Findings

We’re going away for a few days, so I won’t be blogging. This means I’ll miss Poetry Friday as well as Cloudscome’s Garden Stroll on Sunday. Since I’ve come to really enjoy taking part in both of these, I thought I’d do a post combining this week’s gardening with a poem by the most eloquent of gardeners, Wendell Berry.

I can’t get over how satisfying it is to see the vegetables growing — even though I don’t EVER have cravings for vegetables. A few weeks ago, this is what the garden looked like:

Compare that to this week’s view:

We’re enjoying the harvest of lettuce, washed here by my two enthusiastic helpers:

Wendell Berry’s “The Man Born to Farming” captures some of the wonder of watching a garden take off on its own. The title suggests that it’s about the farmer, but really all he does is offer himself; the growing process takes over and does the rest:

The Grower of Trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,
whose hands reach into the ground and sprout
to him the soil is a divine drug…
His thought passes along the row ends like a mole.
What miraculous seed has he swallowed
That the unending sentence of his love flows out of his mouth
Like a vine clinging in the sunlight, and like water
Descending in the dark?

You can read this short poem in its entirety here (along with a few others). Of course he’s many times better at gardening than I am, but I have just a taste of what he’s feeling.

Our other major project has been to replace the stones that edge my flower garden beside the garage. Here it is a few weeks ago in its tumbledown state:

My parents-in-law offered us some large stones, and brought them over yesterday. In my zeal, I started right in hauling off the old rocks without waiting for my husband to come home from work. After all, as I mentioned before, I have two enthusiastic helpers! I didn’t make them do it, but I couldn’t hold them off from trying:

(Note the stuffed horse in the shoulder pouch!)

Then I hauled over the new rocks, using the hand truck they left. End result:

Want a closer look at that hosta?

I feel a little like Jack and the beanstalk with it… It just keeps growing.

All that’s left in the trailer is this pair of monstrous boulders. I’m leaving them for my husband. Seems like Wild At Heart said something about men needing a beauty to rescue and an adventure to live. He can kill both birds with one stone here — I mean, uh, two:

Me, I cuddled up for a good long time last night with an aching back and this.

It’s an electric back massager. I know, I know — a back rub is more romantic. But I was looking more for relief than romance! I think I’ll be able to move again today, at least enough to pack for our trip! Have a great week.

Almost forgot what day it was: Poetry Friday, hosted at Biblio File. Having just finished a reading meme, I’m thinking back to one of the formative influences of my early reading life: The Electric Company. Okay, it screams ’70’s! But where else has such an amazing cast ever been assembled in the cause of literacy?

Want to share my nostalgia-fest? Here’s a short clip (1:15) of the kind of word play that was so integral to the show’s success all those years ago. I guess you’d call it a “found poem,” one that helped convince me as a child that the world was filled with word-treasures, and reading would be the instrument for discovering a sense in nonsense:

(My daughters just watched it with me and enjoyed it… though they agreed that Uncle Sam looks “grumphy.”)

It’s Poetry Friday, hosted at Semicolon today.

I have a love-hate relationship with Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree. I love the generosity of its conception of love, but I also agree with the criticism that it entangles love with something darker and more abusive.

This poem, “The Wishing Tree” by Kathleen Jamie, offers a slightly more optimistic picture:

I stand neither in the wilderness
nor fairyland,

but in the fold
of a green hill,

the tilt from one parish
into another.

To look at me
through a smirr of rain

is to taste the iron
in your own blood;

because I bear
the common currency

of longing: each wish
each secret visitation…

The rest of the poem is here. I’m thinking of this poem today as part of my ongoing anxiety over living on the Marcellus Shale, supposedly an incredibly rich vein of natural gas the extraction of which is now being feverishly discussed in newspapers and village meetings. How will the huge amounts of waste water from drilling be disposed of? What chemicals do drillers pump into the ground to soften the rock? Why are they exempt from disclosure of the additives they use? How is it that they went so far as to divert streams and spill diesel fuel at several sites in the state next to us before anyone noticed? 

As lawmakers determine whether to streamline the regulatory process without having answers to many basic questions, I’m reflecting on how we treat the land like the wishing tree at best, the giving tree at worst. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say “they” – the gas industry, the municipal government, the landowners eager to drill and make a quick fortune. But it’s “we” that will experience the long-term effects. There’s already a large plume of TCE from an old spill spreading through the ground a few miles away from us, requiring ventilation systems to be installed in many homes. I was hoping the wisdom of experience just might take root before my children live through (and breathe through) more such consequences.

