ETIAP 3

Week 3 - An opening note to the symposians: As you can see, each week I am picking up a different theme.  When I started with this project last year, I had called it “Confluence,” as an assortment of tributaries coming together.  One of those tributaries was, and is, Stillwater itself.  

In this week’s Thursday moleskin installment I give some acknowledgments, and let me add here: thank you all for indulging me with these weekly installments and helping me to brush up my efforts. Also, Anne, my moleskin acknowledgment to you deserves some further explanation.  It was about three years ago that you and I went out on a run, and along that way you had encouraged me to tell the story of my decisions to move to Minnesota as a ninth grader, to join the Air Force before college and then to move back to Chicago after growing up a few years.  As it turns out, my moleskin project doesn’t get past the age of thirteen, all before you were born, but you were a spark to telling this story.  Thank you!


EVERY THOUGHT IS A PRAYER

Week 3: Stillwater Symposia

Stillwater Symposia is our family blog of random poems, stories, photographs and ideas. The blog is there for all to see but it remains our intimate gathering of riverside contributors.

01/15: Writing For The Symposia: Part 1
01/16: What Would You Write?
01/17: Dear Symposians
01/18: Reflective Study Of Howard
             Nemerov's Blue Swallows
01/19: Writing For The Symposia: Part 2
01/20: Carrying It Forward
01/21: Moleskin 1.3: Acknowledgments


01/15

Writing For The Symposia: Part 1

This I write for the symposia
inspired by stillwater dreams
and turtle songs and prayer requests
and trappist breweries.

I raise my glass to those a’ ya
who have known the wilder seas
but are still led to restfulness
along God’s peaceful streams,

and as the quiet river flows
with more movement than the
     surface shows,
let these odd words be for those a’ ya
who celebrate such things
but would convive to bring to life
your erstwhile hidden dreams.


01/16

What Would You Write?

O sister, brothers, water is not
The point.  Watching it flow, that
Is the point, and celebrating
Truth at every shore..


01/17

Dear Symposians

I have another poem to share, and this time with some spindrift analysis.  The poem is another one by someone else: The Blue Swallows, by Howard Nemerov. The analysis is a parsing of the poem’s abundant allegories.

I first planned on sending this just to Dan, as I thought he might be more in to my urge to deconstruct, but then I remembered that I had once shared a few lines of this with you, Anne, and then I discovered some Stillwater symbolism in the poem, and then I realized how much this poem reminds me of the birds of Windmill Creaks (the swallows at the millstream, and a midstream tie to of one of my most Windmill Creakish poems (“What would you write, Ruben...”).   With all of that, I knew I had to post this on the Water-blog.

For those interested in the allegories, my first fascination was how this poem brought together so many subjects of which I know next to nothing (D’Arcy Thompson’s force diagrams, Jung’s archetypal Self, Occam’s Razor, the Kaballah, the Vedas, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Plotinus’s Enneads, even a Hamlet allegory).  How ironic it was that the poem would pique my interests in these subjects before ultimately directing me to find the world again and see things without the “spelling mind”!

I purposefully found the allegories on my own efforts, with the help of Google and Wikipedia but without reading anyone else’s analysis of the poem.  Occam’s razor was easy enough, because I had actually heard of that before, and the author of the second quoted passage was quickly revealed (Thompson), but it took me a while to learn that the first quote is a less common translation from Marx’s manifesto.  I wasn’t keen on embarking further into communism, let alone delving into an introduction to cabalistic history or Jung’s capitalized Self. But the kaleidoscope of allegories kept appearing.  From Hamlet, “ Alas, poor ghost.” From the Vedas, Brhadaranyaka Upanishad (I.3.28): “From the unreal lead me to the Real.”  From Plotinus: “Never did eye see the sun unless it had first become sun-like.”  Or more expositively, from Plato’s Republic: “Any one who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind's eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye.”

What led to all of this?  Wanting to pick a poem, other than one of my own, to memorize. I’ve always liked this poem but never fully understood it, and I thought a quick study would help me commit it to
mindfulness.  And it has.  I’ve done it! Memorized it, I mean; I think I’m only about halfway to understanding it.

And why, again, this interest in memory work?  In getting back to those walking hours in the mornings and afternoons (birding interests having been set aside by full time parenting duties, then being more directly replaced by having a dog to pull me along), I have found it invigorating to exercise more than the legs.

But why do I bring this to the Stillwater Symposia?  I suppose Nemerov would say that I am missing the point with this poem, and yet in our own way, with this blogsite, we, brothers and sister, are finding the world again.   But there’s more.  I’ve got a paraphrase, just for you symposians.  And in my efforts to understand this poem, I don’t think the poet would mind if I brought God back into it (as long as he was not too Selfish, or political, or scientific, or cabalistic, or presupposed)....


01/18

Reflective Study Of Howard Nemerov's Blue Swallows

Across the millstream below the bridge
     from where I work and where we cross
Seven blue swallows divide the air
     into big patterns all their own
In shapes invisible and evanescent,
     as if to thwart the witnessing:
Kaleidoscopic beyond the mind’s
     imaginative stagnancies
Or memory’s power to keep them there
     but there they are.

