O my brave brown companions, when your souls Flock silently away, and the eyeless dead Shame the wild beast of battle on the ridge, Death will stand grieving in that field of war Since your unvanquished hardihood is spent. And through some mooned Valhalla there will pass Battalions and battalions, scarred from hell; The unreturning army that was youth; The legions who have suffered and are dust.
Sun floods the room at six Two steps to the balcony to watch Tai chi social media bagpipe cigar Distant gaze usual metaphysical confusion
Boardwalk stroll for latte and scone Superhearty good mornings from fellow oldies Translation: GRATEFUL LIKE HELL I'M HERE Here meaning the world rather than
Whatever's behind the metaphysical curtain Latte machine broken so cafe person Climbs almost to the top of it while cafe people On the ground make inadequate latte after latte
All apologize I'm fine take your time Boardwalk stroll back to the balcony More greetings from gratefuls And now: Grateful metaphysical breakfast
The day here begins in the eighteenth century: No trains, planes, or automobiles. Birdsong, rather. A farmer's market lays out tables down the street. A choir in the Catholic church rehearses.
At eight the trains arrive from Harper's Ferry. The industrial revolution is underway. Handmowers, mailboxes, dishwashers, bicycles. The buzz also of dogwalkers talking among themselves.
Cars are the following era, and planes from Reagan, But cars are few, and planes keep their distance. There's still not quite the din of the twentieth century. Still a village quiet. Quieter still
Is the twenty-first. The dogwalkers walk heads down At their cell phones. Electric cars are silent. Evenings of course are timeless - black skies, stars - Except for the strange passage of satellites.
As once the winged energy of delight carried you over childhood’s dark abysses, now beyond your own life build the great arch of unimagined bridges.
Wonders happen if we can succeed in passing through the harshest danger; but only in a bright and purely granted achievement can we realize the wonder.
To work with Things in the indescribable relationship is not too hard for us; the pattern grows more intricate and subtle, and being swept along is not enough.
Take your practiced powers and stretch them out until they span the chasm between two contradictions…For the god wants to know himself in you.
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This is by way of a pep talk, mes petites, having to do with nothing less than the imperative to forge a creative, meaningful life. When you were a child (see Intimations of Immortality) the sheer visceral energy of being young, that heedless life force, “carried you over” the darkness and peril of being. But that was kidstuff, and it only pertained to you, and it didn’t mean much beyond simple inarticulate strength and delight in earthly existence. Now it’s time to transcend the unproblematic egotism of youth and offer something to the world, and that will mean struggling with complex, problematic forces to perceive and build so-far “unimagined” connections.
To infuse the world with wonder, to reveal its hidden beauty, means overcoming the dark abyss that lies under all that we do. That abyss (‘Winding across wide water, without sound. / The day is like wide water, without sound‘) is not merely our own awaiting mortality, but also the soundless nothing the world is without our articulate speech, without our artistic/architectural hand upon the land. So this is the pep talk: You can do it. You can shape and fill the earth with meaning, articulate sound, human beauty. Your soul offers you, grants you, the capacity for this earth-brightening achievement; you must not be afraid to accept what it wants to grant.
For after all, it’s “not too hard” for you to work with the seemingly unbridgeable complications of the world, to take its welter of Things and bring them together in clarifying, enabling ways:
I loved you, so I drew these tides of Men into my hands And wrote my will across the Sky and stars
Indeed, you cannot shirk this imperative, much as you would like to be “swept along” in the abyss. You must be adequate to the challenge of the world.
Use your powers, stretch them out, flex your creative muscles! Stand boldly above the abyss and bring the seemingly irreconcilable complications of a world of turmoil into alignment, so that where there was once nothing there is now something — something upon which your fellow human beings can locate and know ourselves and the world. For the god / Wants to know himself in you. Only through our interiority can the earth arise and know itself. Only our human powers of perception and feeling can intuit and express both the contradictions of existence and their overcoming.
When she walks her paths, piles of feathers mark battlefields.
Here are two feathers (mourning dove?) she picked up and brought inside yesterday.
A local poet, who lives next to an old forest slated for development, writes about her owls.
