What are you listening for, who
already know everything I have
to say? You are nothing but
a tourist of the night.
What appears empty to you
is in fact a fully inhabited tenement.
Your inscrutable fruit is far
more pungent than you can know,
who do not risk becoming
someone else’s morsel.
Who cooks for you?
*
Response to last night’s post. (In bird guides, the barred owl’s call is usually described as sounding like “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you-all?”)
I am listening for an owl that doesn’t call.
It’s as taciturn as the coyotes whose presence here
we mainly infer from footprints.
Night ripens on the boughs, its blue-black fruit
an antidote to the 24-hour Wal-Mart of the soul
in which I sink.
A video version of my poem from last week. It took about four hours to make, process, and upload a video for a poem that I wrote in twenty minutes.
What do the numbers 4 or 7
feel like to a bird
with four or seven notes
in its invariable song?
Imagine
being able to count
without knowing anything
of those empty placeholders
the numbers.
Imagine going
only by your pulse
& a feeling of completion
when the 4 or the 7
have been sung.
Imagine being able
to know
one number
with the body,
never with the mind.
A door opening
only to the right key.
The right forest
complete with mate
& nest & young
waiting beyond.
To hold the attention of a Sunday school class, my brother said, he once had to eat a piece of chalk. He never said what the lesson was about, just that the chalk was tasteless and thoroughly indigestible.
Watching a video of Borges giving a talk, I’m struck by the way he keeps smiling at something three feet above the heads of his audience. And how, seeing his smiles come and go, they smile too, pleased by their proximity to such a famous solitude which they are sure must be filled with light.
I’ve kept all the glass ashtrays from when I used to smoke, lovely as the stained glass of a church in which I can no longer kneel.
Someone asked, “What is my self?”
Jôshû said, “The oak tree in the front yard. Look at it.”
A monk asked, “I come from far away. Master, what is your teaching?
Jôshû said, “I do not tell it to the people.”
The monk asked, “Why do you not tell it to the people?”
Jôshû said, “This is my teaching.”
The monk said, “If you do not tell it to the people, why should they come across the seas to visit you?”
Jôshû said, “You may be a sea, but I am not.”
The monk said, “Well, then, what is there within the sea?”
Jôshû said, “I hooked one fish.”
The official Sai asked, “Can even a great master go to hell?”
Jôshû said, “I lead the way.”
Sai said, “But why should an excellent master, of all people, go to hell?”
Jôshû said, “If I don’t go, how can I meet you there?—Yoel Hoffman, tr., Radical Zen: The Sayings of Jôshû (Autumn Press, 1978)
Yesterday’s episode of Bill Moyers’ Journal featured W.S. Merwin, in a wide-ranging discussion that kept coming back to what I gather is the apophatic premise of his new, Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Shadow of Sirius. PBS won’t let me embed the video, but it does provide a full transcript I can quote from.
BILL MOYERS: You titled this new book, the one that just one the Pulitzer Prize, “In The Shadow of Sirius”. Now, Sirius is the dog star. The most luminous star in the sky. Twenty-five times more luminous than the sun. And yet, you write about its shadow. Something that no one has never seen. Something that’s invisible to us. Help me to understand that.
W.S. MERWIN: That’s the point. The shadow of Sirius is pure metaphor, pure imagination. But we live in it all the time.
BILL MOYERS: How so?
W.S. MERWIN: We are the shadow of Sirius. There is the other side of– as we talk to each other, we see the light, and we see these faces, but we know that behind that, there’s the other side, which we never know. And that — it’s the dark, the unknown side that guides us, and that is part of our lives all the time. It’s the mystery. That’s always with us, too. And it gives the depth and dimension to the rest of it.
BILL MOYERS: But this is the first poem in the book. Would you read this for us?
W.S. MERWIN: That must be “The Nomad Flute.”
You that sang to me once sing to me now
let me hear your long lifted note
survive with me
the star is fading
I can think farther than that but I forget
do you hear medo you still hear me
does your air
remember you
o breath of morning
night song morning song
I have with me
all that I do not know
I have lost none of itbut I know better now
than to ask you
where you learned that music
where any of it came from
once there were lions in ChinaI will listen until the flute stops
and the light is old againBILL MOYERS: “I have with me all that I do not know. I have lost none of it.” What — how do you carry with you what you do not know?
