Tag Archives: imagination

Waking in the middle of January.

my garden, the language, winter, , , , , , , , ,

Today felt like the beginning of a fresh season. The real seasons don’t sync with the dates on the calendar, and right now presents itself as more natural for starting something, for having the necessary energy and expectation. If my helper Alejandro hadn’t come to prune, it might not have happened still. But I did ask him to come, so I guess I got the ball rolling, or the pruners opened, or something.

In the first week of January, I only needed to go to church, to be carried on a wave of feasts and exultations. I did that seven times in seven days, because of St. Basil’s Day, Theophany, and our parish feast day, with all the associated Matins and Vespers services. When I go to church it’s nearly impossible for me to get Anything Done the rest of the day. So of course I was Behind in the second week, and before I had caught up much I sank a bit Under the Weather, and put this painting as the background of my computer monitor:

Felix Vallotton, Femme Couchee Dormant, 1899

But! I didn’t resemble that lady all the time, and when I put her picture up it was at my New Computer I was sitting, the whole project of which was accomplished for me (just before I went Under) by a team of family members, starting with Soldier, who chose and ordered the machine, and the Professor and Scout who got it set up beautifully. Especially Scout, whom some might remember as the boy at left, but who now is a young man and my favorite I.T. guy. My computing (reading and word processing) now goes blessedly like lightning, compared to the old system.

That speed enabled me to switch my Duolingo lessons from my phone to the computer, which was a relief, because all the phone pecking had aggravated my right thumb joint. It is in an effort to learn Greek that I was suffering the abuse, which led one friend to declare that I now have a Greek Thumb. I found the audio-visual lessons to be inadequate without writing practice, so once I switched to the computer I started writing down some phrases and sentences I was learning.

A trip to Greece is in my near future, if all goes as planned — I will surely tell you more about that soon. It’s doubtful that I will use the language much when I go there, but at least I may be able to make out some signage. And languages are always fun. I really need to work on my Greek penmanship, though!

My Greek Thumb had been one more cause of my enervation. But after about a week of lounging about and never quite finishing the dishes and laundry, I found myself out in the garden picking greens and stringing up pea supports. It was an overcast day, but I wore my barn coat and garden gloves and happily pulled out the rotten cherry tomato plant and took pictures of the pomegranates before they got pruned.

Many people have looked out the window at those fruits and wondered what they could be. The pomegranates get bleached by the winter rain and frosts, and don’t resemble at all the deep red fruits they were in the fall.

The day’s harvest of parsley, kale, collards and Swiss chard was fantastic. I hadn’t picked any for a couple of months. That type of kale on the top of this bowlful is so beautiful and hardy, I hope I can find the same seeds to plant again this year.

On the last day of lounging, my podcast listening also helped me get into a more active mode, because my contemplative self had been supremely satisfied by listening to Malcolm Guite. He was talking about George MacDonald, at a celebration last year of MacDonald’s 200th birthday.

The event took place at the Wade Center at Wheaton College, and the recording of it can be found here on YouTube: “When A Heart Is Really Alive: George MacDonald and the Prophetic Imagination.”

If you are at all interested in MacDonald, C.S. Lewis’s conversion, the vision of Coleridge, or myth and the imagination generally, I very heartily recommend it. I’m going to watch/listen again. Guite’s love for God and for his subject(s) are contagious. Immediately following that experience, I had today a perfect Home Alone Day, when my scattered mind wasn’t too challenged by having to multi-task. And that helps me to get more Things Done, which is calming and energizing.

Even though my last couple of days were more about Getting Up than waking up, I put the word “wake” in the title of this post because one theme of Guite’s talk and MacDonald’s writings is Waking Up. You can listen to the podcast and hear more about what we might wake to; I will just leave you with a related thought from the author himself:

“The world…is full of resurrections… Every night that folds us up in darkness is a death; and those of you that have been out early, and have seen the first of the dawn, will know it — the day rises out of the night like a being that has burst its tomb and escaped into life.” -George MacDonald

Poetry is on the side of being.

culture, poetry, quotes, , , , , ,

A Touchstone magazine article from a while back ponders “On the Loss of Poetry as Necessary Knowledge.” In it Stephen Faulkner warns,

“Our modern poetry is in pieces…. This makes a defense of poetry difficult. But defend it we must, for poetic knowledge is an essential kind of knowledge. Without it, our understanding of the world suffers a severe distortion. It is as if we have grown up in an age of one-eyed men who have heard rumors that people could once judge distances, depths, and colors by the use of two eyes, but are now reduced by this flat, prosaic information age that relies on scientific analysis as virtually our only source of knowledge. We are a century of Cyclops.”

