Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.
Franz Kafka
Thanks
by W. S. Merwin
Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges 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 thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our 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
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you
with the animals dying around us
taking our 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
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is
Is this the end of my obsession with sonnets? Maybe, though I will always welcome them back to the stable. I have pursued sonnets as far as I think my imagination can take them for now. It is time for me to write and think in a little different vein for a bit.
However, my obsession with poetry will never subside. Poetry has become a method of breathing, a way of seeing, a purpose to get up in the morning. I have enjoyed the companionship that poetry has created in my life, both with the people who share it with me, with the people who have visited my blog on a regular basis and for all the poets who left their legacy on the page for me to discover. I have enjoyed the process of spending time with the more than 600 poets who are represented in the over 1,000 posts on this blog.
It was never my intent to create an all encompassing poetry resource. My design was to create a personal anthology that I found intellectually stimulating and interesting. It has become my poetry gospel for my old age, when I may no longer have a place for my library, I will always have at my fingertips more than 2,000 poems that I felt compelled to share, to enjoy and that spoke to me.
I intend to make some additions to this blog, to make it an even more helpful resource to find the poets and poems that are contained. I also intend to create some lesson plans around specific poems for various grade levels. Look for several improvements to come slowly over the next year. If any of you have a suggestion on a poet you would like me to do an overview, a deeper dive next January, please pass it along, send me an email or make a comment on this post. Although I will not be posting weekly in the future, I may continue to do an annual retrospective on one poet at the start of the new year. The criterion for consideration is the poet needs to have a body of work, (several published books) must have dabbled in sonnets or a derivative of sonnets in some form during their career and their writing means something important to you. Preferably they wrote in English, but if not, a final requirement is English translations must be readily available. Rilke, as an example, might be tempting fodder for a future January. All suggestions are welcome. No big deal if the poet is currently out of print, I am pretty good at finding used books with a little well-read grime on their covers.
I bid you adieu, but not farewell. Be well and do good work.
May peace be with you and may you love on, through love’s eternity.
Tom
Sonnet 14 – If Thou Must Love Me
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
If thou must love me, let it be for nought Except for love’s sake only. Do not say, “I love her for her smile—her look—her way Of speaking gently,—for a trick of thought That falls in well with mine, and certes brought A sense of pleasant ease on such a day”— For these things in themselves, Belovèd, may Be changed, or change for thee—and love, so wrought, May be unwrought so. Neither love me for Thine own dear pity’s wiping my cheeks dry: A creature might forget to weep, who bore Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby! But love me for love’s sake, that evermore Thou mayst love on, through love’s eternity.
There is no path to happiness: happiness is the path.
Gautama Buddha
The Shoehorn
by Robert Bly
It’s odd that the shoehorn has been able to preserve It’s shape over centuries. At dusk my ignorance Slips away and hides its eggs in the woods.
Everyone knows when a great man or woman Is about to die, and fights that. Many of the Jews Wanted to speak privately to Pilate.
Our parents’ faces at dawn have so much grief That the resemble those stone faces on Easter Island, gazing toward some missing Friday.
After every one of our wars, the newly dead Hold out a cup to us. What can we do But testify to a thousand years of darkness?
Iron keeps calling to earth, and earth to iron. If you throw a knife high in the air, The knife soon curves and sticks in the soil.
I guessed how difficult my selfishness would Be when I heard the sound the hitch makes When it slides off the drawbar onto the ground.
I am endlessly amazed in conversations with people who do not read poetry their misconception of what they think poetry is and isn’t. I was at a bar this week when someone asked me what I do for fun and I answered, “I write a blog on poetry.” They looked at me like I had two heads. “You write a blog on poetry and you consider that fun?” said with an air of disdain, like I must have a pretty low threshold for fun. I embraced that idea of a low bar, rather than be offended by it. I said; “absolutely, I can’t imagine a better way to start my day than reading a couple of poems, its the easiest way to put me in a positive frame of mind.” I wonder if anyone has ever done a blind study with depressed people, take two poems each morning before breakfast and one at night before you go to bed and compare that to standard anti-depressants and find out which one works better over time? There are side effects of poetry taken daily; curiosity is heightened, a sense of well being grows, a lessening of loneliness, a connection to humanity and the human condition increases, a greater sense of purpose and focus slowly is instilled. Poetry will sneak up on you and shine a light into recesses long left dark, release hormones, flood your brain with serotonin. It’s a wonder drug.
The biggest misconception I find among people that don’t read poetry is that they think it is supposed to be serious. Bly is one of the best examples of humor and poetry being inseparable from each other. Bly writes all kinds of jokes in his poetry; sarcastic, silly, Dad-jokes, brilliant one-liners. If you aren’t laughing reading Bly, you might need to relax a bit, that’s what a glass of wine or sipping whiskey is for on your side table, next to your book of poems, a little brain lube to make the jokes easier to spot. I find Bly got funnier after he had early success in being recognized as a serious poet. Once he got that over with, his writing improved immeasurably in my opinion. I think the Sufi poets, like Hafiz and Rumi, that he translated, helped guide his sense of humor in his own writing. You can’t read Sufi poets and not smile. I feel the same way about Bly. Try reading Bly with an ear of hearing his booming laugh at the end of the reading the poem out loud, you’ll be laughing right along with him. Bly’s best writing is a gift of shared humanity with an ear for the parts of life, even the difficult parts of life, that are absurd with humor if we let it be funny. Read the poem below out loud twice. The second time see if you are laughing at the top of the Ferris wheel with your hands in the air, your head flung back, giddy with the butterflies in your stomach. Kick your feet a little. Enjoy the ride.
Hiding in a Drop of Water
by Robert Bly
It is early morning, and death has forgotten us for A while. Darkness owns the house, but I am alive. I am ready to praise all the great musicians.
Whatever happens to me will also happen to you. Surely you must have realized this from hearing The way strings cry out no matter who hits them.
From the great oak trees in the yard in October, Leaves fall for hours each day. Every night A thousand wrinkled faces look up at the stars.
Still we know that any second the soul can stand Up and start across the desert, as when Rabia ended up Riding on a resurrected donkey toward the Meeting.
It is this reaching toward the Kaaba that keeps us glad. It is this way of hiding inside a drop of water That let’s the hidden face become visible to everyone.
Gautama said that when the Great Ferris Wheel Stops turning, you will still be way up There, swinging in your seat and laughing.
What I learned is the difference between of destiny and fate. We are all fated to die. Destiny is recognizing the radiance of the soul that, even when faced with human impossibility, loves all of life. Fate is the death we owe to Nature. Destiny is the life we own to soul.
Marion Woodman
The Glimpse of Something In The Oven
by Robert Bly
Childhood is like a kitchen. It is dangerous To the mice, but the husband gets fed; he’s An old giant, grumbling and smelling children, The kitchen is a place where you get smaller
And smaller, or you lose track. In general You become preoccupied with this old lady In the kitchen…. She putters about, opens oven doors, The thing is the old woman won’t discuss anything.
The giant will. He’s always been a fan of Aristotle, Knew him at school. It is no surprise to him That the Trojan War lasted ten years, or how it Ended. He knows something you don’t.
Your sister says, “Say, what’s that in the oven?”
I am consciously aware that I am causing Robert to squirm a bit in his grave. I worry that he maybe thinking I have not been listening to all he has left behind for me to read. Many of Bly’s later poems are postcards and discussions with the dead. Why shouldn’t I engage in the same act with him in this blog?
