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Your Own Way of Looking at Things

May 5, 2013 in Aesthetics, Art Making, Poetry | 12 comments

Bouuldersboat
Solitary boat man on the river in Hampi, India

When I Met My Muse

I glanced at her and took my glasses
off – they were still singing. They buzzed
like a locust on the coffee table and then
ceased. Her voice belled forth, and the
sunlight bent. I felt the ceiling arch, and
knew that nails up there took a new grip
on whatever they touched. “I am your own
way of looking at things,” she said. “When
you allow me to live with you, every
glance at the world around you will be
a sort of salvation.” And I took her hand.

–William Stafford

When a friend posted this short piece by William Stafford online, it came into my consciousness as a fully formed image of great power. Glasses that were still singing. A voice belling forth. Bent sunlight. A ceiling that arches and makes more space. Every glance a salvation. It’s all there, a tableau so clear and so powerful that I read it through ten more times.

I adore Stafford as a poet as well as an exemplar of living (I’ve listed my previous blog posts about him and his work at the bottom of this page.) Unpretentious with a quiet demeanor, he didn’t publish his poetry until he was in his late 40′s. His creative gait through life is epitomized by these words from an interview: “I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life, you know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes, I follow it along trustingly. And I don’t have any sense of its coming to a kind of crescendo, or of its petering out either. It is just going steadily along.” That description juxtaposed with his Muse encounter speaks to both the surrender and the salvation of his life’s poetic practice.

Two other writers offer an expansion to this Staffordian backdrop. One is David Esterly, author of a thoughtful book called The Lost Carving: A Journey to the Heart of Making. A former academic who quotes Yeats and Plotinus with ease, Esterly became a world class wood carver who was asked to repair the carvings destroyed by fire in Henry VIII’s palace at Hampton Court. (Because he is an American, this was a bit of a surprise request.) His prowess with language is evident in this book:

A carver begins as a god and ends as a slave. I concocted this aphorism long ago and couldn’t stop using it. It was born of experience. This trajectory repeated itself with each successive project. In all of them the balance of power progressively shifted from the maker to the made. The wood began as a submissive, put-upon thing, then gradually came to life, like Pygmalion’s statue. The carver’s ideas steadily lost their power, while the object grew imperious…You start as a godlike creator, imposing ideas on a passive medium, and you end up grounded in the life of this world, taking instructions from the thing in front of you.

The transmogrification that takes place in the act of making is a key theme in Esterly’s account. It correlates with a passage in the ever insightful Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry by Jane Hirschfield:

Violinists practicing scales and dancers repeating the same movements over decades are not simply warming up or mechanically training their muscles. They are learning how to attend unswervingly, moment by moment, to themselves and their art; learning to come into steady presence…Yet however it is brought into being, true concentration appears—paradoxically—at the moment willed effort drops away…At such moments, there may be some strong emotion present—a feeling of joy, or even grief—but as often, in deep concentration, the self disappears. We seem to fall utterly into the object of our attention, or else vanish into attentiveness itself. This may explain why the creative is so often descried as impersonal and beyond self, as if inspiration were literally what its etymology implies, something “breathed in”.

I’m not sure how to describe these experiences in terms that are linear, measured and easily understood. I sometimes get tired trying and give up, dropping into those easy catch alls of the mystical and/or the magical. But you just can’t throw concepts like those around willy nilly without getting yourself into some trouble, especially at cocktail parties and academic conferences.

Is there a middle ground, a way to express my own way of looking at things? I found some help by reworking a quote* from Frederick Buechner:

The act of making points to that area of human experience where in one way or another we come upon mystery as a summons to take a journey; where we sense meanings no less overwhelming because they can be only hinted at in myth and ritual; where we glimpse a destination that we can never know fully until we reach it. We are all of us more mystics than we believe or choose to believe.

That captures some of it.

