the kingdom

At times

the heart

stands back

and looks at the body,

looks at the mind,

as a lion

quietly looks

at the not-quite-itself,

not-quite-another,

moving of shadows and grass.

Wary, but with interest,

considers its kingdom.

Then seeing

all that will be,

heart once again enters -- 

enters hunger, enters sorrow,

enters finally losing it all.

To know, if nothing else,

what it once owned.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from The October Palace

the ninth elegy

Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely

in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all

other green, with tiny waves on the edges

of every leaf (like the smile of a breeze)–: why then

have to be human–and, escaping from fate,

keep longing for fate? . . .

Oh not because happiness exists,

that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss.

Not out of curiosity, not as practice for the heart, which

would exist in the laurel too. . . . .

But because truly being here is so much; because everything here

apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way

keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.

Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,

just once. And never again. But to have been

this once, completely, even if only once:

to have been one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

And so we keep pressing on, trying to achieve it,

trying to hold it firmly in our simple hands,

in our overcrowded gaze, in our speechless heart.

Trying to become it.–Whom can we give it to? We would

hold on to it all, forever . . . Ah, but what can we take along

into that other realm? Not the art of looking,

which is learned so slowly, and nothing that happened here. Nothing.

The sufferings, then. And above all, the heaviness,

and the long experience of love,– just what is wholly

unsayable. But later, among the stars,

what good is it – they are better as they are: unsayable.

For when the traveler returns from the mountain-slopes into the valley,

he brings, not a handful of earth, unsayable to others, but instead

some word he has gained, some pure word, the yellow and blue

gentian. Perhaps we are here in order to say: house,

bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window–

at most: column, tower. . . . But to say them, you must understand,

oh to say them more intensely than the Things themselves

ever dreamed of existing. Isn't the secret intent

of this taciturn earth, when it forces lovers together,

that inside their boundless emotion all things may shudder with joy?

Threshold: what it means for two lovers

to be wearing down, imperceptibly, the ancient threshold of their door–

they too, after the many who came before them

and before those to come. . . . ., lightly.

Here is the time for the sayable, here is its homeland.

Speak and bear witness. More than ever

the Things that we might experience are vanishing, for

what crowds them out and replaces them is an imageless act.

An act under a shell, which easily cracks open as soon as

the business inside outgrows it and seeks new limits.

Between the hammers our heart

endures, just as the tongue does

between the teeth and, despite that,

still is able to praise.

Praise this world to the angel, not the unsayable one,

you can’t impress him with glorious emotion; in the universe

where he feels more powerfully, you are a novice. So show him

something simple which, formed over generations,

lives as our own, near our hand and within our gaze.

Tell him of Things. He will stand astonished; as you stood

by the ropemaker in Rome or the potter along the Nile.

Show him how happy a Thing can be, how innocent and ours,

how even lamenting grief purely decides to take form,

serves as a Thing, or dies into a Thing–, and blissfully

escapes far beyond the violin.–And these Things,

which live by perishing, know you are praising them; transient,

they look to us for deliverance: us, the most transient of all.

They want us to change them, utterly, in our invisible heart,

within–oh endlessly–within us! Whoever we may be at last.

Earth, isn't this what you want: to arise within us,

invisible? Isn't it your dream

to be wholly invisible someday?–O Earth: invisible!

What, if not transformation, is your urgent command?

Earth, my dearest, I will. Oh believe me, you no longer

need your springtimes to win me over–one of them,

ah, even one, is already too much for my blood.

Unspeakably I have belonged to you, from the first.

You were always right, and your holiest inspiration

is our intimate companion, Death.

Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future

grows any smaller . . . . . Superabundant being

wells up in my heart.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from Duino Elegies (1923)

Empedocles' Physics

In all its parts the deep foul valley trembled so

I thought the universe felt love, which some believe

Has many times returned the world to chaos; here below

And elsewhere in that moment, the ancient cliffsides tumbled.

The Inferno, Canto XII

'Aversion carves the self.'

- A Vedic teaching too, though here

it is Empedocles', who wrote

that Hate creates our fractal'd world,

which Love would have a single, formless sphere.

An example: enemy soldiers, late

in 1914, carolled each other across the fields.

