Mind 4

"What makes form adventurous is its unpredictable appetite for particulars. The truly creative mind is always ready for the operations of chance. It wants to sweep into the constellation of the artwork as much as it can of the loose, floating matter that it encounters. How much accident can the work incorporate? How much of the unconscious life can the mind dredge up from its depths?" ~Stanley Kunitz

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"Your eyes are on your side, for you cannot see your eyes, and your eyes cannot see themselves. Eyes only see things outside, objective things. If you reflect on yourself, that self is not your true self any more. You cannot project yourself as some objective thing to think about. The mind which is always on your side is not just your mind, it is the universal mind, always the same, not different from another’s mind. It is Zen mind. It is big, big mind. The mind is whatever you see. Your true mind is always with whatever you see. Although you do not know your own mind, it is there—at the very moment you see something, it is there. This is very interesting. You mind is always with the things you observe. So you see, this mind is at the same time everything." ~Shunryu Suzuki, Zen’s Mind, Beginner’s Mind, p. 134

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208. If you change your mind, you are free. Or you were.

From Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays by James Richardson

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The Woman Who Is Early        Nin Andrews

The Woman Who Is Early is always at least one step ahead of
time. She is always rushing and rushing. Where-ever she goes,
she is already there long before she arrives. Whatever she is
saying, she has already said it before the words leave her lips.
Whatever song she is singing she is already so sick of it, and she
wishes she could get it out of her mind. Whatever meal she is
preparing, she has eaten it before taking the first bite. Whatever
man she desires, she had made love to him a thousand times
before he ever undresses her. A man can never make love to her
the way he did once upon a time, before he made love to her. Of
course therapists tell her she should slow down and rest a spell.
Relax. She has heard those words long before she ever sees
therapists. Does she have to explain it to them again? How a
great wave is chasing her? It is rising above her head even as she
thinks of it. If she looks back, just once, it will wash over her.
She will instantly drown. Of course, she is right. That's why she
has already drowned. 

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The Storm                                                                                Jennifer Moss

Where one mind stops,
another begins.

Where cutlery shines on plates,
a voice lowers.

One length of forgiveness,
round and round like a child's game
in the dust.

Outside, the rain formalizing.

When we leave we are replaced.

Shaky clouds in lightning,
my shadow alive on the floor.

Then the small passage for sleep.

How green and spidery the sky.


In its net, the dead bees of memory. 


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"The mind wants to live forever, or to learn a very good reason why not. The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness; the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God. The mind’s sidekick, however, will settle for two eggs over easy.

The dear, stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel. And, incredibly, the simple spaniel can lure the brawling mind to its dish. It is everlastingly funny that the proud, metaphysically ambitious, clamoring mind will hush if you give it an egg.

Further: while the mind reels in deep space, while the mind grieves or fears or exults, the workaday senses, in ignorance or idiocy, like so many computer terminals printing out market prices while the world blows, up, still transcribe their little data and transmit them to the warehouse in the skull."

~Annie Dillard, in Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters, p. 99

Absurd

I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems. ~Wisława Szymborska

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"Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one."  ~Voltaire

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Like most children he prefers sameness, routine, consistency. This, too, I understand. Repetition is the essence of meaning. Without it we are lost. But taken to its extreme, a love of system becomes absurd.  

 ~Siri Hustvedt, from "Franklin Pangborn: An Apologia," an essay in A Plea for Eros

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Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand—that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us. 

~Annie Dillard, in Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

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53
They have a proverb: Absurdity
is marvelous, but you get hungry an hour later.

I reply But that is what it is for.

