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Poetry

There will come soft rains

I meant to brighten your Thanksgiving weekend with imagery of beautiful nature, all kinds of appealing fauna I came across during my southern California sojourn. Alas, I can’t stop my brain and keep my mouth shut. Nature, its lasting beauty and seeming resilience, as well as its wrath, was linked to destruction in my war-preoccupied mind. Thus a poem and a short story derived from the poem, that depict post-apocalyptic nature with us humans no longer playing any relevant role, really any role at all. The way we’re going, that might not be too far in the future.

If you prefer the tranquility of a post-prandial daze, stop reading here and just look at the pictures! No offense taken. My gratitude on this day of Thanksgiving, however, extends to all those refusing to be indifferent.

“There Will Come Soft Rains”
(War Time)

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

by Sara Teasdale in Flame and Shadows, 1920

Teasdale (1884 – 1933) was an American poet who won the first Columbia Poetry Prize in 1918, a prize that would later be renamed the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, yet she was marginalized as a second-rate poet by next generations. Depressed, ill and isolated, she took her own life before she even turned 50 years old. The poet was highly educated and deeply influenced by reading Charles Darwin and thinking through the implications of his evolutionary theory regarding the centrality – or absence thereof – of human kind in nature. A personified Spring and the rest of nature’s representatives in the poem couldn’t care less if we self-obliterated.

She was also a pacifist, whose views had to be carefully phrased into the framework of a pastoral setting in her poetry. After all, this poem was first published in 1918, two months after the Sedition Act of 1918 was enacted. The law made it a criminal offense to “willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of the Government of the United States.” It still theoretically exposed her to criminal prosecution – and if she had the courage to speak out against war, we should have the decency to bear witness.

Fast forward to the 1950s, we have Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) expressing his fears of nuclear war in a short story, August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains’, published in his Martian Chronicles. The setting is a house filled with technological gadgets that continue their daily routines and tasks, when the world and all its inhabitants have been wiped out by nuclear war. The house in Allentown, CA, and a badly maimed dog, are all that remains. There is cooking, cleaning, laying the table and reading a daily randomly selected poem to the extinct inhabitants – Teasdale’s poem, as you might have guessed. Random debris is pushed down the incinerator, called evil Baal, a reference to the praying at the altar of false gods, our belief in the gifts of technology that prove futile when they are made obsolete by even more powerful technological inventions like the atomic bomb.

Ironically, nature has the last word: a violent wind lights a fire in the house which burns it down, the last vestige of human habitation. Only a ticking clock survives.

The worry about nuclear arms has resonated across the media during the weeks since the war started. Really years, since it is a topic for both the ongoing war in Ukraine and the bombardment of Gaza by Israel. Focussing on the latter, I found that a recent essay by Roger Cohen in the NYT is required reading, spelling out some of the causal mechanisms that have led to the chasm now impeding any hope for peace.

“Almost forgotten are the Palestine Liberation Organization’s recognition in 1993 of Israel’s right to exist in peace, and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s determination to pursue that peace, a decision that cost him his life in 1995 at the hands of an extreme right-wing Israeli assassin who said he acted “on the orders of God.”

These were the ephemeral glimmerings of shared humanity, soon quashed.

In the intervening decades, Hamas and the ultranationalist religious Israeli right have each extended their influence. The conflict now involves fundamentalist religious ideologies, distinct in critical regards but equally convinced that all the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River has been deeded to them by God.

A political and military struggle between two national movements for the same land can be resolved by compromise, at least in theory. France and Germany settled their differences in Alsace-Lorraine. Peace came to Ireland. But absolutist claims of divine right to territory appear impossible to reconcile.” (My emphasis.)

I am citing at length because the religious fervor is something we regularly underestimated and are increasingly facing at home as well. But I also want to mention some other facts: an Israeli minister, Amihai Eliyahu openly stated that dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza was an option. (He was suspended from Cabinet meetings, and later claimed it was a metaphorical statement. Israel has not confirmed or denied its nuclear capabilities.) Nothing metaphorical about the bombs that have been dropped, though. According to the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, as of three weeks ago already, Israel has confirmed that it bombed over 12,000 targets in the Gaza Strip, with a record tally of bombs exceeding 10 kilograms of explosives per individual. That is the equivalent of two nuclear bombs (absent radiation.)

