Calling Martha Stephens, keeping my promise!

blogging, poetry, Thoughts, United Kingdom

One of my favourite poems is by Stanley Kunitz. I came across his poems by reading his obituary a few years ago. I had a very curious reaction to the article I read about the poet, and immediately was drawn to read some of his work. Before I had done so at any depth, the curious part of this story identified itself – I wrote a poem about a poet I knew very little of, it arrived all by itself really. Now I am going to share this poem with you because in the space that we inhabit internetwise, I have been delighted to make a new acquaintance Martha Stephens via this blog page. I recommend her blog to you, and in our conversation I remarked how striking it is that an artist can connect regardless of the time or location they are writing in. So I present my poem to her, and to you as a comment on that everyday miracle. I don’t think it is a particularly good poem, but the provenance of it is interesting. Then I want to share one of my favourite poems of Stanleys.

In memory of Stanley Kunitz

Hear this; all poets, would-be wordsmiths,
Stanley is gone. Stanley Kunitz, died 101.
(Read and grieve, grieve and read)

A magician amongst wizards, Auden,
Cummins, Ginsberg went before,
overshadowing Stan, but not outliving;
the man , as was the poet, worthy
of our awe.

His lifetime lived in query,
of a father never known;
death by suicide, and Stan
warm in the womb.

(Read and grieve, grieve and read)

His muse played amongst
beloved plants and flowers,
man of spirituality,
knowing the depth
of their heavenly powers.
‘Desire and desire
and desire’ his hand me down,
a way to live, a tinderbox
to ignite others fire.

Loving Keats, and Blake and
struggling, as poets do.,
the chaos of being here,
and now; the conundrum.
Hear this; all poets, would-be wordsmiths,

Stanley is gone. Stanley Kunitz, died 101.

And this is the poem that I put to music and image, the poem that is playing continously in the background of my life. A wonderful evocation of how change is inevitable , and how as humans we need to be able to accept ourselves as we are, as we have been and knowing there will be new challenges to face.

The Layers

BY STANLEY KUNITZ

I have walked through many lives.

some of them my own,

and I am not who I was,

though some principle of being

abides, from which I struggle

not to stray.

When I look behind,

as I am compelled to look

before I can gather strength

to proceed on my journey,

I see the milestones dwindling

toward the horizon

and the slow fires trailing

from the abandoned camp-sites,

over which scavenger angels

wheel on heavy wings.

Oh, I have made myself a tribe

out of my true affections,

and my tribe is scattered!

How shall the heart be reconciled

to its feast of losses?

In a rising wind

the manic dust of my friends,

those who fell along the way,

bitterly stings my face.

Yet I turn, I turn,

exulting somewhat,

with my will intact to go

wherever I need to go,

and every stone on the road

precious to me.

In my darkest night,

when the moon was covered

and I roamed through wreckage,

a nimbus-clouded voice

directed me:

“Live in the layers,

not on the litter.”

Though I lack the art

to decipher it,

no doubt the next chapter

in my book of transformations

is already written.

I am not done with my changes.

Revering Joseph Cornell.

Art, blogging, books

Above is an assemblage by Joseph Cornell, the New Yorker who was a genius at bringing together ephemera, and producing assemblage art in a time when the genre wasn’t really considered as art. A collector extraordinaire,inspired by the surrealists and dedicated to the care of his brother whom he cared for and who sadly died early from his condition of cerebral palsy, this gentleman produced items that inspired a new generation of artists and writers, and well, just people. His work inhabits the hinterland between the reality we live in, and the dreams we have, the inner realities that can sustain and sometimes seem more meaningful than the exterior lives we lead. And that is why I love him. And that is why that love propelled me to produce my own small tribute to him. A mixture of images from some of his work mixed with my own journeys into unreality.

https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/164010242/hand-made-artists-book-original-and?ref=shop_home_feat

“..how to walk a clean path between obscenities.”

Art, books

‘Do you come to art to be comforted, or do you come to art to be reskinned?’ she asked in a 2003 interview with Jeanette Winterson.