~from James Richardson's The Encyclopedia of the Stones: a Pastoral      

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Give (#2)

"God has given you one face, and you make yourselves another." ~Shakespeare

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Giving up the ideal for the real is our only job. Recognizing the point where the creative urge is stilled is our basic moral dilemma. Surrendering at that point the symbolic aggregates of matter and self is morally the right thing to do. Morality is giving the crystallized images of captured energy flows back to the universe. Wanting to live forever is immoral, just as it is immoral to destroy energy still possessed by the desire to be, just as it is immoral to circumscribe the desire of another. That is why immortality (Dracula) is evil, Los Alamites are guilt-ridden, and Utah polygamists are bad. Morality is the secret knowledge of every organism of its exact relation to desire.  
~Andre Codrescu, The Disappearance of the Outside: A Manifesto for Escape, p.190-1

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My Topiary Is a Hedge against Confusion                      Michele Glazer

You have to come at it from a distance,
to walk up close to it to see the animal
is only from a distance:
then to be charmed by it.
The closer you get the more abstract.

       The dog is named for the variegated privet.
Walk away & the wind shakes Spot & the little leaves flicker,
perhaps, as if in happiness,
or, the water off.
It is not giving up anything nor is it
literal to a fault.

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The work of the imagination / is to give itself away.   
~Erica Funkhouser, from  “The Marvels of Insect Life,” in Pursuit

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472. We invent a god to help us understand solitude. In time, we give him a wife, a son, pets, students. He seems kinder; we know him better. But then we need a new god. 
~from Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays by James Richardson

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God does not demand that we give up our personal dignity, that we throw in our lot with random people, that we lose ourselves and turn from all that is not him. God needs nothing, asking nothing, and demands nothing, like the stars. It is a life with God which demands these things.

Experience has taught the race that if knowledge of God is the end, then these habits of life are not the means but the condition in which the means operates. You do not have to do these things; not at all. God does, not, I regret to report, give a hoot. You do not have to do these things—unless you want to know God. They work on you, not on him.

You do not have to sit outside in the dark .If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.

~Annie Dillard, in Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters, p. 31

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Age of Vanya                                         Jeffrey Harrison

Three months after my brother's death,
I saw Uncle Vanya in New York.
Near the end of the play, Vanya says
he's forty-seven years old. I had forgotten that,
and the line caught me off-guard. Forty-seven
was my brother's age when he killed himself.
I wondered if there was something about being
forty-seven—the very beginning of growing old—
that makes a certain kind of person take
the measure of his life and find it wanting,
even unbearable. Did Andy feel that way?

A few years earlier, over Christmas, Andy and I
had watched Vanya on Forty-Second Street together.
We kept rewinding and replaying the scene
near the end of Act Three, fascinated
by Wally Shawn's performance of Vanya's tirade
and lamentation, which was terrifying
but somehow funny, mordant but pathetic.
I almost don't want to admit we were laughing,
yet I also hold our shared laughter dear.
Now I wonder how close Vanya was to suicide,
and when that possibility entered my brother's mind.

Approaching forty-seven myself now, I can say
it hasn't entered mine. And yet, some days
I have to remind myself my life isn't over,
that I am still, by some measure, young,
that I shouldn't give up and it isn't too late
to get something done. There could be decades ahead,
or at least the thirteen years that Vanya
gives himself. I tell myself it's just a phase,
as our elders used to say annoyingly
when we were teenagers. It's just the age of Vanya,
something to dread, something to get beyond.

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…that poets are those to whom the difficulty of writing gives ideas, not those from whom it takes them away.  
~Reginald Gibbons, On Rhyme, APR, Nov./Dec. 2006

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It is said that in marriage, the man and woman give each other “his or her nethermost beast” to hold. Each holds the leash for the “nethermost beast” of the other. It’s a wonderful phrase.
~Robert Bly, in “Iron John: A Book About Men,” p. 77

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Desert Ant                               Sawako Nakayasu

Says “and” with every step, so that it sounds like this: “and and and and and and and and  and and and and and,” and so on. By the time I make my way to the same desert, I have been collecting and carrying an accumulation of nouns over the past, oh I don’t know how many days, and so I insert them in between the steps of the ant. Cilantro, tennis, phone, hand. Needle, rock, hair. Mingus. Monk. Mouth. I have been ignoring the dirty looks the ant keeps giving me, but finally I cave in, which means I stop to listen carefully. I am informed that I have thrown off the rhythm of “and and and and and.” I am informed that this shall not continue. I am given several options. I choose Monk, so for a while we do “monk and monk and monk and monk and monk and monk and monk.” I thought we were doing okay, but before I know it the ant is out of sight, and then before I know it, the ant has made a decision, and then before I know it, the ant is in my mouth, and mouth, and mouth, and mouth, and mouth, and mouth , and mouth. 

