Heraclitus 124: σάρμα εἰκῇ κεχυμένον ὁ κάλλιστος, φησὶν Ἡράκλειτος, [ὁ] κόσμος
Balis’ translation: “The comeliest order on earth is but a heap of random sweepings.” (p.18)
The chapter titles of Frazier’s Cold Mountain strangely emerge from phrases from the text of each chapter. Each title has a resonance that significantly exceeds its original context, the result being that they appear on the surface at least to be but random sweepings little related to their original context. One could have easily picked other phrases from each of the chapters and achieved a similar resonance. Yet the chapter titles begin with “the shadow of a crow” and end with “spirits of crows, dancing” and generally move from mere “shadows” of the earlier chapter to expressions that are truer reflections of the later ones. They are random sweepings that take on a most comely order precisely because they are and are not random, both tied and untied to the text. So much of this book is about how meaning emerges from the apparent randomness of nature, these chapter titles being a case in point. From almost random associations we build patterns and structure until we almost believe this universe makes sense.
(See Post: Charles Frazier's Cold Mouintain and Heraclitus Fragment 124)
the shadow of a crow
He flipped his wrist, and the hat skimmed out the window and caught an updraft and soared. It landed far out across the playground at the edge of the hayfield and rested there black as the shadow of a crow squatted on the ground. (p. 2, a window upon the past)
the ground beneath her hands
The ground beneath her hands was dry and littered with chicken feathers and old chicken shit and the hard dead leaves of the bush. (p. 21, Ada in the boxwood)
the color of despair
You will be living fitfully. Your soul will fade to blue, the color of despair. Your spirit will wane and dwindle away, never to reappear. Your path lies toward the Nightland. (p. 59, Swimmer’s spell “To Destroy Life”)
verbs all of them tiring
To Ada, Ruby’s monologues seemed composed mainly of verbs, all of them tiring. Plow, plant, hoe, cut, can, feed, kill. (p. 80)
like any other thing, a gift
Before the war he had never been much of a one for strife. But once enlisted, fighting had come easy to him. He had decided it was like any other thing, a gift. Like a man who could whittle birds out of wood . . . You had little to do with yourself. (p. 96)
ashes of roses
Ada now remembered she had walked through the house to go upstairs to her room, she had been struck by the figure of a woman’s back in the mirror. She stopped and looked. The dress the figure wore was the color called ashes of roses, and Ada stood, held in place by a sharp stitch of envy for the woman’s dress and the fine shape of her back and her thick dark hair and the sense of assurance she seems to evidence in her very posture. (p. 111, Ada note recognizing her own reflection. The description goes on: . . . . The light of the lamps and the tint of the mirrors had conspired to shift colors, bleaching mauve to rose.)
exile and brute wandering
The night was tom-stridden for hours. They drank through boom and flash, sprawled in the straw, telling tales of exile and brute wandering. (p. 131, sharing sleeping quarters with Odell)
source and root
Ruby’s fanciful heron story of source and root reminded Ada of a story Monroe had told not long before his death. It concerned the manner in which he had wooed her mother . . . . (p. 152)
to live like a gamecock
--To live like a
gamecock, that is my target, he said in wistful voice. (p. 164. Spoken by Veasy to Junior about the pleasures of the roving life.)
in place of the truth
We might never speak again, and I don’t plan to leave that comment in place of the truth. You’re not owning up to it, but you came with expectations and they were not realized. Largely because I behaved contrary to my heart. (p. 208, Ada’s memory of her farewell to Inman going off to war.)
