9-30-24  MARIE PONSOT--ABOUT CLARITY

MARIE PONSOT—PATHETIC FALLACIES ARE BAD SCIENCE BUT

On reading Susanne K. Langer's Mind

If leaf-trash chokes the stream-bed

reach for rock-bottom as you rake

the muck out. Let it slump dank,

and dry fading, flat above the bank.

Stand back. Watch the water vault ahead.

Its thrust sweeps the surface clean, shores the debris,

as it debrides its stone path to the lake,

clarity carrying clarity.

To see clear, resist the drag of images.

Take nature as it is, not Dame nor Kind.

Act in events; touch what you name. Abhor

easy obverts of natural metaphor.

Let human speech breathe out its best poor bridges

from mind to world, mind to self, mind to mind.

Yet, I admit the event of the wood thrush:

In a footnote Langer (her book rapids-clean

like the spring-water aired over sleeked rock)

says she witnessed an August bird in shock

when a hawk snatched its mate. It perched, rushed

notes fluting two life-quotas in one flood,

its lungs pushing its voice, flushing the keen

calls, pumped out as the heart pumps blood,

not in twilight or warning but noon & wrong,

its old notes whistled too fast but accurate.

I read this drenched in bird-panic, its spine-

fusing loss all song, all loss; that loss mine

awash in unanswered unanswered song.

And I cannot claim we are not desolate.

I find myself reflecting now and again on the state of the world and how we humans fit into what is a churning stream of events. Part of my confusion with all of the vectors and forces at play is how to see what is happening with more nuance and subtlety. It is altogether very easy to attribute to our advanced technologies and sciences certainty and predictability. We build trust in our cell phones and computers and the information that the sciences turn out. But I have to remind myself that everything we do in science or technology and, indeed, in our own personal lives is experimental. By that I mean that we are continually posing hypotheses about what decision to make, what action to take, what to say in our relationships with the world around us. But it is also true for me to remember that many experiments don't prove the hypotheses initially proposed. So, I am often left somewhat confused as to what comes next in my understanding or how to proceed with words or actions. This outcome is familiar to scientists whose work is predicated on taking the next step, where a negative outcome is just the beginning of another line of inquiry. I don't think this is necessarily the way most of us in our daily lives think about what we might consider a setback or a rebuke of our best intentions. We have emotional lives that complicate how we see ourselves in the great flow of life. But I propose that we can, in fact, use our emotions, often conflicting ones, to come to a deeper understanding of our lives and to see that we share them with other species. After all, we have come from nature and live our lives dependent on what nature offers us and to realize that all beings and things are interdependent.

Ed Yong has written a book, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, in which he surveys how the senses familiar to us (he lists as chapter headings smells and tastes, light, color, pain, heat, contact and flow, surface vibrations, sound, echoes, electric fields, magnetic fields) or senses not at all gifted to us but alive and functional to what might be termed “lesser” species on an arbitrary hierarchical scale. He points out that only science has been able to describe through experiments what some of these exquisite senses are and what they might mean to the life and survival of the creatures that possess them. But his extensive survey begs the question: What other senses are experienced by other species that we can only guess from our species-specific (and often limited) array of sensory inputs? Yong includes a quote from William Blake on the first page of his book that echoes what Marie Ponsot includes in her poem. It is:

“How do you know but ev'ry Bird

that cuts the airy way,

Is an immense world of delight,

clos'd by your senses five?”

Ponsot's poem title draws us in to this new realm of perception by referring to “pathetic fallacies,” defined as the attribution of human emotions or characteristics to inanimate objects or to nature. The “but” in the title is a key word, an interruption in our usual way of thinking and prepares us for what she ponders in her poem. I think it is all too easy to dismiss the sensescapes of other creatures as we cling to our own, a very normal and human trait.

The first stanza takes the stand of someone observing nature's force as if the event were strictly scientific and practical. If there is muck in the stream-bed, then one clears the way for the water to flow more freely and cleanly. All the observations of the water are factual and obvious and the human factor in moving the water is also described. Humans are agents in the “sweep” of nature's force. There is emphasis in the last line on clarity and this seems to be assumed as the outcome of the efforts to channel nature's energies. Very human and hubristic, it seems. Yet, there is an outstanding metaphorical reference to flowing waters here. The metaphor is one used in religious settings to refer to God's flowing presence and, also, to the refreshing and cleansing presence of Jesus. The clarity of flowing water is a universal reference. I am not certain, of course, that the poet wants us to note this meaning at the beginning as much as to reinforce how water does clarify and cleanse but not with any religious overtones. On the other hand, perhaps she wants us to arrive at the religious meaning by working our way through the poem to finally clear out what we might have been led to believe is a “pathetic fallacy.”

The second stanza is an attempt to shore up what the first stanza suggests by framing how one might think of human control, eliminating all emotional import to what is, on the surface, a very scientific occurrence. The poet takes up the idea of “clarity” again, to see nature clearly as a neutral realm of cause and effect. We are strongly encouraged to avoid looking at the natural phenomena in any way but in causal terms and also to name the phenomena as they appear and not attempt metaphorical allusions. The only hint in this stanza of what is to come are the lines: “Let human speech breathe out its best poor bridges/from mind to world, mind to self, mind to mind.” The “best poor bridges” lets us know that there might be more to perception than we can observe or manifest.

The third stanza is really a narrative within the narrative of the poem but it represents a turning point in the poet's thinking. The “yet” at the beginning of the stanza echoes the “but” in the title, indicating something contrary to expectation or hypothesis. The story is gleaned from a work by Susanne Langer in her three-part book Mind: An Essay on Human Feelings (1967, 1972, 1982). Once again there is a reference to Langer's approach to perception as being “...rapids-clean/like the spring-water aired over sleeked rock.” There follows the incredibly dramatic and tragic event in the life of a wood thrush when its mate is “snatched” by a hawk. The response of the thrush casts off what might be seen as a “natural” event, something one might observe scientifically as behaviors characteristic of both thrush and hawk. But the poet here casts off any restrictions applied by a “pathetic fallacy” to relate in visceral terms what the thrush experiences, framed in the terms of what a human (and the poet certainly) feels when such a loss is experienced at a deep level.

The final stanza is a resolution of sorts. The poet tells us how she has been moved physically to the loss expressed as the thrush's “keen calls” and finding no answer to the tragic loss expressed by the bird, equally unable to find an expression for the loss except in song. The final line: “And I cannot claim we are not desolate.” It is the “we” in this line that makes common cause with the thrush and underscores the “clarity” of the first stanza as seeing a shared emotion with another species, as if it were your own loss. The clarity of science is bound with the clarity of emotional content, each contributing to a wider view of the human species embedded in a world of countless species, all of which are adapted to their own sensescapes. And these sensescapes are miracles of adaptation and subtlety and amazingly beyond our own limited senses. And there is no way to know if the many species with their own unique sense experiences are also bound with emotional content that we can't perceive. We need to give up our arrogant attitude about how special we are in the whole scheme of life. We need to see ourselves as changing and evolving and perhaps hoping that one day we will understand all those “lesser creatures” on their own terms in their own realms. Marie Ponsot outlines for us what that might look like as we use our own senses as stepping off points to a wider and deeper understanding of the “immense world.”

I am continually amazed to see how a poet's sensibility and sensitivity can emerge from so few words, leaving so much room for our own engagement. More than that, as we study the poem and polish what is there, we are making a mirror in which we see ourselves reflected differently. In this poem, the word “clarity” at the beginning takes on more nuanced meaning as the poem progresses to the end when we discover there is more to being in nature than neutral observation. We are in nature and nature is in us and our senses merge and emotions are shared. We are also offered the opportunity to read into the poem the notion of how human beings fit into the schemes and structures of this world of ours. We are not the end-point of evolution but only on the top rung of beings on a ladder that extends out into the future. Perhaps, noticing this, we can better manage our shared affairs with greater humility and honor all beings and things as created just as we have been.

 

8-30-24

THE SOUL SENSING—THOMAS HARDY AND EDITH PIAF

THOMAS HARDY—THE DARKLING THRUSH

I leant upon a coppice gate

When Frost was spectre-grey,

And Winter's dregs made desolate

The weakening eye of day.

The tangle bine-stems scored the sky

Like strings of broken lyres,

And all mankind that haunted nigh

Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be

The Century's corpse outleant,

His crypt the cloudy canopy,

The wind his death-lament.

