Sunday, February 5, 2012

to know the dark





To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.




~ Wendell Berry
from Farming - A Handbook




Friday, February 3, 2012

feasts of wisdom





I was seeking a cure for my trouble;
My trouble became my cure.
I was seeking a proof of my origin;
My origin became my proof.

I was looking to the right and the left
So that I could see the face of the Beloved.
I was searching outside,
But the Soul was within that very soul.



~  Niyazi Misri (1616 - 1694)
translation by Walter Feldman







temporal affections





Time is what keeps the light from reaching us. 
There is no greater obstacle to God than time: 
and not only time but temporalities, 
not only temporal things but temporal affections, 
not only temporal affections 
but the very taint and smell of time. 




~  Meister Eckhart
art by dali



grandsons, unborn


Georg Trakl 
3 February 1887 - 3 November 1914 


Birth


These mountains: blackness, silence, and snow. 
The red hunter climbs down from the forest; 
Oh the mossy gaze of the wild thing.
The peace of the mother: under black firs 
The sleeping hands open by themselves 
When the cold moon seems ready to fall.
The birth of man. Each night
Blue water washes over the rockbase of the cliff;
The fallen angel stares at his reflection with sighs,
Something pale wakes up in a suffocating room. 
The eyes 
Of the stony old woman shine, two moons.
The cry of the woman in labor. The night troubles 
The boy’s sleep with black wings, 
With snow, which falls with ease out of the purple 
clouds 




His language was simple and clear, even in translation, resembling the work of Hoelderlin, with strong and precise imagery, darkly brooding sensitivity, and an adept feeling for color. He wrote about death, decay, and doom, hiding himself in lyrical metaphor and the ambiguity of his images. Trakl saw the world collapsing around him and taking him with it; and while his poetry is overwhelmingly negative, critics find in it a gesture of affirmation.


Otto Dix - Sunrise (1913)


The Ravens (1913)


Over the black crevice
at noon the ravens rush with rusty cries.
Their shadows touch the deer’s back
and at times they loom in gnarled rest. 

O how they derange the brown stillness,
in the one acre itself entranced,
like a woman married to grave premonitions,
and at times you can hear them bicker 

about a corpse they sniffed-out somewhere,
and sharply they bend their flight towards north
and dwindle away like a funeral
march in the air, shivering with bliss. 


One year after Georg Trakl's poem and Otto Dix' painting, visions of the impeding disaster, both men were called to the military. World War I had begun. In July 1914, shortly before being drafted by the Austro-Hungarian Army, Georg Trakl received a large monetary gift from the then unknown philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein who was distributing his enormous inheritance to artists. Unfortunately, Trakl never was able to use the money. His emotional instability became worse under the strains of war and he was hospitalized numerous times as a result of depression and suicide attempts. After several bloody defeats at the hands of the Russians, Trakl was left to single handedly care for 90 wounded men in a barn near Grodek where he wrote the following poem:


Albin Egger-Lienz
 Den Namenlosen (Those Who Have Lost Their Names)
 1914


Grodek (1914)

At evening the autumn woodlands ring
With deadly weapons. Over the golden plains
And lakes of blue, the sun
More darkly rolls. The night surrounds

Warriors dying and the wild lament
Of their fragmented mouths.
Yet silently there gather in the willow combe
Red clouds inhabited by an angry god,

Shed blood, and the chill of the moon.
All roads lead to black decay.
Under golden branching of the night and stars
A sister's shadow sways through the still grove

To greet the heroes' spirits, the bloodied heads.
And softly in the reeds Autumn's dark flutes resound.
O prouder mourning! - You brazen altars,
The spirit's hot flame is fed now by a tremendous pain:
The grandsons, unborn.



Trakl could not adequately relieve the pain of his patients on his own, and he witnessed the splattered brains of one soldier who shot himself. Trakl then went outside, and after seeing some of the local Ruthenians hanging from trees, suffered a mental breakdown and threatened to shoot himself. In October, Trakl was hospitalized in Cracow, Poland, and received a visit from a friend who encouraged Trakl to send for his benefactor Wittgenstein. Unfortunately, Trakl injected himself with a fatal dose of cocaine, a probable suicide attempt, on November 3, 1914, three days before Wittgenstein arrived.