Bly would likely protest being eulogized in a way on a blog that is loosely founded around sonnets. In a wonderful essay by Mark Gustafson in Robert Bly In This World, he reminds us that Bly wrote an essay in his magazine The Fifties – titled The Necessity Of Rejecting A Shakespeare Sonnet. The point being, Bly was so at war with the east coast ivy schools snobbery of the ideas of what was and wasn’t poetry in the 1950’s that Bly would have rejected even a resurrected Shakespeare, had he submitted a new poem for Bly to publish, on the grounds that his language was “exhausted, and dead.” And yet Bly embraced myths and stories that go back thousands of years before Shakespeare. It begs the question what is beyond time and what does time forget? The radicals of yesterday are the rejected patriarchy of today. Our grandfather’s rebellious leaders are rarely our own grandchildren’s vaulted idealists. Every generation heralds its own martyrs, holds precious its revolutionaries that suffer for their unique generation’s injustices. This is true even in poetry. Never mind that nothing much has changed in thousands of years in the human condition and that what once was old is always new again. Great literature is great literature, whether the telling of ancient oral stories or lauded over-hyped shiny new bard covers.
Do you remember the ending of the Trojan War? A war fought to a stalemate? It only ended when the sword of innovation combined with the destructiveness of ruthless revenge, were pulled willingly inside the very impenetrable fortress they had been trying to overcome, the courage of the underdog’s ingenuity wins the day. The drunken overconfident dominant culture fell asleep in their revelry of victory and the unthinkable happened; it’s mighty King Agamemnon wakes to find his fortress ransacked, the kingdom’s children slaughtered, his women enslaved, and his beautiful wife Helen, for whom all this nasty business has been fought over for 10 long years, is recaptured. What happens next? Helen either goes to Mount Olympus to live with the gods or returns to Sparta and her old husband Menelaus, depending on which version of the retelling you believe. Agamemnon meanwhile, isn’t around to learn about Helen’s end of the story. He’s murdered on his return from Troy by Clytemnestra.
Why are myths, stories and legends important? Marion Woodman and Robert Bly would argue they are important because they are a connection to our ancestors thoughts and imagination before any concepts of psychology had poisoned the veracity of their subconscious. Stories are literary DNA of our humanity and of our cultures, the footprints left in the fossilized mud of the impervious nature of the human condition to change. Stories connect us to our literary immortality and many would believe to their faith in a literal immortality.
Both Bly and Yeats like to name drop in their poetry. I like that aspect of their writing. It makes me think. Many of the formal “interpretations” of Yeats sonnet, Leda and the Swan, in my opinion, miss the mark. (And yes, I think Bly would have published Yeat’s sonnet below had he the opportunity to be the first in his magazine, so something about the sonnet form must still be relevant. Maybe Robert can go back to napping, and stop worrying, I am paying attention.) Many traditional interpretations of Yeats’ sonnet I feel are too literal, seeing it as the powerful raping the vulnerable, the ruling class vandalizing beauty, the patriarchy inseminating the divine feminine with its own lusty desires and trampling on the rights of women. They view it as sexual and violent. However, since both Yeats and Bly utterly disliked literal and conservative interpretations of poetry and myth, I am perplexed why anyone would think that is what Yeats intended.
Let’s think more openly about Leda and the Swan. I personally think there is lots more going on in this poem. A quick reminder on whom begot whom in the incestuous family tree of the Greek pantheon. Zeus, infatuated by Leda’s beauty, turns into a swan, powerful, white (virginal?), a swan is an unusual expression of male dominance and more traditional symbol of femininity, and lays with Leda lustily and without her apparent consent. Leda, realizing afterwards, that she might be with child, goes to her husband and beds him as well, on the same day, to assuage any suspicions should there be progeny from this mythic day. In fact, there are four offspring from these unions, two girls, Helen and Clytemnestra, and two boys, Castor and Pollux. Which are mortal and immortal? Which are the offspring of Zeus or her mortal husband is somewhat fluid in the retelling, there is no 23 and me technology to sort out the genetic mysteries of the gods and myths. However in most versions Helen and Pollux are immortal at first. Pollux, later gives up half of his immortality so that his brother Castor might live again after dying in battle. They continue as the constellation Gemini, the twins, looking down from the heavens. My point is everything is interconnected in this story. Helen is the daughter of Leda and Zeus, her sister, Clytemnestra, murders the King who abducted her sister. There are multiple crimes of passion and retribution and rebirth. Everything is cyclical.
I think the myth of the Trojan war, Yeat’s poem below, and Bly’s poem above, all are connected to the same idea; the presence and unification of the masculine and feminine in each of us. Yeat’s poem starts with violence, but is it physical, metaphorical or psychological? Isn’t new understanding, new found growth in ourselves, often feel like a staggering blow? Does not new knowledge, whether it be societal, scientific or personal, often feel ugly at first? Rarely do new ideas drop gently down in Disney-esque fairy dust upon our soul or collective understanding, Rather the brutal reality that the earth is round and revolves around the sun is met with a sham trial and rejection because of old school dogma by vested interests, where as subsequent generations see the truth of this new idea as fact. A cancer diagnosis, the sudden death of a child or loved one, the betrayal of a spouse, the resignation of a trusted colleague, all can feel like your world has suddenly been turned upside down. New ideas and new knowledge is often encased in bloody, dark webs, that might repulse us at first, while at the same time caressing our inner sanctum. Climate change is real, but even those that see the unmistakable impacts of that change also may feel the ugly violence of its effects and want to reject it rather than accept. If new ideas were summarily welcomed, we wouldn’t have a sense of reeling from the realizations that emerges from some new understandings of ourselves and of our world.
I view the poem below as Leda, in that moment, has a choice of what to do with this new reality of what has just taken place. She was not in control, was violated, but once she processes what has just happened, she has decisions to make in the aftermath of this unwanted insemination of her new identity? Does she accept the dominance of the patriarchal past to diminish her or does she take from it whatever new found knowledge and power she feels is worthy of herself and instill the best of that in her children? Does she realize that she will rear the next generation, not Zeus, not the giant at the kitchen table? She will control how she nourishes both the masculine and the feminine, to the best of her abilities, in her children. Maybe this poem illustrates the power of the divine feminine? Maybe it is about Leda realizing she will always be a minor player in the great mythology, but her decisions will cast a long shadow on the future? Maybe Leda realizes she is quietly in full control of her own destiny, that the initial act of Zeus, is not the final act. Maybe, she realizes she will have plenty of time to influence her children, for many years to come, in her own kitchen, at her own hearth, in her own way.
If someone tells you that you have ears like a donkey, pay them no attention. But if two people tell you, buy yourself a saddle.
Sholem Aleichem
Talking Into The Ear Of A Donkey
by Robert Bly
I have been talking into the ear of a donkey. I have so much to say! And the donkey can’t wait To feel my breath stirring the immense oats Of his ears. “What has happened to the spring,” I cry, “and our legs that were so joyful In the bobblings of April?” “Oh, never mind About all that,” the donkey Says. “Just take hold of my mane, so you Can lift your lips closer to my hairy ears.”
I am preparing to wind down my weekly engagement with this blog. I have other more pressing matters to attend. I realize that some of what I write makes people who read this blog a bit uncomfortable, in the way poetry sometimes makes us uncomfortable. It’s jarring to see in black and white thoughts we believed only our mind could undertake. For those readers who have just recently come to read my blog, I apologize if you feel I am leaving you in the lurch. I am sorry you are arriving in time for the finish, but there are over a thousand posts you can explore. Perhaps you can pick out a writer or two from the categories list and see where it takes you.
Writing this blog began as my little rebellion, my mental health antidote during the first Trump administration. I am going to need stronger medicine if the political soul of America does not wake up and prevent a second. Fourteen Lines has been my act of poetic justice that I have sent out into the world in hopes that it finds people in need of more poetry in their lives. It has been its own reward and my own education. I have invested a fair amount of time and joy in letting this blog have its freedom to veer off in different directions.
