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Poetry

Language, redesigned.

German is known for its compound words, the joining of two words that then create a new meaning, some of which have gained enough of a reputation to be understood by readers who primarily speak English. Schadenfreude, joy in other people’s misfortune, might be one such, as is Weltschmerz, the heartache over the world’s woes, or your own, for that matter.

I have different favorites, all connected to my own person, Weichei among them, literally a soft egg, but referring to one decidedly wimpy. Then there is the innere Schweinehund, literally an internal pig dog, which refers to one’s weakness of willpower. (Not to be mistaken for Schweinehund, pig dog, which refers to a particularly mean villain. Deutsche Sprache….) Let’s add the Tagedieb, the day thief, who dawdles away her time, that lazy layabout, and Eselsbrücke, the donkey bridge, a name for mnemonic devices, those memory aides which have become indispensable for this aging brain.

Beware of words

One of the joys of reading poetry in your own language is the discovery of compound words that do not exist in the extant language. There is a real thrill when these inventions make perfect sense or suggest something that is new but obvious, or create a hook for you to think about language as it should be but has never seemingly come about. They are also often creating an uncanny mood for their simultaneous familiarity and unfamiliarity.

These invented compound words are also a nightmare for the translator, and a struggle for the second-language reader, since they would not know what is established and what is designed vocabulary.

Luckily, one of the masters of German 20th century poetry, Paul Celan, had some of the best translators one could wish for, John Felstiner, and more recently Pierre Joris, who spent 50 years to convey the entirety of Celan’s works. (The newest edition is Memory Rose into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry. And here is a long but informative interview with Joris about his translation work.)

Even they, though, might not quite capture what a native speaker intuits: Take Celan’s creation Sprachgitter, for example, translated as speechgrille. Gitter are primarily used in German to refer to prison bars. Bars keep you in. Bars can also keep others out. A languagebar or speechbar is obviously not a good translation since it would sound like an obstacle. But the sense of language as a force that prevents departure or entry, a separation device, is not exactly embodied in grille, which rather suggests permeability.

These difficulties aside, it is remarkable that a poet who survived the Holocaust (his entire family did not) sticks to the language of the murderers, admittedly also the language of his mother, even though he is fluent in many other languages.

More importantly, the poet was aware of the abuse of the German language by the totalitarian perpetrators. He called it murderous speech.

 “Only one thing remained reachable, close, and secure amid all the losses,” he later said of his experiences in the camps: “language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss.” “But,” he added, “it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech.” (More on this here and here.)

The ideological core message of supremacists, as we discussed earlier, is one of separation: us vs. them, the good against the bad, the nation against the enemy, the White against the Black, the Nazi against the Jew. Celan’s language systematically undermines separation by fusing words together, words that never belonged in a pair, the compounds creating an ambivalence that stands in direct opposition to the absolutist value and expression of murderous speech. His new words allow us, on occasion, to cross the threshold of separation joining something new.

Graffitti on a store for Judaica

What is a memoryrose?

What is breathturn, what is timestead?

What is ashglory in the context of the Holocaust? Have to read the poems!

Here is Celan reading his own work, translation in subtitles.

Music composed for three of his poems, here.

Photographs are from Paris where Celan lived until his suicide at age 50 in 1970.

Bonus: Here is an excerpt from Jewish Currents that analyzes one of my favorite poems (a stanza, really) as the professionals do…. I just liked the imagery placed into my hometown, otherwise had no clue.

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Escaping the Maze.

Today I am thinking about a ruler contemplating the invasion of Persia. Croesus, not tRump, in case your thoughts went there. There are admittedly some parallels, of course. Filthy rich comes to mind (although purportedly rich, in the case of the latter,) invading and subjugating, and eventually facing a downfall through overreach. (Hello Georgia: a shout-out to all the organizers and voters!)

Croesus (c. 560–546 BC,) having successfully conquered Ioania, was in turn subjugated by the Persians under Cyrus when he went to war with them. His country paid the price, he, on the other hand, got away with it –  Herodotus claims that the King, condemned by Cyrus to be burned alive, was saved by the god Apollo and eventually accompanied Cyrus’ successor, Cambyses II, to Egypt.

Will we see something similar unfolding in our contemporary situation with Iran and the slinking off of a defeated ruler, escaping his just punishment? According to Israeli news sources, the war pressure is on. According to the pattern of a life time, he just might.

Croesus was on my mind because of the puzzling observation that a wonderful poem about him and his relations to the oracle of Delphi pretends that we don’t know what important question he asked. History has, after all, preserved exactly that question and the catastrophic misinterpretation of the oracle’s answer. The king wanted to know whether he should go to war against the Persian Empire and the oracle replied: “If Croesus goes to war he will destroy a great empire.”  Turns out he did. His own.

