Hughlings Himwich

Thinking Along with Henry David: 1-4

1. SOLITUDE (First entry in Henry David Thoreau's Journal, Oct. 22, 1937)

To be alone I find it necessary to escape the present, — I avoid myself. How could I be alone in the Roman emperor’s chamber of mirrors? I seek a garret. The spiders must not be disturbed, nor the floor swept, nor the lumber arranged.

The Germans say, “Es ist ailes wahr wodurch du besser wirst.”

(Translation of the German: All is true through which you become better.) 

Meum Mihi

What makes us 'better' is, of course, problematic. It is not necessarily what makes us happier or wiser or less at odds with the world or more productive or whatever is yet more better (stet). As the Romans say, suum cuique, to which I would add tuum tibi, ergo meum mihi. For me, happiness is overrated. As for wisdom, I am with Socrates: he is wisest who knows he is a fool. If it were the case that I knew something worth knowing, it would still be of no use to you. Happily, for all of us, Henry lives now only as stale prase on the lips of his admirers. I would rather be elsewhere. Nor does work make me a better person. I put no stock in the Protestant work ethic. Doing nothing at all suits me quite well. What is better than dillydallying all day? When I am doing nothing I feel more a part of whatever all of this is, itself without purpose, ever in se sibi. Of course, what I have said puts me at odds with worldly ambitions and with those who would win applause. What a waste! I would rather not even be myself if I could not go dark. Henry David, my Henry David, wrote his first journal entry in the autumnal bloom of 1837.  As for me, I am writing during the plague of 2020. It's spring.   

 

2. Spring

Oct. 25 (1837) She appears, and we are once more children; we commence again our course with the new year. Let the maiden no more return, and men will become poets for very grief. No sooner has winter left us time to regret her smiles, than we yield to the advances of poetic frenzy. “The flowers look kindly at us from the beds with their child eyes, and in the horizon the snow of the far mountains dissolves into light vapor.” GOETHE, Torquato Tasso.

Spring before spring

Henry David wrote this journal entry in late October.  It must be that the autumnal bloom of leaves, the chill air, crisp and aromatic, the silvery breath escaping his lips, makes him think of a spring before spring, which to the poet’s eye is always arriving in all times and places. It is the poet’s gift to us who might otherwise forget that we are always beginning, recreating the world for ourselves and others. Feel the wind on your skin like a kiss. Spring is here.

3. Virgil

Nov. 18 (1837) “Pulsae referunt ad sidera valles” is such a line as would save an epic; and how finely he concludes his “agrestem musam,” now that Silenus has done, and the stars have heard his story, — “Cogere donee oves stabulis, numerumque referre Jussit, et invito processit Vesper Olympo.”

Vesper

The line that would save an epic is from Virgil’s Sixth Ecologue, Pulsae referent ad sidera valles: the struck valleys echo to the stars. The trees, the rivers, the valleys, and stars are the musical instruments upon which the poet strikes his song. Yet, significantly, Virgil’s words are not from his Aeneid. He elevates the "agrestem musam" to the heavens. When all the epic clatter of arms and shouts of heroes have passed away, the pastoral poem reasserts the prior authority of nature’s rhythms: Evening rules even unwilling Olympus and the stars remain as they always are, night and day. 

        From Eclogue 6

        ille canit: pulsae referunt ad sidera ualles:
        cogere donec ovis stabulis numerumque referre               85
        iussit et invito processit Vesper Olympo.

        he (Silenus) sings: the struck valleys echo to the stars:
        until to gather the sheep in the stables and to tally their number
        he bid and, Olympus unwilling, Vesper advanced.  

        agrestem musam: rustic muse

 

4. NAWSHAWTUCT

Nov. 21, (1937) One must needs climb a hill to know what a world he inhabits. In the midst of this Indian summer I am perched on the topmost rock of Nawshawtuct, a velvet wind blowing from the southwest. I seem to feel the atoms as they strike my cheek. Hills, mountains, steeples stand out in bold relief in the horizon, while I am resting on the rounded boss of an enormous shield, the river like a vein of silver encircling its edge, and thence the shield gradually rises to its rim, the horizon. Not a cloud is to be seen, but villages, villas, forests, mountains, one above another, till they are swallowed up in the heavens. The atmosphere is such that, as I look abroad upon the length and breadth of the land, it recedes from my eye, and I seem to be looking for the threads of the velvet. Thus I admire the grandeur of my emerald carriage, with its border of blue, in which I am rolling through space.

We belong to nature

It may be that Henry David is thinking here of the divinely-crafted shield of Achilles. There is, however, great irony between what Achilles' shield depicts and the hero's subsequent slaughter of Trojans. Certainly, strife and death are present in the scenes Hephaestus creates but these take place within a balanced cosmos: the shield’s rim is Oceanus, the sun and moon crown the heavens, there are two noble cities, one at war and another at peace, and there is a young boy plucking his lyre, his song “so clear it could break the heart with longing”:

    and what he sang was a dirge for the dying year,
    lovely ... his fine voice rising and falling low
    as the rest followed, all together, frisking, singing,
    shouting, their dancing footsteps beating out the time.

