The Guilty Pleasure of Salvation
I should be working, my wife says quoting the Beatles, like a dog, dollars per hour work that keeps us alive from pay check to pay check. I should be working, then treat myself to post-midnight labor-of-love work when I would otherwise be sleeping like a log.
Instead, poetry--whether read or composed--becomes guilty pleasure, lacking full substantiation and final satisfaction of hourly work for which I am paid. I should be working. And I'm not. Or, rebelliously, I am. So with addict's logic I explain to myself and you that your lives will be so much better if this poem that begins Robert Creeley's last book, "On Earth," comes express email at this urgent moment rather than at postponed later hour when, yes, its wisdom will be no less dimmed or dramatic. The trouble is, later I might lack the burning need I have to share it now.
So let me make this fix quick. I turn 65 next Saturday and this poem is my birthday card to myself, a poem about what it's like to stare out the window at the unerased tabula rasa of morning, when so much more of living--as flesh, that is--is memory rather than life or worlds to come. Perception itself is sometimes credo. Birds on a wire. The outline of hills. The slant of snow flakes. Men have left home to find true home because of poems like Basho's below.
BASHO'S DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL
Basho knew best about the permanent salvation of true perception. Few poems I have ever read manage the reckoning and transcendence of accumulated time and habit as well as his so-called haikus. I say 'so-called' because the word haiku has become an empty cicada shell, a corn husk. The following is more Logos than haiku:
Clouds come from time to time
and bring to men a chance
to rest from looking at the moon.
That poem is both record and re-enactment of release from bondage. And it even brings a taste (foretaste?) of liberation to those who read it. So maybe satori-poem would be a better label.
THE SWEET MEMORY OF LETTING GO
I have carried that Basho poem with me since college as a kind of 23rd Psalm. Other poems have joined it in the rugsack of memory. But to me it is the core poem for my life as a human being and writer. It is the Sermon on the Mount in shorthand because all that Jesus said about God and Man and Love in that discourse is native, both as sentiment and sediment, to the state of mind this poem describes. The world as Jesus knew and served it comes next after such final resting from looking so long and hard at the moon. Here's another Basho-like poem about release, this one by Paul Reps:
Drinking this bowl of green tea
I stopped
the war.
Ever since I found these poems, Poetry has been a ground of being, much the way those running horse paintings in the Alps caves articulate perception as a ground of being. Funny how those famous 19th century multiple-exposure horse-running photographs depict exactly the same resonant wonder.
FROM BASHO TO BECKETT TO CREELEY--IT'S ALL ABOUT WATCHING
Creeley came to me after Samuel Beckett and then taught me to read Becket--not as an agony but as a joy.
In "To Think," Creeley provides gloss to Basho's text on release from long night and life of moon-gazing:
World's mind is after all
an afterthought
of what was there before
and is there still.
It took years to see this release as peace, not plunge back into darkness. Mystics call it the "Unmanifest" and many describe membership in it. In any case, salvation is more than salvage. It is coming to rest, it is becoming too big and too small to be a 'me' without a 'you,' or an 'us' that isn't God. Aristotle (I think it was Aristotle) was right: essence precedes existence, and to be reborn, or born again, is to reclaim (and be reclaimed by) that essence. My teacher Bawa Muhaiyaddeen said that all his students were born of his union with God, and so we had to be the maker's measure of Himself as Creation, find and share its silver lining of love, mercy, compassion and, my new favorite among God's attributes, justice.
Few poems I have read see the here and now as a resting place where, by dint and wash of full being, we will make good our escape (transcendence). Throughout his later poetry, Creeley seems to say that heaven is content-ment, and, as such, found and dwelled in wherever contentment is experienced.
The way from here is there
And back again, from birth to death,
From egg to echo, flesh to eyeless skull.
One only sleeps to breathe.
The hook, the heart, the body
Deep within its dress, the folds of feelings,
Face to face to face, na bandaged simple place,
No wonder more than this, none less.