“Due to technological developments affecting the potency of bombs, the explosives dropped on Gaza may be twice as powerful as a nuclear bomb. This means that the destructive power of the explosives dropped on Gaza exceeds that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Euro-Med Monitor said, noting that the area of the Japanese city is 900 square kilometres, while the area of Gaza does not exceed 360 square kilometres.”

1200 human souls lost their lives in Israel, indiscriminately slain by Hamas attackers, with over 200 hostages taken – 36 of them children! – , and women violently raped. As of now, 14.500 human souls indiscriminately killed in Gaza, with over 5000 children ! among them (and that is not counting the lives lost in the Westbank over the last months.) Food, water and fuel cut off, preceding likely epidemics. The report of the World Food Program of the United Nations is shocking with its implications of starvation.

Sick and wounded dying for lack of medical treatment, the former not even making it into death by war statistics. All this without even the ability to flee for a civilian population, given that the borders are closed on all sides, by Israel and Arab nations alike. Flight is, however traumatizing, at least a possibility for Ukrainians – current estimates vary that between 6 and 8 million people left their homeland to escape war, of a total population of 36 million in Ukraine.

No end in sight. Certainly no guarantees that this will make Israel safer. A heightened chance that war will regionally spread. No obvious solutions for a longterm arrangement either, since both the two-state solution or a unified non-ethnocratic state seem to be relegated to fantastic wishful thinking given the conditions on the ground.

And, for that matter, no “gentle rains” either, since we’ve managed so thoroughly to wreck climatic conditions on this planet that there will be violent storms and deluges instead, not yet known to either Teasdale or Bradbury, once human suffering has been terminated for good. Or by evil, as the case may be.

It’s easy to feel depleted and paralyzed. Let’s practice hope, though, starting with being consciously grateful for all the privileges and blessings we enjoy on this particular day. May they strengthen us to face what we have to do in days to come.

Music set to the words of the poem.

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Patterns of Conquest

By Scott Greer (1922 – 1996)

Scott Greer was Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Urban Studies at the University of Madison, Wisconsin, and also a published poet. His focus as a social scientist was the issue of globalization, in particular the issue of increasing societal scale which implied necessary subdivisions. That, in turn, leads to loss of common institutions and bonds of trust, according to his theorizing. He was a committed pacifist, often documented in his poetry. The poem is dedicated to another anti-war intellectual, Nazi-refugee Lucian Marquis, who had served in the American army in Europe during WW II and was vocally opposed to the Vietnam war, starting the very first teach-ins as a professor at the University of Oregon during the 1960s. Considering that the “massive shuddering currents we have wrought” are presently shaking up our world again with no solution in sight, I thought this poem would provide some reminder that we need to “take the measure of the force that burns….”

Photographs are of SoCal plant patterns, starkly geometric, given hat the notion of asymmetry of warring factions dominates my mind right now.

Today’s music was dedicated by the composer to the victims of fascism and war – specifically to the victims of fire bombing.

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Eaton Canyon, Revisited

October 21st was Ursula Le Guin’s birthday. I was reminded of that by, of all people, my beloved, who is not exactly into literature and/or poetry, but knows how much it – and her authorship – matters to me. Oblivious to that date, I had actually been thinking about her a few days earlier, while hiking Altadena’s Eaton Canyon, completely transformed from how I had experienced it the first time last April.

Verdant then, with roaring water, now dry, with but a trickle. Full of bloom then, color and the songs of birds, now reduced to pattern, lounging frogs and lizards. Still heartrending beautiful.

I was thinking of the many poems I had read where Le Guin describes the very essence of landscapes, desert as well as coast or woods, and how I could not remember a single one in its accurate wording.

That stood in contrast to one about war, that for obvious reasons now rose to the fore:

The Next War

It will take place,
it will take time,
it will take life,
and waste them.

I don’t know about you, but even when I try, when I immerse myself in beauty combined with physical exertion – something even a few miles will do these days – I cannot distract myself away from the sorrow of the extant and future loss of life in the Middle East. When I read about proposed solutions to the conflict, it seems to me that people are just throwing out words, hopes, and closer inspection reveals that no one really has a clue as to how to bring about realistic change, on ALL sides. (Ukraine, by the way, not forgotten by me, either.) Here is an essay worthwhile contemplating that tries to make a distinction between legality and morality of retaliatory actions, and here is one that talks about the difficulty of speaking to the issues without being labeled anti-semitic or islamo-phobic, rendered to silence when we need to speak up.