The ancient pulse of germ and birth

Was shrunken hard and dry.

And every spirit upon earth

Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among

The bleak twigs overhead

In a full-hearted evensong

Of joy illimited:

An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,

In blast-beruffled plume,

Had chosen thus to fling his soul

Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for caroling

Of such ecstatic sound

Was written on terrestrial things

Afar or nigh around,

That I could think there trembled through

His happy good-night air

Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew

And I was unaware.

EDITH PIAF—LA VIE EN ROSE

Hold me close and hold me fast

The magic spell you cast

This is la vie en rose

When you kiss me, heaven sighs

And though I close my eyes

I see la vie en rose

When you press me to your heart

I'm in a world apart

A world where roses bloom

And when you speak, angels sing from above

Everyday words seem to turn into love songs

Give your heart and soul to me

And life will always be

La vie en rose

I thought that love was just a word

They sing about in songs I've heard

It took your kisses to reveal that I was wrong

And love is real

It is said that whatever your attention polishes turns into a mirror. In that sense, then, when I first read this poem I had not turned on my full attention and it impressed me as a simple poem about how gloom was broken by birdsong. Perhaps the poet's attention to the details was his version of making a mirror. Perhaps he was documenting how the cold and barren landscape of his own life was interrupted (and maybe reclaimed from the gloom) by even as fragile a creature as the thrush. As I sat with this poem over several weeks, more and more of what it implied or linked was my way of letting my attention polish its surfaces.

Parsing this poem on its most obvious surface separated the first two stanzas from the last two. The first stanza begins to paint the very gray and cold landscape that has seized the poet. There is frost, a gray sky resembling the “strings of broken lyres.” There is no one here but the poet, all others have retreated into their houses.

The second stanza extends the gloom of the landscape to portray “the Century's corpse outleant (made visible)”, perhaps a reference to the dregs of war and maybe World War 1, which Hardy (1840-1928) certainly lived through. The corpse takes on a definite substance, as if a person whose death is accompanied by the outlines of the gloomy landscape—the “cloudy canopy,” the lamenting wind, all signs of life gone, and spirits disheartened.

Then, there is a transition, an opening window as Jane Hirshfield calls the part of a poem where some sliver of light is let in. In stanza three the poet hears birdsong (he is not alone, after all), albeit from a thrush “aged, frail, gaunt, and small.” The bird is part of this barren and cold landscape but managing to bring all that his soul can produce for the poet to hear. The birdsong is described as “ecstatic sound” emerging from a place not easily recognized by the poet but a source of “some blessed Hope/whereof he knew/And I was unaware.” The bird's song could not have been placed at the beginning of the poem to have the effect of bringing to life what is otherwise a bleak place in a bleak season.

It was at this point that I wondered what I might have missed in a poem so clearly defined by its contrast of the first two stanzas with the last ones. It seemed simple enough but I was drawn in by taking his references and themes a bit further by what I call a process of spelunking to suggest diving more deeply into caves of meaning. For instance, the thrush is often meant to symbolize inner peace, peace of mind, unlooked for hope (especially in dark times), and Nature herself. There is also the possibility of rebirth and regeneration in a world of decay and chaos, a moral winter. All of these references seemed to fit what Hardy was trying to tell us about the role of the fragile bird in a world of great constriction, ennui, and hopelessness.

Another reference to song and what is described as a “frail” bird reminded me of Edith Piaf (1915-1963), often referred to as a “waif” and “The little sparrow” for her diminutive stature and bird-like physique. Edith Piaf's own biography is an endless lament of abandonment, loss, exposure to the underbelly of life. She, in fact, could be the “aged thrush” of this poem, prevailing over circumstances of a life that might be described as “Winter's dregs made desolate/The weakening eye of day.” But she, too, was able to compose and sing “ecstatic” sounds that lifted her away from the winter of her own life time and again. The symbolism attached to the thrush could just as easily describe the spirit of Edith Piaf.

One of Piaf's most famous songs is “La Vie en Rose,” the lyrics of which are included here with Hardy's poem, came to my mind as an illustration of yet a deeper level of meaning. The word “ecstatic” suggested to me an expression of what might be called a mystical experience. The long history of mysticism in the Christian tradition includes women who sequestered themselves out of devotion to God (the Beguines, a collection of sisterhoods of the 13^th Century). Their devotion took on the flavor of sensual experiences and even a marriage with God with all that that involves, almost a direct sexual relationship, a relationship of the body and its sensing.

This very interesting level of meaning is explained more clearly by Dorothee Soelle in her book The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance. I will quote her directly in order to show a full appreciation of the relationship between sexuality and spirituality.

“Those who at any moment know why and to what end they do this or that, have shut themselves off from the power of the rose that blooms without why or wherefore. In the face and for the sake of this energy that repeals rules and roles, eroticism seems to me a better name than love or sexuality for this place of mystical experience.”

“All religions testify to intersections of eros and religion that arise from a sacred power. Hildegard von Bingen—to name an example that applies to much of women's mysticism—speaks of the human libido in metaphors of heat and fire, very ones she uses when naming the divine energy.”

“The preferred place of mystical experience is eroticism.”

“... this piety understands the erotic as something that is in the Creator's very self. What destroys the human being is to be separated off rather than being united. Eros is one of God's names.”

“Distinguishing between the giver and the gift is an essential first step that appears frequently in mystical tradition. God is not to be loved for the sake of what God gives but for the sake of God's self.”

“Mystical love for God holds together both what causes us to tremble in fright and what never ceases to fascinate us.”

“... in love the boundaries of time, space, and assigned role are crossed over; mysticism is an ever renewed deconstruction of socially constructed sexual roles. It forever subverts and transcends the relations of domination and submission.”

“But love that crosses fixed boundaries is endangered also by a modern self-sufficiency that from the very outset denies mysticism of the erotic.”

“All mystics know that the incomprehensibility of God grows rather than diminishes when God's love comes close to us.”

“In this world of ours, religion is as superfluous as it is indispensable. In a mystical sense, however, religion is indispensable particularly for people who love. For religion still names our poverty and reminds us of the power in us that holds together and heals. Religion still speaks of the sanctity of life for all that we can locate in love.”

The questions that come to mind are: How are sexual energy (the energy of eroticism) and spirituality integrated? And how does all of this relate to Hardy's poem, a product of the Victorian Era? I read Hardy's poem as an invitation to break away from the mental landscape of the first two stanzas and to open up to what I like to think of as mystical sensuality. I am probably far off the mark here but it seems to me that Hardy was preparing us for the relationship sung in Edith Piaf's song. I think Soelle is correct when she writes that the freedom of mysticism is bypassed in contemporary religions, except in the mystical traditions associated with all of the major ones (Judaism/Kabbalah, Islam/Sufism, Hindu/Vedanta and Bhakti schools, Christianity/contemplative tradition). I am not educated enough with all of these to know if there are erotic connections within them. But it seems to me that Hardy's experience and insight in the second half of his poem are not arrived at despite the bleakness of the first half but because of them. This illustrates that part of the mystical experience that has as much to do with “the dark night of the soul” (in St. John of the Cross's telling) as it does with the transcendence that becomes possible. Again, it is a unification and integration of a full life experience that contains both dark and light, both bleakness and “blessed Hope.” The human species is blessed with the possibility of just such a path in a life fully realized and actualized, contingent on having passed through the stanzas of life that describe bleak winters.

My own experience leads me to think that Descartes decapitated our cognitive abilities from our physical bodies (“I think, therefore I am”). It has taken me the majority of my lifetime to begin to understand what mysticism is and, also, how the physical body with all its intricacies and energies is integrated with the powers of consciousness. But it seems logical to me that the miracles of the physical and those of the cognitive are all of one piece, a whole that also includes what is called spiritual. How could it not be the case that physical, sexual, energy is not integrated with our spiritual selves? If Descartes was wrong in his formulation, then we gain freedom to explore how our sexual selves interact with our mystical selves. I appreciate Sorelle's need to use a word different from “sexual” because of its many negative associations, especially as it relates to what is most basic and animal in us as a species. But it challenges us to use that same word to find a place for what identifies us, in part, as wholly integrated individuals. “Eroticism” has its own categories of reference and doesn't really ground sexual energy in a total body experience.