There is nothing depicted on the shield Hephaestus has made that even remotely approximates Achilles’ murderous rampage, against which the Scamander River protests:

   “Stop. Achilles! Greater than any man on earth,
     greater in outrage too—
     for the gods themselves are always at your side!
     But if Zeus allows you to kill off all the Trojans,
     drive them out of my depths at least, I ask you,
     out on the plain and do your butchery there.
     All my lovely rapids are crammed with corpses now,
     no channel in sight to sweep my currents out to sacred sea—
     I’m choked with corpses and still you slaughter more,
     you blot out more! Leave me alone, have done—
     captain of armies, I am filled with horror!” (XVIII, Fagles)

There is no irony of any sort in Henry David’s description of his rustic shield, though one may wonder what protective purpose his may serve. We know he abhorred the intrusion of the ‘machine in the garden’ and the ‘discordant drumming’ of urban life. If this imagined shield is to provide any meaningful protection, it must be that the pastoral landscape he surveys serves to recall Henry David to himself and fortifies him as he engages in the necessary business of everyday life. Just so we may carry within ourselves Henry David’s rustic shield! It will protect us against all harm, not because we cannot be bruised or broken or put to death as Socrates was, but because we have within an inner resource that cannot be touched. We belong to nature.

 

Time of life (with apologies to Zeno)

I have reached that time when I measure my life not by the years but by the months. Thus, I lengthen my life. I say to myself I may have only 6 years remaining, but 72 months is another lifetime. Soon, I will do the same with days and hours, then minutes and seconds. Each new measure will push life’s horizon back to a safe distance. The question is, of course, how long can I get away with this sort of time-chopping. Theoretically, forever. 

That Bird

I. 

When I came to school today, I did not come alone. There was a bear with me. No one seemed to notice except for one young girl whose eyes were filled with the glory of the morning and whose red hair played in the light air.  She gave me a look, laughed, and asked who my friend was. "What do you mean?" I  replied. She laughed again and said "you can't fool me" and flew up into a tree.  Later, walking from one building to another, I heard a bird call, and there she was walking beside me. Cautious, I asked, "Who are you?"  She seemed surprised I didn’t know.  She said she was my student and had been with me from the beginning. This time when she flew away, I growled annoyance and padded on hand and foot to my next class.  

II.

So, I thought I was alone on that beach when a sudden gust of wind blew my old tattered hat away.  It was like the hat had wings or was some sort of kite, diving and lifting over the sea, but having no string attached, it disappeared over the water and surely landed wherever it is that kites go once they are set free.  But then there was this bird call. I turned around and there, where there had been not one solitary person for months, was a girl wearing my hat.  She laughed at my surprise, handed me my hat, and flew happily off.  I knew then I was not alone.  

                                                            

On Poetry

Poetry

Poetry is inspired song. The breath is the soul of the poem. The poet gathers the air around, the blue from the sky and her curling eyes, the warmth from the sun and his lover's body . . . and sings. The air is measured, the lover's body rolls with the waves and her eyes become one with the night. In the morning, the poet crawls out of the sky like a bear, stretching full out, searching again for the sweetness, searching in the movement of cloud and leaf and desire.  He sings. If his words resound in skin and bone, in the stone-cold night, if he enchants the air with his song -- it is poetry.

Metaphor

Metaphor is the mystery. The poetic act is both a participation in and apprehension of that mystery.  A poem may affect us by its lyricism and its passion, by its matching sound with sense -- but without metaphor and the mystery it confers, poetry belongs solely to the decorative or rhetorical arts. It is by metaphor that a poem draws us back again and again to trace the lines that lead to the heart of being and to ourselves.

The Meaning of a Poem

The meaning of a poem comes not from the words, but from the transmutation that occurs in the heart of the poet at the time the poem is written.  In all poetry that is not simply decorative, there is an elemental activity of consciousness, a sustained golden moment that triumphs over raw experience.  The meaning of a poem is that activity of mind, triumphant over the despair that the words of the poem may convey.  

The poem that follows has elicited the dreaded no comment except from one good friend who did me the kindness of asking about the word ‘gimble'. Nevertheless, I continue to enjoy the poem as if it were written by someone else for whom poetry brings into view such beauty that we but suffer the more for its absence. It is a backward way of praising poetry.  That’s what I think antipoetry is doing. Anyway, here is the worthless little bit of a stinker in its final ode-rous form. Hold your nose . . . . .   

 Poetry Stinks

    Poetry gives us just enough of what is real
    to make us howl and gimble in the night,
    too far from moon and what is our fate
    To make it right.  It stinks a lot!

At Seventy-Two

As I have grown older, I have plunged into language as though I were one of Melville's Catskill eagles. Poetry has given me a kind of second sight that sustains me in the dark places and makes me invisible in the light.   Now, at seventy-two, poetry is leading me into a deeper knowledge: to be truly alive means to experience myself as essentially compounded of earth and wind and all other living things. It all breathes fire. I now want more than words. I seek to understand simile and metaphor as reality itself.  Man is as much wolf as wind, as much rain as mind and so I would be.  I know that I am approaching the age of oblivion whose plentitude is ALL, an empty mirror that is yet full of life.  What I tell my students is that to be truly alive is to strive passionately for one’s own truth. My truth is the poetry of mind and heart and of Being itself.  

