Maya Angelou, the eloquent African American poet (now 80 years old!), supported Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama which surprised some. But after Hillary Clinton withdrew, she was “thumping the drum” for Obama.  (The picture is Angelou reciting “On the Pulse of the Morning” at Pres. Bill Clinton’s Inaugural Address.)

From a telephone interview with The Associated Press:

“First I laughed.  Before I could finish laughing, I wept. Then I shook. I mean, I trembled. You know, the old meaning of the word `thrill’ has a physical aspect. It’s like, `Brrrrr!’ My body started shaking.”

But the experience was also cerebral. Images of slavery and the civil rights movement and of her slain friend Martin Luther King Jr. raced through her mind, and in that moment, she realized that the United States was finally “growing up.”

“I thought of my people, African-Americans. I thought of white Americans. I thought of Asians and Spanish people. And I thought, `My God! What a country. What a country.’ I believe that in the secret heart of every American there’s a desire to live in a great country. And look at us now.”

From Harry Smith with Maya Angelou on the Morning Show…

Still I Rise

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
‘Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops.
Weakened by my soulful cries.

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don’t you take it awful hard
‘Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own back yard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

Into the darkness of night
With heart ache kindled into love,
Oh blessed chance!
I stole me forth unseen,
My house being wrapped in sleep.

Into the darkness, and yet safe
By secret stair and in disguise,
Oh gladsome hap!
In darkness, and in secret I crept forth,
My house being wrapt in sleep.

Into the happy night
In secret, seen of none,
Nor saw I ought,
Without, or other light or guide,
Save that which in my heart did burn.

The fire it was that guided me
More certainly than midday sun,
Where he did wait,
He tht I knew imprinted on my heart,
In place, where none appeared.

Oh Night, that led me, guiding night,
Oh Night far sweeter than the Dawn;
Oh Night, that did so then unite
The Loved with his Beloved.
Transforming Love in Beloved.

On my blossoming breast.
Alone for him entire was kept,
He fell asleep,
Whilst I caressed,
And fanned him with the cedar fan.

The breeze from forth the battlements,
As then it tossed his hair about,
With his fair hand
He touched me lightly on the neck,
and reft me of my senses in a swoon.

I lay quite still, al mem’ry lost,
I leaned my face upon my Loved One’s breast;
I knew no more, in sweet abandonement
I cast away my care,
And left it all forgot amidst the lilies fair.

I ended up at the Half Price Bookstore tonight in search of the book recommended by St theresa, The Translucent Revolution. Amazingly, I found a copy that looks like it has never been read for $4.99. I also ended up buying The Cloud of Unknowing and Meister Eckhart, from Whom God Hid Nothing. They are all perfect copies and I spent on all three books exactly what I would have spent had I ordered The Translucent Revolution from Amazon. (I love Half Price Books!)

Something I used to do years ago, after having been given (and having read several times) Finley’s Merton’s Palace of Nowhere and Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain and Zen and the Birds of Appetite, was purchase any decent copy of books by Thomas Merton or about Thomas Merton that I happen to find at the Half Price Bookstore. (I’ve done the same with C.S. Lewis and more recently with books by Ken Wilber, assuming I will get to them eventually.) After making those purchases, I moved on to other interests. So of the twelve Merton books in my collection, I have only finished the three that were given to me as gifts and two that I purchased.

I finished Merton’s book of prayers, Dialogues with Silence, tonight. It’s a lovely book of very personal prayers and line drawings that were collected from his journals, letters, poetry and books. It’s interesting to follow the progression. At first there seems to be a sort of desperation in his prayers - he wants to find God but God keeps escaping him - to a much more grounded, less desperate expression of experience and communal understanding. Interestingly, his line drawings progress in the same sort of way - from representational art to abstract Zen-like drawings. It’s a beautiful book. No highlights to post - the link above is to Google Books where you can find many of the prayers and line drawings.

