Monthly Archives: February 2010

Poetry and Tea

home, poetry, tea,

It’s a rainy Sunday afternoon, which makes the idea of tea and poetry sound really good, especially if there were a blazing fire near the table that I’d drape with a soft tablecloth.

The picture is from a tea party I gave in honor of my friend Bird, now 98 years old. We like to share our favorite poems with each other when we get to visit.

I will post one in her honor here today.

INTRODUCTION to POETRY

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

–Billy Collins

 

Review: For the Time Being

books, nature, philosophy, quotes,

Giacometti said, “The more I work, the more I see things differently, that is, everything gains a grandeur every day, becomes more and more unknown, more and more beautiful. The closer I come, the grander it is, the more remote it is.”

This clip from the book is as good an introduction to Annie Dillard’s book For the Time Being as anything I could write. I’ve been struggling for months now to write a simple review, but I’m not equal to the task. It occurred to me that I could let Dillard speak by transcribing some passages (in boldface) from the book. I hope they are not enough to be copyright-infringing.

There is always a lot of factual knowledge, especially of geography, history, and natural science, in her books. In this one you learn things about Mao Tse-tung, about the Aztecs, the Romans, and grotesque birth defects. Many statistics about natural things and about what percentage of us are dead, and many stories and sayings of Teilhard de Chardin, who I think is a kindred spirit to her: Do you suffer what a French paleontologist called “the distress that makes human wills founder daily under the crushing number of living things and stars?”

Annie Dillard does suffer this way, as many theologians may suffer from contemplating mankind, the universe, and the finite mind’s inability to take it all in, much less neatly organize it and find ultimate meaning. Augustine said to a group of people, “We are talking about God. What wonder is it that you do not understand. If you do understand, then it is not God.”

If the mystery of life makes you uncomfortable, if you like a good reductionist dogma, I don’t think you will enjoy Dillard in most of her writing. Even I tire of her eventually, as she sometimes appears to be a woman who could be described by II Timothy 3:7: “Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.” She likes to see how everything is connected, and I agree, it all is connected, but we have been given the key to the mystery in Jesus Christ, who reveals the Holy Trinity to us, the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End.

Several Jewish theologians down the centuries figure in this particular compendium, her favorite being from the Ukraine in the 18th Century:…the Baal Shem Tov delighted in the spark, the God within. This is not pantheism, but pan-entheism: The one transcendent God made the universe, and his presence kindles every speck of it. Each clot of clay conceals a coal. A bird flies the house. A live spark heats a clay pot.

The thousands of wealth have fallen with wonders, said Rabbi Nathan of Nemirov. Do you find this unclear? It certainly sounds like the sort of thing thousands of wealth do.

And Buddhists: They say there is a Buddha in each grain of sand. It is this sort of pop wisdom that makes the greatness of Buddhism seem aggravating.

“God is in the details” might be Annie Dillard’s motto, as she does always bring all these bits and pieces to bear on a quest for the Ultimate. Every event, every piece of matter, can speak of God. But not in its specialness–rather, its ordinariness. However, It is literally sensible to deny that God exists.

These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other. Who can bear to hear this, or who will consider it?

The closer we grow to death, the more closely we follow the news. Year after year, without ever reckoning the hours I wasted last week or last year, I read the morning paper. I buy mass psychotherapy in the form of the lie that this is a banner year.

So, we are not the center of the universe, but there is meaning, and it has something to do with a transcendent God, not foggy pop wisdom and not a gnostic sort of dualism. The thing to do is to engage, to plunge into life in all its materiality and chaos, and make yourself useful.

As Martin Buber saw it–writing at his best near the turn of the last century–the world of ordinary days “affords” us that precise association with God that redeems both us and our speck of the world.

[Teilhard] “Purity does not lie in a separation from the universe, but in a deeper penetration of it.”

[In an introduction to an account of birds mating in Galilee] Our lives come free; they’re on the house to all comers…. God decants the universe of time in a stream, and our best hope is, by our own awareness, to step into the stream and serve, empty as flumes, to keep it moving.

The first book I read by Dillard was An American Childhood, the story of her youth in the mid-20th Century, and I’d have to say that God used it to make me consider all the many details of my own childhood and how they combined in a significant story that God was writing. In all her books I have read I am impressed with her vision of the sacredness of matter, even while she can’t figure it all out. She accepts her own embodiment and relishes her sensate being, which of course feels more real than the intangible.

[Teilhard] “If I should lose faith in God, I think that I should continue to believe invincibly in the world.”

[when we who are alive now are dead] the living might well seem foolishly self-important and overexcited.

One reason I have spent a ridiculous number of hours trying to write about Annie Dillard, is that the quality of her writing seems to demand a comparable response. She doesn’t waste a word; there is no fluff, and I know that she has a reason for juxtaposing the paragraphs on sand and death and Chinese warriors just so. Surely I could study this one book like the Bible, and keep getting more out of it.

I would get not just philosophy and theology, but also whatever the evasive thing is that one learns from reading a lot of good writing. In The Writing Life she teaches by example, both by relating her attitude and ruthlessness toward second-best work, and in the way she respects the language and makes the most of its potential.

I still haven’t looked up all the words–at least 25 in 204 pages–that were completely new to me, including einkorn, heiratic, schleppernish, and geomantic. Saltate is one I will remember, as Dillard used it three times, first to describe the action of sand:

Mostly, the continents’ streams and rivers make sand. Streams, especially, and fast rivers bear bouncing rocks that knock the earth, and break themselves into sharp chips of sand. The sand grains leap–saltate–downstream.

Later she uses this word, which can also mean to dance, along with another new one, knap: Jerusalem….we have come saltating to worship here–to knap ourselves round.