the doing of it
--Do you not get lonesome living here? Inman said. -- Now and again maybe. But there’s plenty of work, and the doing of it keeps me from worrying too much. (p. 221, Inman and the Goat-woman talking)
freewill savages
They lived in a deep cave of the mountain like freewill savages. All they wished to do was hunt and eat and lay up all night drunk, making music. (p. 226, Stobrod talking to Ruby about the cavers)
a satisfied mind
Coarse as the song was, Ada found herself moved by it. More so, she believed than an any opera she had attended from Dock Street to Milan because Stobrod delivered it with such utter faith in its substance, in its ability to lead one toward a better life, one in which a satisfied mind might one day be attainable. (. 266, comment on Stobrod’s playing of Stone Was my Bedstead)
a vow to bear
Inman set the pistol down on his bedding, for he had taken upon himself a vow to bear, never again to shoot one, though he had killed and eaten many in his youth . . . . The decision came as a result of a series of dreams he had over the period of a week in the muddy trenches of Petersburg. In the first of the dreams he had started as a man. He was sick and drank tea from bearberry leaves as a tonic, and gradually he became transformed into a black bear. During the nights the bear visions rode him, Inman roamed the green dream mountains alone and four-legged, avoiding all of his own kind and of other kinds. He rooted in the ground for pale grubs and tore at bee trees for honey and ate huckleberries by the bushful and was happy and strong. In that manner of life, he thought, there might be a lesson in how to wage peace and heal the wounds of war into white scars. In the final dream he was shot by hungers . . . he was strung from a tree by a rope around his neck and skinned, and he watched the process as from above. .. . he awoke that last morning feeling bear was an animal of particular import to him. (p. 278)
naught and grief
--That’uns come to naught and grief, he said to Stobrod. If you was to pitch in we might get somewhere. Stobrod bowed a note or two from Cindy, and then some other notes, seeming at random, unrelated. He went over them and over them, and it began to be clear that they made no sense. But he suddenly gathered them up and worked a variation on them, and then another more
precise, and they unexpectedly fell together in a tune. He found the pattern he was seeking, and he followed the trail of notes where they lead, finding the way of their logic, which was brisk, brittle, effortless as laughing. (p. 289, Pangle and Stobrod play for Teague and his gang.)
black bark in winter
Such was Ada’s hope for her own construction, that someday a tall locust would stand to mark Pangle’s place, and that every year into the next century it would tell in brief a tale like Persephone’s. Black bark in winter, white blossoms in spring. (p. 302, Ada’s has constructed a cross for Pangle’s grave out of the limbs of a locust tree. Ruby had commented before that locust had such will to live that you could split fence posts from the wood of its trunk and they’d sometimes take root in the postholes and grow.)
footsteps in the snow
You could be so lost in bitterness and anger that you could not find your way back. No map nor guidebook for such a journey. One part of Inman knew that. But he knew too that there were footsteps in the snow and that if he awoke one more day he would follow them to wherever they led as long as he could put one foot in front of the other. (p. 315, Inman’s following footsteps in the snow up into the mountains to find Ada.)
the far side of trouble
Inman thought about it, but then he let himself imagine he had at last come out on the far side of trouble and had no wish to revisit it, so he told only how along the way he watched the nights of the moon and counted them out to twenty-eight and then started over . . . . (p. 343, Inman and Ada are talking in bed like Odysseus and Penelope.)
spirits of crows, dancing
When she reached the place, the boy had already gathered up the horses and gone. She went to the men on the ground and looked at them, and she found Inman apart from them. She sat and held him in her lap. He tried to talk, but she hushed him. He drifted in and out and dreamed a bright dream of a home. It had coldwater spring rising out of rock, black dirt fields, old trees. In his dream the year seemed to be happening all at one time, all the seasons blending together. Apple trees hanging heavy with fruit but yet unaccountably blossoming, ice rimming the spring, okra plans blooming yellow and maroon, maple leaves red as October, corn tops tasseling, a stuffed chair pulled up to the glowing parlor hearth, pumpkins shining in the fields, laurels blooming on the hillsides, ditch banks full of orange jewelweed, white blossoms on dogwood, purple on redbud. Everything coming around at once. And there were white oaks, and a great number of crows, or at least the spirits of crows, dancing and singing in the upper limbs. There wassomething he wanted to say.
An observer situated up on the brow of the ridge would have looked down on a still, distant tableau in
the winter woods. A creek, remnants of snow. A wooded glade, secluded from the generality of mankind. A pair of lovers. The man reclined with his head in the woman’s lap. She, looking down into his eyes, smoothing back the hair from his brow. He, reaching an arm awkwardly around to hold her at the soft part of the hip. Both touch each other with great intimacy. A scene of such quiet and peace that the observer on the ridge could avouch to it later in such a way as might lead those of glad temperaments to imagine some conceivable history where long decades of happy union stretched before the two on the ground. (p. 353, Inman is dying in Ada’s arms.)