___________

*The original quote from Frederick Buechner: “Religion as a word points to that area of human experience where in one way or another man comes upon mystery as a summons to pilgrimage; where he senses meanings no less overwhelming because they can be only hinted at in myth and ritual; where he glimpses a destination that he can never know fully until he reaches it. We are all of us more mystics than we believe or choose to believe.”

Previous Slow Muse posts on William Stafford:

Being Awake
The Strange Notes of our Wildness
Sages of Silence and Fear
That Form in the Grass
Lean Out a Window
Wing, Fin, Flake
Turn to the Open Sea and Let Go
Stillness, in Color
This, Now

Note: Thanks to Desiree Fitzgibbon for introducing me to The Lost Carving—as well as many other great books—and to Jill Fineberg for the Buechner quote. Jill randomly includes quotes at the bottom of her emails, and the timing on this one was perfect.

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The Don’t Know Mind

April 20, 2013 in Poetry, Wisdom | 12 comments

sanddollar
.
.
.

and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes;
and to keep on not knowing
something important.

–Wislawa Szymborska

The idea of fragments and incompleteness was the topic of a blog post I wrote two weeks ago (Pieced Cloth) but it became the predominant leitmotif for life this past week. Tiny fragments found on the streets and rooftops of Back Bay, thousands of photos taken by spectators, eye witness snippets were all assembled by experts to piece together a comprehensible picture of what happened at the Marathon last Monday. Bit by bit a profile emerged of two unlikely protagonists who lived right across the river. And as the net closed in on Friday, millions of us were asked to shelter in place as this week long, “this is a bad movie I can’t stop watching” came to a close.

But a close is not a conclusion. Many of us who have been unable to talk about much else for these five days are still unsettled by a sense of something that is missing. We all live every day “not knowing something important,” but sometimes that sits more easily than it does now.

The Korean Zen master Ko Bong taught, “If you attain don’t-know, that is your original master.” In the “don’t know mind,” ignorance is the seed bed for curiosity and discovery, a willingness for that not knowing to be OK. Not that I’m good at getting there, but that quiet invitation is more appealing than more talk and more conjecture.

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The Deeper Thing

April 5, 2013 in Art Making, Poetry | 5 comments

Blue

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

–Excerpt from East Coker V, Four Quartets, by T. S. Eliot

In What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World, Robert Hass writes about this poem by T. S. Eliot and the difficulty in teaching students about poetry:

One of the traditional ways of teaching poetry is to discuss, to explicate, what Eliot is saying here to make sure that students (and the teacher) understand what’s being said…in teaching poetry, that is quite often what we settle for. We hope that the deeper thing that we can’t communicate has gotten communicated, passed directly from the poem to the student reader without our aid or interference. We do what we can with content, especially if, as in this case, the content is rich, psychologically or philosophically. And we do what we can, harder but still manageable, with affect. And we leave the deeper thing in the work of art, which is also famously the most ineffable, its tone or mood, which is like a sensation of echo, which we often take away quite mutely and quietly, in the same way that people do coming out of a concert hall or theater. In those deepest reaches of a work of art, the truth is what we mostly cannot teach.

Hass goes on to talk about the possibility of teaching echoes. As Eliot has said elsewhere, the past is “modified in the guts of the living” much the way a new work of art emerges from an old one. Like the lives we construct for ourselves from our experiences, our work and our relationships, the sensation of echo is ongoing and sometimes as close as we can get to our own deeper thing.

This feels particularly resonant for me this morning. This weekend is the fifth anniversary of the passing of Morris Arrari, a dear friend to many of us. A group of us are gathering in New York City to remember him. In thinking about Morris more than usual, I was reminded of these words delivered at his memorial service by Andrew Kimball:

Morris said once he would choose to return to earth — should that be our destiny — as a bird, high above hospital rooms, stomas, the gracelessness of ordinary manners — his artist’s eye quickened by the earth’s spiny geology, its interlocking clays and ores, its patterned waterways, the play of shadow across the landscape – observed this time from a distance.