Many people are probably uncomfortable thinking about and using the terms sexuality and eroticism, let alone imagining the actual experiences they imply. I am one of those people too. I am not writing from a soap box. But the energy behind the sexual urge is universal among all living things and beings. There are reasons for developing such a powerful energy source among living things. The reproductive urge is an engine that drives much of how we think and act and exists as it does for “purposes” of maintaining life's abundance. Linking sexuality and spirituality is not a connection that makes much sense intuitively—or in the Cartesian universe. But so much of what we perceive of the world filters into our subconscious. Sexual energy is available for channeling into other pursuits besides sex and may include the mystical urge. In his book, An Immense World, Ed Yong explores the senses humans share with a set of creatures across the wide landscape of life. He makes the point with all of the senses that other creatures are attuned to their Umwelt (the causes and conditions of their particular ecosystems) in ways that we do not sense in our own Umwelt. The differences are very subtle and extend from senses of smell, hearing, touch, pain, taste, and vision. We simply don't have the sensing equipment to mimic what other species can experience. But that begs the question about what subtle senses we do have that we do not exercise. I think that the mystical sense is one of these. I think it is available to everyone but lacks actualization because we are attuned to what distracts us in our lives by technology, general science, and the media. We are a calculating, poll-taking, statistics analyzing, fact-based society. Many critics of our society refer to these distractions as “The Machine.” But it may be that the mystics among us have tapped into a different plane of sensing the world.

What does all of this have to do with Thomas Hardy's apparently simplistic poem? A poem is a vehicle, a portal, for larger and deeper concerns. The poet gives out hints and leaves it up to us as readers to make of them what we will. Hardy is speaking out of the milieu of his own life, his personal Umwelt, and offering us insights into what that life is like. We can pick up the themes and incorporate them into our own time and space. The beautiful linkages are gifts the poet has encouraged, I think. As with the polished objects, our attention to the hints make a mirror that reflects back at us someone we might be surprised to see there. Things we observe are not always what they seem to be at first glance. So it is with this poem of Hardy's. Yes, it is a natural landscape he describes and the soul song of the thrush is part of that landscape. But the poem is also about darkness and light, about the beauty of what he describes as an “aged thrush” whose song is “such ecstatic sound.” Doesn't that hint at a different level of meaning in his poem?

I think Piaf's poem/lyrics (I am thinking of how Bob Dylan's song lyrics were judged as poetry when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature) are more than an expression of sexual energy and the attendant love for another. They are sensual in a way that Soelle described among the women mystics over time. They are an expression of a full life in which emotions, feelings, passions, are not separated from some cold and barren concept of decapitated cognition. They are a linkage with what is incomprehensible and necessary and beautiful.

My sense of mysticism is that it is about mutuality and co-creation as well as a desire for intimacy and unity with the higher concept of the divine. For the mystics with whom I am familiar, apprehending the divine is as much God knowing them as it is them knowing God in the fullness allowed by the limits of human senses, cognition, and emotions. Hardy assigns “some blessed Hope” to the song of the thrush, but I think it could also be an expression of Hardy's love for the world (as Edith Piaf's song is a paean to mystical love), only temporarily dampened by “Winter's dregs.”Love for the world and all it holds is the mystical life if it recognizes our terrestrial being as well as a transcendent link to divine creative energy. This, then, is another channel for the sexual energy that tends to define us in all that we do. And it is this energy that we can choose to utilize in subtle ways that also express what a whole life contains. Perhaps a love for and a marriage with the divine presence is about finding grounding in the only life we have with the only body we have with all its senses.

CLIVE JAMES—NATURAL SELECTION

EXPLAINING SUFFERING

Natural Selection

The gradual but inexorable magic

That turned the dinosaurs into the birds

Had no overt, only a hidden, logic.

To start the squadrons climbing from the herds

No wand was ever waved, but afterwards

Those who believed there must have been a wizard

Said the whole show looked too well-planned for hazard.

And so it does, in retrospect. Such clever

Transitions, intricate beyond belief!

The little lobsters, in their mating fever,

Assaulted from the sea, stormed up the cliff,

And swept inland as scorpions. But if

Some weapons freak equipped their tails for murder

He must have thought sheer anguish all in order.

Source of all good and hence of evil, pleasure

And hence of pain, he is, or else they are,

Without a moral sense that we can measure,

And thus without a mind. Better by far

To stand in awe of blind chance than to fear

A conscious mechanism of mutation

Bringing its fine intentions to fruition

Without a qualm about collateral horror.

The peacock and the tapeworm both make sense.

Nobody calls the ugly one an error.

But when a child is born to pain intense

Enough to drive its family all at once

To weep blood, an intelligent designer

Looks like a torture garden's beaming owner.

What struck me about this poem was the poet's ambivalence about what human suffering looks like. I make the distinction between pain and suffering, just as the Zen Buddhists do. They teach that all of us humans will experience pain. They call that the first arrow, one we can't control and one that often surprises us. Then there is a second arrow, one we inflict upon ourselves. It is the second arrow that causes suffering. The challenge humans have is to avoid the second arrow or, at least, make an attempt to remove it. The distinction between pain and suffering has been a good teacher for me over the years but especially in my later years when pains show up more often and second arrows are more difficult to remove. I don't make the distinction between physical and mental pains, believing that they are equally uncomfortable and relate to the entire body in which all systems are connected.

This poem raised many questions for me, ones I have for the poet. In the first stanza, he is entertained by what he calls “magic” and this refers to what cannot be discerned by human observation but which occurs over millennial time spans, what Darwin described in his provocative work on the evolution of species changes. The poet is unsure that such “magic” of change is a result of some “hidden logic” but, altogether, too steady and determined to be attributed to chance. This establishes one point of ambivalence.

In the second stanza, he introduces the idea that the “delicate transitions,” while clever and beautiful in their intricacy, also include what might be seen as malevolent intentions resulting in what we might interpret as murderous effort, all part of the hidden order of change. This stanza relates to what is observed in the natural world as part of the evolution that changes lobsters of the sea into scorpions of the land.

In the third stanza, the poet introduces what might be the force behind all the intricate details of evolutionary change. An ambivalence here is whether or not to refer to this force as a “he” or “they,” not an unusual question for us who are observing the miracles of natural changes. Because the changes include all good as well as evil, he can't assign to the changes any force with a “moral sense.” Now, with it settled for him that good and evil are all part of the picture of evolution, he rejects any planning or intent that he considered at the beginning. Now, he is willing to invest in chance as the moving force behind the changes, for who would consciously design a system that involves pain and suffering? This is another instance of the poet's ambivalence. Good and evil rendered by design or chance? An additional ambivalence in this stanza is to wonder how such a powerful force in nature can't be “measured.” Our lives are shaped by the technology we experience and by the mindset that technology can deliver to us explanations for all phenomena—and solve all problems we encounter. The poet is ambivalent about the possibility that such a force as powerful as evolution might be the result of some unseen and immeasurable force.

What happens in the fourth stanza is to equate what happens in nature to peacocks and tapeworms are the same things we as humans experience as pain. The ambivalence here is that the poet is able to understand the good and evil among nature's creatures but he is unable to explain human suffering. He ends his thoughtful poem with the idea that if the force governing all things can inflict pain and suffering on its creatures then surely it must smugly exult in such power.

But we humans don't have much evidence that the prevailing force actually wishes us pain and suffering. If we conjure up a Prime Mover, then how do we define its powers? Another valuable question is to ask: What do humans believe they deserve from this life? Are we looking for ways to escape the human fates of disease, disability, depression, depravity, addictions, and death even though most of us would admit that those are common conditions of our individual lives. We are to expect such conditions just as a matter of being human and I doubt anyone would argue their occurrence. It is very common for those afflicted to look for some reason, some meaning, to the pains to which we are subjected at one time or another. The poet's example of a child born with pain is especially poignant, in that we understand that conditions will appear as we age, but we can't imagine pains of such magnitude being delivered to a child. This is another ambivalence that equates pain with age but can't include the pains and suffering of children.

In some ways this poem addresses the idea that we can attribute good things and a steady and happy life to a Prime Mover when all is well but we answer the question about what we deserve when we blame that Mover with what we see as unwarranted pains and suffering. The natural selection of organic changes implies that species will evolve over time subject to the vectors and forces operative in the life we and other species share. If a Prime Mover is involved, then it seems reasonable (logical?) that everything a living creature might experience can happen, whether perceived as desirable or abominable. If a Prime Mover is not imagined, then human pains and suffering are borne free of intention and, perhaps, malevolence or indifference.

