making more tracks than necessary

Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. ~ Mary Oliver ~

[stephenlamb82]

"Cultural pessimism is always fashionable, and, since we are human, there are always grounds for it. It has the negative consequence of depressing the level of aspiration, the sense of the possible. And from time to time it has the extremely negative consequence of encouraging a kind of somber panic, a collective dream-state in which recourse to terrible remedies is inspired by delusions of mortal threat. If there is anything in the life of any culture or period that gives good grounds for alarm, it is the rise of cultural pessimism, whose major passion is bitter hostility toward many or most of the people within the very culture the pessimists always feel they are intent on rescuing. When panic on one side is creating alarm on the other, it is easy to forget that there are always as good grounds for optimism as for pessimism—exactly the same grounds, in fact—that is, because we are human. We still have every potential for good we have ever had, and the same presumptive claim to respect, our own respect and one another’s. We are still creatures of singular interest and value, agile of soul as we have always been and as we will continue to be even despite our errors and depredations, for as long as we abide on this earth. To value one another is our greatest safety, and to indulge in fear and contempt is our gravest error. Sigmund Freud called Americans Lollards, intending no compliment. Still, I hope he was was right. I hope that, whoever we are and by whatever spiritual or cultural path we arrive at Lollardy, we do and will share a generous and even a costly readiness to show our respect for all minds and spirits, especially for those whose place in life might cheat them of respect. It may be that the variety of cultures exists to show us that the histories that form them differently all yield value. The spiritual and intellectual wealth of nations has flowed into this country, enriching it in the degree that those who brought their histories and traditions have been good stewards of their special wealth and good interpreters of it to the larger society."

I'm making my way through The Givenness of Things, Robinson's new collection of essays, reading a couple a week with time in between to process them, and wanted to read these paragraphs from "Reformation" aloud to everyone else in the coffeeshop on Friday to combat some of the thoughtless noise of the week. Since I only read them to a couple people, I thought I might as well post them here too.

[stephenlamb82]

PARNELL: …We must forget about all—all the past injustice. We have to start from scratch, or do our best to start from scratch. It isn’t vengeance we’re after. Is it? MERIDIAN: I don’t want vengeance. I don’t want to be paid back—anyway, I couldn’t be. I just want Lyle to be made to know that what he did was evil. I just want this town to be forced to face the evil that it countenances and to turn from evil and do good. That’s why I’ve stayed in this town so long!

James Baldwin, “Blues for Mister Charlie” {a play} I'm working my way through James Baldwin's plays. Currently up: “Blues for Mister Charlie,” the play he wrote loosely based on the 1955 killing of Emmett Till. Read this just last night, and it seems appropriate to post here today. Parnell is the white friend who knows that justice won't be served at the trial, if it even happens, and Meridian is the father of the black boy who was murdered.

[stephenlamb82]

Good art is a truing of vision, in the way a saw is trued in the saw shop, to cut more cleanly. It is also a changing of vision. Entering a good poem, a person feels, tastes, hears, thinks, and sees in altered ways. Why ask art into a life at all, if not to be transformed and enlarged by its presence and mysterious means? Some hunger for more is in us — more range, more depth, more feeling; more associative freedom, more beauty. More perplexity and more friction of interest. More prismatic grief and unstunted delight, more longing, more darkness. More saturation and permeability in knowing our own existence as also the existence of others. More capacity to be astonished. Art adds to the sum of the lives we would have, were it possible to live without it. And by changing selves, one by one, art changes also the outer world that selves create and share.

Preface to Jane Hirschfield’s Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World. She read this last night at Vanderbilt before she began sharing her poems.

[stephenlamb82]

A story like mine is necessarily partial, not only because of the nature and reliability of traumatic memories, but because while truth is a matter of fact, it is also a matter of perspective. Which facts stand out in our memories and which details seems to us significant decent on which truths matter to us. That does not mean that there is no fact of the matter about what happened in Édouard Roditi's Paris apartment on August 1, 1990, but it does mean that there is not just one correct way of representing the events of that night. How we tell a story, which parts we choose to emphasize and which parts we leave out, is a reflection of our unconscious biases as well as our interests, that is, what we care about. Truth is a matter of interpretation; it is partial and subject to perspective. ...In addition to the details of my experience that never made it on to these pages because they are lost to memory, it is part of the nature of storytelling to embellish and omit for emphasis. When we recount our own tales we focus on the features that to us loom large and omit the ones that to us seem irrelevant. Studies show that it is likely that we do this early on, when we first give linguistic shape to our narrative, such that over time we don’t even see ourselves as exaggerating or minimizing.