The world is sick and getting sicker by the day and no amount of positive thinking is going to wish that away. Darkness may be overcoming the light. The toxic male presence seems to be regaining an upper hand, the misguided and easily impressionable are following tyrants, the flexible are being bent to the will of the inflexible, it is starting to feel a bit hopeless. But maybe hope is part of the problem? Maybe we need to attach our intentions to something more concrete.
I came across Sholem Aleichem’s name several times in the past two weeks. I knew nothing about him as a man or writer until then. I have come to trust my instinct that when something begins to intrude in my thoughts, it is worthy of a bit of investigation. Aleichem was a Russian Jewish playwright from Kiev. He was a staunch proponent of the Yiddish language and Zionism. He advocated to maintain Yiddish culture, the need to protect Jewish heritage at a time when it was under attack and the focus of hate and physical violence. I think the reason that Aleichem’s name has slowly entered my consciousness is that his life connects two of the most problematic wars currently raging, the destruction of Ukraine by its own Russian brothers for no other purpose than to test the political will of the West, a test for a much more deeply unsettling conflict that is yet to come. And the impossible hostilities happening in Israel and the broader middle east, that only further to lengthen the size of the divide around the world in how does the world finds peace and how Israel is going to balance its safety with human rights.
Aleichem died in New York City of complications from tuberculosis and diabetes. His funeral was attended by 100,000 people, a remarkable testament to how popular were his writing and plays at the time of his death. And yet his own son was denied entry into the United States from Geneva, Switzerland, antisemitism very much a part of our past and present that the United States has yet to reconcile and defeat. I do not agree with either side in the current conflict in Israel. There is no political vision for a future that captures my support at the present coming from either faction. I condemn both sides and recognize the desperation of each as well.
I think my search of story in spending time with Bly is what caused Aleichem’s name to come to my attention. Fiddler on the Roof is based on Aleichem’s body of work in story telling and plays. On his monument graveside, written in Yiddish, are the following words that he wrote. In it he is wrestling with his own grief, suffering in silence, while making others laugh, a sentiment I think many of us can relate to at the present.
Sholem Aleichem Monument
Here lies a Jew a simple one, Wrote Yiddish-German (translations) for women and for the regular folk, was a writer of humor.
He circled the world like Kapparot The whole world does well, and he, oh my, was in trouble.
But when the world is laughing applauding and slapping their knee, he sickened – only God knows this in secret, so no-one sees.
The poem below was written in 2014, the last poem I wrote before I began my sonnet obsession. The poem was a hot mess that took months of work to finally take shape. I gave up on it several times, but would be drawn back to it once in a while. It eventually came out of a much longer poem that I slashed and hacked until this is what remained.
A Whispered Prayer is the poem that got me thinking about sonnets, investigating sonnets, reading sonnets. Looking back ten years later, I have no real idea why. One of the things I appreciate about Bly is he writes some poems that feel like they are specifically intended for masculine readers, in the same sense that I sometimes feel in reading Mary Oliver, that she writes for the feminine, as if I found her journal lying around that was not intended for me to read. I have shared the following poem with several people over the years; all women, and they have universally disliked it, which has made me like it all the more. I think I must have gotten something right if it creates that distinct of a negative impression in women. Surrender is a difficult verb. And bone piles do not instill positive images of being worthy of the victorious, regardless of whose bones are being piled. I fear the world is witnessing a forced surrender on multiple fronts in the coming year and most of us feel powerless, if it is in fact inevitable. In the final stages of war, you either surrender and live or become part of the bone pile, it can become a matter of where you think you will be most comfortable. Surrender is usually not the start of peace, it is a forced suspension of hostilities, while the flames of confrontation will continue to smolder, unless forgiveness somehow finds a way, like a gentle snowfall to cool the fires of discontent on both sides. Hatred does not end wars. Neither does wishing. It takes something much more difficult, something bordering on respect, possibly even bordering on love.
A Whispered Prayer
by T. A. Fry
I fear today you will not accept, My surrender as a bone pile. Nor raise my faith, marrow split and spilt Make benevolent this mule’s carcass. But my heart is sure forgiveness comes Through neither force nor guile. So I’ll wait, for patient love, Like winter’s snows, to blanket death’s cold smile And birth’s warm scorn in a tempered white, With only humble purpose; A whispered prayer, carried on North winds, To lessen all our fears.
May winter’s coldest day, freeze your final tears. And all release, even just complaints, like hoarfrost disappears.
You can have a good conversation with your father after he is dead. They learn a lot by dying. But I am glad I had some of them before he was dead.
Robert Bly
Prayer For My Father
by Robert Bly
Your head is still Restless, rolling East and west — That body in you Insisting on living Is the old hawk For whom the world Darkens. If I Am not with you When you die, That would be grievous But just. That part Of you cleaned My bones more Than once. But I Will meet you In the young hawk Whom I see In both You and me. This young hawk Guided you Into the air — And will guide You now to The Lord of Night, Who will give You the tenderness You wanted here.
I spent this past weekend with a group of men on the banks of the St. Croix river, the Minnesota Men’s Conference annual winter meeting. If you are looking for brotherhood with intention, it might speak to your need to search for the Father. The weekend clarified a couple of things for me, the work I need to do within myself. The first is my need to heal from the rift that George Floyd’s murder created, the act of violence perpetrated on our entire community. I am not speaking of the riots afterwards, those were expressions of grief and communal anger, that were impossible to stop. I am talking about the smoldering bewilderment that many of us are feeling still, years later.
For the last 40 years of my life, when asked the question, “where is home?”, I had a ready answer; “Minneapolis.” It is the place I have lived the longest over two long stretches, it is the place I feel most at peace, have the most family, have a body of memories that create my personal foundation. It was a place I was proud to call home. But that foundation cracked as Derek Chauvin kneeled on George’s neck, and stole his breath away. I lost all pride I had in my city in that moment. I lost the will to pay taxes to the city who pays the salary’s of that level of evil in the Minneapolis police department, men who swore an oath to protect and serve, and whose power prevented even the first responders and bystanders to intervene and save George’s life. In that moment, all of my sense of home crumbled and it has not yet been replaced.
It is not a good thing to be sixty years old, and not have a sense of home. I hope one day I will have a ready answer again to that question. I hope to rekindle that deep magic that is critical to a sense of well being. I have the support to do so, both in the land and the people who will re-instill it, but they are going to have to watch me grieve a bit longer. I will have to raise several years of gardens in a new place before that complicated dusty cobweb that is home will begin to fossilize into the core of my chest once again.
The second thing I need to work on is even more difficult. This weekend was one of those rare times when I stop long enough to listen, that I still the insistence of all the things I am supposed to be doing, and in doing so, can hear the repetition of a single word, coming from different voices, at different times in close succession, hear it long enough to realize it is a word that is being directed at me, waiting for me to hear it, in its own haphazard way. And in my case, sometime Saturday evening, in the midst of a sacred circle, singing with a group of men, I realized the word that was being spoken to me was abandonment. Sometimes it takes fraternity, to tease out of yourself the thing that you might not be strong enough to look straight on alone.
There are lots of ways to abandon. I am as guilty as anyone. I am genetically predisposed. The abandonment gene goes back deep in my family, on both sides of my family tree, the woodlot occasionally thinned in the darkest of nights when no one was paying attention and no understanding of where the missing have gone.
Abandonment becomes generational unless there are coordinated efforts to stop it. Siblings have to band together, cousins have to stand shoulder to shoulder, all have to be welcomed to join the circle, even the missing. Otherwise abandonment seemingly becomes an easier answer than staying in difficult long term relationships.
I am not saying that we should stay in all relationships. Some relationships are so unhealthy that individuals must walk away from them for self preservation, but we also have to realize that in walking away, it doesn’t mean we ever really escape. We abandon that which we justify, rather than sometimes reconciling harder truths that call out our own actions that we must take into account, and also hold others accountable for their actions, even if those words are spoken in silence to their ghost.