It is my impression that this poem is asking us readers to consider what ambivalences we entertain when we think of human pain and suffering (do we even imagine such things for other sentient beings?). I can speak for myself when I say that I have had pains and their attendant suffering. It is remarkable to me that often the pains (the first arrow) can be healed, leaving suffering (the second arrow) behind to linger and fester and debilitate. I now trust my physical/mental body to heal according to the mysteries and miracles of all the organ systems contained in my skin bag. I am now more aware of the presence of the second arrows of suffering and I am getting better at avoiding them but, short of avoidance, better at removing them as soon as I know they are there. I am not always successful at this.

Interestingly, thinking in this way about pain and suffering does not challenge me to posit a Prime Mover or, in contrast, to eliminate one from my thoughts. I do believe in one but I don't expect such a force to coddle or rescue me in my life and I trust such a force to encourage me and give me strength to work with the conditions that are essential and inevitable just because I am human and subject to the same conditions that have visited hundreds and hundreds of generations preceding me. The poet seems to accept an “intelligent designer” but places blame and experiences anger and frustration as each of these different arrows pierces his heart. He is willing to view his Mover as conniving, lacking in morals, punitive, petty and capricious, perhaps a plotting and indifferent force (is this payback for our “original sin” in the garden by the Mover?). Perhaps the “selection” of the poem's title refers to what agency humans can exercise in choosing how to manage both first and subsequent arrows. I believe we do have a choice to select what we will do with the second arrow that comes at us as an accompaniment of our pains. This is not to say such effective action is easy. It is to say that we must in some fashion be awake and accountable to our own conditions, to see them as part and parcel of the miracle of our species and not as catastrophes delivered upon us by some unseen and incomprehensible force. We do not need to assign blame anywhere. I believe this perspective allows for bearing witness and for greater compassion for self and other. And, if we have such compassion, who is to say it does not come from the Prime Mover itself? Do we manifest the conditions we perceive in the Mover?

Clive James's ambivalences are good for us as readers. They are good because they cause us to consider how we see the world and how we see our roles as an interdependent species. It might cause us to wonder what unseen and immeasurable Force might be operative in our lives and the lives of all sentient creatures with whom we share a planet. Ultimately, such considerations might make us more aware of how time passes and we are subject to a state, death, in which all pains and suffering cease here in our earthly realm. In some way, we as humans have been naturally “selected” to experience birth and death and everything in between, everything that defines us as one species among thousands, a species with profound capacities and deficiencies, the whole catastrophe of living as we do. 

7-3-24,  A. R. AMMONS--GRAVELLY RUN AND HYMN

A RIFF ON MYSTICISM

GRAVELLY RUN

I don't know somehow it seems sufficient

to see and hear whatever coming and going is,

losing the self to the victory

of stones and trees,

of bending sandpit lakes, crescent

round groves of dwarf pine:

for it is not so much to know the self

as to know it as it is known

by galaxy and cedar cone,

as if birth had never found it

and death could never end it:

the swamp's slow water comes

down Gravelly Run fanning the long

stone-held algal

hair and narrowing roils between

the shoulders of the highway bridge:

holly grows on the banks in the woods there,

and the cedars' gothic-clustered

spires could make

green religion in winter bones:

so I look and reflect, but the air's glass

jail seals each thing in its entity:

no use to make any philosophies here:

I see no

god in the holly, hear no song from

the snowbroken weeds: Hegel is not the winter

yellow of trees: surrendered self among

unwelcoming forms: stranger,

hoist your burdens, get on down the road.

HYMN

I know if I find you I will have to leave the earth

and go out

over the sea marshes and the brant in bays

and over the hills of tall hickory

and over the crater lakes and canyons

and on up through the spheres of diminishing air

past the blackset noctilucent clouds

where one wants to stop and look

way past all the light diffusions and bombardments

up farther than the loss of sight

into the unseasonal undifferentiated empty stark

And I know if I find you I will have to stay with the earth

inspecting with thin tools and ground eyes

trusting the microvilli sporangia and simplest

coelenterates

and praying for a nerve cell

with all the soul of my chemical reactions

and going right on down where the eye sees only traces

You are everywhere partial and entire

You are on the inside of everything and on the outside

I walk down the path down the hill where the sweetgum

has begun to ooze spring sap at the cut

and I see how the bark cracks and winds like no other bark

chasmal to my ant-soul running up and down

and if I find you I must go out deep into your

far resolutions

and if I find you I must stay here with the separate leaves

I am never sure when I am ready to tackle a poem, as it is never clear to me when I have collected my thoughts about what the poet has presented. That is the case with both of these poems by A. R. Ammons. I get a certain feeling about the poems from the beginning but then further considerations make me want to know more about what might be said in them. I am tempted to know more about the poet and how he might have created some slice of autobiography in the poems. But there is something to be said for letting the poems engage the imagination just as they appear.

To engage my imagination is to see where the poems reflect back at me something I have experienced in my own life. I suppose this is an act of affirmation, something that seems to be very human but also something that allows even the most esoteric or opaque work of art an opportunity to breathe as we breathe. I think this is true for all works of art that attract my attention, be they poems or paintings, art installations, dance, or music.

Both of these poems are grounded. By that I mean that both contain references to nature and to a more specific biological state of living things. Ammons seems ensconced in nature and that might reflect his own background as one who majored in biology in his formal education. But it is not necessary to know that. What is important for me to notice is that he observes nature in its macro- as well as its micro- manifestations. His interactions with natural phenomena in “Gravelly Run” and “Hymn” make them the object with him as the observer. I think of this stance as having one foot in the realm of nature/worldly life and the other foot placed in whatever stands against that as a place where spiritual ideas and feelings are present and alive and may even be the destination for a journey through nature's abundance.

I think Ammons wants us to see that observations of nature's beauty and mystery are more than an escape from worldly experiences but are a source with which one in a world of calamity and noise can merge as a participant or even a receptacle of whatever might be considered divine grace. He says in “Hymn”: “You are everywhere partial and entire/ Your are on the inside of everything and on the outside.” “You” in this poem is God to my way of thinking. He reaches this point of insight having observed lakes and clouds and even single-celled organisms (coelenterates—jellyfish and corals). But this is more than just describing them. It is about finding their existence as portals to the realm in which mystery and human destiny cast shadows. The poet finds these connections, not despite the natural phenomena set apart from spiritual matters, but because of them. And it is the mystery and beauty of them that stir something in his soul. Still, he returns to his worldly state among the phenomena:

“no use to make any philosophies here:

I see no

god in the holly, hear no song from

the snowbroken weeds: Hegel is not the winter

yellow of trees: surrendered self among

unwelcoming forms: stranger,

hoist your burdens, get on down the road.” [“Gravelly Run”]

No, what he observes are only evidence of things not seen, those things being what interpenetrates the life we lead (yes, he calls himself a “stranger”, a stranger to what can be experienced only from quickenings of the heart), the burdens we bear, the emotions and feelings that emerge within us on a daily basis, based on what the world offers in distractions and desires. Time and temporal existence are part of our existence but timelessness is also an imagined state of knowing. He puts it this way in “Gravelly Run”:

“for it is not so much to know the self

as to know it as it is known

by galaxy and cedar cone,

as if birth had never found it

and death could never end it:”

This is not a solipsistic poem. It is not really about the observer but only as the observer is another of the phenomena of nature. And the reality of being human sets one apart from whatever one can imagine as the Creator, the spirit that interpenetrates all things and beings. In “Hymn,” he uses the phrase “I know if I find you I will have to ...”, using it three times as follows:

“I know if I find you I will have to leave the earth

and go out

over the sea marshes and the brant in bays”

“And I know if I find you I will have to stay with the earth

inspecting with thin tools and ground eyes”

“and if I find you I must stay here with the separate leaves”

The journey the poet is describing is a progression from what might be a desire to escape the earthly beauty to a final stanza realization that he “must” remain on earth, perhaps to continue what amounts to worship of the mystery and beauty ingrained in natural phenomena (and, as in “Gravelly Run,” to “hoist your burdens, get on down the road”). It is these phenomena that are the only visible evidence of what lies behind the veil of the spiritual life. But the poet seems comfortable with this arrangement: “and praying for a nerve cell/ with all the soul of my chemical reactions/ and going right on down where the eye sees only traces” [“Hymn”].

