Dragonfly Blue

Poetry is the silent voice that is heard everywhere inside of us. UNKNOWN

To Rilke

Once, in a dream,
                               the boat
pushed off from the shore.
You at the prow were the man -
all voice, though silent - who bound
rowers and voyagers to the needful journey,
the veiled distance, imperative mystery.

All the crouched effort,
          creak of oarlocks, odor of sweat,
          sound of waters
          running against us
was transcended: your gaze
held as we crossed. Its dragonfly blue
restored to us
                         a shimmering destination.

I had not read of your Nile journey,
the enabling voice
drawing that boat upstream in your parable.
Strange that I knew
your silence was just such a song.

DENISE LEVERTOV A Door In The Hive

To Rilke is the very first poem in Denise Levertov's 1989 collection, A Door In The Hive. Just a few thoughts that occur to me...

Rilke was a keen traveller, visiting France, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Spain, Russia, Scandanavia and North Africa. He actually did make a trip up the Nile - in a felucca with sixteen oarsmen. During this time he immersed himself in Egypt's culture and mythology, and his fascination with the Egyptian cult of the dead became a major influence behind his great work, Duino Elegies.

In traditional Nile boats the man in the prow would 'sing' from time to time - it was a kind of unearthly, wordless vocalisation - and this 'song' was supposed to assist the boat upstream in its battle against the current. Hence the enabling voice. But Levertov, in her poem, makes a connection between the Nile 'singer' and Rilke in the prow of her dream-boat. Just like the prow-singer's voice, Rilke's voice - his poetic voice - is also enabling. This poetic voice can counter prevailing currents, can help us  see more clearly. This is the voice of the seer and the Romantic poet, the poet of Shelley's assertion that Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

However, there is one important difference. Unlike the prow-singer's voice, the Rilkean voice of Levertov's dream is silent. And Rilke's gaze seems even more eloquent than his silence: ... your gaze / held as we crossed. Its dragonfly blue / restored to us / a shimmering destination. (By the way, how wonderful that dragonfly blue: the one transforming streak of colour - and how necessary and uplifting that splash of colour - in this misty, mysterious, toiling dream-world.)

Perhaps Rilke's voice is silent because poetry is the silent voice that is heard everywhere inside of us? Perhaps his silent voice speaks of his creative, interior transformation of the world - it's his inner voice? Perhaps this is the still, silent voice of God? (Or of Orpheus having left his lyre at home that day?) Whatever our interpretation - of course, his voice is not silent. It sings.

I cannot read this poem without thinking of the mythical Charon ferrying souls across the river Styx from the Earth to the Underworld. Or of Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha working with the ferryman Vasudeva and gaining enlightenment from the river.

And that mystical blue keeps flashing before my eyes... Blue, the colour of German Romanticism, symbol of love and desire, the infinite and the unreachable...

Books Which Change Your Life

I like to think of mindfulness simply as the art of conscious living. You don't have to be a Buddhist or a yogi to practice it. In fact, if you know anything about Buddhism, you will know that the most important point is to be yourself and not try to become anything that you are not already. Buddhism is fundamentally about being in touch with your own deepest nature and leting it flow out of you unimpeded. It has to do with waking up and seeing things as they are. In fact, the word 'Buddha' simply means one who has awakened to his or her true nature. JON KABAT-ZINN Wherever You Go, There You Are

That's the last of my quotes from Jon Kabat-Zinn. It's time to move on to other things. My recent readings of his books Coming To Our Senses and Wherever You Go, There You Are came at just the right time in my life and have affected me deeply. It's strange how sometimes exactly the right book is 'gifted' to us at exactly the right moment in our lives - a book which may quickly become a landmark book, influencing us, rescuing us, inspiring us in profound, often life-changing ways.

When I was in my late teens I read The Penguin Krishnamurti Reader and The Second Penguin Krishnamurti Reader and these books fired a life-long interest in Zen Buddhism and were mind-blowing for me at the time. They affected absolutely the way I thought and the way I lived. Other books which have done this to me are Thoreau's Walden, the novels of Hermann Hesse and John Fowles, and (this may surprise you) the novels of Henry Miller. I read all of these writers in my twenties.

I wonder how many of you have totemic books you read at a critical time in your lives - books which altered your mindset? The power of the written word can be truly astonishing.

