Maxim

A nice poem by Carl Dennis (already online at The New Yorker website):

A Maxim

To live each day as if it might be the last
Is an injunction that Marcus Aurelius
Inscribes in his journal to remind himself
That he, too, however privileged, is mortal,
That whatever bounty is destined to reach him
Has reached him already, many times.
But if you take his maxim too literally
And devote your mornings to tinkering with your will,
Your afternoons and evenings to saying farewell
To friends and family, you'll come to regret it.
Soon your lawyer won't fit you into his schedule.
Soon your dear ones will hide in a closet
When they hear your heavy step on the porch.
And then your house will slide into disrepair.
If this is my last day, you'll say to yourself,
Why waste time sealing drafts in the window frames
Or cleaning gutters or patching the driveway?
If you don't want your heirs to curse the day
You first opened Marcus's journals,
Take him simply to mean you should find an hour
Each day to pay a debt or forgive one,
Or write a letter of thanks or apology.
No shame in leaving behind some evidence
You were hoping to live beyond the moment,
No shame in a ticket to a concert seven months off,
Or, better yet, two tickets, as if you were hoping
To meet by then someone who'd love to join you,
Two seats near the front so you catch each note.

Happy Birthday Bob

I'm told that Dylan is 69 today. If Obama deserved the Peace Prize, how much longer does Bob have to wait for his literature Nobel?

Just Like a Woman

Nobody feels any pain
Tonight as I stand inside the rain
Everybody knows
That Baby's got new clothes
But lately I see her ribbons and her bows
Have fallen from her curls.
She takes just like a woman, yes, she does
She makes love just like a woman, yes, she does
And she aches just like a woman
But she breaks just like a little girl.

Queen Mary, she's my friend
Yes, I believe I'll go see her again
Nobody has to guess
That Baby can't be blessed
Till she sees finally that she's like all the rest
With her fog, her amphetamine and her pearls.
She takes just like a woman, yes, she does
She makes love just like a woman, yes, she does
And she aches just like a woman
But she breaks just like a little girl.

It was raining from the first
And I was dying there of thirst
So I came in here
And your long-time curse hurts
But what's worse
Is this pain in here
I can't stay in here
Ain't it clear that--

I just can't fit
Yes, I believe it's time for us to quit
When we meet again
Introduced as friends
Please don't let on that you knew me when
I was hungry and it was your world.
Ah, you fake just like a woman, yes, you do
You make love just like a woman, yes, you do
Then you ache just like a woman
But you break just like a little girl.

Springs

Why is April National Poetry Month? Why should spring be more poetical than any other time of year? Here's one take, another by Kay Ryan, "Spring:"

Winter, like a set opinion,
is routed. What gets it out?
The imposition of some external season
or some internal doubt?
I see the yellow maculations spread
across bleak hills of what I said
I'd always think; a stippling of white
upon the grey; a pink the shade
of what I said I'd never say.

Spring, while obviously anticipated intellectually, nonetheless takes the eye and the body by surprise, year after year, teaching us the limits of the imagination and the inexorability of nature, even in its luxuriance. No less than natural disasters, spring is an assault upon the senses, the ultimate exercise of natural power. The mind, too, often surprises. So T. S. Eliot famously wrote:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

And Whitman:

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd,
And the great star early droop'd in the western sky in the night,
I mourn'd, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

Spring's annual ritual is both promise and threat, a display of renewal ironically at odds with a mortal body. Spring best embodies the universe's basic superfluity--why something rather than nothing, indeed?

And yet Stevens warns in "Esthetique du Mal:"

The greatest poverty is not to live
In a physical world, to feel that one's desire
Is too difficult to tell from despair.

And Stevens's remedy?

Beauty is momentary in the mind--
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.

Spring should be enough in itself; some of us seem to need poetry to explain why, for restless consciousness, it isn't. Nature has evolved beings who are impatient of nature.

National Poetry Month

I have finally gotten around to reading Kay Ryan:

A Certain Kind of Eden

It seems like you could, but
you can't go back and pull
the roots and runners and replant.
It's all too deep for that.
You've overprized intention,
have mistaken any bent you're given
for control. You thought you chose
the bean and chose the soil.
You even thought you abandoned
one or two gardens. But those things
keep growing where we put them--
if we put them at all.
A certain kind of Eden holds us thrall.
Even the one vine that tendrils out alone
in time turns on its own impulse,
twisting back down its upward course
a strong and then a stronger rope,
the greenest saddest strongest
kind of hope.

This poem spoke to me because of its message of belatedness, contingency, serendipity. We are born into gardens billions of years in the making, yet born also into some bizarre notion that we plant all anew. Yet that is the only way the garden progresses, through the pretense that every moment is pregant with infinite possibilities, not only for generation but for forgetting and "outgrowing." This is a counsel not for fatalism, but surely for circumspection and humility (and self-forgiveness).

