Wizardry 2016: Notes

Reminder:

What I need more of in my life, what I need to remember, is wild magic, not rule bound and law bound magic. Everything you need to learn, you can, from the trees, the wind, the old stones, the lake. No explanations or justifications are necessary. I am far more wild than that. I need to remember and embrace the wild.

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It feels sometimes like all I know anymore is despair, doubt, suffering. But a wizard's way begins in words. Naming is a powerful thing. Change the words, and you change the story, and maybe the story's ending. Words are a wizard's tool, although there are many things behind words. Use the tools, change yourself, change the world.

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Another thing about wizardry and wizards: They notice everything. Everything. And they never lose their sense of wonder. Even at ordinary things. Everything is a source of wonder.

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Half of wizardry, like empathy, is deep listening. Listen to what the world tells you. Most people can't shut up long enough to actually listen to anything. Are you that afraid of silence, that nervous about gaps in social interaction? Try just listening for awhile, without spending all your energies thinking of your next reply.

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If you want to leave a tribute who an artist who made a difference to you, who changed your life somehow, do what that artist did: don't copy what everyone else is doing, make something transcendent, memorable, and durable. Make it count.

Basho said: “Do not imitate the masters. Seek what they sought.”

Be just as good as your gods. That's the minimum tribute they deserve.

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Anentropic

I don't believe in apocalypse, which says that everything must finally grind down to its final end.

I do believe in apokatastasis, which says that there is nothing that cannot be redeemed.

When's the last time you went and sat next to a bed of flowers. Not to touch them, brush your hand through them, though that is good to do. Not to look at them, at their beauty, though that is also good.

Just to be with them. Just to be a companion to what lives.

I resist entropy. I refuse to succumb to that downward slide into black hole abyss without putting up enough of a fight to at least slow down that last end. Every time we do something that brings more light, more love, into the universe, we slow down entropy, we slow down the eventual heat-death of the universe, if only by a little bit. Every time we act to serve life, to be in the service of life's health and joy, we slow down death. It adds up. Every little thing helps.

There is nothing that cannot be redeemed.

Straw for the Fire: Theodore Roethke

The other day I was at the used book store, selling off some books I no longer needed. While they looked over my treasures, I browsed their poetry shelves. In the end, they offered me enough store credit for me to take home a treasure to add to my own poetry collection: a collection of late, posthumous, and excerpted writings by poet Theodore Roethke.

Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke, 1943-63. When he died in 1963, Roethke had left behind almost 300 spiral notebooks full of aphorisms, poetry fragments, notes about teaching poetry, commentaries, entire poems either unfinished or early versions of published poems, and more. He wrote in these notebooks for twenty years, letting his mind rove freely; there are poems in many stages of completion, including many versions he worked on of poems now well-known, worked over till he finished them. Roethke was very much a re-writer, a reviser, a shaper. This is partly because he was primarily a formalist poet, working in forms both old and invented, and was very careful about his word choices, his craft. At heart, though, Roethke was a poet of inspiration, even of lyrical mysticism. His poems all mean something, The collection is edited by poet David Wagoner, who was first Roethke's student, later his colleague at the University of Washington.

This is a fantastic collection of material that I had not seen before. I have all of Roethke's books of poems, including the final Collected Poems. I have long known his poetry. I have heard it set to music, and brilliantly set, by one of my own professors in music composition, William Bolcom. (Seek out the song cycle "Open House" and you'll be impressed.) The collection shows a poet's mind at work. The fragments and aphorisms about poetry, and also about teaching literature, are worth the price of admission. The first half of the book, though, is poems, both complete and in fragment, many never seen before this publication. A short example, very much typical of Roethke's mature poetic voice, as follows:

She moved, gentle as a waking bird,
Deep from her sleep, dropping the light crumbs,
Almost silurian, into the lap of love. . .
She moved, so she moved, gentle as a waking bird,
The bird in the bush of her bones singing;
Woke, from a deep sleep, the moon on her toes.

I'm not much on metered rhymed poetry, nor on neo-formalism, which is more often reactionary than visionary—but Roethke's voice is unique, always more visionary than not. Roethke has a perfect, light touch for rhyme. It always makes sense, never clumsily chiming on the ear the way lesser formalists often do. It's not all about end-rhyme, for example.