Brian Culhane, the poet, is perfectly aware of what the question was. He is educated in classics, his work steeped in them. (I had earlier presented one of his poems here. The King’s Question, the book that contains today’s selection, was the winner of the Emily Dickinson First Book Award, which recognizes an American poet over the age of fifty who has yet to publish a book of poetry.) The interplay between ancient history and his contemporary writing is what made me choose him for today’s musings in the first place.

(Yes, it’s long. Yes, it’s worth it!)

The King’s Question

BY BRIAN CULHANE

In memory of Nancy Tow Spiegel

Before he put his important question to an oracle,
Croesus planned to test all the famous soothsayers,
Sending runners half around the world, to Delphi,
Dodona, Amphiarius, Branchidae, and Ammon,
So as to determine the accuracy of their words;
His challenge: not to say anything of his future

But rather what he was doing in his capital, Sardis
(Eating an unlikely meal of lamb and tortoise,
Exactly one hundred days after messengers had set out).
This posed a challenge, then, of far space not of time:
Of seeing past dunes and rock fortresses; of flying,
Freighted, above caravans and seas; of sightedness,

As it were, in the present construed as a darkened room.
Croesus of Lydia sought by this means to gauge
The unplumbed limits of what each oracle knew,
Hesitant to entrust his fate to any unable to divine
Lamb and tortoise stewing in a bronze pot.
When only the Pythia of Apollo at Delphi correctly

Answered from her cleft, her tripod just the lens
For seeing into the royal ego, she put his mind to rest,
But not before speaking in her smoke-stung voice:
I count the grains of sand on the beach and the sea’s depth;
I know the speech of the dumb and I hear those without voice.
We know this because those present wrote it down.

Of the King’s crucial questions, however, there is nothing.
We have no word. The histories are silent.
                                                                My analyst,
Whose office on Madison was narrow as an anchorite’s cave,
Would sit behind me as I stared up at her impassive ceiling,
As the uptown buses slushed all the way to Harlem,
And I would recount, with many hesitations and asides,

The play I was starring in, whose Acts were as yet
Fluid, though the whole loomed tragically enough.
She would listen, bent over knitting, or occasionally note
Some fact made less random by my tremulous soliloquy.
When much later I heard of her death after long cancer,
I walked across town and stood, in front of her building,

Trying to resurrect those afternoons that became the years
We labored together toward a time without neurosis,
When I might work and raise a family and find peace.
Find, if not happiness exactly, some surcease from pain.
What question had I failed to ask, when the chance was mine?
When she, who knew me so well, could have answered?

Let just one of those quicksilver hours be returned to me,
With my knowledge now of the world, and not a boy’s,
With all that I have become a lighted room. One hour
To ask the question that burned, once, in a King’s throat:
The question of all questions, the true source and center,
Without which a soul must make do, clap hands and sing.

The pretense of not knowing what the king’s question was serves a Gedankenexperiment that leads to today’s oracles, psychoanalysts. Here is a power hungry guy, itching to go to war, testing his soothsayers’ capabilities by inquiring about the mundane issue of what’s for supper. Only the wise woman from Delphi correctly identifies what’s on the menu: the (sacrificial?) lamb and the tortoise (Χελωνη,) the one so perfectly shielded against assault.

The tortoise, it turns out, who used to be a nymph refusing to go to divine weddings, loving to stay home. Subsequently punished by Zeus with transformation into an animal that has to carry that home forever on her back. Also the one that is reported to have killed playwright Aeschylus when dropped on his head by a bird. Also the one that was a sacred symbol of Hermes, the swift messenger God and all around trickster. And of course the one mentioned by Freud In Totem and Taboo as one of the animals used for totemic meals, the annual sacrifice and consumption of the animal, symbolizing the murder of the archaic father. Pick your preferred symbolism from the soup bowl!

But no mention of the question.

So let’s turn to the analyst’s office of years gone by, a place to choose symbolic meaning and interpretation with care, as if it mattered. The poet reminisces about the construction of a life narrative with certain roles and uncertain outcomes, perceived at the time as a tragedy with the self-pity of youth.

The quiet lady is a knitter – now where did we hear about yarn last? Moirai, the fates, where Clotho (the nicest of the three) spins the yarn, the thread of life, that is tied to your destiny. But also Ariadne, who plies Theseus with a sword and a ball of red yarn that helps him escape the labyrinth after he kills the Minotaur. It was Freud himself, after all, who claimed in an interview in 1927 that psychoanalysis “supplies the thread that leads a man out of the labyrinth of his own unconscious.”