~ history and commentary from poetry foundation




Thursday, February 2, 2012

a rotten and crumbling edifice







..Are we really so identified with a rotten and crumbling edifice
 that we are bound to collapse with it? 

This is where I stop. I think that if the thing collapses, and it must,
 a great deal of what we have called “Christianity” will go with it,
 and if we’re around to rub the dust out of our eyes 
we will finally see that it wasn't Christianity at all. 
Who will deliver us from this body of death?... 

I have to go along with policies that are often so inert, so blind, 
so stupid that they utterly stifle the true life of the Church 
and make it impossible for the most clear-sighted and courageous
 of her members to do anything that will further the real manifestation
 of the truth and [love] of Christ in the world … 
behind all this spurious Pentecostal wind one can hear,
 if [one] listens a little carefully, the hideous merriment of demons…






~ Thomas Merton
taken from correspondence between Merton and philosopher Leslie Dewart
in Witness to Freedom: Letters in Times of Crisis





Wednesday, February 1, 2012

winter dreams and butterflys






Winter



Evening. A fire
in the grate and a fire
outside, where a robin
is burning. How they both
sing, offering a friendship
unacceptable to the hand
that is as vulnerable to the one
as it is treacherous to the other.

Ah, time, enemy of their music,
reducing fuel to feathers, feathers
to ash, it was, but a moment ago,
spring in this tinder: flames
in flower that are now embers
on song's hearth.
The leaves fall
from a dark tree, brimming
with shadow, fall on one who,
as Borges suggested,
is no more perhaps than the dream God
in his loneliness is dreaming.




~ R. S. Thomas
from  Mass for Hard Times






You have wakened not out of sleep, 
but into a prior dream, 
and that dream lies within another, and so on, 
to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. 
The path that you are to take is endless, 
and you will die before you have truly awakened.



~ Jorge Luis Borges






Once Chuang Tzu dreamt  he was a butterfly, 
a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, 
happy with himself and doing as he pleased. 
 He didn't know he was Chuang Tzu. 
 Suddenly he woke up and there he was, 
solid and unmistakable Chuang Tzu. 

 But he didn't know if he was Chuang Tzu who had dreamt he was a butterfly, 
or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Tzu.





~ Chuang Tzu
from The Complete Chuang Tzu
translated by Burton Watson



they bless me






I spend all my morning with the muses;  
- and they bless me also in my walks.

Compelled to contemplate a lasting malady, born with an ardent and lively temperament, susceptible to the diversions of society, I was obliged at an early date to isolate myself and live a life of solitude....For me there can be no recreation in human society, refined conversation, mutual exchange of thoughts and feelings; only so far as necessity compels may I give myself to society,—I must live like an exile. 




~ from the Ludwig van Beethoven journals
with thanks to Roderick Maclver


portrait by 
Joseph Karl Stieler




horses








In truth I am puzzled most in life
by nine horses.

I've been watching them for eleven weeks
in a pasture near Melrose.

Two are on one side of the fence and seven
on the other side.

They stare at one another from the same places
hours and hours each day.

This is another unanswerable question
to haunt us with the ordinary.

They have to be talking to one another
in a language without a voice.

Maybe they are speaking the wordless talk of lovers,
sullen, melancholy, jubilant.

Linguists say that language comes after music
and we sang nonsense syllables

before we invented a rational speech
to order our days.

We live far out in the country where I hear
creature voices night and day.

Like us they are talking about their lives
on this brief visit to earth.

In truth each day is a universe in which
we are tangled in the light of stars.

Stop a moment. Think about these horses
in their sweet-smelling silence.






~ Jim Harrison
from Songs of Unreason
with thanks to being poetry




blessing bow






Here at seventy-four, I am having an idea
what I do pretty-well, what not-so-well.
I dream. I keep a journal of my dreams,
and I put images from them in trance-poems.
I do not write or think about poetry
with a very clear intelligence. I love
certain lines and passages without getting
the whole picture, like rocks thrown against
my door without knowing who’s there.
I found this piece of paper on my bookshelf
dated Sept. 2, 1976. It records a three-part
dream from that night. I recall best
what it felt like there at the end, here
thirty-five years later. I am invited to
a dinner table with Gary Snyder, his family
and friends. We sit in the blessing-bow.
He begins, but I raise my head instead,
and open my eyes, feeling a great love
coming. The air is electrical, full of spirit.
He opens his eyes and sees me reaching
my hand toward him. He takes my hand,
still saying the blessing, which is about
filling with love for the ONE, as we are,
and amen to that. Now the dream
feels like an approach into this flawed
and difficult, hilarious, opening-out time
left before death encloses me in its whatever
it-will-be, a full prostration blessing-bow.