Regret

From the order of nature we return to the order – and the disorder – of humanity. From the larger circle we must go back to the smaller, the smaller within the larger and dependent on it. One enters the larger circle by willingness to be a creature, the smaller by choosing to be a human. And having returned from the woods, we remember with regret its restfulness. For all creatures there are in place, hence at rest.

In their most strenuous striving, sleeping and waking, dead and living, they are at rest. In the circle of the human we are weary with striving, and are without rest.

~Wendell Berry

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Regret has to be useless or it’s not really regret.

~Simone de Beauvoir (The Mandarins)

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471. If you never do a thing you may regret later, later will never come. As Eve proved, shame is time.

~James Richardson, (Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays)

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God does not demand that we give up our personal dignity, that we throw in our lot with random people, that we lose ourselves and turn from all that is not him. God needs nothing, asking nothing, and demands nothing, like the stars. It is a life with God which demands these things.

Experience has taught the race that if knowledge of God is the end, then these habits of life are not the means but the condition in which the means operates. You do not have to do these things; not at all. God does, not, I regret to report, give a hoot. You do not have to do these things—unless you want to know God. They work on you, not on him.

You do not have to sit outside in the dark .If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.

~Annie Dillard, (Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters)

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I don't do these kinds of lists much anymore because my personal database keeps pulling up the same poems I've used in previous lists, even when I search for a different word. For example, when looking for 'regret' I pulled up a number of poems and quotes that I had already used with other keywords for topics. Interestingly, an overlap that occurred with some frequency was poems using both the word 'regret' and the word 'logic.' Hmmmmmmmm.
~Jessica

Resolution

James Richardson, poet and aphorist, wrote as his 23rd entry in the book Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays, "All stones are broken stones." To me this immediately said; 1) all stones are broken, not just the one you identify with; and 2) all stones came from something bigger, a bigger stone, a oneness, a wholeness, a whole stone, an earth, a planet.

2014 was the year I was going to end self-loathing. That was my resolution. I am not done yet (may never be done), but I have made significant strides, thanks in large part to the podcasts (available free on iTunes) of meditation teacher Tara Brach, who teaches that one inclusive response to the vagaries of the world and of the self is "This too".

Novelist Marianne Fredriksson said in her book Simon and the Oaks (translated by Joan Tate), "I find it difficult to be with people who don’t like themselves. They let other people pay such a high price for it." Not only is it unpleasant to be with people preoccupied with self-loathing, it's also true that such people (I know from experience) are busy ascribing ugly motivations to the people who do put up with them, for there must be a twisted reason anyone would choose to be with such a loathsome individual as the self. When you let go of self-loathing, you let go of blaming and disliking others as well; when you can forgive yourself, it becomes nothing to forgive others.  And you learn, as the comedian Marc Maron once said, "Feelings aren't facts. Yadda yadda yadda."

So 2015 will be the year I continue to let go of self-loathing. After all, as sung by the band Over the Rhine, "All my favorite people are broken." You could do worse than taking the time to listen to the whole gorgeous song (because whole is gorgeous, and so is broken) here.

Migration

The Chattahoochee Review has a submissions call out on the theme of migration. For all my friends living abroad this is a natural fit; and for those who don't live abroad, I'm sure you've felt the winds of migration at some point in some way in your life. Check it out! Deadline of next September, so there's plenty of time to come up with some quality work.

