The Flame Tree

Celestial Music

by Louise Gluck

I have a friend who still believes in heaven.
Not a stupid person, yet with all she knows, she literally talks
    to god,
she thinks someone listens in heaven.
On earth, she's unusually competent.
 Brave, too, able to face unpleasantness.

We found a caterpillar dying in the dirt, greedy ants crawling
    over it.
I'm always moved by weakness, by disaster, always eager to
    oppose vitality.
But timid, also, quick to shut my eyes.
Whereas my friend was able to watch, to let events play out
according to nature. For my sake she intervened,
brushing a few ants off the torn thing, and set it down across
    the road.

My friend says I shut my eyes to god, that nothing else
    explains
my aversion to reality. She says I'm like the child who buries
    her head in the pillow
so as to not see, the child who tells herself
that light causes sadness---
My friend is like the mother. Patient, urging me
to wake up an adult like herself, a courageous person---
In my dreams, my friend reproaches me. We're walking
on the same road, except it's winter now;
she's telling me that when you love the world you hear celestial
    music:
look up, she says. When I look up, nothing.
Only clouds, snow, a white business in the trees
like brides leaping to a great height---
then I'm afraid for her; I see her
caught in a net deliberately cast over the earth---

In reality, we sit by the side of the road, watching the sun set;
from time to time, the silence pierced by a birdcall.
It's this moment we're both trying to explain, the fact
that we're at ease with death, with solitude.
My friend draws a circle in the dirt; inside, the caterpillar
    doesn't move.
She's always trying to make something whole, something
    beautiful, an image
capable of life apart from her.
We're very quiet. It's peaceful sitting here, not speaking, the
    composition
fixed, the road turning suddenly dark, the air
going cool, here and there the rocks shining and glittering---
it's this stillness that we both love.
The love of form is a love of endings

(Above, "4am flowers," thanks Gib)

Another Thought

Praying
by Mary Oliver

It doesn't have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don't try
to make them elaborate, this isn't
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

Thoughts on Worship

Lately---I can't remember what triggered it---but lately, I've been thinking about worship. There is something about the word 'worship'---along with words such as devotion, prayer, repose---that I adore. They are beautiful words that haven't yet been worn thin by overuse.

Up until recently, I thought of worship as an act---a supplication, a bowing down to. I also thought of it as something that I didn't do. I'm not very a passionate or supplicant type----I do not throw myself down before altars or make pilgrimages or set up shrines. To worship, I thought, one had to sort of clear away a big, scared space: temporal space such as time away from obligation and distraction. Or literal space such as an ancient cathedral or a snowfield at dusk; a silent shoreline; a mountain, magnificent in the still afternoon heat of an African savanna. 

But here is something: worship, I am realizing, is not always so sweeping and intense. It is sometimes but not always. Worship can be little: a gesture---a gesture and another and another that becomes a series and then a lifetime of gestures. What you worship is simply (but not always) what you think about a lot, what you dwell on. I'm not sure, I might be making this up. But anyway, this is what is interesting to me. 

Here is David Foster Wallace's thoughts on the subject, from a commencement address he made to Kenyon College in May 2005 (two years before he would, sadly, commit suicide):

There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect---being seen as smart---you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

"Worship," one minister recently shared with me, "means creating a space for God." Insert your God there: "JC or Allah or YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess"; or your money, your lover, your ambitions or desire for power. It is a rather simple exercise, actually.

Worship means creating a space for God. I like that.

The photo "Checking the ice on Flagstaff Lake" is another by Lizzie McGhee, who definitely worships the good things.

One for the writers

Jeanette Winterson, discussing her book Weight, a retelling of the myth of Atlas and Hercules:

I have written this personal story in the First Person, indeed almost all of my work is written in the First Person, and this leads to questions of autobiography.

Autobiography is not important. Authenticity is important. The writer must fire herself through the text, be the molten stuff that welds together disparate elements. I believe there is always exposure, vulnerability, in the writing process, which is not to say it is either confessional or memoir. Simply, it is real.

Right now, human beings as a mass, have a gruesome appetite for what they call ‘real’, whether it’s Reality TV or the kind of plodding fiction that only works as low-grade documentary, or at the better end, the factual programmes and biographies and ‘true life’ accounts that occupy the space where imagination used to sit.

Such a phenomenon points to a terror of the inner life, of the sublime, of the poetic, of the non-material, of the contemplative.

(For more about Jeanette Winterson and her work click here: jeanette winterson)

Ode to Updike

I am so sad to learn of the death of John Updike today. I knew this day would come, and I've been dreading it. And now it's here, and the feeling is worse than I had anticipated.

I grew up in a small New England town next to Mr. Updike's small New England town. Much of what he wrote personally resonated with me----the essay about the commuter train to Boston, the girl in the AP story who everyone claimed was their sister. His characters were often so familiar----his scenes so famliar----that I turned to his books during lonely times in Africa. When I finished my thesis for Columbia, my gift to myself was his book, In the Beauty of the Lilies. That was the sweetest gift I've given to myself, come to think of it. I loved him so much that I even forgave him that weird habit he had of describing the slightly sagging flesh of women's upper arms and knees...

The moments I actually saw him were magnificent. At the country club dining room one Saturday--he must have been playing golf. This was ten years ago. I remember his ears mostly, they were sort of glowing red in the afternoon summer WASP-y light.