Robert Bly had a complicated relationship with his father. If you go to YouTube, in the video, Searching For The Father, you can listen to him talk thoughtfully about this issue. In it, early on, he remarks on something James Hillman once said, that a mistake many people make in wanting a father that is different, is that we miss seeing the parent in the one we have. We are all imperfect parents, why would we expect anything different of our own? Parenting is a human condition that does not end, does not end with our parent’s deaths. We are not spiders or preying mantis where the female eats the male who fertilizes her eggs, a tasty bit of protein to further along the next generation, the act of copulation the last paternal duty. We are human beings, and whether we want it or not, our fathers and mothers are connected to us, positively and negatively, for our entire lives. We pass along their worst and their best to ourselves, and to our children, and to our grand children, if we are not intentional about our own legacy.
I have just begun to ponder this question in my mind; “can I stop the pattern, or I am so predisposed to abandonment that it is beyond my capacity to do anything than stop abandoning myself?” These are questions I don’t currently have answers. But as I read the wisdom in Robert Bly’s words, I have a sense of calm, that I am not the first person to consider these ideas. I may or may not find the answers quickly or at all, but I will be the better for pondering the questions.
In The Coffin
by Robert Bly
How wild your eyes were When I saw them last. The wheel chair steadied your back, But your head bobbed wild as a bird about to feed. Your eyes pleaded without their usual need to dominate. You must have seen Some tree out the window, The wind blown leaves fallen. Now those eyes are closed Do we have time at last For each other now? Do you have time for me?
What good was all that careful Seeing we did? So as to miss pheasant nests As we plowed, or rocks. Eyes, we both found out Are also for weeping. I place my hand on your chest. Your chest is thin below The burial suit. A chicken’s breast, below my hand. Do you feel like glory in my power As I lay my hand on your chest? A voice says to me, “For now you are the sandy one.”
The best definition of true imagination is that it is the sum of our faculties. Poetry is the scholar’s art. The acute intelligence of the imagination, the illimitable resources of its memory, its power to possess the moment it perceives — if we were speaking of light itself, and thinking of the relationship between objects and light, no further demonstration would be necessary … What light requires a day to do, and by day I mean a kind of Biblical revolution of time, the imagination does in the twinkling of an eye. It colors, increases, brings to a beginning and end, invents languages, crushes men, and, for that matter, gods in its hands, it says to women more than it is possible to say, it rescues all of us from what we have called absolute fact…
Wallace Stevens – Necessary Angels
Wallace Stevens In The Fourth Grade
by Robert Bly
Where a voice that is great within us rises up, As we stand gazing at the rounded moon. . – Wallace Stevens
In the fourth grade he sat on his school bench Daydreaming. He was already admiring his voice That he hadn’t found. And later on the lawn
He spent hours standing at the edge of Hartford Looking at the moon. That is where his voicee was, Far up there, in air, near the rounded moon.
He knew the moon was made of clogged magma, And volcanic rinsings, and punk and dog poop. That was all right. That was better. It was more
Like us. The rogue moon couldn’t hold God Any longer; we’ll have to make do with waltzes, And Florida and those prancing white horses.
There is no Divine; there are only Viennese horses, And ordinary evenings and houses. Things have changed. The boy on the bench can become in poems a god.
I spent this past week reading Robert Bly’s book A Little Book On the HumanShadow. The book contains five different essays approaching the same concept from different angles; the concept of Bly’s interpretation of what is required to achieve an integrated life, a fully fused soul. In it he plays with a metaphor that there is a shadow that exists in all of us, a shadow in our communities, in our nation, that we cannot directly see, but we can feel and observe its effects. He describes how we invest all the things that manifest in our shadow into a place where its easier to carry it about with us in a bag that trails behind us, that reduces the weight of the shadow, but none the less tethers us to its presence. He describes the concepts of Zen where Yin (Light) is balanced and is in harmony with Yang (dark) as an expression of the same idea of balancing our individual and communal shadows. He describes the necessity of being in balance with our light and dark as part of embroiling ourselves in artistic endeavors that mix both on our color palate, that help us to healthfully starve our baser instincts, otherwise the power of the shadow can manifest in dark actions and dark achievements, and pollute goodness with the blindness that goodness can create. Bly advocates for a different path, that we must strive to absorb our shadows, acknowledge what can’t be fully seen, and accept the gifts that eating our shadow can bestow.
Bly’s concept of enlightenment is an act of redirecting the negative potential that holds us back, the negativity that surrounds us and is in us, a negativity that sometimes creates a need to eat our shadow metaphysically, if we are to get beyond our barriers to a state of being that integrates the totality of our human experience. It is a complicated concept. Bly says if we dwell in the darkness and eat too much of our shadow, or make trying to seek our shadow our only focus, we will fail just as miserably as if we ignore its presence. Bly says forsaking our shadow and our collective shadows dooms us to a mistaken identity, that is rife with the lost potential of what could have been. Bly reminds us that the brighter the light the darker the shadow, and hence the greater the creativity that is needed in spending time coalescing the two.
There is lots to ponder in this little book. There are subtle expansions around his ideas in Iron John and his poetry. However the biggest light bulb that went on for me in this book was the surprise waiting for me in the fifth and final essay titled; Wallace Stevens and Dr. Jekyll. When I read the collected poems of Robert Bly, I was surprised by the frequency with which he invokes Wallace Stevens name. There are at least 5 poems about Wallace Stevens that Bly wrote that are in his collected works. He also mentions him several more times in his various essays and prose. It took me a while to figure out why he was so taken by a man that he speaks about rather critically. And then it hit me, Bly is focused on Stevens because he feels Stevens didn’t make the most of his life, didn’t make the most of his potential, and by judging Stevens, he is also judging himself, asking himself, “have I done enough to change my life?”
Bly heaps praise on Wallace Stevens first book of poetry, Harmonium, published when Stevens was 44 years old. I admit that most of the poetry I admire from Stevens body of work are contained in Harmonium. Bly felt that Stevens was too much of a one hit wonder, that none of his later writing measured up to the gift displayed in Harmonium. Bly liked the job of being a critic, he liked sharpening his pen to skewer the very talent he most admired. I learned a long time ago that teasing and criticism is a form of flattery, I have to rise above indifference, a state left to those around us that are not even worthy of our consciousness or time.
However I feel that some of Bly’s criticism goes to far. Bly contradicts my viewpoint on Stevens, when he states Stevens lost his connection to the divine or that he lost the potential that his divinity could have instilled. I see it differently. Wallace Stevens wrote an essay on poetry called Necessary Angels. In it he states that all creativity is an outpouring of an human beings striving to understand their Godliness, that any type of artistic expression is doing holy work, spirit work, and by its very nature, personal growth. Bly seems to imply that only certain kinds of creativity rise to the spirit level. Stevens is not as clear in his distinction and writes about the idea that anything that we are passionate about, exuberant about, is an extension of our creator, even art that others might find troubling or “trashy”. Stevens elegantly explains his own inner life and creative writing as an extension of his statement of faith.
Bly implies that Stevens is god-like but somehow godless, something I completely disagree. It wasn’t until I read Bly’s essay on Stevens that it clicked. Bly is critiquing Stevens for his perception that Stevens never integrated the light and dark parts of his life to Bly’s standards. He is judging Stevens for remaining tightly in control of his artistic life and his business life, keeping them in his opinion, completely separate, never letting those two things eat or absorb the shadow of the other. I interpret Bly’s obsession with Stevens now more as grief, grieving Bly’s perception of the lost potential in Stevens, as an artist and as a person. I think Bly is critical because he truly loves Stevens. Bly’s criticism that Stevens only wrote one great book of poetry in his lifetime is misguided, he should be embracing, applauding Stevens for writing one great book of poetry. It’s then that I realized the poem below is actually a kind of love letter from Bly in his bromance with Stevens, a thank you for expanding Bly’s imagination, for being part of his intellectual family and also thanking him for letting him down in ways that only people that we love can do.