I bought this book on the strength of the excerpts in Bill McKibben’s Comforting Whirlwind: God, Job and the Scale of Creation. The translation was such a rich, vivid rendering of the poetry that I wanted an extended experience of it.

Turns out that Mitchell’s interpretive introduction was equally rewarding. Mitchell considers the work on literary terms, in the context of similar writings in other faiths and cultures. It seems to me that this gives his approach to the book the daring to confront some things I’d noticed, but that I haven’t seen addressed in commentaries on the book as a theodicy. (Not that I’ve seen many commentaries, so my experience doesn’t say much about the norm.)

For instance, what about the viscerally indignant response I have to God in the opening chapters, where he accepts the challenge from the accuser? Mitchell quotes Carl Jung, suggesting that the God of the opening pages is morally inferior to Job, and seemingly plagued by insecurity. He warns us not to take it too seriously though, since these pages are just a prologue to a tale that never revisits either the accuser or the court of heaven — a court that resembles that of “some ancient King of Kings, complete with annual meetings of the royal council and a Satan.”

And what about the difference between that opening picture of God, and the far more resplendent and terrifying one of the whirlwind later in the book? Mitchell suggests that there are two different realities at work, and the shift from one to the other is signalled by the shift from narrative to poetry. The prologue sketches out the Job of ancient legend, a legend that was probably in existence (says Mitchell) for centuries before this version was written. This is the Job James speaks of in the New Testament when he says, “You have heard of the patience of Job.” It bears little resemblance to the ranting, risking, “ferociously impatient” Job of the poetry. It’s as though the writer lays out the framework of the ancient legend, but then explores it in the entirely different and more searching mode of the poem, returning in the last chapter to the narrative to bring us back to earth.

I’ve said Mitchell’s approach is literary. Under that heading, he seems to approach the text through a mixture of psychoanalytical and archetypal criticism. For instance, he speaks at times in terms of ego and superego, suggesting that at the beginning of the book Job is full of anxiety, and his righteousness is motivated by fear. His “superego is riding high,” in Mitchell’s words. Similarly, different components of the story are viewed as externalized subjective states. The accuser, for instance, is seen as an embodiment of God’s doubts about Job. The whirlwind is seen not as an objective tornado, but a “cloud of unknowing,” a symbol of Job’s release of all he thinks he knows about God. (Elsewhere I’ve read an interpretation of the whirlwind as the bluster of the preceding arguments between Job and company.) Under the category of myth criticism is Mitchell’s reading of the book’s themes and imagery in terms of other myths. For instance, the descriptions given out of the whirlwind of the beast and the serpent Mitchell reads as “central figures in ancient near-eastern eschatology, the embodiments of evil that the sky-god battles and conquers at the end of time, just as he conquered the sea and the forces of chaos in creating the world at the beginning of time.” Another example would be his view of Job as a version of an ancient legend, such as one that existed in Sumer as early as 2000 BC. Beneath these ideas is a notion of a set of common archetypes underlying all myths.

I don’t have a problem with seeing this book in those terms… Its writer may very well have used artistic materials already in existence for a long time, but as scholars with far more authority than I have determined, he uses them in an inspired way to give inspired insight.

I could go on and on about the introduction. (Maybe I have already!) I love the discussion of Job’s friends, of their fear of contact with Job’s suffering, of their awareness that the dogmas they wield like an exoskeleton protect an inner lack of any real depth of understanding or experience. I love the discussion of the ending, and of the way the feminine figures so prominently in the form of Job’s daughters. But the most penetrating discussion has to do with the voice from the whirlwind, and Job’s response. Mitchell suggests that the vision of nature offers a worldview that

stands, of course, in direct opposition to the Genesis myth in which man is given dominion over all creatures. It is a God’s-eye view of creation before man, beyond good and evil, marked by the innocence of a mind that has stepped outside the circle of human values… What the Voice means is that paradise isn’t situated in the past or future, and doesn’t require a world tamed or edited by the moral sense. It is our world, when we perceive it clearly, without eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

This vision, Mitchell argues, has a transformational impact on Job. Rejecting the translation of Job’s response as groveling in the dust, he argues that when Job sees this vision, he doesn’t merely capitulate to God’s anger, or submit; he surrenders, and Mitchell’s translation of Job’s response reflects the difference. His discussion of the moral issues involved in his view of God’s response is challenging.

