The Point of Life

Before the month of Easter ends, I wanted to get in one more post, so I’m predating this one by a half dozen hours.  I wanted to stay in April for Easter’s sake but also to commemorate yet another great author who died this month: Peter Matthiessen, the only writer to have won the National Book Award in both fiction and non-fiction categories.  In fact, with his first winner, The Snow Leopard, he won the award twice, once in 1979 for the brief lived category “Contemporary Thought” and then in 1980 for general nonfiction.  The Snow Leopard is a wonderful travel journal about a layman explorer trying to beat the onset of a Nepalese winter in search of the rarest of wild animals, all the while freshly grieving the loss of his wife to cancer.  Then in 2008, joining only two other three-time writers (Saul Bellow and nonfiction writer Lewis Thomas) he won the fiction award for Shadow Country, a uniquely styled murder mystery set in the early 20th century Everglades.  This was my introduction to Matthiessen, and I liked the book so much I read it twice, hardly deterred by its 900 page length.  He lived a full life, into his eighties, and then this year, a week before his last book was to be published, he succumbed to cancer.  I am now in the middle of his last book, In Paradise, a fictional work that had started as another autobiographical travelogue about an odd assortment of pilgrims to Auschwitz — Jews, Buddhists, Christians; Germans, Poles, Americans; a scoffer of the whole idea of pilgrims to Auschwitz, an atheistic scholar researching a weary subject, a man in search of his roots — who have gathered for a weeklong meditation retreat.

About 40 pages into the book (and I’m not that much further as I write this) there is a compelling quote: “The point of life is to help others through it – who said that?”  This, as it happens, parallels my recent very novice study of Kierkegaard’s three modes of life: the aesthetic, the ethical and the spiritual, and also my recent required advocacy (called on to write a report for our church’s annual congregational meeting) for social ministry.  All of which, combined with a bible verse (Luke 23:43), prompted this work-in-progress poem, which I will title with the lead of the same quote from Matthiessen:


The Point Of Life

1 looks to the stars
turns to the east
leans on the powers
of reason & truth.
1 pays for the view
waits for the feast
contemplates beauty
& holds on to youth.
1 bows to the throne
flees from the beast
stands off alone
while one sets up
a booth.
1 searches within
struggles for peace
sees time begin
to grow long
in the tooth.
1 takes up the cross
suffers the sentence
‘s less where he is now
than where he
is going.
1 ‘s done what he’s done
comes to his senses
turns to the one
hanging next to him,
knowing
1 speaks of a presence
lives for today
lifts up the other
and shows him
the way.




And now I can continue on to May.

Kepler's Constellations

     on Josef’s acceptance to gymnasium

Phenomenal, it might be said, for the

phenomenological.  Tycho Brahe

observed the orbits after Copernicus

eccentricized the earth. “The sun

sets without setting at all”, a modern

Polish poet would conclude. And

Kepler, charting what he could, upset

the expectations even more. The

orbits didn’t synch, didn’t course the

way a stargazer might think, and

thus a point elliptical had to enter in.

        We travel such roads all the time

        in efforts to get where we want to go

        or what we wish to see: a setting

        sun, a dawning one, days beyond our

        dreams. Occasionally we ante up

        and amble to the dark unknown. God

        knows what’s there—angler fish,

        Lucifer and machinations all our own

        —heaven help us when we fly to

        others we know not of…. Heaven help

        us anyway: we sojourn unaware.

Joe now goes to survey stars celestial

and earthbound. He’ll enter halls

of Jan Kepler Gymnasium and supply

his share of what’s been supplied

by Copernicus, Brahe, countless more

in line with learning and lighting

the dark unknown. “Eat any fruit,” we

recall, “save that from the tree of

the knowledge of good and evil.” Why

tempt us more than the Serpent?

As Magi know, we travel now in grace.

Spelling Lessons

 

Perhaps a spell is lifted in the slumberous news today:
Gabriel Garcia Marquez has passed away, and students gone and gifted

sent him, and cc’d me, a wistful wave good-bye.

The spell began December third, some thirteen years ago

with the laureate of Chicago, Gwendolyn Brooks, whom I had heard

in ’eighty-two, enchanting us anew. ‘Is she alive?’

a student asked—no Google yet to see—and I replied

‘I hope she hasn’t died. She’s old, for sure and awfully spry—I bet—’

the bell for passing rang, the lesson came to close.

Then later, on the nightly news, I saw the haunting face

of Gwendolyn, a smile of grace: indeed today, an erstwhile vivid muse…

That student would conclude ‘that’s how it sometimes goes.’

Belles lettres studied next and next lent opportune lifelines:

Dickens’ best and worst of times, renderings of Shakespeare texts,

Morrison, Munro, Ishiguro let literature run free

and handed off to Saramago, whose Blindness we pined

to see. Alas, we find we’re in a place we’d been ten years ago—

‘Is he alive?’ and Google now confirms the man to be

but lessons later, mockingly, the Nobel Portugese expired.