I am old. I am young.
I am thirteen. I am an ancient child.
A bear walks in winter
Every growl commanding
The moon to rise, the sun
To dim, holds back
The spring, its claws
marking the trees
With fire, a song
More ancient than man.
Kosakov’s Syndrome
“Gross disturbances of the organization of impressions of events and their sequence in time can always be observed in such patients,” he wrote. “In consequence, they lose their integral experience of time and begin to live in a world of isolated impressions.” -- Luria
Footnote
Further, there may be a profound retrograde amnesia in such cases. My colleague Dr. Leon Protass tells me of such a case seen by him recently, in which the patient, a highly intelligent man, was unable for some hours to remember his wife or children, to remember that he had a wife or children. In effect, he lost thirty years of his life—though, fortunately, for only a few hours. Recovery from such attacks is prompt and complete—yet they are, in a sense, the most horrifying of "little strokes" in their power absolutely to annul or obliterate decades of richly lived, richly achieving, richly memoried life. The horror, typically, is only felt by others—the patient, unaware, amnesiac for his amnesia, may continue what he is doing, quite unconcerned, and only discover later that he lost not only a day (as is common with ordinary alcoholic"blackouts"), but half a lifetime, and never knew it. The fact that one can lose the greater part of a lifetime has peculiar, uncanny horror.
There could be only one thing worse—and that would be to lose one's entire lifetime. My friend Dr. Isabelle Rapin, author of Children with Brain Dysfunction: Neurology, Cognition, Language, and Behavior, tells me that very rarely, in consequence of certain brain tumors or degenerative diseases, children may develop a severe Korsakov's syndrome. If this happens, it has been thought, they risk losing their childhood and even their infancy from a retrograde amnesia which may extend back to birth. Such children may not only become as helpless as newborns but may also become deeply "autistic" as they lose and forget all human relationships, even the most elemental—the memory of mother love.
In adulthood, life, higher life, may be brought to a premature end by strokes, senility, brain injuries, etc., but there usually remains the consciousness of life lived, of one's past. This is usually felt as a sort of compensation: "At least I lived fully, tasting life to the full, before I was brain-injured, stricken, etc." This sense of "the life lived before," which may be either a consolation or a torment, is precisely what is taken away in retrograde amnesia. The "final amnesia, the one that can erase a whole life" that Buñuel speaks of may occur, perhaps, in a terminal dementia, but not, in my experience, suddenly, in consequence of a stroke. But there is a different, yet comparable, sort of amnesia, which can occur suddenly—different in that it is not "global" but "modality-specific."
Thus, in one patient under my care, a sudden thrombosis in the posterior circulation of the brain caused the immediate death of the visual parts of the brain. Forthwith this patient became completely blind—but did not know it. He looked blind—but he made no complaints. Questioning and testing showed, beyond doubt, that not only was he centrally or "cortically" blind, but he had lost all visual images and memories, lost them totally—yet had no sense of any loss. Indeed, he had lost the very idea of "seeing"—and was not only unable to describe anything visually, but bewildered when I used words such as "seeing" and "light." He had become, in essence, a nonvisual being. His entire lifetime of seeing, of visuality, had, in effect, been stolen. His whole visual life had, indeed, been erased—and erased permanently in the instant of his stroke. Such a visual amnesia, and (so to speak) blindness to the blindness, amnesia for the amnesia, is in effect a "total" Korsakov's, confined to visuality.
A still more limited, but nonetheless total, amnesia may be displayed with regard to particular forms of perception. Thus, in one patient whose history I have already described ("The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat," London Review of Books, vol. 5, no. 9, May 1983), there was an absolute "prosopagnosia," or agnosia for faces. This patient was not only unable to recognize faces, but unable to imagine or remember any faces—he had indeed lost the very idea of a "face," as my more afflicted patient had lost the very idea of "seeing" or "light." Such syndromes were described by Anton
in the 1890s. But the implication of these syndromes—Korsakov's and Anton's—what they entail and must entail for the "world," the lives, the identities, of affected patients, has been scarcely touched on even to this day.