~ Coleman Barks
from the Georgia Review
photo by Robert Foah


Tuesday, January 31, 2012

paying attention to the melody





All right.  I know that each of us will die alone.
It doesn't matter how loud or soft the sitar plays.
Sooner or later the melody will say it all.

The prologue is so long!  At last the theme comes.
It says the soul will rise above all these notes.
It says the dust will be swept up from the floor.

It doesn't matter if we say our prayers or not.
We know the canoe is heading straight for the falls,
And no one will pick us up from the water this time.

One day the mice will carry our ragged impulses
All the way to Egypt, and at home the cows
Will graze on a thousand acres of thought.

Everyone goes on hoping for a good death.
The old rope hangs down from the hangman's nail.
The forty-nine robbers are climbing into their boots.

Robert, don't expect too much.  You've put yourself
Ahead of others for years, a hundred years.
It will take a long time for you to hear the melody.





~ Robert Bly
from Talking into the Ear of a Donkey




Sunday, January 29, 2012

creator, preserver, and destroyer




statue from Tamil Nadu, Chola Dynasty, India


As a symbol, Shiva Nataraja is a brilliant invention. 
It combines in a single image Shiva's roles as creator, preserver, and destroyer 
of the universe and conveys the Indian conception of the never-ending cycle of time. 

Although it appeared in sculpture as early as the fifth century, its present, 
world-famous form evolved under the rule of the Cholas. 
Shiva's dance is set within a flaming halo. 
The god holds in his upper right hand the damaru (hand drum that made the first sounds of creation). 
His upper left hand holds agni (the fire that will destroy the universe). 
With his lower right hand, he makes abhayamudra (the gesture that allays fear). 
The dwarflike figure being trampled by his right foot represents 
apasmara purusha (illusion, which leads mankind astray). 
Shiva's front left hand, pointing to his raised left foot, 
signifies refuge for the troubled soul. 
The energy of his dance makes his hair fly to the sides.



~ description by the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Beneath its diversity and complexity, the underlying unity of Hinduism has correspondences with the inward dimension of the Christian faith.

~ Ursula King





Friday, January 27, 2012

only breath










~ Rumi
with Coleman Barks

after long busyness







I start out for a walk at last after weeks at the desk.
Moon gone, plowing underfoot, no stars, not a trace of light!
Suppose a horse were galloping toward me in this open field?
Every day I did not spend in solitude was wasted.




~ Robert Bly
photo by michael totten


Thursday, January 26, 2012

creativity - authority - self-knowledge




There is no method for self-knowledge. 

Seeking a method invariably implies the desire to attain some result and that is what we all want. We follow authority - if not that of a person, then of a system, of an ideology - because we want a result that will be satisfactory, which will give us security. We really do not want to understand ourselves, our impulses and reactions, the whole process of our thinking, the conscious as well as the unconscious; we would rather pursue a system that assures us of a result. But the pursuit of a system is invariably the outcome of our desire for security, for certainty, and the result is obviously not the understanding of oneself. When we follow a method, we must have authorities - the teacher, the guru, the savior, the Master - who will guarantee us what we desire; and surely that is not the way to self-knowledge.

Authority prevents the understanding of oneself, does it not? Under the shelter of an authority, a guide, you may have temporarily a sense of security, a sense of well-being, but that is not the understanding of the total process of oneself. Authority in its very nature prevents the full awareness of oneself and therefore ultimately destroys freedom; in freedom alone can there be creativeness. 

There can be creativeness only through self-knowledge.






~ J. Krishnamurti
from The Book of Life
with thanks to j krishnamurti online






Tuesday, January 24, 2012

you can barely distinguish me






I have hymns you haven't heard.

There is an upward soaring
in which I bend close.
You can barely distinguish me
from the things that kneel before me.

They are like sheep, they are grazing.
I am the shepherd on the brow of the hill.
When evening draws them home
I follow after, the dark bridge thudding,

and the vapor rising from their backs
hides my own homecoming.






~ Rainer Maria Rilke
from The Book of Monastic Life
translation by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy
art from the cave of chauvet-pont-d'arc