The poorer silence now

More than a century ago, William Henry Davies, in his poem, Leisure rued the fact that there was "no time to stand and stare".

What is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

..

A poor life this if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

Today, in similar vein, one could rue the absence of silence in our world. A recent article in the New York Time talked about NYC's  newest (and rarest) luxury item: silence.

“We’re at the breaking point"...  Silence has become a luxury in New York that only a scant few can truly afford, and cultural, technological and economic changes in recent years have added to the din everyone else must endure, creating not just one culprit, but many. 

And it is not merely a constant chatter of sounds that assaults our brains. Reflection and contemplation has also been sidelined thanks to the constant flood of information coming at us from all sides, especially the internet. We need to make a conscious attempt to tune off for some time at least and I for one suffer due to the inability of tuning off the internet. (And I don't even have a smart phone, which adds a whole new level of being continuously connected. The very annoying behavior of many people of continuously looking at their phones every few seconds is something all of us have experienced in the last few years. Let me distract you from this post by directing you to this video making the rounds just this week that cleverly highlights the ridiculousness of our lives. We have become dumb users of smart phones!)

Of course, it is not that we are naive users of these tools of modern life. There have been many studies and reports [1, 2, 3, 4 (video by Nicholas Carr, author of "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains"), 5, 6, ...] about the negative impacts of digital distraction. Of course, as psychologist Kelly McGonigal suggested it's time to start treating the internet the same way you would a diet:

[W]e need to find ways to make [the internet] as nourishing as possible, as we try to do with our diets, and not just turn to what's easiest. Is your Twitter or Facebook nourishing or crushing your soul?

but like all bad habits and addictions, it is easier said than done. In fact, it has now been recognized as a systematic deficiency called an attention deficit trait, or ADT. "It isn't an illness; it's purely a response to the hyperkinetic environment in which we live," and is no doubt worsened by the digital lives we all live.

For anyone who hopes to be a writer, the perils of being distracted by the internet have been highlighted by many. There's a quotation attributed to the person who said a lot of things ("Anonymous") that I keep running into on the internet (ironic, huh!) about how the internet is the bane of any writer: "Being a good writer is 3% talent, 97% not being distracted by the internet." (The author Jonathan Franzen has said something similar but so have many other authors. Best to leave it attributed to Mr./Ms. Anonymous.) But, this is not something new. While probably not talking specifically about the internet, Philip Roth had this to say:

"Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing."

Anyway, we all know this but sometimes find it hard to break a habit. For now, I'll leave you with a poem about silence, reproduced here in its entirety.

Silence
by Billy Collins
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.

The silence when I hold you to my chest,
the silence of the window above us,
and the silence when you rise and turn away.

And there is the silence of this morning
which I have broken with my pen,
a silence that had piled up all night

like snow falling in the darkness of the house—
the silence before I wrote a word
and the poorer silence now.

~*~

And above all, Kindness

The one thing that comes across to me from Cheryl Strayed's columns as "Sugar" was her kindness, love, and graciousness. And not to be judgmental. To persevere and to be dogged in the face of challenges life throws at you comes next. But first comes kindness. The first thing highlighted by George Saunders, who taught (teaches?) at Syracuse Univ, where Strayed got her MFA, is .... kindness and love. Or as the poet Phillip Larkin put it: "What will survive of us is love."

George Saunders, in his beautiful graduation speech to the 2013 class at Syracuse University, writes:

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.  Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded…sensibly.  Reservedly.  Mildly. Or, to look at it from the other end of the telescope:  Who, in your life, do you remember most fondly, with the most undeniable feelings of warmth? Those who were kindest to you, I bet. It’s a little facile, maybe, and certainly hard to implement, but I’d say, as a goal in life, you could do worse than: Try to be kinder.

...

And so, a prediction, and my heartfelt wish for you: as you get older, your self will diminish and you will grow in love. YOU will gradually be replaced by LOVE.

You can read the whole speech here. 

We should all move to Syracuse, blasted winters notwithstanding.... they put something in the water there that fosters kindness and also great writing skills!

Nostalgia, memories, and the unconscious

Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be — but it’s looking a lot better, according an article in the NYT today that reports about a decade of study on the subject! Apparently "Nostalgia was originally described as...

“a neurological disease of essentially demonic cause” by Johannes Hoffer, the Swiss doctor who coined the term in 1688. And nostalgia does have its painful side — it’s a bittersweet emotion — but the net effect is to make life seem more meaningful and death less frightening. When people speak wistfully of the past, they typically become more optimistic and inspired about the future."