Heraclitus 124: σάρμα εἰκῇ κεχυμένον ὁ κάλλιστος, φησὶν Ἡράκλειτος, [ὁ] κόσμος
Balis’ translation: “The comeliest order on earth is but a heap of random sweepings.” (p.18)
What is odd about Balis’ translation of the Greek (and of all others I have found) is that there is no evidence for the word ‘but’ in the original Greek. Here is a literal translation in the order of the actual Greek:
Sweepings at random piled up the most beautiful, says Heraclitus, (the) kosmos.
'Kosmos' in Greek has a variety of meanings: order, arrangement, universe. A more graceful rendering of the original Greek:
The most beautiful kosmos, says Heraclitus, is sweepings piled up at random.
By leaving out the ‘but’ a jarringly different meaning emerges. Things swept up at random somehow present an ‘arrangement’ that is most beautiful to behold. Frazier in Cold Mountain does begin with the pejorative meaning that the ‘but’ implies, but ends with something surprisingly more positive and more faithful to the original Greek. Here is Inman’s last vision:
When she reached the place, the boy had already gathered up the horses and gone. She went to the men on the ground and looked at them, and she found Inman apart from them. She sat and held him in her lap. He tried to talk, but she hushed him. He drifted in and out and dreamed a bright dream of a home. It had coldwater spring rising out of rock, black dirt fields, old trees. In his dream the year seemed to be happening all at one time, all the seasons blending together. Apple trees hanging heavy with fruit but yet unaccountably blossoming, ice rimming the spring, okra plans blooming yellow and maroon, maple leaves red as October, corn tops tasseling, a stuffed chair pulled up to the glowing parlor hearth, pumpkins shining in the fields, laurels blooming on the hillsides, ditch banks full of orange jewelweed, white blossoms on dogwood, purple on redbud. Everything coming around at once. And there were white oaks, and a great number of crows, or at least the spirits of crows, dancing and singing in the upper limbs. There was something he wanted to say. (p. 353)
We do not know what Inman wanted to say. We are left with "everything coming around at once' and with "a home", a kosmos, a beautiful arrangement of things all out of order. Disorder order, order disorder. The way things are and are not.
Sometimes a crumb falls
From the tables of joy;
Sometimes a bone
Is flung.
To some people
Love is given,
To others
Only heaven.
Mind is alive
with the same
force that drives
the stars to seek
their own demise
so mind creates
the light that guides
our steps at night
yet yearns
for that very dark
ness that alone endures
and alone
makes all things right.
Burn, burn
with the beauty
of the night.
The patient’s essential being is very relevant in the higher reaches of neurology, and in psychology; for here the patient’s personhood is essentially involved, and the study of disease and of identity cannot be disjoined. Such disorders, and their depiction and study, indeed entail a new discipline, which we may call the ‘neurology of identity’, for it deals with the neural foundations of the self, the age-old problem of mind and brain. It is possible that there must, of necessity, be a gulf, a gulf of category, between the psychical and the physical; but studies and stories pertaining simultaneously and inseparably to both—and it is these which especially fascinate me, and which (on the whole) I present here—may nonetheless serve to bring them nearer, to bring us to the very intersection of mechanism and life, to the relation of physiological processes to biography.
---from Oliver Sack's Introduction to The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat
Mind runs like water
over rock and root
and seeks to fall
to the stars below.
(for James Broughton)
I went out of mind and then came to my senses
By meeting a magpie who mixed up his tenses,
Who muddled distinctions of nouns and of verbs,
And insisted that logic is bad for the birds.
With a poo-wee cluck and a chit, chit-chit;
The grammar and meaning don't matter a bit.
The stars in their courses have no destination;
The train of events will arrive at no station;
The inmost and ultimate Self of us all
Is dancing on nothing and having a ball.