Could not, next dawn, take up their former places.

Such is the chaos that affection yields.

When did we cut the long-compounded verbs

into their separate nouns,

the worm's life from the bird's?

Must it be loneliness crowns all things

that live?  Packed fat of the sea-lion,

fox blood splashing the brush like early sun-

why give them to our wars to be undone?

But what if in truth Love's perfect One were

Dante's sheered disorder, the known world tumbled?

If the longing and stumble of self were made of sin?

Choose Hate, to stay faceted then

in the many and season-strung minds, the battered salmonskin

peeling its sky's flung rind, the blossoming strife.

Choose the cell's dividing, life into life,

the too-bright stream.  Choose beauty loved-

how loved - within division's light.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from The October Palace

art by picasso

Wendell Berry - on work

This article is printed here courtesy of The Progressive , where it originally appeared as a letter to the editor in response to the article “Less Work, More Life.”

The Progressive, in the September issue, both in Matthew Rothschild’s “Editor’s Note” and in the article by John de Graaf (“Less Work, More Life”), offers “less work” and a 30-hour workweek as needs that are as indisputable as the need to eat.

"Though I would support the idea of a 30-hour workweek in some circumstances, I see nothing absolute or indisputable about it. It can be proposed as a universal need only after abandonment of any respect for vocation and the replacement of discourse by slogans.

It is true that the industrialization of virtually all forms of production and service has filled the world with “jobs” that are meaningless, demeaning, and boring—as well as inherently destructive. I don’t think there is a good argument for the existence of such work, and I wish for its elimination, but even its reduction calls for economic changes not yet defined, let alone advocated, by the “left” or the “right.” Neither side, so far as I know, has produced a reliable distinction between good work and bad work. To shorten the “official workweek” while consenting to the continuation of bad work is not much of a solution.

The old and honorable idea of “vocation” is simply that we each are called, by God, or by our gifts, or by our preference, to a kind of good work for which we are particularly fitted. Implicit in this idea is the evidently startling possibility that we might work willingly, and that there is no necessary contradiction between work and happiness or satisfaction.

Only in the absence of any viable idea of vocation or good work can one make the distinction implied in such phrases as “less work, more life” or “work-life balance,” as if one commutes daily from life here to work there.

But aren't we living even when we are most miserably and harmfully at work?

And isn't that exactly why we object (when we do object) to bad work?

And if you are called to music or farming or carpentry or healing, if you make your living by your calling, if you use your skills well and to a good purpose and therefore are happy or satisfied in your work, why should you necessarily do less of it?

More important, why should you think of your life as distinct from it?

And why should you not be affronted by some official decree that you should do less of it?

A useful discourse on the subject of work would raise a number of questions that Mr. de Graaf has neglected to ask:

What work are we talking about?

Did you choose your work, or are you doing it under compulsion as the way to earn money?

How much of your intelligence, your affection, your skill, and your pride is employed in your work?

Do you respect the product or the service that is the result of your work?

For whom do you work: a manager, a boss, or yourself?

What are the ecological and social costs of your work?

If such questions are not asked, then we have no way of seeing or proceeding beyond the assumptions of Mr. de Graaf and his work-life experts: that all work is bad work; that all workers are unhappily and even helplessly dependent on employers; that work and life are irreconcilable; and that the only solution to bad work is to shorten the workweek and thus divide the badness among more people.

I don’t think anybody can honorably object to the proposition, in theory, that it is better “to reduce hours rather than lay off workers.” But this raises the likelihood of reduced income and therefore of less “life.” As a remedy for this, Mr. de Graaf can offer only “unemployment benefits,” one of the industrial economy’s more fragile “safety nets.”

And what are people going to do with the “more life” that is understood to be the result of “less work”? Mr. de Graaf says that they “will exercise more, sleep more, garden more, spend more time with friends and family, and drive less.” This happy vision descends from the proposition, popular not so long ago, that in the spare time gained by the purchase of “labor-saving devices,” people would patronize libraries, museums, and symphony orchestras.

But what if the liberated workers drive more?

What if they recreate themselves with off-road vehicles, fast motorboats, fast food, computer games, television, electronic “communication,” and the various genres of pornography?