Translating sound into verse

When the wind spoke to me to this morning, it was laughing, another time it was oracular, at another like the whisper of one lover to another. How are we to represent these sounds? The laughter was a flutter of leaves, the prophecy the swoop of eagle fast upon its prey, the whisper a vanishing ‘yes’.  In these different sounds I hear a flute, a waterfall and the new moon's own shy, silvery voice. The sound of all of these is translated into images and may be represented as phlooooemmmm. Let those who are not poets worry about onomatopoeia. Poets are more resourceful translators.

 

 

The Lost Teachings of Hughlings J. Himwich (1946-2019)

I rather be an old fool than a popsicle. 

Why me, why not a zombie?

In rerum libra lacrimae auro gravius pendunt.

The last time I arrive at my destination I was somewhere else.

My mind is a fishbowl. Others sometimes stop and stare for a few moments and then move on.

If I were in free fall, I would not need a parachute.

In your absence, everything else happens.

We never quite say what we mean and so go on talking.

Mind matters, and vice-versa, matter . . . . .

Existence is the consciousness of the universe.

Existence becomes aware of itself (i.e. consciousness of consciousness) in man.

There is something it is like to exist.

Only the logic of metaphor and poetry is able to express the reality and mystery of existence itself: that there is anything at all and not nothing, that the many are one and the one many,  that everything participates in the existence of everything else.

There is a poetics of existence:

                     When night opens like spring
                and stars come out of dark longing
                like flowers out of the earth

                     Then do I close my eyes
                and see.

Existence hides.

Consciousness: that by which we seek the truth is itself the answer.

The searching soul everywhere finds a mirror.

Existence is continuously creating the forms of its own being. Thus light and life come into being.

The artist, the poet, & philosopher create everywhere the human form. Thus do beauty, truth and virtue come to be. 

When your rational mind starts to divide things into this or that, don’t lose sight of the original fullness of being. 

The first step in the search for truth is the most important one. Don’t begin with dichotomy.    Begin with a song of praise for Being itself.

Where eros is driven out, there you will find only thanatos.

What is deadly about rationality is that it strives to explain everything and to reduce all
truth to its truth

Drift and ye will find.

The search for truth comes straight from the heart.

Remember, remember, remember: Unless you somehow already know the truth, you will never recognize it when you find it.

Your being, your heart mind soul, is that by which you will know the truth when you find it.

Don't let school get in the way of your education.

All true speech is sweet delusion.

Truth is like the daughter I never had. Known by its absence.

If there were no soul, there would be no death.

Every time you think you are your brain, you are not.

Will you not also eat the apple core?

Follow the sound. It will lead you to me.

Mind-at-large or no-mind-at-all.

Beware lest you make a ghost of yourself!

To one who knows how to look everything is a mirror. 

What I am not makes everything possible.

Your best thoughts remain mysterious even to you.

Death is fire.

Blindsight is the very life of the darkness.

Mirrors lie.

What it is like to be me is you.

Do you not know the sound of your own voice? Listen to the wind.

Love makes every word sound like a kiss.

Come hither. There is no there here.

The universe curves like a woman's body.

The journey begins when we forget who we are. 

Hand in hand, we wander alone.

What you call truth, I call silence.

Free will is the dream from which I will not awake.

 

Philosophical Journal Entry 1

“Others give you the appearance of happiness, but I give you the reality.” (Socrates, Apology)

 

What is the difference between seeming to be happy and actually being so?  How can it be that I am not actually happy when I think I am? Does this correspond with my own experience? And if it does, what does Socrates offer in place of the “appearance of happiness”?  What good to me is Socrates’ dictum that the “unexamined life” is not worth living?  Is that dictum not some sort of self-torture? I certainly acknowledge that I often feel that there is something lacking in my life, that there should be something more in the daily round of my activities. But what is this “something more”? What for me is happiness? It is sustained activity in accordance with my basic being.  What do I mean by “basic being”? Though there are many possible answers, the one that comes to me again and again is that my “basic being” is ethical – that is, I want most deeply to be a good human being. I believe no harm can come to me if I am actively living in accordance with my own ethical intuitions.  I don’t mean that I would not suffer but that whatever suffering I experience would not be able to touch me. The happiness I experience when I do live “from the inside out,” acting out of that ethical core, makes me inviolable..  Not even death can harm me.  So what about what Socrates offers, the examined life? Is that not precisely what I am doing here and now in this journal entry.  It is.  His dictum recalls me to myself, my basic being, my ethical core.

