A History In Writing
Sometime in the Summer of 2001 I began using a writer’s notebook. Looking back it is interesting that I began to write then, considering the many ways my life would change that summer and thereafter.
Some of you have seen it, or one of the many. Another reason I always have a pen under my watchband. The function has evolved over the years from first being a place to story poetic ideas, to a journal, store house of quotes, observations of the world, sermon notes, biblical thoughts, philosophical musings, and a host of other things. Some turn into poems, some into songs, others just sit and wait for a moment like now.
I have just taken them out of their little storage space after beginning to jot things down in my newest one. Number 20. There are 19 sitting beside me right now, which I am about to go through, page by page. 8 years of doing this poeting thing, with a few anthologies and magazine/journal publications to my credit (another rolled in today), the odd award, and a pushcart nomination. Not to shabby I guess. But this current enterprise gives me pause.
This will not merely be a hunt for new, old inspiration, or a time to see how much my writing has changed, but something more. What I can’t tell yet. It is not often one gets a window to their own soul, through their own handwriting. This should prove interesting to say the least.
Edit/note: I will keep adding to the comments as I make my way through them.
Things Fall Apart
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall . . .
The Fall
Think about it: as myth or as fact, the Jews did a bloody good job of summarizing the human condition. There are four great splits that exist in this world, all of which can be traced back to that story.
Man lives in paradise. God shows up daily for tea and brisk walks. The weather is nice. The animals don’t shit on the lawn. There are no arguments about getting lost and not asking for direction, because where are you going to go? You’re in paradise. All signs point to imperfection, and who wants to go out there?
The tree, the serpent, the temptation, the stupidity: the result is sudden.
Man knows he is naked, signaling a change in relationship with himself.
Man knows that he doesn’t want another seeing his nakedness, signaling a change in community and human relationships.
Man knows that he hears God on the outside of his head for the first time, signaling a change in relationship with the Divine.
And then God curses everyone and everything, heightening the estrangement from self, other, and God, and adding a separation from the rest of creation as well: man will forever think he is so much better than the ground from which he was taken.
What else is there in the world? What other problems do we see which are not based on this system of brokenness?
And isn’t that the nature of redemption, esp. the kind spoken off in the Jewish Oral tradition as well as the New Testament of the Christian Bible (less we forget its writers were good Jews) , a redemption of ALL CREATION. A process of healing the rift which was formed so long ago.
And the rest, all of this in the mean time, is a rehearsal, trying to put Humpty back together again on our own.
And Now Read It Again
From T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, East Coaker
III
O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury.
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away—
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.
You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.
————-
Now, go back, and read it again.
Truth In Contradiction
. . . we defy augury; there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.
If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now;
if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all.
Since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is ’t to leave betimes?
Let be.
~ Hamlet 5.1
Can’t Win For Losing
Seriously.