W.S. MERWIN: We always do that. I think that poetry and the most valuable things in our lives, and in fact the next sentence, your next question to me, Bill, come out of what we don’t know. They don’t come out of what we do know. They come out of what we do know, but what we do know doesn’t make them. The real source of them is beyond that. It’s something we don’t know. They arise by themselves. And that’s a process that we never understand.
BILL MOYERS: And that’s true of poetry.
W.S. MERWIN: That’s true of poetry. All the — I think poetry always comes out of what you don’t know. And with students I say, knowledge is very important. Learn languages. Read history. Read, listen, above all, listen to everybody. Listen to everything that you hear. Every sound in the street. Every bird and every dog and everything that you hear. But know all of your knowledge is important, but your knowledge will never make anything. It will help you to form the things, but what makes something is something that you will never know. It comes out of you. It’s who you are. Who are you, Bill?
[...]
Poetry’s really about what can’t be said. And you address it when you can’t find words for something. And the idea is, is that the poet probably finds words for things. But if you ask the poet, the poet will tell you, you can’t find words for it. Nobody finds words for grief. Nobody finds words for love. Nobody finds words for lust. Nobody found — finds words for real anger. These are things that always escape words.
[...]
One of the great themes that runs through poetry, all poetry, and I think is one of the reasons for poetry, one of the sources of poetry, one of the sources of language, is the feeling of loss. The feeling of losing things. Not being able to hold, keep things. That’s what grief — I mean, grief is the feeling of having lost. Of having something being out of reach. Gone. Inaccessible. And I think that that’s a theme that runs through much of all poetry. But I think the language itself and poetry are born the same way.
As I said before, you know, I think poetry’s about what can’t be said. And I think that language emerges out of what could not be said. Out of this desperate desire to utter something, to express something inexpressible. Probably grief. Maybe something else. You know, you see a silent photograph of an Iraqi woman who’s husband or son or brother has just been killed by an explosion. And you know that if you could hear, you would be hearing one long vowel of grief. Just senseless, meaningless vowel of grief. And that’s the beginning of language right there.
Inexpressible sound. And it’s antisocial. It’s destructive. It’s utterly painful beyond expression. And the consonants are the attempts to break it, to control it, to do something with it. And I think that’s how language emerged.
If you can spare an hour, watch the show here. (This should remain up and accessible on the web indefinitely.) I find Merwin’s example enormously inspiring; it would be fair to say he’s been a bit of a role model for me.
Subscribers must click through, or visit the video page.
Transcript:
I went to the woods to live haphazardly, from hand to mouth, marching like an army on my stomach. The path travels through me like a wave, like a particle. I’ve learned nothing, & am much the better for it — the forest teaches by confounding expectations. The bright orange of an eft, like the hair of a punk rocker, says: leave me alone. The spots on a fawn are a map to a country that doesn’t want to be found. The sun doesn’t move there, trapped in a net of trees. A hen turkey clucks not to lead her chicks, who disguise themselves as stones & vanish, but to lead me, her sudden unwanted charge — to draw me away. Which might turn out to be exactly where I was going.
***
Speaking of forests, be sure to visit the June edition of the Festival of the Trees at Roundrock Journal. And for many more creepy-crawlies like the millipede in the video, check out the latest Circus of the Spineless, the blog carnival for invertebrates and the people who love them.
***
I learned something about making poetry videos today: the addition of music can mean the difference between success and failure.
*
I’m always excited to see other poet-bloggers making videos. Ren Powell recently launched a second blog to showcase her terrific poem animations, AnimaPoetics. I’m sure I’ll link to most of her videos at Moving Poems eventually, but do check out her site in the meantime. She’s posting new videos at the rate of roughly one a week.
I decided to try my hand at translating a few verses from “Proverbios y cantares” (Campos de Castilla, 1912) by Antonio Machado. I welcome any corrections or suggestions for improvement.
Nunca perseguí la gloria
ni dejar en la memoria
de los hombres mi canción;
yo amo los mundos sutiles,
ingrávidos y gentiles
como pompas de jabón.