And the word "nostalgia" cannot be uttered without me thinking of one of my favorite Kundera novels...but I've blogged about that earlier here and here. It is almost 20 years now since I first read Kundera after being introduced to his work by a friend of mine and coincidentally, just this morning I was unpacking my books and arranging the various Kundera novels I bought in the 90s on the bookshelf. I have long wanted to re-read some of those early Kundera novels that I have not read now in 15+ years; not sure when I will get back to them - for now, they just sit mutely perhaps nostalgically waxing about past glories when they actually got read instead of sitting unopened in a book-shelf or a box for years! 

*

And speaking of nostalgia and remembrance of things past, via Twitter I learned that it is Proust's birthday today; born on this date in 1871.

“An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new sensation having on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savors, could not, indeed, be of the same nature.” – Marcel Proust, in' In Search of Lost Time' or alternatively titled 'Remembrance of Things Past'. (French: À la recherche du temps perdu).

And a related quote:

“This is the irony of Proustian nostalgia: it remembers things as being far better than they actually were. But Proust, at least, was acutely aware of his own fraudulence. He knew that the Combray he yearned for was not the Combray that was. (As Proust put it, “The only paradise is paradise lost.”) This wasn’t his fault: there simply is no way to describe the past without lying. Our memories are not like fiction. They are fiction.” – Jonah Lerer, “Proust: The Method of Memory” from Proust Was a Neuroscientist (p. 88)

 
Also, I was reading something earlier about the Examined Life and psychoanalysis and Freud [1] and it is interesting that in finding the above quotes, I also found this excerpt from a book Milton L. Miller titled: 'Nostalgia: A Psychoanalytic Study of Marcel Proust,' which compares Proust's work to that of Freud's queries into the human mind and the unconscious.

"Proust's pursuits revolved around his impressions of the functioning of the unconscious. Thus we are led naturally to a comparison with Freud's beliefs, and with some very recent research into the nature of behavior patterns. The compelling nature of those patterns that seem to have determined Proust's subject matter and the precise way he dealt with what he had to say seem to require some comment from psychoanalytic as well as literary experts. It is not surprising that two men of genius explored the unconscious within the same generation, the one aesthetically, the other scientifically. Proust developed his aesthetic approach to the unconscious in a country which was, in subtle artistry, a leader among nations; his predecessor, Anatole France, helped introduce a tradition of delicate introspective analysis, which was later enhanced by André Gide, a great critic and writer who looked deeply into the unconscious. Meanwhile, from among the Austrians, Hungarians, Germans, English and the Swiss came most of the outstanding pioneers in psychoanalysis. In France, Janet's followers at first accepted psychoanalysis somewhat reluctantly, omitting theories of symbolism; and the earliest psychoanalysts came from the provinces, not Paris. Yet Paris provided the atmosphere in which the great impressionist painters and symbolist poets introduced their theories to the world. The aesthetic rather than the medical approach to the unconscious predominated in France." 

--
[1] A NYT article about a recent book “The Examined Life - How We Lose and Find Ourselves” by the psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz. It seems like it would be an interesting book to read - kind of like some of Oliver Sacks books that I have enjoyed reading in the past. The title (and apparently the book chapter titles) sound like it is one of those self-help books but it isn't. Rather it is "an insightful and beautifully written book about the process of psychoanalysis, and the ways people’s efforts to connect the past, present and future reflect their capacity to change. The book distills the author’s 25 years of work as a psychoanalyst and more than 50,000 hours of conversation into a series of slim, piercing chapters that read like a combination of Chekhov and Oliver Sacks. They invite us to identify with Mr. Grosz’s patients and their losses and regrets, even as we are made to marvel at the complexities and convolutions of the human mind."

Note: see earlier posts on the subject here and here.

Poetry and Science - Deep forms of knowing

From an article discussing "difficult" poetry (like T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland, for example)... 

"Poems and poetry are, for me, a deep a form of knowing, just like science. Yes, obviously, they are different. But each, in its way, is a way to understand the world."

This perhaps explains why despite being trained in the sciences, I lean more and more towards poetry as I age; not for answers or the truth or meaning but sometimes just to make the days worthwhile! Others look to religion too for answers but for some of us that was a delusion we gave up a long time back! Or as the poet Wallace Stevens wrote: 

“After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.”

