Our transcending energies are in communication with an incognito source more ultimate than the abyssal self, as its source of self-transcending. G&B 176
No way to get here now__snow flakes still stop and go
scurry over the black pond__gulls swivel nothing below
crow echos far off crow__I run into Han Shan
you name it that weird laugh__flash of mallard green gone
Our transcending energies are in communication with an incognito source more ultimate than the abyssal self, as its source of self-transcending. G&B 176
No way to get here now__snow flakes still stop and go
scurry over the black pond__gulls swivel nothing below
crow echos far off crow__I run into Han Shan
you name it that weird laugh__flash of mallard green gone
“The Panther” (1905) by Rainer Maria Rilke is a very popular poem. Rilke’s panther is as popular as Blake’s “tyger.” But Rilke’s panther, unlike Blake’s “tyger,” does not radiate terror and delight; on the contrary, Rilke’s panther seems to be a study in boredom and alienation. I include it here, as the work of a slaphappy poet, because I think the event portrayed is just that which makes a poet happy.
His vision, from the constantly passing bars
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.
As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance abound a centre
in which a mighty will is paralysed.
Only at times, the curtain of his pupils
lifts quietly. – And image enters in,
rushes down through the tense, arrested muscles
plunges into the heart and is gone.
Translation: Stephen Mitchell
There’s no doubting what this poem is initially “about”: this panther is in a cage in a zoo and is desperately unhappy. It cannot see beyond the bars: there is no world there. Its own will is disconnected from desire. But every so often suddenly an image startles it awake and pierces its heart.
Rilke does not say this event makes the panther happy. But it is a happening. Rilke was a slaphappy poet who believed that however bored he might become with the routines and necessities of existence, he could not discount the possibility of a happening such as happens to the panther.
This was originally composed for my slaphappypoet blog.
There is oneness that may drown us, as much as oneness that floats us free. G&B 177
bricks block our river views __ new towers hide our sky
they’ve sold the people’s spaces__ice covers the pond where I
ramble in Tu Fu’s absence __ a seagull touches down
rising immediately away__the sea returns to town
under the ice which breaks__its silence and starts to float
lifted from below by fresh__salt water clearing its throat
The human exceeds the human because it is the indwelling of the transhuman. There is something divine about us but we are not the divine. G&B 272
glitter of wind-driven water__across the molten mudflat
an empty Starbuck cup skitters__your voice Li Po in that
our selves pure passages__there not there now there
whiter white of a bufflehead__where to now wanderer
Kay Ryan’s “Chop” with a note on inner form
Chop
by Kay Ryan
The bird
walks down
the beach along
the glazed edge
the last wave
reached. His
each step makes
a perfect stamp—
smallish, but as
sharp as an
emperor’s chop.
Stride, stride
goes the emperor
down his wide
mirrored promenade
the sea bows
to repolish.
–from The Best of It: New and Selected Poems, (2010) p. 224.
Kay Ryan’s small poems expand in the mind of the reader to become maps of a world we barely recognize yet feel compelled to explore. Her style of fabled conciseness (Emily Dickinson is her cousin) seems to be governed by an extra awareness of what goes on beyond words. The process the poems enact seems allied to ascetic processes of meditation, and also to basic artistic form. I call this pattern “inner form” since it has no “surface markers” but inheres in the whole experience of the poem that points beyond itself.
Inner form, a pattern of experience before it is a verbal construct, begins “in” the world of things – “The bird / walks . . .”. The attention “follows” the object deeper into its world, and such attention prompts curiosity or even love. Call this stage the “other.”
The next phase of the pattern is the middle. The middle of inner form is “dialectical” since it involves the self in an exploration of its relationship to and with the other; this phase results not only a more complete knowledge of the other but also self-knowledge. To wit: “the glazed edge” is the observer’s note to herself; “the last wave” is a point in time for the observer.
“His each step” – we are following! – “makes a perfect stamp — “perfect to us, perfect for us! We are amused, and amused at ourselves to find such perfection. (“Perfection” is based on judgement so draws on our subjective values.) And so we create a metaphor that emerges from the thing itself: “smallish, but as/ sharp as an / emperor’s chop.” How happy we are to be able to say that phrase: “emperor’s chop”! How cool we know about chops, those seals used by emperors and . . . Japanese poets and artists. And the idea of “seal” is part of the original world of “selfhood” as experienced: a signature, a self.
The figure takes over: “Stride, stride” – do we mock it? – “goes the emperor”! How we feel his self-awareness, his sense of his being the emperor of all this wet sand! But of course HIS “self-awareness” is a double of our own.
We follow! He goes “down his wide / mirrored promenade” – and well, yes, we are watching ourselves in the glistening mirror, for surely the bird knows nothing of mirrors . . .
So we identify, as it were, with this bird.
As a continuing process with no fixed goal or end, this phase involves “self-transcendence”—the direction is away from the self towards an unknown X. In Ryan’s poem, the attention is now turned to the source of all this glistening stuff: “the sea bows” (we have read that somewhere, oh yes, Emily Dickinson’s poem about taking her dog to the beach–#656, “I started early, took my dog”). “The sea bows / to repolish.”
Those “chops” or “seals” of the emperor disappear as each wave travels up the gradual slope toward us.