I’ve mentioned Striving for Being previously, the letters of Thomas Merton and Cseslaw Milosz that I finished several days ago. It was absolutely fascinating to read these letters! Milosz is a poet from Poland who lived in self-exile in France and then later became a professor at Berkeley. The correspondence lasted 10 years - between 1958 (when Thomas Merton wrote a letter to Milosz telling him how much he admired Milosz’s book The Captive Mind) and 1968 (when Thomas Merton unexpectedly died - was murdered/committed suicide/had bizarre accident??) They discuss the influence of American-mass culture, the Cold War and ideology on both sides of it (they wanted a third way), their own literary endeavors and those of others, spiritual positions, etc. Both were often critical of the other’s views, but they maintained a mutual respect throughout.

A few highlights:

• On Jan. 17, 1959, Milosz mentions the Japanese film Rashomon, where 4 subjective versions of one event are given. He says he practices Rashomon too much so is sometimes afraid of that delectatio morosa. I looked that up. It’s the pleasure taken in a sinful thought or imagination even without desiring it. . I also went to see if I could add Rashomon to my Netflix queue and amazingly, it was at the top of my recommendations because I gave 5 star ratings to Sunset Boulevard, Spirited Away, Lawrence of Arabia, A Clockwork Orange, Being John Malkovich, Lost in Translation, Apocalypse Now and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Bizarre!)
• On May 21, 1959, Merton responds to Milosz’s criticism of Merton’s thoughts on Prometheus and “Promethean theology”: About Prometheus - I wonder if you interpreted it correctly? I have nothing against fire. Certainly it is the fire of the spirit: my objection is that it does not have to be stolen and that it cannot be successfully stolen. It has been already given, and Prometheus’s climb, defeat and despair is all in his own imagination. He had the fire already.
• On Sept. 12, 1959, Merton writes: “You are right to feel a certain shame about writing. I do too, but always too late - five years after a book has appeared I wish I had never been such a fool as to write it. But when I am writing it I think it is good. If we were not all fools we would never accomplish anything at all. As to people of good grain and bad grain, I do not have any answers, but again I think a great deal depends on love, and when people are loved they change. But what is happening in the world today is a wholesale collapse of man’s capacity to love. He has been submerged under material concerns, and by the fantastic proliferation of men and things all around him, so that there are so many of everything that one lives in a state of constant bewilderment and fear. One cannot begin to commit himself to any definite love, because the whole game is too complex and too hazardous and one has lost all focus…The answer - the only answer I know - is that of Staretz Zossima in The Brothers Karamazov - to be responsible to everybody, to take upon oneself all the guilt - but I don’t know what that means. It is romantic, and I believe it is true. But what is it? Behind it all is the secret that love has an infinite power, and its power, once released, can in an instant destroy and swallow up all hatred, all evil, all injustice, all that is diabolical.”
• On Nov. 28, 1960, Milosz writes: “We live through a time when Manichaeism is particularly strong and one could enumerate many reasons for it - though we do not grasp as yet all the causes. I do not know to what extent a sort of despair at the sight of ruthless necessity in Nature is justified. Yet it exists while it was not known until quite modern times. The distance between man and the rest of Creation was so great that for Descartes too the animal was a machine. Some old Manichaean elements started to revive perhaps in the Reformation but they were mitigated. You can say that overstressed compassion for millions and billions of creatures crushed every second makes part of the modern schism which destroyed quite real barriers between man and animal. But the bitter taste of necessity colours the style of our contemporaries and if Simone Weil is such a force and if she counterbalances many modern follies, it is because she was une Cathare. Albert Camus called her (in a letter) “the only great spirit of our time” and Camus undoubtedly was a Manichaen. By the way, I would like to convince you to comment upon La Chute (The Fall), a very ambiguous book, which is a cry of despair and treatise on Grace (absent.) [Manichaeism is one of the major dualistic religions.]
• On May 6, 1960 - Merton: “I enjoy and respect Camus, and think I understand him. What you said about La Chute struck me very forcibly when I read it: it is a fine piece of Manichaean theology and very applicable to this (Trappist) kind of life. In fact I was able to use it to goo effect, perhaps cruelly, in teh spiritual direction of a narcissistic novice. But the thing of Camus that really “sends” me is the marvelous short story about the missionary who ends up as prisoner in the city of salt. There, in a few words, you have a superb ricanement, in theology! And a very salutary piece for Trappists to read, because for generations we have been doing just that kind of thing. I was deeply saddened by his death. In politics I think I am very much inclined to his way of looking at things, and there is in him an honesty and compassion which belies the toughness of his writing….I do not have much interest in Sartre, he puts me to sleep, as if he were deliberately dull: assommant is a much better word. He shaves me, as the French say. He beats me over the head with his dullness, thou Hui Clos (No Exit) strikes me as good and somewhat puritanical play. The other thing of his I have tried to read, Nausee (Nausea), is drab and stupid.
• Also on May 1960, Merton warns Milosz about moving to America. “…the atmosphere of this country is singularly unstimulating. Why live among lotus eaters and conformists, and such conformists. Never was there a place where freedom was so much an illusion…But for the rest you find here no imagination, nothing but people counting, counting and counting, whether with gian machines, or on their stupid fingers. All they know how to do is count.”
• On Nov. 9, 1960 Merton writes: “Certainly there are enormous problems and difficulties about the life of an intellectual in America. There is the awful shame and revolt at being in this continual milkshake, of being a passive, inert captive of Calypso’s Island where no one is ever tempted to think and where one just eats and exists and supports the supermarket and the drug store and General Motors and the TV. Above all there is the shame, the weakness which makes us hesitate to associate ourselves with what has become the object of universal scorn and hate on the part of the intellectuals in Europe.”
• On Mar. 30, 1965, Merton writes: “But the fact of the South that nobody seems to pay any attention to at the moment is that nothing is being done for the sickest and most morally impoverished of them all, Southern whites. Their stupidity and ferocity are, on the contrary, simply being driven to the extreme: of course they invite it. It would be too good not to let them ruin themselves and make fools of themselves but in the end our blissful charity will make perfect Nazis of them. They are that already, without any of the skill of the German types.”