When I came home from the hike I tried to find a desert poem to post, but chanced on the one below, from her ultimate collection of poems,  So Far So Good, finished 2 weeks before her death in 2018.

The volume offers meditations on nature, the recurring topic of so much of her work, but also on aging and the relationship between body and soul. Meditations that are moving, wise, courageous – and also seem an incredible luxury provided by peace time, not available to those tortured, killed and abducted, starved or rained on by bombs. As a committed pacifist, she would have likely agreed.

How It Seems to Me 

In the vast abyss before time, self

is not, and soul commingles

with mist, and rock, and light. In time,

soul brings the misty self to be. 

Then slow time hardens self to stone

while ever lightening the soul,

till soul can loose its hold of self

and both are free and can return

to vastness and dissolve in light,

the long light after time. 

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Fauré seems fitting today for music.

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Days of Mourning, Days of Clinging to our Humanity

I had driven down to Los Angeles anticipating glorious times among family and Southern Californian wonders, plant life included. Instead my head is filled with disbelief and grief about the atrocities unleashed upon the world.

Mourning for civilians of all ages massacred in their homes, at festivals, in the fields. In numbers that, relative to population, would amount to over 40 000 here in the US in a matter of two days. Not counting the wounded. Not counting the innumerable ones left behind, having lost children, parents, siblings, friends. Not counting the trauma that will cling to the survivors for ages. Not counting the disillusionment of the idea there would be one safe place in the world for Jews.

Mourning for civilians of all ages with almost half of them under the age of 14, exposed to white phosphorus bombs, deprived of food and water, told to leave their homes within a 24 hour window, with no place to go, all border crossings remaining closed. A population that has seen the last election in 2006, when 1 million of them were not even born, under the thumb of fanatic Islamists whose goal to destroy any Jewish state includes the knowing sacrificing of their own people. Bent on undermining rapprochement between parts of the Arab world and Israel.

Mourning for the peacemakers on all sides who have been out-gamed by religious zealots on all sides who scorned compromise or political solutions.

Mourning for the consequences of an all-out war for those who will be killed and maimed and traumatized. A war that will create displacement, re-enacting the Nakba, the catastrophe for Palestinians expelled from their lands in 1948. Consequences that will also include fuel to the fires of anti-Semitism, when the extent of suffering of a civilian population trapped in a 140 square mile strip becomes visible to the world, a world that historically preferred to ignore the plight of the Palestinians. Mourning for the Jewish civilians who will then be victimized in the next cycle of violence, in Israel and across the world. As Steven C. Beschloss wrote:

“It’s a stunning, heartbreaking moment on so many levels: The violent horror for every individual and family involved. The grim fact that this will escalate not only as a result of Israel’s retaliation and effort to recover hostages through urban warfare in a densely packed city but possibly also by increasingly triggered neighbors. The tragedy of a Mideast region in which war not peace, conflict not calm, has defined its modern and ancient history. The terrible reality for people who continue to confront a world where enmity is a central fact of life.“

Mourning. But also determined to cling to our basic humanity and acknowledge the suffering of all victims caught in this maelstrom. That does not imply justification of terrorist actions, or excusing potential military defiance of the laws of war. It does not mean political analysis – time for that comes later. It means empathy with the barrage of sorrow unleashed upon this world.

Here is a poem by German Jewish poet Mascha Kaléko who fled Nazi Germany to exile in the U.S and then Israel. It reminds us of the compounded trauma that exists and has been triggered again.

Music today provides a ray of hope, but also tears.

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Resilient, flexible, forgiving: the Gifts of Lillian Pitt

“…and we will remain here as long as we can see ourselves in the stars.”

– Minnesota Poet Laureate Gwen Westerman, from her poem We come from the Stars.

***

IMAGINE coming into a room filled with certain vibes: feeling peaceful, enjoying the flow, feeling grounded, dressed up to party, enjoying the rain, feeling the happiest ever, preparing for a calm rest, ready to unwind, feeling the brightness of the day, blending in, feeling proud of your people, feeling regal, filling the sky with stars. I don’t know about you, but these emotions, expressed in the titles of Lillian Pitt‘s newest exhibition, elicited a sense of joy in me, as well as a smidgen of envy, when I walked among them and the sculptures they were attached to. How can we tap the source of such serenity?