Rethinking Wallace Stevens
by Robert Bly
What can I say? You have this funny Idea that the gods are dead.
You were so rash. I’d play saying The gods have died, but I’d never say it.
If they’re gone, only Imagination Can replace them. That’s you.
We’ll have to come to you, where You stand in your Hartford garden,
Looking and lolling and longing Like a girl in a white dress.
Bly discusses how the things that annoy us or anger us arise out of the affinity we find in ourselves for the very thing that makes us angry. He discusses how anger in men is often generational, it is passed down in a cycle that can only be broken when a man has the courage to absorb the gifts of the anger that has been directed at him or arises in him and eat it, and by doing so not letting it poison him, but nourish him. I think Bly focused on Stevens because of the potential and the gifts he sees in Stevens writing and ponders not how it satisfied Stevens, but instead, ponders greedily and selfishly, whether how much more satisfying it could have been for Bly if Stevens was somehow different than he was in the second half of his writing career.
Bly is beyond my abilities as a writer. I don’t want to infer that I have the same understanding or insights as Bly as he reads Wallace Stevens, but I have felt some of the same bias in reading Wallace Steven’s collected works that Bly expresses. There are some poems of Steven’s that are so brilliant, so innovative, so transformative that I hunger for more of that energy, I thirst for Wallace’s next bit of wisdom, for his next great poem. However, unlike Bly, I realize I do Wallace a disservice when I project on him my quest for brilliance, rather than just being grateful for the wonder he has created in my imagination. I believe I should spend less time judging other people’s art and more time wondering whether maybe I am the one not ready for the wisdom that could be laying in plain sight that Wallace left behind, wisdom that I am currently unprepared to understand.
I would like to think that I do not judge poets on their mediocrity, including Bly and myself, and instead treasure their best. It is the nature of poetry, not everything a poet writes clicks. But if we place judgement on what is art on published poets, then we unfairly idolize the value of being an unpublished poet, like Dickinson, we are biased to poets who never had to live up to any expectations. The unpublished poem can marinate the great with the swill, waiting for some future act of imagination to tweak it into something more fully realized, more balanced. For most people we spend most of our time trying to survive, rather than thrive. This survival is a function of trying to pay our bills, trying do what most lives are all about, walking through this world and being satisfied with mediocrity. I believe that a great poet is a great poet if they can connect with me on just one meaningful poem. Each us will find we connect with different poets and different poems by the same poet on what we would identify as “greatness.” In my opinion, Wallace moved the boundaries that inhibits classical poetry to unveil a new style, a freedom of expression that opened the door for Bly to write his poetry. If there is no Wallace Stevens there might have been no Bly. Wallace proved that you could expand the canvas of a poets language beyond the classics and beyond confessional poetry that was emerging in the early 20th century, into something more dynamic. Bly correctly states confessional poetry, like Berryman’s, may be entertaining, but it is mired in death energy, bound to be an anchor to our shadows and limit the human experience through its excess of negativity. Bly and Wallace believed in something beyond confession, that poetry can be a gateway to a vaster plane where human emotions and ideas go beyond words, beyond, as Yeats said, an over reaching for fact and reason.
Bly admits, reluctantly, he can’t quite shake his own expectations of his classical education, the siren call that lashes both the judgement of his own work and other’s to something that looks like suffering for one’s art. Bly for all his openness to exploration is a bit of a snob in how he defines artists. Bly dances around an idea that is consistent with many poets and artist’s experiences that resembles something akin to an adherence to a religious vow of poverty, a level of suffering that is necessary to fully realize the artist’s potential. Bly criticizes Stevens for doing the very thing he cannot fathom, getting up every day and going to an office to earn a living. He feels that Stevens didn’t change enough throughout his lifetime, that he didn’t evolve, that he remained too faithful to the very institutions of commerce, industry, to the minimization of risk, to insurance, restrictions that Bly feels are at complete odds with the freedom that spontaneity brings to artistic exploration, the high wire act above the elephants that mystifies the audience and defies death with each step. Bly is both genuinely concerned for Wallace Steven’s well-being as a brother in arms in the poetic life, while being flabbergasted by Steven’s decisions in remaining loyal to the very institutions that Bly feels are destroying the soul of America.
Wallace Stevens and Florence
by Robert Bly
Oh,Wallace Stevens, dear friend, You are such a pest. You are so sure You think everyone is in your family.
It is you and your father and Mozart– And ladies tasting cold rain in Florence, Puzzling out inscriptions, studying the gold flake.
As if life were a visit to Florence, A place where there are no maggots in the flesh, No one screaming, no one afraid.
Your job, your joy, your morning walk, As if you walked on the wire of the mind, High above the elephants; you cry out a little but never fall.
As if we could walk always high above the world, No bears, no witches, no Macbeth, No one screaming, no one in pain, no one afraid.
First Childhood, no limits, no renunciations, no goals. Such unthinking joy. Then abruptly terror, schoolrooms, boundaries, . . captivity, and a plunge into temptation and deep loss.
Defiance. The one crushed will be the crusher . . now, and he avenges his defeats, wrestles, wins, and overpowers others, slowly, act by act.
And then all alone in space, in lightness, in cold. But deep in the shape he has made to stand erect he takes a breath, as if reaching for the First, . . Primitive….
Then God explodes from his hiding place.
Do you ever feel like there is knowledge that the world is hiding from you? Sometimes mundane, sometimes momentous, this knowledge seems to have eluded you for decades, though it would have been terribly helpful. If this is commonplace in your life, remember, its not you, there is no great personal conspiracy directed at your being, the rest of the world isn’t that organized and I am sorry to break it to you, but everyone else is rarely thinking about you. This missing essence of information is simply a function of the immense nature of things. Why should we hold ourselves to such a high standard of awareness? I’m just grateful if I can remember to pick up cat litter and light bulbs while shopping.
Knowledge is such a precarious thing, it depends on many factors, within and outside of our control. I was struck today, putting on my socks, that I owe all of you who have never been inside a feed store a piece of valuable knowledge, an open secret rural folk have kept from our city brethern. In the winter, in places like Minnesota where outside temperatures can drop below 10 degrees F, the amount of moisture that is in the air that is then heated can be lower than the driest of deserts. For instance an outdoor air temperature of 0 degrees F, when heated to 68 degrees has an approximate humidity of less than 2%. It’s no surprise that old wood stairs dry and creak, or that our old heals dry out and crack.
I was over 50 before this happened to me for the first time, a condition that is surprisingly painful. It happens when the callous tissue on the heal of your foot dries out so much it splits open. The first time this happened I went to the pharmacy and bought a product with “Feet” in the name. It worked, albeit slowly. The product looks and feels like Crisco my Mother used in making cookies. However, after I turned 60, nothing seemed to cure my cracked heals. A friend of mine, who grew up on a dairy farm, saw me hobbling and asked what was wrong. I said, “a cracked heal” and recounted my frustration in getting it to heal up (kind of a foot pun). He said; “go to the feed store and get one of the products intended for cow udders. I use it on my hands and feet to cure dry skin.”
I promptly went to my local farm supply store and picked up Dr. Naylor Udder Balm. It worked like a charm. My current little tin will last for years. It’s a miracle cream. It made me ponder how we find a way to share the institutional knowledge that urban people know, like where’s the best place to buy bulk spices and get your electric guitar fixed, and the secret knowledge that rural people know, like where’s the best places to go swimming in a lake, and create a kind of helpful cultural exchange that is not Reddit, but occurs face to face over coffee. In our increasingly polarized society, maybe a little thing like the joy of udder butter is something that we could all agree on.