So many gorgeous poems in my Google Reader today.  This one was posted by lightandstorm.

The killings continue, each second
pain and misfortune extend themselves
in the genetic chain, injustice is done knowingly,and the air
bears the dust of decayed hopes,
yet breathing those fumes,
walking the thronged
pavements among crippled lives, jackhammers
raging, a parking lot painfully agleam
in the May sun, I have seen
not behind but within, within the
dull grief, blown grit, hideous
concrete facades, another grief, a gleam
as of dew, an abode of mercy,
have heard not behind but within noise a humming that drifted into a quiet smile.
Nothing was changed, all was revealed otherwise;
not that horror was not, not that the killings did
not continue,not that I thought there was to be no more despair,
but that as if transparent all disclosed
an otherness that was blessed, that was bliss.
I saw Paradise in the dust of the street.

I love this poem! I am grateful to Curlysalamander for reminding me of it.

I

I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk
I fall in.
I am lost … I am helpless.
It isn’t my fault.
It takes me forever to find a way out.

II

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don’t see it.
I fall in again.
I can’t believe I am in the same place
but, it isn’t my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.

III

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in … it’s a habit.
my eyes are open
I know where I am.
It is my fault.
I get out immediately.

IV

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.

V

I walk down another street.

I watched Wit last night. I don’t know what possessed me to do so. I was going to read Nausea, but I had a strong compulsion to watch Wit. So I did. I hadn’t seen it since the first time I watched it in 2001, but have had the DVD sitting on my shelf for quite some time. I remember calling my friend in convulsive sobs after having seen it many years ago. She watched it, called me back, and let me know in no uncertain terms she didn’t feel sorry for Emma Thompson’s character (Prof. Vivian Bearing) whatsoever.

I think that was the point. Emma Thompson’s character didn’t want anyone to feel sorry for her. The movie starts out with Prof. Bearing being told she has cancer, very matter of factly. Stage IV Ovarian cancer - there is no stage V. They are going to put her through a tough course of treatment (full dose), but they know she can handle it. It’s all very matter of fact and she accepts it very matter-of-factly.

Margaret Edson, a school teacher, originally wrote W;t (with a semi-colon) for the theater and she won a Pulitzer Prize for her screenplay. She came up with the idea for the play after working in the cancer and AIDS inpatient unit of a research hospital. She was a unit clerk which she says had her at the center of all the action, like being Radar on Mash.

