Music at the Speed of Love
If Emily Dickinson had a son, or adopted one, and the son chose to carry on the family (pre)occupation (with) of poetry, the name on the birth certificate or documents would be: Robert Creeley. Here's the title poem from his last book, "On Earth," in which son rhymes as well as mom. Note the extraordinary calm and clarity of this poem. In his later years, all was usually well for Creeley, even along the road to hell--"or heaven / even." That sameness, that oneness, is what my wife once called "the soul's stubborn economy." There is such sweetly soulful economy and equanimity here.
The line about hell reminds me of Jack Spicer's aphorism: "Hell is a place where we go to look up."
In any case, these are words of an American watchfulness that I first saw practised in the poetry of Charles Olson and Robert Creeley. Something in me knew then that poetry was a form of yoga. By teaching me to see, they ultimately taught me to be. God bless them. It is all here--right under our eyes, as if our eyes were eaves of a house.
When my teacher told me recently to refuse the temptation of an 'outside,' and thus put us all together in the enclosure of love, I saw that Creeley came to this realization another way: expressing it as compassion for an elsewhere, an other than here, which is always a road to hell, except for those on it who will come to know, via God's Rahmat, that all is well. Bawa and Creeley taught me these last few bobbing days that being, our human being, is well-being. "Make the hunger of others your own," Bawa enjoined ten thousand times in my presence. "And don't forget," his student Jonathan Granoff recently added, "to make the happiness of others your own, too. Once you live in compassion, they all come with the package." On days like this, growing old is, indeed, a mercy.
For the last five years of his life, Maurice Ravel couldn't write a note of music--the result of a catastrophic brain injury suffered in a taxi accident. Friends would see him sitting on the balcony, looking out at the city, and ask, "What are you doing?" Ravel would answer, "Waiting." I think Creeley knew a life of such watch-full-ness and waiting, but he was blessed with the ability to continue composing music. Here's some of it:
ON EARTH
One's here
and there is still elsewhere
along some road to hell
where all is well--
or heaven
even
where all saints still wait
and guard the golden gate.
--Robert Creeley, "On Earth," University of California Press, 2006, page 41
The line about hell reminds me of Jack Spicer's aphorism: "Hell is a place where we go to look up."
In any case, these are words of an American watchfulness that I first saw practised in the poetry of Charles Olson and Robert Creeley. Something in me knew then that poetry was a form of yoga. By teaching me to see, they ultimately taught me to be. God bless them. It is all here--right under our eyes, as if our eyes were eaves of a house.
When my teacher told me recently to refuse the temptation of an 'outside,' and thus put us all together in the enclosure of love, I saw that Creeley came to this realization another way: expressing it as compassion for an elsewhere, an other than here, which is always a road to hell, except for those on it who will come to know, via God's Rahmat, that all is well. Bawa and Creeley taught me these last few bobbing days that being, our human being, is well-being. "Make the hunger of others your own," Bawa enjoined ten thousand times in my presence. "And don't forget," his student Jonathan Granoff recently added, "to make the happiness of others your own, too. Once you live in compassion, they all come with the package." On days like this, growing old is, indeed, a mercy.
For the last five years of his life, Maurice Ravel couldn't write a note of music--the result of a catastrophic brain injury suffered in a taxi accident. Friends would see him sitting on the balcony, looking out at the city, and ask, "What are you doing?" Ravel would answer, "Waiting." I think Creeley knew a life of such watch-full-ness and waiting, but he was blessed with the ability to continue composing music. Here's some of it:
ON EARTH
One's here
and there is still elsewhere
along some road to hell
where all is well--
or heaven
even
where all saints still wait
and guard the golden gate.
--Robert Creeley, "On Earth," University of California Press, 2006, page 41
posted by David Federman @ 1:33 PM
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