In The Frame

Does Anyone Think Like This Today?

Ralph Waldo Emerson on History...this I read and it raised a few questions...one, who thinks and writes like this today, so formal and eloquent and reasoned?  And how he believes in the power of history and our knowledge of it. How many times the word man is used. Given that, do the same reflections apply to men and women and our world and history today? How have women's greater participation in society added to or changed this discourse.

I. HISTORY.

THERE is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to
the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right
of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought,
he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has
befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal
mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and
sovereign agent.

Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its genius is
illustrated by the entire series of days. Man is explicable by nothing
less than all his history. Without hurry, without rest, the human spirit
goes forth from the beginning to embody every faculty, every thought,
every emotion, which belongs to it, in appropriate events. But the
thought is always prior to the fact; all the facts of history preexist
in the mind as laws. Each law in turn is made by circumstances
predominant, and the limits of nature give power to but one at a time.
A man is the whole encyclopaedia of facts. The creation of a thousand
forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain,
America, lie folded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp,
kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the application of his
manifold spirit to the manifold world.

This human mind wrote history, and this must read it. The Sphinx must
solve her own riddle. If the whole of history is in one man, it is all
to be explained from individual experience. There is a relation between
the hours of our life and the centuries of time. As the air I breathe is
drawn from the great repositories of nature, as the light on my book is
yielded by a star a hundred millions of miles distant, as the poise
of my body depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal
forces, so the hours should be instructed by the ages and the ages
explained by the hours. Of the universal mind each individual man is one
more incarnation. All its properties consist in him. Each new fact in
his private experience flashes a light on what great bodies of men
have done, and the crises of his life refer to national crises. Every
revolution was first a thought in one man's mind, and when the same
thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era.

Notes from the bridge to I know where

There we were, after years of talking about it, walking on that bridge to no where in the reflection of the black night. Down below, our friend swam to make sure no rocks would crack our  heads open when we made the leap. Our prophecies would be fulfilled tonight and steal my dreamy sleep. There are a million ways to die and one of them is jumping off the Arboretum's 50 foot bridge to nowhere into Lake Washington. Hidden in its apparent folly is an unforeseen purpose, a connection to that human quality of quest and thrill-seeking. Gazing down, I actually thought about the possibility of death, my death to be exact, while also planning my escape. An infinite jest, or a self-inflicted lobodomy, does life fall somewhere between or does one find it in the wings? I bank on the extremes; why be normal, the bumper sticker on my car reads, a reminder. Standing on this ledge was one classic step on the ladder of life in a summery Seattle, a passage with just a sliver of a moon glinting on the rippling waters to show the way. The juice pulsed in our veins, the kind of juice that makes you spring into handstands of childhood and shiver your limbs...on the ledge, my mother appeared, she filled my empty can, my head,  shook my bones,  called out to me in that voice of hers, and instead of caution it summoned my youthful soul...I held your hand to steady myself, my toes curled, gripping the rough cement, afraid to break through all those walls that keep my world safe and small.  Dancing soldiers circled my wandering soul, vanquished by the hot impulses of my heart. Freedom found. Wiith a yelp and  arms glued to my sides,  I lept and fell fell fell as fellini would immagine, surely I could not fall any more, there was no water, it would never come, i had flown up instead of down, still screaming, foreverness engulfed me, how could it take so long, my arms flew out in exasperation, and then the smacking crack of the water, the shooting pain, the water beat me to a pulp, the plunge into the murky depths, my soul alive, my head full of nonsense, smiling, alive, the heart drums  pounding, the ears popping,  seeing sparks of light where there were none, limbs tangled in the vines, I swayed to and fro, to and fro, which way up,  my arms swirled above, bubbles escaped the gaping lungs, illusions filled my head, and up I went, piercing the surface like a fountain, inhaling the joy, body in tact, soul freed by the be here now of it all, sucking in the life, the air, that leap, finding the child inside that gets my motors going and stalls out now and again as time goes by. And as I swam backstroke slowly to shore, stroke by stroke I felt the water's cool embrace and felt the infinite jest of a thousand stars that lit my way.

Iris--Paper and Stones

I'll let these fly, as Iris did at the beach, by The Sea the sea...excerpts spoken by Iris Murdoch in the movie "Iris"

"It's like music what we do, the music of the angels; love's the only language everyone understands."