The ‘she’ mentioned is one Ali Smith, novelist extraordinaire. Ali Smith was born the year after me, and it is always interesting reading a contemporaries view of the human experience. Reading Ali Smith is like submerging in a more real world than the one I live in. This is why reading excites me so much when the writing is so good you want to be there. Or aroundabouts, not necessarily in the middle of. But the things she writes speak more articulately to me than the world around me does. Increasingly I find myself an uncomfortable fit in a perplexing world of paradoxes. It is a world where we know more about the laws governing the universe than we have ever known before, and yet it is one that apparently is content to live at the surface of reality, less capable or desirous of teasing out meaning.

Ali Smith touches on this with the deftness and lightness of touch that invites you to the party. I want to keep reading and I don’t want to finish because when I finish it I have to re-emerge into today and the here and my now. Not always as stimulating I have to say, thinking about dragging the hoover, which isn’t a hoover its a Dyson but you will know what I mean. That’s the puzzling and delight of language. I use a word to describe a machine which is generically understood by the manufacturer of one of the original machines, but my machine is different and engineered by a more recent manufacturer.

So what I need to advise you is this – read ‘There but for the’ and I can almost guarantee you will find something in it that will delight you. Do I want to be Ali Smith? Probably . Well , I want to have her talent, and the energy and drive to work at finding a voice as compelling as hers. It entertains, it stimulates, it challenges, what’s not to like?

And as an aside, ‘There but for the… ‘ is one of my mantras. It has been a running commentary in my head since I was born into language. Great mantra, because it invites empathy and compassion at times when I might be feeling bad tempered, or mad.

If you want to read about the book there is a review here, but it is dusty compared to the book. Dive straight in, and forget the observations. It would be THE best read for a book group as it brings up lots of talking points to get controversial over.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/01/ali-smith-there-but-for-the-review

Go back to the title of the post; this is the morality behind all good art, all good human endeavour – the attempt to find a way of living our lives cleanly amongst the greed and envy of the human species, how to find wonder and glory and love amongst the debris from terror atrocities such as the young man hacked to death by a fellow human wielding a machete, just one example . Ali Smith relates an incident of such horrific violence . I won’t tell you more, only that it connects me to what I value about being human, our interconnectedness and reliance on one another as a species. I want to tell her.

Take up your pen, it is indeed mightier than the sword.

Life

Reading is a vital element of the person I have become. I have no imagination yon see, no innate ability to create a reality other than the one I am in. I rely on others to do it for me, and have had the good fortune to meet in print authors who have taken me by the hand and led me to places I would never see, and experience lives I will never live. As a young teen I read a biographic account of a young woman’s experience of working abroad amongst torturers and the victims of war. She was tortured herself, and her graphic description has never left me. She showed me how her life looked, how it feeled, how her faith empowered her. ( The book was Audacity to Believe, and Sheila Cassidy the writer, she was practising medicine in Chile while Pinochet was in power and was caught up in the horror, for a time she became a nun whilst in recovery from her ordeal,) My point is this, that her wriiting created an opportunity for me to comprehend something I would know nothing about, but which would change my view of the world. That is powerful. That is how writing works. One of the consequences of a sensibility lacking in imaginative power is that the present moment is the focus. I am not a planner, nor a traveller, I do not know how to fast forward myself imaginatively into a different context, which has far reaching consequences. Because I am a poor planner , I have developed a reactive personality, I fall into the next moment carelessly, and move across situations with less anxiety than a planner would. That is possibly the advantage of a lack of imagination. It is possibly the only one. To connect, a person has to have empathy, an ability to look at a possibility only imagined, not experienced, and it is through the extraordinary power of novelists and journalists that I have understood this. I know empathy can be learnt, because I had to learn it from the pages of books and the leaves of journals, the text of poets and philosophers writing throughout the ages and across cultures. Not everyone has the cultural background or family circumstances that provides the potential for growth; or the extent of growth that is desired. The hope for them is in the connections made for them by writers of all genres, released into the world and allowed to be absorbed into the core of themselves. Every writer who writes authentically from their own life is giving away the substance of life. Thats why writing is hard, and why good writing is handed on generation to generation. Writing not only records our heritage, writing IS our heritage.