 

SEVEN SINILITIES

 

SEVEN SINILITIES that PREPARE YOU for the AFTER-LIFE

1. Talking to no one
2. No longer celebrating your birthday
3. Not recognizing yourself in the mirror
4. Not getting the joke
5. Forgetting your SSN
6. Wearing out your welcome
7. Falling asleep with your eyes open

The Man Who Couldn't Love Someone Like You

He had once been a happy man. He had loved everybody, boys, girls, old women who thought themselves still vibrant and sexy, and old men with dangerously foul breath. He found lovable what others considered obscene, like protruding teeth or flapping ears or a nasty looking scar across the forehead.  He even found drooling as naturally becoming as sweat. He couldn’t help himself. Others thought he was delusional or simply a dirty old man, until one day, he suffered a head injury, having slipped off a ledge while ogling sagging sunbathers. After he recovered, he now found crippling fault with everyone.  His constant refrain was, “Who could love someone like you?” He said this whether the person was overweight, stuttered or blinked too much or had dull brown hair or had one too many eyes. He reserved a special place in hell for redheads, whom he previously had loved to distraction. Some remembered the “dirty old man,' but now putting their full faith in what had before been but a naive myth, that he had once been a lovely human being. They asked him what had changed and he said, “I woke up.” One day he took a good look at himself in the mirror and saw the faults he found in others in himself: unruly hair, yellowing and missing teeth, wrinkles that made his flaccid face look like a prune -- he even thought his skin had turned dark purple. So be it, he concluded, and banged his head as hard as he could against the glass. This time he didn’t wake up.

A wise fool

One day a young monk asked his master, How can one find what one has never lost? You are a fool, the wise master replied.

The monk, who had been the master's most devoted disciple, turned his back and rejoined the world. The wise master smiled and continued teaching what cannot be taught.

Love is so strange

Every time he looked at her he scowled.  She finally had enough and asked him what was his problem.  He said, “You’re so beautiful.  I can’t help myself.”  She didn’t understand. “But your face is so ugly when you look at me?” He didn’t understand and, of course, all the while he was scowling and making himself look ugly.  Finally, she asked, “Can you smile?” and he answered, “I thought I was.” “No, a smile looks like this,” and she smiled for him. He scowled. Then, for some reason, she kissed him. When people see the two of them together now, hand in hand, he scowling and she smiling, they wonder aloud, “What an odd couple!" Love is so strange.

On not explaining ourselves away

It is a common response in light of all that neuroscience has told us of our circuitry to ask how a machine, however complicated, could ever exercise free choice and thereby allow individuals to be responsible for their actions, as we in fact experience ourselves to be. If we are machines, then free choice is not possible. We might well ask if there is not some other approach that would resolve the question of personal responsibility, one that does not require any determination regarding free will or the findings of neuroscience. One such possibility is simply to look to our engagement with life and allow our actions to speak for themselves as irreducible facts that are not to be explained away by any manner of ulterior reasoning. Our answers to the questions of value that life inevitably puts to us would be thus plainly stated and speak of the only reality and the only truth we can ever know. 

 

 

 

The Man Who Cried When It Rained

Why are you crying?

Am I crying?

Yes, you are. Is there something the matter?

No. I’ve had a good day except, of course, for the rain.

Maybe you should get some help.

What kind of help?

Like from a friend.

You’re my friend.

But I can’t help you.

Why do you think I need help?

Because you are crying for no reason.

But I told you.

What?

About the rain.

We are totally transparent to each other . . .

The terrible, wonderful truth is that we are all totally transparent to each other; there is no place to hide. Why not stop trying? No sly, tacit agreement to act as if no one can really know what it is like to be another can change what is in fact the case: I know what it is like to be you and you know what it is like to be me. How could it be otherwise? How else would love be possible? It is a truth so fundamental to our being in the world that it is easy to miss altogether. Or maybe it is a reality that would threaten to overwhelm the space we have marked out as our own private realm. Of course, being a man, I don't know what it is like to give birth, but I do know what it is like to be.  That is enough.  More than enough. It saves us from the objectification of the other. That's no small thing. It is, as Heraclitus, might say, a matter of perspective: the way up and the way down are one and the same.  

Hodos ano kato

Your hand my hand his hand her hand our hand and hand in hand it on.

Who is there is here is there is here so there.

What it is like to be me is what it is like to be what it is like to be you.

Just so much is exactly who we are no more no less you than me no more me than you.

That is just so that is just that so that is that.

A Sacred Madness

There is a loneliness that knows no logic, that is torn from all common sense, all that binds us together, and floats beyond all reckoning, where two plus two equals a dreamless sleep or a beginning that creates strange new worlds, fish leaping out of the clouds, birds bursting from eyes that look directly into the light, or apple trees that bear knowledge of good and evil. Loneliness tells us all things are possible. In the beginning was the word . . . . a kind of sacred madness.

No Way

No Way. Don’t follow me. Where I’ve been is just another signpost telling you that you are on the wrong path. It may look like I’m going somewhere, but I am really just standing still. And if I tell you, you have always been where you’re going to, how will you get to where you already are? So keep traveling down whatever road you’re on and breathe and stretch full out like a bear in spring and swallow the stars with your raucous “I am” and know that you are there, here and now. Don't you hear the children laughing? There is no way, no way at all.