The point, I suppose (at least one of them), is abstraction inside abstraction. Vivian Bearing is an extremely tough “Professor of Philosophy” with a specialty in 17th century metaphysical poet John Donne. She chose Donne because she believed him to be one of the toughest poets to understand and she has a love of words. But she can only understand Donne in the abstract and so she teaches in the abstract. She considers herself to be an uncompromising teacher and the students respect her but fear her. When she ends up in the hospital, she becomes the subject that is studied in the abstract by the research doctors. She remains matter of fact about the whole ordeal, but it is heart breaking to watch. I was crying 10 minutes into the movie, when Bearing’s professor, the “great E.M. Ashford”, is telling her that punctuation matters!

You take this too lightly, Miss Bearing. This is metaphysical poetry, not The Modern Novel. The standard which one would apply to any other text are simply insufficient. The effort must be total for the results to be meaningful. Do you think punctuation of the last line of this sonnet is merely an insignificant detail?

The Sonnet begins with a valiant struggle with death, calling on all of the forces of drama and intellect to vanquish the enemy. But it is ultimately about overcoming the seemingly insuperable barriers separating death, life and eternal life.

In the edition you chose, this profoundly simple meaning is sacrificed to hysterical punctuation:

And Death - capital D - shall be no more - semicolon! - Death - capital D - comma - thou shalt die - exclaimation point!

If you go in for this sort of thing, I suggest you take up Shakespeare.

Gardner’s edition of the Holy Sonnets returns to the Westmoreland manuscript of 1610 - not for sentimental reasons, I assure you. But because Helen Gardner is a scholar. It reads:

And death shall be no more, comma, Death shalt die.

Nothing but a breath - a comma - separates life from life everlasting. It is very simple, really. With the original punctuation restored, death is no longer something to act out on a stage, with exclamation points. It’s a comma, a pause.

Vivian calls it “wit”, and E.M. tells her that it isn’t wit, it’s truth.

I realize Camus would take issue with the idea of life everlasting. But the movie itself makes me wonder about Camus’s challenge at the beginning of Myth of Sisyphus: That judging whether life is or is not worth living is the fundamental question of philosophy - does life have meaning? What could be more absurd than the situation Prof. Bearing finds herself in? Her “fate” seems far worse than Sisyphus who pushes that rock up a mountain for eternity because at least Sisyphus can revel in his strength and ability to “be one” with the rock and with nature. What do you do when you are told you have cancer and your whole world is turned upside down? Revel in it? Take the full dose that the research doctors want you to take just so you can show that you can do it and to prove you don’t want to die? Where is the virtue in that? At some point, isn’t it OK to just give up? To say - I don’t want this anymore. Time to die now. Would that be proof that life doesn’t have meaning? Of course not.

Maybe, just maybe, death doesn’t have the dramatic meaning we give to it. Even if you don’t believe in God, why think of it as death everlasting rather than life everlasting? The idea of death everlasting gives far too much dramatic importance to death. Why give it that importance?

And death shall be no more, comma, Death shalt die.

Death Be Not Proud (Holy Sonnet X)

Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so,
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure: then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell;
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die. -John Donne

SPOILER WARNING!!!

The one and only visitor Bearing receives is E.M. Ashford, just as Bearing is about to die. E.M. was in town for her Grandson’s 5th birthday, inquired about Bearing and discovered she was in the hospital. She asks Bearing if she should recite something from Donne. Bearing shakes her head “no”. So Ashford reads her a story from Margaret Wise Brown, Runaway Bunny. (We have almost every Margaret Wise Brown picture book there is in my little family, and Runaway Bunny is one of my favorites - besides Goodnight Moon, that is.)

The little bunny runs away, but no matter where he goes, the mother finds him. It’s no use. Ashford says something like, “oh, isn’t that a wonderful analogy for the soul? You can run and hide, but you will always be found.” If I recall correctly, at the very end of the book, after the bunny is finally tired of running away and hiding, the mother bunny says, “Here have a carrot. ”

There is nothing to hide. All is well. Here… have a carrot. (And death shall be no more, comma, Death shalt die.)

I picked up Letters to a Young Poet/The Possibility of Being (A Selection of Poems) by Rainer Maria Rilke in the bargain section at Barnes and Noble a few months before I started reading Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov and studying the other existentialists. I didn’t end up reading it until finishing Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Nietzsche. It turned out to be good timing because according to Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche and Rilke have a lot in common.