"Language--reading, writing and preserving the eloquence and beauty that language is capable of is terribly important to human beings because it is connected to thought. This is why we must teach students to read and write with great care and attention.

Education doesn't make you happy, nor does freedom. We don't become happy just because we're free, nor if we've just been educated. Education may be the means by which we realize we're happy. It opens our eyes and ears, tells us where delights are lurking, convinces us that there is only one freedom that is essential to happiness, the freedom of the mind. And education gives us the freedom to walk the path we forge to our own happiness.

Human beings love each other in sex, friendship, and when they're in love, and they cherish animals, plants, and our natural surroundings. Our quest for happiness is held in all of this and in the power of our imagination. Every human soul has seen perhaps even before birth the pure forms of justice, temperance, beauty, love and all great qualities of humans. We are moved toward what is Good by the deeply held memory of these pure qualities. We saw these once in a pure light, because of being pure once before, ourselves.

We need to believe in something divine, without necessarily the need for God, something you might call Love or Goodness. As the Psalm 139 says:

Whither shall I go from thy spirit
Whither shall I flee from thy presence.
If I acsend up in to heaven, thou art there:
If I make my bed in hell, behold thou art there.
If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the outermost parts of the sea,
even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.

Kindness

Two nights ago I went to hear Naomi Shihab Nye give a poetry reading. She was delightful and by that I mean brimming with seeming serendipity, deep appreciation and a certain feeling that this woman enjoys her moments full and many. Her poems, mostly short, spontaneous, starting you in one spot and then seeming to do a flip and land you somewhere else, reminded me of something Iris Murdoch once said, "One of the secrets of a happy life, is continuous small treats." More than a thousand people showed up for her second night of reading. This woman from Texas who is the daughter of a Palestinian storyteller journalist and an American painter, uses words to form a mystic container of reality and a support for the soul. What follows is the last poem she read to us, a longer piece, one from thirty years earlier in her career, which she wrote while on her honeymoon in South America after being robbed of everything they had.

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.

--Naomi Shihab Nye

Pocket poems

(Put these poems in your pocket....I keep them in mine.)

Preludes
T.S. Eliot
IV.

His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o'clock.
And short square fingers stuffing pipes
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

She Walks in Beauty
Lord Byron

She walks in beauty like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies,
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellowed to the tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

One ray the more, one shade the less
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress
Or softly lightens o'er her face,
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling place.

And on that cheek and o'er that brow
So soft, so calm yet eloquent,
the smiles that win, the tints that glow
But tell of days in goodness spent
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent.

More Gertrude Stein

An old dear editor friend of mine, Rebecca, made a request for more Gertrude Stense. A few weeks ago Rebecca came to town and we had a long, lovely dinner. Our conversation ranged over years, families, pursuits and literary circles. One shared gripe was how formulaic and one-dimensional so many novels feel today along with our wish to uncover the brash and vivid Gertrude Steins and James Joyces of today. Is Phillip Roth and John Updike really the best we have to offer? Herewith follows Gertrude who managed to break the mold, and stretch the language in heretofore unknown sensual and strange ways and remain lively and fresh to this day . It's spring. It's luscious. Enjoy. This passage from Lifting Belly frays and braids my mind like a thick silken rope every time I read it. --Thanks Rebecca for a great conversation.

Lifting Belly

Kiss my lips. She did.
Kiss my lips again she did.
Kiss my lips over and over and over again she did.
I have feathers. Gentle fishes.
Do you think about apricots.
We find them very beautiful. It is not alone their color it is their seeds that charm us.
We find it a change.
Lifting belly is so strange.
I came to speak about it.
Selected raisins well their grapes grapes are good.
Change your name.
Question and garden.
It's raining.
Don't speak about it.
My baby is a dumpling.
I want to tell her something.
Wax candles. We have bought a great many wax candles.
Some are decorated. They have not been lighted.
I do not mention roses.
Exactly. Actually.
Question and butter. I find the butter very good.
Lifting belly is so kind.
Lifting belly fattily. Doesn't that astonish you.
You did want me.
Say it again. Strawberry.
Lifting beside belly.
Lifting lindly belly.
Sing to me I say.
Some are wives not heroes.
Lifting belly merely.
Sing to me I say.
Lifting belly.
A reflection.
Lifting belly adjoibs more prizes.
Fit to be. I have fit on a hat.
Have you.
What did you say to excuse me.
Difficult paper and scattered.
Lifting belly is so kind.