A collection of Pitt’s work is currently on display at the Bush Barn Art Center in Salem. It is an assembly of masks, carved wooden figures, ceramic and cast-glass sculptures, shimmering with color, wit and reflections echoing the positive affect of their titles. The exhibition The Art of Lillian Pitt: Past and Present is on view until the end of October, with an artist talk scheduled for Saturday, September 30, 2023. It is more than worthwhile to visit, if only for the reason that Pitt announced it to be her last public showing. I could not envision a more beautiful way to bow out.

Much has been written about the artist (Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs/ Wasco/ Yakama), born on the Warm Springs Reservation in 1943 and living in Portland for the last 60 years, so much that it is hard not to sound repetitive. She is the recipient of multiple arts Awards and part of many, many public and private collections nationally and in Canada. I happily refer to detailed accounts in an Artswatch interview with Dmae Lo Roberts from 2021 and a short documentary video by Jacob Pander from last year. My title lines were borrowed from something Pitt said in that video when asked about her approach to art as well as life. 

What I want to focus on, rather than repeating facts about her evolution as an artist, is the double role she has powerfully used to enrich all of us: that of a member of her own Native American community who reminds the world of both the history and the contemporary presence of tribal life, art and achievements, and that of an artist who brings beauty and new knowledge to the rest of us who are exposed to her works inside or outside wherever we happen to encounter them. Works that teach and produce wonder at the same time. 

Here are a few examples of public art projects that I happen to encounter on my walks, or when taking the Max train (admittedly before the pandemic.) They introduce both familiar and not so familiar imagery to us passing by, clues of a history that has not necessarily been frequently taught. At the Rosa Parks Trimet station depictions of baskets, pictographs, petroglyphs and salmon remind us of the tribal modes of existence in the Pacific Northwest. 

If you live in NE Portland you have surely encountered the Mammook Tokatee Housing around Ne 42nd Ave, which offers surprises around every corner. 

If you walk along the South West waterfront, the River Guardian greets you regardless of the weather – but in full brightness, when the sun hits just right during mid-morning, she sends out these luminous rays that feel like a life force.

And last but not least, at the plaza in Hillsboro there are multiple basalt boulders that reveal their secrets with differing degrees of ease – 30 petroglyphs have been carved by Pitt in an installation called Riverbed. It is a timely reminder that the city is located on Tualatin Kalapuya (Atfalati) land, in this specific case. These are just a few of the many examples that can be found. In general, her public art works weave themselves into our daily lives, making us conscious with whom we share a space and how long lasting a culture and its artifacts or religious objects teaches us about the history of the region and its inhabitants that predate us by ten thousands of years.

***

IN CONTRAST to the large configurations discoverable across the city, the current exhibition has many smaller objects, among them Pitt’s traditional Raku-fired masks,

and the familiar presence of She Who Watches.

There were also numerous wood carvings adorned with, at times, whimsical details. I must admit I was partial to these for idiosyncratic reasons. One of my childhood pleasures was to be allowed to open my grandmother’s sewing box and take out a can with buttons, often large and unusual, playing with them and arranging them to my liking. Multiple buttons can be found on Pitt’s work as well, making my fingers itch…. 

Left to Right: Star person enjoying the Flow, Star person feeling peaceful, Star person feeling grounded, Star person with many stars. Details below.

Details:

Last row: Star Person enjoying the copper rain.

Star persons? I learned from Pitt’s introduction that different tribes had origin stories about the Star People, who helped generate agricultural skills and introduced the most important food groups, according to the Navajo People’s legends; the Sioux used stories of the Star and Cloud people to instill hope among suffering, with animal ancestors coming down from the stars to guide the way home. 

These Star People stories have now found instantiations in the star people capturing color and light: here are some of my favorite instances:

Top to bottomt: Star Person ready to unwind, Star Person feeling the brightness of the day, Star Person preparing for a calm rest, Star Person feeling the happiest ever, Star Person blending in. 