They were both in love with the same woman - Lou Salome (who was also friends with Freud - she had some interesting friends and lovers!!). Nietzsche was both famous and dying by the time Rilke’s love affair started with her. She was barely over 20 when her love affair started with Nietzsche and a mature woman by the time of her love affair with Rilke. She was Rilke’s great supporter and confidant, even after the end of their love affair so it is reasonable to assume she had a strong influence on Rilke’s thinking and that Nietzsche’s thinking had a strong influence on that of Salome’s.

According to Kauffman in From Shakespeare to Existentialism, what Nietzsche and Rilke have most in common is a peculiar piety that

…does not consist of any reverent acceptance of some tradition but a rejection of all that has hardened into stereotypes and in the resolve to be open and ready to their own call. Without believing in any god, they feel that if they will be entirely receptive they will be addressed personally and experience a necessity, a duty, a destiny that will be just theirs and nobody elses, but no less their duty than any categorical imperative.

What Nietzsche and Rilke want is a new honesty, and the sin against the spirit is for them the essentially insincere escape into traditional values and cliches. What is old cannot be altogether adequate now, for me, in an unprecedented situation. It is honesty that demands what is still unsaid. Honesty is the new piety.

Rilke’s writes in his First Elegy, “Alas, who is there we can make use of? Not angels, not men; and even the noticing beasts are aware that we don’t feel very securely at home in this interpreted world.” According to Kaufmann, William James had stressed how important it is that men feel at home in the universe. But the new piety, the new honesty of Nietzsche and Rilke rule out the older piety.

I find this interesting because there is a passage in the New Testament (Luke 9:58 and Matthew 8:20) that has always fascinated me. (It’s a saying attributed to Jesus): “The foxes have their holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no where to lay his head.” What does that mean, exactly? Why are the foxes and birds at home, but not the Son of Man? There is no security for the Son of Man. Why? Because he is open to experience? That makes sense to me. Nietzsche’s and Rilke’s new piety does not permit a sense of security because it is too easy to reduce experience to our preconceived ideas of it when we seek security. We must be willing to live dangerously in order to be open to experience.

I highlighted a few things in Rilke’s letters. One, of course, being the “live the questions” that is so often quoted. It’s in the fourth letter to Franz Xaver Kappus (the young poet) sent July 16, 1903:

…..If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable. If you will love what seems to be insignificant and will in an unassuming manner, as a servant, seek to win the confidence of what seems poor, then everything will become easier, more harmonious, and somehow more conciliatory, not for your intellect - that will most likely remain behind, astonished - but for your innermost consciousness, your awakeness, and your inner knowing.

You are so young; you stand before beginnings. I would like to beg or you, dear friend, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day. Perhaps you are indeed carrying within yourself the potential to visualize, to design, and to create for yourself an utterly satisfying, joyful, and pure lifestyle. Discipline yourself to attain it, but accept that which comes to you with deep trust, and as long as it comes from your own will, from your own inner need, accept it, and do not hate anything.

And something I touched on several months ago about relationships from the same letter (I’ve been slowly making my way through the poetry so have taken a long time to read this book):

Perhaps the sexes are more closely related than one would think. Perhaps the great renewal of the world will consist of this, that man and woman, freed of all confused feelings and desires, shall no longer seek each other as opposites, but simply as members of a family and neighbors, and will unite as human beings, in order to simply, earnestly, patiently, and jointly bear the heavy responsibility of sexuality that has been entrusted to them…

….Therefore, dear friend, embrace your solitude and love it. Endure the pain it causes, and try to sin out with it. For those near to you are distant, you say. That shows it is beginning to dawn around you; there is an expanse opening about you. And when your nearness becomes distant, then you have already expanded far; to being among the stars…

Be good to those who stay behind, and be quiet and confident in their presence. Do not torment them with your doubts, and do not shock them with your confidence or your joy, which they cannot understand. Try to establish with them a simple, sincere mutual feeling of communion, that need not change if you yourself change. Love the life that is theirs, although different from yours…

I also appreciated this from the sixth letter (December 23, 1903):

….ask yourself, dear Mr. Kappus, whether you have really lost God. Is it not rather true that you have not yet possessed him? For when could that have been? Do you think a child can hold him, him whom men can bear only with great effort and whose weight crushes the aged ones? Do you think that the one possessing him could lose him like a little stone? Or do you not rather agree that he who might have him could be lost by him? However, if you conclude that he did not exist in your childhood and not before that, if you surmise that Christ was deluded by his yearning and that Mohammed was betrayed by his pride - and if you, with great dismay, feel that he does not exist, even during this hour, while we are speaking of him, what right have you then to miss him, like someone out of the past, him, who never existed, and to seek him as though he were lost?

