Ideal Nature

Man steht mit der Natur gerade in so unbegreiflich verschiedenen Verhältnissen, wie mit den Menschen; und wie sie sich dem Kinde kindisch zeigt, und sich gefällig seinem kindlichen Herzen anschmiegt, so zeigt sie sich dem Gotte göttlich, und stimmt zu dessen hohem Geiste.

                                                                                       --Novalis, Die Lehrlinge zu Sais

One’s relationship to nature in unfathomably different circumstances is the same as with human beings; she shows herself childishly to the child, and nestles pleasingly in his childlike heart, and shows herself divinely to God, in agreement with his high Spirit.

I remember how, as a child, I first came to know nature.  It was a magical encounter; magical, because it seemed full of a hidden potency that could be experienced but never fully understood. I was especially overwhelmed by three particular qualities of nature: its sensuousness, its profligacy, and its mystery.  Why did mint smell so sweet?  Why did even the humblest sparrow seem so perfectly designed, like a flawless work of art?  Why did the date palm freely offer such sweet, earthy fruit?   Why were grapes ripening in the sun so warm and juicy?  Why was the mulberry tree covered in sweet purple fruit and sour red fruit?  Why were even the leaves of chile plant so spicy hot?  Why were sunsets so spectacular?  Why were trees so green?  Why did the blossoms of the lantana contain so many florets, each one perfect and unique?  In addition to the sensual richness of nature, there was all its superabundance.  The mulberry tree didn’t just make fruit, it made thousands of fruits.  The dandelions did make a single perfect sunburst, they made fields of sunbursts.  A single bird didn’t sing an incomparable song, there were always flocks of coloratura sopranos.  It all seemed a riddle to me.  Why did the lantana offer so many florets?  Why did the date palm make so many giant clusters of dates?  Why did the sunset paint the entire firmament?  Nature’s generosity was a mystery beyond compare.  But it was a joyful mystery.  Nature’s plentitude didn’t blunt its sensual power.  At that time, I had no real understanding that sickness, death, and decay were also a part of nature.  And the first theology I was taught claimed those things as products of The Fall, of purely human wickedness.  They remained somehow apart from nature’s intrinsic character—if a bird died it was because of human cruelty; if a tree died it was because of human neglect.  Wo Kinder sind, da ist ein goldenes Zeitalter (Where children are, there is the Golden Age), Novalis wrote.  As a child, I believed in, and also experienced, nature as it existed in the Golden Age.  Like most children, I had a very active and very rudimentary spiritual life, but it seemed to exist on a different plane than that of nature.  Morality, for example, was a necessary part of one’s spiritual growth, but it was hard to understand how it applied to the natural world.  Birds stole from farmers and even each other.  Lions and wolves killed to eat.  Spiritual beings could protect you from harm, but nature was indifferent to human problems.  It gave what it could but had no interest in assuring that you had everything you actually needed.  It was benevolent, generous, and beautiful, but those qualities seemed somehow separate from the same virtues in the spiritual world.

     As my spiritual understanding grew (in its own halting, confused, and humble way—still infinitely far from a divine understanding of things), I began to see that nature contained qualities of a spiritual design: things like unity, order, simplicity, and perseverance, to name but a few.  I began to understand the sacramental essence of nature.  Nature was no longer just a joyful day at the fair.  It was also, in Novalis’ words, ein Universaltropus des Geistes, ein symbolisches Bild desselben (a universal trope of the spirit, a symbolic picture of it).

Happy New Year

Walking through Skid Row
on my way to the Greyhound station
January 3rd, 2020
in apocalyptic L.A.
which is too excited in the head
and too tired at its feet

a homeless woman--
who looked like a frontier settler
or an Arctic explorer--
was moving her tent
(a group of officers stood by)

and she wished me a Happy New Year
not bitterly
not with irony
but with genuine goodwill

and I thought of Richard Brautigan
how he would have made a poem out of it

Dances for Everyone

I have a couple of new stories here and here.  And I have another piece that (I think) is coming out this month, as well as several that will appear in print and online next spring.  All the editors have been absolutely great, and I am so honored to have my work appear in their journals.