Spinning a yarn, as some conceive of therapy, is not to be dismissed. Threads weave patterns, and they become stories, with a beginning and an end, mapping the maze, which is, after all, finite as well. Would any particular question change that? Would an oracle/ therapist supply an answer any less ambiguous than that which led Croesus astray? The very fact that the narrator is even wondering what question he failed to ask, suggests it could not have made that much of a difference. Narratives shift, narratives might not be based on reality, but narratives do bring some order into the experienced upheaval. They need to be cohesive, but they do not depend on definitive answers. The very fact that the oracle of Delphi denied certitude – like the Gods, or life itself – to the questioner, frames how loaded questioning – and answers – can be. Catastrophe might well ensue.

Without definitive answers Culhane’s last line suggests we “must make do, clap hands and sing.” Action is what counts in this play that we have been assigned to, or this script that we constructed ourselves, preferably with joyful expression. Living a life rather than thinking about it. The only way out of the maze.

Photographs today are of a different kind of invasion: not kings, but robins decided to pick the last specks of colors in my wintry yard, gorging on the red berries.

Music by Strauss tells the tale of Ariadne, one who saves with love and pragmatism.

Bonus: There is a lovely 1971 album by Francoise Hardy called La question. Available in full on Spotify. Here is the title song.

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Mindsets

Putting on my psychologist hat today.

I think we can all agree that thoughts and feelings interact with each other. What I think can shape what I feel – if I think highly of myself or one of my accomplishments, I will feel pleasure, or elation, or sustained confidence. If I think poorly of myself or the outcome of my actions, I can feel insecurity, or shame ore guilt.

The opposite is true as well: my emotions can affect my thinking. If I am feeling happy-go-lucky, self-confident and optimistic, I might be protected from catastrophic thinking. (I might also fail to prepare for potential disaster and caught helpless when it strikes, just saying….). If I feel needy for approval, or belonging, or fearful of change, I might think in ways that make sure these needs and fears are dealt with. In these cases, I will think along the lines of the group I want to belong to and avoid dissent even if data suggest I have the wrong ideas (think climate change, for example.) I might not see the world as it is, but my feelings will be protected.

Julia Galef, a co-founder of the Center of Applied Rationality, offers a persuasive explanation of how different categories of emotional needs and skills interact with how rationally and accurately we assess the world. Her book, The Scout Mindset, will be released this April. For a lightening overview of her model, here is a 10 minute TED talk.

Galef’s ideas begin with the assumption, shared by a host of contemporary psychologists, that there is such a thing as directionally motivated reasoning. Most of us are trying to make ideas that we like “win” and those that we don’t like, “lose.” In a nutshell, we ask for those things that we want to be true if we can believe the evidence. For undesirable conclusions, on the other hand, we ask ourselves if we must believe the evidence. In the process of forming our beliefs we have a lot of flexibility: we can choose what evidence to include and which to ignore, who we find trustworthy and who we avoid, whether we consult second opinions and so on.

The author suggests that two different mindsets, that of a Soldier and that of a Scout, decide how we approach the world and look at evidence to protect our feelings. The Soldier Mindset defends what it believes, advances arguments, holds positions on issues and fights what contradicts their beliefs, shoots down ideas, refuses to concede points. Importantly, sticking to your preconceptions or beliefs despite evidence that they might be false, is driven by feelings of need for belonging and approval (tribalism,) fear of showing weakness if changing opinion, and a choice to see the world through optimistic glasses to feed your psychological immune system with positive illusions against the threats of the world.

(I talked about some of these processes, including confirmation bias, previously here.)

The Scout Mindset, on the other hand, is all about being able to see things as they are, not as you wish they were, even if that implies unpleasant or inconvenient insights. It explores the actual lay of the land rather than defending assumptions about how the land is configured.

” It’s what allows you to recognize when you were wrong, to seek out your blind spots, to test your assumptions and change course. It’s what prompts you to honestly ask yourself questions like “Was I at fault in that argument?” or “Is this risk really worth it?” As the physicist Richard Feynman said: “The first rule is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.” Easier said than done, of course. The Scout Mindset is about how, concretely, to keep from fooling yourself. Throughout the book, I lead the reader through key techniques for becoming aware of your own rationalizations, making more accurate predictions, learning from disagreements, and noticing what you’re wrong about.”

What feelings drive this more rare and difficult mindset? Feelings of curiosity, it turns out, and feeling grounded enough that you are not dependent on ideology or others’ opinions or them liking you, feeling ok rather than weak when you are openminded and proven wrong, and full of yearning to understand the world as it is. I very much hope that her book’s publication in April provides the promised pointers as to how pursue this way of thinking so that we are able to discern truth amongst all the noise and prejudices surrounding it. I believe in a world where polarization has increasingly grown, with tribalism encouraging group think and constraining available information, it is more urgent than ever to help us get to scout mode.