--Robert Creeley, from "The Red Flower," On Earth, p. 44
Death, Creeley says, is the only way to let the imagining of complete stillness be more than afterthought of what we once knew. That's why my teacher talked incessantly about dying before death. It was to dscover the first circumstance (code word: God) during our time as flesh and blood: to be the ultimate echo. Heavenly sentience.
"When Christ walked on water and invited Peter to do the same," a college friend who was a devotee of Meister Ekchart told me, "that's when he resurrected far more usefully than he did in the cave." I know now that Christ was showing Peter how and what it's like "to die before dying." Trust, gratitude and praise, as my teacher often said.
"The crucifixion," the same friend told me, "was just Christ's way of sying, 'You can't kill the truth.'" I remember feeling I had no inkling of what he meant, and looking at him with embarrassed incomprehension. My friend laughed. "Put it this way, Dave," he continued, "Which way would you rather take to the truth. To join your teacher on a cross or join him in the swimming pool?" I laughed, but until today, the laugh was one me. Now I think we need to learn to walk in this world with the same light tread Christ walked on water. Somewhere along the way, my teacher, Bawa, got out of the boat and walked with Christ on the ocean water. And now he beckons to his pupils (as in students, as in eyes).
THOSE BLESSED DAYS THE GREAT WHEEL SUFFERS A FLAT TIRE
There are stories about the last hours of my two fathers--Bawa and Eugene Dwayne Federman--that are strikingly similar and consoling. These stories speak well for a lovely knowledge that breaks loose, and free, at the end. Days before he died, Bawa opened his room to all and said it was never again to be shut to anyone. Then he drifted in and out of consciousness, once awakening when I was there and asking either, "Am I in heaven?" or "Am I still here?" With blessed similarity, my biological father asked when the paramedics were trying to revive him, "Am I still here?" and successfully fought off any further attempt to keep him prisoner in this untenable here-and-now. I often thank God for that final union of my two fathers and pray for reunion with them through equal readiness to die. (But, to be honest, I shiver as I write this.)
As I have told you repeatedly, I am an existential Sufi. So a willing paradise to find would be the one I was born to inherit: a world where it is worth it to have been born just to be here, and be enough, unflinchingly, comfortingly. "It is all one day," Tennessee Williams says. I am cheered by his discovery. But it must become my own. For Creeley, it was, and is, enough to stand by words, our own life lived as well as it can be, and in that quality of dignified self-maintenance. In the beginning was the word, the Logos. That same word is our final word, as if our our first hour is our last, because it is all one day, one time. Eternity closes in on the hour. "Rosebud" is Aramaic for "Ready."
I can't tell you how grateful to God I am that Robert Creely has been a sacred adjunct of my life for 45 years. May this poem show you why.
WHEN I THINK
When I think of where I've come from
or even try to measure as any kind of
distance those places, all the various
people, and all the ways in which I re-
member them, so that even the skin I
touched or was myself fact of, inside,
could see through like a hole in the wall
or listen to, it must have been, to what
was going on there, even if I was still
too dumb to know anything--When I think
of the miles and miles of roads, of meals,
of telephone wires even, or even of water
poured out in endless streams down streaks
of black sky or the dirt roads washed clean,
or myriad, salty tears and suddenly it's spring
again, or it was--Even when I think again of
all those I treated so poorly, names, places,
their waiting uselessly for me in the rain and
I never came, was never really there at all,
was moving so confusedly, so fast, so driven
like a car along some empty highway passing,
passing other cars--When I try to think of
things, of what's happened, of what a life is
and was, my life, when I wonder what it meant,
the sad days passing, the continuing, echoing deaths,
all the painful, belligerant news, and the dog still
waiting to be fed, the closeness of you sleeping, voices,
presences, of children, of our own growing children,
the shining, bright sun, the smell of the air just now,
each physical moment, passing, passing, it's what
it always is or ever was, just then, just there.