David Foster Wallace lived with the realism, possibly the super realism of the depressive. He was aware of the nuances of his own and others thinking, and this is a difficult landscape in which to build a life. The depressive is not sad, he is dead. That is why Wallace explained that suicide is not a cry for help. It is the rational outcome of a depressives state of mind, the nihilistic understanding that the body continues to function after death of the mind has been experienced, and that is called Hell. What the depressive forgets in the midst of an episode, is that states of mind are generally temporary. They function like weather, and like weather, can only be ameliorated and not annihilated. His was a heroic life, a life where he wanted words to connect, to explain, to give himself some sense of who he was , who he could become, in a world that made no sense. All our lives are heroic in one sense, that we strive to make sense of an insensible, nonsensical world. We try, and keep trying because the alternative is one step too far for most of us. David Foster Wallace chose to die. I respect his choice. I respect his life, his endeavour to communicate. This post began celebrating my early delight in finding a world beyond my immediate experience, and it ends in celebration of all writers who bravely tell us their stories, and reflect our own humanity to us, the flaws, the hopes, the falls and the triumphs.

“Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.”
― David Foster Wallace

We all suffer alone in the real world. True empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with their own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple.”
― David Foster Wallace

Meaning What Exactly?

anthropology, Life, lifemeaning, literature, philosophy, Thoughts, writers

I am re reading this from 5 years ago, and it resonates still, and as it didn’t get much of an airing then, I am recycling it for another go! I came to it after reading an interesting article that made comparisons between some of the things written by Shakespeare with some of the Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. It fascinates me that today we are still turning to the wisdom of some human beings long gone, who lived very different lives , with very similar experience of being human.

I woke up this morning late, again, after another disturbed night. I woke up perturbed by a question I know is unanswerable, that thinkers far more erudite than I have asked themselves since time began and woefully have failed to satisfy themselves. What for? Why do we live the life we do? A few weeks ago my eldest shared with me one of his thoughts that bothered him, about how he understood we were on a continuum of development with the animal world in terms of consciousness, but how he was grappling with the idea that that continuum of consciousness could be shared with robots in the future. He wanted to know what separated us not from the animal world, as had bothered our predecessors, but what made us special and distinct from the new explosion of robot intelligence that is at its genesis. Naturally I don’t have any answers at my fingertips, but his speculation mirrors my own curiosity about our place in the universe. I had read enough about Leo Tolstoy to recognise his deep angst over a related query – what are we? Tolstoy is well known and revered for his literary novels, and the breadth of human experience he brings to them. He was dismissive of my hero Shakespeare , which upset me a little. Tolstoy was well educated, lived a comfortable life, had worldly success in his lifetime, married successfully, had children he loved , in short he had everything most people could aspire to. Then he had a crisis. Possibly we would call it a breakdown now, in a world that patholigises everything. In his ‘Confessions’ he relates his life story and how he continued to seek meaning from his existence, and how he could not find it. This is from a celebrated thinker who had people hanging onto his words,

“I felt that what I had been standing on had collapsed and that I had nothing left under my feet. What I had lived on no longer existed, and there was nothing left.” Chapter iii…..

………..“My life came to a standstill. I could breathe, eat, drink, and sleep, and I could not help doing these things; but there was no life, for there were no wishes the fulfillment of which I could consider reasonable. If I desired anything, I knew in advance that whether I satisfied my desire or not, nothing would come of it. Had a fairy come and offered to fulfill my desires I should not have know what to ask. If in moments of intoxication I felt something which, though not a wish, was a habit left by former wishes, in sober moments I knew this to be a delusion and that there was really nothing to wish for. I could not even wish to know the truth, for I guessed of what it consisted. The truth was that life is meaningless. I had as it were lived, lived, and walked, walked, till I had come to a precipice and saw clearly that there was nothing ahead of me but destruction. It was impossible to stop, impossible to go back, and impossible to close my eyes or avoid seeing that there was nothing ahead but suffering and real death – complete annihilation.” Chapter iv

In an attempt to master his demons, he investigates the contemporary worlds of science, philosophy, eastern wisdom and his fellow ‘men of letters’, but is unable to find any answers meaningful to him. In an attempt to survive he has to abandon his rational scepticism and disgust for the superstitions that enveloped the orthodox Russian Christianity and find some sort of peace in the convictions of the ordinary citizens who practised their faith . He recognises that he still has doubt, but accepts the living truth of ordinary men and women toiling throughout their lives and carrying with them the hope that faith offers.

“That there is truth in the teaching is to me indubitable, but it is also certain that there is falsehood in it, and I must find what is true and what is false, and must disentangle the one from the other. I am setting to work upon this task. What of falsehood I have found in the teaching and what I have found of truth, and to what conclusions I came, will form the following parts of this work, which if it be worth it and if anyone wants it, will probably some day be printed somewhere.”