Photographs today depict seedpods of the Western White Clematis, Clematis ligusticifolia. It grows in our NW forests and wetlands. I thought they’d serve as a good example of the difference between what you believe to be true – here are flimsy, fluffy things, their vines probably strangling trees, beautiful but useless – and what you learn when you apply scouting:

The seed floss has been used by natives as tinder for starting fires, as insulation in shoes, and as an absorbent in baby diapers; the stems to make carrying nets and bow strings; the roots to make a shampoo. An infusion or poultice of this plant was applied to sores, wounds, bruises, swellings, painful joints, and was also used to treat chest pain and backaches and to treat horses and other animals. Crushed roots were reportedly placed in the nostrils of tired horses to revive them. Stems and leaves, which have a peppery taste, were chewed for colds or sore throats. (Ref.)

Music is by Chopin. His Preludes include one titled Uncertainty (Op. 28. #5) – we need to tolerate uncertainty to become good scouts…

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Thoughts and Feelings

“Be courageous when the mind deceives you
Be courageous
In the final account only this is important” ― Zbigniew Herbert

I am not good with New Year’s Resolutions. Not good in devising them, and certainly not good in keeping them. I am, however, taking a benchmark date like January 1st at least to think through what I have accomplished with things I cared about, where to continue and possibly how to improve. And then I forget about it…..

My daily writing has been important to me as a tool to focus my thoughts, learn new things, exercise my brain and either offer some teaching, or some cheer, or simply some tangible evidence that we are all in this together, sharing thoughts if not able to keep company with each other.

The delight of writing about my experience of art has been curbed by the restrictions we all face: inaccessibility of travel and museums or galleries. The passion of writing about politics has been severely impacted by the depth to which this realm has sunk into ugliness and despair, at the existential expense of the most vulnerable among us, and the emotional expense of all of us who often can’t bear to hear yet another piece of bad news.

Luckily, the realm of science remains open for exploration as does the domain of literature and poetry, both providing insights and beauty to come in a year that will still not be easy. Gratefully, the everlasting joy provided by nature has no limits either, even if my current photographic explorations are narrowed to the Pacific Northwest – plenty of beauty all around! (Photographs are from last week’s walk at Oaks Bottom. The herons were out in droves – look closely at the water’s edge.)

So I will go on to describe my thoughts, difficult as it may be.

When it comes to the difficulty of describing feelings, I defer to a writer who, for me, has the distinction of infusing us with the courage to live like no other poet I know. (OK, scratch that. I have discovered Emily Dickinson this year, after all. They are in a tie.) The Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert died of causes related to poverty in 1998, despite being recognized as one of the most brilliant European minds of our life time. As a staunch opponent of communism he was later betrayed by many in the Solidarity Movement he had supported, when they turned NeoCon. His work was shaped by the fall-out from the traumas Poland experienced throughout its history, and he managed to convey the history itself, the issue of moral necessity, human suffering but also human resilience, all at once. Here is a fine introduction to the man and his work by his latest translator.

Here is his quest to find the right words, or, more importantly, the right insights.

I Would Like to Describe

Zbigniew Herbert – 1924-1998

I would like to describe the simplest emotion
joy or sadness
but not as others do
reaching for shafts of rain or sun

I would like to describe a light
which is being born in me
but I know it does not resemble
any star
for it is not so bright
not so pure
and is uncertain

I would like to describe courage
without dragging behind me a dusty lion
and also anxiety
without shaking a glass full of water

to put it another way
I would give all metaphors
in return for one word
drawn out of my breast like a rib
for one word
contained within the boundaries
of my skin

but apparently this is not possible

and just to say - I love
I run around like mad
picking up handfuls of birds
and my tenderness
which after all is not made of water
asks the water for a face
and anger
different from fire
borrows from it
a loquacious tongue

so is blurred
so is blurred
in me
what white-haired gentlemen
separated once and for all
and said 
this is the subject
and this is the object

we fall asleep
with one hand under our head
and with the other in a mound of planets

our feet abandon us
and taste the earth
with their tiny roots
which next morning
we tear out painfully

I’ll settle for dragging a dusty lion behind me in the new year, and drinking the water that was not spilled by trembling hands, embracing feelings as well as thoughts, in whatever fashion they are described, all the blurriness contained in me, grateful for new beginnings.

Happy New Year – or at least a content one where we can still connect to planets and taste the earth, something that is happening in today’s music selection as well. Here is Beethoven’s Piano concerto Nr. 4, Op 58.