The most interesting part of Straw for the Fire for me, however, is the second half of the book, the prose section. I always like to read poets writing about poetry, about how they work, about how poetry is a way of life. Roethke gives us many sublime insights, over a range of topics. Wagoner has arranged the book into topical sections, with time-ranges based on the notebooks they were excerpted from. This arrangement gives focus to otherwise random thoughts covering much time and many topics. Some of what Roethke writes is very close to my own thinking, and when we diverge he is still worth considering. Roethke is a poet who always needed to deal with transcendence, with things mysterious and beyond the ordinary. He was a constant, skeptical explorer. His internal poems, his psychological poems, are among his best.

Like many poets who are his disciples, he is considered at times to be a philosophical poet; unlike many who imitate him, the philosophical force of his poetry is real, and profound. Roethke can write in the abstract, about Big Ideas, but he compels your attention, your desire to follow in thought where he is leading. He does not dull or become intellectual; he remains sharp and visceral. This is a poet who, even when he writes of the life of the soul, does not bore.

Here's a bit of poem from the book, to bolster this point:

Outside time
Beyond the focus of this dark,
Give me one pulse of that heart,
One push from those lungs,
One touch of his ribs,
And I'd dive into the bright
Heart of the night, I'd take on
With the thin bones of my hands
Every weak weed of my life. Their petals fall
To the ground before his imagined shadow.
I am neither near nor far, nowhere in time,
O now nothing but hasps and needles,
With a young snake's tongue to rise an inch from his face:
Only that air he breathes,
With the flaming heart
Of a heart. . .

Here are a few excerpts that I bounce off, from the Prose half of the book. I will spend some time thinking about them, and they will draw out responses in both thought and poems. There are many more that I could also quote here, but a small sample will suffice for now.

§

A poet: someone who is never satisfied with saying one thing at a time.

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The things that concern you most can't be put in prose. In prose the tendency is to avoid inner responsibility. Poetry is the discovery of the legend of one's youth.

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Dangers:
Substituting words for thought.
The sneer is easy to master, and usually the mark of the adolescent.
Beware when you think you have found what you want.

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It is hard to be both plain and direct and not appear a fool to contemporaries fed on allusions, sybilline coziness, hints and shadows.

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It's the damned almost-language that's hardest to break away from: the skilled words of the literary poet.

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A poem that is the shape of the psyche itself; in times of great stress, that's what I tried to write.

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The poem that is merely painful revelations: my impulse is to tell you everything—which may destroy everything.

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When you roar, make sure it's from a true disquietude of the heart, not a mere temporal pitch. . . In the end, if you aspire to the visionary's toughness, you not only have to chew your own marrow, but then must spit it in your neighbor's eye.

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Live in a perpetual great astonishment.

Dag Hammarskjöld's Markings: An Appreciation

At the Goodwill retail thrift store in Delavan yesterday—a place I often find good stuff, especially good books—I found an old hardcover edition of Markings by Dag Hammarskjöld (trans. from the Swedish by Leif Sjöberg and W.H. Auden). (I also found new copies of Zen & Zen Classics, a redaction of R.H. Blyth's multi-volume work edited and with drawings by Frederick Franck; and Thomas Merton's Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander.)



(I pause here to add that I think this is a beautifully designed and printed edition of this work. As a book it's been brought back into print several times, but the trade paperback editions most commonly available today do not have the solidity, heft, textured paper, or beautiful typeface used in this early hardcover edition, which I believe to be a later printing of the first edition. I photographed the cover, above, and a few pages from inside the book, below, to make this point more obvious.)

Hammaskjöld was one of those great minds of the first half of the 20th C., thinkers and writers who my parents revered. Growing up, there were always books around by Albert Schweitzer, Albert Einstein, and Hammarskjöld's one famous book, published after his death. Many people of my parents' generation universally knew and admired all of these great men, as much for their social work as their scientific or artistic work. I grew up in a household where this thinking was available to me whenever I sought it out. The first time I read Markings I must have been in my teens; I remember liking it, but mostly intellectually. It was when I re-read it, probably just after college, when I was going through a personal crisis, that Markings first left a deep mark on me: I recognized in it a kindred spirit who was asking the same questions as I, and thus helped shepherd me towards some of my own answers.