“History is where tensions were,”
     giving stages to society, and
“Form is the diagram of forces,”
     seeing patterns in biology:
Thus, helplessly, there on the bridge,
     between birth and forgetfulness
While gazing down upon those birds—
     having the time and taking it
How strange, to be above the birds!—
     to end up here, so out of place!
Thus helplessly the mind in its brain
     wanting to make some sense of it
Weaves up relation’s spindrift web
     trying to trace the winds of waves
Seeing the swallows’ tails as nibs
     in nature, begging imitation,
Dipped in invisible ink, writing . . .
     an ever-changing rhyme.

Poor mind, what would you have them write?
     Poor poet, sticking out your chest,
Some cabalistic history
     of old traditions being reclaimed
Whose authorship you might ascribe
     to fit your backward preference
To God? to Nature? Ah, poor ghost,
     leading the living to their unrest,
You’ve capitalized your Self enough
     and overscored the trinity.
That villainous William of Occam
     trimming off inelegance
Cut out the feet from under that dream
     in search of more simplicity
Some seven centuries ago
     out of the dust of time.

It’s taken that long for the mind
     collectively, immortally
To waken, yawn and stretch, to see
     beyond its unreality
With opened eyes emptied of speech
     and turned to continuity,
The real world where the spelling mind
     in a state of higher consciousness
Imposes with its grammar book
     of meaning being read into
Unreal relations on the blue
     brushstrokes over stream and sky,
Swallows. Perhaps when you will have
     time to gaze awhile,

Fully awakened, I shall show you
     what you have not seen before,
A new thing: even the water
     sharing colors with the sky
Flowing away beneath those birds
     dancing above the moving stream
Will fail to reflect their flying forms,
     can't capture what they seem to be
And the eyes that see become as stones
     bewildered in the river bed
Whence never tears shall fall gain
     nor add life to the stream.

O swallows, swallows, poems are not
     O sister, brothers, water is not
The point. Finding again the world,
     the point.  Watching it flow, that
That is the point, where loveliness
     is the point, and celebrating
Adorns intelligible things
     truth at every shore...
Because the mind’s eye lit the sun.
     to become the fire.


01/19

Writing For The Symposia: Part 2

This too I write for the symposia,
inspired by blue winged teal
gliding on a river surface
and becoming one with the water.

I do give credit to those a' ya
who do not show their busy feet
or the power of the carrying current,
who offer poems without words
like faith without argument.

We would be symposians,
but you are the better Siddhartas
showing us the river for what it is.


01/20

Carrying It Forward

Inauguration Day, 2009

     I

Paine wrote it,
Washington read it,
Obama retold it
in the depth of winter:
“Let it be retold...”
and “Let it be said
by our children’s children...”

...that when we faced
our coldest cold,
our hardest hardship,
when it seemed nothing
but hope and virtue
could survive,
city and country
came forth to meet
their common danger
together, braved
the icy currents
and coming storms
and safely delivered
that great gift
of hope and virtue
to their future
generations.
And now we mark
the day again
and remember when
we carried forth
God’s grace upon us
and wouldn’t let
our journey end.


     II

Seward proposed it,
Lincoln pronounced it,
Obama proclaimed it
with the resonance
of fighting words:

...stretching out
from battlefields
and patriot graves,
the mystic chords
of memory played
from Concord to
Gettysburg
and Normandy
to now: This time,
our time, has come
to choose our
better history,
to summon the
better angels
of our nature,
to remember
who we are, how
far we’ve come.
This is our moment.
This is our time
to be renewed
and reconciled.
This is our
day to take
responsibility
and seize our duties
gladly.


     III

John Locke asserted it,
Jefferson declared it,
Obama offered it
as old and true:
“We hold these truths...

...and carry them forward;
Paul said this too:
we set aside
the things of youth
and see at last
what must abide:
our faith, our hope,
our charity,
and equally,
intrinsically,
our rights to life
and liberty
and free pursuit
of happiness:
These things are old.
These things are true.
And now we return
and rejoice in the truth,
that precious gift,
that noble idea,
the God-given promise
that all are equal
all are free, and
all deserve a
chance to pursue
the fullest measure.


     IV

Carry it forward,
Thomas, George,
that we may bear
the winter winds
and see the spring.
Carry it forward,
William, Abe,
that we may hear
and learn to sing
the battle hymns
that came before us.
Carry it forward,
Thomas, John,
the glorious burden,
price and promise
of our birthright.
Carry on, Barack,
that we may know
the greater purpose
of our present
season. Carry
on, that we
may take
responsibility
with what we’re given,
the old and true,
the truth renewed....

...your story, too:
now carry it
and call on us
to serve with you.


01/21

Moleskin 1.3: Acknowledgments

My story is your story, too: you, to whom I turn, are in these pages, every one of you.  Sister Anne, who prompted me a few summers ago with a passing what if.  Brother Dan, who has inspired and reinspired the ink to flow.  Brother Josh, who shows beyond scribbling down how good it is to live. Son Andrew and daughter Kirsten, my flesh and blood, my dreams and hopes, wonderfully determined to be more than a reflection.  Mother Marilyn, and father Joe too, whose own faces I sometimes see in the mirror, and there you are in my smile.  And more of you: family, friends, associates, neighbors, fellow congregants.  Ghosts from the past, strangers I have yet to know, and many more whose names I'll never learn: thank you all the same, for being the faces I see before me and within me, the very mirrors to my soul.