Prospero's Books

Make the path as you walk

Several years ago I sat in on a colleague's course in 20th century Spanish literature. The course pushed the limits of my Spanish, but it was worth the effort, in part because it introduced me to one of my now favorite poets, Antonio Machado.

Monday, in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, Al Gore quoted Machado:

Pathwalker, there is no path. You must make the path as you walk.

Gore continued:

We are standing at the most fateful fork in that path. So I want to end as I began, with a vision of two futures—each a palpable possibility—and with a prayer that we will see with vivid clarity the necessity of choosing between those two futures, and the urgency of making the right choice now.

Bethlehem speaks in many tongues

The best Christmas meditation I've read so far this year comes from Zoughbi Zoughbi, director of the Wi'am Palestinian Conflict Resolution Centre in Bethlehem, as quoted in the always inspiring Signs of Emergence blog:

Every homeless refugee, desperate for a bed for a night, understands the agony of Joseph of Bethlehem.

Every frightened teenage girl, pregnant and lost, comprehends the bewilderment of Mary.

Every executive, trying to reconcile commercial realities with moral imperatives, identifies with the local innkeeper.

Every working person, in a daily routine awakening to a sudden reverence for life, experiences the awe of the Judean shepherd.

Every ruler or intellectual, coming to the limit of human power, evinces the humility of the Magi.

Every tyrant who keeps in control by means of ruthless and harsh practices knows the insecure fear of Herod.

Every infant, born on the rubbish heap of a city slum, shares the indignity of the Holy Birth.

Bethlehem speaks in many tongues....

A myth before the myth

I'm reading Wallace Stevens's long poem "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction" with one of my grad students. Here's a passage that has stood out for me:

The clouds preceded us.

There was a muddy centre before we breathed.
There was a myth before the myth began,
Venerable and articulate and complete.

From this the poem springs: that we live in a place
That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves
And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.

We are the mimics. Clouds are pedagogues.

(Among the categories into which I've put this blog posting are Signs, Systems, and Spirit, but also Emergence. Those tags may help you see some of the things Stevens is saying to me.)

So do we think in pentametric lines?

I've often heard, and repeated, the assertion that Shakespeare's use of iambic pentameter--indeed any poet's use of iambic pentameter--somehow captures, and elevates, the normal rhythms of English speech. So I'm fascinated by a posting this week by Ron Rosenbaum, author of The Shakespeare Wars.

Rosenbaum quotes one of his readers, an Allan Henderson, who notes that the three seconds taken by a typical spoken iambic pentameter line may be related to the approximately three-second duration of our experience of the present. He credits Stephen Pinker's new book, The Stuff of Thought, for pointing our that "the human experience of the present moment is not a continuous flow,  but a roughly 3-second interval."

Henderson, citing Pinker (and I'm sorry that my attributions get so many layers deep here), writes:

Steven Pinker’s observation about the 3-second present comes from Ernst Poppel, a brain researcher at the University of Munich. Dubbed Poppel’s Law it says that “We take life three seconds at a time.” Poppel illustrates his law by pointing out that a handshake lasts about three seconds. So does the preparation for a golf swing, short-term memory, a phrase in spontaneous speech, the pause when channel surfing for a television program to watch, and  line of poetry. Pinker talks about this on page 189 of his new book THE STUFF OF THOUGHT, where he says “our intuitive conception of time differs from the ceaseless cosmic stream envisioned by Newton and Kant. To begin with, our experience of the present is not an instantaneous instant. Instead, it embraces some minimum duration, a moving window on life in which we apprehend not just the instantaneous ‘now’ but a bit of the recent past and a bit of the impending future.”

Rosenbaum and his commentators also continue a discussion, begun in The Shakespeare Wars, on the wisdom of including a slight break at the end of each spoken iambic pentameter line.

(Thanks to ShakespeareGeek for the reference.)

This Great Love

Today is the 800th birthday of the Sufi poet Rumi. In honor of the day, Beliefnet has posted a visual and musical meditation, "This Great Love," using Rumi's words. I think you will like it.

