Mind 3

"The true contemplative is not the one who prepares his mind for a particular message that he wants or expects to hear, but who remains empty because he knows that he can never expect or anticipate the word that will transform his darkness into light. He does not even anticipate a special kind of transformation. He does not demand light instead of darkness. He waits on the Word of God in silence, and when is “answered,” it is not so much by a word that bursts into his silence. It is by his silence itself suddenly, inexplicably revealing itself to him as a word of great power, full of the voice of God."

~Thomas Merton, Contemplative Prayer, p. 112-3

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"Writing fiction is like remembering what never happens. It mimics memory without being memory. Images appear as textual ground, because this is how the brain works. I am convinced that the processes of memory and invention are linked in the mind."

~Siri Hustvedt, from 'Yonder', an essay in A Plea for Eros

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The Plan is the Body               Robert Creeley

The plan is the body.

There is each moment a pattern.

There is each time something

for everyone.

The plan is the body.

The mind is in the head.

It’s a moment in time,

an instant, second.

The rhythm of one

and one, and one, and one.

The two, the three.

The plan is in the body.

Hold it an instant,

in the mind—hold it.

What was say you

said. The two, the three,

times in the body,

hands, feet, you remember—

I, I remember, I

speak it, speak it.

The plan is the body.

Times you didn’t want to,

times you can’t think

you want to, you.

Me, me, remember, me

here, me wants to, me

am thinking of you.

The plan is the body.

The plan is the body.

The sky is the sky.

The mother, the father—

The plan is the body.

Who can read it.

Plan is the body. The mind

is the plan. I—

speaking. The memory

gathers like memory, plan,

I thought to remember,

thinking again, thinking.

The mind is the plan of the mind.

The plan is the body.

The plan is the body.

The plan is the body.

The plan is the body.

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From Why I Write, by Joan Didion

Of course I stole the title for this talk, from George Orwell. One reason I stole it was that I like the sound of the words: Why I Write. There you have three short unambiguous words that share a sound, and the sound they share is this:

I

I

I

In many ways writing is the act of saying I, or imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasion—with  the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, and imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space. 

Rhythm

Dylan Thomas: “[A poem] is the rhythmic, inevitably narrative, movement from an over-
     clothed blindness to a naked vision.”

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The Plan is the Body               Robert Creeley

The plan is the body.

There is each moment a pattern.

There is each time something

for everyone.

The plan is the body.

The mind is in the head.

It’s a moment in time,

an instant, second.

The rhythm of one

and one, and one, and one.

The two, the three.

The plan is in the body.

Hold it an instant,

in the mind—hold it.

What was say you

said. The two, the three,

times in the body,

hands, feet, you remember—

I, I remember, I

speak it, speak it.

The plan is the body.

Times you didn’t want to,

times you can’t think

you want to, you.

Me, me, remember, me

here, me wants to, me

am thinking of you.

The plan is the body.

The plan is the body.

The sky is the sky.

The mother, the father—

The plan is the body.

Who can read it.

Plan is the body. The mind

is the plan. I—

speaking. The memory

gathers like memory, plan,

I thought to remember,

thinking again, thinking.

The mind is the plan of the mind.

The plan is the body.

The plan is the body.

The plan is the body.

The plan is the body.

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Two is the rhythm of the body; three is the rhythm of the mind. Leonard Bernstein

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The Elementary Structures of Kinship      from The Making of the Mother: Portraits        Marcia Aldrich

The rhythm of the mother's chopping onions hurts her daughter's soul. Chop. Chop. Chop. Pause.
      Hurt.
      The top of this mother's lip curls before the difficulty of the onion. What is the difficulty of this onion, the daughter thinks, and why are her eyes tearing up. Is it from the milky sap of the onion or the skin of the mother? Chop. Chop. Chop. Pause.
            Hurt.
      The mother looks up from her onion to her daughter and wipes her eyes. She, too, has tears. The daughter thinks—are my mother's tears caused by the onion or has she read my mind? Does my mother know that she irritates my soul?
      The mother holds out the knife to her daughter: “Will you chop awhile? My eyes,” she says.
      The daughter takes the knife silently from her mother and begins chopping. Chop. Chop. Chop. Pause.
      Hurt.

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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.

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Perhaps the first songs were lullabies. Perhaps mothers were the first singers. Perhaps they learned to soothe their squirming simian babes by imitating the sounds of moving water, the gurgles, cascades, plashes, puddlings, flows, floods, spurts, spills, gushes, laps, and sucks. Perhaps they knew their babies were born from water. And rhythm was the gentle rock of the water hammock slung between the pelvic trees. And melody was the sound the water made when the baby stirred its limbs.