Karyn L. Freedman - "One Hour in Paris" Picked this up because of my interest in books that combine personal narrative with research. Her summary of current research and thought on trauma, PTSD, and panic attacks, interspersed with her own story of learning to live with the aftermath of a traumatic event, is really good and well worth your time.

[stephenlamb82]

“Love is a badly depreciated word. It’s a word you mustn’t use except in context, some kind of context. I mean, your arms around somebody is a context.” “People have learned to put “just” in front of the name of their occupation. “I’m just a farmer.” One of the most disconcerting things I’ve heard in my life, in public meetings, is to hear perfectly intelligent people stand up and say, “I'm just a farmer, but…” and then say something really worthwhile.” “Optimism and pessimism are programs. It means you’ve already decided ahead of time how things are going to come out. And you’ve, in effect, taken possession of the future in the name of optimism or pessimism. You’ve reduced the future to your sense of how it is going to turn out. Hope is a different matter, because hope is, well, hope is the opposite of despair. As you know.” “Knowledge without affection leads us astray. Affection leads us, by way of good work, to authentic hope.”

Some quotes from Wendell Berry's Yale 2013 Chubb Lecture

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4c3GdB461s

[stephenlamb82]

Second Life by David Whyte My uncourageous life doesn’t want to go, doesn’t want to speak, doesn’t want to carry on, wants to make its way through stealth, wants to assume the strange and dubious honor of not being heard. My uncourageous life doesn’t want to move doesn’t even want to stir, wants to inhabit a difficult form of stillness, to pull everything into the silence where the throat strains but gives no voice. My uncourageous life wants to stop the whole world and keep it stopped not only for itself but for everyone and everything it knows, refusing to stir even a single inch until given an exact and final destination. This uncourageous second life wants to win some undeserved lottery so that it can finally bestow a just and final reward upon itself. No, this second life never wants to write or speak, or cook or set the table or welcome guests or sit up talking with a stranger who might accidentally set us traveling again. This second life doesn’t want to leave the door, doesn’t want to take any path that works its own sweet way through mountains, doesn’t want to follow the beckoning flow of a distant river nor meet the chance weather where a pass takes us from one discovered world to another. This second life just wants to lie down; close its eyes and tell God it has a headache. But my other life my first life, the life I admire and want to follow looks on and listens with some wonder, and even extends a reassuring hand for the one holding back, knowing there can be no real confrontation without the need to turn away and go back away from it all, to have things be different, and to close our eyes until they are different. No, this hidden life, this first courageous life, seems to speak from silence and in the language of a knowing, beautiful heartbreak, above all it seems to know well enough it will have to give back everything received in any form and even, sometimes, as it tells the story of the way ahead, laughs out loud in the knowledge. This first life seems sure and steadfast in knowing it will come across the help it needs at every crucial place and thus continually sharpens my sense of impending revelation. This first courageous life in fact, has already gone ahead has nowhere to go except out the door into the clear air of morning taking me with it, nothing to do except to breathe while it can, no way to travel but with that familiar pilgrim movement in the body, nothing to teach except to show me on the long road how we sometimes like to walk alone, open to the silent revelation, and then stop and gather and share everything as dark comes in, telling the story of a day’s accidental beauty. And perhaps most intriguingly and most poignantly and most fearfully of all and at the very end of the long road it has travelled, it wants to take me to a high place from which to see, with a view looking back on the way we took to get there, so it can have me understand myself as witness and thus bequeath me the way ahead, so it can teach me how to invent my own disappearance so it can lie down at the end and show me, even against my will, how to undo myself, how to surpass myself: how to find a way to die of generosity.

Still working my way through David Whyte's Pilgrim, and this is another favorite.