I quite empathize with this because although I have always read poetry, the amount of time spent reading poetry and reading about poetry has definitely increased in the last 5 years since I went through some tough times after the death of my father. In these 5 years, I've found myself going back to Wallace Stevens poems again and again; as if seeking some light, some form of redemption, some strength in words, some allusion of joy in words! His poems, in particular, are an intriguing mix of life lessons, but not in a cliched kind of way that bad poems can be! But in most of his poems, there is always something that immediately inveigles you in but very often leaves you on the fringes of understanding it completely. And although it is tough to explain to you why this is so, I believe it is this lack of complete understanding that makes me go back to them again and again. This is true of Stevens poems as well as the work of Ashbery but then there are obviously some poems whose works I do not understand at all and it does NOTHING for me. (Case in point, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets like Lyn Hejinian and some poems by Rae Armantrout come to mind but there are many others.)

In any case, I think of Stevens being a poet who I will continually be going back to for the rest of my life. After years of borrowing books of poems by Stevens and books about his poetry, I finally bought Stevens' Collected Poems last year when I found it in a used book store and coincidentally just this morning I found the book again while emptying out boxes of books; so I may read some more of his amazing but complex poems later tonight before going to sleep...so you may expect a few other posts about them in the next few days/weeks!

I'll leave you with an excerpt from one of many favorite poems of mine by Stevens ....

A cultivation of the low, the common and the near

After unpacking some of my boxes of books yesterday, I found a few old issues of Believer magazine that I had bought at a library sale some years back.

I took one of them with me to bed last night and started reading an interview with philosopher, Simon Critchley. I was very tired and fell asleep before finishing it but I thoroughly enjoyed the bits I did read. For example, here is a short excerpt:

Q: So God or other universal or absolute ideas cannot offer answers to the question of the meaning of life, and thus any answer has to come from within human life, which is finite and capable of error. What kind of answer can that be?

Simon Critchley: Well, the answer is given in the question. The only answer to the question of the meaning of life has to begin from the fact of our human finitude, of our vulnerability and our fallibility. ....The formulation that I use in my book is “the acceptance of meaninglessness as the achievement of the everyday or the ordinary.” What I mean by that is that once we’ve accepted that the meaning of life is ours to make, we make meaning. Then we accept that we live in a situation, or, rather, that we inherit a situation of meaninglessness, and out of that meaninglessness we create meaning in relationship to the ordinariness of our common existence. I try to argue for a cultivation of the low, the common and the near—the everyday—as that in relationship to which we can make a meaning out of the meaninglessness of our existence.

There are many other quotable quotes in the interview, like Critchley talking about Nietzche and nihilism and about injustice in the world and being "deeply pessimistic about the present situation" and yet "not luxuriating in a dispirited bath of nihilism" and about how "philosophy begins in the experience of political disappointment, the fact of injustice. In the face of that fact, one can create. Ethically, legally. One can try and do something." and so on....  but instead of quoting excerpts here, you can read the interview in its entirety at the Believer website. (Thanks for not archiving this behind a paywall, Believer magazine!)

An empyrean way of digesting the surreal

Reading an article at the New Yorker book blog by Kelsey Osgood about Kafka for kids, these lines jumped out at me:

It's easy to brush aside traditional fairy tales and their modern retellings because we have lost our belief in the overtly fabulous, but what Kafka describes becomes more frightening to us as we age. We are sure, as mature people with 401(k)s and digital subscriptions to the Times, that we will never be stalked by an amorous, sparkly vampire, but we are not sure that we won't be charged and prosecuted for a crime we aren't even sure we committed...In this way — not the bloody, but the banal — Kafka's work becomes more spooky than the original Brothers Grimm, in which Snow White's evil queen is forced to dance to death in scalding iron shoes.

...

And though this might be taken as an argument for sheltering kids from Kafka, consider that the urge to avoid feeling fear altogether is stronger in grown-up humans than in small ones. “Grownups desperately need to feel safe,” Maurice Sendak said in 1993, “and then they project that onto the kids. But what none of us seem to realize is how smart kids are… they’ll go for the hard concepts, they’ll go for the stuff where they can learn something.” Perhaps Kafka’s works can be best confronted by children, who have that empyrean way of digesting the surreal and decoding symbols, who are braver, in their innocent beliefs, than we can ever be. 