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The Night Migrations

by Louise Glück

This is the moment when you see again the red berries of the mountain ash and in the dark sky the birds' night migrations. It grieves me to think the dead won't see them-- these things we depend on, they disappear. What will the soul do for solace then? I tell myself maybe it won't need these pleasures anymore; maybe just not being is simply enough, hard as that is to imagine.

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from DEFINITIONS OF POETRY by Carl Sandburg

12. Poetry is a fossil rock-print of a fin and a wing, with an illegible oath between.

13. Poetry is an exhibit of one pendulum connecting with other and unseen pendulums inside and outside the one seen.

14. Poetry is a sky dark with a wild-duck migration. 

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As darkness falls for real, it’s a beginner’s world again, the same evening as that day sixty million years ago when this migration began.   Richard Powers, The Echo Maker, p.3

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from The Encyclopedia of the Stones:
a Pastoral                                                                 James Richardson

1
They do not believe in the transmigration of souls.
They say their bodies will move
as leaves through light.

Everything would be perfect if the atoms
were the right shape and did not fall down.

The Comfort of Cannot

The other day blogger John Biesnecker posted about "The Joys of Having a Forever Project," a project that he describes as one that "despite its audacity and seeming impossibility, simply will not put itself to bed. . . . that is hard to imagine actually embarking on, but whose mental cost of abandonment is far too high to even consider."

The next day he wrote another blog post about "Why the Forever Project Hit a Nerve," as it had--getting over 45,000 hits in 18 hours and becoming a focus on Hacker News and Reddit.

When I (finally) found out about Biesnecker's forever project, I was immediately reminded of the quote by Henry Moore: "The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for the rest of your life. And the most important thing is, it must be something you cannot possibly do.”

I have loved this Henry Moore quote for years, have turned to it when I have wondered why I spend so much of my life writing poems, never getting written what I really want to write. And I turn to this quote when I wonder if I have wasted my life, which I wonder quite a bit...

There is something that cheers me to work on what I know is impossible but what I know I will never stop trying to do.

And then I started thinking about the beauty in all the things that cannot be:
 
"I cannot seem to feel alive unless I am alert," Charles Bowden writes in his recent book, Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), "and I cannot feel alert unless I push past the point where I have control."

". . . The aim is to become / something broken / that cannot be broken further . . "
from Jorie Graham’s Overlord

"Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature because we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery we are trying to solve. " Max Planck

The Pieces That Fall To Earth                           Kay Ryan

 

One could

almost wish

they wouldn't;

they are so

far apart,

so random.

One cannot

wait, cannot
abandon waiting.
The three or
four occasions
of their landing
never fade.
Should there
be more, there
will never be
enough to make
a pattern
that can equal
the commanding way they matter.

Your eyes are on your side, for you cannot see your eyes, and your eyes cannot see themselves. Eyes only see things outside, objective things. If you reflect on yourself, that self is not your true self any more. You cannot project yourself as some objective thing to think about. The mind which is always on your side is not just your mind, it is the universal mind, always the same, not different from another’s mind. It is Zen mind. It is big, big mind. The mind is whatever you see. Your true mind is always with whatever you see. Although you do not know your own mind, it is there—at the very moment you see something, it is there. This is very interesting. You mind is always with the things you observe. So you see, this mind is at the same time everything. Shunryu Suzuki, Zen’s Mind, Beginner’s Mind

Iris Murdoch once wrote, “The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved.”

 

…you cannot always be happy, but you can almost always be focused, which is the next best thing.  Winifred Gallagher, Rapt

40. Wind cannot blow the wind away, nor water wash away the water. From James Richardson's Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays

 

207. Sometimes I hate beauty because I don’t have a choice about loving it. I must be wrong in this, but whether because I take freedom too seriously, or love, I cannot tell. From James Richardson's Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays

 

 

The prose poem is the result of two contradictory impulses, prose and poetry, and therefore cannot exist, but it does. This is the sole instance we have of squaring the circle. Charles Simic, The Monster Loves His Labyrinth

Contemporary poets have for the most part forgotten about symbolism, especially its one great insight that Being cannot be stated but only hinted at.  Charles Simic, The Monster Loves His Labyrinth

Girder                                                 Nan Cohen

The simplest of bridges, a promise
that you will go forward,

that you can come back.
So you cross over.