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The owl came because he wants this scrap of woodland, wants the beeches and their hollow hearts, their cavities. He came because so long ago the farmer left his fields alone to grow their latent crop of trees that no one came to cut. The owl wants this wooded hilltop, its ancient oaks that stand among heaped quartz the farmer or his father or his father’s father cleared. The owl wants the hilltop’s crown of hollies, wants the deep-shade roost they’ve made; he wants this open branch that ends a wing-wide tunnel through the hollies’ shelter, wants this place to watch, to rest and cast his pellets, wadded clumps of fur and bone the rain dissolves to show he wanted squirrels, and voles, and frogs, and once a huge black beetle. If you knew a wood would call an owl back, if you knew the owl’s calls would fill the winter wood until another owl answered, wouldn’t you want to leave the land alone to grow its woodland, wouldn’t you want to grant the owls what they wanted?
Everyone struggles. The only real thing to be said about that is: compassion.
Why did David and Eve Kosofsky’s older sister abandon the family? UD puzzles over this one routinely, but especially at holiday gatherings. David had his theories; Eve wrote about it. The elder Kosofskys made various efforts at contact but were always rebuffed. Now that all those she abandoned are dead, it’s a different sort of story, sealed in permanence, but still a mystery. The best UD can do after all these years and all this thought is: See #1. Compassion dictates that you stop thinking about the cruelty of it and think rather of the fragility that would need to run that far away to achieve (what she seems to have achieved) a reasonably successful life.
Shortly after finishing “Pragmatism and Romanticism,” I was diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer. Some months after I learned the bad news, I was sitting around having coffee with my elder son and a visiting cousin. My cousin (who is a Baptist minister) asked me whether I had found my thoughts turning toward religious topics, and I said no. “Well, what about philosophy?” my son asked. “No,” I replied, neither the philosophy I had written nor that which I had read seemed to have any particular bearing on my situation. I had no quarrel with Epicurus’s argument that it is irrational to fear death, nor with Heidegger’s suggestion that ontotheology originates in an attempt to evade our mortality. But neither ataraxia (freedom from disturbance) nor Sein zum Tode (being toward death) seemed in point.
“Hasn’t anything you’ve read been of any use?” my son persisted. “Yes,” I found myself blurting out, “poetry.” “Which poems?” he asked. I quoted two old chestnuts that I had recently dredged up from memory and been oddly cheered by, the most quoted lines of Swinburne’s “Garden of Proserpine”:
We thank with brief thanksgiving Whatever gods may be That no life lives for ever; That dead men rise up never; That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea.
and Landor’s “On His Seventy-Fifth Birthday”:
Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art; I warmed both hands before the fire of life, It sinks, and I am ready to depart.
Cities burn behind us; the lake glitters. A tall loudspeaker is announcing prizes; Another, by the lake, the times of cruises. Childhood, once vast with terrors and surprises, Is fading to a landscape deep with distance – And always the sad piano in the distance, Faintly in the distance, a ghostly tinkling (O indecipherable blurred harmonies) Or some far horn repeating over water Its high lost note, cut loose from all harmonies. At such times, wakeful, a child will dream the world, And this is the world we run to from the world. Or the two worlds come together and are one On dark, sweet afternoons of storm and of rain, And stereopticons brought out and dusted, Stacks of old Geographics, or, through the rain, A mad wet dash to the local movie palace And the shriek, perhaps, of Kane’s white cockatoo. (Would this have been summer, 1942?) By June the city always seems neurotic. But lakes are good all summer for reflection, And ours is famed among painters for its blues, Yet not entirely sad, upon reflection. Why sad at all? Is their wish so unique – To anthropomorphize the inanimate With a love that masquerades as pure technique? O art and the child were innocent together! But landscapes grow abstract, like aging parents. Soon now the war will shutter the grand hotels, And we, when we come back, will come as parents. There are no lanterns now strung between pines – Only, like history, the stark bare northern pines. And after a time the lakefront disappears Into the stubborn verses of its exiles Or a few gifted sketches of old piers. It rains perhaps on the other side of the heart; Then we remember, whether we would or no. – Nostalgia comes with the smell of rain, you know.
In the seating at the back of the back.