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Of Apologies and Good Intentions

Many people who celebrate Christmas have a decorated Christmas tree (if they are lucky: tree shortages are reported.) The custom actually predates Christianity by centuries. Ancient Romans decorated trees with small pieces of metal during Saturnalia, their winter festival in honor of Saturnus, the god of agriculture. Modern Christmas trees appeared in the middle 1500’s.

It is customary to put a star on top which symbolizes the Star of Bethlehem, purported to have guided adoring folks to the manger where the Messiah was born. Angels can be found up there (the manger and the tree) as well, the latter ever after Queen Victoria introduced them in her Windsor Castle decorations. Unlikely that they look like the angels from today’s photographs, though. (Here is a lovely history of the Christmas tree customs.)

My thoughts today, however, were prompted by a different star, one used with customary slight of pen by one of my favorite poets to point to the vastness of the universe where even the sun is small, and to our corresponding speck-ness. Yes, I know, not a word, but an image that, you will hopefully agree, captures our limitations.

Under a Certain Little Star

Wislawa Szymborska

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.
My apologies to necessity in case I’m mistaken.
May happiness not be angry if I take it for my own.
May the dead forgive me that their memory’s but a flicker.
My apologies to time for the multiplicity of the world overlooked
  each second.
My apologies to an old love for treating the new one as the first.
Forgive me far-off wars for taking my flowers home.
Forgive me open wounds for pricking my finger.
My apologies for the minuet record, to those calling out from the 
  abyss.
My apologies to those in railway stations for sleeping comfortably 
  at five in the morning.
Pardon me hounded hope for laughing sometimes.
Pardon me deserts for not rushing in with a spoonful of water.
And you O hawk, the same bird for years in the same cage,
forever still and staring at the same spot,
absolve me even if you happened to be stuffed.
My apologies to the tree felled for four table legs.
My apologies to large questions for small answers.
Truth, do not pay me too much attention.
Solemnity, be magnanimous to me.
Endure, O mystery of being that I might pull threads from your
  veil.

Soul, don’t blame me that I’ve got you so seldom.
My apologies to everything that I can’t be everywhere.
My apologies to all for not knowing how to be every man and
  woman.
I know that as long as I live nothing can excuse me,
because I myself am my own obstacle.
Do not hold it against me, O speech, that I borrow weighty words,
and then labor to make them light.

Translated by Joanna Trzeciak

(For language lovers, here is a serious treat – 4 different translations of this poem side by side.)

The poem holds for me a complicated emotional tension, one that has been particularly true in this year, a year that held personal tragedy for our family and shared tragedy for mankind, from the persistence of hatred between those not like each other, the victory laps of greed and power, the premature death of so many to, finally, the unmitigated slide towards climate disaster.

The poem’s endless run of apologies had its echoes in my own head – the sense of unearned privilege against the suffering of the many, the sense of inadequacy in fulfilling public moral obligations or my own demands of a private ethical self. Thinking of yourself as inconsiderate, forgetful, unjustly privileged, over-consuming or all around your own obstacle is, on the one hand, a good thing. Insight could lead to change.

On the other hand, it is also a preoccupation with self, with our own role and importance, with individual choice that might or might not make a difference. I do not read the poem as solely a call to go gently on yourself, allow yourself pleasure, acknowledge that you can’t fix everything, an encouragement to just lead your life, because no-one is perfect. I do not believe that self, alone, is to be the ultimate obstacle, the challenge to what is happening under a certain little star.

The title of the poem that puts the individual under a planetary body really points to the fact, in my reading, that it is not just about me, that infinitesimal small speck in the universe. It is about us, all of us, that live and love, act and die under this sun. It is as a collective, on a shared planet, that we have to change ways, or can change ways, with the individual improvement being a necessary but not sufficient step. The focus on untamed individualism, for good or bad, blinds us to the dire need for concerted action as community. We need to plan, agree upon, and carry out changes with shared intent, because the cause is bigger than just individual remedies of personal imperfections.

I, too, across the years, have labored to make words light in this blog, but these I mean in all their weight.

I will take a little break and resume writing in January. Happy Holidays!

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I dwell in possibility

Nothing you haven’t seen before, if you have followed this blog for a while. The same vistas, the same trees, the same kind of birds. A recurrent destination for my walks, Sauvies Island. And yet….

Yesterday, the light was moody. It felt like dawn had lingered into mid-morning, reluctant to leave to wherever dawn goes, a darker place perhaps.

The birds were moody. Resting one minute, then driven into the air by the hunters’ shots or a hungry raptor chasing their weakest links, no safety here.

Canada Geese, now staying year-round

Snow geese, on their migratory routes, in dire need of refueling and rest, where constantly erupting into their airy circling, feeling threatened.

The ducks were just trying to hide, making themselves small in the water.

