Reasons To Stay Alive

Matt Haig's Reasons to Stay Alive — I very much recommend this book if you suffer from depression or know anyone suffering from depression. And, let's face it, that's most of us. Here's an extract:

Life is hard. It may be beautiful and wonderful but it is also hard. The way people seem to cope is by not thinking about it too much. But some people are not going to be able to do that. And, besides, it is the human condition. We think therefore we are. We know we are going to grow old, get ill and die. We know that is going to happen to everyone we know, everyone we love. But also, we have to remember, the only reason we have love in the first place is because of this. Humans might well be the only species to feel depression as we do, but that is simply because we are a remarkable species, one that has created remarkable things — civilisation, language, stories, love songs. Chiaroscuro means a contrast of light and shade. In Renaissance paintings of Jesus, for instance, dark shadow was used to accentuate the light bathing Christ. It is a hard thing to accept, that death and decay and everything bad leads to everything good, but I for one believe it. As Emily Dickinson, eternally great poet and occasionally anxious agoraphobe, said: 'That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.'

A Light Exists In Spring (7)

A poet who took definition as her province, Emily Dickinson challenged the existing definitions of poetry and the poet’s work. Like writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, she experimented with expression in order to free it from conventional restraints. Like writers such as Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, she crafted a new type of persona for the first person. The speakers in Dickinson’s poetry, like those in Brontë’s and Browning’s works, are sharp-sighted observers who see the inescapable limitations of their societies as well as their imagined and imaginable escapes. To make the abstract tangible, to define meaning without confining it, to inhabit a house that never became a prison, Dickinson created in her writing a distinctively elliptical language for expressing what was possible but not yet realised. POETRY FOUNDATION

A Light Exists in Spring

A light exists in spring
   Not present on the year
At any other period.
   When March is scarcely here

A color stands abroad
   On solitary hills
That science cannot overtake,
   But human nature feels.

It waits upon the lawn;
   It shows the furthest tree
Upon the furthest slope we know;
   It almost speaks to me.

Then, as horizons step,
   Or noons report away,
Without the formula of sound,
   It passes, and we stay:

A quality of loss
   Affecting our content,
As trade had suddenly encroached
   Upon a sacrament.

EMILY DICKINSON

Poetic Connections

My poem from a couple of days ago — with its lines I skipped away, a nobody with nothing, / And felt as light as dust and free as air — brought to mind the Beatles' song, Nowhere Man:

He's a real nowhere man,

Sitting in his Nowhere Land,

Making all his nowhere plans

For nobody.

Which made me recall this piece by Emily Dickinson:

I'm nobody! Who are you?

Are you nobody, too?

Then there's a pair of us! — don't tell!

They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!

How public, like a frog  

To tell your name the livelong day  

To an admiring bog!

Which caused me to think of my favourite Emily Dickinson poem: 

We introduce ourselves

To Planets and to Flowers

But with ourselves

Have etiquettes

Embarrassments

And awes

Which at once conjured up Wordsworth's daffodils: 

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the milky way,

They stretched in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

Which connected inevitably with other Lake District poets, including the great but underappreciated Norman Nicholson:

And what need therefore

To stretch for the straining kite? — for kite and flower

Bloom in my room for ever; the light that lifts them

Shines in my own eyes, and my body’s warmth

Hatches their red in my veins. It is the Gulf Stream

That rains down the chimney, making the soot spit; it is the Trade Wind

That blows in the draught under the bedroom door.

My ways are circumscribed, confined as a limpet

To one small radius of rock; yet

I eat the equator, breathe the sky, and carry

The great white sun in the dirt of my finger nails.

Which returned me to the wonderful Emily Dickinson, who ate the equator and breathed the sky despite being confined to Amherst, Massachusetts:

The wind tapped like a tired man,

And like a host, “Come in,”

I boldly answered; entered then

My residence within

  

A rapid, footless guest,         

To offer whom a chair

Were as impossible as hand

A sofa to the air.

  

No bone had he to bind him,

His speech was like the push         

Of numerous humming-birds at once
From a superior bush.

  

His countenance a billow,

His fingers, if he pass,

Let go a music, as of tunes

Blown tremulous in glass.         

  

He visited, still flitting;

Then, like a timid man,

Again he tapped —’t was flurriedly —

And I became alone.

I could go on like this all day, for poetic connections are so infinitely rich . . .