Well, he was old and tired—imagine teaching Plath when shockingly

she sealed her flat to take the leaking gas alone…

Havel’s plays—abstruse, absurd—were finally sinking

in by mid-year break, and thinking we could commandeer the new year,

Vaclav moled away in Prague, our common home.

Szymborska’s ‘View with a Grain of Sand’ slid in. We shared

the view and then prepared to wonder with her why and what and who

and, spellbound as we were, this poet left our world.

We hadn’t set things down, when Heaney, digging well

before the mid-term break expelled the chance to see him in our town

(as I had twice before, and relished every word):

“A four foot box, a foot for every year.” Mere inches in,

the school year would begin as the stubborn bogland spell took root.

We studied on—what could we do?—and so

we’re celebrating Easter now, with Lazarus and friends,

and as his curtailed century ends, and as his magic would allow,

we raise Remedios the Beauty… now, for Gabo.

Before your iPhones entered in, we swam in Solitude.

Ambivalent to verisimilitude, the novel failed to find its center

in millennials who had no qualms or queries

about a race condemned or exiled from the memory

of men—whose armory had no time for Macondos on the mend,

no clutter for vacation breaks… or centuries.

Still, we wore three covers out—one had Macondo

on a hill, an island in a Day-Glo Babel, jungle-clad, an anthill stout

and mad, and maybe Ben, my son, saw sheer

delight in that tableau. He painted one his own:

a house and homme and chestnut tree, a sun and moon to look below

and unenormous wings of bluebird flying o’er,

stirring breeze to beat the hurricane. Ben bade

the spell adieu—he drew in solitude a more enlivened place to be,

and when he’s old enough to read the tome,

I hope he’ll see his instinct led him from the start:

his and Gabo’s fleeting art as noble, humble, immaculate, distinct,

and fit for classes, yes—our common home.

Why We Become We

 
Sixth-graders trying to be state champs

in the chill of April, seventy-nine, and who

but Chris Theodore, senior Hawk, by chance

surceased his journey home, ostensibly to

watch our novice, nonplussed play. We

had seen him in a huge parade atop a fire

truck: Jay Huyler, Jeff Baker, the community

of Maine South Hawks had dawned desire

to play this sport for all its worth. Such

fascination to palm the ball, pogo up, dice

the air with fingertips and backboard touch

as all spheres in a younger’s mind suffice.

Michael Jordan was a sophomore then,

struggling to make his own town’s team.

Chris Theodore would smile at that—again

he journeyed on to waken other dreams.

Standing in an Open Field

Because it is National Poetry Month, and because I do not have a new poem to offer at the moment, here is something from the archives.

Eight hundred years ago, A Sufi monk wrote a book of poems that he called Walled Gardens.  He wrote from his faith’s perspective, in his language and to the people of his Persian culture, and yet, as poetry makes possible, he speaks to me.

By Sanai’s inspiration, I offer my own poem, reflecting some of the monk’s existentialism but adding a bit of my own perspective.  Poetry also allows this, and I make no apologies for rewriting someone else’s poem and applying it to my own language and faith and life.

I do not pretend to understand Sufiism, nor will I let it threaten my Christian beliefs or Western biases.  To the contrary, just as I hear some of Ecclesiastes, or maybe Hemingway, in Sanai’s poetry (“The sun also rises!”), I appreciate that it is the same sun that rises on us all.

Standing in an Open Field

The sun of truth rises unbidden,

and with it sets the moon of learning.

In this halt of just a week,

to be is not to be, and to come is to go. 

- Sanai, tr. David Pendlebury

   

  For all that I know,

  that which I’ve learned,

I am a moon that mirrors

  a distant fire:

I watch the sun rise,

  and my reflected brilliance

   fades with the light of day.

   

For all that I know,

  that which I’ve found,

I am a rooster that crows

  in the early dawn:

I watch the sun rise,

  and my hallelujahs

   fade with the light of day.

For all that I know,

  that which I suppose,

I am a wildflower in

  a garden of shadows:

I watch the sun rise,

  but my morning glory

   fades with the light of day.

As long as I am living

  the sun will shine,

and the sun will shine

  when I am gone,

and the moon will rise

  and the rooster will crow

and the shadows will stir

  and the gardens will grow.

For all that I know,

  that which I believe,

life is a blessing

  beyond understanding:

I will watch the sun rise

  for as long as I can

   until I fade with the light of day.

As long as I am living

  the sun will shine,

and the moon will rise

  and the rooster will crow

and the sun will shine

  when I am gone,

and the shadows will stir

  and the gardens will grow.

As long as I am living

  and when I’m gone,

the shadows will stir

  in this garden of mine

and the sun will shine

  and the rooster will crow.

  Hallelujah for all I know!