The clouds were moody as well. Forming bulwark banks in some places, wispy sheets in others, breaking on occasion to remind us the sun still exists. Flecked and blue skies in alternation, until the rain came and washed the light into uniform grey.

The corn was moody. Late, dry stalks whispering when not drowned out by the cries of a thousand geese. Bordering on water that came too late in the year to be of use. Or maybe it was the hunters whispering in their corn-clad hide-outs.

I was moody. But as always, nature soothed with magic. The sandhill cranes danced.

Each return to this ever changing place reminds me of possibility. I might not gather paradise, but at minimum a distraction. If lucky, a kind of peace that descends temporarily from that everlasting roof of a sky.

I dwell in Possibility

BY EMILY DICKINSON

I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –

Of Chambers as the Cedars –
Impregnable of eye –
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky –

Of Visitors – the fairest –
For Occupation – This –
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise –

Might even spot some flying swans, reminding us of nature’s gift of transition.

Music today is Debussy‘s perfect capture of moody possibility.

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Thoughts on Experience

The Wild Swans at Coole

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty swans.

The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake’s edge or pool
Delight men’s eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?

Don’t sweat the details. Trees displayed late, not early autumn beauty. The paths were muddy, not dry. It was December daylight, not October twilight, and there were surely fewer than 59 swans. A number, I am told that signified something other than reality in any case in the poem, since swans do not congregate in such large flocks and if they did you couldn’t count them…

Other than that, I thought Yeats perfectly captured the experience during my current jaunts. There is the splendor of late autumn, caught in all the rusts and russets, garnet, oranges and gingers I’ve been walking amongst.✅  There is that sense that the lighter steps are a thing of the past, and treading is a bit harder with approaching age.✅  The heart sore? ✅  Nature’s beauty immutable? Ok, Yeats could not have possibly heard about the climate crisis, so we give him a pass on that. Future can only be guessed at? ✅, again.

I know I sound like a broken record, but for me something that transcends the particulars of a given time and/or historical setting, is necessary if not sufficient to make it art. I don’t know the particulars of the Irish turmoil and rebellion in 1916 that literary critics link to the poem, as they do to Yeat’s personal misery as a refused lover, who feared to be cut off from happiness in his approaching twilight years. And I don’t need to know them.

The description of someone seeing time pass by and fearing changes that are not kind, stand on their own, an experience known to all of humanity. The fact of nature’s beauty existing independently from us is timeless – and could be read as a reminder not to take ourselves too serious after all, but be grateful for the lovely cyclic permanence around us. Then again, the juxtaposition of nature, beautiful in each of its stages, but also guaranteed a renewal after each season, and our own linear progression towards a winter without spring, is rather depressing, don’t you think? The words resonate.

Quick, the reliable sharpness of Margaret Atwood to the rescue:

Hm, pull back a bit from exhortation and despair, and come to your own conclusions about a poem written over a century ago, which provided an experiential understanding if not of human impact, then of human frailty.

Not a great help, either….. but maybe I am indeed coming to the wrong conclusions.

(Poem from Atwood’s new collection: Dearly.)

Here are two different versions of the poem set to music.

Photographs were taken in the last 5 days, at Oaks Bottom, 1000 Acres and at the Ankeny Wildlife Blind.

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Reds against Blues

Hard times when sadness hits. Advice comes in all forms and shapes and levels of triteness (if earnestly felt), levels of pragmatism, levels of wishful thinking, or levels of abandon to a higher power. Nothing wrong with picking and choosing among the options, whatever appeals, as long as it lifts the dark.

Today’s Smörgåsbord (some of it found in selected offerings by Maria Popova’s incomparable newsletter BrainPickings) includes

the “human connection and plants will heal” variety,

and the “God will right it, but in the meantime, for God’s Sake, stay busy” variety,

found in a letter by Charles Dickens, written in 1862 to console his grieving sister:

I do not preach consolation because I am unwilling to preach at any time, and know my own weakness too well. But in this world there is no stay but the hope of a better, and no reliance but on the mercy and goodness of God. Through those two harbours of a shipwrecked heart, I fully believe that you will, in time, find a peaceful resting-place even on this careworn earth. Heaven speed the time, and do you try hard to help it on! It is impossible to say but that our prolonged grief for the beloved dead may grieve them in their unknown abiding-place, and give them trouble. The one influencing consideration in all you do as to your disposition of yourself (coupled, of course, with a real earnest strenuous endeavour to recover the lost tone of spirit) is, that you think and feel you can do. . . . I rather hope it is likely that through such restlessness you will come to a far quieter frame of mind. The disturbed mind and affections, like the tossed sea, seldom calm without an intervening time of confusion and trouble.

