The End of Desire

In the December issue of Poetry magazine, just inside the cover is an excerpt from the poem "Twigs" by Taha Muhammad Ali, printed in memory of the Palestinian poet, who died recently.  The stanza reads

And so
it has taken me
all of sixty years
to understand
that water is the finest drink,
and bread the most delicious food,
and that art is worthless
unless it plants
a measure of splendor in people's hearts.

With that splendor comes stillness and longing at once, the paradox of the contemplative moment. In fact, the entire poem, which appears in Ali's collection So What? resigns itself to longing, desire, attachment and finally, the non-attachment we speculate we'll find in death.

Neither music,
fame, nor wealth,
not even poetry itself,
could provide consolation
for life's brevity,
or the fact that King Lear
is a mere eighty pages long and comes to an end,
and for the thought that one might suffer greatly
on account of a rebellious child.

So the poem begins.  It ends

After we die,
and the weary heart
has lowered its final eyelid
on all that we've done,
and on all that we've longed for,
on all that we've dreamt of,
all we've desired
or felt,
hate will be
the first thing
to putrefy
within us. 

Oh, to release our hold on that dark desire, to say farewell to hate at last! Is it so, only in death? Alas. And isn't Mortality the perfect muse, birthing her twins, Hope & Despair?

 

It's Still Winter

It's still winter in the Northern Hemisphere, though we have a bit more sunlight each day.  In a mere few weeks, daffodils and crocuses will be poking up through the mud, and forsythia will froth up the hedges overnight here in Tennessee. Nevertheless, temperatures have been especially frigid in the North, well below zero recently, and we've had an unusual bit of snow in the South.  Though I'm not a fan of cold weather, I do like the way winter stills the world and forces me to attend to what I might not notice in the excitement and busyness of the warmer seasons.

Back in November, when the cold shredded the last of the bright leaves from the trees, I began to pay attention to how the trees' essential shapes were revealed.  At first, the word I chose to describe those black branches against the cold sky was "unadorned", but that word was not exactly right. The trees were very much adorned, fringed still with old brown leaves that had managed to hang on, and dotted with squirrels' nests I would never have noticed when the trees were full and green.  At the time, I was teaching Thoreau in my American literature course and kept returning to one of my favorite passages from Walden, one that I've already taken a look at in this blog: On Purpose.  In the passage, Thoreau describes his rejection of typical worldly pursuits in favor of what he felt would be a more meaningful life of quiet contemplation.

I couldn't help but read the wintry, stripped down trees as a metaphor for what Thoreau was trying to do, paring his life down to its most essential nature.  They also put me in mind of Patanjali's Sutra on Practice, 11.30.  This sutra enumerates the yamas, or abstentions of yoga.

The yamas are nonviolence, truthfulness, refrainment from stealing, celibacy, and renunciation of unnecessary possessions. (Translation by Edwin Bryant)

The yamas are a summons to mindfulness in our day to day activities, markers on that path to our essential nature.  Winter makes me notice the squirrels' nests, yoga awakens the consciousness. I'll still kvetch about the cold, but I want also to be grateful for the restraints of winter turning me inward as the season stills the world about us.

On Song, Breath, and Wallace Stevens

A couple of days ago I heard a story on the radio about human responses to regional accents.  The story mentioned that songbirds also have regional "accents" and that, like humans, birds recognize these differences.  Curious, I searched a bit more for discussions of birdsong and accents, and I found another story suggesting that speech and language have their origins in song.  Then, like a good yogi, I started thinking about the role of sound in yoga practice, how chanting and bells and the sounds of the natural world help us find our way to our essential being...and then, of course, I thought about breath, how it sounds inside and outside the body.  And I realized that, while breath and sound are both rather magical things, the space between them, that stillness between the inhalation and exhalation, that silence before and after the tone, are just as magical.  So, of course, that all made me think about this verse from Wallace Stevens' famous "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird":

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendo,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

All I Was Doing

All I was doing was being, and the Dancing Energy
           came by my house.
His face looks curiously like the moon, I saw it
           from the side, smiling.
                                    
             --Mirabai  "All I Was Doing Was Breathing"

Fresh out of joy? Put together a playlist:  a little Ravi Shankar kicking it over to The Rolling Stones, Tina Turner, the latest from Mavis Staples, some big brass funk on the bottom from the Soul Rebels...hit shuffle, crank it up, get your groove on and open the door!  You've got company, and his face looks curiously like the moon!

Common Question

Today the bright blue October sky sinks into a pile of pink and gold clouds at dusk.  There's a ghostly slip of a crescent moon already dangling just above that same western horizon, so early, so soon.  As my dog Macy and I stroll about in this beautiful evening light sifting down through the maples out back (more orange leaves than green now), I recall a favorite May Swenson poem,  "Question".   In it Swenson considers what existence might be like without a body, asking, at the poem's conclusion

How will it be

to lie in the sky

without roof or door

and wind for an eye

With cloud for shift

how will I hide?