In her own way, Mary Oliver, another poet exploring heaven and earth, once said about how to approach one's life:

“Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.”

That is the poet's charge, one poet to another and one person's formula for engagement with earthly life. I expand this admonition to include all beings and things that we might encounter in our own personal journeys through life. It is no mystery in these days that there are forms and forces in earthly life that present great challenges at a time when many of us feel unprepared to manage the waves of change and the threats we might perceive from those changes. I do not think poetry, or any art form, can offer an escape from what arrives at our doorsteps on a daily basis. But I do believe in what the Zen Buddhists propose and that is to use art forms as a way to confront and live through what seems most threatening and fearful. It is no challenge to enjoy the joys, beauty, and the moments of happiness and successes. The challenge that poetry, for instance, can answer is the encroaching unknown of a world built on consumerism, on pleasure as an end it itself, on extraction, on technology designed to blur and manipulate our personal and communal lives. Poetry as one art form can be a portal for reestablishing right balance in a world that seems out of control. It is also a portal for right action in our personal lives, reigniting personal connections and communications over time that feed kindness and compassion. I think imagining a better life for everyone is realistic if we can imagine our own inner lives as active and engaging and the source of spiritual health. “Telling about it” beckons others to share in what we have noticed and what we think about those things. Art forms can do this. Art in the form of deeper listening, considered speech, shaping a life of ethics and morals, and supporting the less fortunate are all examples of artful action. One can be an artist within the constraints of this earthly life, just as Ammons is suggesting to us in his two poems. It is what we notice (what we pay attention to) and what meaning we make of them that makes everyone a potential artist.

Several more ideas come to mind as I think more deeply about these two poems. One is to wonder about the vocabulary we use all the time with some words falling out as obsolete and others being added or even invented to get closer to something whose expression seems inadequate. Here is Ammons with his background in biology using nomenclature for describing natural phenomena, a vocabulary that makes communication universal among the interested. Because he mixes into his poems references to natural phenomena using universal nomenclature that is understandable by those interested as well as references to the more mysterious realm of spiritual life, I wonder if words we no longer use to refer to what might be heavenwardly oriented could be revived and help more of us understand what that realm and those words mean in the context of our worldly lives today. I am not sure that inventing new words for what previous generations could name in their orientation to the spiritual life would be helpful. This brings those experiences and the words used to describe them back into the light of our curiosity. Perhaps this would depend on a greater degree of reflection on what shape the spiritual realm actually takes for us. So many citizens are leaving formal church/synagogue/temple affiliations that it is no wonder that the words that sustained the faithful in the past have fallen out of daily use. I am thinking of words like: sin, forgiveness, redemption, devotion, sacrifice, penitence, atonement, heaven and hell—all solid words with meanings that might or might not challenge us in our lives today. But they might also open up more nuances of meaning that deepen our relationship with nature as well as one another.

Another idea that strikes me about these two poems is that Nature (as in Mother Nature) has no pretenses. The truth in nature, while incompletely explored and described (thus, its mysteries), is its basic formulation, open to us to observe and relate to. Nature is also neutral when it comes to knowing or acting on behalf of human beings. Our efforts to control nature have met with mixed results, not all of which are successes by any measure. But my sense is that nature will manage her own processes in spite of what humans do to them. This is humbling and valuable in that regard for us humans, as we have begun to believe we humans are the controlling agents in all things when, in fact, what we have hoped to control with our technology is beginning to control us. We could use more humility.

All of these ideas have been spurred by how Ammons has shaped these poems. He presents dichotomies with the option of interpreting them as unities. He suggests this as much in his relationship with both nature and the spiritual realm. He invites the reader to form whatever meaning those relationships generate, as all poets attempt to do, I think. It is all about thinking—and paying attention, as Mary Oliver shouts to us.

5-25-24--THOM GUNN--IN SANTA MARIA DEL POPOLO

PALPABLE MYSTERY

IN SANTA MARIA DEL POPOLO

Waiting for when the sun an hour or less

Conveniently oblique makes visible

The painting on one wall of this recess

By Caravaggio, of the Roman School,

I see how shadow in the painting brims

With a real shadow, drowning all shapes out

But a dim horse's haunch and various limbs,

Until the very subject is in doubt.

But evening gives the act, beneath the horse

And one indifferent groom, I see him sprawl,

Where he has fallen, Saul becoming Paul.

O wily painter, limiting the scene

From a cacophony of dusty forms

To the one convulsion, what is it you mean

In that wide gesture of the lifting arms?

No Ananias croons a mystery yet,

Casting the pain out under name of sin.

The painter saw what was, an alternate

Candour and secrecy in side the skin.

He painted, elsewhere, that firm insolent

Young whore in Venus's clothes, those pudgy cheats,

Those sharpers; and was strangled, as things went,

For money, by one such picked off the streets.

I turn, hardly enlightened, from the chapel

To the dim interior of the church instead,

In which there kneel already several people,

Mostly old women: each head closeted

In tiny fists holds comfort as it can.

Their poor arms are too tired for more than this

--For the large gesture of solitary man,

Resisting, by embracing, nothingness.

Reading and parsing poems is an exercise in reflection, a way to embed them in one's wandering life. For me, this is how poems come “alive.” This is how they add to my life and work on whatever powers I have to make sense of this roiling and unsettled world. When I read a poem, I see what is on the page and from then on it makes its way into my thoughts and my thoughts tend to shift according to what the leadings of the poem suggest. Individual words take on new meanings and I also encounter new words that are not part of my vocabulary. I find references to things and beings that are unfamiliar to me but meaningful to the poet and, thus, important for my understanding. The marvelous part of all of this is that the poem shifts and changes as I do. Or, perhaps, I change as the poet and poem uncover for me the layers of understanding. I begin to see what the poet has seen and I feel what might have been the poet's experience. It is an act of embodiment. There is no gaining or goal in any poem beyond how the poet gets the work on paper. From then on it is available to become part of a curious life. I do not think of reading poetry as a hobby, that something that one does when one doesn't know what else to do with idle time. It is a spacious and capacious working out of an intention in the moment. It is a passing look into something that might contain the infinite or the infinitesimal, or both. The leadings of poetry are vast and not easily contained. They are portals through which the reader can enter into the space of the interior life from the world of toil and distractions and fleeting meanings. The poet and reader can enter together.

What is the mindset of this reader that makes poetry so important?

As I live longer with each passing day, I seem to become more sensitive to the state of having one foot in the secular world and the other foot in the spiritual realm. I look for or make connections in everything I read and this makes the effort a fruitful one of personal edification as well as one of continual discovery. Reading and parsing poems highlight these distinctions. Reading this poem by Thom Gunn (1929-2004) is no exception. This has been a complex poem for me, as I flipped from one stanza to another to discern what attracted me to it in the first instance. There are many references in this poem and connections made by the poet. I was fascinated by the Caravaggio (1571-1610) painting the poet tries to understand and wondered how much of the poem that followed was in some measure a biography of the painter and maybe some shared autobiography with the poet. I don't think either one of them was a confessed religious person but everything about this poem is about having one foot in the spiritual realm and the other one in the mundane life all of us experience, a life of sensory experiences that shape what we can ever know of the mysterious spiritual life.

Poems aren't meant to make meanings for the readers as much as they exist to open up those possibilities and to draw into some form what plays in the mind of the poet. In this poem, Gunn has to wait for the sun to rise high enough to illuminate the painting (often titled “Conversion on the Way to Damascus”) and it is clear that he has come to see this painting in a church, an unlikely venue for a painting masterpiece hung within the shadows. Still, the play of light and shadow obscure the painting enough to make him wonder what he is seeing. He returns later in the day to be sure of what he was seeing. There is then light and shadow, the dim light early on making it difficult to see what Caravaggio has presented. Is this the foot in the secular world hidden within the church setting? Is this a preface to what we might make of the painting's subject and, maybe, an early suggestion of what we are to make of the play of illumination and darkness later on in the poem?

