A Small, Sound Voice on Stillness

Cultural historical memories are fickle:  A few people are remembered; many are forgotten. This holds true for literature as well.  How many people have written poetry?  The number is unimaginable.  And yet, open any anthology of poetry, and you will find poems by fewer than a hundred poets, usually only a few dozen.

Siegfried Sassoon (1917)

One early 20th-century English-speaking poet who has been a victim of this cultural forgetfulness is Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967).  His poems are mostly forgotten because he got labeled as being a "war poet" for his poems expressing the horrors of World War I.  But his war poems could not match those of his contemporary Wilfred Owen, and so Sassoon became eclipsed by Owen.  However, only some of Siegfried Sassoon's poems are about war.  Many are spiritual.  Some are also about Nature.  One in particular speaks of winter in a way that is meaningful whether the world is at peace or at war.

The poem begins with the words "December stillness," setting the nearly-still atmosphere of both the poem and the winter day the poet is experiencing.  The next words quickly show that it is more than stillness Sassoon is evoking.  He is also speaking about an invisible depth behind the stillness, a spiritual depth -- one that some readers might want to use the word "God" for, even though Sassoon never employs that word:

"December stillness, teach me through your trees

That loom along the west, one with the land,

The veiled evangel of your mysteries."

At this point, it would be tempting for any poet to begin describing those "trees."  After all, winter evergreens can be majestically beautiful, as can the outlines of bare trees with winter snow in the background.  Instead, Sassoon seizes upon another phenomenon of winter -- that the bareness of trees can better allow us to look up at the sky:

"Speak, roofless Nature, your instinctive words;

And let me learn your secret from the sky,"

Continuing to convey his firsthand, immediate experience, Sassoon has his clear line of sight caught by something seemingly unexpected:

"And let me learn your secret from the sky,

Following a flock of steadfast, journeying birds"

Now, Sassoon's contemplative openness to Nature on this still winter day leads to his becoming more aware of, and being able to express, a yearning within his heart.  The desire he speaks in the poem's final line mirrors something he perceived in the birds:

"Teach me to travel far and bear my loads."

We may all be eventually forgotten.  Nonetheless, may our lives more often touch the depths of our own living by being touched by the depths of Nature.

~~~

Even if winter has only begun where you live, have you noticed any changes in Nature?  Have you noticed any changes in the stirrings of your heart at this time of year?

(Sassoon's poem is from Collected Poems of Siegfried Sassoon, © 1918, 1920.)

(The entire poem can be read at this external link:  "December Stillness.")

Etiquette, Empathy, and Animals

The short radio segment stayed with me.  It did so because it was about something people shared and didn't share in their ways of looking at the world.  The article (on NPR radio) was about a survey showing that in the U.S., both parents and schoolteachers thought it was important that children be kind.  But when the survey dug a little deeper, it revealed a significant difference in what the adults meant by “being kind.” Parents tended to think it meant that a child had good manners.  In contrast, teachers tended to thing that being kind meant that a child had learned to empathize with what other people are feeling.

In its usage today, the word “manners” lies on a spectrum between “etiquette” and “courtesy.” Etiquette encompasses practices that have to do more with locale and social standing.  Such as where the fork, knife, and spoon are placed around the dinner plate.  Or how a person manipulates their fork while eating.  Although manners can overlap with some codes of etiquette, the word “manners” implies ways of behaving that are more fundamental to smoothing the wheels of social interaction. Such as saying “please” and “thank you.”

Even learning manners, however, does not require being sensitive to what other people are feeling (as those schoolteachers tried to remind us).  Being well-mannered means that I have developed some self-restraint, civility, and forbearance in my actions.  But that does not mean that I can empathize with the feelings and needs of other people amid the complexity of real-life situations -- so that I can compassionately adjust my response to the needs of the moment.

Even some non-human animals can be said to be well-mannered based on the demands of their own social groups.  For example, animal behaviorists (such as the 20th-century pioneer Konrad Lorenz), have studied how dogs have evolved instinctive rituals for greeting each other.  And dogs have even developed such abilities as recognizing that a human's smile showing teeth is a sign of friendliness, whereas instinct usually interprets the baring of teeth as meaning aggression. However, such an extension of knowledge beyond one's own species is uncommon. For non-human social animals, “manners” are in most cases confined to their own species.

In contrast, as the Christian eco-theologian Thomas Berry has pointed, we humans are unique in our ability to feel compassion for all other species. Although instances have been observed in which some mammals have shown distress when an animal of another species was in anguish, to the best of our knowledge, only we humans can try to identify with what all other species experience.  And behind that possibility, in addition to our conceptual powers, lies the remarkable ability of humans to empathize with what another creature might be feeling.

There is a classic story out of the ancient Chinese faith-tradition of Taoism.  The wise teacher Chuang Tzu and a companion, walking together, pause on a footbridge to watch the fish swimming in the water below.  After a bit, Chuang Tzu says “How happy those fish are!” The second man replies, “You are not a fish.  So you cannot know what a fish feels.”  But Chuang Tzu cleverly responds by saying, “If that were the case -- and you not being me -- then how can you know what I do and do not know about fish?”

~ ~ ~

What do you think prevents us human beings from better cultivating our ability to empathize?

(The story “The Joy of Fishes,” in poetic stanzas,
 can be found in The Way of Chuang Tzu by Thomas Merton, © 1965.  pp. 97-98.)

(The pictures are from Konrad Lorenz's books Man Meets Dog and
  King Solomon's Ring, and are used under Fair Use.)

Looking Up to Trees

Down the block from the house where my wife grew up, there is a modest but nice park.  There is only a little bit of playground equipment.  Instead the park is mostly a place for kids to run and adults to walk beneath the tall, very old trees.

One evening near sunset, I strolled alone into the park, and found myself for some reason pausing before one of the trees.  With no one else around to make me feel embarrassed, I felt a desire to unhurriedly contemplate the tree.  At first I saw up close the rough texture of its bark and the pockmarks from where life's diseases had left scars.  Despite those signs of the tree's vulnerability, I was next struck by the tree's massiveness.  It's height and solidity.  I thought about how the tree had endured countless nights, standing there unattended through wind, rain, and dangerous lightning.

I found myself not only looking up at the tree in its immense height, but also looking up to the tree for its virtues.

To some people, it might seem strange to turn to trees to look for virtues to inspire.  But Tennessee Williams, in his play The Night of the Iguana, turned to a tree for guidance on the distinctly human challenge of facing one's mortality.  In that play (superbly adapted into a movie), a middle-aged spinster artist is traveling through Mexico with her 97-year old grandfather, who is a poet.  The two are broke, trying to hang on by her drawing portraits of tourists and by his recitation of poems for tips.

Intermittently throughout the play, the now nearly deaf and nearly blind grandfather repeats the opening lines of a poem he has been working on but has been unable to complete:

"How calmly does the orange branch

Observe the sky begin to blanch..."

The play's climax is expressed poetically through the grandfather finally having completed his
poem mentally, which he then recites while his granddaughter transcribes it.  The completed poem expresses how the tree, even though it lives "without a prayer" (unlike humans), nonetheless shows "no betrayal of despair" in the face of its future:

grandfather reciting poem
in The Night of the Iguana

"Sometime while night obscures the tree...

A second history will commence.

...the broken stem

The plummeting to earth...."

This return to the earth is:

"An intercourse not well designed

For beings of a golden kind."

It is instead " [a] bargaining with mist and mould."

And yet, despite that altered future, the living tree still holds its head high.  So much so that the soon-to-die grandfather looks up to the tree, expressing in the final stanza of the poem his desire to live like it:

"O Courage, could you not as well

Select a second place to dwell,

Not only in that golden tree

But in the frightened heart of me?"