I could not help but wonder if these were companions during mental preparation for retirement, an artist’s recital to herself that a life so full as her’s deserved a rest, unwinding, happiness. And that that would unfold. I cannot imagine for a second, though, that a creative mind like Pitt’s would ever slow down, much less shut down. Maybe the public exposition of her work, but not the ideas themselves. After all, she is a story teller in the grand tradition of her people, full of experience, wisdom, knowledge to be shared. And storytellers need to tell their stories. 

Of course, this is the pleading voice of the audience, here, who doesn’t want to let go of opportunities to explore the legends. To hold the beauty, a beauty, in my book, most emotionally conveyed in Pitt’s ceramic work:

Starperson feeling the strength of the Snake Goddess

Star Person Blushing

Star Person filling the sky with stars.

Resilient, flexible, forgiving: attributes of the clay that she shapes into testimonials to Native American history. Attributes that shaped her into one of our most important sources of artistic expression inseparable of that history. 

Dear Lillian Pitt, could we respectfully ask you to please postpone retirement a little longer?

***

Here is the full poem about what the Star People brought.

Wicaŋhpi Heciya Taŋhaŋ Uŋhipi

(We Come from the Stars)

Stellar nucleosynthesis.
That explains 
where everything

in our universe

came from according to astrophysicists who 
only recently discovered the cosmological constant causing
the expansion

of our universe.

Our creation story tells us we came from the stars to this place Bdote
where the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers converge,
our journey along the Wanaġi Caŋku, 

in our universe,

that stargazers later called the Milky Way now disappearing 
in the excessive glow of a million million urban uplights. 
The original inhabitants of this place,

of our universe,

we are Wicaŋhpi Oyate, People
and will remain here as long as 
we can see ourselves 

in the stars.

Gwen Westerman (Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota Oyate/ Cherokee)

***

THE ART OF LILLIAN PITT: PAST AND PRESENT

SEPTEMBER 1 – OCTOBER 29, 2023

Bush Barn Art Center + Annex

Bush’s Pasture Park
600 Mission St. SE
Salem, OR 97302

Wednesday-Friday, 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and noon to 5:00 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday

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Sunflowers, Umpteenth Edition.

Yes, this time of year again. A few years ago I paired the real flowers with the painted ones (see below). I figured this year we just look at the real thing, the surround where they grow and the words they bring to mind.

Got Sunflowers?

So walk with me, and bring a bucket, since the farm where I went near Hillsboro allows you to pick all things ripe. Grapes were beckoning – the vines laden – or is it loaded? Whatever, lots of grapes. Still dry on Wednesday, the day before the rain came.

But I had come for the sunflowers – equally attracted by the buds,

the blossoms,

This one had a drop of water in the center like a jewel

the stems and the leaves. Intent to paint with the camera:

Emil Nolde would have been proud of me – except I am not proud of him…

Daily wildlife made an unanticipated appearance. It pays, if you are old and walking slowly, so that critters like these are more curious than frightened. S/he put on quite the show.

The makeshift tents to protect against the sun had their own structural beauty, folded and unfolded, plastic, metal rods, netting all claiming attention.

I can never decide if the poem below is full of wisdom or soppy (or both.) But in August, with the annual radiance of sunflowers, it speaks to me. (Although I’d prefer to embrace the present rather than reveling in memory. Move forwards. not backwards.)

You Can’t Have It All

But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands
gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger
on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.
You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look
of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite
every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,
you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love,
though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam
that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys
until you realize foam’s twin is blood.
You can have the skin at the center between a man’s legs,
so solid, so doll-like. You can have the life of the mind,
glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting pettiness,
never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who’ll tell you
all roads narrow at the border.
You can speak a foreign language, sometimes,
and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave
where your father wept openly. You can’t bring back the dead,
but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands
as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. And you can be grateful
for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia, grateful
for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels
sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts,
for passion fruit, for saliva. You can have the dream,
the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot sand.
You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed,
at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping
of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise.
You can’t count on grace to pick you out of a crowd
but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump,
how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards,
until you learn about love, about sweet surrender,
and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind
as real as Africa. And when adulthood fails you,
you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond
of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas
your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.
There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother’s,
it will always whisper, you can’t have it all,
but there is this.

by Barbara Ras

The sky filled with clouds, the rain would appear in force the next day.