*** 

I saw a pair of ducks today, in a settling pond enclosed by a fence.  They were swimming together.  Not feeding, not fleeing predators, just swimming over the placid water.  “Shaded, safe, saved,” to quote Thomas Pynchon.

Dances for Everyone

The leaves in the wind

And the ducks on the water

And the kids with their cell phones

And the dogs in their yards

And the clothes on the clotheslines

And Don Carlos on his porch:

Dances for everyone.

Let’s turn up the music.

Writers of Conscience

I’ve been thinking about the basic decency of writers like Peter Weiss and Heinrich Böll, which is so evident in their work, whether or not one agrees with all of their words and opinions.  As young men, they were witnesses to the cauldron of German fascism and to World War II, though Weiss, in exile, was spared as close a view as Böll.  Both also witnessed the divided post-war world, the struggles in the Third World against European and American colonialism, the continuing political repression in Eastern Europe, the oppressiveness and spiritual vacancy of Western capitalism and the struggle of artists and activists to overcome it.  Through it all, they managed to be people of conscience, of decency, which was, and is, a hard thing thing to—both in their day and in our own.  To be decent just means to be human, but that doesn’t mean it is easy in today's world.

Above the Sea

Caspar David Friedrich - Blick auf die Ostsee

They climbed the stair, and sat them down on the green grass awhile watching the ocean coming in over the sand and the rocks, and Ralph said: "I will tell thee, sweetling, that I am grown eager for the road; though true it is that whiles I was down yonder amidst the ripple of the sea I longed for naught but thee, though thou wert beside me, and thy joyous words were as fire to the heart of my love. But now that I am on the green grass of the earth I called to mind a dream that came to me when we slept after the precious draught of the Well: for methought that I was standing before the porch of the Feast-hall of Upmeads and holding thine hand, and the ancient House spake to me with the voice of a man, greeting both thee and me, and praising thy goodliness and valiancy. Surely then it is calling me to deeds, and if it were but morning, as it is now drawing towards sunset, we would mount and be gone straightway."

                                                                                             —William Morris, The Well at the World’s End

The World is a Revelation . . .

Alles, was wir erfahren, ist eine Mitteilung. So ist die Welt in der Tat eine Mitteilung, Offenbarung des Geistes. Die Zeit ist nicht mehr, wo der Geist Gottes verständlich war. Der Sinn der Welt ist verloren gegangen. Wir sind beim Buchstaben stehngeblieben. Wir haben das Erscheinende über der Erscheinung verloren.

Ehemals war alles Geistererscheinung, jetzt sehn wir nichts als tote Wiederholung, die wir nicht verstehn. Die Bedeutung der Hieroglyphe fehlt. Wir leben noch von der Frucht beßrer Zeiten.

                                                                                                           —Novalis, Neue Fragmente

Everything we experience is a message. So the world is indeed a communication, a revelation of the Spirit. We no longer live in a time when the Spirit of God is comprehensible. The meaning of the world has been lost. We stopped at the letter. We have mistaken the image for the manifestation.

In the past, everything was a spiritual phenomenon; now we see nothing but dead repetition, which we don’t understand. The meaning of the hieroglyph is missing. We are still living on the fruits of better times.

All of this is true, and yet, “In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness . . .” (Romans 8:26)  We were made to read the revelation of the Spirit in the world.  But which of us is willing to go into that inner desert—to listen quietly in that arduous but necessary silence?

Let Us Go to That Country Where Dwells the Beloved

The servant Kabîr sings: "O Sadhu! finish your buying and selling, have done with your good and your bad: for there are no markets and no shops in the land to which you go."

                                                                                              —Kabîr, Song LXXIII, tr. Rabindranath Tagore