~~~

Are there any qualities of trees that you would like to share in?

(The poem quoted is recited by Nonno in The Night of the Iguana by Tennessee Williams, © 1961.  Act. 3.)

(The movie-still from The Night of the Iguana [1964], directed by John Huston, is used under Fair Use.)

(The full poem by Tennessee Williams, in print and read by a different actor, is at this external link:  "How calmly does....")

A Flow that Courses Beneath Our Lives

Rivers.  Every continent on this planet has at least one major river that forms a backbone of life. There is the Nile of ancient Egypt.  The Mesopotamian Tigris and Euphrates of Biblical proportions.  The Mississippi.  Not to mention the Ganges, considered sacred, so important is it to India.

I remember once in my very early adulthood looking out a railway-car window at night as the train I was on crossed over the Mississippi River.  Even though I had read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn growing up in school, only then, as I saw that river's serpentine twists in the moonlight, was I able to truly understand how Huck and Jim were able to experience that river as both a source of safe places to hide and as a treacherous place for navigating in the fog.

celebrating the Festival of Lights
by floating lamps on the Ganges

Obviously, rivers are composed of water, and as such participate in all the symbolic meanings of water, no matter which shape the river takes.  However, because rivers are massive and flowing, they have carried additional layers of symbolism -- ones that draw upon the aspects of depth and of time.  (As the early 20th-century author Thomas Wolfe knew when he titled one of his novels Of Time and the River.)

The story of humankind has been filled with tragedy and comedy, mischief and virtue, chaos and order.  Through it all, rivers have been not only a physical means for life-support, but also a way for faith-traditions and writers to find a way of supporting the fragile boats that our lives sometimes become.  Rivers have thus served as symbols that penetrate into the often hidden continuity of our existence amid all of life's flux.  Amid all the twists and turns of life.

contemporary ferryman in India

I do not know of any novel where this layer of
symbolism is used to better effect than in Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha (1922), in which the author fuses Eastern Buddhist thought and Western psychological insights.  That book follows the life-course of a man from early adolescence through his middle years and into his later years -- as he struggles to find an integrity and meaning for his life.  Both as a young man and as old man, he crosses the same river, while that ever-flowing body of water and the ferryman provide a continuity. During one of their encounters later in life, the ferryman guides him with this lesson:  "The river has taught me to listen; you will learn from it, too.  The river knows everything; one can learn everything from it.  You have already learned from the river that it is good to strive downwards, to sink, to seek the depths."

The 14th century Christian mystic theologian Meister Eckhart had a gift for spiritual teaching. Part of that gift lay in his ability to speak of the Eternal in ways that helped his students discern God not as an abstract concept but as a Force underlying their own ordinary lives.  Eckhart drew upon many metaphors to do that.  Once he wrote:

"God is a great underground river

 that no one can dam up  and no one can stop"

~~~

Have you found a continuity in your life that helps sustain you?  What is it?

(The Hesse quote is from Siddhartha [1922], trans. by Hilda Rosner, © 1951.  p. 86.)

(The Eckhart quote is taken from Wrestling with the Prophets by Matthew Fox, © 1995.  p. 13.)

(The first photo is by User:Pradeep211, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

(The second photo is by Steffi, upload by Herrick, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.)

Much Missed about Mary’s Monster

Despite all the new movie characters you will see portrayed by children in costume come Halloween, you might still spot that perennial favorite Frankenstein.  Usually that depiction will be modeled on Boris Karloff's makeup in the 1931 movie (perhaps all the way down to the lug-bolts on each side of the monster's head, an indication that he was put together from parts).  That movie has also been the primary vehicle through which people have learned a Frankenstein story.  But that movie diverged in significant ways from the original British novel by Mary Shelley.  And what was left out may tell us something significant about life, and even other species.

Mary Shelley

The 1818 original novel was inspired partly by Mary Shelley (wife of poet Percy Shelley) having heard about experiments in which scientists were beginning to discover physical connections between electricity, chemistry and biology.  For example, the severed legs of a frog would "kick" when an electrical current was applied.  Some scientists wondered if electricity could somehow bring a whole dead animal back to life.  Mary's imagination took the matter one step further by having her fictional young scientist use electricity to bring life to a being assembled from parts of human corpses.

So far, novel and movie are roughly the same.  The critical question is:  How will complications appear?  What matters has the scientist overlooked that will lead to difficulties (something any good plot needs, horror story or otherwise)?  In the movie, an explanation for the damage that will ensue is provided by the scientist's assistant unwisely having substituted a criminal's brain for a normal person's brain.  But Mary's book provided no such easy out.

In the movie, the monster was mute and slow-witted (probably because of that inadequate brain). In quite a contrast, the book's newly created living being is precocious, and quickly learns to talk quite well.  He even learns to read, and becomes quite erudite.  How could anything go wrong?

And yet, there are problems from the start, and they have to do as much with the scientist as with the monster.  The new being, desiring contact, reaches his hand out to the scientist's, but the scientist pulls back, avoiding touch.  That will be the key to the problems that continue to develop as the new being seeks companionship but cannot get it, and also seeks a mate but cannot find one.  For, after all, this new being is the only one of its kind.  Like all living beings on this planet, he needs others of the same species.  It is as if he were the last of a virtually extinct species the moment he was "born."

To put it in a nutshell, to me, Mary Shelley's monster story suggests not just the danger of arrogant science, but the even greater problems of living and of loving.  If social species such as mammals and birds could watch movies, they might also identify with the "monster."