Dwelling In The Possibility Of The Sacred

It's fascinating how words can change their meaning and popularity over time. Society is constantly dynamic, ever changing - changes brought about by the latest political trends and philosophies, by science and technology, by war, by climate, by many other things; changes in fashion, in habits, in lifestyle, in health, in beliefs and opinions, in morals and ethics, and so on. And the language we use necessarily reflects these changes.

For instance, in post-WWII Germany you could no longer comfortably use words like 'Volk' (the people, the mass) or 'Vaterland' (fatherland) and many such 'loaded' words. National Socialism had polluted this vocabulary. The words had become tainted with fascism. And to take another example, this time from the religious field, it's difficult to use with confidence words like 'God', 'Heaven','Covenant', 'Salvation', 'Redemption', 'Absolution', 'Sin', 'Evil' and scores of other 'Christian' words post-Darwin, post-WWI and post-Existentialism.

But these 'religious' words haven't really gone away. It's just that their meaning has changed, as meanings do - and widened, and, to some extent, become secularized. They have lost their capital letters. And that's just fine. Why should the Religious have a monopoly over the religious? Why should my God be better than your god?

Take the word 'sacred'. We tend to associate it with Christian holiness, but that's a very partial view. The word comes from the Latin 'sacrum' which refers to the pre-Christian gods of Ancient Rome and, spatially, was the area around the 'templum' (temple). All religions can share in the sacred - as well as humanists, agnostics, atheists, pagans... all of us. The numinous is available to everybody.

In the book I'm reading at the moment, Coming To Our Senses by Jon Kabat-Zinn, I've just come across this paragraph:

In a lovely appreciation of all that is mysterious and sacred, Emily Dickinson invokes the wholehearted affirmation: 'I dwell in possibility'. Her very next line is 'A fairer house than prose' - which I take to mean the domicile of reasonable, rational, linear, and so often limiting thoughts and opinions. Can we say the same? Can we truly dwell in possibility? In not knowing, but risking anyway? And in this very moment? How does it feel?

Here's the poem he quotes, by the wonderful Emily Dickinson:

:
 I dwell in Possibility

I dwell in Possibilty -
A fairer House than Prose -
More numerous of Windows -
Superior - for Doors -

Of Chambers as the Cedars -
Impregnable of Eye -
And for an Everlasting Roof -
The Gambrels of the Sky -

Of Visitors - the fairest -
For Occupation - This -
The spreading wide of narrow Hands -
To gather Paradise -

Tracing Shadows

It is with some reluctance that I must finally close The Golden Treasury Of Poetry, the beacon-book of my childhood, and return it to the shelf. But not before quoting 3 last poems. The 1st is another sonnet by John Keats. This sonnet is particularly poignant when we remember that Keats died of tuberculosis at the very young age of 25. In this poem Keats senses he soon will die; and the poem ends with a quiet acceptance.

When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starred face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love; - then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

There have been a few patches of winter fog lately - fog's more likely here on the alluvial plain of the Trent valley than the snow and deep frost they've been getting further 'up north' - so it seems apposite to include Carl Sandburg's delicate little poem Fog:

Fog

The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking

over harbour and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

Last but not least here's Emily Dickinson again:

Certainty

I never saw a moor,
I never saw the sea;
Yet know I how the heather looks,
And what a wave must be.

I never spoke with God,
Nor visted in heaven;
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if the chart were given.

What a masterpiece of concision!

(I meditated on my very favourite Emily Dickinson poem here and here.)

3 Poems

I've been dipping again into The Golden Treasury Of Poetry. 3 poems leaped out at me. The 1st is by Robert Frost and is called The Runaway. It's a good choice for this time of year:

The Runaway

Once when the snow of the year was beginning to fall,
We stopped by a mountain pasture to say, 'Whose colt?'
A little Morgan had one forefoot on the wall,
The other curled at his breast. He dipped his head
And snorted at us. And then he had to bolt.
We heard the miniature thunder where he fled,
And we saw him, or thought we saw him, dim and grey
Like a shadow against the curtain of falling flakes.
'I think the little fellow's afraid of the snow.
He isn't winter-broken. It isn't play
With the little fellow at all. He's running away.
I doubt if even his mother could tell him, 'Sakes,
It's only weather.' He'd think she didn't know!
Where is his mother? He can't be out alone.'
And now he comes again with a clatter of stone,
And mounts the wall again with whited eyes
And all his tail that isn't hair up straight.
He shudders his coat as if to throw off flies.
'Whever it is that leaves him out so late,
When other creatures have gone to stall and bin,
Ought to be told to come and take him in.'