Once the poet has been able to examine the painting in better light, he picks apart the elements of the painting that support the biblical story of Ananias curing Saul's blindness and thus converting him to the discipleship of Jesus. In this process, one of transformation for Saul become Paul, Saul is given a new name. This made me think about what it is to have a name and how we identify one another by our names. We identify with our own for many reasons and we know others (if only superficially) by their names. The “other” is named and seen and, thus, belongs. The symbol pictured in the painting is that of Saul flat on his back with both arms uplifted. Is this a gesture of belonging, of acceptance, or of dubious wonder, a skeptical refusal of all that has befallen him (including receiving a new name that marginalizes who he thought he was) in the hands of Ananias? Is it a gesture of unchosen fate, of helplessness in the presence of God's power, of some version of refusal, or of gratitude?

The third stanza of the poem tells another story, one of the poet reflecting on what Ananias intended; a spiritual revival, or was it just a mission to exorcise sin? Cure of Saul's blindness brought back the sensory world to him but there was something converting “in side the skin.” At this point in the poem the poet recalls another Caravaggio painting in which a “young whore” is clothed in resplendent dress (“Venus's clothes”) but destined to be victimized in what is a very graphic turn for the poem. But this seems to illustrate, once again, the foot that stands in the secular world, apart from the pull of a more spiritual nature that seems to course through the entire poem.

It is interesting, in the fourth stanza, that none of these reflections on the potential for “enlightenment” and spiritual conversion are convincing enough for the poet. But here are old women, in the same church in which conversion is the theme, not with open hands and uplifting arms, but praying in the secret (“closet”) of their hearts, too tired to make the same dramatic gesture that so dramatically expressed Saul's all-encompassing conversion, if it was a conversion after all. Is it possible that Saul was already a man of the spirit (he was Jewish before his conversion to Christianity) and that his gesture was one of refusal? The old women are not so dramatically inclined nor able in their tired state to lift arms. Yet, the foot each has placed in the spiritual realm brings them to a place of “resisting, by embracing, nothingness.” The balance, then, is perhaps equal weight on the secular foot as well as the spiritual foot. What is to be seen is the gesture, or lack of one, but still an expression of what the poet feels is the mystery of conversion or transformation, something ephemeral and available to all of us regardless of our state of fatigue or blindness or state of sin. The “nothingness” recalls what Zen Buddhists refer to as the space of enlightenment, a space either populated by all possibilities or an infinite void to which no words can attach or describe, a vast space unimaginable and incomprehensible but still present for all of us in our daily toil, unsuspecting of conversion.

The dictionary terms for what has happened to Saul/Paul are shades of conversion. “Conversion” is 1) adopting a new religion (this is the formal intent of the story and painting about Saul), 2) change from one belief, opinion, or practice to another—or to a deeper loyalty to faith. “Transformation” is 1) to change markedly the form or appearance (the whore, for instance) and 2) to change a nature or function or condition. On the other side of conversion and perhaps what Caravaggio wanted to imply are “revelation,” a manifestation of divine will or truth, and “epiphany,” a spiritual event in which the essence of a given object or manifestation appears to the subject, as in a sudden flash of recognition.

None of these nuanced words seems to describe the experience of the old women, whose daily lives, despite the drudgery of them, are still able to access the same divine condition of acceptance, mercy, and grace. In some way, it seems to me that poet Gunn has found a way to imagine his own life in a way that was a rebuke to being a gay man at a time when sin and mystery were mixed together and “an alternate/ Candour and secrecy in side the skin” were possible. Perhaps the same was true for Caravaggio whose life was punctuated by excessive sensory and sensual experiences. Perhaps the same is true for all of us at any age and in all times.

The poem is one of deep contrasts and impressions. It is at least an exploration of how one might live on the streets and still have one foot deeply planted in the spiritual realm. If nothing else, the poem offers us a glimpse of our own lives with their failures and redemptions. Should a poem do more than this?

 

 

LOUISE GLUCK—CELESTIAL MUSIC

THE FULLNESS OF LIFE

CELESTIAL MUSIC

I have a friend who still believes in heaven.

Not a stupid person, yet with all she knows, she literally talks to God.

She thinks someone listens in heaven.

Brave too, able to face unpleasantness.

We found a caterpillar dying in the dirt, greedy ants crawling over it.

I'm always moved by disaster, always eager to oppose vitality

But timid also, quick to shut my eyes.

Whereas my friend was able to watch, to let events play out

According to nature. For my sake she intervened

Brushing a few ants off the torn thing, and set it down

Across the road.

My friend says I shut my eyes to God, that nothing else explains

My aversion to reality. She says I'm like the child who

Buries her head in the pillow

So as not to see, the child who tells herself

That light causes sadness--

My friend is like the mother. Patient, urging me

To wake up an adult like herself, a courageous person--

In my dreams, my friend reproaches me. We're walking

On the same road, except it's winter now;

She's telling me that when you love the world you hear celestial music:

Look up, she says. When I look up, nothing.

Only clouds, snow, a white business in the trees

Like brides leaping to a great height--

Then I'm afraid for her; I see her

Caught in a net deliberately cast over the earth--

In reality, we sit by the side of the road, watching the sun set;

From time to time, the silence pierced by a birdcall.

It's this moment we're trying to explain, the fact

That we're at ease with death, with solitude.

My friend draws a circle in the dirt; inside, the caterpillar doesn't move.

She's always trying to make something whole, something beautiful, an image

Capable of life apart from her.

We're very quiet. It's peaceful sitting here, not speaking. The composition

Fixed, the road turning suddenly dark, the air

Going cool, here and there the rocks shining and glittering--

It's this stillness we both love.

The love of form is a love of endings.

It is telling that the title of this poem comes from a stanza in which the poet has a dream. Her thoughts are reflected in her relationship with a “friend” who is the counterpoint to herself. It is apparent at the beginning that the poet is somewhat skeptical of her friend's belief in heaven but the friend is also “brave too, able to face unpleasantness” which is perhaps how the poet confesses in their discussion about faith, cowardly and timid. This is a poem about faith and what a leap into it might look like—or feel like.

Not only is this about faith but it is also about what exists on this side of faith. It is about a caterpillar and its fate given over to “greedy ants.” In the second stanza the poet describes herself as “moved by disaster/always eager to oppose vitality/but timid also.” I stumbled over the vitality part, as I read into this at first some opposition to life as vitality. But the dictionary offered as a possible definition the “capacity to live, grow, or develop.” Perhaps the poet sees in herself enough timidity not to be open to the force or energy needed to experience personal growth. Sometimes we humans favor what holds us back because it is what is comfortable. Diving into the unknown and the uncertain and unfamiliar is a leap too far. Yet, aren't all of us drawn to “disaster” because it is dramatic and novel? This is one of the juxtapositions that this poem develops. Our need for control over our environment keeps us stuck in our emotional responses and we can't “let events play out/according to nature.” The poet's friend is more open about what is possible to control and what must happen according to urges and compulsions that lie beyond our conscious understanding. The poet's friend contrasts what it is to be a child in the world, a child that hides from aspects of reality because they are too fearful and the child is too timid to face them. To be an adult is to be a “courageous person.” To be courageous is to wake up to what life offers even when (or especially when) reality is unpleasant or threatening.

Then, in stanza four, there is the dream sequence. It is here that we are introduced to what “celestial music” might be. The friend tells her “that when you love the world you hear celestial music.” Love binds what we know of the world and the realm in which celestial music can be experienced (heaven). The phrase bridges the gap between our material lives and a realm in which something as insubstantial and profound as music can coexist. It is this latter realm that is the “heaven” the friend believes in. But it is love that crosses the bridge. When urged to look up, the poet still grips her reality and can't see anything, just the details of the winter's day and she fears for her friend's delusional state of mind. What will change the poet's mind?

Stanza five returns this friendly couple to the reality of their hike together. Together they experience details of the landscape, the forms of reality, and we see that they are a mixture of what were earlier details specific to the dream as well as ones specific to the waking sequence with the dying caterpillar. Silence and peace fall over them and there is a turning to an easy acceptance of death, perhaps as the caterpillar has died free of the ants. The friend's courage encompasses not only making of something seemingly brutal a beautiful “image,” but also an image “capable of life apart from her,” a realm in which there is celestial music to behold. There is a return to the familiarity of the landscape but now perhaps burnished in ways that highlight their beauty. And, lastly, “It's this stillness we both love/The love of form is a form of endings.” Love, remember, is the medium that carries the weight of this world into the realm of faith over the bridge that connects the two realms in the fullness of life.