Note comparisons with meditative processes of “emptiness.” As movement away from the solidity of the initial situation, this process is a “via negativa” – the kind of knowledge learned as this phase continues is marked by an increasing loss of certainty about the self. Our self changes during the poem from an everyday observer of the normal to a curiosity to metaphor-builder to an awakening to our own limits and the illimitable “sea.” (For Emily Dickinson, Ryan’s cousin, the sea is a favorite figure for death.)
But it’s the poem we love, the pattern that led us on. We are such suckers for that! The pattern itself, as “inscribed” or “fleshed” in the poem becomes a kind of knowledge. Not exactly self-knowledge, either, knowledge of an X we may call “transcendence as other” only because we don’t know what to call it. We have no name for the referent in the image of the sea which “bows” (ironically!) to “repolish” this surface which the emperor bird of our self keeps marking (up) as his own.
“Between nothing and God, there are deaths that let the ‘unborn infant’ be born.” G&B 27.
crow calls lost in the drizzle __ South Mill Pond low
fog of a January warm spell__muddy ooze where snow
was styrofoam cups a cast-off bra__empty high tide’s detritus
What trifles humans are – Wang Wei__gush of returning tide and yes
thrash and splash of ducks bathing__sunk in Wang Wei’s worn
serenities there’s all this silence__this breathing of the unborn
POND SONG 3.30
We are drawn to agapeic selving by this passing of the divine within us, and a passing that no longer makes it possible for us simply to be within ourselves. G&B 274
Spartina stalks outshine the snow__a thaw on Epiphany Sunday
ducks heads-down space the pond__ there’s something in the way
a young hen waits at the edge__ raising one long orange foot
to a spot needing attention__ high clouds open and shut
Pond Song 3.29
There is nothing empty about the nothing we have become. We are released to what is passing. G&B 340
such openings call you Xie__happenings of inner form
this town would box the ocean__you were here when last night’s storm
shaped snow down to the pond__snow clouds blow at my feet
and across glittering mudflats__by tide pools gulls repeat
unsayable things in the glare__ducks push through icy floes
into open water the moon moves__in Xie’s deep tracks I pause
[This essay was written for the blog metaxyturn.com]
I spent the last few years before college in the Bay Area of northern California. As a child I had driven up the Central Valley to visit Carmel on vacations–a pretty little tourist town on one side, on the other, the paradoxically named Pacific ocean– it is not particularly peaceful. Sublime is not too big a word for the Pacific crashing into that rocky coast. (Not to mention the sea lions, barking in the fog.) In any event, in my teens, Robinson Jeffers was one of my favorite poets. He could summon up my cherished sense of place in a few words: “Unbroken field of poppy and lupin . . .”
His reputation has grown since then; major editions have solidified his academic standing. He was championed by Czeslaw Milosz, and that helped his international standing. Here is “Carmel Point”:
The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses–
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupid walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads–
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff. — As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.
(from Wild Reckoning: an Anthology provoked by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, edited by John Burnside and Maurice Riordan, Calouste Gulbenkain Foudnation, 2004, p 159)
I loved the compact visionary imagery serving the prophetic intuition: “the image of the pristine beauty / Lives in the very grain of the granite . . .” Behold: “the very grain of the granite” (my dictionary confirms that “granite” is rooted in the Latin word for grain). A vision of the “pristine” (I believe Jeffers intended the true meaning of the word, which goes beyond science to myth). A vision to live by! Living with that vision includes inuring oneself to nature’s “indifference” and helped tune me to Hardy and other great modern writers.
But reread the poem in light of climate change: nature does “care” about what the spoiler has done to it. Jeffers’s confidence was misplaced. His “Carmel Point” is a myth.
Even the tremendous final line seems reductive now: “the rock and ocean that we were made from.” Well, of course, yes, that’s true, but there’s more, and poets are witnesses to the more as well as to the “less deceived” versions of human consciousness.
For me, as a poet Jeffers is more than a spokesman for an outmoded ecological view. The beauty of his images can still change minds. But if the ecological view turns out to be just another system (geological or otherwise), it will not have served the purpose it seemed to promise: an inclusive and open vision of existence on earth.
Jeffers’s vision of life draws strength from a firm awareness of finitude: everything passes. In light of this cosmic fact, human pride is foolish. Indeed, humans, taken as individuals, pass more quickly than other things residing on the earth. This is tonic for a young man who loves solitude and desires to grow up to be a poet. He is quite willing, he feels, to uncenter his mind and unhumanize his views. He has little to lose.
But it is not good enough for what I know now about human life and indeed the life of the earth. Ecological systems must be open to the “meta” dimension suggested by metaphysics: “meta” meaning both “with” and “beyond” (as William Desmond reminds his readers). We live with other beings on the earth; and each of us is “beyond” the other. The situation has a complexity beyond belief.
This level of complexity outstrips Jeffers’s vision of geologic time. There is more to time than time, there is eternity. We cannot know eternity but as a dimension of existence we must stay open to if we are to avoid turning the earth into our image. All of this arduous spiritual unhumanizing and ascetic awakening is to no avail without going beyond human dialectics to a new patience, perhaps “like” that of Jeffers’s vision of things, but unlike it in being patiently conscious of transcendence as other. Even the sublime imagery of granite and Pacific waves falls short of this transcendent other. We want to speak of the sacredness of the earth: it is sacred as an image of what is beyond “belief,” beyond system, beyond myth. Earth is a place of wonders, and sometimes they open our clogged mentalities to mysteries beyond words. Those poppies, those lupins!
