Trees

To be a giant and keep quiet about it,

to stay in one's own place;

to stand for the constant presence of process

and to always seem the same;

to be steady as a rock and always trembling,

having the hard appearance of death

with the soft fluent nature of growth,

One's Being deceptively armored,

One's Becoming deceptively vulnerable;

To be so tough, and to take the light so well,

Freely providing forbidden knowledge

Of so many things of heaven and earth

For which we should otherwise have no word -----

Poems or people are rarely so lovely,

And even when they have great qualities

They tend to tell you rather than exemplify

What they believe themselves to be about,

While from the moving silence of trees,

Whether in storm or calm, in leaf and naked,

Night and day, we draw conclusions of our own,

Sustaining and unnoticed as our breath

And perilous also--though there has never been

A critical tree---about the nature of things.

Howard Nemerov

Twigs (excerpt)

Neither music,
fame, nor wealth,
not even poetry itself,
could provide consolation
for life’s brevity,
or the fact that King Lear
is a mere eighty pages long and comes to an end…

And so
it has taken me
all of sixty years
to understand
that water is the finest drink,
and bread the most delicious food,
and that art is worthless
unless it plants
a measure of splendor in people’s hearts.

–Taha Muhammad Ali (From So What:  New and Selected Poems, translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin)

The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety--Alan Watts

““But in practice we are all bewitched by words. We confuse them with the real world, and try to live in the real world as if it were the world of words. As a consequence, we are dismayed and dumbfounded when they do not fit. The more we try to live in the world of words, the more we feel isolated and alone, the more all the joy and liveliness of things is exchanged for mere certainty and security. On the other hand, the more we are forced to admit that we actually live in the real world, the more we feel ignorant, uncertain, and insecure about everything.”

“But there can be no sanity unless the difference between these two worlds is recognized. The scope and purposes of science are woefully misunderstood when the universe which it describes is confused with the universe in which man lives. Science is talking about a symbol of the real universe. It is a convenient time saver for making practical arrangements. But when money and wealth, reality and science are confused, the symbol becomes a burden.”

“Similarly, the universe described in formal, dogmatic religion is nothing more than a symbol of the real world, being likewise constructed out of verbal and conventional distinctions. To separate “this person” from the rest of the universe is to make a conventional separation. To want “this person” to be eternal is to want the words to be the reality, and to insist that a convention endure for ever and ever. We hunger for the perpetuity of something which never existed. Science has “destroyed” the religious symbol of the world because, when symbols are confused with reality, different ways of symbolizing reality will seem contradictory.”

“The scientific way of symbolizing the world is more suited to utilitarian purposes than the religious way, but this does not mean that it has any more “truth.” Is it truer to classify rabbits according to their meat or according to their fur? It depends on what you want to do with them. The clash between science and religion has not shown that religion is false and science is true. It has shown that all systems of definition are relative to various purposes, and that none of them actually “grasp” reality. And because religion was being misused as a means for actually grasping and possessing the mystery of life, a certain measure of “debunking” was highly necessary.””

Alan Watts - The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety (via kenobi-wan-obi)(via catherinewillis)

 Source: kenobi-wan-obi

In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself, in a dark wood, where the direct way was lost. It is a hard thing to speak of, how wild, harsh and impenetrable that wood was, so that thinking of it recreates the fear. It is scarcely less bitter than death: but, in order to tell of the good that I found there, I must tell of the other things I saw there.

I cannot rightly say how I entered it. I was so full of sleep, at that point where I abandoned the true way. But when I reached the foot of a hill, where the valley, that had pierced my heart with fear, came to an end, I looked up and saw its shoulders brightened with the rays of that sun that leads men rightly on every road. Then the fear, that had settled in the lake of my heart, through the night that I had spent so miserably, became a little calmer. And as a man, who, with panting breath, has escaped from the deep sea to the shore, turns back towards the perilous waters and stares, so my mind, still fugitive, turned back to see that pass again, that no living person ever left.

Dante Alighieri

Inferno Canto I:1-60 The Dark Wood and the Hill 

What it is Like to Go to War

What Its like to Go to War--Bill Moyers with Karl Marlantes

At 40 minutes during this engrossing interview with Bill Moyers Karl Marlantes (November 20, 2012), the author of the Vietnam novel Matterhorn and more recently the non fiction account of "What It is Like to Go to War" speaks of the crushing effect of combat on the minds of soldiers during World War II.

And I think about, there's sort of several ways that the mind can go. In World War II, there was only-- several ways out. The war had to be over or you had to be wounded bad enough that they never sent you back or you could die. And about a quarter of the casualties were psychiatric. A quarter.
What that's telling me is that the mind says, "I've got to get out of here. This is just not good for me. This is not good for me. How am I going to do it? I'm going to go crazy. That's how I'm going to do it." And how did they solve that? They said, "We’re going to give them all a length of service, so that they know when it's over." Vietnam, you know, the Army had 12 months, the Marines had 13 months. The psychiatric casualty rate dropped to something like two percent.