Sun

The Woman in Sunshine

It is only that this warmth and movement are like
The warmth and movement of a woman.

It is not that there is any image in the air
Nor the beginning nor end of a form:

It is empty. But a woman in threadless gold
Burns us with brushings of her dress

And a dissociated abundance of being,
More definite for what she is--

Because she is disembodied,
Bearing the odors of the summer fields,

Confessing the taciturn and yet indifferent,
Invisibly clear, the only love.

Wallace Stevens

Blue

It troubled me as once I was --
For I was once a Child --
Concluding how an Atom -- fell --
And yet the Heavens -- held --

The Heavens weighed the most -- by far --
Yet Blue -- and solid -- stood --
Without a Bolt -- that I could prove --
Would Giants -- understand?

Life set me larger -- problems --
Some I shall keep -- to solve
Till Algebra is easier --
Or simpler proved -- above --

Then -- too -- be comprehended --
What sorer -- puzzled me --
Why Heaven did not break away --
And tumble -- Blue -- on me --

Dickinson

Moving On?

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose? Can't be.

A "low dishonest decade" on multiple levels.

"September 1, 1939"

W. H. Auden

Light

The Buddha's Last Instruction

"Make of yourself a light,"
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal--a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.
An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.
And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire--
clearly I'm not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.

Mary Oliver

Figuratively Speaking

It will soon be eleven years since I read this to Julia:

In courtesy I'd have her chiefly learned;
Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned
By those that are not entirely beautiful;
Yet many, that have played the fool
For beauty's very self, has charm made wise,
And many a poor man that has roved,
Loved and thought himself beloved,
From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.

May she become a flourishing hidden tree
That all her thoughts may like the linnet be,
And have no business but dispensing round
Their magnanimities of sound,
Nor but in merriment begin a chase,
Nor but in merriment a quarrel.
O may she live like some green laurel
Rooted in one dear perpetual place.

From "A Prayer for my Daughter," W. B. Yeats (full poem here)

Is This It?

Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu

That would be waving and that would be crying,
Crying and shouting and meaning farewell,
Farewell in the eyes and farewell at the center,
Just to stand still without moving a hand.

In a world without heaven to follow, the stops
Would be endings, more poignant than partings, profounder,
And that would be saying farewell, repeating farewell,
Just to be there and just to behold.

To be one's singular self, to despise
The being that yielded so little, acquired
So little, too little to care, to turn
To the ever-jubilant weather, to sip

One's cup and never to say a word,
Or to sleep or just to lie there still,
Just to be there, just to be beheld,
That would be bidding farewell, be bidding farewell.

One likes to practice the thing. They practice,
Enough, for heaven. Ever-jubilant,
What is there here but weather, what spirit
Have I except it comes from the sun?

Wallace Stevens


For the time being I can no longer pretend that I have the time or the motivation to continue blogging here on a regular basis. The nearly 300 posts since last year (counting the longer predecessor of "Blue to Blue") have been a fascinating project, well worth doing. But I have said many of the things I had to say, in this format at least, and circumstances have changed; there are real-life matters that need to be taken care of.

I may occasionally return if I have a poem or other bee in my bonnet that I can't resist sharing, but it won't be on any regular basis, and it would be for myself more than for anyone else. After the first of the year things may have settled down enough that I'll want to undertake something new. I will continue to follow some of the folks on the Blogroll from time to time. But as for this site, thanks for reading up to now.

Poetic Diagnosis

I wasn't familiar with this poem, which I happened upon this morning:

Neurotics

No one gives you a thought, as day by day
You drag your feet, clay-thick with misery.
None think how stalemate in you grinds away,
Holding your spinning wheels an inch too high
To bite on earth. The mind, it's said, is free:
But not your minds. They, rusted stiff, admit
Only what will accuse or horrify,
Like slot-machines only bent pennies fit.

So year by year your tense unfinished faces
Sink further from the light. No one pretends
To want to help you now. For interest passes
Always towards the young and more insistent,
And skirts locked rooms where a hired darkness ends
Your long defence against the non-existent.

Philip Larkin

In some ways this seems a harsh, unlovely, and ungenerous piece, but on the other hand it has its accuracies. When it was written, in 1949 according to my volume, "neurosis" of course was a commonplace term owing to the cultural prominence of psychoanalysis. Neurosis remains a widely recognizable term, of course, but one no longer finds it in mainstream psychiatric diagnosis, as it has been split into myriad anxiety, mood, and perhaps personality disorders.

