenience. The fact that my area – and my business – have been largely protected from the economic vicissitudes of recent years is a result of a healthy local economy and continued growth – the same growth that eats up farmland and turns woodlots and wetlands into commercial developments.
This sense of inexorable creep resulting in compromise – compromise of place and of personal values – is what suburbia represents to me. Although we’ve participated in forums on sprawl, and served on committees to preserve and strengthen local communities, deep down I recognize the insidious and seductive lure of change, opportunity, and convenience. The difference between me and the “flatlanders” – the suburbanites who come here from Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York and New Jersey – is that I’m acutely aware of what’s being lost.
Today, the entire hillside in back of our house has been developed. The winding road where I used to walk every morning is filled with whizzing, commuting cars, and the warbler-filledwoods at the top have been cut and replaced with a 50-unit condominium development. And even with our plantings of wildlife-feeding and -sheltering shrubs, and refusal to manicure the underbrush, the deer and the hermit thrush don’t come to our backyard any more.
“Oh?” says my transplanted neighbor. “Are there birds?”
"I've always wanted a pergola," I said to our hostess last Friday night as we walked from her backdoor to the driveway through a lovely white lattice walkway wound with flowering clematis vines in purple and soft pink.
"Ah, yes! A pergola," she said. "I haven't heard that word for a long time. We had one in the convent."
Pergola Rosita Copioli (Italian, 1948-)
I dreamed I had a pergola
which later became a meadow of weeds,
of twigs of stones. And a few steps in front,
the sea—which had spread
light and sun and infinite cries—turned
gray little by little in the white
northern light, and died out. But from
the broken limbs of the garden to the villa with its
vine-covered pergola and dark
bunches over the marble doors,
from the broken limbs, the sun
outlined my hands on the marble
and let them fall
as itself was falling.
The door jambs, the vine shoots, the small white
chairs shattered in the sun.
And from the villa not
far from the sea, dust rose
with the sun, dust and white seeds,
the wind.
"Rosita Copioli graduated from the University of Bologna, Italy, with a Ph.D. in classical studies with a dissertation on “The Idea of Landscape in Leopardi.”
"Copioli’s work deals mainly with myth and nature. She is interested in the dawn of life, of history, of civilizations. Time and history are often compressed in her work. This compression is distilled in lists: enumerations of winds, of cities, of mythological characters, of minerals and flowers, of geographical places. Her world embraces the Mediterranean sea and the effects of modern civilization on the pristine world of the Greeks and the Romans."
--from thedrunkenboat
"At its most successful, my 'touch' looks into the heart of nature; most days I don't even get close. These things are all part of a transient process that I cannot understand unless my touch is also transient-only in this way can the cycle remain unbroken and the process be complete." Andy Goldsworthy
I've been following Goldsworthy's work for a couple of years, since seeing a book of photographs of his "sculptures" - for this is, by and large, the only way one can experience these pieces which are made from nature and reclaimed by it. The film, narrated only by an occasional comment from the artist as he is filmed in Nova Scotia and his home in the highlands of Scotland, allows the viewer to be present at the birth, end, and often precipitous collapse of Goldsworthy's amazing and - to me - very moving creations. Some, like his stone cairns, do persist and may be around for a very long time. But others, created of found objects like leaves of graduated color joined into long "paper chains" by thorns and set afloat in a river, or tree leaves "sewn" together with a seemingly endless "thread" of reed, or the incredible stars and ribbons made of ice, confront us with the nature of time itself, and our own place in both its relentlessness and indifferent but heart-melting beauty. This is what preoccupies and motivates Goldsworthy, along with, I think, a desire to have us look more closely at our world.
Goldsworthy works a lot with a dark, rocky river that winds through woods in his property; I think he said that he sees that river as a metaphor for life. The water has worn deep cavities in the rock, and one of his favorite devices is to fill one or two of those cavities with a starting color - hundreds of dandelion petals, for example. In one segment, he pulls a rock out of the river and rubs it hard against another, creating a red powder - there's so much iron in the rock that it crumbles red. He spends a whole day crumbling rock, and uses it to dye one of the pools. And we're shocked - what is it, but our blood, made red by iron too?
For someone who makes almost nothing that can be "sold", Goldsworthy has certainly done well through the photography that he uses to document what he makes, but I love the way his work circumvents and questions the whole art gallery establishment; it is more like dance, fleeting but haunting because it goes to the core of who we are on this planet.
