1. Late this afternoon, on a day I spent thinking a lot about the grace of being quiet and of silence while there's so much sound and fury in cities, towns, and, for me, especially online -- in both my Facebook and my Twitter feed --, I turned again to the poets William Stafford and Robert Bly. On the dvd Bill and Diane sent me, featuring the short film, Every War Has Two Losers, there's a second feature. It's an hour long. It's called A Literary Friendship. It features Stafford and Bly reading a few of their poems and talking about their lives, their thinking, and their writing -- why they write and how they go about it.
I don't know exactly in what year(s) this project was filmed. Stafford died on August 28, 1993. That's the only time marker I have. I bring this up because everything they said about poetry and its place in the world addressed the very same kind of fury and agitation we all know is taking place right now.
Maybe because lately I've been contemplating even more than usual the virtues of being quiet, of silence, it was inevitable that as I listened to Bly and Stafford read their roughly thirty year old (or more) poems, that I would hear almost all of them inviting readers into stillness, the stillness of nature and of one's own inward life.
In his poem, "On the Oregon Coast", dedicated to William Stafford, Robert Bly depicts the vastness and fury of the ocean. The ocean becomes a metaphor, pointing our attention beyond itself to giving us a concrete experience with fury, and how, in the midst of turmoil (and tumultuous times), one feels small. It's hard to read fury or understand it. It's overwhelming. We can do something, though. Bly suggests the following in the poem's third and final verse:
Remembering the fury, it is up to us, even
Though we feel small compared to the loose
Ocean, to keep sailing and not land,
And figure out what to say to our children.
Bly's poem does not imagine us paddling in the disorderly, or, as he puts it, "the loose" ocean, frantically trying to row our way back to land. He imagines us sailing. To me, it's a calm, even quiet, image of persistence. Sailing is not ignoring. It's a duty. It's "up to us". We sail in the fury. We sail "though we feel small". Our purpose is to grow wiser in our sailing, to "figure out what to say to our children".
Later I listened to a TEDx talk on YouTube given by Coleman Barks. In just twenty minutes, Barks summed up much of what I've heard him say in other presentations about the Sufi poet Rumi and his relationship to Rumi. I loved hearing Coleman Barks again, loved traveling back to the years at LCC when I taught World Lit and the poems of Rumi were (for me) the ecstatic core of the course. Listening to Coleman Barks -- well, I sat here and did not try to escape the fury and unrest and confusion of the last week, of the last few months. I felt small. I kept sailing. I was home alone. (Debbie was visiting a friend.) I was quiet. I cannot quell our nation's agitation nor can I quiet the agitation of those near me. I can quiet my own agitation, though, and can hope that in this quiet there is some measure of grace.
If you have any interest in experiencing some of what I did today, here are some links:
The film, A Literary Friendship is on YouTube, here.
YouTube also carries the William Stafford documentary, Every War Has Two Losers, here.
Robert Bly's poem, "On the Oregon Coast" is here.
And, the Coleman Barks TEDx talk is here.
Feeling small became a focus of mine today. Rumi wrote this short poem about feeling small. It's a Coleman Barks translation.
This Great Love Inside Me
I am so small I can barely be seen.
How is this great love inside me?
Look at your eyes. They are small,
but they see enormous things.
2. My late afternoon foray into the worlds of William Stafford, Robert Bly, Coleman Barks, and Rumi were a welcome shift from how spent the rest of my day. I finished reading All the President's Men and, in doing so, finished swimming in the troubled and furious waters of the Nixon Administration from about June, 1972 through about November of 1973 or so. As I thought about this book while reading it and when finished, I kept coming back to the idea that laws and regulations form the basis of a social contract between all of us. For this contract to work, the parties living and working under the rule of law must, for lack of a better word, cooperate with the purposes of the laws -- or, if the law is unjust, work to change the law. The chief threat to the upholding of the law in All the President's Men was power -- the efforts made on Richard Nixon's behalf to win the presidency and to hold on to the power of the office.
This social contract becomes fragile when it's ignored, scoffed at, regarded as naive, seen as an impediment, and cynically exploited. Although the book All the President's Men never discusses political science or theory, never examines the nature of the law and the social contract, to me, the primary thrust of the book was dramatizing what happens when the law is disregarded, broken, and the social contract erodes.
3. Political corruption, fury, and calm and ecstatic poetry didn't define the whole of my day. There's also that matter of protecting myself from Hepatitis B, especially if I go on dialysis or go through a kidney transplant. Today I went to the clinic up on McKinley and was injected with Hepatitis shot number two of three. My last shot of this course will happen on, or soon after, August 30th.
It's fun to remember places we could dine in Kellogg many years ago and Stu commemorates some of those places in this limerick:
Lots places to grub from the past.
Like the “Fish Feed” on Friday’s din’t last.
Pik Kwik’s counter, The Boat,
Corner Drug, get a float!
Miner’s Hat had sit down or leave fast.
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