--Reobert Creeley, "On Earth," University of Califorrnia Press, 2006, page 4
Instead, poetry--whether read or composed--becomes guilty pleasure, lacking full substantiation and final satisfaction of hourly work for which I am paid. I should be working. And I'm not. Or, rebelliously, I am. So with addict's logic I explain to myself and you that your lives will be so much better if this poem that begins Robert Creeley's last book, "On Earth," comes express email at this urgent moment rather than at postponed later hour when, yes, its wisdom will be no less dimmed or dramatic. The trouble is, later I might lack the burning need I have to share it now.
So let me make this fix quick. I turn 65 next Saturday and this poem is my birthday card to myself, a poem about what it's like to stare out the window at the unerased tabula rasa of morning, when so much more of living--as flesh, that is--is memory rather than life or worlds to come. Perception itself is sometimes credo. Birds on a wire. The outline of hills. The slant of snow flakes. Men have left home to find true home because of poems like Basho's below.
BASHO'S DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL
Basho knew best about the permanent salvation of true perception. Few poems I have ever read manage the reckoning and transcendence of accumulated time and habit as well as his so-called haikus. I say 'so-called' because the word haiku has become an empty cicada shell, a corn husk. The following is more Logos than haiku:
Clouds come from time to time
and bring to men a chance
to rest from looking at the moon.
That poem is both record and re-enactment of release from bondage. And it even brings a taste (foretaste?) of liberation to those who read it. So maybe satori-poem would be a better label.
THE SWEET MEMORY OF LETTING GO
I have carried that Basho poem with me since college as a kind of 23rd Psalm. Other poems have joined it in the rugsack of memory. But to me it is the core poem for my life as a human being and writer. It is the Sermon on the Mount in shorthand because all that Jesus said about God and Man and Love in that discourse is native, both as sentiment and sediment, to the state of mind this poem describes. The world as Jesus knew and served it comes next after such final resting from looking so long and hard at the moon. Here's another Basho-like poem about release, this one by Paul Reps:
Drinking this bowl of green tea
I stopped
the war.
Ever since I found these poems, Poetry has been a ground of being, much the way those running horse paintings in the Alps caves articulate perception as a ground of being. Funny how those famous 19th century multiple-exposure horse-running photographs depict exactly the same resonant wonder.
FROM BASHO TO BECKETT TO CREELEY--IT'S ALL ABOUT WATCHING
Creeley came to me after Samuel Beckett and then taught me to read Becket--not as an agony but as a joy.
In "To Think," Creeley provides gloss to Basho's text on release from long night and life of moon-gazing:
World's mind is after all
an afterthought
of what was there before
and is there still.
It took years to see this release as peace, not plunge back into darkness. Mystics call it the "Unmanifest" and many describe membership in it. In any case, salvation is more than salvage. It is coming to rest, it is becoming too big and too small to be a 'me' without a 'you,' or an 'us' that isn't God. Aristotle (I think it was Aristotle) was right: essence precedes existence, and to be reborn, or born again, is to reclaim (and be reclaimed by) that essence. My teacher Bawa Muhaiyaddeen said that all his students were born of his union with God, and so we had to be the maker's measure of Himself as Creation, find and share its silver lining of love, mercy, compassion and, my new favorite among God's attributes, justice.
Few poems I have read see the here and now as a resting place where, by dint and wash of full being, we will make good our escape (transcendence). Throughout his later poetry, Creeley seems to say that heaven is content-ment, and, as such, found and dwelled in wherever contentment is experienced.
The way from here is there
And back again, from birth to death,
From egg to echo, flesh to eyeless skull.
One only sleeps to breathe.
The hook, the heart, the body
Deep within its dress, the folds of feelings,
Face to face to face, na bandaged simple place,
No wonder more than this, none less.