For the Old Gnostics
by Robert Bly
The Fathers put their trust in the end of the world And they were wrong. The Gnostics were right and not Right. Dragons copulate with their knobby tails. Some somnolent wealth rises unconcerned, Yes, over there! Ponderous stubborn Sorrow weighs down the flying Gospels. Scholars cobble together new versions. The untempered soul grumbles in empty light.
Depiction of early Christian Gnostic concepts of Basilides.
Abstain, then, from a quarrelsome woman lest you are distracted from the grace of God. But when you have rejected the fire of the seed, then pray with an undisturbed conscience. And when your prayer of thanksgiving, descends to a prayer of request, and your request is not that in future you may do right, but that you may do no wrong, then marry.
Isidore writing about ethics in the Gospel of Basilides.
Advice From The Geese
by Robert Bly
Hurry! This world is not going to get better! Do what you want to do now. The prologue is over, Soon actors will come on stage carrying the coffin.
I don’t want to frighten you, but not a stitch can be taken On your quilt unless you study. The geese will tell you— A lot of crying goes on before dawn comes.
Do you have a friend who has studied prisons? Does a friend say: “I love the twelve houses”? The “houses” suggests prisons all by itself.
So much suffering goes on among prisoners. There is so much grief in the cells. So many bolts Of lightning keep coming down from the unborn.
Please don’t expect that the next President Will be better than this one. Four o’clock In the morning is the time to read Basilides.
Every seed spends many nights in the earth. Robert, you’ve always been too cheerful; you too Will not be forgiven if you refuse to study.
Today’s poems come from Robert Bly’s book My Sentence Was A Thousand Years ofJoy. Published in 2005, it is the second volume of poetry that Bly employed the ghazal poetic form. I have observed that Bly likes to use the term thousand or thousands in his writing over and over. I think its because he understands that most of us can relate to a numeric concept of a thousand. A thousand is attainable, measurable, it is something humans can conceive. It is longer than our life span and still in the realm of our ancestors, our stories, our myths, our religions. Numbers bigger than a thousand start to become harder to comprehend. The universe is thought to be 13.7 billion years old, plus or minus 200 million years. The earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old. (Which might make the earth a whoopsy baby, born after the universe’s late middle age fling with a rock star).
Total emissions of carbon dioxide globally exceeded 37 billion metric tons in 2023. American’s combined credit card debt surpassed 1.0 trillion dollars for the first time in 2023. The total student loan debt stands at 1.77 trillion dollars. The United States deficit stands at 34 trillion dollars. The kitchen that I am sitting in is 127 years old. The oldest person alive is 116 years old. Which of these numbers can you relate?
Poets don’t often use terms like million, billion or trillion because the numbers aren’t conceivable for most readers, they are simply decimal points added on to an already really big number. Do you know what comes after a trillion? Does it matter? Mathematicians have names for them all, all the next three zero’s; order and precision important apparently. Computers have no trouble handling big numbers. Human’s are not computers.
It’s why the name drop in the first poem is interesting — Basilides. Basilides was an Gnostic scholar and teacher in the early Christian sects that emerged after Jesus’ death. He lived in Egypt. He took parts of the old testament, The Gospel of John, while rejecting the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, and wrote his own gospel to append onto the old testament with John. Like several other Gnostic gospels written during this time of fluidity in early Christian writing, we know its details only by the later scholars who attacked its principles. All of the copies of his writings along with his son Isidore, were destroyed or have yet to be found.
I find some religious terms confusing and very confining by traditionalists. I have considered myself agnostic for most of my life, a term that I define as state of belief that is incomplete in both my faith and doubt. I am not an atheist, I open to new ideas and ideas that go beyond a narrow view of Christianity. I have a fully formed spiritual viewpoint that parallels the Presbyterian church to which I grew up in and have remained connected. However, I am starting to revise that internal label of myself as agnostic to something that feels more real, aligns even better with a broader concept of Gnosticism. I have yet to fully understand my definition of Gnosticism, other than it is a collection of religious ideas from a range of cultures that have influenced each other over thousands of years. The formal term Gnosticism evolved out of the early Christian church in the late 1st century AD among Jewish and early Christian sects. These various groups emphasized personal spiritual knowledge over the orthodox teachings, traditions, judgments and authority of religious and authoritarian institutions of their time. The concept of being a Gnostic has become embroiled with ideas of mysticism in modern interpretations and in my opinion has been unfairly shuffled off into the dustbin of spirituality based on suspicions of occultism and magic, which unfortunately are accurate in some instances in the intervening history. There are dark and misguided principles of corrupted Gnostic writings that overshadow the good ideas that are included in Basilides writing. But when I read about Basilides. I don’t see the mind of a charlatan. I see a spiritual man grappling with his place in the universe.
Basilides world view sounds more like Buddhism in some ways than Christianity. He created an overly elaborate idea of a spiritual cosmos in my opinion, with 365 heavens, Jesus and the Jewish God very much present in his divine hierarchy, among a vast array of angelic powers. At the top of it all was the Non-Being God; a non-sentient, non-material, unfathomable energy that all of creation is apart, a primordial dimension, from which all things emanate and return. Basilidies recognized both feminine and masculine energy is apart of this creative energy and each balances the other in both the material and spiritual dimensions.
Here’s the take on Basilides from the Catholic Encyclopedia, written from a perspective to discredit him and his followers. Basilides teachings continued for hundreds of years following his son Isidore’s death, who built on his father’s ideas and teachings.
Basilides taught that Nous (Mind) was the first to be born from the Unborn Father; from Nous was born Logos (Reason); from Logos, Phronesis (Prudence); from Phronesis, Sophia (Wisdom) and Dynamis (Strength) and from Phronesis and Dynamis the Virtues, Principalities, and Archangels. By these angelic hosts the highest heaven was made, by their descendants the second heaven, and by the descendants again of these the third, and so on till they reached the number 365. Hence the year has as many days as there are heavens. The angels, who hold the last or visible heaven, brought about all things that are in the world and shared amongst themselves the earth and the nations upon it. The highest of these angels is the one who is thought to be the God of the Jews. And as he wished to make the other nations subject to that which was especially his own, the other angelic principalities withstood him to the utmost. Hence the aversion of all other peoples for this race. The Unborn and Nameless Father seeing their miserable plight, sent his First-born, Nous (and this is the one who is called Christ) to deliver those who should believe in him from the power of the angelic agencies who had built the world. And to men Christ seemed to be a man and to have performed miracles. It was not, however, Christ who suffered, but rather Simon of Cyrene, who was constrained to carry the cross for him, and mistakenly crucified in Christ’s stead. Simon having received Jesus’ form, Jesus assumed Simon’s and thus stood by and laughed at them. Simon was crucified and Jesus returned to His Father. Through the Gnosis (Knowledge) of Christ the souls of men are saved, but their bodies perish.
Wow. If taken literally there’s some pretty far out ideas in there. But there other interpretations of The Gospel of Basilides that are partially lost to time that are more enigmatic. The monotheistic viewpoint of the modern Catholic church does not align with his views, but is the Catholic church actually monotheistic? Hippolytus, one of the great early Catholic historians and scholars, wrote about Basilides differently. Here’s a broader and older view of Basilides and Isidore’s teachings.
Basilides believed that faith was an inherent part of being human, it came naturally from the mystical emanation of our birth. He also believed that sin and suffering were an inherent part of the human condition. He eschewed the concept of martyrdom in early Christianity because of the religious fervor and idolatry that it fomented and felt it did not align with his principles of salvation through knowledge. He felt that martyrdom glorified suffering in the material world and diminished the opportunity to focus on what he felt was the highest form of salvation.
