Tuesday, June 30, 2020

on the value of not-knowing







All sorts of torturers, dictators, fanatics, and demagogues struggling for power

 by way of a few loudly shouted slogans also enjoy their jobs, 
and they too perform their duties with inventive fervor. Well, yes,
 but they “know.” They know, and whatever they know is enough for them
 once and for all. They don’t want to find out about anything else,
 since that might diminish their arguments’ force. And any knowledge
 that doesn’t lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain
 the temperature required for sustaining life. In the most extreme cases,
 cases well known from ancient and modern history, 
it even poses a lethal threat to society.

This is why I value that little phrase “I don’t know” so highly. 

It’s small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include 
the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth 
hangs suspended. If Isaac Newton had never said to himself “I don’t know,” 
the apples in his little orchard might have dropped to the ground 
like hailstones and at best he would have stooped to pick them up 
and gobble them with gusto. Had my compatriot Marie Sklodowska-Curie
 never said to herself “I don’t know”, she probably would have wound up
 teaching chemistry at some private high school for young ladies from good families,
 and would have ended her days performing this otherwise perfectly respectable job.
 But she kept on saying “I don’t know,” and these words led her, 
not just once but twice, to Stockholm, where restless, questing spirits
 are occasionally rewarded with the Nobel Prize.

The world — whatever we might think when terrified by its vastness 

and our own impotence, or embittered by its indifference to individual suffering,
 of people, animals, and perhaps even plants, for why are we so sure
 that plants feel no pain; whatever we might think of its expanses
 pierced by the rays of stars surrounded by planets we’ve just begun
 to discover, planets already dead? still dead? we just don’t know;
 whatever we might think of this measureless theater to which we’ve got 
reserved tickets, but tickets whose lifespan is laughably short,
 bounded as it is by two arbitrary dates; whatever else
 we might think of this world — it is astonishing.

But “astonishing” is an epithet concealing a logical trap. We’re astonished, 

after all, by things that deviate from some well-known and universally 
acknowledged norm, from an obviousness we’ve grown accustomed to. 
Now the point is, there is no such obvious world. Our astonishment exists per se 
and isn’t based on comparison with something else.

Granted, in daily speech, where we don’t stop to consider every word, 

we all use phrases like “the ordinary world,” “ordinary life,” “the ordinary
 course of events” … But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed,
 nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it.
 Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, 
not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world.




 ~  Wisława Szymborska
 art by Salvador Dalí from a rare edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland


 

Monday, June 29, 2020

so much of Everything








Reality demands
we also state the following:
life goes on.
At Cannae and Borodino.
at Kosovo Polje and in Guernica.

There is a gas station 
in a small plaza in Jericho,
and freshly painted
benches near Bila Hora.
Letters travel
between Pearl Harbor and Hastings,
a furniture truck passes
before the eyes of the lion of Chaeronea,
and only an atmospheric front advances
toward the blossoming orchards near Verdun.

There is so much of Everything,
that Nothing is quite well concealed,
Music flows
from yachts at Actium
and on board couples dance in the sun.

So much keeps happening, 
that it must be happening everywhere.
Where not a stone is left standing,
there is an ice-cream truck
besieged by children.

Where Hiroshima had been,
Hiroshima is again
manufacturing products
for everyday use.

Not without its draws is this terrible world,
not without its draws
worth our waking.

In the fields of Maciejowice
the grass is green
and on the grass is - you know how grass is -
transparent dew,

Maybe there are no fields but battlefields,
those still remembered,
and those long forgotten,
birch groves and cedar groves,
snows and sands, iridescent swamps,
and ravines of dark defeat
where today, in sudden need,
you squat behind a bush.

What moral flows from this? Probably none.
But what really flows is quickly drying blood,
and as always, some rivers and clouds.

On the tragic mountain passes
the wind blows hats off heads
and we cannot help-
but laugh.




~ Wislawa Szymborska
from miracle fair
translated by Joanna Trzeciak



 

living in two worlds









~ Miriam Rose Ungunmerr-Bauman




Sunday, June 28, 2020

water and ice










~ Joseph Goldstein



 

like a creek






The way the soul is with the senses
and the mind, is like a creek.