Most will read the poem as a little meditation on death (oh great...I know, I know...another autumnal mediation on death...), but I think it's also concerned with notions of attachment and non-attachment. How funny to think of a modest little soul trying to cover itself up with a bit of cirrus cloud!  Of course we know that there is no hiding from this final transformation out of the body, but I am quite amused by the prospect of that pale naked soul still figuring out what it means to be free of the body's boundary! The poet imagines that soul wondering how to exist without the protection of an earthly shell (a house, a body), and feeling itself merge into all creation ("wind for an eye"). There's no explicit suggestion here that a soul transformed by death joins some larger divinity.  Without the body, asks Swenson, what really becomes of us? Do we just melt into the sky?

In the Bhagavad Gita Krishna offers Arjuna an answer:

Whoever knows, profoundly,

my divine presence on earth

is not reborn when he leaves

the body, but comes to me.

Released from greed, fear, anger,

absorbed in me and made pure

by the practice of wisdom, many

have attained my own state of being.

So, I guess, no matter what, when faced with that ultimate transformation of our earthly energy into something else, we needn't worry about what to wear.

Autumnal Upanisad & Shelley's West Wind

Autumn.  The ever-shortening days, the falling leaves swirled up and dropped by ghostly gusts, bleak skies framed by black branches, that chill -- winter's harbinger, settling in, seeping under the door.  No wonder those melancholy poets, in their eternal contemplations of mortality, can't resist it.  Go ahead, look 'em up and you'll likely find every poet you have ever liked has written a poem about autumn!

One of my favorites is Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind". Instead of being a simple contemplation of mortality, the poem becomes a celebration of change.  Shelley's west wind energizes the landscape; it's a transformational force, shaping and reshaping the planet, the mind, the soul.  The speaker addresses the wind as

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere,
Destroyer and Preserver

Many poets see this turning season as a summons to death lurking on the other end of November in winter's deep freeze, but Shelley's autumn isn't that at all; it's a reminder that immortality exists in the eternal cycle of destruction and renewal, that what destroys, preserves as well.  Or, to frame it in terms of the Isa Upanisad

Whoever knows becoming and destruction--
     Both of them, together --
By destruction crosses over death
     And by becoming reaches immortality.

On Feeling Full

That is full; this is full;
     Fullness comes forth from fullness;
When fullness is taken from fullness,
     Fullness remains.
-- from the Brhadaranyaka Upanisad 

It's all energy, baby.  It's all good.  It's all right there. Just hold that paradox up to the sun and have a look at infinity.  Make yourself at home in what poet James Berry calls " a mighty nest full of stars."

Emily's Zen Beginner's Mind

In Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Suzuki-roshi explores this koan:

In the beginner's mind there are many

possibilities, but in the expert's there are few.

I spend my days working in academia, an environment where expertise is the coin of the realm.  People build entire careers around their reputations as experts.  For many of us it's easy to get caught up in the notion that one is one's expertise.  Thank goodness for Suzuki-roshi.  And Emily Dickinson, who also appreciates beginner's mind.

I dwell in Possibility --
A fairer House than Prose --
More numerous of Windows --
Superior -- for Doors --

Of Chambers as the Cedars --
Impregnable of eye --
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky --

Of Visitors -- the fairest --
For Occupation --This --
The spreading wide my narrow hands --
To gather Paradise

The more I read Emily Dickinson, the more I think she was probably a Zen Master disguised as a reclusive 19th century poet.

What I Meant To Say Was...

Jump in and let go.  Not hang on.  Let go. So, I made a rather poor word choice for the title of my last entry, though I intended the "jump in and hang on" idiomatically, as in "Listen and follow what I'm saying here, boy. Take the plunge into another way of being."   What Krishna is actually telling Arjuna is that this warrior living in The World needs to LET GO of desire, of ambition, of attachment, not hang on at all.  For instance, have a look at the following passage from Stephen Mitchell's translation of the Bhagavad Gita.  Krishna says:

If a man keeps dwelling on sense-objects,
attachment to them arises;
from attachment, desire flares up;
from desire, anger is born;

from anger, confusion follows;
from confusion, weakness of memory;
weak memory -- weak understanding;
weak understanding--ruin.

But the man who is self-controlled,
who meets the objects of the senses

with neither craving nor aversion,
will attain serenity at last.  (2.62-64)

This detachment from the world of the senses, from desire and ambition, expressed here reminds me of a rather famous Wordsworth sonnet, "The World is Too Much With Us."  In it the poet mourns the dominance of materialism and ambition in the Christian west and expresses a Romantic notion of another world view, one in which Gods are manifest in Nature. Arjuna, meet William.  William, Arjuna.