So with a chat for chit and with tat for tit,
This will be that, and that will be It!
now east now west
the road has a mind of its own
and my feet obey
the rest of me stays behind
treelike
above
the sky grows gentle
MY HEART OPENS
the road goes on
as if not knowing
which way is best.
On a walk through the field we come out below the pond
And see a bird floating as if on its own reflection
It is still early though the light seems of an evening
When first I found rest in the quiet of your eyes.
What makes this long sentence so creepy is that by the time we arrive at its end Schmidt has unwittingly revealed himself to be the kind of creepy guy he ostensibly disavows. I have highlighted some of the structural elements.
Schmidt had had several years of psychotherapy and was not without some perspective on himself, and he knew THAT a certain percentage of his reaction to the way these older men coolly inspected their cuticles or pinched at the crease in the trouser of the topmost leg as they sat back on the coccyx joggling the foot of their crossed leg was just his insecurity, THAT he felt somewhat sullied and implicated by the whole enterprise of contemporary marketing and THAT this sometimes MANIFESTED VIA PROJECTION as the feeling that people he was trying to talk as candidly as possible to always believed he was making a sales pitch or trying to manipulate them in some way, as if merely being employed, however ephemerally, in the great grinding US marketing machine HAD SOMEHOW COLORED HIS WHOLE BEING and that something essentially shifty or pleading in his expression now always seemed inherently false or manipulative and turned people off, and not just in his career – which was not his whole existence, unlike so many at Team Δy, or even that terribly important to him; he had a vivid and complex inner life, and introspected a great deal – but in his personal affairs as well, AND THAT somewhere along the line his professional marketing skills HAD METASTASIZED THROUGH HIS WHOLE CHARACTER so that he was now the sort of man who, if he were to screw up his courage and ask a female colleague out for drinks and over drinks open his heart to her and reveal that he respected her enormously, that his feelings for her involved elements of both professional and highly personal regard, and that he spent a great deal more time thinking about her than she probably had any idea he did, and that if there were anything at all he could ever do to make her life happier or easier or more satisfying or fulfilling he hoped she’d just say the word, for that is all she would have to do, say the word or snap her thick fingers or even just look at him in a meaningful way, and he’d be there, instantly and with no reservations at all, he would nevertheless in all probability be viewed as probably just wanting to sleep with her or fondle or harass her, or as having some creepy obsession with her, or as maybe even having a small creepy secretive shrine to her in one corner of the unused second bedroom of his condominium, consisting of personal items fished out of her cubicle’s wastebasket or the occasional dry witty little notes she passed him during especially deadly or absurd Team Δy staff meetings, or that his home Apple PowerBook’s screensaver was an Adobe-brand 1440-dpi blowup of a digital snapshot of the two of them with his arm over her shoulder and just part of the arm and shoulder of another Team Δy Field-worker with his arm over her shoulder from the other side at a Fourth of July picnic that A.C. Romney-Jaswat & Assoc. had thrown for its research subcontractors at Navy Pier two years past, Darlene holding her cup and smiling in such a way as to show almost as much upper gum as teeth, the ale’s cup’s red digitally enhanced to match her lipstick and the small scarlet rainbow she often wore just right of center as a sort of personal signature or statement. (Oblivion, “Mister Squishy,’ 25-26)
The loneliest thought
Is not knowing you are there
and care for me.
It is like rain that falls
but does not reach
the ground.
Yea but for love
you would not be here at all:
I keep you close.
In deepest winter
clouds gather along the ridge.
It is all souls' night.
Those who help not
those in need
who come their way
Are worthless
as those who stay inside
and fear the rain.
It is what is:
No more to ask
No more to give.
Rain cleans all bones the same.
But for night
When eyes are blind
When you and I
Think as one
And touch as though
Were earth and sky
(So turn around
In mind and space
Our sighs in time)
Love would break
Like light the day
Those it would unite.
so close your eyes
and let the dark
ness be thy sight
and If you die
there's none to say
I lied.