The sensation of echo, the ineffable deeper thing—these are concepts that don’t translate easily into words. But remembering this wish for an ambient presence brought me closer to that unsaidness.

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Dreams of Eden

April 3, 2013 in Art Making, Poetry | 3 comments

hand

In Robert Hass‘s essay, “On Teaching Poetry,” he references W. H. Auden‘s book of essays, The Dyer’s Hand, named after a phrase from Shakespeare‘s Sonnet 111:

Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,
And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand:

In Shakespeare’s sonnet the dyer’s hand is stained and branded—shamefully in this case—by blood-guilt. In Auden says Hass, “it is connected to a notion of someone so immersed in their trade that they are permanently colored by it.”

The Dyer’s Hand is full of memorable Audenisms, and a feistiness is evident throughout (like the starting quote for his essay, “Reading” from C. G. Lichtenberg: “A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.”)

Here is a passage that spoke directly to me when I was reading this morning:

Though the pleasure which works of art give us must not be confused with other pleasures that we enjoy, it is related to all of them simply by being our pleasure and not someone else’s. All the judgments, aesthetic or moral, that we pass, however objective we try to make them, are in part a rationalization and in part a corrective discipline of our subjective wishes. So long as a man writes poetry or fiction, his dream of Eden is his own business, but the moment he starts writing literary criticism, honesty demands that he describe it to his readers, so that they may be in the position to judge his judgments.

Our unavoidable proclivities to subjectivity. Each of us with our own dream of Eden. Possessing a hand that, with time, reveals itself through the work we do.

That’s an interwoven nest of wisdom for my day.

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We Are Pale Ramon

March 29, 2013 in Aesthetics, Art History/Theory, Poetry | 6 comments

cloudsovermidwest
Ghostly demarcations of the land under cloud cover, taken over the US midsection during a recent cross country flight.

My very clever and well read niece Rebecca Ricks sent me a link to an essay published in Frieze Magazine last year. Titled Of Ourselves and of Our Origins: Subjects of Art, it is an edited version of a lecture given by Peter Schjeldahl at the School of Visual Arts.

Peter Schjeldahl of course is the long time art critic at the New Yorker magazine. I read just about every article he writes and connect with him more than I don’t. This essay is particularly full of resonant wisdom and what’s more, it includes the full text of my favorite Wallace Stevens poem, “The idea of Order at Key West” (whose final line is referred to in the title: “Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,/The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,/Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,/And of ourselves and of our origins,/In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.”) Schjeldahl says this about the poem after quoting it: “I think it’s safe to say that nothing in recent writing or art reaches this level of beauty and intelligence, so confidently, let alone with such total mastery of form.”

It just may be that there is a stealth tribe, not easily determined but primal nonetheless: the kinship of those who carry an unearthly passion for that poem. Recite it by heart, and you’re in.

A few snippets from Schjeldahl’s essay (and there are oh so many):

***
Good art evicts intelligence from its left-brain command centre into other parts of the brain, and of the body. It does this by some or another touch or twist of beauty, which can’t be conceptualized but only undergone, like a beneficent seizure.

***
To be really good at anything, assuming that you’re talented, is to work harder and longer, with more ruthless honesty and discipline, than other people could do without bursting into tears. Your secret is that, hard as it may be, it doesn’t feel like work to you. It feels normal, like eating and sleeping…

So as an artist you’re lonely. You know the fragility and vulnerability of your Great Good Place but you lean your whole weight into it anyhow. Along with wanting fame and money and sex, like everybody, you want to slip that place into the map of the world, to make the world a little less wretched to you. You will even go without the fame and money and sex parts, if necessary. You will be misunderstood, often enough by people – darling dumbbells – who praise you. (Be kind to them if you can.) That’s the deal. No one said you were an artist. You said you were an artist. You asked for it. No whining.