There is the endless delight we taken in new beings . . . and there is the antediluvian rage they evoke by their blind, screaming, shitting, and pissing helplessness. So the songs for them are two-faced, lulling in the gentle maternal voice but viciously surrealistic in the words. Rock a bye, baby, in the treetop, when the wind blows the cradles will rock, when the bough breaks the cradle will fall, down will come baby, cradle and all . . . . Imagine falling through a tree, your legs locked and your arms tightly bound to your sides. Imagine falling down into the world with your little head bongoing against the boughs and the twigs, and the branches whipping across your ears as if you were a xylophone. Imagine being born. Lullabies urge us to go to sleep at the same time they enact for us the terror of waking. In this way we learn for our own sake the immanence in all feelings of their opposite. The Bible, too, speaks of this as the Fall.

E. L. Doctorow, in The City of God, p. 139

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Pattern

Something and Nothing                            Katie Ford

In the month my brother began to love a married woman,
the month the lantana took all the heat of late summer
into its orange sanctuary blooms, bearing it, storing it
as if for some suddenly-cold October night, he let her be.

In a twilight in which we are told the stars are portioned
into patterns like goblets and horses and archers he slid
her photograph into a copper frame welded
at the edges with a darker wire melted against it

and in. And it became
something of untiring capacity, growing
like the miles of hollowed land stunned and crafted
so far before us the metallic light of morning
that we could never imagine
unmade the land,
then towered the rain down, centuries worth,

to make a lake of what was gone, desire in which he let
her be and waters where the tired
but living carp swim back and forth. 

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We thrive, in part, when we have purpose, when we still have more to do. The deliberate incomplete has long been a central part of creation myths themselves. In Navajo culture, some craftsmen and women sought imperfection, giving their textiles and ceramics an intended flaw called a “spirit line” so that there is a forward thrust, a reason to continue making work. Nearly a quarter of twentieth century Navajo rugs have these contrasting-color threads that run out from the inner pattern to just beyond the border that contains it; Navajo baskets and often pottery have an equivalent line called a “heart line” or a “spirit break.” The undone pattern is meant to give the weaver’s spirit a way out, to prevent it from getting trapped and reaching what we sense is an unnatural end.    Sarah Lewis in The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery

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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.

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“I know that I have an instinct towards math and cleverness in structure that I work against, and so I try to make something … I make this whole structure which takes up a cork wall of index cards, and then I feel that is the architecture of the book, and what you do with architecture is that you cover it completely . . . And why I am driven to make something this complicated I don’t know. It’s just a pleasure for me always in all kinds of reading and fiction to know that there is some kind of clock ticking in the background. It could be rhetorical device, the way that language goes in the book. That there’s a pattern to it, because it’s nice to feel when you close the book that there’s a pattern to life.” Andrew Sean Greer in an interviewwith Michael Silverblatt on KCRW’s Bookworm 

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Time                                                    Robert Creeley

Moment to

moment the

body seems

to me to

be there: a

catch of

air, pattern

of space— Let’s

walk today

all the way

to the beach,

let’s think

of where we’ll be

in two year’s

time, of where

we were. Let

the days go.

Each moment is

of such paradoxical

definition—a

waterfall that would

flow backward

if it could. It

can? My time,

one thinks,

is drawing to

some close. This

feeling comes

and goes. No

measure ever serves

enough, enough—

so “finish it”

gets done, alone.

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Desire is, among other things, a function of repetition, or so the very patterns of your life have led you to believe. John Keene

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Weather

“You are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather.”
― Pema Chödrön

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No Narrative                    A. E. Watkins

A paradise forecloses once an aperture—no narrative but trees
are saying birds between them. Sun through green leaves like green

stained glass—a bright room, the birds spoken in through
a window—translating between two

weathers: the birds as captives or portents.
The forest and feathered currents

coursing its chambers; what to think
of open doors, the emptied sanctuary Your trilling

lingers the rafters now branching several scenes.
No narrative but birds on wires humming between

poles—lining the street—front doors and absence cut in each
tree to let wires through: an entrance by which

a blood-thick night can pass.
The birds with beaks pulled to breasts, their small claws clasp

a wilderness humming sun-lit rooms and flitting. 

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  from  Ice Cream  by Robert Creeley

Where we are there must

be something to place us.

Look around. What do you see

that you can recognize.

.

Anxious about the weather,

folding the door shut, unwrapping

the floor covering and rolling it

forward at the door.

.

So that’s what you do:

ask the same questions

and keep answering.

.

Was that right.

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Language has no weather, and therefore is not, strictly speaking, an environment.

~from Jennifer Moxley's 'Fragments of a Broken Poetics'

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APPREHENDING THE WEATHER IN KANSAS                 Jon Kelly Yenser

For Becca

I'd forgotten that
the front edge of a front
seems its opposite

a long in-drawing
a sough up high in the elms
in the maples a sigh.

Just before the first drops
icy and big as dimes change
things for the better

the wind comes up.
You never mistake the storm
for what came before.

I grew up agape
and breathless in this weather
and the pulse it kept.

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Ghost                 Mark Irwin

Now your name's just a guest here, one that cancels
all hellos. Fleshless
you come & go through the mansion

of air. How
will I address you, small
weather? Sometimes your name's

a dress like an iron
bell the years
swing shadows from

longer that home. Can you hear
that word peal? I'm going
there now,

carrying the windows
from inside
all the vowels. 

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