Philosophical Journal Entry 2

The difficulty of reading literature that is alive with the consciousness of its author – densely metaphorical, infused with memory, searching for any meaning that will not simply evaporate when the writing is done – is that a single image or turn of phrase can turn one away from the writing to one’s own thoughts and spark the desire to explore and express one’s own consciousness. So, for example, I have been reading Saramago’s Notebook and was lifted out of the text by the following:

In recent years Lisbon has been transformed, has managed to reawaken in the conscience of its citizens that strength that hauled it out of the mire into which it had fallen. In the name of modernization, concrete walls have been erected over ancient stones, the outlines of hills disrupted, panoramas altered, sightlines modified. But the spirit of Lisbon survives, and it is the spirit that makes a city eternal. (pp.5-6)

What Saramago says of Lisbon, one could say of almost any person whom one is lucky enough to love for a long time: that person awakens our conscience, hauls us out of the mire of daily life, and though the vistas and circumstances of life may have altered, the love survives and makes any place we share home.  Such meaning was not in Saramago’s writing, but that writing is nevertheless its source.  Ultimately, consciousness is one. The difficulty of reading such writing is that it requires a lifetime.   

Tranquility

It is in memory we seek understanding and justification, but truth and absolution remain elusive in the current of the present, for what we remember joins the chaotic flow of things and is so overwhelming that we would drown if we did not from time to time close off our minds to all reality and dwell tranquilly in the emptiness of our being.

The Loneliest Loneliness (Nietzsche's phrase)

The Loneliest Loneliness.  Who knows himself and does not know the loneliest loneliness? Who has loved,  been loved, betrayed love, risked love, sold their body for love and does not know the loneliest loneliness? It is always there.  It slept while you slept and woke when you woke. It is what you will be after you have died. It is what you were before you were born. Dost thou not remember? Dost thou not know thyself? You shall know that loneliness when the mirror you hold to trace the lines of your age becomes only  memories. The Other will come and ask what you are staring at? And you will answer, truthfully. Nothing. Nothing at all. What will you do then? Let us sing a song of the night, of the darkest night, that is so passionate and true that the darkness itself becomes beautiful:

Out of the night comes love;

Out of the night comes the darkness of your eyes;

Out of the night comes the body of the world;

Out of the night come the larger and the smaller light;

Out of the night comes the leaf to the branch;

Out of the night comes the weyard wind.

Did you touch me?

            Did you touch me? Did I touch you?

            No.

            Then why do I feel like this?

            I don’t know.

            Don’t know or won’t say?

            Both.

            Where are we?

            You tell me.

            Don’t you know?

            No.

            Well, we’re here at least, you and me, aren’t we?

            I think so.

            But you don’t know? Is that right?

            Yes.

            Where else could we be?

            I don’t know.

            The hell you don’t! You touched me and I . . .

            Touched you.

Undoing

What rules life is the next thing to be done, death being only the last, wherein every breath is a labor.  So we have our marching orders, but who says we must obey.  There are glimpses of something else in dreams and song, in love and inspiration.  Such things help us through the night, but day comes and reminds us of what is real and of the next thing.  But what is more real: this sunlit world or that which makes it possible that there is any world or light at all? And what is that but that same activity of mind that gives rise to dreams and song and to the self that ever longs to return to its source and is ever thrown back?  It is not that the world is an illusion; rather, it is that we mistakenly live in the world as if it exists as it does independent of our engagement with it.  Dreams, songs, love, inspiration, all the activities of mind, weave themselves into the fabric of things and give it form, color and meaning.  It turns out that what rules life is not the next thing to be done but the right thing, the true and beautiful thing to be done. In dying nothing is to be done; it is the undoing the self has earnestly longed for in all its virtue, all its beauty and all its truth.  

School Mission Statement

Misshun Stut: Hellwedoso hootlums gonna giv' ‘em me grimey grin & sooth allso one de spitum spatum whieldy whurldly whims to beg a bit a mutterbutter for a toll. 

 

Memorial

March 12, 2016. My birthday. 70 years old. Time stops today. Tomorrow will be the after life and though clocks will run and I will age, time holds me within the stillness of her arms. You will see me and talk with me and not know that I am already gone, walking up a forest path to a cabin above the clouds. There I will sleep and wake and talk to the birds and ride on the wind and seem to be moving among you as I always have. The mystery is how the two can be one. How I have earned this gift I do not know, but it is so.

ἀλήθεια

The source of the longing for truth is not our desire to know but rather our yearning to participate in the very reality we would disclose and thereby transcend this life, this body, this death.  Out of this longing comes a life as simple and mysterious as the fall of rain, a life ever new and ever dying, as though we were to come to our last day as to our first, giving ourselves up to the morning, open at last to the possibility of all things. 

 

 

Is it poetry?

Poetry is inspired song. The breath is the soul of the poem. The poet gathers the air around, the blue from the sky and her curling eyes, the warmth from the sun and his lover's body . . . and sings. The air is measured, the lover's body rolls with the waves and her eyes become one with the night. In the morning, the poet crawls out of the sky like a bear, stretching full out, searching again for the sweetness, searching in the movement of cloud and leaf and desire.  He sings. If his words resound in skin and bone, in the stone-cold night, if he enchants the air with his song -- it is poetry.

Light acts upon us as inspiration

Light acts upon us as inspiration.  The touch of the beloved makes us beautiful.  The bird’s song becomes our own.  The chill in the air turns us into living stone.  With each step we create the earth, our pulse the measure of all things.  The river runs away from and into us.  Being is because we are.  The doors of perception always open upon our own creation and we pronounce it good. 