I love the initiative of this kid, who is now my age.
http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/12/05/document-the-symbolism-survey/
For Ber
like laughter or
like light to those
who know themselves
to be like trees
that root themselves
in common ground
though mind apart
for he is free
to give himself
so generously
not another word
why even that
why not silence a blank page
cause one is also other
a phantom that can not be driven off
that lurks and lures and loves to be what it is not
the mirror holds no image yet
the other there waiting patient suffering
creates itself even in darkness
for the darkness is
we stride ever through
And if we turn within
"For Christ's sake, not another
How To Be a Poet
by Wendell Berry
(to remind myself)
i
Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill—more of each
than you have—inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.
ii
Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.
iii
Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.
On a bat’s wing I am flying:
Poetry is the art of dying.
There is a girl
so fell and free
she wants for love
like a memory
her hair like night
covers all the ground
and leaves behind
no trace of me.
November 19, 2011
The New York Times
Poet-Bashing Police
By ROBERT HASS
Berkeley, Calif.
LIFE, I found myself thinking as a line of Alameda County deputy sheriffs in Darth Vader riot gear formed a cordon in front of me on a recent night on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, is full of strange contingencies. The deputy sheriffs, all white men, except for one young woman, perhaps Filipino, who was trying to look severe but looked terrified, had black truncheons in their gloved hands that reporters later called batons and that were known, in the movies of my childhood, as billy clubs.
The first contingency that came to mind was the quick spread of the Occupy movement. The idea of occupying public space was so appealing that people in almost every large city in the country had begun to stake them out, including students at Berkeley, who, on that November night, occupied the public space in front of Sproul Hall, a gray granite Beaux-Arts edifice that houses the registrar’s offices and, in the basement, the campus police department.
It is also the place where students almost 50 years ago touched off the Free Speech Movement, which transformed the life of American universities by guaranteeing students freedom of speech and self-governance. The steps are named for Mario Savio, the eloquent graduate student who was the symbolic face of the movement. There is even a Free Speech Movement Cafe on campus where some of Mr. Savio’s words are prominently displayed: “There is a time ... when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part.”
Earlier that day a colleague had written to say that the campus police had moved in to take down the Occupy tents and that students had been “beaten viciously.” I didn’t believe it. In broad daylight? And without provocation? So when we heard that the police had returned, my wife, Brenda Hillman, and I hurried to the campus. I wanted to see what was going to happen and how the police behaved, and how the students behaved. If there was trouble, we wanted to be there to do what we could to protect the students.
Once the cordon formed, the deputy sheriffs pointed their truncheons toward the crowd. It looked like the oldest of military maneuvers, a phalanx out of the Trojan War, but with billy clubs instead of spears. The students were wearing scarves for the first time that year, their cheeks rosy with the first bite of real cold after the long Californian Indian summer. The billy clubs were about the size of a boy’s Little League baseball bat. My wife was speaking to the young deputies about the importance of nonviolence and explaining why they should be at home reading to their children, when one of the deputies reached out, shoved my wife in the chest and knocked her down.
Another of the contingencies that came to my mind was a moment 30 years ago when Ronald Reagan’s administration made it a priority to see to it that people like themselves, the talented, hardworking people who ran the country, got to keep the money they earned. Roosevelt’s New Deal had to be undealt once and for all. A few years earlier, California voters had passed an amendment freezing the property taxes that finance public education and installing a rule that required a two-thirds majority in both houses of the Legislature to raise tax revenues. My father-in-law said to me at the time, “It’s going to take them 50 years to really see the damage they’ve done.” But it took far fewer than 50 years.
My wife bounced nimbly to her feet. I tripped and almost fell over her trying to help her up, and at that moment the deputies in the cordon surged forward and, using their clubs as battering rams, began to hammer at the bodies of the line of students. It was stunning to see. They swung hard into their chests and bellies. Particularly shocking to me — it must be a generational reaction — was that they assaulted both the young men and the young women with the same indiscriminate force. If the students turned away, they pounded their ribs. If they turned further away to escape, they hit them on their spines.