 

The terrible and graphic loneliness of the great Americans

I was reading a NYT review of a recently published book - the journals of author, Alfred Kazin (comprising journal entries from 1933 to 1998!) and I found this excerpt which really spoke to me as being very representative of the American life.

"Yet the most extraordinary element in all this is something difficult, perhaps hazardous, to express; that is, the terrible and graphic loneliness of the great Americans. Thinking about them composes itself, sooner or later, into a gallery of extraordinary individuals; yet at bottom they have nothing in common but the almost shattering unassailability, the life-stricken I, in each. Each fought his way through life — and through his genius — as if no one had ever fought before. Each one, that is, began afresh - began on his own terms - began in a universe that remained, for all practical purposes, his own...” - from Alfred Kazin's Journals, edited by Richard M. Cook

Hope - Not the same thing as optimism

An excerpt from Vaclav Havel, which I found while reading Seamus Heaney's essay, The Redress of Poetry.

The kind of hope I often think about .....I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul; it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.


Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but, rather, an ability to work for something that is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more unpropitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper the hope is. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. In short, I think that the deepest and most important form of hope, the only one that can keep us above water and urge us to good works, and the only true source of the breathtaking dimension of the human spirit and its efforts, is something we get, as it were, from “elsewhere.” It is also this hope, above all, which gives us the strength to live and continually to try new things, even in conditions that seem hopeless as ours do, here and now.

A longer excerpt can be found here.

Nostalgia

A friend shared this quote from the TV show, Mad Men:

Nostalgia - it's delicate, but potent. Teddy told me that in Greek, "nostalgia" literally means "the pain from an old wound." It's a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn't a spaceship, it's a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards... it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It's not called the wheel, it's called the carousel. It let's us travel the way a child travels - around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know are loved.

 Reminded me of what Milan Kundera wrote about Nostalgia in Ignorance:

The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return. To express that fundamental notion most Europeans can utilize a word derived from the Greek (nostalgia, nostalgie) as well as other words with roots in their national languages: añoranza, say the Spaniards; saudade, say the Portuguese. In each language these words have a different semantic nuance. Often they mean only the sadness caused by the impossibility of returning to one's country: a longing for country, for home. What in English is called "homesickness." Or in German: Heimweh. In Dutch: heimwee. But this reduces that great notion to just its spatial element. One of the oldest European languages, Icelandic (like English) makes a distinction between two terms: söknuour: nostalgia in its general sense; and heimprá: longing for the homeland. Czechs have the Greek-derived nostalgie as well as their own noun, stesk, and their own verb; the most moving, Czech expression of love: styska se mi po tobe ("I yearn for you," "I'm nostalgic for you"; "I cannot bear the pain of your absence"). In Spanish añoranza comes from the verb añorar (to feel nostalgia), which comes from the Catalan enyorar, itself derived from the Latin word ignorare (to be unaware of, not know, not experience; to lack or miss), In that etymological light nostalgia seems something like the pain of ignorance, of not knowing. You are far away, and I don't know what has become of you. My country is far away, and I don't know what is happening there. Certain languages have problems with nostalgia: the French can only express it by the noun from the Greek root, and have no verb for it; they can say Je m'ennuie de toi (I miss you), but the word s'ennuyer is weak, cold -- anyhow too light for so grave a feeling. The Germans rarely use the Greek-derived term Nostalgie, and tend to say Sehnsucht in speaking of the desire for an absent thing. But Sehnsucht can refer both to something that has existed and to something that has never existed (a new adventure), and therefore it does not necessarily imply the nostos idea; to include in Sehnsucht the obsession with returning would require adding a complementary phrase: Sehnsucht nach der Vergangenheit, nach der verlorenen Kindheit, nach der ersten Liebe (longing for the past, for lost childhood, for a first love).

Also, later on page 77-78, he writes: 

Until then her view of time was the present moving forward and devouring the future; she either feared its swiftness (when she was awaiting something difficult) or rebelled at its slowness (when she was awaiting something fine). Now time has a very different look; it is no longer the conquering present capturing the future; it is the present conquered and captured and carried off by the past. She sees a young man disconnecting himself from her life and going away, forevermore out of her reach. Mesmerized, all she can do is watch this piece of her life move off; all she can do is watch it and suffer. She is experiencing a brand-new feeling called nostalgia.

Update: I realized I have posted before on the subject of añoranza and Kundera's take on it here.