--Robert Creeley, from "The Red Flower," On Earth, p. 44
Death, Creeley says, is the only way to let the imagining of complete stillness be more than afterthought of what we once knew. That's why my teacher talked incessantly about dying before death. It was to dscover the first circumstance (code word: God) during our time as flesh and blood: to be the ultimate echo. Heavenly sentience.
"When Christ walked on water and invited Peter to do the same," a college friend who was a devotee of Meister Ekchart told me, "that's when he resurrected far more usefully than he did in the cave." I know now that Christ was showing Peter how and what it's like "to die before dying." Trust, gratitude and praise, as my teacher often said.
"The crucifixion," the same friend told me, "was just Christ's way of sying, 'You can't kill the truth.'" I remember feeling I had no inkling of what he meant, and looking at him with embarrassed incomprehension. My friend laughed. "Put it this way, Dave," he continued, "Which way would you rather take to the truth. To join your teacher on a cross or join him in the swimming pool?" I laughed, but until today, the laugh was one me. Now I think we need to learn to walk in this world with the same light tread Christ walked on water. Somewhere along the way, my teacher, Bawa, got out of the boat and walked with Christ on the ocean water. And now he beckons to his pupils (as in students, as in eyes).
THOSE BLESSED DAYS THE GREAT WHEEL SUFFERS A FLAT TIRE
There are stories about the last hours of my two fathers--Bawa and Eugene Dwayne Federman--that are strikingly similar and consoling. These stories speak well for a lovely knowledge that breaks loose, and free, at the end. Days before he died, Bawa opened his room to all and said it was never again to be shut to anyone. Then he drifted in and out of consciousness, once awakening when I was there and asking either, "Am I in heaven?" or "Am I still here?" With blessed similarity, my biological father asked when the paramedics were trying to revive him, "Am I still here?" and successfully fought off any further attempt to keep him prisoner in this untenable here-and-now. I often thank God for that final union of my two fathers and pray for reunion with them through equal readiness to die. (But, to be honest, I shiver as I write this.)
As I have told you repeatedly, I am an existential Sufi. So a willing paradise to find would be the one I was born to inherit: a world where it is worth it to have been born just to be here, and be enough, unflinchingly, comfortingly. "It is all one day," Tennessee Williams says. I am cheered by his discovery. But it must become my own. For Creeley, it was, and is, enough to stand by words, our own life lived as well as it can be, and in that quality of dignified self-maintenance. In the beginning was the word, the Logos. That same word is our final word, as if our our first hour is our last, because it is all one day, one time. Eternity closes in on the hour. "Rosebud" is Aramaic for "Ready."
I can't tell you how grateful to God I am that Robert Creely has been a sacred adjunct of my life for 45 years. May this poem show you why.
WHEN I THINK
When I think of where I've come from
or even try to measure as any kind of
distance those places, all the various
people, and all the ways in which I re-
member them, so that even the skin I
touched or was myself fact of, inside,
could see through like a hole in the wall
or listen to, it must have been, to what
was going on there, even if I was still
too dumb to know anything--When I think
of the miles and miles of roads, of meals,
of telephone wires even, or even of water
poured out in endless streams down streaks
of black sky or the dirt roads washed clean,
or myriad, salty tears and suddenly it's spring
again, or it was--Even when I think again of
all those I treated so poorly, names, places,
their waiting uselessly for me in the rain and
I never came, was never really there at all,
was moving so confusedly, so fast, so driven
like a car along some empty highway passing,
passing other cars--When I try to think of
things, of what's happened, of what a life is
and was, my life, when I wonder what it meant,
the sad days passing, the continuing, echoing deaths,
all the painful, belligerant news, and the dog still
waiting to be fed, the closeness of you sleeping, voices,
presences, of children, of our own growing children,
the shining, bright sun, the smell of the air just now,
each physical moment, passing, passing, it's what
it always is or ever was, just then, just there.
--Reobert Creeley, "On Earth," University of Califorrnia Press, 2006, page 4
posted by David Federman @ 9:27 AM
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