Something in the cold
this far West recalls winters
in the East. Not snow
but reminders of
snow within releases rage–
nature’s perfection
woos the soft flesh locked
down for the duration now
trees stark at first light.
Something in the cold
this far West recalls winters
in the East. Not snow
but reminders of
snow within releases rage–
nature’s perfection
woos the soft flesh locked
down for the duration now
trees stark at first light.
For James Edgecombe
A breath of winter
I close the door behind me
cold breathed into me
from beyond the edge
where creatures greet each other
each from its own cloud
The birds have vanished
from a thousand rivers– a
thousand years and more
ago Liu Tsung-Yuan
wrote about a state of mind
now closer to fact.
An old man still wades
into the cold stream and casts
as he learned to do
watching the line’s glint
in the morning light over
the empty waters.
Christmas carols low
in the cafe, young voices
plan revolution.
I listen full of
pity, they are beautiful
and it’s warm in here.
My coffee grows cold,
the pages I am reading
connect us elsewhere.
I’ve learned to walk on
ice, walk on with shambling step,
my younger stride in
check, heel landing soft
as the snow. Even frozen
ground is Mother Earth.
L
The Return
Taking the next train to the city, yet always returning to the place on a bridge over a river, throbbing with trout, whose widening circles are like the mandala for contentment. So will a poet return to the work laid on one side and abandoned for the voices summoning him to the wrong tasks. Art is not life. It is not the river carrying us away, but the motionless image of itself on a fast- running surface with which life tries constantly to keep up.
Current discussions of poetry usually avoid the old idea of “imitation” or “mimesis,” but that avoidance may have a downside of blinding us to the value of certain poems that ostensibly address themselves to the world the poet shares with the reader. On the other hand, it may be asked why should we discuss poems so traditional that they may be assumed to be about worlds no longer relevant to most readers. That’s an assumption that works at an unconscious level — like “prejudice” in general — so it may be worthwhile to make an account of one of these old fashioned poems.
One sort of “imitation” that we do find in the R. S. Thomas poem cited above is a use of syntax to “follow” or “express” the the meaning of the sentences. There’s a problem of validation here, since the interface between style and substance is always problematic, they are always somehow already intertwined. But here the way the syntax grips and pushes off the line endings gives one a visceral sense of the inertias involved in the return. The “mimesis” is of a mind deeply set in its ways.
Another aspect of mimesis that is always potentially relevant involves the structure of the poem — its dialectics. The flow of imagery and concept in time goes on transparently as in conversation until it doesn’t — the introduction of a new image or concept will require adjustments in the whole environment of the poem. “Art is not life. It is not the river . . .” Which in turn prepares a space for the final image of the poem. The “charge” of this move, which I’d put down to “double relativity” lifts the poem into the imagination.
What I mean by “double relativity” is as follows. Can we say that the poem “imitates” a motion of consciousness towards something other beyond itself? This transformational moment depends on an expansion of values from the first scenario in which the habits of the commuter are judged in light of the “return” to the place on the bridge. Then THAT comparison yields to a comparison of the “place on the bridge” to the place of composition and participation, an awkward but perhaps justifiable way, given what is at stake, to put what is suddenly on the horizon in this poem.
“The motionless image of itself” is, like many uses of the phrase “of itself,” obscure. Rereading the sentences allows one to proceed with some confidence that the “itself” is “art” which is not life, not the river. It is an image that appears on the “surface” of life (the river)
First the comparison of the place on the bridge to a state of mind via the phrase “mandala of contentment.” I love the sense here that such a gorgeous phrase is, in this poem, a kind of throw-away, structurally speaking, as we shall see. “Contentment” as temptation! (This is a poem by a priest, after all, and R. S. Thomas no less!) Then we are led to a comparison between that and the work left undone. But that situation requires a further distinction, between “doing the work one abandoned” and reconsideration of life itself in light of the “motionless image” beyond it yet reflected on the “fast-running surface” of the river. That is not all: the judgement made by the relation includes an insight: life constantly tries to keep up with the surface on which the image of art appears. Life, relative to art . . . So even the mimesis of this poem senses its limits.
Thus “double relativity.” Double relativity is a feature of Daoist philosophy, where everything is dependent on the Dao, which itself is no-thing. The phrase appears in a new work by William Desmond. In the chapter of The Intimate Universal (U. Columbia 2016), Desmond writes: “We see the double relativity of a metaxu, the self-relating, singular happening, in a field of communication where selfing is doubled over with being in relation to what is other” (83). The italicized Greek word “metaxu” — which can mean both with and beyond and was used by Simone Weil to refer to the power of human works to communicate spiritual truth –refers to the double reference in an image that relates both “with” and “above” its syntactic environment. The poem as “metaxu” refers to the sense of a dimension beyond the “mimetic.” This beyond, however, acknowledges a source of energy otherwise unaccounted for. “The motionless image” recalls the original image of the mandala, as an expression of the commuter’s retreat to the contemplation of the boiling life of the trout in the river, but contrasts to “contentment” a more perplexed, participatory image in keeping with the disjunction “art is not life.”
