Poetry Makes Might

In light of the violence and destruction in Oslo today, I wanted to post a poem that speaks to the absolute and enduring might of loving another person, even across lifetimes. This translation of a poem by Rabindranath Tagore is one of my favorite readings on any given day. In the belief that words are true power, that words create thoughts, and thoughts create reality what better reaction to violence than poetry read aloud at cribs and kitchen tables, in heatwaves and heartbreaks. Poetry whispered or sung might be the answer to life's unanswerable questions. Who knows? Given enough attention, poetry might have the power to make enough space in our hearts for peace--for might as expressed today causing the end of human life is an empty mouth; the abyss of an expressionless face. Be mighty in response, read poetry this week to yourself or anyone who will listen. Maybe start with this one:

Unending Love

I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times...
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs,
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,
In life after life, in age after age, forever.

Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, it's age old pain,
It's ancient tale of being apart or together.
As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge,
Clad in the light of a pole-star, piercing the darkness of time.
You become an image of what is remembered forever.

You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount.
At the heart of time, love of one for another.
We have played along side millions of lovers,
Shared in the same shy sweetness of meeting,
the distressful tears of farewell,
Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever.

Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you
The love of all man's days both past and forever:
Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life.
The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours -
And the songs of every poet past and forever.

~Rabindranath Tagore

From Selected Poems, Translated by William Radice

Read Silver Sparrow

Summer is one of my favorite times to read, and I would bet it is one of yours too. Especially right now as so many of us are in the grips of a serious heatwave. Why not turn on the fan, turn up the air conditioning, put your feet up and read. My recommendation this week is Silver Sparrow, the third novel by author, Tayari Jones. I was captivated by the voices in the novel and could not put it down. The novel begins, "My father, James Witherspoon, is a bigamist..." and the story picks up speed from there with gorgeous storytelling,complex characters,  and tension that will not turn you loose, and trust me, you won't take a breath until you reach the last page. This book has something for every reader.

You might even catch Tayari on tour, if she is in your part of the country don't miss the chance to attend a great reading. Or listen to her interviewed here.

The Chapel of Angels and Bones

Hanging from a cliff at Sitio, is a beautiful and tiny chapel (the ceiling featured here). I've visited this chapel on every trip to Nazaré, and the place (rich in it's own legend and origin connected to the appearance of the Blessed Mother) holds a kind of mystique for me that I am yet to unravel. Aside from  its absolute and obvious beauty there remains in this place a  physical symbol of an aesthetic state of being, a transcendence, as if the chapel is a doorway to another doorway.  I copied these lines from Fernando Pessoa in the notes from my journal documenting the day: My dreaming of you will be my strength, and when my sentences tell of your Beauty they will have melodies of form, curves of stanza, and the sudden splendors of immortal verse.

This day left an whisper in my ear, but memory continually eluded my conscious mind over the week since I left Portugal. Until yesterday, when a friend said he believed angels often inhabit tangible substances and give those places life. His words made me think that angels, as he described them, become the sign pointing to the next sign. The "presence", if you will, that brings inspiration/creativity  into the bloodstream. 

By chance today, I picked up two books that I have had on my shelf for awhile, George Steiner's Real Presences, and Real Presence by Nathan Mitchell. * Steiner, a linguist and cultural critic, poses questions towards transcendence (or divine presence) in modern culture, while Mitchell, a theologian, is speaking more directly the the concept of the eucharist as it exists in the Roman Catholic faith (note: this is a gross simplification of both of their works, please read them, and forgive me the understatements).

What struck me was that both "presences" were host in this chapel at one time or another, and still reside on some level side by side. Steiner argues in his work that a covenant exists between language and the world, that "whereever and whenever human beings experience meaning, they implicitly affirm the presence of Ultimate Meaning..." and asserts that this meaning can be understood as God, as Plato's "Ideas", as Descartes' self-consciousness, as Kant's transcendent logic, or as Heidegger's "Being" - that "it" remains the center to which all of these roads lead (Steiner 121). 

The chapel has convinced me: certain ideas, like certain books are as bone, and the responsibility of the artist is to  chew them carefully,  to suck their marrow, or swallow them whole, whatever means necessary to obtain their meaning in the fullest measure, to intuit the Source that grew the bones in the first place; the body where Art lives.

Tonight I Can Write...

When writing in Nazaré, the sea is a prescence that expands anything near it, creativity, poetry, even Neruda seems more beautiful with the waves roaring in the background. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXHPk-ctoYY