I would like to reflect on some of the elements of this poem which I think make it a brilliant and forceful illustration of how one can come to a faithful life. In part, the message of the poem is embedded in how juxtapositions of forms can illuminate the story being told. This poem, after all, is about a pilgrimage, a hike if you will, with action and musings complimenting and emphasizing one another. It seems to me that one of the responsibilities of a poem is to challenge the dimensions of the whole person; body, mind, and spirit. This can happen in bits and pieces but with all of them pointing to what a life experience might be in granular detail as well as the celestial. There might also be intimations of immortality in the images of a sunset or a birdcall or a “caterpillar dying in the dirt.” No experience is off limits in a full life and we know our courage as “adults” when we are able to admit into our consciousness what we might hide from. The philosopher C. G. Jung offers just this orientation to life when he explores dream archetypes (most often inhabiting the unconscious realm) and how they define how we see and live in the world.

There are also in this poem references to metaphors of space: heaven in the first stanza; “look up”; height; a net over the earth; celestial. All of these are located at some point on a vertical axis, sometimes contrasted with what occurs at ground level, perhaps in a more horizontal axis. One cultural critic (Glenn Slater in Jung vs. Borg: Finding the Deeply Human in a Posthuman Age) enlists the notion of verticality (“higher planes of existence”) and contrasts that with our mundane lives lived on the ground, in a horizontal plane. He makes this distinction throughout his book:

“Alongside the temporal dimension of remembering there is a spatial one too, recalling the dimensionality of experience and the breadth of being.”

“Whereas for most living in the industrialized world at least, reversion to such practices [rites and rituals] has become unthinkable, we are in a desperate need of the kind of vertical awareness that alerts us to the psychic realities and archetypal patterns these practices tend to preserve.”

“By the deeply human I am thus referring to the base upon which the vertical axis of reality stands. This axis reaches up into the ineffable experiences of life, which poet and mystic attempt to witness and express through word and image; and it reaches down into the enduring patterns of nature—to the place where animality meets psychology.”

Slater develops the idea of how important it becomes for individuals to explore the interior life, by going “in and down.” The interior life is presented as an antidote to the current overwhelming emphasis on technologies and the possible menace of AI as we become more and more dissociated from the forces and energies that not only make us thoroughly human on good days but also those energies (Jung's archetypes) that we suppress but which continue to shape our emotional lives. Slater makes more of the vertical and the horizontal but Gluck introduces those metaphors in her poem with accompanying space surrounding them to allow us as readers to make some of the same associations Slater postulates. What Slater also points out in his book, and what is true in this poem, is the necessity of having the form of a dying caterpillar (for instance) to contemplate as the beginning of an awareness of where celestial music can be heard.

The caterpillar (on the continuum of life on the horizontal axis) is an archetype of death, feared and avoided early in this poem, returns as an accommodation to death, made more bearable by the poet's friend's attempt to “make something whole, something beautiful, an image/Capable of life apart from her” (perhaps a life somewhere on the vertical axis). It is a “form” with an ending and, in the last phrase, this form and the love of it that echoes love of stillness in the line just above it. Stillness and endings are linked together here as a beckoning toward where love can lead. And love of the caterpillar (a form) is a “love of endings” (where endings, death and its possible “beyond”) create the ground from which ascent on the vertical axis can be experienced. In this poem, the stillness of present reality and celestial music are made one by love in the fullness of life.

 4-22-24 

THE BEGINNING OF FAITH

 PHILIP LARKIN—AUBADE

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.

Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.

In time the curtain-edges will grow light.

Till then I see what's really always there:

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,

Making all thought impossible but how

And where and when I shall myself die.

Arid interrogation: yet the dread

Of dying, and being dead,

Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse

--The good not done, the love not given, time

Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because

An only life can take so long to climb

Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;

But at the total emptiness for ever,

The sure extinction that we travel to

And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,

Not to be anywhere,

And so; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is not a special way of being afraid

No trick dispels. Religion used to try,

That vast moth-eaten musical brocade

Created to pretend we never die,

And specious stuff that says No rational being

Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing

That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,

No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,

Nothing to love or link with,

The anesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,

A small unfocused blur, a standing chill

That slows each impulse down to indecision.

Most things may never happen: this one will,

And realisation of it rages out

In furnace-fear when we are caught without

People or drink. Courage is no good:

It means not scaring others. Being brave

Lets no one off the grave.

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.

It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,

Have always known, know that we can't escape,

Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.

Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring

In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring

Intricate rented world begins to rouse.

The sky is white as clay, with no sun.

Work has to be done.

Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

THE INNER LIFE AS A WINDOW

The title of Larkin's poem is a bit misleading. Aubade in dictionary terms is: a piece sung or played outdoors at dawn usually as a compliment to someone. The tone of this poem is more like a dirge. Larkin awakens to “soundless dark” and there isn't any other musical reference in this poem. This is the third Larkin poem in a short sequence I am parsing and all three are windows into his inner life and his relationship with formal religion as well as how he is drawn to reckon with his mortality. Religion has a way of doing this for the appropriately sensitive individual. And, in some ways, religion begs questions about this tumultuous life we live every day and what happens when all of that life ends. What do we imagine? What about this life prepares us for what happens after it?

I am coupling this poem with a short book by Mark Doty, Still Life With Oysters and Lemon. It is a memoir, a look at a still life painting by Jan Davidsz de Heem in the 1650s. His reflections, as with Larkin's, are seen through a window into his inner life. In both cases, however, there is a visit to memories and an effort to find some meaning in the granularity of daily toil. Larkin struggles with the idea of death, especially when “we are caught without people or drink.” His poem does begin in the early hours of the day, what seems to be the only connection with what an aubade is said to be. I do not find in it anyone whom he might be complimenting. In fact, the whole poem is a darkened landscape of mortal fears. There are references to: “unresting death,” “arid interrogation,” “dread of dying,” “being dead,” for instance.

Larkin imagines a place of “emptiness for ever,” “extinction,” and of being lost in this place “always.” He disparages the efforts of religion to assuage these feelings of horror and dread by pretending that people don't actually die. At different places in the poem he bumps up against what he feels is the finality of his physical life with nowhere else to go. It is the end of a sense-filled life where there is “nothing to love or link with/ the anesthetic from which none come round.”

And how does he respond to this dreadful situation? He relegates the “blur” of it to the margins of his consciousness. It is a realisation for him that no amount of courage or bravery or whining will save him from the final end. In the first stanza he awakens to the darkness of the day and later as it begins to get light “I see what's always there.” In the last stanza he returns to the room in which he is awakening to see the objects he expects to see and feels he has to make the decision to accept this mundane life with all its familiar objects and the work that “has to be done,” the very granular existence that we experience from day to day. He makes this choice to sound like a begrudging one, perhaps the most convenient default so as not to slip into the nothingness he imagines the next life to be. He doesn't entertain the idea that perhaps one can be transformed from one life venue into another of a very different nature. He does not seek any comfort from his bleak existence. Is he suggesting to us that in rejecting the darkness of death we are choosing life? Or is he preparing us, the readers, for just such a possibility by letting us see into his inner life? We, too, have choices to make about what our inner lives will tolerate when it comes to the unimaginable, the infinite possibilities that poets of all stripes have explored when they have considered mortality and death.

It is all too easy enough for me to read through this poem once and then discard it, thinking that its dark message that sits on the top of the poem leaves me with little to work with as far as enlightenment is concerned. But why should I expect a poet or anyone else to provide me with enlightenment? I try to reconcile with what I know and believe about this life and anything after it with what Larkin puts before me. After all, the title is about a musical form and there are references in the poem to light and the reality of every day life. Every day life is where all of us must begin, no matter how the monk, mystic, CEO, or UPS driver manages the day after arising. It is where new beginnings can also find us—or where we find them. To this point, I think Larkin's poem is his beginning and he leaves it unfinished to allow us to imagine what follows. In some way it introduces us to the exploration of Mark Doty and what he discovers looking and reflecting on a still life. I would like to think that Larkin's discordance is a prelude to experiencing some of the illuminations that capture Doty. Larkin's (the poet) life is a very still life, a dark one, but one with the potential for transcendence, as I feel everyone's life can be, always beginning with wardrobes, telephones, and “the uncaring/intricate rented world.”