~~~

Have you ever identified with a monster in a movie, or thought about why we sometimes can?

(The drawing of Frankenstein is by André Koehne 

and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

(The portrait of Shelley is in the Public Domain because its copyright has expired.)

Ex Libris Nature

People don't use them much anymore.  Bookplates, that is.  (In case you're not familiar with their name, bookplates are those rectangular labels, about 3 in. x 4 in., that can be glued into the inside of the front cover of a book to identify the book's owner.  Sometimes the label bears the phrase "Ex Libris" or "From the Library of," ready to be filled in.)  I've been able to notice the decline in their use from having been a volunteer church librarian for almost three decades, and so having sorted through thousands of donated books whose owners have spanned several generations.

A first thought might be that paper bookplates have declined with the rise of electronic books. But the strong sales through Amazon show that physical books made of paper remain popular. (Did book-owners place bookplates in their books more often when, unlike today, a plethora of books could not be so quickly and easily purchased -- thus perhaps making them seem more precious?)

What interests me more about bookplates, however, particularly those from half-a-century to a century ago, are the designs of the artwork that adorn them.  Especially the way Nature so lovingly appears in the bookplates dating from about 1900 to 1950.

I know about them from owning two books published by Dover containing hundreds of samples from that pre-World War II era. There are bookplate illustrations with the lacy filigree of Art Nouveau, and bookplate illustrations with the streamlined polish of Art Deco.

Whatever the style or era, what I notice is the ways Nature appears in the art.  In a fair number of instances, the artwork portrays a person reading outdoors.  (Do people read outdoors much anymore?)  Even if the artwork portrays an inviting reading nook in the corner of a house, there will be a window there with a garden view for the imaginary reader to delight in when they look up from their book.

My hunch is that there is an unconscious symbolic connection between books and Nature.  When we read, and thus connect our minds and hearts with another living person, something living within us grows -- just like those living plants so frequently drawn by Art Nouveau bookplate artists. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. spoke to this enlivening quality of reading by making a comparison to the stimulating effect of music.  He wrote:

"The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts."

~~~

If you had only three books to keep forever (and adorn with bookplates), what would those three books be?

An Easy Way for Evaluating People?

Oh, if we could only know what is going on in another person's head!  Not everything (that would be a nightmare), but enough to protect ourselves against danger that might be coming from someone else.  How can we know through observation whether another person can be relied upon or not?  Interestingly, one formula that has sometimes been given in literature is to watch how that person treats animals.

Just to give some examples from Western literature:  Charlotte Brontë, in her lesser-known novel Shirley, wrote of one character, "we watch him, and see him kind to animals."  That character turns out to be kind also "to little children, to poor people."  In Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, the body language and speech of the gardener Ben makes him forbidding; but then his deeper character is revealed through his affection for a robin.  In one of Victor Hugo's most famous novels, that kind of contrast is emphasized by a caring for birds being displayed by the hideous-looking hunchback.  In this case, the action toward animals not only reveals character, but also belies Quasimodo's ugly physical appearance.

poem
"Kindness to Animals"
by Jane Taylor (1783-1824)

There are so many examples like these that we might think that with them we have gotten the animal-human connection figured out.  But the matter is more complex.  Setting aside the problem of trying to catch a glimpse of a person mistreating an animal in advance of injuring a person, there is the question of whether treatment of animals is really a sure-fire indicator.  Part of the complexity here is that literature is not neutral, objective observation.  Literature develops familiar patterns to suit particular audiences.  Thus, these recurring scenes of good treatment of animals by reliable people could simply be an easy device for the author to reveal what is within a character's head without using a stream-of-consciousness technique.

Moreover, sometimes literary themes develop in order to teach moral lessons.  English literature, especially in the 1800's, was frequently considered to be a vehicle for teaching children.  That role of stories means that animal-treatment scenes may have been designed to teach good behavior, not as a claim about predicting a person's future behavior.

Nonetheless, recent scientific research indicates that our human brains are indeed inclined to prefer a person who is kinder over a person who is not.  Researchers at Yale had babies only five months old watch two stuffed animals (manipulated like puppets) behave differently toward a third stuffed animal.  After watching one stuffed animal be helpful and another animal be unhelpful toward a third animal, the babies were then offered the two main puppets.  Which would they prefer to have?  The babies reached out their arms for the stuffed animal that had been "nice" 75 % of the time.

That's a pretty good predictor.  Nonetheless, we have to admit that in 25 % of the cases, the babies did not choose the "nice" puppet.  It seems that just as with adults, we cannot always be able to predict how a baby is going to behave.

~~~

Do you remember any story you read as a child in which animals were treated kindly?

(The Brontë quotes are Shirley's words to Charlotte in Chap.12 of Shirley by Charlotte Brontë [1840].)