I come to the book with a different worldview and spiritual framework, but I felt that Mitchell gave me fresh insight. He is able to honestly wrestle with the text on its own terms because he has perhaps less of a stake in it; it seems he isn’t out to defend a pre-existing view of God — or at least, his set of pre-existing assumptions is different than mine. This book provides provocative analysis that serves as a good counterpoint to other commentaries, and a translation that seems to scrape all the varnish of the ages off this amazing, explosive poetry. (I should give some examples, but this post is too long already! You can see some excerpts of the poetry, and the intro in entirety, here at Mr. Mitchell’s site, along with reviews by more qualified writers.) Though I’m not ready to agree with the commentary on every point, it’s challenging and confrontational, and it explores aspects of the text that I haven’t seen addressed elsewhere. It’s well worth a read.

I love my early morning walks. There’s something about being out alone under the moon before the sun exposes everything, something about not being required to talk, something unbroken that prepares me for the long string of interruptions that will comprise the day.

Here’s Billy Collins’s “Silence”:

There is the sudden silence of the crowd
above a player not moving on the field,
and the silence of the orchid.

The silence of the falling vase
before it strikes the floor,
the silence of the belt when it is not striking the child.
 
The stillness of the cup and the water in it,
the silence of the moon
and the quiet of the day far from the roar of the sun.

You can read the rest here. Cloudscome at a wrung sponge is hosting the Poetry Friday roundup today. 

I’ve been reading the book of Job this week, which is full of poetry itself. It’s a rich, troubling, fascinating, in some ways deeply satisfying book. But in the back of my mind as I’ve tried to puzzle it all out, and confronted its magnificent refusal of easy rationality, has been this Emily Dickinson poem. I read it as a cryptic surrender to mystery:

301

I reason, Earth is short –
And Anguish – absolute –
And many hurt,
But, what of that?

I reason, we could die –
The best Vitality
Cannot excel Decay;
But, what of that?

I reason, that in Heaven –
Somehow, it will be even –
Some new Equation, given –
But, what of that?

Is it flippant — “So what?” Or a tiny New England fist shaken at God? Or a refusal of pedantic debate about matters that can’t be explained? Or an affirmation of the value of our timebound, rational life, nestled in the eye of a whirlwind of mystery?

The Poetry Friday roundup is hosted at Just Another Day of Catholic Pondering today.

I wasn’t aware that Madeleine L’Engle had written a volume of poetry till I went looking for this title, published in 2000, in the fiction section of the library and couldn’t find it. (I’ve discovered since that she has at least one other collection, The Weather of the Heart, which I’ve yet to see). Though L’Engle is most familiar for her fiction, her autobiographical Crosswicks Journal books and her treatise Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art have achieved a level of recognition as well. Her poems appear to be less well-known. I consider A Cry Like a Bell a treasure.

This book starts with a brief intro by Luci Shaw, and contains poems written from the perspective of different biblical characters, and filtered through L’Engle’s speculative imagination. Some of them are characters in starring roles, but quite a few are the the less textually fleshed-out but indispensable characters: Gershom, Herman the Ezragite, Balaam’s donkey, the ram slaughtered in Isaac’s place. A few characters warrant series: Mary, Abraham and Isaac, David. But many are given a single “bell-tone” in this feast for the ear.

I liked the book partly because I’ve written a few imaginative pieces myself from within the perspective of Bible characters who’ve caught my fancy. The Bible includes plenty of poetry, but it’s frustratingly terse about many of its main players. With the exception of the Psalms, we don’t get many passages of “inside” description of how characters feel. We can often guess easily enough; it doesn’t take much imagination to grasp how Mary felt at the foot of the cross. But generally speaking, those of us who enjoy the readerly voyage into other personalities aren’t often indulged in the biblical stories. So L’Engle’s poems supply a welcome glass of water to a parched, if perhaps unfair, expectation of the text.

It’s not a tepid glass, either. Much of the devotional poetry I’m familiar with flirts with (or dives headlong into) the sentimental or the dogmatic. But these poems are refreshingly honest, deeply reflective, and have a simplicity that feels more like life than a churchly emanation. In this volume, Malchus, the high priest’s servant whose ear is cut off by an enraged Peter, saves the ear that fell to the ground after Jesus gives him a new one. Isaac begins by stating flatly, “From now on, no fathers are to be trusted. I know.” The angel who appears to Mary in “Annunciation” is sorrowful, fearing to ask of her the task he knows will be almost unbearable.