In the Multiverse

The poem I like most this week:

In the Multiverse

If there are really many universes,
As many physicists now claim, if there
Are infinite universes out there –
Then I exist an infinite number
Of times and places, and so do my wife
And baby daughter. In some, sadly, I
Do not exist; in some, my wife and I,
We never met. And that’s the tragedy.
But out there too my mother also lives
And, living, knows and loves my daughter who,
In my own universe, she’s never seen
And, knowing that, I think on it with joy.

--Troy Camplin, Interdisciplinary World

God found I wasn't there

Religious fundamentalists are often guilty of lifting text out of its context--such as quoting the ban on homosexuality in Leviticus without noting that it's surrounded by many obsolete, and mostly unobserved, laws.

Atheist fundamentalists are often guilty of the same wrong. Two recently published collections of "atheist" quotations--and quite a few Web sites--reproduce the first four lines of Robert Frost's eight-line poem "Not All There":

I turned to speak to God
About the world's despair;
But to make bad matters worse
I found God wasn't there.

What's left out is the remaining four-line stanza:

God turned to speak to me
(Don't anybody laugh)
God found I wasn't there--
At least not over half.

The poem as a whole makes a complex statement, reflecting the complexity, nuance, and ambiguity of Frost's religious thought. Quoting only the first stanza is intellectually dishonest, doing great disservice to Frost--and, more importantly, to the reader. 

A falcon, a storm, or a great song

An essay in Slate, by Clive James, on the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) has reminded me to look again at one of my all-time favorite poems, "Ich lebe mein leben," from Rilke's Book of Hours. I love it in part for its evocation of the great spiral, the great chaotic system, that is our lives.

My favorite translation is by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (see What I've Been Reading), but to avoid seeking permission from them, I'll quote an anonymous translation from the Picture-Poems site:

I live my life in growing rings
which move out over the things around me.
Perhaps I'll never complete the last,
but that's what I mean to try.

I'm circling around God, around the ancient tower,
and I've been circling thousands [of] years;
and I still don't know: am I a falcon, a storm
or a great song.

We are, of course, all three.

(If the translation I've used is copyrighted, please let me know, and I'll remove it.)

The dance along the artery

The animation company XVIVO has been winning awards for "Inner Life of the Cell," an animation produced for the Molecular and Cellular Biology Program at Harvard. The best-looking version of the film I've seen is at Harvard's own Multimedia Production Site, where it can also be downloaded free for educational purposes.

The film takes my breath away. The only words I can think of to describe it are from T. S. Eliot's "Burnt Norton," the first of his Four Quartets, one of the great spiritual poems of the last century:

The dance along the artery
The circulation of the lymph
Are figured in the drift of stars

Have a look, and you'll see exactly what I mean.

The reader's creation of a poem

Last week, in my "Shakespeare, Systems, and Intertextuality" course, we explored another pair of premises:

6a. Systems exist in the relationships among their parts. “Systems are greater than the sum of their parts.” That is, they have “emergent” properties that are not properties of their parts but emerge only at the system level.

6b. Artworks, and their communities of discourse, exist in the relationships among their parts. For example, literary works, such as plays, exist in the transaction between text and reader, or between production and audience. Similarly, theatrical productions exist in the collaborative relationships among artists and script. (Thus the concept of “faithful” and “unfaithful” productions of Shakespeare is meaningless; all productions are a transaction between script and artists.) And Shakespeare’s plays exist in their intertextual relationships with other works.

Louise Rosenblatt, in The Reader, the Text, the Poem (1978), spoke of emergence, and laid the foundation for a systems-theory approach to literature:

The reader's attention to the text activates certain elements in his past experience—external reference, internal response—that have become linked with the verbal symbols. Meaning will emerge from a network of relationships among the things symbolized as he senses them. . . .

. . . the reader's creation of a poem out of a text must be an active, self-ordering and self-corrective process (11).