An addressable reality

A poem, as a manifestation of language and, thus, essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the — not always greatly hopeful — belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense too are under way: they are making toward something. Toward what? Toward something standing open, occupiable, perhaps toward an addressable Thou, toward an addressable reality.

Paul Celan


Image: North polar region of Jupiter. MSSS/SwRI/JPL-Caltech/NASA

The sea

If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

from ‘At the Fishhouses’ by Elizabeth Bishop

Image: Earth 100 million years from now

'Stay close to the cold stream'

Dawn lights up the room. I close my book and sleep
dreaming of Bell Mountain and full of tenderness 

How do you grow old living with failure and disgrace?
Stay close to the cascading [stream]: cold, shimmering. 

Chant by Wang An-shih translated by David Hinton


Photo by Rob Pedley

Stone

"If you don't believe me," says the stone
"just ask the leaf, it will tell you the same.
Ask a drop of water, it will say what the leaf has said.
And, finally, ask a hair from your own head.
I am bursting with laughter, yes, laughter, vast laughter,
although I don't know how to laugh."

from Conversation with a Stone by Wisława Szymborska

Integrative experience

Carl Jung and many before him would call the integrative experience my soul, but not wanting to claim too much or depend on a word worn smooth with use, I prefer to call it my poem-self. The fusion of my three ordinary states of being heightens each one of them, and produces an excitement frequently so intense that I can’t bear it for too long at a stretch, but must get up and run outside for rests from it, then come back for some more. The poem I write during this experience will contain the experience, the more strongly the better the poem is, and will continue to contain it after the trance has left me. What I create, really, is a new body made of words and the potent arrangement of words, in which my soul as it was at a particular moment will go on existing.

A Defence of Poetry by Les Murray (1998).

In Murray's account, the three states of being are the waking consciousness mind, the occult mind of dreams, and the body.


Image: Wright Brothers' Glider Test, 1902 via NASA

Like rain it sounded

...It loosened acres, lifted seas
The sites of Centres stirred
Then like Elijah rode away
Upon a Wheel of Cloud.

Like rain it sounded till it curved Emily Dickinson

Thanks to DK

Image: NASA/ISS 16

'Carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of science itself'

If the labours of Men of science should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the Poet will sleep then no more than at present; he will be ready to follow the steps of the Man of science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of the science itself. The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the Poet’s art as any upon which it can be employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us, and the relations under which they are contemplated by the followers of these respective sciences shall be manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings. If the time should ever come when what is now called science, thus familiarized to men, shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the Poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the Being thus produced, as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man.

Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1800), quoted in Pandaemonium by Humphrey Jennings

Image: blueprint for the Analytical Engine (1838)

Inner ear

...Lemur and tree-shrew linger in the spine
becoming steps; a track worn in the grass; 

a moment’s pause
before the rain moves in.

from The Inner Ear by John Burnside

Image by author

'We dream, and wake, and have a body'

All other mental faculties — imagination, conscience, intuition, the unconscious mind — are theoretical and inferred, and may be differently divided up in different cultures, but all can agree that we dream, and wake, and have a body.

Defence of Poetry by Les Murray (1998)

Image: Mike Salway via APOD

Gratitude

What I described in Another Life — about being on the hill and feeling the sort of dissolution that happened — is a frequent experience in a younger writer. I felt this sweetness of melancholy, of a sense of mortality, or rather of immortality, a sense of gratitude both for what you feel is a gift and for the beauty of the earth, the beauty of life around us. When that’s forceful in a young writer, it can make you cry. It’s just clear tears; it’s not grimacing or being contorted, it’s just a flow that happens. The body feels it is melting into what it has seen...Ultimately, it’s what Yeats says: “Such a sweetness flows into the breast that we laugh at everything and everything we look upon is blessed.” That’s always there. It’s a benediction, a transference. It’s gratitude...

Derek Walcott, Paris Review 1985

Photograph by author of shed on a much-loved orchard/allotment

Beyond a beach of shapes

     ...And past the poppies bluish neutral distance
     Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach
     Of shapes and shingle.
     Here is unfenced existence:
     Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.

from Here by Philip Larkin

Image from thecoastalpath.net

The man pulling radishes

     The man pulling radishes
Pointed my way
     With a radish.  

Can you imagine the situation? the narrator of the poem is hiking along a road. He stops to ask for directions. And the fellow working in the field waves his radish — it’s a daikon, one of those long skinny Japanese radishes — and says, “Oh, it’s about four miles down the road on the left”…  

One of the pleasures of this poem [by Kobayashi Issa] is that it is written from the point of view of the traveler. And it is in the past tense. So...we are in the mind of the traveler after he has received directions from the farmer. One imagines a slight smile on his face as he records to himself his own observation of the farmer’s small, revelatory gesture. It is the smile the poem gives us. And, as readers, we are in a position to notice that the traveler is doing what travelers do, noticing and telling afterwards. It is famously, one of the reasons for travel: to be given the fresh pair of eyes that an uprooting from our normal routine gives us. That is, the traveler in the poem is behaving exactly like a traveler in the same way that the farmer is behaving exactly like a farmer. Everyone, the poem observes, is subsumed to his element, and metaphorical contexts of this observation are rootedness and uprootedness and also the seeking out of direction 

on teaching poetry Robert Hass

"Humour and wonder can be a double act"

Man’s a phenomenon, one knows not what,
And wonderful beyond all wondrous measure. 