Markings is an aphoristic journal, essentially a record of a man's spiritual progress. It contains almost no references to his daily life; it is an inward journal, a record of what he had learned that stayed with him as wisdom. This book remains a classic of 20th C. spiritual literature, appealing to non-religious New Agers and more conventionally religious thinkers alike. Hammarskjöld was a true ecumen. He described his book, which he had written for himself over many years, as a sort of white book concerning my negotiations with myself—and with God.

Dag Hammarskjöld was a Swedish national who spent his career as a public servant, first gaining prominence on the board of the directors of the Bank of Sweden. But he is best known for being a two-term Secretary-General of the United Nations, beginning in 1953. He was a Secretary-General who was widely admired and respected, and he was present for several important historical occasions and crises, which he participated in resolving. He died in 1961, in a plane crash in Africa, on his way to negotiate a cease-fire between UN and regional militia forces.

My family was in India at that time; we often received the news quite late, for example, Time magazine would get to us, sent by family, but months late. I have a young boy's memory of my parents being upset by the death of this man, when the news reached us finally

In re-reading Markings again, what strikes me now, this time, in the wake of my own life's major changes these past few years, is how very Zen-like Hammarskjöld's words can be. In this book, he is engaged with his inner "negotiations" and the outer world is barely mentioned. Death and life, and the wrestling with them to create meaning, are confronted again and again. But he also knew the still, calm center that one arrives at through meditation, through enlightenment experiences, or through contemplative prayer. He writes:

We all have within us a center of stillness surrounded by silence.

One of his short almost-poems in Markings reads:

Tomorrow we shall meet,
Death and I—
And he shall thrust his sword
Into one who is wide awake.

That could stand as a Zen master's death-poem, in the Japanese tradition of a final poem being dictated to one's disciple's from one's death-bed. It contains a warrior's stance, but also a spiritual master's stance. Both are true, in Hammarskjöld, both alive and awake. And in fact, he did die while engaged in his work as a spiritual warrior, journeying to engage in negotiations for peace. In the book, the line appears: In our era, the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action. That is a prophet's dictum, or a warrior-saint's.

There are hints in Markings that the writer was a visionary, hints that he may have had oceanic or mystical experience. Opening to a page almost at random, I find:

Now you know. When the worries over your work loosen their grip, then this experience of light, warmth, and power. From without—a sustaining element, like air to the glider or water to the swimmer. An intellectual hesitation which demands proofs and logical demonstration prevents me from "believing"—in this, too. Prevents me from expressing and interpreting this reality in intellectual terms. Yet, through me there flashes this vision of a magnetic field in the soul, created in a timeless present by unknown multitudes, living in holy obedience, whose words and actions are a timeless prayer.

I want to respond to this again, now, and I find I can only paraphrase. Yet this passage, among others, made me feel, during that aforementioned re-read of this book during my own difficult times, connected and less alone in my experiences. I may own a bit of my enduring sanity to Dag, simply because he validated me at a time I needed validation.

I have often opined that, at the core of every spiritual tradition or world organized religion, there originally lay a mystical experience of Union with the Divine. All the rest is local interpretation: we put things into words based on what we know, and often must use analogy or metaphor, or parable, to describe the Union. This is why so much poetic wisdom sounds the same, coming from so many different sources.

Hammarskjöld, who saw the universal in the individually human many times, affirms this insight:

The ultimate experience is the same for all.



He goes on to point out where Meister Eckhart, and the Taoists and Confucianists all same similar things. Elsewhere he re-frames this question as a swipe at the tendency in us, like the Pharisees, that seems to always want to ossify our morals into rigid codes:

Jesus' "lack of moral principles." He sat at table with publicans and sinners, he consorted with harlots. Did he do this to obtain their votes? Or did he think that, perhaps, he could convert them by such "appeasement"? Of was his humanity rich and deep enough to make contact, even in them, with that in human nature which is common to all men, indestructible, and upon which the future has to be built?