Gertrude Stense

A: I think I won't I think I will I think I will I think I won't I think I won't I think I will I think I will I think I won't I think I won't I think I will I think I will I think I won't I think I will I think I won't I think I will I think I won't I think I will I think I won't I think I won't I think I won't I think I won't I think I will I think I won't Of course I think I will I think I won't I think I won't I think I will This is a good example if you do not abuse it.

Q: An example?

A: Of Gertrude Stein, but of art that is alive. It is implicitly - as here explicitly - an all but continuous insistence on deciding, on choosing and refusing.

Q: It gives me a feeling that she has just left her motor running.

A: So she has, so that you can listen to it without distraction.

Q: Am I actually to confuse the art of literature with internal combustion engines?

A: It seems one has to confuse literature with something if one is to think about it articulately. One can very well measure the authenticity and power of a work by its truth to its time. There are other measures, but the truth to its time is most easily seen by comparing or confusing it with the typical real created product of the time, in our case the internal combustion engine surely. There is nothing terribly wrong with letting the natural power of a natural subject pull the created thing along except that it constitutes a horse-and-buggy situation and puts you in a horse-andbuggy time. You become schizochronic, if you please, and sentimental. "We have all forgotten the horse" should be true, but there is a minority chic and a majority relaxation in going in for horses and horse-drawn literature.

Q: But why should we forget the horse?

A: Because it cannot be completely exciting any more. You are not really living your life when you amuse yourself with horses. And art should be an intense and real way of living one's life, actually and not retrospectively....

Q: But what was that "of course" late in the passage?

A: The motor missed.

Q: I think it missed the horse.

A: Yes, it is human. When it abandons its own energy of choice and says "of course" to anything, either it is coasting or it is letting a natural thing do the moving. But I confess it is a pleasure and refreshing to have it happen, at least in the proportion in which the passage has it happen. It saves us from making a mechanical necessity of choice.

Q: Let us not abuse the example.

--An excerpt from an interview with Gertrude Stein. More to come.

Winter Jewels

Rocks, cold diamonds
an avalanche of wonder
exploded my head

Countless Plaids of Pleasure

How many times may it be repeated,

those countless plaids of pleasure?

The tale will forever be done

It flows and then it suddenly stops

launches again,

gestures in motion and time

a revolution of relations

threaded in the warp

woven, cloven, emotion

reds and blacks

blues and greens

craving the hue and cry

Oh those Countless plaids of pleasure

just wrap me in it now

My shawl bent to wishes.

In the Garden

In each century since the beginning of the world wonderful things have been discovered. In the last century more amazing things were found out than in any century before. In this new century hundreds of things still more astounding will be brought to light. At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, then they begin to hope it can be done, then they see it can be done—then it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago. One of the new things people began to find out in the last century was that thoughts—just mere thoughts—are as powerful as electric batteries—as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison. To let a sad thought or a bad one get into your mind is as dangerous as letting a scarlet fever germ get into your body. If you let it stay there after it has got in you may never get over it as long as you live.

So long as Mistress Mary's mind was full of disagreeable thoughts about her dislikes and sour opinions of people and her determination not to be pleased by or interested in anything, she was a yellow-faced, sickly, bored and wretched child. Circumstances, however, were very kind to her, though she was not at all aware of it. They began to push her about for her own good. When her mind gradually filled itself with robins, and moorland cottages crowded with children, with queer crabbed old gardeners and common little Yorkshire housemaids, with springtime and with secret gardens coming alive day by day, and also with a moor boy and his "creatures," there was no room left for the disagreeable thoughts which affected her liver and her digestion and made her yellow and tired.

So long as Colin shut himself up in his room and thought only of his fears and weakness and his detestation of people who looked at him and reflected hourly on humps and early death, he was a hysterical half-crazy little hypochondriac who knew nothing of the sunshine and the spring and also did not know that he could get well and could stand upon his feet if he tried to do it. When new beautiful thoughts began to push out the old hideous ones, life began to come back to him, his blood ran healthily through his veins and strength poured into him like a flood. His scientific experiment was quite practical and simple and there was nothing weird about it at all. Much more surprising things can happen to any one who, when a disagreeable or discouraged thought comes into his mind, just has the sense to remember in time and push it out by putting in an agreeable determinedly courageous one. Two things cannot be in one place.