NONE of the police officers invited us to disperse or gave any warning. We couldn’t have dispersed if we’d wanted to because the crowd behind us was pushing forward to see what was going on. The descriptor for what I tried to do is “remonstrate.” I screamed at the deputy who had knocked down my wife, “You just knocked down my wife, for Christ’s sake!” A couple of students had pushed forward in the excitement and the deputies grabbed them, pulled them to the ground and cudgeled them, raising the clubs above their heads and swinging. The line surged. I got whacked hard in the ribs twice and once across the forearm. Some of the deputies used their truncheons as bars and seemed to be trying to use minimum force to get people to move. And then, suddenly, they stopped, on some signal, and reformed their line. Apparently a group of deputies had beaten their way to the Occupy tents and taken them down. They stood, again immobile, clubs held across their chests, eyes carefully meeting no one’s eyes, faces impassive. I imagined that their adrenaline was surging as much as mine.
My ribs didn’t hurt very badly until the next day and then it hurt to laugh, so I skipped the gym for a couple of mornings, and I was a little disappointed that the bruises weren’t slightly more dramatic. It argued either for a kind of restraint or a kind of low cunning in the training of the police. They had hit me hard enough so that I was sore for days, but not hard enough to leave much of a mark. I wasn’t so badly off. One of my colleagues, also a poet, Geoffrey O’Brien, had a broken rib. Another colleague, Celeste Langan, a Wordsworth scholar, got dragged across the grass by her hair when she presented herself for arrest.
I won’t recite the statistics, but the entire university system in California is under great stress and the State Legislature is paralyzed by a minority of legislators whose only idea is that they don’t want to pay one more cent in taxes. Meanwhile, students at Berkeley are graduating with an average indebtedness of something like $16,000. It is no wonder that the real estate industry started inventing loans for people who couldn’t pay them back.
“Whose university?” the students had chanted. Well, it is theirs, and it ought to be everyone else’s in California. It also belongs to the future, and to the dead who paid taxes to build one of the greatest systems of public education in the world.
The next night the students put the tents back up. Students filled the plaza again with a festive atmosphere. And lots of signs. (The one from the English Department contingent read “Beat Poets, not beat poets.”) A week later, at 3:30 a.m., the police officers returned in force, a hundred of them, and told the campers to leave or they would be arrested. All but two moved. The two who stayed were arrested, and the tents were removed. On Thursday afternoon when I returned toward sundown to the steps to see how the students had responded, the air was full of balloons, helium balloons to which tents had been attached, and attached to the tents was kite string. And they hovered over the plaza, large and awkward, almost lyrical, occupying the air.
Robert Hass is a professor of poetry and poetics at the University of California, Berkeley, and former poet laureate of the United States.
Like a woman
who does not know
she is beautiful
turns to a mirror
and looks and looks
but does not find
what is not there
and does not know
the mirror clings
to her form
and ravishes her,
body and soul
so too the sun
burns and brings
all to life,
mere shadows
on the ground.
The free will vs. determinism debate derives its relevance from dualistic thinking, i.e. that our conscious self is not the one driving the boat, as if there were on the one hand a consciousness that is ignorant of the source of its choices and on the other a brain that is purely mechanical and unconsciously drives our decisions. That argument presupposes that consciousness is something other than the natural unfolding of brain function. This notion of unfolding yields an organic and coherent understanding of how we make decisions. Consciousness is a dimension of a dynamic system, one that allows for self-correction and support for an organism’s fundamental integrity. That the dynamic system is deterministic says no more than that the unfolding of the brain is a natural process that realizes itself in awareness. It is one process, not two. How could it be otherwise? To move at last beyond such dualistic thinking allows us further to contemplate ourselves as an unfolding within a universal process -- as a wave that moves always at one with itself and the sea of which it is an expression.
The night leaps up
And paints the sky
Just so a kiss
Draws a lover’s sigh.
You love so much
You long to die
Your eyes are stars
Your soul is fire.
What will you do
What will you do
You have to live
And do and do
O you O you
What will you do
No one comes
To rescue you
So too so too
They'll come for you
They'll talk you up
And do and do
No one knows
No no one knows
Just what it's like
To be like you
O you O you
What will you do
There's no one there
To be there for you.
What is this? An invitation to respond poetically to the question. I want to hear from all of all my former students and others who feel moved to respond.I will collect and publish all the responses I receive. So I dream.