My Relations with Illusion & Reality

Perusing some of Philip Larkin's poems again, I started reading more about him via Google Books and found this quote, which I really liked.

"The real trouble with me is my relations with illusion & reality. Illusion is poetry, art, love, belief, confidence, and is what you are enthusiastic about. Reality is daily work, illness, death, money, sex, one's actions independent of one's beliefs or fancies, and is impossible to be enthusiastic about."

He also said: "Joy impregnates, sorrow brings forth; perhaps that is the explanation" ...on how his muse demanded that he be in a constant state of privation to be able to write. Or put another way, he said: "life, personally is unhappy: imperssonally it is happy."

Leave you with these lovely lines from Larkin's rather depressing poem, Aubade, which has been lauded as Larkin's almost perfect poem:

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,   

A small unfocused blur, a standing chill   

That slows each impulse down to indecision.   

Most things may never happen: this one will,   

And realisation of it rages out

In furnace-fear when we are caught without   

People or drink. Courage is no good:

It means not scaring others. Being brave   

Lets no one off the grave.

Death is no different whined at than withstood. 

A presumptuous taming of reality

Heard this excerpt from John Updike's memoir, Self-Consciousness on an old interview with Terry Gross (No transcript but there is a link to that interview from 1989 at this page on NPR, which is from when Updike died in Jan 2009.)

Writing is my sole remaining vice. It is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality, a way of expressing lightly the unbearable. That we age and leave behind this litter of dead, unrecoverable selves is both unbearable and the commonest thing in the world -- it happens to everybody. In the morning light one can write breezily, without the slightest acceleration of one’s pulse, about what one cannot contemplate in the dark without turning in panic to God. In the dark one truly feels that immense sliding, that turning of the vast earth into darkness and eternal cold, taking with it all the furniture and scenery and the bright distractions and warm touches, of our lives. Even the barest earthly facts are unbearably heavy, weighted as they are with our personal death. Writing, in making the world light -- in codifying, distorting, prettifying, verbalizing it -- approaches blasphemy.

Been a fan of Updike's fiction from the first time I read it in 1995 and continue to be wow-ed by how he puts together sentences.

Lapsing into oblivion

Found this quote in an essay, The Conspiracy of Silence, by the poet Charles Simic in the book, Memory Piano.

 "How everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described, or passed on." - W. G. Sebald (Austerlitz)

Or as the poet, Donald Justice, so eloquently put it in his poem, Bus Stop:

And lives go on   

Like sudden lights   

At street corners

Or like the lights   

In quiet rooms

Left on for hours,   

Burning, burning.

And so it goes.

The crack's in me

I seem to have blogged this quote twice before (in 2007 and again in 2009) and I found myself returning to it again today.

"The natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness. I think also that in an adult the desire to be finer in grain than you are only adds to this unhappiness in the end" - F. Scott Fitzgerald, as quoted in Nonconformity by Nelson Algren. 

I had read the above quote when I read NonConformity some years back. But today, I dug out the actual piece by Fitzgerald. It was a very interesting essay - a three-part self-analysis by Fitzgerald in Esquire magazine back in 1936. What an amazing start to the essay, titled Crack-Up:

Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work -- the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside -- the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don't show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within -- that you don't feel until it's too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.

What a find! Going through some personal issues myself and so this really finds a connection with the way I feel at the current time!

Here is another lovely excerpt from the essay:

"Instead of being so sorry for yourself, listen -- “she said. (She always says “Listen,” because she thinks while she talks -- really thinks.) So she said: “Listen. Suppose this wasn’t a crack in you -- suppose it was a crack in the Grand Canyon.”

“The crack’s in me,” I said heroically.

“Listen! The world only exists in your eyes -- your conception of it. You can make it as big or as small as you want to. And you’re trying to be a little puny individual. By God, if I ever cracked, I’d try to make the world crack with me. Listen! The world only exists through your apprehension of it, and so it’s much better to say that it’s not you that’s cracked -- it’s the Grand Canyon.”

Here's another great excerpt from the 2nd part of the essay:

Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering -- this is an all-weather beatitude for gloom in general and fairly salutary daytime advice for everyone. But at three o’clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn’t work -- and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day. At that hour the tendency is to refuse to face things as long as possible by retiring into an infantile dream -- but one is continually startled out of this by various contacts with the world. One meets these occasions as quickly and carelessly as possible and retires once more back into the dream, hoping that things will adjust themselves by some great material or spiritual bonanza. But as the withdrawal persists there is less and less chance of the bonanza -- one is not waiting for the fade-out of a single sorrow, but rather being an unwilling witness of an execution, the disintegration of one’s own personality…
Unless madness or drugs or drink come into it, this phase comes to a dead end, eventually, and is succeeded by a vacuous quiet. In this you can try to estimate what has been sheared away and what is left.