I’m not sure I could come up with a good closing paragraph if I gave it another hour’s effort. My apologies for the inferior review that took me so long; I justify it on a principle I’m not sure Annie would agree with: Any job worth doing is worth doing poorly, at first while you practice.

So I will close with another snippet from the book, a thought that I’m confident is connected to everything else I’ve put down here. It’s mostly a quote from John Muir in 1869:

“What can poor mortals say about clouds?” While people describe them, they vanish. “Nevertheless, these fleeting sky mountains are as substantial and significant as the more lasting upheavals of granite beneath them. Both alike are built up and die, and in God’s calendar, difference of duration is nothing.” 

[a few more of my thoughts on Dillard here]

God Sent a Robin

books, church, family, home, poetry, ,

A robin chirped at me this morning before I got out of bed, and what a lot he had to say!

First, he reminded me of his great-great grandfather, who had spent a whole spring and summer several years ago just bringing a message of love and care from my Father. In those days, every morning I woke to that bird’s song, and every evening as I chopped vegetables or washed dishes, I got used to his company just outside my window.

Not that I ever saw him–he hid somewhere in the trees, or perhaps perched on the roof above my head. I would leave my cooking and wander outside looking for him, because at the time I didn’t know what species the voice belonged to.

Pippin our naturalist had left a set of bird call tapes in her bedroom when she went away to college, and I listened to the two hours’ worth of sample bird songs, but didn’t hear My Bird. When she came home one weekend she heard him and said, “Oh, that’s a robin!” Today I can easily find this page online that might have answered my question then. Or this book with recorded bird calls, given to us by the same daughter more recently.

My 2010 Robin brought his greeting thus: “cheerily cheer-up cheerio.” At least, that’s how the birders describe it. I got the meaning rather than the sound, and it was clear enough.

And he said, “Attend!”, confirming my prayer of yesterday’s blog. I thought back to our first years of homeschooling and a unit study the children and I did. It was structured around character qualities, beginning with those most essential for learning. The first was Attentiveness, and the nature/science aspect of the unit was birds, because one needs to focus and concentrate one’s mind if one wants to notice birds in the first place.

We set up a tray feeder right outside our big window next to the dining table, and every day the towhees, finches and jays would visit and fascinate us. Nothing like that was possible to replicate when we moved to our present house, and any kind of bird feeder only made it easier for the cats to make a meal of any creature in feathers.

“Attend!” is a word we often hear in church, because even there we forget What is Happening and Who is Present. Of course the reverential tuning and turning of our hearts and minds is a key to the spiritual life, and it’s a habit I could despair of ever learning.

This morning I was almost afraid to get out of bed, for fear of getting swept up in the hurricane of decisions and dilemmas about what to focus on, what to do first. Should I phone my lonely friend a tenth time, hoping to get through and make a lunch date? If I don’t, what will I do with these quarts of soup I just made? Am I getting another sore throat? Perhaps I need to run downstairs and gargle first thing. Should I go to Matins, or the gym, or stay home and vacuum?

I did the only thing I could be sure of, and began my prayers before putting my feet on the floor.

O Heavenly King, the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth,
Who art everywhere present and fillest all things,
Treasury of blessing, and giver of Life,
Come and abide in us, and cleanse us from every impurity,
And save our souls,
O Good One.

At a time like this, free-form prayers are of little use. Besides, who could improve on the above? It’s a wonderful beginning for what we want to be A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, to use the evocative title of a book I’ve never read.

I was still there when Robin started in. One thing I heard was this discussion he had with another of God’s creatures:

“Overheard in an Orchard” by Elizabeth Cheney

Said the robin to the sparrow,
“I would really like to know
Why those anxious human beings
rush around and worry so.”

Said the sparrow to the robin,
“Friend, I think that it must be
That they have no Heavenly Father
such as cares for you and me.”

Lenten Spring Things

church, garden, Lent, quotes, trees

It’s Lent now, so I think of everything in that context. Here in the Northern Hemisphere, at least some of us have Spring during Lent, so I want to note that in pictures.

 

What got me going was the graceful manzanita trees at the library yesterday. Theirs have white blossoms. When I came home, I wanted to take a picture of our backyard bush in pink.

 The photo shows the ubiquitous weeds and fallen pine needles that tell of my absence. That’s the snowball bush in the background; it hasn’t budded out yet.

After chilly weather, rain, and a bad cough kept me from even venturing into the garden for several weeks, suddenly one day the sun was shining and I was taking pictures of all the blossoms, the cherry plum tree and violets, too.

B. had been up the ladder pruning the wisteria on the arbor.

Many years I completely miss the violets, their visit is so brief.

Now, about Lent….I have to say I’m off to a disappointing start on several fronts. From one perspective, Lent seems long. That is, if one is thinking only of struggling and feeling defeated.

Or if one feels deprived, and is waiting for feasting to begin again. But Father Michael said Lent is not about deprivation, but rather, “Taste and see that the Lord is good.”

Which made me think of  Isaiah 55:2: “Wherefore do ye spend money for that which is not bread? and your labour for that which satisfieth not? hearken diligently unto me, and eat ye that which is good, and let your soul delight itself in fatness.”

Lent feels short, when I think how slow I am to get with the program of fattening my soul instead of my body. I will almost surely miss this brief opportunity, or at least, fail to make good use of it. I must try not to fret; but how to keep my trying from turning into more fretting…?

All these springtime blooms are helpful to look at, because they bring to mind another picture from Metropolitan Kallistos Ware: “Repentance is not self-flagellation; it is an opening flower.”

I know that my Heavenly Father clothes the lilies of the field, just as He will give me this day my daily bread, Himself my Bread of Life. Now if I will just pay attention and eat from the loaf that tastes good, and nourishes the soul.