Basilidies coined the term Abraxas for this primordial force at work in the universe. He proposed a state of nonexistence prior to creation of all things, brought forth into our physical experience by a desireless Not-Being God. Where Basilides gets convoluted with dark forces is his term for the non-Being God, Abraxas, a derivative of the word, abracadabra, a term we tend to think of in relation to spells, magic, magicians and witchcraft. Abracadabra predates Basilides coining the word Abraxas. Abra is the Aramaic equivalent of the Hebrew word ‘avra’, which means, I will create. ‘Cadabra’ is the Aramaic version of the Hebrew word “kedoobar’, which roughly means ‘as is spoken’. If we put them together along with Basilides definition of the universe, it means creating something out of nothing, by speaking it into existence, exactly what a magician appears to do with an illusion or occultists think they are doing at a seance. In the Gospel of Basilides Abraxas is the Non-Being God that are spoken into existance by the unspeaking force. How different is that from Genesis.
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void: and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let their be light: and there was light.
Genesis 1
It is the spirit of God who moves upon the earth’s waters, an ancient knowledge that all life requires water and sunlight for life to exist on this planet. God speaks the things required for life to exist into existence out of the void; nonexistence.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
John 1
However, some occultists, in which I would include some fraternal organizations, like the Scottish Masons, and other more extreme cults, have twisted the idea of Abraxas into a physical god, that is both dark and light, with mystical powers. Some depictions of Abraxas are violent and scary, a dragon with snake for feet and a sword, or the head of a rooster, with a shield and serpent appendages, all of these a grotesque corruption of Basilides’ idea of Abraxas as a non-being. Basilides Abraxas in my mind, is more the concept of what forces helped God, ideas that start of Genesis and John are both trying to assimilate. One possibility is Basilides Abraxas is the word that was with God in John.
An aside, some scholars believe the word Abracadabra goes back thousands of years, into prehistory, and predates Christianity. It is very possibly a word that has survived thousands and thousands of years relatively unchanged, simply because it is a fun word to say and sounds impressive in building the anticipation of an audience for revelation.
Basilides in my opinion constructed an overly convoluted religious paradigm. What’s interesting to me is that is he put forth an idea that is very much aligned with modern Christianity. Basilides predicted the epoch that began in his lifetime would continue for thousands of years, an epoch that revolves around learning about Jesus’ teachings. This is partly why later later Catholic scholars couldn’t completely detach some of Basilides ideas from mainstream theology that have filtered all the way through to present.
Basilides conceived redemption as a return to the primordial state, a reunion with the forces before the creation of the world. Basilides differentiated between material elements, associated with the physical world and its inherent imperfections, and how all things in our material world return to what he termed a primal chaos. He described how he believed the psychic elements of our soul and consciousness return to a different realm governed by angelic forces, of which the Jewish god and Jesus have a prominent place. Basilides believed our spiritual element, the highest form of existence, returns to the Not-Being God, a divine energy that transcends our concepts of time and existence, and by its very nature, is eternal, it predates the earth, a concept that most humans cannot wrap our heads around — a concept of eternity. Eternity is a mathematical number that can be described by humans but not necessarily understood, a concept beyond our true comprehension. He describes a restoration to a state of blissful ignorance that is the opposite of unknowledge, but rather a state of tranquility and peace, an absence of desire or striving, in returning to the Not-Being (unthinking) God.
Isidore built on these ideas and emphasized the concepts of rising above all human desires, including sexual desires, as an important step in preparing for this state of unknowing bliss. The concept of a spiritual sexual celibacy on earth as a way to prepare for a future higher spiritual existence or nonexistence is an idea many religions have embraced, with a corresponding vow of celibacy that members of their leadership or followers partake. The principles of celibacy was something that early Christian sects were wrestling with. It eventually became part of the Catholic cannon that required both Priests and Nuns to take a vow of chastity and celibacy. Todays widespread scandals in the Catholic church of child abuse have exposed the inherent challenges of imposed celibacy that may not be best for the Catholic church, its leaders or its followers.
Sex and religion have always been linked in our human form around an idea of divine experience. Orgasms flood our brains with some of the best mind altering chemicals for human health. However the two are difficult bedfellows because of the abuse that can flow from misguided or even evil people that attempt to incorporate the two in ways to control others. The idea of Tantric sex can be a healthy approach to human sexual interactions, but some forms of Gnosticism embraced morally questionable practices that deserved to be abandoned. Some followers of Basilides faltered in their interpretations of his writings, and slipped into a darker cult. (I would argue all forms of religion can be twisted to embrace morally questionable practices). Isidore elaborated on his father’s ideas and introduced additional elements that are built on Stoic (Greek) philosophy. Isidore emphasized, even more than his father, the gifts that come from abstaining from worldly desires to achieve a purifying knowledge or a state of Gnosis. He also condoned human sexuality when done with the right mindfulness as part of the need for continued creation on earth, a natural extension of the divine.
The establishment of the Nicene Creed in 325 AD marginalized all Gnostic sects. I find the Nicene creed fascinating on several levels. It is spoken word for word in both Catholic and Protestant congregations, when new members join a church. Both the new member, the elders and the congregation recite it. It is the original statement of faith in Christianity. It contains the word catholic, lower case “c” intentionally, a word we rarely see anywhere else in a religious context. Lower case catholic is by definition the concept of a universal church that learns through apostolic teachings of those that wrote about Jesus’ life after his death. I believe the lower case catholic, invites a broader inclusion of human beliefs that is aligned in some ways with the core of the idea of Gnosis, or divine knowledge. Although the Nicene creed rejected the idea of a Not-Being God, a concept that is present today in our increasingly secular society, it welcomed all forms of Christianity under its tent that would come in the future, having been constructed out of a broad group of fundamentalist sects vying for affirmation and approval. We sometimes forget that Christianity was borne out of diversity of thought, not unthinking agreement.
It is interesting that in some ways the concept of a Not-Being God has attracted more followers around the world than current Christianity in 2024. The idea of nonexistence is at the core of Basilides principles, the idea that we come from nonexistence and return to it, a testimony, and a remnant of his Gnostic beliefs, that is alive and well, despite 1800 years of the Catholic church’s attempts to forcefully expel and repel his ideas.
Eating Blackberry Jam
by Robert Bly
When I hear that we all belong to nonexistence, I drop my eyes, but then I raise them out Of love for the little creatures of nonexistence.
Some say that perch became like each other To keep the shark from zeroing . But staying alive Doesn’t mean they are free from nonexistence.
The cries of the infant barn-swallows rising from The mud-nests fastened ingeniously to the rafters Taught me to love the skinny birds of nonexistence.
Taoists with their thin beards fishing all day With a straight hook tell us they have learned Not to expect a whole lot from nonexistence.
Blackberries have so many faces that their jam Is kind of thickening of nothing: each of us Loves to eat the thick syrup of nonexistence.
When each stanza closes with the same word, I am glad. A friend says, “If you’re proud of that, You must be one of the secretaries of nonexistence.
A ritual is the enactment of a myth. And, by participating in the ritual, you are participating in the myth.
Joseph Campbell
The Country Roads
by Robert Bly
Last night in my dream, I drank tea steeped In iron that had failed; at the bottom I saw ruined tines of an old pitch fork.
Everything we leave behind is testimony, Even our nail-clippings. Then my old clothes Are testimony of my love of nakedness.
During the months everyone spoke badly of us, Then I had the fiercest love of you. People still try to encourage us by speaking badly.
So many times this week I’ve felt like weeping. It’s natural, like the cry of Canada Geese Who call to each other over the darkening reeds.
In my early poems I praised so many lost things. The way the crickets’ cries in October carried Them into the night sky felt right to me.
Every way of knowing is blessed by bootleggers. Because the government does not allow delight To be sold, you have to find it on country roads.
