On Purpose

I was trolling for some enticing tidbits of American literature with which to tempt my students into enthusiasm for what probably feels to them like dusty old writing by dead white guys who were never on Facebook.  I flipped the anthology open  and found just the right page from Thoreau, no mean accident, I'm sure.  Often quoted, yes to the point of cliche, but still worth visiting here is the following passage from Walden, Chapter 2, "Where I Lived and What I Lived For":

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.  I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation unless it was quite necessary.  I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life...

When we begin a yoga practice, it's not unusual for an instructor to encourage us to "set your intention to be present in your practice today."  I think old Henry David (who, by the way, studied the ancient texts of Hinduism and Yoga) offers some real insight on the matter.

We are All Avatars

In Louise Erdrich's novel Four Souls, the character Nanapush considers the existence of a reality other than the one we see. Many of Erdrich's characters have the ability to understand and manipulate mysterious forces originating in some other reality, so to enter this novelist's world is to accept that other worlds exist beyond the one most of us consider "real". (And indeed, isn't experiencing a fictional world itself already a sort of alternate reality?) In Erdrich's fictional world, certain individuals simply accept that other realities exist and seem to understand that perhaps we can move back and forth among them. Others only intuit the presence of these various layers of reality, and still others just remain clueless. Nanapush observes

Each of us has an original, you see, living somewhere underneath the shadow of our daily life.  That life we live in the moving world is the dream life of the copy.   She runs, she breathes, she cares for others, she mends their clothes.  You gaze into the water of your day and there your face floats back, serene, unguarded.  See! See! Beneath that thin smile you are smiling somewhere else.  Your hand moves and the hand moves below you.  Perhaps in another country more real than you are, in another life.

There's something a bit Platonic about this notion that the physical world, or what our habits of mind dictate as "real", is merely a copy of another world.   But Nanapush's description of a  two-layered reality also reminds me of tales from many cultures that suggest what we consider a "dream" world, is more real than our "real" world.  Dreaming time allows us a momentary glimpse into the myriad other possible "realities".

So, while Marie Ponsot's Denis "sees what is there to see", and my previous post used that line to decry our over-dependence on metaphor and symbol to create meaning, I find Nanapush's view a helpful counterpoint.  So, while we strive to see "what is there to see", we live with the paradox that there is, most likely more to see that what is there to see.

Figure Not

I love how really good poems focus the attention on the beauty of the ordinary, the divine details.  In her poem "For Denis at Ten" Marie Ponsot takes us walking with a boy, Denis, on his way to a brook to harvest watercress, a happy little chore he's been sent to do, by grownups no doubt, who probably need their world-weary palates entertained by something crisply cold & bitter.  On his way, Denis notices critters, cow poop, sky, stones. They are just there, and so is he, and that is that; he is on his way to the brook.  And,

                             He goes there, whistling.
                                               Nothing reminds him of something.
                             He sees what is there to see.


Oh, perhaps in her imagination Ponsot idealizes a tiny bit the child's sense of the world's immediacy, that be-here-nowness we somehow believe children naturally possess.  Still, I appreciate the poem's suggestion that a walk to the brook (or, by extension, down the street, across the room, around the continent) need not be laden with symbolism, metaphor, nostalgia, anxiety, imminence, the fancy figures we think make meaning.  The world is as the world is. Focus the attention.  See what is there to see.

Something in Common with Kay

I've been considering the possibility that Kay Ryan, the U.S. Library of Congress's 16h Poet Laureate, and I share the same problem with the muses.  Well, it's not just Kay Ryan's problem, or mine of course.  Anyone whose creativity has gone a bit fallow might wonder about why the muses have gone mute.  In "Her Politeness"Ryan observes

                                                     how she
                                     isn't insistent, how
                                    she won't impose, how
                                    nothing's so urgent
                                    it won't wait

Now I don't mean to blame my laziness or general lack of discipline about blogging on the mute muse.  But what I like here in Ryan's ever aphoristic verse is the notion of non-attachment tweaking the nose of desire.  Of course we want that muse to whip us up, give the command, tell us the answer.  We wish for, as Ryan says

                                               the muse                               
              you'd have leap at your throat
              you'd spring to obey.

But Miss Museypants just sits there all meek and quiet, smiling politely, waiting for you to figure it out on your own.