Well, that’ll be “life,” supposedly, and anything beats work.

Mr. de Graaf makes the further doubtful assumption that work is a static quantity, dependably available, and divisible into dependably sufficient portions. This supposes that one of the purposes of the industrial economy is to provide employment to workers. On the contrary, one of the purposes of this economy has always been to transform independent farmers, shopkeepers, and tradespeople into employees, and then to use the employees as cheaply as possible, and then to replace them as soon as possible with technological substitutes.

So there could be fewer working hours to divide, more workers among whom to divide them, and fewer unemployment benefits to take up the slack.

On the other hand, there is a lot of work needing to be done—ecosystem and watershed restoration, improved transportation networks, healthier and safer food production, soil conservation, etc.—that nobody yet is willing to pay for. Sooner or later, such work will have to be done.

We may end up working longer workdays in order not to “live,” but to survive."

Wendell Berry

Port Royal, Kentucky

Love Wins

with thanks to practicing resurrection

stable as the land

How necessary it is for monks to work in the fields, 

in the rain, in the sun, in the mud, in the clay, 

in the wind: these are our spiritual directors and our novice masters. 

They form our contemplation. 

They instill virtue into us. 

They make us as stable as the land we live in. 

You do not get that out of a typewriter.

~ Thomas Merton

from The Intimate Merton

art by van gogh

morning bird songs

I wake up my car;

pollen covers the windshield.

I put my dark glasses on.

The bird songs all turn dark.

Meanwhile someone is buying a paper

at the railroad station

not far from a big freight car

reddened all over with rust.

It shimmers in the sun.

The whole universe is full.

A cool corridor cuts through the spring warmth;

a man comes hurrying past

describing how someone right up in the main office

has been telling lies about him.

Trough a backdoor in the landscape

the magpie arrives,

black and white, bird of the death-goddess.

A blackbird flies back and forth

until the whole scene becomes a charcoal drawing,

except for the white clothes on the line:

a Palestrina choir.

The whole universe is full!

Fantastic to feel how my poem is growing

while I myself am shrinking.

It's getting bigger, it's taking my place,

it's pressing against me.

It has shoved me out of the nest.

The poem is finished.

~ Tomas Transtromer

from The Unfinished Heaven

translated by robert bly

a love song

The little river twittering in the twilight,

The wan, wondering look of the pale sky,

This is almost bliss.

And everything shut up and gone to sleep,

All the troubles and anxieties and pain

Gone under the twilight.

Only the twilight now, and the soft "Sh!" of the river

That will last forever.

And at last I know my love for you is here;

I can see it all, it is whole like the twilight,

It is large, so large, I could not see it before,

Because of the little lights and flickers and interruptions,

Troubles, anxieties and pains.

You are the call and I am the answer,

You are the wish, and I the fullfilment,

You are the night, and I the day.

What else - it is perfect enough.

It is perfectly complete,

You and I,

What more--?

Strange, how we suffer in spite of this.

~ DH Lawrence
from Look! We Have Come Through!
photo by kate thompson

without time?

Like a singer, for example; to him the voice is the greatest security, 

and when that fails he is ready to commit suicide. 

 

What is really exciting and true is to find out for oneself a way of life

 that is highly sensitive and supremely intelligent; and this is not possible

 if there is fear, anxiety, greed, envy, the building of images 

or the living in religious isolation. That isolation is what all religions

 have supplied: the believer is definitely on the threshold of suicide.

 

 Because he has put all his faith in a belief, when that belief is questioned

 he is afraid and is ready to take on another belief, another image, 

commit another religious suicide. So, can a man live without any image, 

without any pattern, without any time-sense? I don’t mean living 

in such a way as not to care what happens tomorrow or what happened yesterday,

 That is not living. There are those who say, “Take the present and make the best of it;

 that is also an act of despair. Really one should not ask whether or not it is right

 to commit suicide; one should ask what brings about the state of mind

 that has no hope – though hope is the wrong word because hope implies a future;

 one should ask rather, how does a life come about that is without time?

 

 To live without time is really to have this sense of great love, because love

 is not of time, love is not something that was or will be; to explore this and live

 with it is the real question. Whether to commit suicide or not is the question 

of a man who is already partially dead. Hope is the most dreadful thing.

