From: http://www.grabbagiraffe.com

Learning From the Starfish:

         I have always been fascinated by the fact that starfish can grow back a severed arm.  We humans, unfortunately, are not so resilient. Like the starfish, we, too, live in pretty rough waters, where many forces tear at us physically and emotionally. Someone close to us dies, perhaps, or we break up with a lover, we become seriously ill.  It may seem at such moments that we are far less fortunate than the starfish.  He has lost an arm, but we have had our very hearts torn out of us!

         I watched a news story recently about workers who had been fired due to corporate downsizing.  I can only imagine how someone in that position feels. How do we recover from traumas of this magnitude?

         Yet these are only dramatic examples of what happens to all of us as we age and gradually lose our strength,  looks, health, even our memory.  When I was growing up, I easily memorized poems by Robert Frost and soliloquies from Shakespeare’s plays.  Nowadays I am lucky if I can remember my own phone number!  There are also spiritual losses, which are harder to put one’s finger on, but are equally devastating.  Modernist poetry in the Twentieth Century reflected a keen awareness of the way that contemporary life can rob us of our individuality, and ultimately our sense of meaning and purpose.  T.S. Eliot wrote in “The Hollow Men”:

 

         We are the hollow men

            We are the stuffed men

            Leaning together

            Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

 

 

         I am reminded of the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, who felt hollow and without substance.   The poem continues:

 

 

         Our dried voices, when

            We whisper together

            Are quiet and meaningless

            As wind in dry grass

            Or rats' feet over broken glass

            In our dry cellar...

 

 

         If there are any readers out there who have never felt like the Scarecrow at some point in their lives, I would like to meet them.  But I also remember what the Wizard told the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion:  that they already had everything they were searching for—  a heart, a brain, strength, and courage. They only needed to seek within to find out that these qualities had never been lost, and indeed were fully available to them.

         This latter part of the Wizard’s message, however, seems to have been lost on many of the great thinkers of our age.  The last century was an era during which many traditional beliefs and ideologies were radically questioned and ultimately abandoned by the intellectual elite.  Existentialism came into vogue, which taught that life has no overarching meaning or purpose other than the ones which we impose upon it by an act of will—  while physical science presented the world as an essentially blind play of material forces.  Freudian psychology portrayed an equally mechanistic view of the human psyche as being largely the product of brute and unconscious instinctual forces.

         The poets of the era, though deeply influenced by these skeptical trends, as evidenced by the work of Eliot and others, never fully bought into the idea that life was random or purposeless.  As a high-school student growing up in the late sixties,  I fell in love with poetry, which offered glimpses of a deeper, more mysterious potential in our human nature.  Raised in a nonreligious household, the words of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robinson Jeffers, and Gary Snyder became a kind of first scripture for me.  These poets were clearly tuned in to a place within themselves which was connected to the larger rhythms of nature, history, and the human spirit.  They had moved beyond meaninglessness to a mystical vision of our unity with the Greater Life beyond their skins.  Look at Jane Kenyon’s magnificent poem, “Let Evening Come.”

 

{Are you wanting a table (or art rule) behind Kenyon’s poem?  Or is this a weird paste-up residue from html code from a webpage?  I may be able to work something into the layout if you wanted it, but it will depend on textual/visual space during formatting.} 

 

 

         Let the light of late afternoon

            shine through chinks in the barn, moving

            up the bales as the sun moves down.

 

            Let the cricket take up chafing

            as a woman takes up her needles

            and her yarn. Let evening come.

 

         Through a series of vivid images of the onset of evening, Kenyon conveys a sense of enveloping mystery.  The night is upon her. She is fully aware that life involves loss, that things end.

 

         Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned

            in long grass. Let the stars appear

            and the moon disclose her silver horn.

 

{end table?}

 

         Yet she proclaims that we shall not be left “comfortless,” though she never discloses exactly how this comfort will arrive, or what form it will take.  (Read the poem in its entirety on Poets.org.  {http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16019 )}

         We have moved decisively beyond Eliot’s hollow men. There is darkness here, but no emptiness.  The order of the world is not yet visible, but the poet senses in the darkness itself a presence which confers meaning.  Consider the untitled poem {title? Jane Hirshfield does not give it a title} by a much earlier Japanese female poet, Izumi Shikibu.

 

 

         Although the wind

         blows terribly here,

         the moonlight also leaks

         between the roof planks

         of this ruined house.