Why don’t you think of him as the coming one, who has been at hand since eternity, the future one, the final fruit of a tree, with us as its leaves? What is keeping you from hurling his birth into evolving times and from living your life as though it were one painful beautiful day in the history of a great pregnancy? Don’t you see that everything that happens becomes a beginning again and again? Could it not be his beginning, since a beginning in itself is always so beautiful? If, however, he is the most perfect one, would not what is less than perfect have to preceed him, so that he can choose himself from great abundance? Would not he have to be the last one,in order to envelop everything within himself? And what sense would our existence make, if the one we longed for had already had his existence in the past?

I also earmarked a few poems for various reasons. I would like to see how others have translated these and perhaps I’ll dig more deeply into them at a later date: “Early Apollo”; “David Sings Before Saul”; and “Death Experienced”.

Snagged from Nacho’s Blog

You take a final step and, look, suddenly
You’re there. You’ve arrived
At the one place all your drudgery was aimed for:
This common ground
Where you stretch out, pressing your cheek to sandstone.

What did you want
To be? You’ll remember soon. You feel like tinder
Under a burning glass,
A luminous point of change. The sky is pulsing
Against the cracked horizon,
Holding it firm till the arrival of stars
In time with your heartbeats.
Like wind etching rock, you’ve made a lasting impression
On the self you were
By having come all this way through all this welter
Under your own power,
Though your traces on a map would make an unpromising
Meandering lifeline.

What have you learned so far? You’ll find out later,
Telling it haltingly
Like a dream, that lost traveler’s dream
Under the last hill
Where through the night you’ll take your time out of mind
To unburden yourself
Of elements along elementary paths
By the break of morning.

You’ve earned this worn-down, hard, incredible sight
Called Here and Now.
Now, what you make of it means everything,
Means starting over:
The life in your hands is neither here nor there
But getting there,
So you’re standing again and breathing, beginning another
Journey without regret
Forever, being your own unpeaceable kingdom,
The end of endings.

– David Wagoner

Finished Slaughterhouse-Five this morning and think I enjoyed it as much if not better than Mother Night. I could probably go on reading Kurt Vonnegut books all summer!!

Slaughterhouse-Five is supposedly semi-autobiographical. Vonnegut was an American Prisoner of War in Dresden during the Bombing of Dresden . This bombing which took place through traditional air attacks by the Royal Air Force and was aided by the Americans, killed more innocent people than did the atomic bomb at Hiroshima. (According to Slaughterhouse-Five, 135,000 people died as a result of the air attack on Dresden. American air attacks on Tokyo killed 83,793 people on March 9th, 1945. The atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima killed 71, 379 people.) Vonnegut was assigned to dig up the rubble to find bodies.

He said he had been trying to write this book for quite some time but couldn’t find words for it until someone told him that they were all children fighting WWII. That was when he was finally able to make the book work - it was subtitled, “The Children’s Crusade”.

On an interview with Charlie Rose, Vonnegut said he gives 3 of his books an A+. Those are Cat’s Cradle, Mother Night and Slaughterhouse-Five.

I thought this was interesting from Howard Campbell in Slaughterhouse-five:

America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, “It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.” It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though American is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and florify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: “If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?” There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand - glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register…

Americans, like human beings everwhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. The most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say, Napoleonic times.

Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves. Once this is understood, the disagreeable behavior of American enlisted men in German prisons ceases to be a mystery.

Do you think this is true?

It reminded me of the Langston Hughes poem (God to Hungry Child) that people kept referring to after Katrina:

Hungry child.

I didn’t make this world for you.

You didn’t buy any stock in my railroad.

You didn’t invest in my corporation.

Where are your shares in Standard Oil?

I made the world for the rich

And the will-be-rich

And the have-always been rich.

Not for you,

Hungry child.