 Wasn't it Dante who said, “Leave hope behind when you enter the Inferno?"

 To him, paradise was hope, that's horrible.

~ J. Krishnamurti

from The Urgency of Change

art by Katsushika Hokusai

again and again

Again and again, however we know the landscape of love

and the little churchyard there, with its sorrowing names,

and the frighteningly silent abyss into which the others

fall: again and again the two of us walk out together

under the ancient trees, lie down again and again

among the flowers, face to face with the sky.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke 

the couple

They turn the lights off, and its white globe glows

an instant and then dissolves, like a tablet

in a glass of darkness.  Then a rising.

The hotel walls shoot up into heaven's darkness.

Their movements have grown softer, and they sleep, 

but their most secret thoughts begin to meet

like two colors that meet and run together

on the wet paper in a schoolboy's painting.

It is dark and silent.  The city however has come nearer

tonight.  With its windows turned off. Houses have come.

They stand packed and waiting very near,

a mob of people with blank faces.

~ Tomas Transtromer

translated by robert bly

from The Half-Finished Heaven

art by picasso

the tangerine-eater

Oh what foresight!  This rabbit of the fruit-world!  Imagine: 
 thirty-seven little pits in a single specimen, ready to fall every-which-way
 and create offspring.  We had to correct that.  She could have populated
 the whole earth - this little headstrong Tangerine, wearing a dress
 too big for herself, as if she intended to keep on growing.
  In short: badly dressed; more concerned with reproduction 
than with style.  Show her the pomegranate, in her armor of Cordova leather: 
 she is bursting with future, holds herself back, condescends... 
And, letting us catch just a glimpse of her possible progeny, 
she smothers them in a dark-red cradle.  She thinks earth
 is too evasive to sign a pact of abundance.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from Uncollected Poems,

four sketches

photo by bill thompson III

gratulerer med dagen Edvard

I was walking along a path with two friends – the sun was setting – 

suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, 

feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – 

there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – 

my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety – 

and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.

~ Edvard Munch 

from his diary Jan. 22, 1892

He paints, or rather regards, things in a way that is different from that of other artists. He sees only the essential, and that, naturally, is all he paints. For this reason Munch's pictures are as a rule "not complete", as people are so delighted to discover for themselves. Oh, yes, they are complete. His complete handiwork. Art is complete once the artist has really said everything that was on his mind, and this is precisely the advantage Munch has over painters of the other generation, that he really knows how to show us what he has felt, and what has gripped him, and to this he subordinates everything else.

~ Christian Krohg

a friend of Munch

Munch 1933

an ecstasy

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, 

and beyond which life cannot rise. 

And such is the paradox of living, 

this ecstasy comes when one is most alive,

and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. 

~ Jack London 

from The Call of the Wild

photo by Shreve Stockton

the ordinary and the wild

Unnameable Heart

The cricket who

kept me company three days

has fallen silent,

I don't know where.

There are so many

lives of which I know nothing.

Even my own. It moves now

through my fingers toward yours

and I know nothing

I can say that will name its heart.

A boat drifts far out

on the river below the mountains,

and below it

the fish, the great fish

that the one in the boat has come for,

swims in the shadows.

Perhaps the cricket is there, inside the fish.

Stranger things have happened.

I have looked everywhere else

for my lost companion.

From here, the shadow looks small,

but to the fish it is huge.

Range after range of mountains,

and still the old painters

found a place

where two could walk together, side by side.

~ Jane Hirshfield

gifts

The things we really need come to us only as gifts, 

and in order to receive them as gifts, 

we have to be open. 

In order to be open we have to renounce ourselves, 

in a sense we have to die to our image of ourselves, 

our autonomy, our fixation upon our self-willed destiny. 

We have to be able to relax the psychic 

and spiritual cramp which knots us in the painful, 

vulnerable, helpless “I” that is all we know of ourselves

~ Thomas Merton

sketch by catherine doherty

On this day in 1941 Thomas Merton arrived at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani 

and on this day in 1968 he died in Thailand while participating in a conference of Benedictine and Trappist monks. In the 27 years between those two events he wrote a succession of books which have touched many lives.