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Consciousness of the Mountain

March 25, 2013 in Art Making, Poetry, Spiritual | 1 comment

url

The poet Robert Hass has won the National Book Award, The National Book Critics Circle award and the Pulitzer Prize. I have admired his work for some time. So when a good friend enthusiastically suggested that I explore some of his prose as well, I took her up on it. What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination and the Natural World is a collection of essays that is so readable, engaging and elegantly thoughtful that this book has been at my side for weeks now. (For readers like me who suffer from extreme promiscuity, that’s a seriously committed relationship.)

It turns out that Hass and I score high on shared interests. His first essay is about his adolescent initiation into a lifelong connection to the work of Wallace Stevens (that’s when I fell under Stevens’s spell as well). That is followed by a contextual nesting of Allen Ginsberg‘s legendary “Howl” that was extremely helpful in rethinking that work (which is a portrait of San Francisco just as I was coming of age in the Bay Area), the thoughtful comparison of intent shared by poet George Oppen and painter Paul Cezanne (always a topic of interest), and insightful portraits of many of the poets who impacted me in my college years including William Everson, Robinson Jeffers and Czeslaw Milosz.

And most coincidentally I read his essay, “Notes on Poetry and Spirituality,” while I was flying back from two weeks in Utah. It turned out to be about an invitation for Hass to speak to poetry students at Brigham Young University. Just days before I had been asked to meet with art students at BYU, so reading about his experience at that school was both timely and resonant.

Here are a few passages that may engage you as well.

***

Wallace Stevens:

I imagine I am not through thinking about this poem ["The Emperor of Ice-Cream"] or about “Sunday Morning” or “The Snowman” or “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” or “The Idea of Order at Key West” or “Of Mere Being” or “The World as Meditation,” which are other poems I have been brooding over and arguing with myself about for much of my adult life. But I heard it early and I’ve lived with it for some time and thought that it would serve for one image of the way poems happen in a life when they are lived

***

George Oppen and Paul Cezanne:

What’s extraordinary about George Oppen’s poetry is moment after moment in his work, line by line, syllable by syllable, you have a sense of an enormous ethical pressure brought to bear on the act of perception, and a sense that the ethical pressure of the act of perception is for him the same thing as the writing of the poem. And that is a way in which he is extraordinarily like Cezanne, it seem to me. The way Cezanne made lines, the way he studied color and tint, the way he insisted on seeing made it impossible for people to paint in the same way they had painted before…

Most poets are afraid of consciousness, perhaps because our art has magical and incantatory roots. And consciousness of consciousness, as the naked ground of all serious speech, has tormented twentieth-century writing. The first condition of honesty in poetry, and in the other arts, has been a certain self-reflexiveness; at the same time a flight from consciousness is probably the root of the passion to possess the world through language. That seems to be the fork in our path: a self-referential and hermetic poetry on one side, and on the other a passionate quest that strains toward and against dissolution.

George Oppen’s poems are remarkably free of both these passions. They are also free from many of the subversions of ego that accompany them: the desire to charm, the desire to dazzle, the need to have one’s suffering seen and acknowledged. This freedom is the ambience of only a few artists. Cezanne wasn’t trying to do anything to Mont Sainte-Victoire; he wasn’t trying to give it anything or take anything from it or make anything out of it. The mountain was there and he was there, and the painting—which was both consciousness of the mountain and consciousness of the consciousness of the mountain—was their meeting place and a single-minded act of devotion to the meeting place.

***

Poetry and spirituality at Brigham Young University:

Sitting there I found myself thinking that those Mormon kids could be good Mormons for their entire lives without getting in touch with their spirituality, whatever their spirituality was. And that the discovery of that possibility must turn on some kind of break from trying to be the kind of person they thought they were supposed to be seen to try to be, that, for me, the content of spirituality was almost always everything in me that rebelled against whatever the pattern of being a socially approved and good person was, even when I experienced that rebellion as failure. And that for me, the content of poetry, or at least what drew me to poetry—the way in which I could say to myself it was spiritual—had to do with negation, with some version of saying no to the plausibly constructed world, and of being drawn through that negation toward—what? i didn’t like any of the words. I tried out mystery and wonder, and more helpfully I thought of Emily Dickinson.