[Byron's] knowingly unknowing way of seeing things is not really—or not only—felt as a predicament, but also as an energising pleasure, something akin to Camus’s sense of the absurd in The Myth of Sisyphus, born of the confrontation between a human need to understand things and the recalcitrance of the world to human understanding. ‘Living’, Camus notes, ‘is keeping the absurd alive.’ Indeed, the absurd is a commitment to a certain style of life; ‘one does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness.’ Should the manual ever be written, what its author might be tempted to say is that wonder, like its close relation the absurd, acknowledges the maze inside amazement, but without implying that a removal from the maze would always be desirable. Part of what feels funny (sometimes darkly, sometimes lightly funny) about wonder is the feeling that puzzlement may sponsor plenitude.

—  from The Funny Thing About Trees by Matthew Bevis


Image: Apollo and Daphne by Antonio del Pollaiolo, circa 1470 (Wikipedia). Bevis quotes Tom Lubbock: ‘the picture gives no impression of gradual, graceful, organic transformation. The fleeing nymph raises her arms in alarm and appeal, and they just go whom! ...tree! —  with a flourish like a conjurer's bouquet.’

The landscape-color of heart-mind

To feel [in classical Chinese] is constructed of the character for “heart-mind” and the one for “the blue-green color of landscape”, a remarkable concept of color that includes both the green of plants and trees and nearby mountains, and the blue of distant mountains and sky. Hence, the “heart-mind in the presence of landscape-color” or “the landscape-color of heart-mind.”

from Hunger Mountain by David Hinton

Image: Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains Wikimedia

Our body is a cup, floating on the ocean

          The mind is an ocean... and so many worlds

          are rolling there, mysterious, dimly seen!

          And our bodies? Our body is a cup, floating

          on the ocean; soon it will fill, and sink...

          Not even one bubble will show where it went down.

          The spirit is so near that you can't see it!

          But reach for it... don't be a jar

          Full of water, whose rim is always dry.

          Don't be the rider who gallops all night

          And never sees the horse that is beneath him.

           —  The jar with a dry rim by Rumi, translated by Robert Bly

or, as Brian Koberlein puts it:

We borrow our existence from the cosmos. We flow on until, like spirals of water, we fade back into the calm.

Image: Two Years At Sea

A Speck upon a Ball

I saw no Way — The Heavens were stitched —
I felt the Columns close —
The Earth reversed her Hemispheres —
I touched the Universe — 

And back it slid — and I alone
A Speck upon a Ball —
Went out upon Circumference —
Beyond the Dip of Bell

Emily Dickinson, c. 1862

Image: NASA

The dimension of the present moment

Apparently, the present moment — our sense of "now" — lasts about three seconds. [1]  It is part of an illusion created by the brain and sits in a hierarchy of processes between the functional moment, which is the brain's response time to stimuli (typically in thousandths of a second [2]) and a sense of mental presence, which operates over a timespan of about thirty seconds and gives us a sense of continuity. [3]

In a collection of essays published in 1990, Mirsolav Holub noted that the dimension of the present moment, at about three seconds, is roughly the same amount of time as it takes to speak a line of poetry. And language, of course, plays an important role in our ability to place ourselves in much longer stretches of time. [4]


Notes:

[1] see Laura Spinney The time illusion: how your brain creates now, drawing on Moments in Time by Marc Wittman.

[2] The auditory system can distinguish sounds that are two milliseconds apart. The visual system requires tens of milliseconds. Two events must be at least 50 milliseconds apart before you can tell which came first. But the computation in the brain involved in understanding sounds is much slower (see this). 

[3] Thirty seconds being the amount of time that experienced moments are held together in short-term, or working memory.

[4] Brief overviews of the science of time: this by Sean Carroll and this by Jim Holt.


Image:  Étienne-Jules Marey

"I recall only wonder"

     Pure Beauty, benediction: you are all I gathered
     From a life that was bitter and confused,
     In which I learned about evil, my own and not my own.
     Wonder kept seizing me, and I recall only wonder,
     Risings of the sun over endless green, a universe
     Of grasses, and flowers opening to the first light,
     Blue outlines of the mountains and a hosanna shout.
     I asked, how many times, is this the truth of the earth?
     How can laments and curses be turned into hymns?
     What makes you need to pretend, when you know better?
     But the lips praised on their own, on their own the feet ran;
     The heart beat strongly; and the tongue proclaimed its adoration.

     — Czesław Miłosz

Image: Oak tree in winter by Henry Fox Talbot (1842/3)

Winter warbler

Winter warbler
Long ago in Wang Wei's
hedge also

On his deathbed Yosa Buson, version by Robert Haas


Image of Japanese Bush Warbler by Robin Newlin

The echo of strange noises

The past has flown away,
the coming month and year do not exist;
Ours only is the present’s tiny point. 

Time is but a fancied dot ever moving on
which you have called a flowing river stream.  

I am alone in a wide desert,
listening to the echo of strange noises. 

– Mahmud Shabistari (1317)

Image: Abandoned Mining Town, Namibia by Marsel van Oosten