When desire-weeds grow thick,
your intelligence cannot flow,
and soul-creatures stay hidden.

But sometimes a flooding comes
that runs so strong
it clears the clogged stream,
as though with God’s hand.

No longer weeping and frustrated,
your being grows as powerful
as your wantings were before.

Laughing and satisfied,
that masterful current
lets soul-creatures appear.

You look down,
and it’s lucid dreaming.
The gates made of light
swing open. 
You see in.




~ Rumi
from A Year with Rumi
translation by Coleman Barks
photo by ansel adams





not yet discouraged







By plucking her petals, you do not
gather the beauty of the flower.

Clouds come floating into my life,
no longer to carry rain or usher storm,
but to add colour to my sunset sky.

Death is not extinguishing the light;
it is only putting out the lamp
because the dawn has come.

Do not say, ‘It is morning,’
and dismiss it with a name of yesterday.
See it for the first time
as a newborn child that has no name.

Don’t limit a child to your own learning,
for he was born in another time.

Emancipation from the bondage of the soil
is no freedom for the tree.

Every child comes with the message
that God is not yet discouraged of man.

Every difficulty slurred over
will be a ghost to disturb your repose later on.

Everything comes to us that belongs to us
if we create the capacity to receive it.

Faith is the bird that feels the light
when the dawn is still dark.

From the solemn gloom of the temple
children run out to sit in the dust,
God watches them play and forgets the priest.

I have become my own version of an optimist.
If I can’t make it through one door,
I’ll go through another door - or I’ll make a door.
Something terrific will come
no matter how dark the present.





~ Rabindranath Tagore





Friday, June 26, 2020

the storm

.


We lay in our bed as in a tomb
awakened by thunder to the dark
in which our house was one with night,
and then light came as if the black
roof of the world had cracked open,
as if the night of all time had broken,
and out our window we glimpsed the world
birthwet and shining, as even
the sun at noon had never made it shine.

~ Wendell Berry
.


Thursday, June 25, 2020

mindfulness










~ Joseph Goldstein



 

and for nothing was there a why and a wherefore



"The rain fell alike upon the just and upon the unjust, and for nothing was there a why and a wherefore."


~  from Of Human Bondage, 1915




Maugham then studied medicine for six years in London. He qualified in 1897 as doctor from St. Thomas' medical school, but abandoned medicine after the success of his first novels and plays.




"I have never pretended to be anything but a story teller. It has amused me to tell stories and I have told a great many. It is a misfortune for me that the telling of a story just for the sake of the story is not an activity that is in favor with the intelligentsia. I endeavor to bear my misfortunes with fortitude." 

from Creatures of Circumstance, 1947

With the outbreak of WW I, Maugham volunteered for the Red Cross, and was stationed in France for a period. There he met Gerald Haxton (1892-1944), an American, who became his companion. Disguising himself as a reporter, Maugham served as an espionage agent for British Secret Intelligence Service in Russia in 1916-17, but his stuttering and poor health hindered his career in this field.

In 1917 he married Syrie Barnardo Wellcome, an interior decorator; they were divored in 1927-8.

Syrie

Maugham named his daughter and only child, Elizabeth 'Liza' Mary Maugham, after the title character in his first novel  Liza of Lambeth.

Liza center




"He did not know how wide a country, arid and precipitous, must be crossed before the traveler through life comes to an acceptance of reality. It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched, for they are full of the truth-less ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded."

~ from Of Human Bondage, Ch. 29
Initially titled "The Artistic Temperament of Stephen Carey"







“The writer is more concerned to know than to judge,” 
declares the narrator of Maugham’s novel The Moon and Sixpence (1919)





Guy Hague and Ramana Maharshi





Meditation enables them to go
Deeper and deeper into consciousness,
From the world of words to the world of thoughts,
Then beyond thoughts to wisdom in the Self.

Sharp like a razor's edge, the sages say,
Is the path, difficult to traverse.