And coming to her I knew I needed another definition. If religion is a community created by common symbols of the sacred, and is not the same thing as a spiritual life, then the first thing to say about spirituality is that it is almost always a private matter.

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Small Swishings of Joy

January 19, 2013 in Poetry, Theater | 8 comments

diabelli-variations-final-page1
The last page of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations

.
.
.
Life Is Not What You

expected — cows
ruminate by the highway
even in rain or bat their
ears forward and back and how
you thought the story of your life
would get told: the children you thought
you’d already have by now partially grown
books and other accomplishments — houses
owned cities seen lakes traversed — and now
we’re stuck in traffic
and it’s not even rush hour
with the hurricane storm
moving slowly north from Alabama.
How come it’s raining here already
somewhere south of Albany — just one
damned thing after another and those
injections you’ve had to give yourself and
your dad’s bypass surgery. Just look:
Evening primrose all along the roadside match
the painted line and Queen Anne’s lace
on the other side rows of young corn
joe-pye weed blurred to Scottish heather.
When you go for a walk blackberries have started
ripening you    pluck two
from each bush notice tadpoles suck air
along the fountain’s rim. Such small swishings
of joy maybe
this is it — every day puts forth a new song deer flies
dive-bombing your head when the breeze
lets up —

–Sharon Dolin

This poem brings feelings to the surface that are closely aligned with those I felt after seeing the Boston production of Moisés Kaufman‘s 33 Variations. Juxtaposing Beethoven‘s creation of the inimitable Diabelli Variations with the slow demise of a passionate but overly cerebral musicologist from Lou Gehrig’s Disease, the play is full of missed opportunities to seize the day and celebrate life, those “small swishings of joy.” As dire as the circumstances in this story are, the play’s ending is a redemptive one as the characters assemble on stage to dance a minuet to variation #33, the final from Beethoven’s masterful work. All the time we are holding the knowledge that this work, probably the greatest variation ever written, was created by Beethoven from a simple beer hall waltz during the years when he was losing his hearing. No, life is not what you expected. Yes, life is not what you expected.

Thank you to Linda Crawford for sending me Sharon Dolin‘s poem.

Note: 33 Variations, starring Boston’s own inimitable Paula Plum, is at the Lyric Stage through February 2.

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Enduring the Mystery

April 25, 2012 in Poetry | 2 comments


A close up view of Candara, from a painting series inspired by space and planetary bodies

1.
Tina says what if dark matter is like the space between people
When what holds them together isn’t exactly love, and I think
That sounds right—how strong the pull can be, as if something
That knows better won’t let you drift apart so easily, and how
Small and heavy you feel, stuck there spinning in place.

Anita feels it now as a tug toward the phone, though she knows
The ear at the other end isn’t there anymore. She’ll beat her head
Against the rungs of her room till it splits, and the static that seeps out
Will lull her to sleep, where she’ll dream of him walking just ahead
Beside a woman whose mouth spills O after O of operatic laughter.

But Tina isn’t talking about men and women, what starts in our bodies
And then pushes out toward anywhere once the joy of it disappears.
She means families. How two sisters, say, can stop knowing one another,
Stop hearing the same language, scalding themselves on something
Every time they try to touch. What lives beside us passing for air?

–Excerpt from the poem, Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith

2011 will be remembered as a year with no novel deemed worthy of a Pulitzer Prize. But thankfully the poetry recipient, Tracy K. Smith, has the gravitas to hold her place singlehandedly. Her award winning collection, Life on Mars, is a rich inquiry, complex and yet accessible. She has said the poems were inspired by her father who worked as an engineer on the Hubble project, and a contemplation of space and our place in that immense order of things runs throughout the poems. In the words of one reviewer in the New York Times, “Smith is quick to suggest that the important thing is not to discover whether or not we’re alone in the universe; it’s to accept—or at least endure—the universe’s mystery.”