The variety of speaker is matched by variety of form. Some, like the opening poem about Eve, are consciously molded to a form:

When we left the garden, we knew that it would be forever.
The new world we entered was dark and strange. Nights were cold.
We lay together for warmth, and because we were afraid
of the un-named animals, and of the others: we had never
known about the giants, and angels gone wild. We had not been told
of dwarves and elves; they teased us; we hid whenever they played…

This poem, with its carefully crafted six stanzas, six lines each, abcabc rhyme, poses a contrast to the rapid-fire staccato of the second poem about Ishmael and Hagar finding water in the wilderness:

Light
eye-thirsting for light
oh come
sight-drenching
night-wrenching
cloud-clearing
fountains of light
refreshing
renewing
caressing
blessing…

L’Engle attempts a number of different formal approaches: sonnets, dialogues, a character’s response to one of the epistles, others. The diversity testifies to L’Engle’s sophistication as an artist, and the content reflects the sweeping imaginative reach readers of her fiction have come to expect. I’m glad she tried her hand at poetry, especially considering her initial obstacles as a 5th grade poet, which she mentions self-deprecatingly in a commencement address here:

There was a poetry contest which was open to the entire school, and judged by the head of the English department. The entries weren’t screened, or I’d never have got one in. My poem won the contest, and my home room teacher predictably said, “Madeleine couldn’t possibly have written that poem. She’s not very bright, you know. She must have copied it from some place.”

Poor teacher. She lived to reconsider her criteria of judgment, I’m sure. I recommend A Cry Like a Bell to anyone who needs a dash of water on spiritual drought, to fans of L’Engle who (like me) may be unfamiliar with her foray into poetry, and to those looking for imaginative devotional writing to be savored.

There’s another review of this book online here, and a sampling of her poems from other sources here. Poetry Friday is at Wild Rose Reader this week.

645

Bereavement in their death to feel
Whom We have never seen—
A Vital Kinsmanship import
Our Soul and theirs—between—

So writes Emily Dickinson here. Her words capture a rhyme and reason behind the grief we feel over the children killed in last week’s earthquake in China. We mourn with these families we’ve never met because their story strikes at the heart of our shared humanity. 

That sorrow was reinforced by the news of another Chinese child, this one the youngest adopted daughter of singer Steven Curtis Chapman, tragically killed. I’ve liked Chapman’s music for quite a while, and went to one of his concerts a few years ago. It wasn’t just a show. He spoke out eloquently for the cause of adoption, and had set up a foundation to help interested families with the costs. Here’s a video of his acoustic performance of ”Cinderella,” written for his two youngest adopted daughters. (This is the more polished version, but I prefer the other, which includes his personal introduction.)

My prayers go out with those of many others for the survivors of the earthquake, many of whom lost their one and only child, and for the whole Chapman family.

Becky has the Friday poetry roundup today. I see that she’s posted another Chapman song, one that gives his perspective on tragedy. It’s well worth a listen.

Edited to add:

• Here is another article worth reading.
• Here is a special blog set up for people to express their condolences to the Chapmans.
• Here is the website for Shaohannah’s Hope, the adoption foundation set up by the Chapmans.

Sometimes lying awake makes molehills look like mountains. But more often, I’ve noticed the strange clarity that comes in the middle of the night. This is the up-side of my now predictable insomnia, startling awake around 2:00 and seeing something I really needed to see during the preceding day, but the daytime noise, and my daytime defenses, kept it hidden. I lie there in the quiet and understand: that’s why my child reacted that way; that’s why it bugged me so much when so-and-so said that; that’s how I should have handled that. I hate losing sleep. But I also need these moments.

Wendell Berry develops a similar theme, but with unmistakable irony, in ”Voices Late at Night.” It’s structured as a series of short prayers and their answers. Here are a few excerpts:

O Lord, until I come to fame
I pray Thee, keep the peace;
Allay all strife, let rancor cease
Until my book may earn its due acclaim.

It ends in strife, unknown.

***************************

Since I have promised wealth to all,
Bless our economy;
Preserve our incivility
And greed until the votes are cast this fall.

Unknown, it ends in ruin.

****************************

O Lord, despite our right and wrong,
Let Thy daylight come down
Again on woods and field and town,
To be our daily bread and daily song.

It lives in bread and song.

The entire poem isn’t available online, but it’s from Entries, Pantheon Books, 1994.

Poetry Friday is here today.

I listened to this story on NPR while making supper last night. It’s about a Chinese couple waiting while excavators dig out the building where their 2-year-old was staying with his grandparents. I wanted to somehow recognize their story, out there beyond the self-indulgent bubble of my blog with its books and ideas.

Frantic voices in another tongue
break the stillness of my kitchen.

They wait
for what is lost
to be found.

Long days, they wait –
propping one another up –
tossing the unraveling spool of hope back and forth
a gossamer thread
stitching them together.

The lost are found.

The child,
cradled in the arms of a grandfather,
his last vision the face of a grandmother
standing behind
steadying hands resting on Grandfather’s shoulders.

“Mommy is here” she moans into the rubble –
Another language, but an anguish that pierces me
stitching me to them
here in my kitchen half a world away.

Lost.
Found.
Lost.