(The novel by Victor Hugo mentioned is The Hunchback of Notre Dame [1831].)

The Good, the Bad,and the Ugly in Nature

Every Fall, I receive in the mail some calendars from environmental organizations that want to coax me into making a donation.  The calendars represent marvelous examples of nature photography, bringing me beautiful close-up images of wildlife, and panoramic images of landscapes.  Although I enjoy the colorful photographs, in the back of my mind I am aware of a drawback in their representations of Nature.  And therein lies a complex paradox about the natural world and our human relation to it.

John Ruskin
     

The key to understanding the paradox is remembering that I enjoy beautiful pictures of Nature, whereas things in Nature are not always beautiful.  This insight was laid out by the 19th-century art critic John Ruskin when he criticized a minister who had depicted a landscape as being only light and freshness.  Ruskin pointed out things that had been left out of that depiction, by adding:  "Beside the rock, in the hollow under the thicket, the carcase [carcass] of a ewe, drowned in the last flood, lies nearly bare to the bone....  At the turn of the brook, I see a man fishing with a boy and a dog -- a picturesque and pretty group enough certainly, if they had not been there all day starving.  I know them, and I know the dog's ribs also, which are nearly as bare as the dead ewe's...."

A bit of reflection can, without too much difficulty, lead to the recognition that not all things we see in Nature are aesthetically beautiful.  It is more difficult to recognize and accept those things in Nature that we can feel a moral distaste for.  Such as a tiger chomping its teeth on the body of a beautiful antelope that is not yet dead.  (You will never see a close-up of that on one of those wildlife calendars.)

It has been easy for humankind to be repulsed by such predation, labeling it "bad."  Our modern science of ecology teaches us, however, that predators play critical roles in the internal, balancing dynamic of ecosystems. And over eight centuries ago, the theologian Thomas Aquinas cautioned his readers against imposing a too simple absolute moral grid upon other forms of life, writing:  "The wolf, though in its own kind a good of nature, is nevertheless evil to the sheep."

It might seem that the matter is resolved at this point.  It might seem that I have to just abandon my revulsion at the ugliness I see in the non-human realm of Nature.  True, I should be concerned about that needy man and boy who Ruskin pointed out to me.  But shouldn't I just set aside my feelings when I see distasteful things in the non-human world, such as the ewe Ruskin described?  It might seem so, but I think that would be misguided.  It could result in a hardening of my own heart.  My sensitivity is part of what makes me a living being -- similar to the way the poor ewe had its own forms of sensitivity.

The paradox is that I need to see in Nature a wider beauty that incorporates things that should be disturbing to me in a certain way.  So, ironically, even as I try to remember that Nature was not designed for my own aesthetic or moral pleasure, I say to those environmental organizations, "Don't stop sending those beautiful wonder-filled calendars!"

~~~

Are there things in Nature you experience as being ugly or unpleasant?

(The Ruskin quote is cited in McGrath, Alister E.  A Fine-Tuned Universe:

  The Quest for God in Science and Theology.  © 2009. p. 81.)

(The Aquinas quote is from his A Compendium of Theology [1269-1273], I, 142.)

Libraries for the Souls

imagined interior of Library of Alexandria

Book-lovers are almost always lovers of libraries.  (I confess to being both.)  Ask a book-lover about some good memory of a library, and I bet you will get a childhood memory.  My wife, for example, tells about her persuading the librarian to make an exception to the 3-book checkout limit because, as a child, she went through books so fast.  So helpful have been libraries to the human race that it is no surprise that the library in ancient Alexandria had over its entrance the sign:

"A hospital for the soul." 

Not that I have found all libraries life-giving or even conducive to learning.  I remember in particular one seminary library where the books were covered in dust, pages dried out and sometimes falling out because the radiators were set too hot.  Some books were wedged in horizontally above other books. And there were no chairs in the stacks area, nor even space between the rows of shelves to make oneself comfortable even on the floor.  That library cramped both books and people's spirits.

Most libraries I have experienced, however, have been life-giving. It interests me how that usually entails letting in important elements of  Nature:  Natural light, and clean air (even if that cleanliness is created by a good air-conditioning system).  Also, how helpful it is to have chairs and tables near a window so that readers can intermittently look up from their books in order to look outside to rest their over-taxed eyes.  And also so that they can look up from their reading to let their over-filled minds relax and expand. Expand so that the thoughts and feelings swirling from the written words can settle deeply into their souls.

One of the unrecognized contributions of the U.S. to the world has been its having been in the vanguard of establishing libraries free to the public.  A good number of older immigrants to the U.S. (such as the actor Kirk Douglas, whose parents came from Russia) tell how their parents were amazed that in the U.S. children could go to a library and borrow books free.  That accessibility has now been expanded through computerized search catalogs, as anybody who has been to a contemporary library knows.  I will confess that there was a romance in the older cataloguing method of index cards, a hole punched at the bottom of each card to keep it securely within the wooden drawers for alphabetical browsing.  That method also meant that every school-child could quickly learn the correct answer to the librarian's perennial question:  "Can anyone tell us what are the three main types of cards in the card catalogue?"  A child could raise their hand and answer, "Title, Author, and Subject."  Nevertheless, I do concede that the computer now makes searching a large library faster.

So those are the ingredients for my recipe for a good library:  Natural light.  Clean air.  Sunlight (not glaring).  Tables by the window.  Comfortable chairs.  A good cataloguing system for finding items.  Oh yes, there is one other ingredient I haven't mentioned:  Good content in the books. That is the real nutrition.

~~~

Do you have a good childhood memory of a library?  Do you have a favorite library today?  Why?

A Fiery Paradoxical Mystery

In his "Canticle of Brother Sun," St. Francis of Assisi uses a series of verses with very similar wording to celebrate one by one each part of the natural world.  Each part -- moon, air, water, and so forth -- is celebrated as both praising God and being a means by which we join Nature in praise.

There is one part of the natural world, however, that is singled out by St. Francis as being most like God, and it is surprising:  Francis singles out the sun.  When speaking to God about the sun, Francis says, "Of you, Most High, he bears the likeness."