Thomas knew how to make an “image” of what can’t be represented. Yes, he was a priest. Yes, he was a poet. The tension is a topic of gossip; given a poem such as this, the conflict of values assumed by the two callings only inhibits our enjoyment of the poem the priest made for us. The lamination of the image of the “mandala of contentment” and this more tense orientation creates in the reader a “space” between the images, a liminal space given its meaning by the “supernatural” or ‘hyperbolic” appearance of this motionless image. It is a moment of “porosity” or flow-through between the finite world, richly evoked by the poem, and the unnameable origin to which the poem returns. And to which the reader may well understand herself to have returned as she comprehends the open wholeness of this lovely poem by R. S. Thomas.
In USA, the day called Thanksgiving Day is troubled by memories of the racist imperial origins of the country, which included genocide; racial tension continues to define the USA. As does oblivion. Like most holidays it has suffered from the commodification of “times” — these “holy days” have become rituals of consumption. A lot of people know this and still enjoy the holiday as a time of redeeming time by feasting with family and friends.
The haiku I wrote yesterday and continued to worry about today is just barely a haiku. Of course the fun I have with haiku is predicated on the form’s openness to mixed genres. My haiku often have an epigrammatic element that when overdone can flatten the internal tensions of the form. Perhaps the turn of the poem towards outside/inner weather makes it sound more like a haiku. One of the integrated genres here is the song of praise, or psalm.
shopping done pack packed I walk back slowly grateful for the wind and rain
Having grown up in a desert place, the austerities of winter communicate states of mind to me. Back then, the bony dryness and the transparencies of cold air took me inward. My mental habits took root. Today, 60 years later, living in Portland Oregon, it is a seagull that holds my attention, and since then I’ve acquired the habits of the haiku poet.
Having reached this far
a seagull returns to the sea
under icy clouds
But a few years ago, on the opposite coast, it was a Pond and Thoreau that held my attention. The lines are prosaic, awkward, discontinuous (at least on the surface) coming into view as the gaze penetrates the world of the pond on that day. While the poems often seem forced from this distance, several years of these “pond songs” provide me now with a notebook full of the imagery of a place intensely observed but now evoking distance as well as immediacy.
November 30, 2013
Pond Song 3.76
There is an other origin beyond the origin in the self with its own inward otherness. GB 176
sea-level pond no mountain top__wind-polished light-carved waves
this wind kept me up all night__day breaks what light saves
sparrows sit low in pale grass__milky ice drapes the shore
sunglare glazes the mudflats__where shallows darken more
wind-shadows spark across__out where buffleheads dive
in summer there’s only one now__it drops from sight its absence excessive
THIS WAS FIRST POSTED ON READINGTHEBETWEEN.COM
This is page 1 of Jan Zwicky, Wisdom and Metaphor. The Necker Cube figure reappears throughout the text, but only on page 1 do we get the quote from Wittgenstein’s Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology.
“Astonishment is thinking.” This riffs on Aristotle, of course. But thinking about the Necker Cube often loses its astonishment, at least as Zwicky uses it. She’s interested in the “internal” relations between the two aspects of seeing (Gestalt) : the box headed down to the right or up to the left. The Necker Cube helps her prove a point in philosophy.
But I think Wittgenstein’s point — “astonishment is essential to a change of aspect” — directs us to the “outside” of the figure — to the fact that it can be taken both ways. Not at once, of course; but “transcendently” — apart from the time of the instant; it’s as if the only name we can give to the <em>potential</em> change of aspect is <em>astonishment</em>.
This kind of thinking illustrates what I call “the habit of poetry.” In reading a poem, analyzing it, rereading it, over and over, we find it inexhaustible. As language, it points beyond itself to the hyperbolic dimension. People who read and write poetry have learned how to “see” poems as both finite structures and as participating in what Rowan Williams calls “the hinterland” of language. It’s almost as if the “tight’ construction of a poem — like the Necker Cube — tries to contain what is beyond it. Only the Necker Cube is NOT open to more than two aspects; Zwicky is right about that. But a poem?
Poems think outside the box. The wonder of a great poem only grows.
On the off chance yes bits of heaven as that wee bird sings its head off
Somehow as I dig deeper into the history of Zen poetry — now the rise of poetics in third century CE China (Lu Chi) — I want to return to my first love in poetry– W. B. Yeats. As a young teenager The Celtic Twilight; in my late teens, a more analytical study of the sound patterns in the poetry somehow reinforced my ecological bent. Summers in the Sierra. History is weird. One’s contingencies porous to the divine otherness baked into creation. Gads.
TEXT: In my notebook for the this day I had noted that on page 260 of God and the Between, Desmond writes: “Our passage through life takes firm form, but our passing makes fluid again the forms, and the abiding porosity prior to form and beyond form offers again its never closed off chance: chance of ultimate commication between us and the ultimat.”
As you can see from the structure of the passage above, the composition of the sentences uses poetic forms to weave a grammar of the between. Very few philosophers show such mastery of the potentials of language to communicate richly nuanced insights into our common reality.