It is at this point that I bring in the short memoir of Mark Doty, also a poet. His work explores ideas about time and its passing; the fragility of life, mortality, and death; the sensual life at its fullest; the functions of memory; and the meaning of objects we collect and carry. I found this book in some ways to be a completion of Larkin's poem (and the preceding two: “Church Going” and “Faith Healing”), an extension of an exploration and also a celebration of what living this life can mean when reflecting on the finality of it. It is a different view on an inner life that seems more vivid and hopeful, if only to find meaning in what we encounter by our senses. Larkin's “unfocused blur” turns into Doty's still life with delicious objects and color and light.

Here are some short passages from Doty's book that help illustrate what his inner life is witnessing. I include many short references because Doty's poetic identity brings to light and attention what is life-giving in daily life and in art.

“That there can never be too much of reality; that the attempt to draw nearer to it—which will fail—will not fail entirely, as it will give us not the fact of lemons and oysters but this, which is its own fact, its own brave assay toward what is.

“That description is an inexact, loving art, and a reflexive one; when we describe the world we come closer to saying what we are.”

“And something else, of course; there's always more, deep in art's pockets, far down in the chiaroscuro on which these foodstuffs rest: everything here has been transformed into feeling, as if by looking very hard at an object it suddenly comes that much closer to some realm where it isn't a thing at all but something just on the edge of dissolving.”

This seems like a poetic way to describe how we reveal our inner lives and our personal substance, opening a window to the morning allowing more light to enter.

“To think through things, that is the still life painter's work—and the poet's. Both sorts of artists require a tangible vocabulary, a worldly lexicon. A language of ideas is, in itself, a phantom language, lacking in the substance of worldly things, those containers of feeling and experience, memory and time. We are instructed by the objects that come to speak with us, those material presences. Why should we have been born knowing how to love the world? We require, again and again, these demonstrations.”

“Therein lies a large portion of the painting's poetry; these things form not a single whole but a concert, a community of separate presences; we are intended to compare their degrees of roundness, solidity, transparency, and opacity. They are each a separate city, a separate child in a field of silent children. They speak back and forth—do they?--across the distance between them.”

“The brink upon which still life rests is the brink of time, the edge of something about to happen. Everything that we know crosses this lip, over and over, like water over the edge of a fall, as what might happen does, as any of the endless variations of what might come true does so, and things fall into being, tumble through the progression of existing in time.”

“At first still life seems so entirely of this world—a clarification and celebration of what is—that it can have little to do with mortality. But in truth, the secret subject of these paintings is what they resist.

… Everything in the field of our vision is passing. ...Here intimacy seems to confront its opposite, which is the immensity of time.”

“[And then there is]...the adult recognition that the things of the world go on without us, that the meaning with which we invest them may not persist, may be visible to no one else, that even that which seems to us most profoundly saturated in passion and feeling may be swept away.”

“The most beautiful still lifes are never pristine, and herein lies one of their secrets.”

“I am learning to accept the flux and revision time and experience in variably make, but I am also learning to love what I wish to keep the same, something that nothing in my life has taught me until now; learning, that is, not to let go but to hold on. I hold on to the mended, exactly right old platter, fixed in its place, cherished, singular, at rest.”

“What is it that such a clear-eyed vision of the particular wishes to convey? A way to live, perhaps; a point of view, a stance toward things.”

“A still life is more like a poem than it is like a portrait.”

“Maybe [Garcia] Lorca has it right—we want thing to wash us clean, we crave the plainness of the unmediated, the directness of apples. If we could live with their solidity, with the apple's clear distinction between inner and outer, how the firm shine and protective color of the peel wraps seamlessly around that fragrant, nourishing core, so that it remains unbruised by air, ready to feed...Fit to carry the dark central star of the seeds into the world. In this sense, still life is refuge, consolation, place of quiet. The world becomes bearable, apprehensible because so many elements have been subtracted from it.”

“But these paintings fill me with the pleasure of being bound to the material, implicated, part of a community of attention-giving. That is what we do with sight, give it out, give it and give it away, in order to be filled.”

“They [the paintings] cannot be generalized about without diminishing them, but I can report on their lesson, which is to remind us of the strangeness and singularity of things, and therefore of ourselves. Singularity, they wish us to know, resides in the physical, the particular, the seen; this knowledge can be looked at, can be held. Here you are, the painters say, a body in the city of bodies, in concert, in the astonishing republic of things, the world of light, which is the same gray world sliding past the boat, lapping and chilly, alive with detail as the boat pushes forward, slipping away.”

“Sometimes I think these paintings seem full of secrets, full of unvoiced presences. And surely one of their secrets—somewhere close to their essence—lies in a sense of space that is unique to them. These things exist up close, against a background of burnished darkness. No wide vistas open behind them, no far-flung landscapes, no airy vastness of heaven. This is the space of the body, the space of our arms' reach. There is nothing before us here we could not touch, were these things not made of paint. The essential quality of them is their nearness. “

“What is documented, at last, is not the thing itself but the way of seeing—the object infused with the subject. The eye moving over the world like a lover. And so the boundary between self and world is elided, a bit, softened.”

“It [still life] is an art that points to the human by leaving the human out; nowhere visible, we're everywhere. It is an art that points to meaning through wordlessness, that points to timelessness through things permanently caught in time. That points to immensity through intimacy. An art of modest claims that seems perennial, inexhaustible.”

“Someone and no one. That, I think, is the deepest secret of these paintings, finally, although it seems just barely in the realm of saying, this feeling that beneath the attachments and appurtenances, the furnishings of selfhood, what we are is attention, a quick physical presence in the world, a bright point of consciousness in a wide field from which we are not really separate. That, in a field of light, we are intensifications of that light.”

“Still life. The deep pun hidden in the term: life with death in it, life after the knowledge of death, is, after all, still life.”

“What makes a poem a poem, finally, is that it is unparaphrasable. There is no other way to say exactly this; it exists only in its own body of language, only in these words. I may try to explain it or represent it in other terms, but then some element of its life will always be missing....It's the same with painting.

Part of what that poetry is, I think, is the inner life of the dead, held in suspension. It is still visible to us; you can look at the paintings and you can feel it. This is evidence that a long act of seeing might translate into something permanent, both of ourselves and curiously impersonal, sturdy, useful.

Of what use, exactly? As advocates of intimacy, as embodiments of paradox, as witnesses to earth, here, this moment, now. Evidence thus, that tenderness and style are still the best gestures we can make in the face of death.”

This is a long way around the subject of Larkin's poem but the path is a way of illuminating what alternate meanings might be. There is no way for me to know if Larkin might have shared Doty's impressions of still lifes and poetry if he had extended his reflections about life and death—and maybe even faith. Certainly, his mood is dark and sad in its losses and the doleful acceptance of a life of daily toil without respite. He does not seem to share Doty's view of shared objects and what intimacy they might proffer. He doesn't see the dazzle of light in the same way. He does not perceive his own poetry as “the best gesture we can make in the face of death”--or does he? Is Larkin making the distinction, by subtle contrast, between the mundane practicalities of life and what beauty can be found in them if looked for, as Doty does in his wonderful little book?

At various points in my life I have become fretful of the details of the routines and habits of daily toil, thinking them needlessly tedious. I have thought: if only I could escape them, then I could experience the freedom I can only taste fleetingly when I am awake enough to sense their presence. But I see these points now as Larkin moments. I see now that they were an opening to Doty moments where being attentive to life and life-giving sustenance attested to the necessity of beginning with “what we know/ have always known, know that we can't escape/ yet can't quite accept” (Larkin). I have learned to begin with what I know of daily toil and its tedium in order to make a leap of faith to a place where “in a field of light/ we are intensifications of that light” (Doty).

Here we have two poets viewing still lifes in very different ways. Sitting side by side, each is a contrast to the other and each enriches the perceptions of the other. One is of melancholy and disappointment and the other is of illumination and transcendence. Human life holds all of this. When we look at our own lives what do we see?

Beginning with the Larkin and then visiting Doty's essay brings light into the darkness, as “slowly light strengthens” (Larkin). It seems to me that what Doty says about still life painting and poetry applies as well to faith, or maybe a prayerful life. It all begins with a recognition of what is present for us in just this moment and extends out into a wider world of impressions, perceptions, interior condensations, reflections, and countless opportunities to experience our world's objects and their intimate connections to memory and dreams. And this is the beginning of peering through or under the veil that shields our eyes from more light and new life, full of beauty as well as sorrows and joys. Philip Larkin has done us a favor, as has Mark Doty.