I hear so many echoes in this of other wise minds of this past century: Frederick Franck; Thomas Merton; Albert Schwietzer; and many more. No matter what tradition of faith these minds were raised in, they all went past the parochial and achieved the universal, fully human. (Indeed, Franck explicitly discusses this process and goal in many of his books.)

Yet part of Hammarskjöld's complete humanity lies in his encounters, again and again, with the darker aspects of humanity; with the shadow; with pain and suffering. This is strongly reflected in Markings. A few sections pulled out of the book, again at semi-random:

That piece of pagan anthropomorphism: the belief that in order to educate us, God wishes us to suffer. How far from this is the assent to suffering when it strikes us because we have obeyed what we have seen to be God's will.



The pure, simple self at the hour of waking—and the first thing it sees—its grotesque image in the mirror of yesterday.

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Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for.

A mere sampling: there are many other such passages, and others even darker, full of doubt and crisis. To be fully human means to live fully in the shadow as well as the light. You cannot strip part of the self and remain whole.

How am I to find the strength to live as a free man, detached from all that was unjust in my past and all that is petty in my person, and so, daily, to forgive myself?

Life will judge me by the measure of the love I myself am capable of, and with patience according to the measure of my honesty in attempting to meet its demands, and with an equity before which the feeble explanations and excuses of self-importance carry no weight whatsoever.

Yet he does not revel in such awareness of his own limits:

Not to brood over my pettiness with masochistic self-disgust, nor to take pride in admitting it—but to recognize it as a threat to my integrity of action, the moment I let it out of my sight.

This is the self-awareness of the spiritual warrior, one who knows both his strengths and limits, and monitors his self not out of obsessive self-regard but as a captain watches her troops. In order to maintain integrity of action, to act out of integrity, in a manner internally consistent with one's ethics and moral compass.

I'll end with one last quote from Markings, one that to me represents both the author's doubts about his purpose, and my own. This is a question I often find myself asking of myself. Hammarskjöld speaks to egoless action here, to right action, in a manner that again reminds me of Zen. He also reminds me of why I write my own journals and notes, and helps me remember the best, most natural way to accomplish that writing: not for glory, but as a way of remembering, and marking, the Way. I am humbled when I read this again, and reminded to keep in check my own tendencies towards spiritual pride and literary ambition, neither of which I really want to feed. I have not chosen to take Hammarskjöld's extreme option of waiting till after my death to let anyone read my writings—although there are a few in that category—yet I do share his urge towards egolessness of expression and away from vanity.

You ask yourself if these notes are not, after all, false to the very Way they are intended to mark.

These notes?—They were signposts you began to set up after you had reached a point where you needed them, a fixed point that was on no account to be lost sight of. And so they have remained. But your life has changed, and now you reckon with possible readers, even, perhaps, hope for them. Still, perhaps it may be of interest to somebody to learn about a path about which the traveler who was committed to it did not wish to speak while he was alive. Perhaps—but only if what you write has an honesty with no trace of vanity or self-regard.

Writing Aphorisms

Sometimes in life it's time to synthesize, to crystallize, to reflect upon experience in short, pithy sayings. These are called aphorisms. The word comes to us via French, sourced from the Greek aphorismos: to define, from apo- + horizein to bound. Aphorisms have come to mean a concise statement of a principle. Often short, pithy, and witty, aphorisms are a practice many writers have engaged in since antiquity.

The Gnostic Gospel of Thomas opens with the line: These are the secret sayings that the living Jesus spoke and Didymos Judas Thomas recorded. It's in some ways the only Gospel I read anymore, as it seems closest to the source.

Oscar Wilde was a gifted aphorist. Many of his throw-away lines are wit embodied.

Yesterday I was thinking about dialogues with other writers I had been engaged in recently, discussing books, poems, and related matters. I am occasionally frustrated with my peers, as at times many seem to cling to opinion beyond reason. The aphoristic phrase came into my mind late yesterday:

An opinion that is not an informed opinion is just a prejudice.

I can accept an opinion from someone, even if I disagree with their opinion, if I am assured that they've done their reading, and have thought about their opinion. Right opinion, in the sense of right livelihood and right being, is based on experience, on going out there and seeing things for yourself, on having read the book you're making remarks about. Nothing is more awful than a book review where it's obvious the reviewer didn't actually read the book.