But nothing is to be attained without striving. In a determined effort to settle the thoughts, to parcel out the day, to find occupation regularly or to make it, to be up and doing something, are chiefly to be found the mere mechanical means which must come to the aid of the best mental efforts.

There is the “always look for the bright side” variety (alas communicated by an artist who took his own life after decades of depression, by drinking a glass of cholera infected water no less) Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky:

I am sitting at the open window (at four a.m.) and breathing the lovely air of a spring morning… Life is still good, [and] it is worth living on a May morning… I assert that life is beautiful in spite of everything! This “everything” includes the following items: 1. Illness; I am getting much too stout, and my nerves are all to pieces. 2. The Conservatoire oppresses me to extinction; I am more and more convinced that I am absolutely unfitted to teach the theory of music. 3. My pecuniary situation is very bad. 4. I am very doubtful if Undine will be performed. I have heard that they are likely to throw me over. In a word, there are many thorns, but the roses are there too.

Of course there’s also Emily Dickinson, who knew that in the end, advice is useless. (And who knew how to mess with readers’ expectations – the poem below could be anything, a description of depression, a descent into madness, an ode to forgetting something traumatic, or a REALLY bad migraine….)

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain

BY EMILY DICKINSON

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading – treading – till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through –

And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum –
Kept beating – beating – till I thought
My mind was going numb –

And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space – began to toll,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race,
Wrecked, solitary, here –

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down –
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing – then –

(How I a d o r e Dickinson – that final ambiguity, finished knowing – it could be the end of knowing, or a state of arrival after plunging where you now know….)

May the planks of reason be sturdy and refuse to break. May a neighbor bring you amaryllis. May your day be busy with a structure that has meaning. May this endless rain stop so I can go out and forget everything while photographing plenty of rose hips among the thorns! November’s red confetti.

Muskrat baby (in November?) agrees – saw him this week.

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“Finding immortality, one pumpkin at a time.”

“Finding immortality, one pumpkin at a time,” was reportedly uttered by Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk in response to the work of the Maniac Pumpkin Carvers, Marc Evan and Chris Soria. (I am skipping his newest book published this September, The Invention of Sound, all about mortality in its most sadistic forms….)

The Brooklyn, NY-based duo has been carving pumpkins for many years. One of their approaches, carving famous works of art into their pumpkins, has been recognized by New York’s Museum of Modern Art. MoMa has ordered an annual pumpkin devoted to a piece from their collection for the last 7 years, so has the Whitney and the Queens Museum of Art. And now Chuck Palahniuk.

Here is a sampling of their work, done these days in cooperation with 12 other carvers, using tools from different trades, including kitchen knives, hardware tools, such as small saws, serrated knives, linoleum cutters (typically used for printmaking), and clay loops (used for trimming in pottery). (Photographs from the website.)

Keith Haring
Van Gogh

The pumpkins, internally wired with little lamps, can cost up to $800. That is a lot for a fleeting pleasure, and not much if you consider the skill that goes into it and the fact that this is probably a one-shot-per-year business.

To put the word immortality and pumpkin into one sentence requires some chutzpah. I cannot think of another organism widely available to observe, perhaps with the exception of sunflowers when they go dry and black, that reminds me so visibly of death and decay. Who hasn’t thought about the fleeting of existence when watching the crisp pumpkins melting into pulp and slime, on one’s doorstep as much as in the fields come winter?

On my visit to Sauvie Island yesterday, the fields were ready to be picked, the greenery already gone, the pumpkins bare for the take. It poured, I could not even leave the car, photographing out of the window. My favorite willow tree had finally collapsed under its own weight, pieces stacked along Reeder Road.

The ponds were dry, not good for November when so much traveling water fowl needs a place to settle.

(The red dirt is where usually the pond resides)

As a result a universe of hunters concentrated around one of the few remaining wet spots, killing scores of ducks by the unrelenting sound of the shooting.

Mortality was on my mind, not immortality. Beauty, of course, as always is the case in nature, visible even in the stark reminders of transience.

Then again, the quest for immortality, or ruminations about it, have also created some – literary – beauty. The ancient Greek texts come to mind, or Wordsworth, but also something decidedly contemporary. Here is Brian Culhane.