And this quotable quote:

Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement -- discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.

In the third and final part, he writes:

This was at least a starting place out of the morass in which I floundered: “I felt -- therefore I was.” At one time or another there had been many people who had leaned on me, come to me in difficulties or written me from afar, believed implicitly in my advice and my attitude toward life. The dullest platitude monger or the most unscrupulous Rasputin who can influence the destinies of many people must have some individuality, so the question became one of finding why and where I had changed, where was the leak through which, unknown to myself, my enthusiasm and my vitality had been steadily and prematurely trickling away.

....


-- I only wanted absolute quiet to think out why I had developed a sad attitude towards sadness, a melancholy attitude toward melancholy, and a tragic attitude toward tragedy -- why I had become identified with the objects of my horror or compassion.

Does this seem a fine distraction? It isn’t: identification such as this spells the death of accomplishment. It is something like this that keeps sane people from working.

And later:

This led me to the idea that the ones who had survived had made some sort of clean break. .......  A clean break is something you cannot come back from; that is irretrievable because it makes the past cease to exist. So, since I could no longer fulfill the obligations that life had set for me or that I had set for myself, why not slay the empty shell who had been posturing at it for four years? I must continue to be a writer because that was my only way of life, but I would cease any attempts to be a person -- to be kind, just, or generous. There were plenty of counterfeit coins around that would pass instead of these and I knew where I could get them at a nickel on the dollar. In thirty-nine years an observant eye has learned to detect where the milk is watered and the sugar is sanded, the rhinestone passed for diamond and the stucco for stone. There was to be no more giving of myself -- all giving was to be outlawed henceforth under a new name, and that name was Waste.

The decision made me rather exuberant, like anything that is both real and new.

And so we prod on.... looking for that which will set us free - hoping that we have the audacity to make that 'clean break' and move on to what is "both real and new".

Where we end and the world begins

One of my favorite poets this year has been Mark Strand. I have put up some excerpts from his poems which I read and enjoyed but to capture the essence of what his poetry means to me, I am going to use* something he wrote (as quoted in this article by Edward Byrne):

“ … it’s not that poetry reveals more about the world — it doesn’t — but it reveals more about our interactions with the world than our other modes of expression. And it doesn’t reveal more about ourselves alone in isolation, but rather it reveals that mix of self and other, self and surrounding, where the world ends and we begin, where we end and the world begins. ”

Elsewhere (in the Introduction to the Best American Poetry, 1991), Mark Strand also said this about poetry:

The way poetry has of settling our internal house in order, of formalizing emotion difficult to articulate, is one of the reasons we still depend on it in moments of crisis and during those times when it is important that we know, in so many words, what we are going through. ... Without poetry, we would have either silence or banality, the former leaving us to our own inadequate devices for experiencing illumination, the latter cheapening with generalization what we wished to have for ourselves alone, turning our experience into impoverishment, our sense of ourselves into embarrassment.

--
* I could never articulate what poetry has meant to me (especially in the last 2-3 years) in any meaningful way and so I have to lean on these giants of poetry to speak for me! 

Realize where I am

Lovely snippet from an interview with John Ashbery:

John Ashbery: I don't know what my life is, what I want to be escaping from. I want to move to some other space, I guess, when I write, which perhaps was where I had been but without being fully conscious of it. I want to move in and out of it, while I'm writing.
Sue Gangel: Take a journey?
JA: Yeah, but also realize, more, where I am.

Source: Interview with Sue Gangel. "An Interview with John Ashbery" (originally printed in the San Francisco Review of Books [November 1977], rep. in Joe David Bellamy, Ed. American Poetry Observed: Poets On Their Work (Urbana: U Illinois P, 1984), 14.

To Be Or Not To Be

Flipping channels a few days back, I came upon Charlie Rose's interview with Jude Law, who I learned is playing Hamlet in a Broadway production: Hamlet -  directed by Michael Grandage; in preview starting Oct 6th at the Broadhurst Theatre in NYC. The play played to much acclaim in London before this.