Music today played by the talented Sol Gabetta, who was seemingly dressed in a cloud, but her cello sounded more like thunder, appropriately Shostakovian. If that’s a word. They seem to be reticent today!

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Drought

My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed

I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,

with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.

― Adrienne Rich The Dream of a Common Language (1978)

“I HAVE to do this: believe that there is the possibility of reconstitution. I have to be sure of the fact that there will always be those who are already engaged and can be joined, so no one has to go it alone.” Such were the thoughts on my hike last week, when assaulted by the heat and the views of so many oak trees either diseased, or dying, or dead.

The grasses will recover.

So will the wild blackberries, although the fruit dried on the wine, hard little balls of no use to perusing wildlife.

The trees, though, are suffering.

Eventually I made it to sturgeon lake, now just a puddle. Small California sunflowers lined the shores where there is usually water, a golden band screaming: beauty!

The herons and egrets joined the pelicans, some of them roosting in the trees behind the water.

A flock of Western sandpipers, really a murmuration, undulated as a cloud in the air, and looked like blossoms on a tree, in a particular spot. They were miraculous, shimmering, moving hard in the hot air. They are difficult to photograph and to detect, just look closely.

I had to sit down in a shady spot twice during a hike that I used to do briskly, without any sense of fatigue then. Yet, I am still hiking. I am still casting my lot with those who love nature and try to raise consciousness about the climate crisis. I still believe change is possible. And the birds still signal wonder.

Music today is the same mix of sadness and resilience that colored this week – from Poland with decidedly Jewish melodies perfect for the upcoming High Holidays, I’ve been listening intently.

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Green thoughts in a green shade.

In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

On Auden’s grave marker, in Kirchstetten, Austria.

***

Their Lonely Betters

As I listened from a beach-chair in the shade
To all the noises that my garden made, 
It seemed to me only proper that words
Should be withheld from vegetables and birds.

A robin with no Christian name ran through
The Robin-Anthem which was all it knew, 
And rustling flowers for some third party waited
To say which pairs, if any, should get mated.

Not one of them was capable of lying, 
There was not one which knew that it was dying
Or could have with a rhythm or a rhyme
Assumed responsibility for time.

Let them leave language to their lonely betters
Who count some days and long for certain letters; 
We, too, make noises when we laugh or weep: 
Words are for those with promises to keep.

by W.H.Auden

Our cucumbers

W.H. Auden’s 1951 poem depicts him thinking out loud in the garden shade, less praise and more lament, in my opinion. At first sight, the poem is presumably about language, which makes us “betters” as a sign of evolutionary development, but also introduces lying and consciousness about how much our days are numbered. Is language something that improves our existence or is it a curse, and we would be better off to be like plants and critters, who thrive in the absence of language?

Our tomatoes

Underneath it is, as so much of Auden’s poetry, about love. The one we wait for, the one which is withheld, the absence of which is felt as loneliness. Words manifesting in broken promises. Auden was known to connect over and over again to Freud’s writings in  ‘Civilisation and its Discontents’, which posits a negative relationship between how civilized we are and how happy we might be. The rule, Freud claims, is that humanity will show increasing unhappiness the more civilized we become. Human progress, and note I am oversimplifying his claims here, is closely linked to increases in loneliness and depression. So, there is this whiff of sadness lingering around Auden’s words.

I, on the other hand, was sitting in my garden chair in the shade, too hot to venture anywhere else, eternally grateful for words. They made it possible to read Auden and noticing the link to words written in the 17th century by another poet,  Andrew Marvell, in his renowned poem, The Garden. Here is my favorite line:

“(To) a green thought in a green shade.“

Salvia on its way out

The next stanza after this line describes a paradisal state (and he refers indeed to the biblical paradise) until it becomes clear in the stanza after that that a solitary existence won’t do – and things go downhill from there, with Eve’s appearance. But let that wait for another day, for now let the soul glide into the boughs.

Zillions of zinnias

Pictures today obviously from my garden, with eternal gratitude to our friend M. who donated all the tomato starts. We now have regular salad nights with homegrown lettuce, cucumbers and tomatoes, unless the deer got to the beds first. Speaking of which – one of them, plunked under my plum tree, surely had green thoughts in a green shade, of green plums shifting to a sweeter blue, most likely.