Learning to see

To love you must first learn to see. 

To really see is to experience yourself as no more than what you see and so become the falling of the rain, the flowing of the river, the fluttering of the leaf in the breeze, the shadow cast by the sun, the look of longing in your lover’s eyes, the cry of pain in the voice of your child. You are that. And that is what it is to love. 

Standing Still

I had forgotten where I was when someone called, “You're late.” For what, I didn’t know.  “I’ll be right there.”  But where was there? I walked toward the voice, but someone or something touched me from behind. I turned around.  Again, the voice, "You're late," but this time I just stood there.  

Imagination

If you were ever to doubt that you live in and through your imagination, that you are always -- not just sometimes when you need an escape -- experiencing things as being real that are not, just ask yourself where you are feeling that doubt.  In your mind, perhaps.  Where is that? Inside that pretty skull of yours? Let’s take a look and see what’s there.  If we can get past the brain mass and focus on the specific neural activity that correlates with your doubt, we would find nothing but the biochemistry of axons, dendrites, glucose metabolism, ubiquitous electrical happenings, etc. Perhaps some playful fellow would say that that specific neural activity, joined perhaps by other yet to be specified neural events, is in fact the experience of doubt we seek. If so, that would support the idea that your experience of doubt is not what it is or that the nature of our biochemistry is much stranger than we previously thought. It is almost as if the most accurate description of human reality is that we are not what we are and are what we are not, a twist of Jean-Paul’s description of consciousness. The fundamental mistake is to think of the imagination as just one among a variety of mental capacities (memory, perception, rational thought, etc.) rather than the very ground of our being. Perhaps we can set up camp here for the night and discuss these questions further.

Some time later beneath the "dingle starry": 

She: But what if someone were to say that doubt is not just the neural activity itself but the meaning of that activity?

He: That meaning would have its own neural correlation, I suppose.  Would we next be talking about the meaning of meaning?

She: Perhaps it goes on indefinitely, this meaning of meaning. 

He: Are you saying that meaning is not what is and is what it is not? 

She: I suppose so. What's next?

They sleep, they wake and find each other,
the night all aflower as in a dream.  

The Meaning of a Poem

The meaning of a poem comes not from the words, but from the transmutation that occurs in the heart of the poet at the time the poem is written.  In all poetry that is not simply decorative, there is an elemental activity of consciousness, a sustained golden moment that triumphs over raw experience.  The meaning of a poem is that activity of mind, triumphant over the despair that the words of the poem may convey.  

Beauty

Beauty. Beauty is the experience of consciousness beholding itself.  In so far as my consciousness in its structure, movement and content is like that of every other man and woman beauty is universal; in so far as my consciousness is individual and personal so is my experience of beauty. It may that this experience of beauty goes back to our infancy and even before that where desire and fulfillment were one and indistinguishable. It may even be that this initial experience becomes the energy or eros to create or seek out beauty.  If so, its beginning is a gift that propels us out into the world to find ourselves, to make ourselves whole again.  In so far as the personal and individual aspect of consciousness dominates, it tends to become narcissism, but in so far as consciousness seeks its universal reflection it becomes love of beauty itself. And so it is also with truth and virtue.  Truth is the correspondence of consciousness to reality. Virtue is making it so. 

Out of the necessity of our own experience

Why is there something, why not nothing? Whence comes love or conscience? Do our lives have any meaning? . . . It makes no difference that the answers we discover to such questions are ones that we have created for ourselves alone, provided they have been created out of the necessity of our own experience.  The questions must so press themselves upon us that we scorn self-deception and refuse to take another’s truth as our own.   When questions are so fervently asked, the answers come indirectly and in many forms: in art, in poetry, and, strangely, often in the very questions themselves.  For some the answers come as prayers.  In silence.  And very often, in despair. But always, always out of the necessity of our own experience. Thus is Truth discovered, such as it is, whether it be yours or mine.  

 

 

 

 

The Secret of the Sirens

The secret of the sirens is that they know your secret: your love of self in all its flower. The sirens lure you by weaving that love into song. What was once but the distant thunder of crashing waves becomes an echo in your soul. The song reaches out to you in the call of birds. Wind and wave carry the song and draw you close.  At last, you know you are loved. Too late you see the rocks and the shore bleached white with bone.  Were you able like Odysseus to hear the sirens’ song and contrive as he does to pass them by, you would become like a god. And just as surely die.  So Odysseus, as Dante tells us (pace Homer), sets a new course to the west and away from home. No thought of Ithaca or Penelope holds him back. Out he sails to unknown lands, but all he finds is the barren sea.  He sails on, as dead as he will ever be, the song now a bird of prey. Best never to leave home. The sea, of course, will find you, but at least you will die in your bed. 

Questions with no answers

Why do we ask questions for which there are no answers? There is a mystery to this. The mystery is that in searching out questions about the meaning of life our own lives become thereby meaningful. It comes upon us as a shadow at straightup noon and is experienced as a profound deepening. 