I have never really been exposed to much Shakespeare (other than reading highly abridged versions of the plays when I was 15) and also have not gone to Broadway plays yet. Also, if you ask me to make a list of 20 really good Hollywood actors of the 80s, 90s, and 00s, I doubt Jude Law would even make my list.

And so, it was with great surprise that as I watched the interview, I got hooked by the minute. I am not sure if it was Jude Law's passion and his way with words or what ... but I absolutely loved the interview and it inspired me to pull my copy of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations off the book-shelf to read lines from Hamlet! (I know - the entire play can be read online, thanks to Bartleby, but I find it easier, for the purposes of finding wonderful lines, to read this book which has 9 pages worth of quotations from Hamlet.)

While it is not my intention to transcribe the lines I liked (there are so many!) here, I will post this short excerpt from the interview that talks about what is perhaps one of Hamlet's (arguably even Shakespeare's) most famous lines:

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of disprized love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

And here is a section from the Charlie Rose interview, in which Rose played a short clip where Peter Brooks talks about the famous phrase.

CHARLIE ROSE:  This is Peter Brook, who is analyzing... "to be or not to be."  Here it is. 

    (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
Peter Brook:  To be or not to be, which is should I then kill myself?  Or if I live, what can I live for?  And it ends -- the thought leads to him saying, thinking too much is what gets one into trouble.  And he says that the greatest enterprises can be completely squashed by what he calls the pale cast of thought.  And Hamlet realizes that he had been thinking and thinking all this time of should he kill, shouldn’t he kill, is life right, are people like this, are people like that.  And he now realizes that there is something much simpler, whether it’s -- he likes it or not -- he has an action with his destiny, and so he says, the speech would start to be or not to be and ends with this word, action.  And from then on, everything changes. 
    (END VIDEO CLIP)

Brilliant! So, "To be or not to be" is not about life-and-death as it may seem but about leaving our doubts, insecurities, and questions (which Hamlet has many throughout the play!) behind and taking action!

P.S. WNYC’s Sara Fishko considered a range of approaches to Hamlet. Also learned from the page that there have been over 50 film versions of Hamlet made since 1900, making it the most filmed Shakespeare play! Embedded at the link is a youtube video of a 1913 silent film version and in the embedded audio file Fishko mentions female actress(es?) who have played the lead part in some plays!

P.P.S. Via wikipedia, comes this rendering of the "To be, or not to be" soliloquy from First Quarto (Q1) which was published In 1603 by booksellers Nicholas Ling and John Trundell. It is the so-called "bad" first Quarto.

New possibilities, New experiences, New connections.

Perfect place to start the day...

 "When the way things are seems to offer no possibility; when you are angry and blocked, and, for all your efforts, others refuse to move or cooperate, ..when even enrollment does not work and you are at your wit's end -- you take this next ...practice: our graduate course in possibility." - Chapter 10, Art of Possibility, by Benjamin & Rosamund Zander. 

Enrollment is a concept from the previous chapter and is about the art of generating a spark of possibility for others to share.

I thought this quote at the start of Chapter 10 was quite timely to read this AM as I had a disheartening conversation with a local company yesterday. Through an old friend/contact, I thouoght I had got a foot in the door - a door which I had hoped would open up the possibility of a job soon. But after yet shut door and yet another disappointment in what has become a long drawn out and frustrating job search process, I find myself groping to pick myself up again and go at it again.

So, bring it on, Zanders -- not that reading about this makes it any easier to open up new realms of possibility!

P.S. Benjamin Zanders is the Conductor of the Boston Philharmonic and a teacher at the New England Conservatory of Music. His TED talk (embedded below) shows us how energetic and excited he can get about the art of possibility and how it can shape and transform lives - on both professional and personal fronts.

Eliot's Four Quartets, Life, and the Gita

I just ran into these lines from East Coker, the third poem in Eliot's Four Quartets:

And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

The last line sounds very Bhagwat-Gita-ish!

"Karmanye Vadhikaraste Ma Phaleshu Kadachana, Ma Karma Phala Hetur Bhurmatey Sangostva Akarmani"

Which translates as: "You have a right to perform your prescribed action,but you are not entitled to the fruits of your action. / Never consider yourself the cause of the results your activities,and never be associated to not doing your duty."

Or like my friend, Bharat said to me once: "apna kaam pura kar. phal ki ichha kyon, Paarth?" ("Complete your work, why desirous of the fruits, Paarth?" -- Paarth being another name of Arjuna, to whom, in his moment of wavering, Krishna narrates the Bhagavad Gita in the Mahabharata.)