If I state an opinion, you can be certain I've done my homework, and I've thought about it. That's my rule of operation. Perhaps it's a variation on the stoic theme given by the Norwegian side of my ancestry: If you haven't got anything good to say, don't say anything. That's an aphorism with some cultural weight. I reinterpret it for myself as: I'll say any damned thing I want to, but before I say it I'll be sure to know what I'm talking about.

Which leads me to my follow-up aphorism:

Opinions based on prejudice are generally impervious to reason.

Nothing is as impervious to discussion as a fixed opinion, in which your interlocutor is intolerant of disagreement, rejects alternative interpretations, and likes to have the last word, even if it means shouting down all opposition in the most blatantly foolish manner visible. (Y'all know who you are: Literature World is full of such bloviators.)

Quick knee-jerk opinions, it must be made clear, are not the same as intuitions—those sudden knowings which are beyond doubt. Intuition is as available as sunlight; and it can be developed as a skill. If you take an instant emotional dislike to someone, that's usually prejudice, not an intuition—because genuine intuition tends to be emotionally neutral, just data, just a knowing, a gnosis that arrives unbidden and unwanted. Knee-jerk opinions are indistinguishable from prejudices primarily because they evince no thoughtfulness beforehand. Few things reveal a fool like the agility with which they put their foot in their mouth.

Which leads me to my next follow-up aphorism:

Prejudice reveals itself by its own reflexes.

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So you see the process by which one might convert some thoughts into aphorisms. This is one way to write aphorisms, by distillation and compression to the least statement of a principle. It requires compression in one's writing style, and focus on the essentials. One is encouraged to prune away anything extraneous. In this, writing aphorisms is like writing haiku: nothing but the core, nothing extra.

When a writer reaches a certain age in their writing experience—which is coincident with but not identical to their calendar age—it's time to start distilling one's experience into aphorism. Think of it as refining what you know. You can find witty or humorous ways to state it, and you can also just be blunt. I appreciate aphoristic wit when I encounter it, but my own style tends towards the plain-spoken, even blunt.

As much as I enjoy reading discursive writing, the model of which is Montaigne's Essays, one can distill numerous aphorisms from the broad weave. Oscar Wilde often disguised his best aphorisms as asides in dialogue. One living novelist who often gives us many excellent aphorisms hidden within the weave of his narratives is Neil Gaiman.

When I was in high school, Creative Writing was offered as an English elective class in 11th Grade. I took that class with pleasure—so much for MFA programs, we did it in high school, thank you very much—and discovered I had a flair for the writing exercises and ways of thinking our teacher presented. My creative writing teacher, in fact, became one of my creative life's first real mentors, encouraging me to go further, helping me with extra reading and lessons, and encouraging me to submit my finished writings to contests and publications. So it was that a short story I wrote that year was published, and won a national award.

I look back on this now and realize that this was the experience that kindled my first real interest in writing. Writing as self-expression, certainly. But more importantly, it was a realization that writing was another artistic medium by which I could interpret the world to myself. Writing was a lens through which I could explore the world, explore myself, explore my friendships and relationships, and learn about them. Writing is a kind of self-learning, a form of reflection. The living paradox is that one goes inward to learn about the outer life: writing as a practice is solitary, introverted, but what it can teach you about living and relationships is profound. As novelist Jerzy Kosinski once remarked in an interview, Novels are a rehearsal for life. Now there's an aphorism for the ages.

One exercise we were given in creative writing class was to carry around a notebook and notate everything we observed. I did this with my full attention, not realizing at the time that this was precisely the same kind of mindfulness that I later learned from studying Zen meditation. Pay attention! I'm sure I looked a little strange, walking around my neighborhood that week, stopping every few feet to scribble some few words in a palm-sized notebook. But what I learned from that practice, which I still do, is to observe closely, to see things clearly just as they are, without the filters of prejudgment, and transform them into words. This practice was foundational. It is the root and spring of writing even now. I am a writer who observes, who chooses the telling detail from the broad weave, who follows the image or experience wherever it leads. I have become an explorer, an adventurer; which is one reason I keep inventing new poetic forms rather than repeating stale ones: it's a way of fitting experience into the most perfect display container.