The Ingenuous mysticism of poetry

First I need to say that I am intentionally using the phrase ‘ingenuous mysticism' as opposed to 'ingenious mysticism'.  By ingenuous mysticism I am referring to a spontaneous, intuitive, ‘innocent’ mysticism untethered to any doctrine or school of thought.  Ingenuous mysticism happens when the imagination seeks to express experience without any predetermined mindset.  This causes language to become metaphoric and customary logic to fall away.  The result is that poets speak a kind of beautiful nonsense that reveals a dimension of reality otherwise inaccessible.

That's what I'm talking about

Drive, she said.
Where are we going?
Somewhere else and fast!
But . . .  
Perhaps I should drive.
No way!
Yeah, that’s what I am talking about.

The Myth of Narcissus

de quo consultus, an esset / tempora maturae visurus longa senectae, / fatidicus vates 'si se non noverit' inquit. . . Everywhere there are mirrors if we but knew how to look . . . in the trees and in the wind that they catch but cannot hold, in the mountains and in the clouds that rest upon them before the wind comes, and in all the varieties of water: rivers, pools, oceans and, yes, in your tears that are more like rain than you will ever know, and most especially in every dream, fantasy, delusion, and lie . . . in every act of the imagination and in every sight, smell, and touch . . . your skin, this kiss. . .  in such images we find ourselves . . . not something, but not nothing either . . . . we see as if in a mirror the essential movement of mind through which there is anything at all, through which there is meaning . . .  and, like the wind in the trees, that meaning is elusive. . .  we are like Narcissus who at first did not recognize the image in the clear pool as his own;  we too experience the world and its meaning as if they were there to be discovered and precisely not as something for which we are responsible . . . all that there is is the reflection of our own minds at large . . . should we come to know ourselves as Narcissus did, we would know that we are responsible for everything, that without us there would be no joy and no death, no love and no suffering . . . according to the ancient story, Narcissus remains eternally enchanted by his own reflection in the River Styx . . .If we too come to know ourselves would not we also remain frozen in time as if we had encountered some Medusa . . .to know oneself guilty of every act of cruelty would surely  turn us to stone . . . . . or would we like Narcissus in Melville’s account plunge into the pool and drown . . . Melville tells us that the image Narcissus beholds in the water is the ungraspable phantom of life and that somehow is the key to it all . . . CONSIDER YOURSELVES WARNED . . . as was Narcissus: that he would live a long life if only he did not come to know himself . . . this way lies madness . . . as there is in the very capitalization of that warning . . . shall we like Ishmael remain on the bank of that pool, frozen by cowardice and fade into a living death . . . or like Ahab seek to embrace the image of ourselves and drown . . . BE WARNED . . . just so this early morning warns me as the coming light fades into night . . .

Reality consists of all that is and all that is not

The meaning of language is one thing, the meaning of life another.

The one static and syntactical; the other creative and experiential.

Life is made meaningful when we are inspired by truth, beauty and virtue, words that are otherwise meaningless in that they do not correspond to any objects in the world. When we treat these ideas as if they were such objects, the world becomes other than what it is and we other than what we are.

If there is beauty or justice or virtue in the world, it is because we have put them there.

Thus we participate in the creative happening of Being.

If I were a rock, I would roll downhill; if I were a wolf, I would hunt -- since I am a man, I create meaning where none is to be found.

Reality consists of all that is and all that is not.

Trying desperately to be good

His clothes were patchwork, held together by dozens of safety pins. As he came on the bus, carrying all his belongings in a burlap bag, others looked away -- he smelled bad. He sat down next to a man in a business suit, but the man got up and moved to another seat. Suddenly, there was a fight: the old man in safety pins and burlap was screaming at the man in the business suit, throwing fists: "I could have had your life, your suit; you are not too good to sit next to me." The bus driver separated them and at the next stop the man in the business suit ran out of the bus and up the street, disappearing into the night. The man in safety pins came and sat next to me. He showed me a silver revolver. He flashed it and told me he was Matt Dillon and had killed many bad men. He said it's a struggle between the good guys and the bad. I sat in silence trying desperately to be a good guy.  

Virtus et Veritas

What if you were required at the age of 18 to have an indelible tattoo of three words or less engraved on the inside of your left lower arm, stating by what high purpose your life is to be measured?  But I may change my mind, you say.  Answer: You already know by what principle your soul yearns to live. What is required is truthfulness and courage. But, you say, some day I may regret my choice because it has proven too lofty, too idealistic, too difficult to achieve.  Answer: How else could it be if it is to last you a lifetime?

 

What if you were required at the age of 18 to have an indelible tattoo of three words or less engraved on the inside of your left lower arm, stating by what high purpose your life is to be measured?  But I may change my mind, you say.  Answer: You already know by what principle your soul yearns to live. What is required is truthfulness and courage. But, you say, some day I may regret my choice because it has proven too lofty, too idealistic, too difficult to achieve.  Answer: How else could it be if it is to last you a lifetime?

 

Honor

Honor est verbum Latinum.

Lingua Latina est terra incognita.

Gnothi Seauton

To know myself is to know that even though my eyes reflect the stars and I feel the river’s force as my own and my breath runs with the wind and the love of my life drives away the darkness, the stars and the river and wind will go on without me and darkness will cover all.