Only that day dawns to which we are awake. THOREAU

Siddhartha

Siddhartha laughed warmly. 'Yes, I have become a ferryman. Many people have to change a great deal and wear all sorts of clothes. I am one of those, my friend.' Siddhartha to Govinda - from Siddhartha by HERMANN HESSE

Every harlot was a virgin once. WILLIAM BLAKE

I'll end my brief postings on Hermann Hesse with a piece from Siddhartha, probably Hesse's best loved book. This is taken from the last chapter, and is one of Siddhartha's revelations to the monk Govinda, his friend from youth:

'Knowledge can be communicated but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it. I suspected this when I was still a youth and it was this that drove me away from teachers. There is one thought I have had, Govinda, which you will again think is a jest or folly: that is, in every truth the opposite is equally true. For example, a truth can only be expressed and enveloped in words if it is one-sided. Everything that is thought and expressed in words is one-sided, only half the truth; it all lacks totality, completeness, unity. When the Illustrious Buddha taught about the world, he had to divide it into Samsara and Nirvana, into illusion and truth, into suffering and salvation. One cannot do otherwise, there is no other method for those who teach. But the world itself, being in and around us, is never one-sided. Never is a man or a deed wholly Samsara or wholly Nirvana; never is a man wholly saint or sinner. This only seems so because we suffer the illusion that time is something real. Time is not real, Govinda. I have realised this repeatedly. And if time is not real, then the dividing line that seems to lie between this world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between good and evil, is also an illusion.'

6 Facts About Hermann Hesse

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. HERMANN HESSE Wandering

6 facts about Hermann Hesse:

1. Both of his parents were Christian missionaries.

2. He had intense conflicts with authority figures such as his parents and teachers - which resulted in him being placed in special schools, even in a mental institution.

3. He worked in bookshops until the publication of his novel Peter Camenzind enabled him to lead an independent life as an author.

4. He was exempted from military service due to an eye condition. All his life he was afflicted with nervous disorders and headaches.

5. He underwent long periods of psychoanalysis following the death of his father, the sickness of his son and his wife's schizophrenia.

6. He knew Carl Jung personally.

Evenings

Evenings the lovers walk
Slowly through the field,
Women let down their hair,
Businessmen count money,
Townspeople anxiously read the latest
In the evening paper,
Children clench tiny fists,
Sleeping deep and dark.
Each one with his own reality,
Following a noble duty,
Townspeople, infants, lovers -
And not me?

Yes! My evening tasks also,
To which I am a slave,
Cannot be done without by the spirit of the age,
They too have a meaning.
And so I go up and down,
Dancing inside,
Humming foolish street songs,
Praise God and myself,
Drink wine and pretend

That I am a pasha,
Worry about my kidneys,
Smile, drink more,
Saying yes to my heart
(In the morning, this won't work),
Playfully spin a poem
Out of suffering gone by,
Gaze at the circling moon and stars,
Guessing their direction,
Feel myself one with them
On a journey
No matter where.

From Hermann Hesse's Wandering

Wandering

What could I say to you that would be of value, except that perhaps you seek too much, that as a result of your seeking you cannot find. HERMANN HESSE

There is no reality except the one contained within us. That's why so many people live an unreal life. They take images outside them for reality and never allow the world within them to assert itself. HERMANN HESSE

The truth is lived, not taught. HERMANN HESSE

Not long ago I posted a few thoughts about the walking and travel books which had most stimulated my own interest in walking and travel. I mentioned Patrick Leigh Fermor and Robert Louis Stevenson, John Hillaby and Eric Newby, Laurie Lee and Hilaire Belloc. Other bloggers suggested some of their own favourites: Wilfred Thesiger and Robert Byron, Hamish Brown and Nicholas Crane, W. H. Murray and Thomas Firbank. Recently I remembered another delightful, short book about a walk from southern Germany into northern Italy - probably the book that influenced me most of all during my adolescent years: Hermann Hesse's Wandering.

At that time I used to read a lot of Hesse. I suppose he's the natural choice of the (male?) 'sensitive teenager'. I think I must have read everything he ever wrote - except, surprisingly, The Glass Bead Game, his last major work - for which he won a Nobel Prize in 1946. I used to devour him. Siddhartha, The Journey to the East, Steppenwolf, Narziss and Goldmund - once started I couldn't put these books down until I'd read every single word. I've mainly avoided revisiting Hesse - I instinctively felt it would be disappointing. Adolescent crushes usually are when you attempt to re-experience them in later life.

Wandering. Subtitle: Notes and Sketches by Hermann Hesse. Published in paperback by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux of New York in 1972. At a price of $1.95. My own copy - which I have here beside me as I write - has the same cover design as the image above. Like much of Hesse it's romantic and poetic, full of adolescent dreaming and German Sehnsucht. The book is arranged as a series of brief meditations - 23 in all. Each meditation is prefaced by a naif watercolour sketch and ends with a poem.

I daren't reread it. I don't want to deflate in any way my strongly idealized, young man's impression of this book. What was important then may not be so important now. And yet - haven't we all still got some of that youthful yearning, that romantic longing, that impossible idealism, that teenage melancholy somewhere deep within us? I hope so. I think so. I know so...

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves.

Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail. A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.

From Wandering by Hermann Hesse 1918