Somehow it seems to smack of sun worship!  Wasn't I taught in church-school how the ancient Israelites in the Bible took pains to differentiate their concept of God from the beliefs of the other ancient cultures that worshipped a planet or the sun?  So why does Francis say that of all the things in the natural world God is most like the sun?  We, today, in most mainstream Christianity are more likely to prefer that God be likened to something more close at hand than the sun, and something less likely to burn us.  It's more comforting to think of God as being like a gentle breeze, or a good friend.

Francis's own statement that the sun "brings the day" shows that he found a similarity to God's faithfulness in the sun's faithful rising every morning.  Francis also says that it is through the sun that God provides us light. However, another clue as to how God might by like the sun might be found later in the "Canticle" where Francis says of "Brother Fire" that fire too not only brings light but is also "full of power and strength."  Light and warmth but also power -- some of the same properties held by the fiery sun.

So here is a paradox which might speak even more closely to the similarity between the sun and the great Divine Mystery we call God, who we never see:  We receive light and warmth from the sun, but we could never touch the sun itself, much less enter its fiery core, without being consumed.  Similarly, I can find intimations of God here on Earth, but how could my mind ever fully grasp what kind of power it can be that can make possible all of the 170-billion galaxies, with an average of 100-billion stars in each galaxy?  My mind would be completely overwhelmed, consumed.

In 1654, the Christian philosopher Blaise Pascal experienced for about two hours one of those mystical experiences in which a veil is lifted and the Divine Mystery is experienced extraordinarily directly.  For the remainder of his life, Pascal carried with him a piece of paper on which he had written a description of his experience of God.  It's words in part were:

"In the year of Grace 1654, on Monday 23rd November...

From about half past ten at night until about half-past twelve.

FIRE.

... Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy."

~~~

What to you most strongly proclaims the greatness of the world we live in?

(The Pascal quote is taken from An Anthology of Christian Mysticism, by Harvey D. Egan, © 1991.  p. 482.)

(The photo of artwork, by Frank Vincentz,

 is used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

(One translation of St. Francis's "Canticle" can be read at this external link: "Canticle.")

A Strange Word for a Strange World

The first time I was in a national park, I didn't know I was.  During that family vacation, I was elementary-school age, and I don't recall my parents every saying we were going to the "national park," or even to "the park."  Instead, we were going to see "the cave" or "Mammoth Cave."  Even though that famous cave is in a national park, I don't recall our having explored any landscape above ground (other than the gift shop and restaurant).

Mammoth Cave

I also believe it was during that family vacation that I first encountered the word "mammoth."  Today in the U.S., we rarely employ that word as an adjective, preferring "huge," "immense," or "gigantic."  Perhaps at the age I was, I had heard the word "mammoth" used as a noun to talk about woolly "mammoths" (based on the Russian name for those extinct animals first discovered in Siberia).  But I have no recollection of knowing about those creatures at that time either.  Because of my unfamiliarity with that strange word with three "m's" in it, the phrase "Mammoth Cave" did not sound like a description of the cave's size, but instead seemed to be a distinctive proper name, just like the name "Kentucky" for the state we were headed to.

Since that time of my childhood, I have been a tourist in a half-dozen other caves with less descriptive names.  What has stayed with me most in my memory is the otherworldliness of the experience.  (It has been similar to the experience of going into a dark movie theater and becoming so lost in the world of the movie that when I emerged back into daylight I had forgotten what day it was, and even what time of day.)  Some of that strangeness of caves has come from the fascinating, but in a way bizarre rock formations, often accentuated by man-made lights. More than those things, there has been the otherworldliness of actually being beneath the ground that had seemed so solid when I was above it.

Over a half-century before I entered Mammoth Cave as a boy, the early nature-writer John Burroughs (1837-1921) wrote eloquently about his own experience in that very same cave.  He emphasized the strangeness of the place by explaining how even blind people found it so:  "The blind seem as much impressed by it as those who have their sight....  They get some idea of the spaciousness when words are uttered....  When no word is spoken, the silence is of a kind never experienced on the surface of the earth, it is so profound and abysmal."

Burroughs then penetrates more deeply into the otherworldliness by pointing to its similarity to the dead being underground:  "I... said to myself, the darkness and the silence of their last resting-place is like this....  No vicissitudes of earth, no changes of seasons, no sound of storm or thunder penetrate here; winter and summer, day and night, peace or war, it is all one; a world beyond the reach of change...."

Burroughs' words made me even gladder that we humans have evolved so as to be suited to living upon this green Earth's surface, not confined inside it.

~~~

If you have ever been in a cave, what was it like being there and coming back out?

(The Burroughs quotes are from Riverby [1894] by John Burroughs.)

(The photo inside Mammoth Cave is by Daniel Schwen,

 and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

Flowers Against the Stereotype

Many a poet has drawn upon the delicate beauty of flowers for literary inspiration.  The softness of the petals.  The sweet fragrance.  Flowers thus lend themselves to being a symbol of femininity. (Also, notice how in our U.S. culture, women will be given a corsage to wear vastly more often than men are given boutonnieres.)

Here are some poetic examples of flowers in an inspiring role:  Shakespeare's Juliet, in the balcony scene of Romeo and Juliet, depicted herself as "a beauteous flower."   Alfred, Lord Tennyson connected the physical characteristics of a flower even more explicitly to those of a woman, writing:

"Lightly was her slender nose

Tip-tilted like the petal of a flower."

The 19th-century German writer Heinrich Heine went straight to the point, titling one of his poems "Du Bist Wie eine Blume," which translates to "You are Like a Flower."

I wonder what such poets -- who thought of flowers as being delicate and feminine -- would have thought about a flower from Sumatra that I heard about on the radio. Far from sounding feminine, it was described as being "like a giant finger jutting straight up... eight feet tall and [weighing] 250 pounds."  Nor would a person want to extract the essence of the aroma this flower gave off, because it had a "distinctive rotting-corpse-like odor."  The evolutionary explanation behind that flower (scientific name Titan arum) is that the putrid odor enables it to attract insects who believe they are coming to the carcass of an animal on which they might feed.  The insects flocking to the flower get tricked, while the clever flower gets itself pollinated.