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Holding it All

March 29, 2012 in Books, Poetry | 1 comment

Hold Everything Dear

as the brick of the afternoon stores the rose heat of the journey

as the rose buds a green room to breathe

and blossoms like the wind

as the thinning birches whisper their silver stories of the wind to the urgent

in the trucks

as the leaves of the hedge store the light

that the moment thought it had lost

as the nest of her wrist beats like the chest of a wren in the morning air

as the chorus of the earth find their eyes in the sky

and unwrap them to each other in the teeming dark

hold everything dear

the calligraphy of birds across the morning

the million hands of the axe, the soft hand of the earth

one step ahead of time

the broken teeth of tribes and their long place

steppe-scattered and together

clay’s small, surviving handle, the near ghost of a jug

carrying itself towards us through the soil

the pledge of offered arms, the single sheet that is our common walking

the map of the palm held

in a knot

but given as a torch

hold everything dear

the paths they make towards us and how far we open towards them

the justice of a grass than unravels palaces but shelters the songs of the searching

the vessel that names the waves, the jug of this life, as it fills with the days

as it sinks to become what it loves

memory that grows into a shape the tree always knew as a seed

the words

the bread

the child who reaches for the truths beyond the door

the yearning to begin again together

animals keen inside the parliament of the world

the people in the room the people in the street the people

hold everything dear

–Gareth Evans

So begins John Berger‘s book of the same name, Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance. Written about a post 9/11 world, these essays are very different from the exquisitely written books about art and life that most of us have come to know during Berger’s long career—his canonical Ways of Seeing as well as The Shape of a Pocket, About Looking and Sense of Sight. This book is full of discouragement and frustration with the state of the world and in particular Middle Eastern politics, and Berger doesn’t mince or soft pedal his views. This wasn’t an easy book for me to read.

But I am reminded of what he wrote in Ways of Seeing over 40 years ago: “Perspective makes the single eye the centre of the visible world.” That is evident in these essays.

But as for the poem, that’s a keeper.

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Fresh Coat

November 16, 2011 in Poetry | 4 comments

Unfolding

If there is no spirit unfolding itself in history,
No gradual growth of consciousness
Beneath the land grabs and forced migrations,
The bought elections, the betrayal of trust
By party faction in the name of progress—
What about spirit in the personal realm
Unfolding slowly inside us, so slowly
That our best days seem like a holding action?
Seasons repeat themselves, but the tree
Shading the yard keeps growing.
Don’t be chagrined that the sadness you felt
This evening beside the bed of a friend
Who’s growing weaker wasn’t more profound
Than the sadness of yesterday, that you still
Can’t imagine a fraction of what he’s feeling
As the world he loves slips from his grasp,
No progress from your perspective,
But who’s to say what you might notice
If the scroll of the last few months were unrolled
On the table before you, how clear it might be
That your understanding of all you’re losing
In losing him has been slowly deepening?
Another day, you say to yourself, at dusk
As you climb your porch steps, which you notice
Could use some scraping and painting this weekend,
A fresh coat that with luck will last a year.

–Carl Dennis

The poignancy of this poem has stayed with me since I first read it in the New Yorker issue from October 24.

Carl Dennis is an American poet who has taught at State University of New York at Buffalo for a number of years. From The Poetry Foundation:

Dennis told Contemporary Authors: “I don’t see myself as belonging to any particular school of poetry. Yeats was the most important early influence, but I hope that his presence is now very difficult to detect. Like him I’m interested in making my poems sound like actual speech, something that one might actually say out loud to a single listener. In Yeats’s day this meant avoiding poetical ornament and mechanical rhythms. Today it also means avoiding poetry that is either too private (concerned with the play of the writer’s own mind and not with an actual subject outside himself) or too public (not concerned with the particular context of speaker and listener in a dramatic situation).”

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