It says you can come back.
So you go forward,

But even if you come back
then you must go forward.

I am always either going back
or coming forward. There is always

something I have to carry,
something I leave behind.

I am a figure in a logic problem,
standing on one shore

with the things I cannot leave,
looking across at what I cannot have.

 

Interviews with Two Poets

Here are a few terrific interviews with poets.

For the first I have to give a shout-out to poet extraordinaire Mari L'Esperance, who told me about this interview with Kundiman fellow Janine Oshiro at Lantern Review Blog. One of the most interesting points for me was when Oshiro talked about forming a manuscript from her poems and thinking about it as a single work with an arc, and how this larger perspective showed her new poems that she could write to complement the ones that existed. I was also cheered by her statement that poets need to be comfortable with their own processes, and not focus on quantity of output.

Another interview I enjoyed this week was a New Letters on the Air podcast by Angela Elam, talking with James Richardson.  Richardson talks about how the mood necessary for writing poetry is the opposite of the feeling of being productive. He says that when he makes himself write, he ends up writing the same old stuff. He explained that "it takes vast amounts of space" in order to come up with something new. Later he reiterates that particularly when ending up a book, "when everything you are thinking about is coming together...and you know everything, or think you do...", you can sit down and write a poem and get three lines into it and realize it is an old poem, which is why you need free time to "get back to your ignorance, back to your sense that you don't really know." "It's possible to be new just by your ignorance again," he says when comparing writing to the process of recent research in physics. Isn't that comforting?

Well, I've been a big fan of James Richardson for awhile, which is why I've posted about him one, two, three times in the past. And now I can't wait to get familiar with Janine Oshiro's work as well. Enjoy these interviews.

Fear of (fill in the blank)

So last night I was reading a book of interviews, in which Coleman Barks quoted the following of his own translation of Rumi:

Keep walking, though there’s no place to get to.
Don’t try to see through the distances.
That’s not for human beings. Move within,
but don’t move the way fear makes you move.

When I read that, immediately I realized that given the issues I have been struggling with recently, I have begun to do exactly that: move the way fear makes me move. So how exactly do I escape that impulse, I wondered. Then I remembered this aphorism from James Richardson's Vectors:

121. The worst part of fear is not knowing what to do. And often you only have to ask What would I do if I were not afraid? to know what to do, and do it, and not be afraid.

So that's the new plan. Again. 

And since I was thinking of fear, I looked up a few random other quotes about fear that have been meaningful to me over the years. Here they are:

Let go of grief. Let go of joy. Let go of hope. Let go of fear. Let go of history. Let go of coming and going. Let go of culture. Let go of waiting. Let go of letting go.  
Rudolph Wurlitzer from Hard Travel to Sacred Places

I wanted to find one law to cover all of living. I found fear.
Anne Carson from "The Anthropology of Water"

 ...remember fear for what it is: a resistance to the unknown.
Terry Tempest Williams

When I was in my 20s, a friend said to me, "You are fearless. You'll try anything." I had to explain to her that in fact I was consumed with fear. Getting out of bed in the morning caused great anxiety in me. But since everything made me afraid and anxious, I didn't distinguish between experiences that made people with normal fear responses feel fearful and everyday situations that caused worry in me. Since on any given day I had already overcome 58 other fearful situations before being asked if I wanted to do something that would make a person with a good grip of reason feel fearful, I would think, Yeah sure, I'll try it; what's one more terrifying thing to try today?

Somewhere along the line I lost that ability to manage my distress. But I've got to get it back. Fear, my one constant. You think I'd be better at this by now.