What does this have to do with aphorisms? My creative writing teacher was fond of them. One day we all wrote aphorisms in class, and some of the kids revealed both wit that made us all laugh, and some real wisdom that made us stop and think. There were several aphorisms our teacher was fond of repeating on appropriate occasions. Here are two of them, one humorous, and one profound.

Monads are essentially windowless.

And they also have a topological value of zero. Think about it.

The Kingdom of Boredom is within you.

I have to say, I took that latter saying to heart. I have therefore almost never been bored. In thinking about the aphorism, I realized that boredom is a luxury of the young, and never a necessity. It's easy to be bored if you're young and understimulated. But the solution is to go out and do something. Or invent a game. Or go for a bike ride. Or read a book. I did all of those things. I can honestly say that boredom is something I rarely experience.

When I do feel something like boredom, I now recognize it as acedia, the dryness of spirit, the noonday demon, that is a warning sign of spiritual discontent, of the nearness of the dark night of the soul. Acedia is a modern condition par excellence, in our culture which supplies us with Unlimited Stuff and Endless Entertainment, but at the unfortunate cost of depth of feeling. Far better to be passionate than bored. Far better to be engaged with life at full volume, at full intensity—as with Walt Whitman, Odysseas Elytis, Frederick Franck—than to be dried up, bored, and mental. Oscar Wilde's pose of dissolute boredom was in truth a pose: a mask that concealed his passionate engagements with life, words, and relationships. It seems to me that the greatest poets, the greatest artists, have all been passionately engaged with life—sometimes with its quietude and silence rather than its voluptuousness, but engaged nonetheless.

This morning I began reading Kathleen Norris's book Acedia & Me: A marriage, monks, and a writer's life. There are almost no books currently that explore acedia as the root of modern discontent. We're not really bored, we're not really depressed, as a culture, we're in the grip of acedia. The only other books I know of that approach our cultural malaise from this direction are Andrew Solomon's brilliant book The Noonday Demon: An atlas of depression, and the "Via Negativa" section of Matthew Fox's book Original Blessing.

I look back over where I began this essay, which has wandered far off into parallel universes, and I realize that my original aphorism, An opinion that is not an informed opinion is just a prejudice, in fact does contain a comment about acedia. Prejudices are one symptom of acedia. Opinions that mean nothing in the grand scheme of things are another. As Norris writes:

It is indeed acedia's world when we have so many choices that we grow indifferent to them even as we hunger for still more novelty. As luxury goods and pornographic images permeate the culture, no longer the province of a select few, we discard real relationships in favor of virtual ones and scarcely notice that being overly concerned with the thread count of cotton sheets and the exotic ingredients of gourmet meals can render us less able to care about those who scrounge for food and have no bed but the streets. Now more than ever we need contrarians like Thomas Merton, who once told a Louisville store clerk who had asked what brand of toothpaste he preferred, "I don't care." Merton was intrigued by the man's response. "He almost dropped dead," he wrote. "I was supposed to feel strongly about Colgate or Pepsodent or Crest of something with five colors. And they all have a secret ingredient. But I didn't care about the secret ingredient." Merton concluded that "the worst thing you can do now is not care about these things."
—from Kathleen Norris, Acedia & Me, p. 125

The worst thing, if you listen to the advertising and marketing gurus. The best thing, if you listen to your soul.

And that's where I was going with this meditation on writing aphorisms all along: As a way that I have used to combat acedia in my own soul. Writing as a tool of self-revelation, indeed, or self-expression. But much more, writing as a tool of discovering and making relevant to the self what really matters: of discovering what there is to live for, on those days I can't find any other reasons to keep on going.

Acedia, the Kingdom of Boredom, is a killer because it kills meaning. Camus' crisis of doubt in the meaning of existence itself can lead either to death or to overcoming. (And Camus always points us towards overcoming, unlike Sartre, who pointed resolutely at death.) Writing is fighting back the noonday demon, beating it with sticks and braces, till it retreats. If only for today.

Fight acedia. Write an aphorism. Don't be bored. Give a damn about what really matters.