 

 

            (Written ca. 995, translated by Jane Hirshfield,

                     The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems..., 1990.)

 

 

         Here, too, though “the wind blows terribly,” and she is exposed to the punishing elements of life, the poet sees the light of the moon, if only through the chinks in the roof planks of a ruined house.  The moon in the poetry of Zen represents the pure mind or unblemished nature of ourselves.  The poet is telling us that we can catch glimpses of our own true nature, but only in places where our defensive self-image has collapsed leaving gaps for something transcendent to filter through.  Jane Hirshfield goes on to comment:  “This poem reminds that if a house is walled so tightly that it lets in no wind or rain, if a life is walled so tightly that it lets in no pain, grief, anger, or longing, it will also be closed to the entrance of what is most wanted.”

         Which brings us to one of the themes for this issue of The Centrifugal Eye:  renewal.  We started out by looking at the kinds of losses that happen during the course of our lives.  In my reading, both Janes, Kenyon and Hirshfield, are suggesting that loss can, paradoxically, lead us  to a greater wholeness and deeper understanding.  But only if we fully embrace the loss, only if fearlessly we open ourselves to the darkness and inherent mystery of existence.  Here is one of my favorite Walt Whitman poems, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”:”

 

 

            When I heard the learn'd astronomer,

            When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

            When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide,

            and measure them,

            When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with

            much applause in the lecture-room,

 

 

         (Whitman becomes exhausted by the effort to name and quantify everything and wanders off under the night sky to experience firsthand the sublimity for which the learned astronomers can offer no rational explanations.)

 

 

         How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

            Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,

            In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

            Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

 

 

         Again, the idea that renewal is only possible when we leave the well-lit lecture hall of human reason and head off into the uncharted territory of the night sky.  A theme echoed in the following Rainer Maria Rilke poem, “Sometimes a Man Stands Up During Supper”:

 

 

            Sometimes a man stands up during supper

            and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,

            because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.

 

            And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.

 

 

         I can relate to Rilke’s observation that if the father does not go off, his children will have to do so in his stead:

 

 

            And another man, who remains inside his own house,

            dies there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,

            so that his children have to go far out into the world

            toward that same church, which he forgot.

 

 

            (Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Robert Bly.)

 

 

         My own father was a man of intense spiritual longings, who was, nevertheless, unable to move beyond the narrow rationalism of his upbringing into a sustaining faith.  As a result, I took Rilke’s journey to “the church that lies somewhere in the East,” spending over five years in India where I studied the Hindu tradition and practiced meditation.

         For me, writing and reading poetry is a continuation of this spiritual quest.  To create a memorable poem it is necessary to enter into a kind of “poetic trance” in which I dive into the “meaning-making” place within myself.  There is deep refreshment in going there.  I have come to realize that it is not really necessary to head off to India, or engage in endless meditation retreats to experience the spiritual renewal that all of us seek. It is enough to open oneself to the wonder which surrounds us.  I take heart from the poem, “Wild Geese,” by Mary Oliver.

 

 

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves...

 

 

                       

         Oliver goes on to suggest, through a series of arresting natural images, that all we really need to do is pay attention to the world around us.

 

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

 

            (Read the poem in its entirety online.  http://peacefulrivers.homestead.com/MaryOliver.html#anchor_14792)

 

 

 

 

The world “offers itself to your imagination.” The way to most deeply enter the world, in other words, is not through bare observation, or rational analysis, but the poet’s art of imagination, literally “making images.”  These images, however, are not arbitrary or merely “imaginary” creations. They are what the wild geese evoke from us.  These wild geese can be likened to the muse, who is active not just in practicing poets, but in all of us who sense within ourselves the intuition of our “place in the family of things.”

         So while it is true that we humans, unlike the starfish, can never regrow a severed limb, the doors of regeneration are open to us.  We may never again be as young, beautiful, healthy, and bright as we once were.  Loss is an unavoidable fact of the human condition.  Yet inward renewal is possible at any stage of life, if only we can come to see things through fresh eyes.  This is poetry’s task, and why I find it personally to be such a terrific blessing in my life.  Let William Blake have the last word.

{It’s my intention to leave the lines long, if they fit in final formatting; otherwise, they’ll be broken and indented traditionally.}

         If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.

            For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narow chinks of his cavern.

 

 

            (from “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:

                 A Memorable Fancy.”)