This strategy reminds me of the countdown traffic lights that eliminate the uncertainty of the duration of waiting at a traffic signal.  

Countdown Traffic Lights...the countdown traffic light is convenient since it also illustrates just how short the duration of a red light actually is. Waiting 20 seconds can last forever if you don’t actually know that it is 20 seconds. In this case uncertainty is a stressful experience that may only be eliminated by embracing the low-risk of jaywalking.

However, by showing the duration of a red light, the countdown traffic light effectively eliminates uncertainty thereby reducing cognitive stress since we are no longer charged with closely monitoring the signal while pondering the decision to stay or cross.

Waiting for the red light to turn green patiently reduces enormous stress on the part of driver (and pedestrian alike).  On the other hand, a countdown green light has the opposite effect at least with regard to safety as motorists and pedestrians will speed up in order to "make the light" often causing more accidents then uncertainty might have predicted.

Made me wonder:  Are we born with a "length of service" that provides the same effect of reducing uncertainty?  Sure, there is a lottery as to which day will be the last but we can depend upon averages to eliminate that issue.   Are we less stressed knowing that all of this will come to an end some day and do not have to choose to go insane to be removed from the situation?

IT IS NOT you who call. It is not your voice calling from within your ephemeral breast. It is not only the white, yellow, and black generations of man calling in your heart. The entire Earth, with her trees and her waters, with her animals, with her men and her gods, calls from within your breast.

Nikos Kazantzakis "Asktiki"

The Cry Is Not Yours--Nikos Kazantzakis

THE CRY IS not yours. It is not you talking, but innumerable ancestors talking with your mouth. It is not you who desire, but innumerable generations of descendants longing with your heart.

--Nikos Kazantzakis "Askitki"

THE GOOD LIFE

You stand at the window.
There is a glass cloud in the shape of a heart.
The wind's sighs are like caves in your speech.
You are the ghost in the tree outside.

The street is quiet.
The weather, like tomorrow, like your life,
is partially here, partially up in the air.
There is nothing you can do.

The good life gives no warning.
It weathers the climates of despair
and appears, on foot, unrecognized, offering nothing,
and you are there.

 - Mark Strand

Just this. Just this, this room where we are. Pay attention to that. Pay attention to who's there. Pay attention to what isn't known there. Pay attention to what is known there. Pay attention to what everyone is thinking or feeling; what you're doing there. Pay attention. Pay attention.

 - W. S. Merwin

A little rain, a little blood. Black fingernails in August; and going berserk, going bananas. As if entrapped in a tropical heatwave, with dozens of whirlwinds swirling in one's mind, one thinks of a way out, or a way in: out of the scorching bosom of a volcano, and in – into the centre of a raging hurricane. And tracing the labyrinthine ways of your mind, the haphazard vagaries of your thoughts at ease, the odds and ends of your mental surplus you carelessly throw at the world, one wants to be at a loss, in a maze; amazed, and amazingly unabashed.

  - Adam Zagajewski

Some thing I want to say:

This Chinese character, a knife hovering over the heart and pronounced    REN    means patience.   Or it implies patience or what patience might imply.   The Chinese written language so poetic allows for the fact that it may mean much more or something else simultaneously.   A knife hovering over the heart that cuts deeply.  

Constraint?  Threat!  Annihilation--imminent and dangerous.  Or not?  A prolonged and unrequited anxiety.  Unfulfilled yearning.  Clearly, I would suggest, not a healthy prescription for the poor heart.  Certainly not for the pure heart.  Or, ought the heart to be severed?  To be cut in two?  Would that then  kill the heart?  Or might  the heart   exist in two?  Patience may imply the willingness to exist with the heart in two places.  Not unlike a parent   whose heart  lies outside her body for the rest of her life yet beats palpably beneath her breast.   To be patient might imply to be willing and able to exist with the heart in two places.  One in expectation, and the other in fulfillment?  To live with total acceptance and surrender to the heart below the knife?   To wake each day split in two the same way as the samurai warrior who wakes each day to his own death before putting on his sandals?

Now that I have had my say

 ….you will remember nothing:

Or do you?

The Choice

I met a young writer yesterday who proclaimed boldly the desire to make a living from her work.  Already four unpublished novels she aims to tailor her writing to what she perceives to be the market.  I don't know how any of this works, it is clear.  But I suspect strongly that the motivation for money, even just a little enough to get by, misdirects the effort.  

The Choice

The intellect of man is forced to choose
perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
When all that story's finished, what's the news?
In luck or out the toil has left its mark:
That old perplexity an empty purse,
Or the day's vanity, the night's remorse. 

William Butler Yeats