"Where, you tend a rose, my lad,

A thistle cannot grow."

While the secret garden was coming alive and two children were coming alive with it, there was a man wandering about certain far-away beautiful places in the Norwegian fiords and the valleys and mountains of Switzerland and he was a man who for ten years had kept his mind filled with dark and heart-broken thinking. He had not been courageous; he had never tried to put any other thoughts in the place of the dark ones. He had wandered by blue lakes and thought them; he had lain on mountain-sides with sheets of deep blue gentians blooming all about him and flower breaths filling all the air and he had thought them. A terrible sorrow had fallen upon him when he had been happy and he had let his soul fill itself with blackness and had refused obstinately to allow any rift of light to pierce through. He had forgotten and deserted his home and his duties. When he traveled about, darkness so brooded over him that the sight of him was a wrong done to other people because it was as if he poisoned the air about him with gloom. Most strangers thought he must be either half mad or a man with some hidden crime on his soul. He, was a tall man with a drawn face and crooked shoulders and the name he always entered on hotel registers was, "Archibald Craven, Misselthwaite Manor, Yorkshire, England."

He had traveled far and wide since the day he saw Mistress Mary in his study and told her she might have her "bit of earth." He had been in the most beautiful places in Europe, though he had remained nowhere more than a few days. He had chosen the quietest and remotest spots. He had been on the tops of mountains whose heads were in the clouds and had looked down on other mountains when the sun rose and touched them with such light as made it seem as if the world were just being born.

But the light had never seemed to touch himself until one day when he realized that for the first time in ten years a strange thing had happened. He was in a wonderful valley in the Austrian Tyrol and he had been walking alone through such beauty as might have lifted, any man's soul out of shadow. He had walked a long way and it had not lifted his. But at last he had felt tired and had thrown himself down to rest on a carpet of moss by a stream. It was a clear little stream which ran quite merrily along on its narrow way through the luscious damp greenness. Sometimes it made a sound rather like very low laughter as it bubbled over and round stones. He saw birds come and dip their heads to drink in it and then flick their wings and fly away. It seemed like a thing alive and yet its tiny voice made the stillness seem deeper. The valley was very, very still.

As he sat gazing into the clear running of the water, Archibald Craven gradually felt his mind and body both grow quiet, as quiet as the valley itself. He wondered if he were going to sleep, but he was not. He sat and gazed at the sunlit water and his eyes began to see things growing at its edge. There was one lovely mass of blue forget-me-nots growing so close to the stream that its leaves were wet and at these he found himself looking as he remembered he had looked at such things years ago. He was actually thinking tenderly how lovely it was and what wonders of blue its hundreds of little blossoms were. He did not know that just that simple thought was slowly filling his mind—filling and filling it until other things were softly pushed aside. It was as if a sweet clear spring had begun to rise in a stagnant pool and had risen and risen until at last it swept the dark water away. But of course he did not think of this himself. He only knew that the valley seemed to grow quieter and quieter as he sat and stared at the bright delicate blueness. He did not know how long he sat there or what was happening to him, but at last he moved as if he were awakening and he got up slowly and stood on the moss carpet, drawing a long, deep, soft breath and wondering at himself. Something seemed to have been unbound and released in him, very quietly.

"What is it?" he said, almost in a whisper, and he passed his hand over his forehead. "I almost feel as if—I were alive!"

I do not know enough about the wonderfulness of undiscovered things to be able to explain how this had happened to him. Neither does any one else yet. He did not understand at all himself—but he remembered this strange hour months afterward when he was at Misselthwaite again and he found out quite by accident that on this very day Colin had cried out as he went into the secret garden:

"I am going to live forever and ever and ever!"

The singular calmness remained with him the rest of the evening and he slept a new reposeful sleep; but it was not with him very long. He did not know that it could be kept. By the next night he had opened the doors wide to his dark thoughts and they had come trooping and rushing back. He left the valley and went on his wandering way again. But, strange as it seemed to him, there were minutes—sometimes half-hours—when, without his knowing why, the black burden seemed to lift itself again and he knew he was a living man and not a dead one. Slowly—slowly—for no reason that he knew of—he was "coming alive" with the garden....

The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Chapter 27