. . . AND THE NEED FOR SILENCE

From yesterday's post on the creation of a sacred place in one's home to something closely related and equally important — the need for a modicum of silence in one's life.

Soon silence will have passed into legend.  Man has turned his back on silence.  Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation . . . tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego.  His anxiety subsides.  His inhuman void spreads monstrously like gray vegetation.

Jean Arp 

Our task is to listen to the news that is always arriving out of silence.

Rilke

The quieter you become, the more your can hear.

Ram Dass 

In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in a clearer light, and what is elusive and deceptive resolves itself into crystal clearness.  Our life is a long and arduous quest after Truth.

Gandhi 


Now all my teachers are dead except silence.

W.S. Merwin 
(from "A Scale in May")

THANKSGIVING, DARK THOUGH IT IS SOMETIMES

While rereading Anne Lamott's Traveling Mercies a couple of nights ago, I came across a lovely poem by W.S. Merwin that captures my own sense of the need to remain grateful in a world that is often riddled with war, loss, and injustice.  Happy Thanksgiving to all of you, and may you find something in this poem that also resonates with your own lives.

THANKS

By W.S. Merwin

                    Listen

                    with the night falling we are saying thank you

                    we are stopping on the bridge to bow from the railings

                    we are running out of the glass rooms

                    with our mouths full of food to look at the sky

                    and say thank you

                    we are standing by the water looking out 

                    in different directions

                    back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging

                    after funerals we are saying thank you

                    after the news of the dead

                    whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
                    in a culture up to its chin in shame
                    living in the stench it has chosen we are saying thank you

                    over the telephones we are saying thank you

                    in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators

                    remembering wars and the police at the back door

                    and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you

                    in the banks that use us we are saying thank you

                    with the crooks in office with the rich and fashionable

                    unchanged we go on saying thank you thank you

                    with the animals dying around us

                    our lost feelings we are saying thank you

                    with the forests falling faster than the minutes 

                    of our lives we are saying thank you

                    with the words going out like cells of a brain

                    with the cities growing over us like the earth

                    we are saying thank you faster and faster

                    with nobody listening we are saying thank you

                    we are saying thank you and waving

                    dark though it is

WHY POETRY?

It is difficult to get the news from poems,

yet men die miserably every day for the lack of what is found there.

William Carlos Williams

One of the great joys of blogging is the opportunity to interact with other people who love poetry, many of whom are poets themselves.  It's a social pleasure that I rarely encounter in my day-to-day life offline.  Perhaps it's an unjustifiable cultural bias of mine, but most of my fellow Americans seem to head for the exits at the mere mention of poetry.

Thanks to an extraordinary teacher I had in high school, poetry has been a constant companion of mine for more than five decades.  When I have felt friendless and alone, poetry has offered its friendship and reminded me that I am not the first to undertake this uncertain voyage; nor shall I be the last.  When I have felt bewildered and lost, poetry has provided a bright lodestar against which I could take my bearings and find my way.  And when I have found myself stymied over the inability to understand the true essence of love—this pervasive ideal that seems impossible to define with any precision—poetry has always revealed something so beautiful, so simple and unexpected, that I could say at last, "yes, this is what love feels like." 

I'm digressing a bit here, for the main point of this post is to share some wonderful observations I have come across recently about the unique importance of poetry in our lives.  The first quote comes from  V.V. Raman, who is a theoretical physicist, rather than a poet himself.  All of the other quotes are from former poets laureate of the United States, and are found in The Poets Laureate Anthology (2010).

V.V. Raman

(From Interview with Krista Tippett in Einstein's God)

[P]oetry is what gives meaning to existence.  Not fact and figures and charts, but poetry. Poetry is essentially a really sophisticated way of experiencing the world.  And it is much more than mere words and stories.  Poetry is to the human condition what the telescope and the microscope are to the scientist.

W.S. Merwin

Prose is about something, but poetry is about what can't be said.  Why do people turn to poetry when all of a sudden the Twin Towers get hit, or when their marriage breaks up, or when the person they love most in the world drops dead in the same room?  Because they can't say it.  They can't say it at all, and they want something that addresses what can't be said.

Kay Ryan

It's poetry's uselessness that excites me . . . Prose is practical language. Conversation is practical language.  Let them handle the usefulness jobs. But of course, poetry has its balms.  It makes us feel less lonely by one.  It makes us have more room inside ourselves.

Billy Collins

Time is not just money—sorry, Ben Franklin—time is a way of telling us if we are moving at the right pace through the life that has been given us. One of the most basic pleasures of poetry is the way it slows us down. The intentionality of its language gives us pause.  Its formal arrangement checks our haste.

Stanley Kunitz

If we want to know what it felt like to be alive at any given moment in the long odyssey of the race, it is to poetry we must turn.  The moment is dear to us, precisely because it is so fugitive, and it is somewhat of a paradox that poets should spend a lifetime hunting for the magic that will make the moment stay.  Art is the chalice into which we pour the wine of transcendence.  What is imagination but a reflection of our yearning to belong to eternity as well as to time.

Robert Fitzgerald 

Our lifetimes have seen the opening of abysses before which the mind quails.  But it seems to me there are few things everyone can humbly try to hold onto: love and mercy (and humor) in everyday living; the quest for exact truth in language and affairs of the intellect; self-recollection or prayer; and the peace, the composed energy of art.

                                         

Photos:  Photo of V.V. Raman downloaded from Wikipedia.  All other photos were downloaded from the website of the Poet Laureates of the United States.