And Christmas several years ago, after the Christmas Eve church service. His wife was in charge of something or other, and had brought a basket of individually wrapped cookies to hand out to the congregration as we left. It's a tiny church in our neighborhood, Mr. Updike didn't attend often. His wife---one of those compact, efficient wives he so often rendered in words----had hooked the basket of cookies over his bent elbow and (I imagine) instructed him to stand there. He did it with a combination of humilidity and amusement, standing outside the door in the icey New England cold, holding his Easter basket of Christmas cookies. He was rather shy standing there---too shy to push the cookies on people, so you had to be brave to go up and take one. Then he smiled nicely, and even apologetically, as if to suggest he wasn't really the best man for the job, but he was trying his best.

(The image is of John Updike. See http://www.illoz.com/arichardallen/)

Mornings at Blackwater

by Mary Oliver

For years, every morning, I drank
from Blackwater Pond.
It was flavored with oak leaves and also, no doubt,
the feet of ducks.

And always it assuaged me
from the dry bowl of the very far past.

What I want to say is
that the past is the past,
and the present is what your life is,
and you are capable
of choosing what that will be,
darling citizen.

So come to the pond,
or the river of your imagination,
or the harbor of your longing,

and put your lips to the world.
And live
your life.

(everyone buy Mary Oliver's amazing new book, Red Bird.)

Tuesday morning thought on creative infinity

Finding yourself in a hole, at the bottom of a hole, in almost total solitude, and discovering that only writing can save you. To be without the slightest subject for a book, the slightest idea for a book, is to find yourself, once again, before a book. A vast emptiness. A possible book. Before nothing. Before something like living, naked writing, like something terrible, terrible to overcome.
            Marguerite Duras, Writing

Recuerdo

Here is my favorite love poem of all time. Edna St. Vincent Millay was my grandmother's favorite poet. She told me this almost secretly, as an aside. A little something I needed to know before she died. I think it was her way of suggesting that she too ran a bit free in the 1920s in New York City. Oh how I love this poem! Read it aloud, if you can close your office door or are brave enough to be a bit dorky. Do you remember how Jennifer Jason Leigh, playing Dorothy Parker in the film Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle, read Parker's poems? With a sort of rough, measured, druggy, smirky voice. Read it like that it's so fun.

Recuerdo
by Edna St. Vincent Millay

We were very tired, we were very merry---
We went back and forth all night on the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable---
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.

We were very tired, we were very merry---
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
And the sun rose dripping, a bucket full of gold.

We were very tired, we were very merry.
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed "Good morrow, mother!" to a shawl-covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
And she wept "God bless you!" for the apples and the pears,
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.

Map of Another Town

The following is the introduction (untitled) by M.F.K. Fisher to her book Map of Another Town, originally published in 1964.

Often in the sketch for a portrait, the invisible lines that bridge one stroke of the pencil or brush to another are what really make it live. This is probably true in a word picture too. The myriad undrawn unwritten lines are the ones that hold together what the painter and the writer have tried to set down, their own visions of a thing: a town, one town, this town.
    Not everything can be told, nor need it be, just as the artist himself need not and indeed cannot reveal every outline of his vision.
    There before us is what one human being has seem of something many others have viewed differently, and the lines held back are perhaps the ones most vital to the whole.
    Here before me now is my picture, my map, of a place and therefore of myself, and much that can never be said adds to its reality for me, just as much of its reality is based on my own shadows, my inventions.
    Over the years I have taught myself, and have been taught, to be a stranger. A stranger usually has the normal five senses, perhaps especially so, ready to protect him and nourish him.
    Then there are the extra senses that function only in subconsciousness. These are perhaps a stranger's best allies, the ones that stay on and grow stronger as time passes and immediacy dwindles.
    It is with the invisible ink distilled from all these senses, then, that I have drawn this map of a town, a place real in stone and water, and in the spirit, which may also be realer.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

by Wallace Stevens

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
in which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

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

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet of the women about you?

VII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
in the cedar-limbs.

       *

As a Massachusettsian, I'm struck by how this poem makes Connecticut---a state I know as a landscape of routes that lead to New York City---seem so exotic. But that's an aside.

"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" (a literary nod to the Cubist movement) is full of whim and beauty and seriousness and symbolism.  I learned all this yesterday on Wikipedia and now I will share it with you.

The poem suggests (as the famous Helen Vendler notes) "an infinite number of ways of looking at and symbolizing any piece of reality." (One year in college, my house mate---a very disciplined artist---had an art assignment that has stayed with me all these years, and I think relates to this concept of looking at a piece of reality. She had to chose an object and render it artistically, using any medium, each day, every day, for the entire semester. She chose an old cowboy hat. Some days she did a quick sketch, other days an oil painting, or a photo, or an abstract, or a pen and ink of a detail, etc. What a great project that would be, I always thought. Though I remember that by December, she wanted to throw-up on the hat and never see it again.)

The blackbird is often noted as a symbol of death in the poem, and re-reading the poem with that in mind does enlighten the text considerably.

Haddam (stanza VII) sounds Biblical or Islamic, and it made me feel dumb right away, like references I should know were flying over my head and all over the place. But, actually, it's a town in Connecticut. There's an old saying 'to have been to Haddam' that means 'to have had syphilis'. For more elaboration on this, click here.

Meanwhile, for a very prestigious and solemn and sometimes smoky, champagne-y writing group, I have been assigned to write something---anything---on the word 'displacement'. It's due, conveniently, in 13 days. I'm feeling very cowboy hat/blackbird about it.

Stay tuned for tomorrow's introduction.