It was not only insects who have been disappointed in the case of this particular flower, which was on display at the U.S. Botanic Garden in Washington, D.C.  Many of the museum-goers who flocked to the flower, hoping to get a whiff of its repellent odor, were disappointed because the colossal flower emitted its odor for only a few hours, and did not have the courtesy to schedule its opening so as to align with the museum's daytime hours.

The finger-shaped Titan arum is not the only tropical Asian flower to have evolved such a trick of deception.  Another species, the Rafflesia arnoldii, has a more typical floral shape, being circular with petaled edges.  But it is similarly oversized (two or three feet in diameter) and also smells like a carcass during part of its blooming period, even if only briefly.

I was not among either the disappointed or the pleased museum-goers at the U.S. Botanic Garden. Nevertheless, I take delight in that news story about the non-stereotypical flower for two reasons.  I take delight first in being reminded again about how evolution, with all its immense variety, has developed a living being that defies our human expectations, particularly our cultural associations.  Secondly, I am pleased to hear that so many people can themselves take delight in an example of biodiversity that we ourselves would not have designed, and might have usually found repulsive.

~~~

Do you have any thoughts about these huge, putrid flowers?

(The Tennyson lines are from "Gareth and Lynette," line 574, in Idylls of the King. 1859-1885.)

(The news story was "Lure of Flower's Putrid Essence Draws Crowd," July 22, 2013. © NPR.)
(Second photo, by Henrik Ishihara Globaljuggler, used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.) 

Life-Giving Corn

When I was a child, my mother would usually allow me in the kitchen while she worked. More than allow -- she often seemed to like it. She endorsed the motto of "learning by doing," inspired by the early 20th-century educator John Dewey.  When I was young, there was not much I could do by myself in the kitchen except watch up close.  But occasionally, there was a task I could do all by myself: shuck the corn.  However, she sent me outside to do it, knowing it could make a mess.

I would first open several sheets of newspaper, and spread them out on the driveway (the way I had been shown).  That would make it easy to fold up the discarded parts of the corn into a large wad that could be tidily dropped into the trash.  It was pretty easy for me to pull off the green husks and most of the long "hairs."  (Only once was I startled by a small, now dead caterpillar that lay neatly in one of the rows of kernels.)  It was a bit of a chore, however, to try to get rid of every last one of those "hairs" on the ear of corn.  I might have been appreciative of those silks if I had know that it was through them that the cob of corn had been brought to life, those strands being the upper female part of the plant's flower.

Over the past decades in the U.S., corn has been mentioned in the media mostly in regard to concerns about the amount of corn syrup in processed foods, or about the drawbacks of using food such as corn (rather than something like switchgrass) to make ethanol to add to gasoline. About the only time corn gets mentioned with exuberant appreciation is in the patriotic story of how in 1612 Capt. John Smith's ill-equipped Virginia colonists were saved by the bushels of corn they received from Native Americans.  And so, I'd like to speak a good word for the often overlooked corn (which is called "maize" in most of the world).

corn vendor
in India today

Those Virginia colonists were not the only people whose lives have been saved by corn.  When Columbus landed in Cuba, he found the production of maize going strong.  A similar discovery was made by Francisco Pizarro in the early 1500's.  The Inca nation (whose leader Pizarro captured) was vast:  2,200 miles long and containing nine million well-fed people.  Their lives were to a great part sustained by maize.  Even though corn contains little protein, its advantage over the world's other major grains (wheat and rice) is that it can be simply cooked and eaten without having to process the grain.

Moreover, the "sweet corn" bred for human eating is but one category of maize.  Even the Native Americans had field-corn as well for their domesticated animals (which in turn supported human life).  And they had flour corn, whose kernels are more suitable for making flour.  Not to mention that enduring cinema attraction, popcorn.

Guila Naquitz cave, Oaxaca, Mexico
(site of 6,250 year-old corn remains)

All these types date back to a form of wild grass in the Zea genus, whose seed-ear is minuscule.  Human cultivation enlarged that seed-ear.  The great chain of human life living off cultivated corn throughout the world has been traced back by archaeologists over 7,000 years!

~~~

Do you have any childhood memories involving corn?            
           

(The photo of the vendor is by Babasteve.  That of the cave is by Jerry Friedman.

  Both are used under Creative Commons Attribution Generic licenses.)

Kingly Care for Animals

Before the PBS series "The Story of India" provided me a fairly-deep look at that nation's history, my knowledge about that Eastern culture had come through the movies of Satyajit Ray, restaurants, and books.  For example, an Indian over-the-counter vegetarian restaurant named Annapurna's led me to a reference book to discover that it was named after a mountain in the Himalayas.  On a different occasion, however, when a more formal Indian restaurant opened bearing the name "Ashoka's," I was ahead on my knowledge.  I was delighted an establishment with that name was opening not just because I liked Indian cuisine.  It was also because, from my reading, I already knew of and admired Emperor Ashoka's religious tolerance and compassionate attitudes toward animals.

one pillar
erected by Ashoka

Ashoka ruled in the 3rd century B.C.E. and made known his wishes partly through edicts carved on tall stone pillars, ten of which are still standing.  Part of his edict regarding religious tolerance reminds us that we do not increase the appeal of our own faith-tradition by unnecessarily disparaging the faith-traditions of other people.