What a word picture Frost paints here! You can just feel the cold, hear the hooves, see the falling snowflakes and the whites of the colt's eyes.

Apart from Shakespeare's, the sonnets of Keats are some of the most perfect sonnets ever written. This sonnet, On The Grasshopper And The Cricket - among other poems by Keats - also appears in The Golden Treasury:

On The Grasshopper And The Cricket

The poetry of earth is never dead:
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead.
That is the grasshopper's - he takes the lead
In summer luxury, - he has never done
With his delights; for, when tired out with fun,
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.

The poetry of earth is ceasing never.
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills
The cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems, to one in drowsiness half lost,
The grasshopper's among some grassy hills.

Yes, how we yearn for summer during these last endless wintry months!

Finally, there's this short, succinct poem by the wonderful Emily Dickinson:

I'm Nobody! Who Are You?

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us - don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

Frog-celebrities of Celebrity Big Brother, please take note...

We Are Stardust, We Are Golden

We introduce ourselves/To Planets and to Flowers/But with ourselves/Have etiquettes/Embarrassments/And awes EMILY DICKINSON

Hello? Are you looking? Can you see? Ah, there you are. And this is me. I know I must often disappoint you, as you often disappoint me. But that is a fact of life. It should not be a disappointing fact. It is just a fact of nature. That is all. If we are disappointed with each other we might as well say we are disappointed with a frog, or with the beached shards of flotsam and jetsam at the sea's edge, or with the gentle soughing of the wind in the alder trees encircling the lake. In other words, 'disappoint' is the wrong word. In this context the whole idea of 'disappointment' is the wrong idea, and a uniquely human idea.

I will put it another way. Here I am. And there you are. Yes, I am somewhere in here, and you are somewhere out there. Indisputable fact? I think you may be in a small space, perhaps in a woodpecker's hole, or in a hare's form maybe, hidden in a little resting place in the woods or the corn fields, in a small refuge scooped out and sheltered from the wind and the rain.

Or perhaps you are to be found in one of those bigger spaces, exposed in the vast nothingness or somethingness between the stars, in the interstices of thought, or somewhere out among the uncaring, ice-cold molecules of the oceans.

Wherever we are, whoever we are, we are both insignificant - from the perspective of the universe. But from another viewpoint - and everything has another viewpoint - we may possess some tiny piece of significance, some unique, pulsating, significant identifier, some beating energy pulsing at our own eccentric rate, an erratic rate unique to ourselves.

We are all frighteningly yet also comfortingly unique. We are all the product of a completely individual set of genes and influences and experiences and other unalterable circumstances. And if we can recognise this uniqueness, this potentially alienating, yet also healthy, human, natural, necessary, inevitable difference between us, and respect it, and not fear or fight or criticize or ignore or reject it, then I think we may be getting somewhere. We may even be able to embrace this unique difference which keeps us apart; indeed, in the end, it may be the very thing which binds us together.

Hello? Let's look. Let's look and see. Here am I and there are you and you and you and all of you. A million miles away, yet somewhere here inside of me too, in some peculiar, mystical, electromagnetic way. Didn't Joni Mitchell once sing about us all being stardust? And about getting ourselves back to the Garden?

Let us all bow our heads to the different gods within each one of us.

Namaste.

Hello You, Hello Universe

Many have written long literary and mystical texts on mankind's problematic rapport with the natural world, and how we all have the potential ability to be in harmony with the near and far universe if only we knew how to grasp it. (Jonathan Bate has written, from a writerly, metaphorical standpoint, a wonderful book about this called The Song of the Earth. I too have touched on it from time to time, for instance here.)

Many also have written even longer psychological, anthropological and sociological studies on identity and our individual relationship with ourselves and with others. Indeed, parts of the blogworld have been riffing round this theme recently.

But Emily Dickinson manages somehow to condense all of the above, with breathtaking clarity and a little touch of ambiguity (the word ourselves), in this remarkable short poem. And in just 16 words. Magic.

We introduce ourselves

To Planets and to Flowers

But with ourselves

Have etiquettes

Embarrassments

And awes