Monthly Archives: February 2024

The shape of what you lived.

poetry, , ,

REMEMBERING

And you wait. You wait for the one thing
that will change your life,
make it more than it is—
something wonderful, exceptional,
stones awakening, depths opening to you.

In the dusky bookstalls
old books glimmer gold and brown.
You think of lands you journeyed through,
of paintings and a dress once worn
by a woman you never found again.

And suddenly you know: that was enough.
You rise and there appears before you
in all its longings and hesitations
the shape of what you lived.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

Rilke, by Leonid Pasternak 1928

Whole types of thought are impossible.

culture, quotes, , , , ,

The following excerpt is from an interview with poet Dana Gioia that was, but is no longer, on the Fact and Arts website of the BBC, I think more than ten years ago. Gioia has been Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts and Poet Laureate of California. I’m sorry I can no longer link to the whole interview, but I think this small part is worthwhile.

F&A: You’ve said, “I don’t think Americans are dumber than they were 25 years ago, but our culture is.” Tell me how our culture is dumber.

Dana Gioia: Our culture is vastly dumber. I’ll give you an example. If you’ve got a copy of The New Yorker from 30 years ago, it would have about six times as many words as it does now. The same thing for The Atlantic. With most of our newspapers, if somebody wrote a review of a book, it was thousands of words long. People would actually think through things in print in a serious way. Even if you didn’t like The New Yorker, you had to take it seriously.

Nowadays we have the USA Today version of culture. People have been trained by TV and the Internet to want an image and a headline. The notion of careful sequential thought contextualized historically, ideologically is a vanishing skill. When we collectively lose our ability to have sustained linear attention, whole types of thought are impossible. I see this in my students who are bright kids but have read very little.

Excitement at dusk.

nature, smells, weather, , ,

The rain stopped this evening, just in time for me to walk on the bike path to the bridge. This wooden bridge spans two little creeks where they join and flow on westward through my patch of suburbia. I figured out that when I have a few more minutes available than it takes to walk around the block, I can go on this more woodsy walk to the middle of the bridge and still be back in less than 15 minutes.

What got me excited was just the utter freshness of the air after days of steady rain, and getting to see the creeks fuller than usual. It’s interesting how one is so much muddier than the other. Many wonderful plant scents were in the cool and damp air, underneath the bolder smell of wood smoke.

Between my house and that bike path, one of my neighbors has my favorite color of daffodils blooming right now. Their faces were heavy with rain, so I had to stoop down to get a good view of their happiness.

Let yourself get soaked.

nature, poetry, weather, , ,
“Rain Bird” woodblock by Hirokazu Fukuda

The poem below is part of a collection of “Himalaya Poems” on the “Asymptote” website, where that magazine’s name is explained like this:

“Asymptote is the premier site for world literature in translation. We take our name from the dotted line on a graph that a mathematical function may tend toward, but never reach. Similarly, a translated text may never fully replicate the effect of the original; it is its own creative act.”

I orignally read the poem on a blog that didn’t tell what century the poet was writing in, so I had to hunt around to find out that he is a contemporary Korean. On his own website he writes something that I can relate to: “I long not to finish my life as a poet. In other words, I wish I could be a poem at the end of the poet.” 

If Ko Un does manage to set off and “walk on and on until the sun sets,” and not just write about that kind of activity, then I think he stands a good chance of turning into a poem. Especially if he gets drenched! Lately I have done a lot of walking in the rain myself, and I have begun to look forward to those wet outings. I keep wondering why that is…

One friend said something about “the ions,” and online I found numerous articles about the “health benefits” of walking in the rain. Every article counted a different number of benefits, ranging from four to nine, one number per article, and that coordinated numbering was the most interesting thing about them.

I try not to take an umbrella on my walks, because of the way an umbrella usually takes my attention from the wind and water assaulting me, and forces me to give my all to one more instance of wrestling with technology, especially if it’s the pop-up type. (However, umbrellas seem to add cheer to dark and rainy paintings.) If the day is very wet, I do merely a loop around a block or two, and change into dry clothes afterward. That’s not a pilgrimage, but it makes me feel that I am walking in a (short) poem.

YOUR PILGRIMAGE

A slower pace, a somewhat slower pace will do.
Of a sudden, should it start to rain,
let yourself get soaked.
An old friend, the rain.

One thing alone is beautiful: setting off.
The world’s too vast
to live in a single place,
or three or four.

Walk on and on
until the sun sets,
with your old accomplice,
shadow, late as ever.
If the day clouds over,
go on anyway
regardless.

-Ko Un

McGee Creek Trail in the Sierras