However, the construct of "neuroticism," which is a general tendency to emotional negativity and instability and susceptibility to stress, still exists as one of five major components of personality as identified in psychological testing (the other four are openness vs. conventionality, conscientiousness vs. expediency, extroversion vs. introversion, and agreeability vs. its lack). Neuroticism is correlated with increased risk for depression, anxiety, and eating disorders among other things. To my mind, describing someone as broadly neurotic can be more helpful and convenient than listing the five DSM-IV diagnoses they may happen to meet criteria for.

As for Larkin's poem, it painfully depicts the disfiguring and ostracizing effects that neuroticism can have; no, it is not (quite) leprosy, but it can alienate almost as much. It conveys the sense of stasis and sluggishness ("clay-thick"), of emotional torpor that results not from repose, but from wasteful psychological exertion (the metaphor of wheels spinning but gaining no traction on earth is just right).

Larkin puts his finger on the core problem of neurosis, which is the lack of internal freedom; while philosophers forever debate freedom vs. determinism in the abstract, the neurotic battles fatalism on a daily basis. Cheer up; don't be afraid; eat less; exercise. How can these things seem so impossible? For one thing, the neurotic lives in a different perceptual world from the rest of us, with a mind that will "admit only what will accuse or horrify."

"Tense unfinished faces" is perfect, suggesting the way in which anxiety inhibits and blurs individuation. There is a sense in which neurosis is a disabled identity. I'm not sure that "hired darkness" works as well, but I assume Larkin means here the classic avoidance by which the neurotic seeks to fend off "non-existent" threats, although ironically the threats in question are in reality all-too-existent, merely within the neurotic's "locked rooms," and not without as he imagines.

The Season

"Autumn Day"

Lord: it is time. The huge summer has gone by.
Now overlap the sundials with your shadows,
and on the meadows let the wind go free.

Command the fruits to swell on tree and vine;
grant them a few more warm transparent days,
urge them on to fulfillment then, and press
the final sweetness into the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house now, will never have one.
Whoever is alone will stay alone,
will sit, read, write long letters through the evening,
and wander on the boulevards, up and down,
restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing.

Rainer Maria Rilke (trans. Stephen Mitchell)

The Hidden God

Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit

If there must be a god in the house, must be,
Saying things in the rooms and on the stair,

Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,
Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghost

Or Aristotle's skeleton. Let him hang out
His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly.

He must be incapable of speaking, closed,
As those are: as light, for all its motion, is;

As color, even the closest to us, is;
As shapes, though they portend us, are.

It is the human that is the alien,
The human that has no cousin in the moon.

It is the human that demands his speech
From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.

If there must be a god in the house, let him be one
That will not hear us when we speak: a coolness,

A vermilioned nothingness, any stick of the mass
Of which we are too distantly a part.

Wallace Stevens

The Beauty of Things

Not mine (alas):

To feel and speak the astonishing beauty of things--earth,
stone and water,
Beast, man and woman, sun, moon and stars--
The blood-shot beauty of human nature, its thoughts,
frenzies and passions,
And unhuman nature its towering reality--
For man's half dream; man, you might say, is nature
dreaming, but rock
And water and sky are constant--to feel
Greatly, and understand greatly, and express greatly, the
natural
Beauty, is the sole business of poetry.
The rest's diversion: those holy or noble sentiments, the
intricate ideas,
The love, lust, longing: reasons, but not the reason.

Robinson Jeffers

Novalis

It's odd that I've never gotten around to sharing some of the real Novalis (1772-1801). Talented aphorists are a rare breed, from the transcendental (Emerson) to the empirical (Samuel Johnson) to the mordant (Oscar Wilde). Novalis's fragmentary style suited his tuberculosis-shortened life. As I was looking over a recently rediscovered volume, I was struck by some of these (all from Novalis: Pollen and Fragments, translated by Arthur Versluis):

"We seek above all the Absolute, and always find only things."

"The insignificant, mundane, raw, loathsome and ill-bred becomes through witticism alone fit for companionship. It is as if these were intended only as jokes: their destined aim is to be a joke."

"Humanity is a humorous role."

"The most ingenious insight is discerning the proper employment of insight."

"Each individual is the midpoint of an emanation-system."

"Where children are, there is a golden age."

"All enchantment is an artistic madness. All passion is an enchantment. An alluring maiden is an actual sorceress, inasmuch as one believes in her."

"A character is a completed, refined Intention."

"Bias and attachmentn are for the imagination what fog, blinding light, and colored spectacles are for the eyes."

"The higher something is, the less it overturns--rather, the more it strengthens and corrects."

"Play is experimenting with chance."

"All that is visible rests upon the invisible--the audible upon the inaudible--the felt upon the unfelt. Perhaps thinking rests upon unthinking."