~ Katha Upanishad



This is the passage from which the title of Somerset Maugham's book The Razor's Edge was taken. His story traces the spiritual journey of an American fighter pilot traumatized by WWI. The book is apparently based on the life of Guy Hague who had spent time with Ramana Maharshi in Tamil Nadu, India, as did Maugham himself.
Maugham's novels explore the beauty of and intricacy of the fabric of life in-which we are all entwined.









Wednesday, June 24, 2020

souvenir







I would like
to take something with me

but even one chair
is too awkward
too heavy

peeling paint
falls off in a suitcase
hinge sounds betray a theft
cheeses won't keep

the clothespin 
without its surroundings 
would be mediocre

the big thunder rolled elsewhere

the umbrella is for sale
but in a desert what you want is a soaking

the do not disturb sign is tattered

I have many times taken
some cafe's small packets of sugar
so that in Turkey
I might sweeten my coffee with China
and in Italy remember a Lithuanian pastry

but where is the coffee

hands left and right useless

Knees clattery
heart finally calm
as some hero at the end of a movie
squinting silently into the sun

you can't hold an umbrella there anyhow
and what would he hang from the clothespin



~ Jane Hirshfield
from The Beauty



Tuesday, June 23, 2020

When I come near the red peony flower





When I come near the red peony flower
I tremble as water does near thunder,
As the well does when the plates of earth move,
Or the tree when fifty birds leave at once.

The peony says that we have been given a gift,
And it is not the gift of this world.
Behind the leaves of the peony
There is a world still darker, that feeds many.



~ Robert Bly

real presence is the ideal







Real presence is the ideal of all true individuation.  When we yield to helplessness, 
we strengthen the hand of those who would destroy.  When we choose indifference, 
we betray our world.  Yet the world is not decided by action alone. 

 It is decided more by consciousness and spirit; they are the secret sources of all action
 and behavior.  The spirit of a time is an incredibly subtle, yet hugely powerful force. 
 And it is comprised of the mentality and spirit of all individuals together. 

 Therefore, the way you look at things is not simply a private matter.  
Your outlook actually and concretely affects what goes on.  When you give in
 to helplessness, you collude with despair and add to it.  When you take back
 your power and choose to see the possibilities for healing and transformation, 
your creativity awakens and flows...


~ John O'Donohue
from To Bless the Space Between Us
art: Herzeloyde – The Mother Archetype


Monday, June 22, 2020

singly







They come singly, the little streams,
Out of their solitude.  They bear
In their rough fall a spate of gleams
That glance and dance in morning air.

They come singly, and coming go
Ever downward toward the river
Into whose dark abiding flow
They come, now quieted, together.

In dark they mingle and are made
At one with light in highest flood
Embodied and inhabited,
The budded branch as red as blood.




~ Wendell Berry
from This Day - Collected & New Sabbath Poems


flow like the Tao





Who can free himself from achievement
And from fame, descend and be lost
Amid the masses of men?
He will flow like Tao, unseen,
He will go about like Life itself
With no name and no home.
Simple is he, without distinction.
To all appearances he is a fool.
His steps leave no trace.  He has no power.
He achieves nothing, has no reputation.
Since he judges no one
No one judges him.
Such is the perfect man:
His boat is empty.




~ Chuang Tzu
translation by Thomas Merton
from The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton




who?





 who sees exactly what is taking place in the world, 
and who really wants to find out if God, truth, 
is an actuality or merely a clever invention of the priest? 

After all, you and I are the result of the collective, are we not? 

And there must be individual human beings who have completely broken away from the collective, 
from society, who are free from conditioning, not in layers or in spots, but totally, 
for it is only such individuals who can find out what truth or God is 

-not the man of tradition, not the man who does japa, rings the bell, quotes the Gita,
 and goes to the temple every day. 
It is the irreligious people who do that. 

But the man who really wants to find out 
what this extraordinary movement of living is 
must not only understand the process of his own conditioning, 
but be able to go beyond it. 

Because, the mind can find out what is true 
only when it is free from all conditioning, 
not when it merely repeats certain words or quotes the sacred books. 
Such a mind is not free.





~ J. Krishnamurti
from  Collected Works