Nonsense

Nonsense. Everything happens as if we were free to do otherwise. We walk toward the horizon but are everywhere rooted to the ground. Our promises betoken nothing. Even the tap tap tap of these keys makes no sound, no sense. The candle burns and casts no light. Yet we are responsible for all we do, life is a journey, promises are binding, and these words echo silently in your mind. Or so it seems. "But I think, I exist. I have a mind." You do not. "But the candle burns." It does not. “But why does it seem there is something, why not nothing?” Because nothing is something. “But that is nonsense!” Exactly.

The Idiot

He went about tapping and rapping.  The little hammer became part of his hand, the one that wasn’t there, amputated to save his life. He could stretch his missing hand and phantom fingers, but they weren’t there.  Now he was wondering what else wasn’t there.  He wondered about the wind, how it seemed to caress his skin, and he knew it too wasn’t there.  He wondered about his other hand, but decided not to take the chance. He tapped on doors and trees and tables and chairs and, sure enough, they weren’t there at all, for they all seemed the same.  He wondered about colors, especially the orange of oranges and the blue of the sky and rainbows.  None of them were there at all.  One day he broke a window with his tapping but nothing changed, so he put down his hammer and decided to live sensibly like everyone else and prepare to die. 

To a Young Writer

You know your writing is good if you enjoy the flow of thought and feeling and word.

Work like crazy to make your writing as good as possible.

You will know when you have done this. You will know as surely as you know yourself. 

To hell with what a teacher thinks.  You're not really writing for him or her anyway. 

 

Mother and Child

The fire nestles into the darkness like a child into her mother's arms. 

Getting there

Getting there -– it’s a kind of a going wrongly right but I found myself hunkering after hard-assed things like Cars and Stars to hang my hat and self by, many such things left behind, begging to be lost and found but most all to sail off into the bluest blue like rain-- so grows my heart in my head and so sleep and slept and be gone. So paint we nature, motherfucker and all. You damn well better come and preach Good Sorrow, making the lines purr – I know you understand.

Is it poetry?

Poetry is inspired song. The breath is the soul of the poem. The poet gathers the air around, the blue from the sky and her curling eyes, the warmth from the sun and his lover's body . . . and sings. The air is measured, the lover's body rolls with the waves and her eyes become one with the night. In the morning, the poet crawls out of the sky like a bear, stretching full out, searching again for the sweetness, searching for the sun in the movement of cloud and leaf and desire.  He sings. If his words resound in skin and bone, in the stone-cold night, if he enchants the air with his song -- it is poetry. If you have to ask if it is poetry, it is not.

A Journey to the Shore

 

The song is beautiful; the singer gone.

The best of us are lonely and forever in love.

Maybe not tonight but soon this silence.

Though there is a chill in the air Ono still purrs.

The girls chatter happily.  Who can help a smile?

Sea and sky are one.  So too the sand.

In the distance, I hear a voice.  An echo?

Words. Distant thunder. 

No two alike.  This night and day.

Alone at last. The fire chirps and brings me warmth. 

Picasso's Guernica

Let anyone who would know the secret of things first learn geometry. It is as if all things are generated from straight lines that bend and circles that yield to angles as lines and circles do in Picasso’s painting. Geometry pervades the canvas in small details, e.g. on the open hand of the fallen warrior, and in the large triangles that give a sense of order to the chaotic images. Against the angles and straight lines rounded images emerge, human faces, distorted as if yielding to a linear force. There is a brooding fatalism about the painting; the human figures seem the playthings of impersonal forces that are beyond human governance. The bull is the only figure that expresses no anguish; it presides over the scene with an idiotic look, as if to say– how has it all come to this, this terrible suffering? The bull, the horse, and the fallen warrior are potentially expressive of the corrida and the painting as whole displays the tragic meaning of that event – life in death and death in life, an event that plays itself out in war as it does in all things. We can imagine the bull as Picasso himself viewing from the safe distance of his Paris studio a torn and scattered world that is only a heartbeat away. He is the idiot, a man alone, as Aristotle says, not fully human, a beast or god. The black and white of the painting, blending into shades of gray, underscore the elemental, geometrical struggle that the painting represents. Tragedy is inherent in the nature of things. The artist triumphs over that tragedy by making it at once devastating and beautiful.  

The Library

When at last you have lost almost all trace of identity, and you are on the verge of achieving your heart’s desire, God, All-Loving as He is, learns of your virtual nonentity and invites you to the Library. He knows what it is like to be nobody. You say with all the passionate emptiness of your heart: Thou hast heard. God goes to the bookshelves and pulls out a great volume. You open it up and read: Call me Ishmael . . . . and there you are, with a damp, drizzly November in your soul, following funerals, and needing all your self-restraint not to step into the street and start knocking people’s hats off. You consider killing yourself right out – like Cato throwing himself upon his sword. This can’t be happening, you think to yourself, though what it is that is happening is an empty thought. Then, it is final. The lines of text become threads, a twisted umbilical cord at the end of which there is nothing it is like to be you. You take to ship, a white phantom leading you on. And there you are, abandoned, floating on a vast, milky sea of non-being.