That August Night in New Orleans

Mind met up
with Soul
corner
of Tchoupitoulas & Canal.
She undressed
him on the ferry
to Algiers.
Other passengers
they didn’t say
a word
against that
pale naked Mind
(It was New Orleans, remember?)
just standing
by the deck rail
in the rain
stunned but
glad to have
figured it out
at last.

New Orleans, it's one of those magical cities where you know just about anything can happen. My favorite time to be there is August, when most of the sensible tourists stay away from the 100 degree heat, monsoon downpours, and steam-bath humidity. Something about the town, especially then, peels me down to what's essential; especially when each breath is saturated with moisture, the aromas of fabulous food, and the muddy-wet smell of the Mississippi as it curves around the French Quarter.

I wrote this poem (yup, it's one of mine!) upon returning to Tennessee, my mind still soaked in a funky residue after spending a few days in New Orleans. The piece comes from a waking dream of sorts, one in which it's easy to imagine the feminine Soul getting the masculine Mind to let go and just be. Lately, my mind has been racing into fast forward or short circuiting in the past, so looking at this poem reminds my Mind to hush now, be still, let Soul strip us down.

Kali, Ganesha, Energy and Angels

One of my favorite characters in Tony Kushner's play Angels in America is Harper Pitt.  She's an agoraphobic, delusional, valium addict coming to grips with the realization that she has married a closeted gay man who also happens to be a devout Mormon.  Harper is also plenty worried about the hole in the ozone, and in one of her delusions, she actually visits Antarctica to try and get a look at it.  By the end of the play, though, it seems Harper has made some peace with her delusions and fears, and has come to terms with what it means to be alive in a broken but hopeful world.  In her final scene, Harper has left her husband behind in Brooklyn and is heading for San Francisco.  She turns to the audience and says:

Night flight to San Francisco.  Chase the moon across America.

God! It's been years since I was on a plane!

When we hit thirty-five thousand feet, we'll have reached the tropopause.  The great belt of calm air.  As close as I'll ever get to the ozone.

I dreamed we were there.  The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening.

But I saw something only I could see, because of my astonishing ability to see such things.

Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like sky divers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning.  And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules, of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them, and was repaired.

Nothing's lost forever.  In this world, there is a kind of painful progress.  Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead.

At least I think that's so.

Harper, it seems, has figured out a little something about reincarnation.  I suspect she also knows a little something about the First Law of Thermodynamics, which states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It only changes form.

 Considering Harper's speech also makes me think a bit about Kali, the goddess of eternal energy (and death) and about Ganesha, the god of transitions and remover of obstacles, and about how energy, a constant force shapes and changes us as we, in turn, seek to shape and change it.

In yoga, we learn to breath and to be one with the moment, with what is.  We embrace stillness, but our existence is not static.  The practice itself is transformative; as breath moves through us, it changes our bodies and minds; it changes our way of being here. As we move through our asana practice, we flow through the transitions, the space between each posture, as much as we move into the posture.  Transition compels mindfulness, as does stillness.  Being present in the moment can mean being present in a moment of change.

The Universal Translator

I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of
      the Soul,

The pleasures of heaven are with me and 
     the pains of hell are with me,

The first I graft and increase upon myself,
  the latter I translate into a new tongue.

Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"

In those vintage old Star Trek episodes, the crew of the Enterprise can communicate with folks from other galaxies by using the Universal Translator, which conveniently translates the languages spoken on distant planets into English.  Apparently, no one in the TV audience on Earth in the 1960s spoke Klingon, Romulan or Vulcan, though I understand many folks do today. Still, the Universal Translator served its purpose well back then, rendering the speech of those distant races intelligible to a generation of American Trekkies.

When I read the above passage from Whitman, I can't help but think of him as a different sort of Universal Translator, a very literal sort -- he literally (and literarily) Translates the Universe into his poems, a new tongue.

What I, like many readers, find so compelling about Whitman's poetry is the way he takes it all in -- it seems everyone and everything are included in his work. He addresses all of us collectively and at the same moment speaks to each individually.  Indeed, he tells us in the first few lines of "Song of Myself" For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.  Now that's what I call aparigraha!

I wonder what would happen if we stepped into a transporter beam together?