Tolstoy was an old man when he died, and he chose to die away from his home after deciding that it was his duty to live among the citizens and away from his comforts of home and family. When he chose to find meaning within the boundaries of Russian Christianity , it led to a schism with his old way of life, he renounced his claim on his ancestral estate and broke off his relationships with the family. His main supporter during these final years was Vladimir Chertkov, a wealthy army officer whom the family called ‘The Devil’. Chertkov was with Tolstoy on his final journey, and as Tolstoy was dying of pneumonia he ‘’ remembered Tolstoy’s conception of human life, namely, that man is a manifestation of the spirit of God temporarily imprisoned within the confines of his individual existence and seeking to break out and merge with the souls of others and with God. And I felt with especial force that life, understood in this way, was a blessing, that was absolutely inviolate. In short, death was no more.’

Tolstoy is a fascinating man, containing paradoxes that emphasize his humanity. He never shrugged off the deep anxiety that he was not worthy enough, and this drive to improve his understanding of himself and the world propelled him to become great in the eyes of many of his fellow Russians and beyond that, befriending and influencing Mahatma Gandhi, impressed by Tolstoys stance on non-violent resistance.

That Tolstoy renounced his rational side to reclaim his understanding of the meaning in life, and to embrace the idea of a God, a universal spirit manifested in man raises the possibility in myself that I am ignoring perhaps the central concern. Perhaps I am looking in the wrong place for meaning, and like Tolstoy need to explore the avenues of mysticism to find meaning. The rational part of me shouts so loud, but I know too there is a voice somewhere deep inside that recognises mystery and the unknowable.

‘The truth is that Tolstoy, with his immense genius, with his colossal faith, with his vast fearlessness and vast knowledge of life, is deficient in one faculty and one faculty alone. He is not a mystic: and therefore he has a tendency to go mad. Men talk of the extravagances and frenzies that have been produced by mysticism: they are a mere drop in the bucket.In the main, and from the beginning of time, mysticisn has kept men sane. The thing that has driven them mad was logic. It is significant that, with all that has been said about the excitability of poets, only one English poet ever went mad, and he went mad from a logical system of theology. He was Cowper, and his poetry retarded his insanity for many years. So poetry, in which Tolstoy is deficient, has always been a tonic and sanative thing. The only thing that has kept the race of men from the mad extremes of the convent and the pirate-galley, the night-club and the lethal chamber, has been mysticism-the belief that logic is misleading, and that things are not what they seem.’

G. K Chesterton

What really provoked me into researching Tolstoy was this mornings unease on waking. I was thinking about how ordinary men live, in contrast to some extraordinary men. Is it easier to live with extraordinary talent or wealth or status ? Or more likely to derive a meaningful life from living an ordinary experience? It appears that wealth and status are no more likely to fulfil than being a baker, or a taxman, or a thief even. Alexander the Great had conquered half the Hellenistic world when he was in his twenties. Still died in a brawl with a mate. It’s all strange. I am going to leave you with this thought from an interview with Irvin D Yalom, the psychotherapist and novelist. Don’t know why, but it makes sense to me.

I find the idea of dying, of not existing for the next 5 billion years and beyond, chilling. It takes my breath away. Can you offer any comfort?

Well, did the last 5 billion years bother you? I mean, it seems to me that what happens after we die is not really the problem. It is a kind of peace. The challenge for us is how we live
between now and then, whether we have the courage to stop denying it and use our anxieties to live more authentic, meaning-filled and purposeful lives. – Irvine Yalom

That sounds simple, but it isn’t. I really isn’t. The paradox we live with every day of our lives is that we probably know how we can improve our own lives, but choose to perform duties and responsibilities in ways that are in conflict with that desire. We really don’t have infinite time to work out how we want to live our own lives. We have to make those choices today. Just saying.

People usually think that progress consists in the increase of knowledge, in the improvement of life, but that isn’t so

Progress consists only in the greater clarification of answers to the basic questions of life. The truth is always accessible to a man. It can’t be otherwise, because a man’s soul is a divine spark, the truth itself. It’s only a matter of removing from this divine spark (the truth) everything that obscures it. Progress consists, not in the increase of truth, but in freeing it from its wrappings. The truth is obtained like gold, not by letting it grow bigger, but by washing off from it everything that isn’t gold.