Ashoka's compassionate attitudes came about as part of his adopting Buddhism, one of the most significant conversion experiences in all of history.  Previously, he had followed the approach of earlier emperors by expanding his kingdom through war.  But after winning a huge battle at Kalinga in 260 B.C.E. (in which 100,00 were killed and 150,000 deported), Ashoka was shocked by the horrible sights when he surveyed the battlefield.  He turned his life around (the root meaning of the word "conversion").

lion capital on
another Ashoka pillar
     

For the 31 years that remained of his rule, Ashoka cultivated throughout his administration a peaceful attitude of enhancing the welfare of all people, and encouraged a similar attitude among the populace.  Here is where the animals come in. Ashoka ordered protections on their lives in many ways (2000 years before the SPCA was created in the West!).  As one edict of Ashoka's explained, "On bipeds and quadrupeds, on birds and aquatic animals, various benefits have been conferred by me even as far as the grant of life."  Another edict specified over two-dozen mammals and birds "declared by me inviolable," rounding off the list by including "all quadrupeds which are neither useful nor edible."

Ashoka matched his words with actions.  Among his humanitarian accomplishments were the construction of  roadside way-stations providing water and shade.  As an edict explained, "wells have been caused to be dug and trees have been caused to be planted, for the use of animals and humans."  He also created hospitals for "medical treatment for humans and medical treatment for animals."  Some of those veterinary clinics are still in existence in India today -- a continuous legacy of care probably unparalleled in the world.

I'd tell you more about this man, but I've got to stop writing and go put fresh water in the water dish on my deck.  I've been reminded by Ashoka that the birds might be thirsty.

~~~

Do you think any of Ashoka's ideas are applicable today?  Which ones?  How?

(All quotations are from Ashoka's Rock Edicts, Nos. II, V, II, and II, respectively,

adapted from the translation in Asoka's Edicts, by Amulyachandra Sen. © 1956.)

(Photo of full pillar by Amit Bikram Kanungo, used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

“Bard of the River and of the Wood”

It seems to me that a large number of the poems written in the U.S. today contain the word "I" in their first sentence.  Even if the word "I" is not actually present, many contemporary poems focus on the poet's individual experience.  Two centuries ago, one American asked what American writing should be weighted toward to distinguish itself -- what it should be drawn to. And he had a different answer.  He thought this new nation should have its poetic attention drawn to Nature, particularly the extraordinary woods, mountains, and skies of the American landscape.  Through his own poetry, his editorship of the New York Evening Post, and his cultivation of other poets and artists, he had that very effect upon 19th-century American creativity.  His name was William Cullen Bryant.

"Kindred Spirits"
(depicting Bryant and Cole)

Even if you do not recognize his name, you may have seen an often reproduced painting in which he and another man stand side by side at a cliff's edge, surrounded by green forest, a waterfall within earshot, and mountains in the hazy distance.  That painting's title, "Kindred Spirits," describes the friendship of the two men depicted.  One of them is the painter Thomas Cole, who led the Hudson River movement, and whose own landscape paintings both glorified the American wilderness and struggled with its relationship to human civilization.  "Kindred Spirits" was painted by Asher B. Durand in 1849 as a memorial to Cole the year after he died.  The second man in the painting, holding a hat, is none other than William Cullen Bryant, who is sometimes wearing just such a hat in some photographs of him later in life.

Following the American Revolution, the question arose in some American minds of how this new country could differentiate itself from the ancient, warring nations of Europe -- not only politically but also culturally.  Born only a decade after the American Revolution ended, Bryant came to promote the idea that an American freedom of poetry and art could be developed by drawing upon our communion with America's distinctive manifestations of Nature.  Walt Whitman described Bryant as "Bard of the river and of the wood, ever conveying a taste of open air."

Bryant's spirit was personally suited for such a task.  He wrote of himself, "I was always a delighted observer of external nature."   His most famous poem, "Thanatopsis," opens with a description of how we can feel a kindredness with Nature despite its variability:

"To him who in the love of Nature holds

Communion with her visible forms, she speaks

A various language; for his gayer hours

She has a voice of gladness, and a smile

And eloquence of beauty, and she glides

Into his darker musings, with a mild

And healing sympathy, that steals away

Their sharpness, ere he is aware...."

~~~

How do you draw strength from friendships?  How do you draw strength from Nature?

(Whitman's description and Bryant's description of himself are taken from

 the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edition, © 1977.  Vol. II, p. 328.)

(The full text of Bryant's poem [1811, 1817] can be read at this external link:  "Thanatopsis".)

The Oyster’s Secret

One species of
edible oysters

Any number of movie writers have used the plot device of a person eating at a restaurant and finding a pearl in their oyster.  If the screenwriters had consulted marine biologists, those scientists would have disappointed them by explaining that those species of oyster people eat do not include the mollusks that produce pearls. The idea of such a find is appealing, however -- like a winning lottery ticket from Nature herself!  But this source of new-found wealth would come in the form of a small luminescent sphere.

The 20th-century novelist John Steinbeck cautioned against that appeal in The Pearl, a book that was assigned reading when I was in middle school.  The school's decision to require our reading that novella probably lay in its small size and obvious moral:  Greed over material possession can cause people to damage what is truly valuable -- human relationships and love.  Human beings have now figured out how to artificially induce the growth of "cultivated" pearls.  We have not, however, figured out how to get rid of human greed.

There can be another reason for appreciating mollusks:  for food, as many oyster lovers know. Oysters even come with a running gag to make eating them more entertaining.  Namely, the joke that it was a brave man who ate the first oyster.  (I myself very much appreciate the first man or woman who learned how to batter and fry oysters prior to their being served.)  Many people repeat that "brave man" joke without knowing that it originated with the 18th-century Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver's Travels.

Although the oyster's secret might seem to be a possible pearl hidden within, it is really no secret that pearls are now usually cultivated.  What is a secret is not what might lie within an oyster, but where oysters lie.  Where they now lie "at rest," so to speak.  And what that speaks about humankind.

The walrus and the carpenter --
whose oysters had fictional legs

That secret lies underwater in middens, old refuse heaps from human cultures.  Those underwater heaps,  which are on coastal areas throughout the world, besides containing bones, contain oyster shells -- evidence of how oysters were an important source of dietary protein and minerals to Neolithic cultures twelve thousand years ago. One midden in Maine, mostly oyster shells, was over 30 feet deep and over 1,300 feet wide.  Although in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass the comic walrus and carpenter tempted the oysters to come out for a walk on the beach so that they could be eaten, oysters had the benefit to humans of being food that could neither run away nor counterattack.  As such, oysters would have sustained human life over precarious times.