The world is too much with us, late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
Are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything we are out of tune;
It moves us not.  Great God!  I'd rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So I might, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

Jump In, Hang On, Krishna Riffs

Suzan-Lori Parks is one of my favorite contemporary playwrights.  A few years back, she published a collection of short plays, 365 Days/365 Plays; she wrote a play a day for a year!  When she was done, selections from the plays were performed by theatre companies all over the country.  One can't help but admire the dedication with which Parks practiced her art every day, and the results are pretty remarkable, like one long improv jazz suite.  One of my favorite plays in the collection is the first, Start Here, in which the characters, Krishna and Arjuna, have a conversation about the illusion of free will and what it means to let go of our attachments in order to take up an unfamiliar path.  As in the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna is the wise one, Arjuna the sometimes reluctant student.  While the characters are derived from an ancient text and the theme itself is eternal, the groovy language of the play is all Parks':  Check out this excerpt in which Krishna riffs, encouraging Arjuna to take the plunge into a new reality:

Krishna: Yr having 2nd thoughts.  I understand.  Everything you own, everything you are, everything you know is back there, right ? Yr not prepared, you think.  You forgot to pack yr toothbrush.  You forgot to lock the front door.  You forgot to turn on the machine.  You forgot to turn off the stove.  You may have left the bathwater running.  You dont speak the language of --wherever it is we're headed.
Arjuna: Right.
Krishna:  Hear that sound?
Arjuna: Sounds like leaves moving in the wind.
Krishna: Its the sound of writing. Theyre writing yr name in the Book.
Arjuna: My name?
Krishna: Why not yr name?
(Rest)
Arjuna: Im afraid. A little.
Krishna: Good.
(Rest)
At the start theres always energy.  Sometimes joy. Sometimes fear. By the end, youll be so deep in the habit of continuing on youll pray youll never stop. Happens all the time. But dont take my word for it. Lets go and youll see for yourself.
(Rest)
Get up. There you go. Breathe. Okay. Come on.

Doesn't Parks just make you want to jump in and hang on? Keep going! Remember to breathe!

Perfect Imperfection

On his good days, when Gerard Manley Hopkins was not so weighed down with the deep grief that comes from the heavy work of living on this planet, the poet-priest could render with incredible clarity the fundamental beauty of a world infused with divine perfection. I have yet to meet a person who does not enjoy his poem"Pied Beauty"; even readers who are not spiritually inclined appreciate the imagery and musicality, and more especially the way the poem's details teach us how to love the world and embrace its contradictions.

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things--
  For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
    For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
   Landscape plotted and pieced--fold, fallow, and plough;
     And all trades; their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
     With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                                                Praise him.

Image from Mr. Cordova's Trout Blog

Contrast, opposition and change create beauty and prompt the poet to honor the eternal paradox: contrast, opposition and change are constant and therefore divine -- stippled, fickle, beautiful, perfect, all.

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?

Try a Little Tenderness

On a day when the events of the world can seem inordinately cruel and random, I recommend either listening to some Otis Redding (and dancing in your jammies around the apartment) or reading some Jane Hirshfield.  Take, for instance, this little piece from Hirshfield's collection The Lives of the Heart.

Late Prayer

Tenderness does not choose its own uses.
It goes out to everything equally,
circling rabbit and hawk.
Look: in the iron bucket,
a single nail, a single ruby --
all the heavens and hells.
They rattle in the heart and make one sound.

I love the quiet astuteness of Jane Hirshfield's poetry.  No doubt her studies in Zen have helped her develop a keen, still gaze, the kind that penetrates through the illusory world of objects to see what is essential about this existence.  Hirshfield's poetry can take readers to the calm center of the universe, reminding us that the true self is the self at peace, one with the world, one with what is beyond the world.  And, if as Hirshfield says, tenderness "goes out to everything equally," it goes out to you, even if you are the one who has to send it out to yourself.  Go ahead.  Try a little tenderness.

Laughter Yoga -- Maybe in Slidell

Gonna go to West Memphis to look for my joy
Go to West Memphis to look for my joy
Maybe in West Memphis I'll find my joy
Maybe in West Memphis I'll find my joy

Gonna go to Slidell to look for my joy
Go to Slidell to look for my joy
Maybe in Slidell I'll find my joy
Maybe in Slidell I'll find my joy

--Lucinda Williams


There is an ayurvedic doctor in India who prescribes Charlie Chaplin DVDs to patients with depression, looking for joy. Really. Here's what the good folks at NPR had to say about him today:

In India, laughing is a serious matter. There are laughing clubs — groups who gather in parks for a collective guffaw to relieve the stresses of daily life.

Ashok Aswani goes one step further: He hands out free DVDs of Charlie Chaplin movies to patients as a cure for depression.

"This makes them feel better," he says. "They enjoy it. The next visit, they ask for another movie."

Laughter Yoga...it's about finding your joy. Wherever you are.