"Every word is a word of incantation. Whatever spirit is called, such a one appears."

"Paradise is strewn over the earth--and therein become unknown--its scattered lineaments are bound to coalesce--its skeleton is bound to become enfleshed. Regeneration of paradise."

"Completed speculation leads back to nature."

"One could call every illness an illness of the soul."

"Poetry must never be substantive, but rather always only wonderful."

"Earnestness must glimmer cheerfully; jokes must glower soberly."

"Whoever has no sense of religion, must nevertheless have something in its place, which is for him what religion is for another--and therein originates much contention."

Delusion?

Delusion? -- No!

In atmosphere almost too heavenly
Pure for nourishment of earthbound
Bone, or bone-borne flesh, I stood,
At last past sweat and swink, at crag-edge. Felt
My head swell like the sky that knew
No distance, and knew no sensation but blueness.

In that divine osmosis I stood
And felt each discrete and distinct stroke
Of the heart as it downward fled--
Cliff, cleft, gorge, chasm, and, far off,
Ravine cut in the flattening but still high glitter
Of earth. I saw afar the peek-a-boo of some stream's gleam.

Mind plays strange tricks on us.
One moment I felt the momentous, muscular thrust
Skyward of peak, then the thumb-and-forefinger twist
Of range on range. I entered in.
Was part of all. I knew the
Glorious light of inner darkness burn
Like the fundamental discovery.

Yes, stretch forth your arms like wings, and from your high stance,
Hawk-eyed, ride forth upon the emptiness of air, survey
Each regal contortion
And tortuous imagination of rock, wind, water, and know
Your own the power creating all.

Delusion? -- No! For Truth has many moments.

Open your eyes. Who knows? This may be one.

Robert Penn Warren

Lessons in August

School is starting up. I don't know why this poem came to mind:

The Ball Poem

What is the boy now, who has lost his ball,
What, what is he to do? I saw it go
Merrily bouncing, down the street, and then
Merrily over--there it is in the water!
No use to say 'O there are other balls':
An ultimate shaking grief fixes the boy
As he stands rigid, trembling, staring down
All his young days into the harbour where
His ball went. I would not intrude on him,
A dime, another ball, is worthless. Now
He sense first responsibility
In a world of possessions. People will take balls,
Balls will be lost always, little boy,
And no one buys a ball back. Money is external.
He is learning, well behind his desperate eyes,
The epistemology of loss, how to stand up
Knowing what every man must one day know
And most know many days, how to stand up.
And gradually light returns to the street,
A whistle blow, the ball is out of sight,
Soon part of me will explore the deep and dark
Floor of the harbour...I am everywhere,
I suffer and move, my mind and my heart move
With all that move me, under the water
Or whistling, I am not a little boy.

John Berryman

The Cool Web

It occurred to me that this poem's title is a double-entendre in the perpetually hip Internet age, but the meaning works either for words or for websites. I've spent much of my life among words, but I go through stretches in which my faith in them flags and I crave reality (and resent the postmodern notion that there is no reality outside of our words and concepts). Wallace Stevens put it another way in "The Motive for Metaphor."

The Cool Web

Children are dumb to say how hot the day is,
How hot the scent is of the summer rose,
How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky,
How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by.

But we have speech, to chill the angry day,
And speech, to dull the rose's cruel scent.
We spell away the overhanging night,
We spell away the soldiers and the fright.

There's a cool web of language winds us in,
Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:
We grow sea-green at last and coldly die
In brininess and volubility.

But if we let our tongues lose self-possession,
Throwing off language and its watery clasp
Before our death, instead of when death comes,
Facing the wide glare of the children's day,
Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums,
We shall go mad no doubt and die that way.

Robert Graves

The Sunlight on the Garden

The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold,
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.

Our freedom as free lances
Advances towards its end;
The earth compels, upon it
Sonnets and birds descend;
And soon, my friend,
We shall have no time for dances.

The sky was good for flying
Defying the church bells
And every evil iron
Siren and what it tells:
The earth compels,
We are dying, Egypt, dying

And not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too
For sunlight on the garden.

Louis MacNeice

Heavenly Bodies

As I was reflecting on the Earth-sized impact site just found on Jupiter, and the impending solar eclipse, this D. H. Lawrence poem came to mind:

Southern Night

Come up, thou red thing.

Come up, and be called a moon.

The mosquitoes are biting to-night

Like memories.

Memories, northern memories,

Bitter-stinging white world that bore us

Subsiding into this night.

Call it moonrise

This red anathema?

Rise, thou red thing,

Unfold slowly upwards, blood-dark;

Burst the night's membrane of tranquil stars

Finally.

Maculate

The red Macula.