THE IMMORTALITY ODE

Bill Evans is quiet, fingers still above the keys,
But ready to begin again and again and again
The first twelve bars before the drums come in,
Just as I am ready for inspiration this evening,
Fingers rehearsing an entrance above the keyboard
Of the Olivetti Lettera 32 I pounded years ago
On Charles Street, nights I wore my father’s
Black cashmere overcoat whenever the steam
Failed to make it up five flights, and back then
Evans waited, too, for his entrance, rain on glass
Waiting to accompany him, and on the B side?
Everlastingness is still there, and all Camus
Said it was, the boulder, the hill, the boulder again
That we come to over and over, pushing—
Quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua
As Lucky said and which my annotated Beckett
Traces to the Latin (qua) for in the capacity of.
As in I qua Sisyphus, I quaquaquaqua greybeard
Old father shuffling along in black cashmere:
The Child is father of the Man, a looped immortality,
While happiness, per Camus, if patently absurd,
Nonetheless may rise with the struggle to old heights
And just might be enough to fill a man’s heart,
Even as Evans once more lifts his fingers for
“You and the Night and the Music,” his solo fresh
As when he first sat down, and the night is young.

And here the referenced music by Bill Evans. Stay alive for now, folks. We need to be around for the official calling of the election…..

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Look Forwards, Stockholm

Yesterday poet Louise Glück was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature. On the positive side, a great decision in favor of poetry over prose, in favor of a woman, in favor of a lifetime accomplishment that impresses with cohesion of topics. A deserved recognition for a woman who overcame numerous, diverse obstacles in her own life, able to make use of the particulars and tying them to the general issues we all are confronting, precisely written up within the framework of her enormous knowledge about and familiarity with the classics, particularly Greek mythology. A poet equally applauded and criticized for her confessional style, and her penchant for dark topics, melancholic tone.

On the other hand, and you knew that would be coming, did we really need a decision in favor of a “safe” candidate, a writer in the realm of the past, with classic, European roots? Are the recurring topics – – betrayal, love, loss and mortality – – what matters most these days, or should we not celebrate someone whose feminism reaches beyond what’s generally seen as a consensus feminism? Someone who forces us to understand the relationship between the political and the personal with inescapable force of language? Where are the heiresses to Audre Lorde or Adrienne Rich, since these writers are no longer with us? Where is acknowledgement for international poets who are not familiars within the White canon?

Glück has won about every literary prize there is. There is no doubt about her deserved standing among the best of contemporary poets. I am more dismayed by the “play it safe” by a Nobel committee which has been riddled with scandals, and perhaps tried to calm a world that is grappling with catastrophic burdens. Here is the reasoning for the prize:…. “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”…. “seeks the universal, and in this she takes inspiration from myths and classical motifs, present in most of her works.”

Individual existence might not be universal, after all, when the color of your skin determines how your life – and death – unfolds.

Here is a NYT interview with her from yesterday after she received the news. I read this after I wrote the blog, happy for the expressed sentiment.

Here is one of my favorite poems of Glück’s, providing a fine assessment of dire reality and simultaneously a forceful invitation to preserve hope.

NEST

A bird was making its nest.
In the dream, I watched it closely:
in my life, I was trying to be
a witness not a theorist.

The place you begin doesn’t determine
the place you end: the bird

took what it found in the yard,
its base materials, nervously
scanning the bare yard in early spring;
in debris by the south wall pushing
a few twigs with its beak.

Image
of loneliness: the small creature
coming up with nothing. Then
dry twigs. Carrying, one by one,
the twigs to the hideout.
Which is all it was then.

It took what there was:
the available material. Spirit
wasn’t enough.

And then it wove like the first Penelope
but toward a different end.
How did it weave? It weaved,
carefully but hopelessly, the few twigs
with any suppleness, any flexibility,
choosing these over the brittle, the recalcitrant.

Early spring, late desolation.
The bird circled the bare yard making
efforts to survive
on what remained to it.

It had its task:
to imagine the future. Steadily flying around,
patiently bearing small twigs to the solitude
of the exposed tree in the steady coldness
of the outside world.

I had nothing to build with.
It was winter: I couldn’t imagine
anything but the past. I couldn’t even
imagine the past, if it came to that.

And I didn’t know how I came here.
Everyone else much further along.
I was back at the beginning
at a time in life we can’t remember beginnings.

The bird
collected twigs in the apple tree, relating
each addition to existing mass.
But when was there suddenly mass?

It took what it found after the others
were finished.
The same materials – why should it matter
to be finished last? The same materials, the same
limited good. Brown twigs,
broken and fallen. And in one,
a length of yellow wool.

Then it was spring and I was inexplicably happy:
I knew where I was: on Broadway with my bag of groceries.
Spring fruit in the stores: first
cherries at Formaggio. Forsythia
beginning.

First I was at peace.
Then I was contented, satisfied.
And then flashes of joy.
And the season changed – for all of us,
of course.

And as I peered out my mind grew sharper.
And I remembered accurately
the sequence of my responses,
my eyes fixed on each thing
from the shelter of the hidden self:

first, I love it.
Then, I can use it.

from  Vita Nova by Louise Glück.

Here are two different bird’s nest songs.

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