[stephenlamb82]

I've mentioned inspiration. Contemporary poets answer evasively when asked what it is, and if it actually exists. It's not that they've never known the blessing of this inner impulse. It's just not easy to explain something to someone else that you don't understand yourself. When I'm asked about this on occasion, I hedge the question too. But my answer is this: inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It's made up of all those who've consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners - and I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous "I don't know." ...This is why I value that little phrase "I don't know" so highly. It's small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended. If Isaac Newton had never said to himself "I don't know," the apples in his little orchard might have dropped to the ground like hailstones and at best he would have stooped to pick them up and gobble them with gusto. Had my compatriot Marie Sklodowska-Curie never said to herself "I don't know", she probably would have wound up teaching chemistry at some private high school for young ladies from good families, and would have ended her days performing this otherwise perfectly respectable job. But she kept on saying "I don't know," and these words led her, not just once but twice, to Stockholm, where restless, questing spirits are occasionally rewarded with the Nobel Prize. Poets, if they're genuine, must also keep repeating "I don't know." Each poem marks an effort to answer this statement, but as soon as the final period hits the page, the poet begins to hesitate, starts to realize that this particular answer was pure makeshift that's absolutely inadequate to boot. So the poets keep on trying, and sooner or later the consecutive results of their self-dissatisfaction are clipped together with a giant paperclip by literary historians and called their "oeuvre" ...

Wislawa Szymborska's Nobel Lecture, "The Poet and the World" http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1996/szymborska-lecture.html

[stephenlamb82]

The Sun by David Whyte This morning on the desk, facing up, a poem of Kavenagh's celebrating a lost love. "She was the sun," he said, and now she still lives in the fibre of his arms, her warmth through all the years folding the old man's hand in hers of a Sunday Dublin morning. Sometimes reading Kavanagh I look out at everything growing so wild and faithfully beneath the sky and wonder why we are the one terrible part of creation privileged to refuse our flowering. I know in the text of the heart the flower is our death and the first opening of the new life we have yet to imagine, but Kavenagh's line reminds me how I want to know that sun, and how I want to flower and how I want to claim my happiness and how I want to walk through life amazed and inarticulate with thanks. And how I want to know that warmth through love itself, and through the sun itself. I want to know that sun of happiness when I wake and see through my window the morning color on the far mountain. I want to know when I lean down to the lilies by the water and feel their small and perfect reflection on my face. I want to know that gift when I walk innocent through the trees burning with life and the green passion of the pasture's first growth, and I want to know as lazily as the cows that tear at the grass with their soft mouths. I want to know what I am and what I am involved with by loving this world as I do. And I want time to think of all the unlived lives: those that fail to notice until it is too late, those with eyes staring with bitterness, and those met on the deathbed whose mouths are wide with unspoken love. Every year they keep me faithful and help me realize there is more to lose than I thought and more at stake than I could dream. They remind me why I want to be found by love, why I want to come alive in the holiness of that belonging, and like Kavanagh I want to be be courageous in my terrors. I want to know in life or death all the ways that warmth of that great rose fire sun in its heaven has made me. And everything that made me has been a sun to my growing, that is the article of my faith, even the darkness of that soil that went before the time of light was another kind of sun. What I am is what I have been grown by, the sun, that great love, all the many small loves and that one love too who waited so long to find me and who has always walked by my side folding my remembering hand in hers.

I've been spending some time with David Whyte's poetry lately, and this is one of my favorites in "House of Belonging."

[stephenlamb82]

Empathy is always perched precariously between gift and invasion. Empathy isn't just remembering how to say "that must be really hard"--it's figuring out how to bring difficulty into the light so it can be seen at all. Empathy isn't just listening, it's asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see. A 1983 study titled "The Structure of Empathy" found a correlation between empathy and four major personality clusters: sensitivity, nonconformity, even temperedness, and social self-confidence. I like the word "structure." It suggests empathy is an edifice we build like a home or office--with architecture and design, scaffolding and electricity. The Chinese character for "listen" is built like this, a structure of many parts: the characters for ears and eyes, a horizontal line that signifies undivided attention, the swoop and teardrops of heart. Rating high for the study's "sensitivity" cluster feels intuitive. It means agreeing with statements like "I have at one time or another tried my hand at writing poetry" or "I have seen some things so sad they almost made me feel like crying" and disagreeing with statements like: "I really don't care whether people like me or dislike me." This last one seems to suggest that empathy might be, at root, a barter, a bid for others' affection: "I care about your pain" is another way to say "I care if you like me." We care in order to be cared for. We care because we are porous. The feelings of others matter, they are like matter: they carry weight, exert gravitational pull. ...We should empathize from courage, is the point--and it makes me think about how much of my empathy comes from fear. I'm afraid other people's problems will happen to me, or else I'm afraid other people will stop loving me if I don't adopt their problems as my own.

Some favorite lines from the eponymous essay in Leslie Jamison's new book, "The Empathy Exams."