Former students will remember an old bell in my classroom. It was forged in 1878, and has a wonderfully resonant sound. This bell of memory or some bell in your possession may spark a response.
If your first response to the question is baldly scientific, remember that the response is to be poetic, though I can easily imagine an objective statement curling like smoke into something beautiful and mysterious.
What is a poetic response? As one of my 8th grade students put it: something “on the edge of nonsense.” Perhaps like this very invitation.
Deadline for submissions: November 1
Using the search routine on this page, you can find a poetic response of my own. It was written for students from whom I was sadly departing. It is only meant for those who need a little push off the cliff of our everyday sensibility. If you don’t need that push, you may not want to read it just now. In any case, I plan to write another.
Ah, but poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simple emotions (one has emotions early enough)--they are experiences. For the sake of a simple poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighbourhoods, to unexpected encounters and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn't pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else--); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the stars,--and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labour, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very well blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves-only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.
Excerpt from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.
You were always the harlot
Then a mere thought
You patiently taught me
all you are not
Even if it is true that who we think we are is but a narrative the brain constructs, even if consciousness itself is every bit as much a construction as that narrative (as is that very light by which we see itself but neural machination), even if consciousness, I say, is an illusion, it is not nothing. Whatever consciousness is, it possesses quality and all the activity of the brain goes to create and maintain that quality. The quality of consciousness is our reality; it is what makes life worth living or not. You know it well. It is the rhythm of the sea, always at one with itself though wave after wave breaks upon the shore. We are forever returning to that sea
I turn to you to find the light
and like a tree that grasps the earth
these arms embrace the wind
like you my heart
as earth through darkness sweeps
around the sun I turn
and turn to you
and kiss the night.
I know the dying
And the dying
sigh
Like the light these eyes
Like these eyes
the night
So still the rhythm
of a heart
that's torn
Forlorn forgotten
Longed for
adored.
We have two cats, Nikei and Ono. Ono is a clown, and Nikei we call the Furrer because he demands obedience and is a killer. Ono sometimes wears a yamaka just to tease him, kind of like the jester in Lear, and Nikei sometimes wears lipstick, just because he can. No one laughs. When Nikei dies, he will most likely go to hell and run things there. Ono is already an angel here on earth. We love them both.
Of course
he had known her
before. Now
when they met
black on black
he blessed her
and she
she did not blush
to be remembered
in his prayers.
In the evening, all the cats who had participated in the rat-catching had a grand session at the Swordsman's house, and respectfully asked the great Cat to take the seat of honor. They made profound bows before her and said: "We all wish you to divulge your secrets for our benefit." The grand old cat answered: "Teaching is not difficult, listening is not difficult either, but what is truly difficult is to become conscious of what you have in yourself and be able to use it as your own."
From a 17th century master's book on swordplay, The Swordsman and the Cat
Plato inverts the world as we know it. This world is an Erebus, wherein Socrates is a Tiresian character, alone among the souls of the dead possessing that activity of mind that makes us akin to the gods. For Plato, this world is a kind of dream and philosophy a way of waking up to this reality that culminates under Socratic questioning in an “I don’t know” revelation. Such a revelation entails a dying to oneself and to this world and provides an intimation, if not knowledge, of another, truer way of being. Persephone by this Platonic inversion is the queen of our world and requires of us a payment if we are to be released from the cycle of births and deaths that is but a play of shadows from beginning to end. Socrates made that payment; he paid with his life.
The majority of men are subjective towards themselves and objective towards all others, terribly objective sometimes -- but the real task is in fact to be objective towards oneself and subjective towards all others.
Here where every sound
is a lama lama sabachthani
echoing in the brain
Where even silence
is a fairy tale
like that girl
who pulls my beard
and laughs
to make these gray hairs
roll on like waves
Here are the tears
of things that yet
break like thunder
on the shore.
in the wild
there is a strange
silence yet
there is music
Listen
there is wind
tumbling through
trees water
flowing over
rock then rush
of wing you
hear yourself
singing
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 deepening of our sense of self.