And given that we prefaced this today with an exhortation to praise: I am so eternally grateful for a tree- lined place in the heat, and my heart goes out to the houseless who fight this on asphalted streets and dusty roads. We are so privileged.

The three dahlia plants that survived

And here is some jazz in the garden…

Japanese Anemone just starting to bloom.

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Shape, and Shifting

Too hot to write. So I borrow words and burrow in the archives to find the matching images. Have not yet made it to the beach so far, a deep regret. And now it’s August, crowded, hot. But looking at these creatures so amenable to metaphors is at least cooling….


Difference

The jellyfish
float in the bay shallows
like schools of clouds,

a dozen identical — is it right
to call them creatures,
these elaborate sacks

of nothing? All they seem
is shape, and shifting,
and though a whole troop

of undulant cousins
go about their business
within a single wave’s span,

every one does something unlike:
this one a balloon
open on both ends

but swollen to its full expanse,
this one a breathing heart,
this a pulsing flower.

This one a rolled condom,
or a plastic purse swallowing itself,
that one a Tiffany shade,

this a troubled parasol.
This submarine opera’s
all subterfuge and disguise,

its plot a fabulous tangle
of hiding and recognition:
nothing but trope,

nothing but something
forming itself into figures
then refiguring,

sheer ectoplasm
recognizable only as the stuff
of metaphor. What can words do

but link what we know
to what we don’t,
and so form a shape?

Which shrinks or swells,
configures or collapses, blooms
even as it is described

into some unlikely
marine chiffon:
a gown for Isadora?

Nothing but style.
What binds
one shape to another

also sets them apart
— but what’s lovelier
than the shapeshifting

transparence of like and as:
clear, undulant words?
We look at alien grace,

unfettered
by any determined form,
and we say: balloon, flower,

heart, condom, opera,
lampshade, parasol, ballet.
Hear how the mouth,

so full
of longing for the world,
changes its shape?

– By Mark Doty

From My Alexandria. Copyright 1995 by Mark Doty. Used with permission of the poet and the University Illinois Press.

Music by Scriabin today, expansive like the sea.

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This Sleepy Backwater

Housekeeping first: I am taking part of next week off from the blog, need to spend some time photographing, something that has gotten short shrift over all the writing.

***

I had to laugh at this headline found yesterday in an article in VOX:

“Especially the “if true” part” – UFOs, dead alien pilots, reverse engineering, secret government programs… the rumor mill is at it again, this time through a whistle blower, a former government official named David Grusch, who has worked in the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office, who gave public testimony before a House of Representatives committee Wednesday.

No evidence provided, just more talk of hear-say. But what I find interesting is this eternal preoccupation with a world “out there,” instead of saving the one we’re currently wrecking, or at least loving it for what it is. I have written about the psychological function of alien narratives previously. Today I will just turn to the tried and true, a poet with whose views I agree more often than not, and whose remarkable ways of getting a point across with seeming ease belying masterful construction always puts me in awe.

She is content enough with our sleepy backwater…

The Ball

As long as nothing can be known for sure
(no signals have been picked up yet),
as long as Earth is still unlike
the nearer and more distant planets,

as long as there’s neither hide nor hair
of other grasses graced by other winds,
of other treetops bearing other crowns,
other animals as well-grounded as our own,

as long as only the local echo
has been known to speak in syllables,

as long as we still haven’t heard word
of better or worse mozarts,
platos, edisons somewhere,

as long as our inhuman crimes
are still committed only between humans,

as long as our kindness
is still incomparable,
peerless even in its imperfection,

as long as our heads packed with illusions
still pass for the only heads so packed,

as long as the roofs of our mouths alone
still raise voices to high heavens —

let’s act like very special guests of honor
at the district-firemen’s ball
dance to the beat of the local oompah band,
and pretend that it’s the ball
to end all balls.

I can’t speak for others —
for me this is
misery and happiness enough:

just this sleepy backwater
where even the stars have time to burn
while winking at us
unintentionally.

by Wislawa Szymborska

translated by S. Baranczak and C. Cavanagh

from View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems, by Wislawa Szymborska

Photographs today are of some of the more alien looking flora I’ve come across this year in this sleepy backwater. Wish it would stay sleepy and not burn up….

Here is a track – Of Beauty – from Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (THE SONG OF THE EARTH). Beautiful music about a beautiful world.


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