Though Faulkner wrote that in the 20th century, I doubt whether he would think the situation has improved in the 21st. In the same year as the Touchstone article, Czeslaw Milosz published this offering that is a form of therapy for our distorted vision: In the introduction to the anthology of poetry that he compiled, The Book of Luminous Things, he writes:

“Many poems that I like or admire are not in this anthology because they do not correspond to my criteria of size and accessibility to the reader.”

“My proposition consists in presenting poems, whether contemporary or a thousand years old, that are, with few exceptions, short, clear, readable and, to use a compromised term, realist, that is, loyal toward reality and attempting to describe it as concisely as possible. I act like an art collector who, to spite the devotees of abstract art, arranges an exhibition of figurative painting….”

He also thinks we moderns are missing something essential to our soul’s health. Whereas Faulkner writes metaphorically of a problem with our eyes, Milosz says, also metaphorically but more generally, “We seem to be missing some vital organs…”

“I have written elsewhere of this deprivation as one of the consequences brought about by science and technology that pollutes not only the natural environment but also the human imagination. The world deprived of clear-cut outlines, of the up and the down, of good and evil, succumbs to a peculiar nihilization, that is, it loses its colors, so that grayness covers not only things of this earth and of space, but also the very flow of time, its minutes, days, and years. Abstract considerations will be of little help, even if they are intended to bring relief.

“Poetry is quite different…. Since poetry deals with the singular, not the general, it cannot — if it is good poetry — look at things of this earth other than as colorful, variegated, and exciting; and so, it cannot reduce life, with all its pain, horror, suffering and ecstasy, to a unified tonality of boredom or complaint. By necessity poetry is therefore on the side of being and against nothingness.”

Almost all of the poems are introduced with a line or two about what he likes about that one, as an example of good poetry. None of his own poems is included. Here is one from the collection with a teacherly comment from Milosz to introduce it:

Walt Whitman

“The strong presence of a thing described means that the poet believes in its real existence. That is the meaning of a programmatic and unfinished poem by Walt Whitman, ‘I Am the Poet,’ which rehabilitates a ‘naïve’ approach and rejects philosophy’s unfavorable opinion on the direct testimony of our senses.”

I AM THE POET

I am the poet of reality
I say the earth is not an echo
Nor man an apparition;
But that all the things seen are real,
The witness and albic dawn of things equally real
I have split the earth and the hard coal and rocks and the solid bed of the sea
And went down to reconnoitre there a long time,
And bring back a report,
And I understand that those are positive and dense every one
And that what they seem to the child they are
[And that the world is not a joke,
Nor any part of it a sham].

-Walt Whitman

The Plain Sense of Things

poetry, winter, , , ,

THE PLAIN SENSE OF THINGS

After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.

It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.

The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.

Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence

Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires.

-Wallace Stevens

By Oksana Berda

Since we are poor, a warmth.

poetry, reality, , , , , , , ,

FINAL SOLILOQUY OF THE INTERIOR PARAMOUR

Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one…
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

-Wallace Stevens

I discovered this poem on the blog Kingdom Poets, where the poet-blogger D.S. Martin wonders if Stevens ought even to be “mentioned in a blog about Christian poetry.” Martin also quotes a few speculative lines from a biographer of Stevens, as to the lifelong skeptic’s motives for receiving Christian baptism on his deathbed. I’d like to read more of what he wrote later in life, but the images and evocations of this poem are familiar enough to me to make me think that Wallace Stevens had truly tasted of the Kingdom of God, that Holy Spirit-quickened heart where Christ dwells, of which He spoke when He said, “The Kingdom of God is within you.”

St. Porphyrios said provocatively, “Whoever wants to become a Christian must first become a poet.” Father Stephen Freeman has quoted the saint when he writes about “what can drive us both to poetry as well as theology”:

“The reduction of the world and its ‘history’ are the tools of those who lack the imagination and patience to find the truth. The Fathers tell us to ‘pay attention.’ This is true with regard to the heart, but it is also true with regard to the world around us. Attention does not solve the mystery, but it at least acknowledges its presence and gives rise to enough wonder to make understanding possible at some point.”

“Evil is never creative. It is destructive and occasionally diverse in its activities. But creativity requires energy and commitment. Evil’s own entropy always reduces it to banality and boredom. It prefers prose: poetry is too much work.”

Fr. Stephen also quotes a poem from e.e. cummings, including the lines, “i do not know what it is about you… only something in me understands…”

The type of somethings that e.e. cummings refers to can’t be known intellectually, but they are the testimony of our own experience that “mystery is not only an aspect of the divine, but part of the nature of all reality. Everything is far more than it appears.”

I am eternally grateful to writers like Wallace Stevens who commit their strength of mind and length of days to sharing their glimpses of the mysterious reality behind the obvious,

…since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.