Without eyes or an obvious head, and given their inability to run away, it can be easy, I think, for us to forget that oysters are animals, as are we. Oysters live; they breathe; they reproduce. They are another testimony to evolution's ingenuity.  Moreover, although there may not be a pearl within that rugged lump of seeming rock, for ancient humans, there was a source of life within.

~~~

Imagine people gathering oysters thousands of years ago.  Does anything come to mind?

(The photo of oysters is by Myrabella

and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

(The illustration of walrus and carpenter is in the public domain because its copyright has expired.)

Resonance and Reverence

I can't remember the first time I heard about Aeolian harps. Maybe it was when I was in high school; maybe in college.  I do know, however, that I was fascinated with the idea from the very start.  Imagine a musical instrument that would play without the touch of any human hand, needing only a breeze to vibrate its strings, creating enchanting tones!  That is what Aeolian harps are.  Despite my fascination with them, I did not realize how Aeolian harps could be a key to understanding the West's struggles with science, Nature, and spirituality ever since the Scientific Revolution.

Their name (fascinating in itself) speaks of ancient Greek culture and mythology.  The Aeolians were people who settled in central Greece around 1100 B.C.E.  Aeolus was the god of the winds, his name derived from the Greek aiolos, meaning "quick-moving."  Although the winds in ancient Greece may have moved quickly, the image evoked by Aeolian harps has usually been that of peace and sensitivity.

Although Aeolian harps (sometimes called "wind harps") are ancient, they captured the imagination of many Western poets, particularly the Romantic poets in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, who had a love for Nature.  Ralph Waldo Emerson hung an Aeolian harp in his open window.  They were drawn upon as a metaphor by William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Henry David Thoreau, and Thomas Hardy.  Most famously, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote a poem titled "The Eolian Harp."

In that poem, Coleridge addressed an ongoing concern of himself and other poets of the Romantic era.  Namely, in an age in which more and more knowledge and control of Nature has resulted from science's treating Nature as inanimate objects that can be manipulated, how do we restore  a more intuitive way in which Nature can touch our souls?  Similarly, in an age in which God is getting shoved back to the beginning of time as the Maker of natural laws that seem to allow the world to operate mechanically, how can we again come to sense the Divine as immediately present in the natural world?

Here is where the Aeolian-harp metaphor of resonance with Nature's breezes came to be useful.  What if we could tune our hearts and imaginations to resonate to the beautiful subtleties within Nature?  And what if we could perceive a Living Spirit present behind all life?  Coleridge daringly asked a similar question in his poem: "And what if all of animated nature / Be but organic Harps diversely framed, / That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps ...one intellectual breeze, ...the Soul of each, and God of all?"

These efforts to restore a harmony in our sensibility towards Nature were also efforts to restore a split within our human selves.  That idea was expressed in a poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, in which he also expressed a role for reverence:

"Let knowledge grow from more to more,

But more of reverence in us dwell;

That mind and soul, according well,

May make one music as before."

~~~

Are there occasions in which you feel a special resonance with Nature?  When?

(The Coleridge lines are from "The Eolian Harp" [1796], lines 44-48.)

(The Tennyson quatrain is from "In Memoriam" [1850], Prologue, stanza 7.)

Following the Sun

In the 2013 PBS Nova special "Earth from Space," NASA satellite photography was combined with computer graphics to show the unseen currents on our planet.  One animation I particularly remember was how commercial airplanes, in order to expand the time they fly in daylight, more often travel toward the sun during daytime.

I recalled those airplanes "following the sun" in a quite different context -- one that brought much greater meaning to the imagery of that phrase.  I was watching a gentle 1941 Japanese movie, a soft-spoken romance titled Ornamental Hairpin (Kanzashi), directed by Hiroshi Shimizu.  The emotional weight of the story surrounds the character Emi, who takes advantage of her having lost an ornamental hairpin to return to a country hospice to retrieve the piece of jewelry, and to apologize to the young man who was injured when he accidentally stepped on the hairpin in the deep water of the communal bath.  Through Emi's conversations with a woman friend who follows her to the countryside to try to retrieve her, we learn that Emi is trying to find a way to separate herself from a relationship with a man back in Tokyo, a relationship she finds stifling, perhaps even repressive.

It is during one of those conversations that Emi speaks the line about following the sun.  The friend had at first judged Emi as being irresponsible.  But the friend's attitude changes as Emi conveys how her time vacationing in the countryside has given her new life.  Emi describes how she has been spending her days outdoors, strolling and chatting with the young man and a pair of elementary-school boys, but also washing clothes in the river, hanging them in the sun to dry.  Emi also points out how outdoors her skin has become less pale.

"but at least while I'm here
every day in the sunshine"

Responding to her woman friend's query of what she will do next, Emi says, "I don't know what the future holds, but at least while I am here, every day in the sunshine, the sun will show me the way."  All of the world's faith-traditions contain encouragements to have courage in the face of an unknown future.  We can never be certain what the next day will bring.  But as the earth turns, we can face the next day, following the sun, and following the light we can see.

Reflecting now upon the film, I think about how Emi's words must have had additional meaning for a Japanese audience in 1941.  Their nation had been at war with China for four years, and was now on the verge of being engulfed in the even larger World War II, which had already been expanding in Europe.  It had to be a frightening and uncertain time for many Japanese people.

Hiroshi Shimizu's touching movie closes with two wordless scenes expressive of the presence of beauty in situations in which humans follow a hard or uncertain walk of faith:  The beautifully appareled Emi, carrying a parasol, walking alone up a steep incline of steps.  And Emi walking on a very narrow footbridge across the river.

~~~

Is there something that helps you face each day as it comes?

(The still photos are from the movie Ornamental Hairpin,
directed by Hiroshi Shimizu, © 1941 [based on a novel by Masuji Ibuse], and are used under Fair Use.)