My favorite version is Seven Blind Mice by Ed Young - it’s one of our all-time favorite kids books around here. Here’s a summary:

One day seven blind mice were surprised to find a strange Something by their pond. “What is it?” they cried, and they all ran home. Red mouse thinks it’s a pillar. Green mouse thinks it’s a snake. Yellow mouse thinks it’s a spear. Purple mouse thinks it’s a great cliff. Orange mouse thinks it’s a fant. Blue mouse thinks it’s a rope. And they all began to argue. But white mouse goes to the pond and ran up one side and down the other and from end to end and realizes the something is as sturdy as a pillar, supple as a snake, wide as a cliff, sharp as a spear, breezy as a fan, stringy as a rope - but altogether, the Something is… an elephant! And when the others ran up one side and down the other and across the Something from end to end, they agreed. Now they saw, too. The Mouse Moral: Knowing in part may make a fine tale, but wisdom comes from seeing the whole.

It’s interesting to see the other versions of this tale..

From the Jain perspective:

Once upon a time, there lived six blind men in a village. One day the villagers told them, “Hey, there is an elephant in the village today.”

They had no idea what an elephant is. They decided, “Even though we would not be able to see it, let us go and feel it anyway.” All of them went where the elephant was. Everyone of them touched the elephant.

“Hey, the elephant is a pillar,” said the first man who touched his leg.

“Oh, no! it is like a rope,” said the second man who touched the tail.

“Oh, no! it is like a thick branch of a tree,” said the third man who touched the trunk of the elephant.

“It is like a big hand fan” said the fourth man who touched the ear of the elephant.

“It is like a huge wall,” said the fifth man who touched the belly of the elephant.

“It is like a solid pipe,” Said the sixth man who touched the tusk of the elephant.

They began to argue about the elephant and everyone of them insisted that he was right. It looked like they were getting agitated. A wise man was passing by and he saw this. He stopped and asked them, “What is the matter?” They said, “We cannot agree to what the elephant is like.” Each one of them told what he thought the elephant was like. The wise man calmly explained to them, “All of you are right. The reason every one of you is telling it differently because each one of you touched the different part of the elephant. So, actually the elephant has all those features what you all said.”

“Oh!” everyone said. There was no more fight. They felt happy that they were all right.

From the Buddhist perspective:

The raja asks each man what an elephant is like. The blind men assert the elephant is like a pot (head), winnowing basket (ear), ploughshare (tusk), plough (trunk), grainery (body), pillar (foot), mortar (back), pestle (tail), or brush (tip of the tail). The men come to blows, which delights the raja. The raja says:

O how they cling and wrangle, some who claim
For preacher and monk the honored name!
For, quarreling, each to his view they cling.
Such folk see only one side of a thing

And from a 19th Century American poet:

It was six men of Indostan

To learning much inclined,

Who went to see the Elephant

(Though all of them were blind),

That each by observation

Might satisfy his mind

The First approached the Elephant,

And happening to fall

Against his broad and sturdy side,

At once began to bawl:

God bless me! but the Elephant

Is very like a wall!

The Second, feeling of the tusk,

Cried, Ho! what have we here

So very round and smooth and sharp?

To me tis mighty clear

This wonder of an Elephant

Is very like a spear!

The Third approached the animal,

And happening to take

The squirming trunk within his hands,

Thus boldly up and spake:

I see, quoth he, the Elephant

Is very like a snake!

The Fourth reached out an eager hand,

And felt about the knee.

What most this wondrous beast is like

Is mighty plain, quoth he;

‘Tis clear enough the Elephant

Is very like a tree!

The Fifth, who chanced to touch the ear,

Said: Even the blindest man

Can tell what this resembles most;

Deny the fact who can

This marvel of an Elephant

Is very like a fan!?

The Sixth no sooner had begun

About the beast to grope,

Than, seizing on the swinging tail

That fell within his scope,

I see, quoth he, the Elephant

Is very like a rope!

And so these men of Indostan

Disputed loud and long,

Each in his own opinion

Exceeding stiff and strong,

Though each was partly in the right,

And all were in the wrong!

Moral:

So oft in theologic wars,

The disputants, I ween,

Rail on in utter ignorance

Of what each other mean,

And prate about an Elephant

Not one of them has seen!

– John Godfrey Saxe