Me gusta verlos pintarse
de sol y grana, volar
bajo el cielo azul, temblar
súbitamente y quebrarse.
My song never strove
for glory, nor to linger
in the minds of men; I love
worlds of understatement,
weightless & delicate
as soap bubbles. I like
watching them paint themselves
with sun & grain, float
beneath the blue sky, quiver
suddenly & break.
* * *
¿Para qué llamar caminos
a los surcos del azar?…
Todo el que camina anda,
como Jesús, sobre el mar.
Why give the name roads
to the ruts of fate?
All who travel tred
like Jesus on the sea.
* * *
Cantad conmigo a coro: Saber, nada sabemos,
de arcano mar venimos, a ignota mar iremos…
Y entre los dos misterios está el enigma grave;
tres arcas cierra una desconocida llave.
La luz nada ilumina y el sabio nada enseña.
¿Qué dice la palabra? ¿Qué el agua de la peña?
Sing along with me: We know nothing,
we come from an esoteric sea, we’re headed for an uncharted sea…
And between these two mysteries there’s a great enigma:
three arks locked with an unknown key.
The light makes nothing clearer, the wise teach nothing.
What does the word have to say? Or water from the rock?
* * *
Ayer soñé que veía
a Dios y que a Dios hablaba;
y soñé que Dios me oía…
Después soñé que soñaba.
Yesterday I dreamed I saw God
& was talking to God,
& I dreamed that God heard me…
And then I dreamed I was dreaming.
* * *
¡Oh fe del meditabundo!
¡Oh fe después del pensar!
Sólo si viene un corazón al mundo
rebosa el vaso humano y se hincha el mar.
Oh, faith that comes from contemplation!
Oh, faith that follows thought!
Only when a heart approaches the world
does the human cup run over & swell the sea.
* * *
Yo amo a Jesús, que nos dijo:
Cielo y tierra pasarán.
Cuando cielo y tierra pasen
mi palabra quedará.
¿Cuál fue, Jesús, tu palabra?
¿Amor? ¿Perdón? ¿Caridad?
Todas tus palabras fueron
una palabra: Velad.
I love Jesus for telling us:
Heaven & earth will pass away.
When heaven & earth pass,
my word will remain.
Your word, Jesus — which one?
Love? Forgiveness? Generosity?
All your words were really
one word: Attention Vigilance.
UPDATE: I rewrote the poem and remade the video on September 18, 2010. The post below refers to an earlier incarnation, using mostly the same footage.
Although I’ve experimented with video poems before, this is the first one where I relied on audio for the text rather than superimposing the words on the screen. The footage was all shot this past Sunday, at the top of our field (which is also the top of the Plummer’s Hollow watershed). My friends Chris and Seung had come up from D.C. for a weekend of sledding, and while temperatures on Friday and Saturday stayed nice and cold, and we had some spectaular toboggan wipe-outs (which is the main point of tobogganing, as I understand it), on Sunday morning the thermometer climbed into the 40s (i.e. between 5 and 10 degrees Centigrade, for you farriners). The snow turned sticky. Snowballs flew back and forth like carrier pigeons with one basic but never monotonous message.
By the time we got to the top of the field it was time for some sunbathing, and that’s when Seung’s interest in snowball-making turned from skirmishing to art, as seen in the film.
I wanted to see if I could make a video shorter than a minute and a half, primarily because my most common reaction to other amateur videos is that they aren’t edited well enough. I’m sure there are still lots of things I could improve, though. I don’t particularly like the sound of my own voice, and in general the video doesn’t come close to conforming to the idea I had in advance. There are a lot of avant-gardey things I simply don’t know how to do, and probably can’t do until I get better video editing software (on order). But it’s a start.
For inspiration I am indebted to the poets who have been making videos for qarrtsiluni, especially Christine Swint, who recently tried to stir up interest in the art at Read Write Poem as well.
Incidentally, I also have a photo of Seung up on the photo blog — a badly underexposed, low-resolution snapshot taken with the camcorder that I altered almost beyond recognition in the digital darkroom for a portrait of an altered state which is not, I assure you, an accurate representation of our condition at the time.