Coming to think of it, a lot of Four Quartets seems to be derived from teachings of the Gita or other Hindu philosophy, which Eliot had studied. For example: the lines about "endings and beginnings" in the 1st Quartet, Burnt Norton ...

... say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now.

...

Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between un-being and being.

...

Quick now, here, now, always—
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after. 

...and coming back to this theme again throughout the poem; with minor variations that further embellish this theme through repetition - trying to capture the complexity of life. For example East Coker, starts with "In my beginning is my end" and ends with the opposite - "In my end is my beginning". Then in the last quartet, Little Gidding, he ends with:

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.

This is nothing but about the cyclical nature of life (a Hindu philosophy), no? Also, many lines of the poem (some of my favorite lines, in fact) are about time, the past-present-and-future, memory, consciousness, existence, and the "flux of life". They again remind me of some of the teachings of the Gita, which I admittedly have only read cursorily.  

Note (1): Eliot ends his poem The Waste Land with "Shantih shantih shantih" - but I have not really read this poem with a detailed eye and hence do not enjoy it as much as I do Four Quartets.

Note (2): I have been reading bits and pieces of Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot a lot recently in addition to two books about Eliot - The Achievement of T.S. Eliot  by  F.O. Matthiessen & Art of T. S. Eliot  by Helen Gardner. The latter especially has greatly enhanced my appreciation for Four Quartets. For example, in addition to the knowledge that the titles of the four poems in Four Quartets are about four places that were important in Eliot's life, I learn that they also represent the four elements - Burnt Norton about air ("on which whispers are borne, intangible itself, but the medium of communication"), East Coker is about earth ("the dust of which we are made and into which we shall return), The Dry Salvages is about water ("which some Greek thinkers thought was the primitive material out of which the world arose, and which man has always thought of as surrounding and embrancing the land, limiting the land and encroaching on it, itself illimitable), and Little Gidding is about fire ("the purest of elements... which consumes and purifies.") 

Thus,...

"the whole poem is about the four elements whose mysterious union makes life...and perhaps adding that some have thought that there is a fifth element, unnamed but latent in all things: the quintessence, the true principle of life, and that this unnamed principle is the subject of the whole poem."

Note: All quoted lines above are from an essay in Helen Gardner's book called 'The Music of Four Quartets'. This is an old book - from 1950 - which I am able to read thanks to the amazing public library system in the US. There are a few different essays about Four Quartets in the book but this particular one tells us about the musical aspects of this poem -- not just with naming it "Quartets" but also how each of the quartets contains five "movements", each with their own inner structure. However, it would be too much to go into all the details here of the exquisite lyrical quality of the poem that Ms. Gardner beautifully elucidates - not only through the music in the recurring words, each time deepened and expanded by fresh use but also through repetition of images, each time with different meanings. Instead I'll leave you with these lines by Gardner about the poem - which I think captures the reasons why I find such affinity to this poem.

We might begin a description of Four Quartets by saying it presents a series of meditations upon existence in time, which, beginning from a place and a point in time, and coming back to another place and another point, attempts to discover in these points and places what is the meaning and content of an experience, what leads to it, and what follows from it, what we bring to it and what it brings to us.

The point she goes on to make is that such a description can only be brief and abstract and such abstractions must yield to considerations of the form of the poem, to which it "owes its coherence". And that is where the circular nature of the poem, the repetitions, and the sense of working out through the "beginnings and endings" of life does the poem rise from being mere poetry to sublime art, which, like the Gita, captures the very essence of Life. Or as Ms. Gardner beautifully summarizes with the last line of her essay:

In it the form is the perfect expression of the subject; so much so that one can hardly in the end distinguish subject from form. The whole poem in its unity declares more eloquently than any single line or passage that truth is not the final answer to a calculation, nor the last stage of an argument, nor something told us once and for all, which we spend the rest of our life proving by examples. The subject of Four Quartets is the truth which is inseperable from the way and the life in which we find it.

Despair

What an amazing picture - definitely worth a thousand words and more! 

© Erik de Castro / AP

A man takes a break from cleaning a house swamped by flash floods brought on by Typhoon Ketsana, in Marikina, The Philippines.

Possibilities

Soren Kierkegaard, the famous Danish philosopher wrote in his book Either/Or:

If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating as possibility?