I don’t live on a country road, but it used to be. I live 1/4 mile from where the black top ends. The gravel road then runs to our driveway and sweeps around an arching curve to the west and heads up a steep hill. The difference between living on a black top road and a gravel road is on a gravel road you can watch your tax dollars at work. On a gravel road, with great regularity, a giant road grader comes along and grades your country road flat from April through October. Many dump trucks show up unannounced every other year or so, with class 5 gravel from the quarry nearby and discharge their contents so that the grader can level out the spots needing improvement. Gravel roads are built up over many years of pain staking attention by an actual human who is proud of their work to keep your road safe.
When it didn’t snow this winter and the road grader, who is also the snowplow driver, wasn’t needed, and it got so warm that the road thawed out between Christmas and New Years, I was surprised by the unmistakable noise of the road grader paying me a visit, a time when the road is normally frozen. He painstakingly graded the curve one more time, just to reassure me he’s keeping an eye out for me and everyone else who travels this curve.
The reason behind this perpetual maintenance is because gravel roads develop rhythmic ridges that prevent tires from making contact with the road at higher speeds, making it impossible to brake on a sharp turn like ours. If you don’t slow down on gravel roads, you can slide right off and roll your vehicle. Gravel roads are dangerous because drivers who are inexperienced or youthfully exuberant or drunk sometimes crash. I have known fathers and mothers who lost a teenage son on their country road, near their home, an endless grief that may never be overcome, the reminder ever present, every time they drive by the site of the one car crash.
This mutual reliance between myself and the road grader is an annual ritual played out normally from May to October each month. On a black top road, you only get attention from the city or county sporadically, when the potholes are too big to ignore or the road has to be rebuilt once every 20 or 30 years, or there is a big snowfall. It may feel like nobody is paying attention to your needs on a black top road. In fact, you may never live long enough on your black top road to see it repaired or improved or cared for in the summer. The snowplow comes along in the dead of winter, but it’s not the same as having a year-round roadside benevolent companion.
Today’s poems come from The Night Abraham Called To The Stars. I have read it two or three times all the way through in the past month. I have gotten the impression sitting with Bly and this book that these are in some ways not really separate poems. They may appear to be separate poems, each on its own page with its own title, but really Bly is writing the same poem over and over or it’s one long poem, framing different parts on different pages. Bly is wise enough to recognize that all learners and particularly adult learners need repetition. That the secret to ritual learning is repetition. We require redundancy and consistency if meaning is going to sift into our bones. Bly is a patient teacher in the learning process, waiting for us to understand. He offers the same or similar insights 5, 6, 8, 10 or 100 different ways, so that our minds eye might find just the right crack to see through to let the light in, (thank you Leonard Cohen).
I have always liked the ritual of saying the Lord’s Prayer whether in a church service or funeral, whether in a Catholic church or a Protestant church. It is sometimes the only part of the entire service I can relate to. I have a blog that I wrote a few years ago on how I interpret the Lord’s Prayer, with a little twist on the word art. You can find it here: Our Father Who Art In Heaven. What I left out of that blog is my middle name is Arthur, my father’s name, who goes by Art. My family who read it understood the deeper meaning that was not present explicitly in the original blog. I share it now so you might find this blog more revealing.
Relationships between fathers and sons are complicated and many times not very spiritual. As someone who struggles with literal interpretations of Christianity and the bible as too confining for my own beliefs, I still sometimes find meaning in the most holy of Christianity’s scripture. It is part of my history and life experience, even if I still wrangle my faith. Not every poem or passage in a religious text is necessarily relatable to your experience or beliefs. In my opinion, it’s our spiritual responsibility to collect the ones we find that bring meaning to our lives and if necessary, twist them a bit to fit the space in our hearts and our heads. And to do that we may have to read them more than once. We may have to come to them at different times in our lives. We may have to build the opportunity for repetition, for ritual into our busy lives and then silence our minds and see what happens. Our spiritual obligations to ourselves are no different than the approach we should take with difficult human relationships, as the relationship with ourself can be the most difficult one in our lives.
Ritual and ceremony are connected to our deep-seated need for spirituality, to get in touch with creation, to bring comfort to our incompleteness of understanding. Through ritual we get the opportunity to try and learn the lessons we are still missing, the opportunity to spend a lifetime trying to master newness. Ritual is something I appreciate about the Catholic mass. It is pretty much always the same, so that you can stop thinking and be present for a moment. Protestants are a bit too fixated on novelty, hoping for brilliance to come out of their church leaders mouths every Sunday. Brilliance is hard to sustain consistently and is in the eye of the beholder. Brilliance is an unfair expectation of anyone, even people who are brilliant.
Why Is It The Spark’s Fault?
by Robert Bly
The soul is in love with marshy ground and snails, with mud, darkness, wind, smoke and fire. The cucumber and melon lead us back toward Heaven.
Why is it the spark’s fault if the moment a hammer Hits hot iron the spark curves toward earth? In July even lightning cannot help itself.
Italian fiddlers are always ready to play Near the enclosed bed of the Prodigal Son While a plump woman eats a pear with a small knife.
Let’s keep disaster remembered in our poems. Our memory feeds us ruin just as cows Stand around drinking from river water.
Who stands for the melon? Seth, Abraham And Shem. The lightness of grasshoppers suggests They are taking in some fiddle music from the grass.
Please forgive me if I know so many words And say so little. The Word catches in my throat. Because some force does not want me to follow Abraham.
I’m left with the overriding feeling that the most beautiful friendship between men is that of profound brotherhood, each learning from the other with reciprocity, generosity and care — without so much the handing down of advice — but through deep listening, observing a life as it is simply lived, and taking copious notes.
Asher Packman in an essay on the friendship between William Stafford and Robert Bly
Cutting Loose
by William Stafford
Sometimes from sorrow, for no reason, you sing. For no reason, you accept the way of being lost, cutting loose from all else and electing a world where you go where you want to.
Arbitrary, a sound comes, a reminder that a steady center is holding all else. If you listen, that sound will tell where it is, and you can slide your way past trouble.
Certain twisted monsters always bar the path – but that’s when you get going best, glad to be lost, learning how real it is here on the earth, again and again.
In reading an essay by John Rosenwald in the book Robert Bly – In This World, I had an epiphany. I realized the word and concept that is at the center of almost all of Bly’s work is grief. Bly doesn’t dwell in grief, he doesn’t celebrate it, but he doesn’t shirk it. Iron John and The Sibling Society in many ways are Bly’s how-to manual to address and move beyond grief. Adulting (a modern term I dislike) is the art of confronting the grief of ourselves, admitting we will never be as smart, as capable, as successful as we were in our mother’s eyes, nor as dumb, as incompetent and downtrodden as we were in “fill in the blanks” eyes. We have to swallow our grief so it doesn’t metastasize into depression. We need to consume grief so that it nourishes resiliency. We need that special nourishment to get ready for even bigger griefs that loom in the shadows that are going to pounce on you when you least suspect it.
Bly writes about in Iron John that most men (remember it is a book for men), go through a dark period in their late adolescence on their journey to the first stage of manhood. In pre-industrial societies boys had to move from the world of their mothers, to the world of their fathers. And in doing so, they had to get in touch with their anger, their dark side and reconcile it with the lightness of their mother’s world. This period is a period of grief, we are grieving the loss of possibilities. We are grieving the loss of naivety. We are grieving the loss of what felt like freedom in childhood, freedom of responsibilities. Responsibility is hard. Preparation for being self sufficient financially, for being ready to be a father, to be ready to be a good neighbor and contributor to your community is hard. And our current society gives an illusion to young people that it either isn’t worth the pain to deal with their grief or that this process isn’t even necessary and it sets them up for failure. Bly says that the lack of a male presence in young men’s lives to help guide them in this process can make it even more difficult for men to successfully jump this hurdle in their development.
Each of us has to come to terms with our transitions in life. It happens more than once. Bly reminds us that sometimes we have to transition from lightness of being to being in touch with rat hole under the ground next to the chicken coop. The rat builds the burrow that the gopher snake one day decides to move in, and devour the children of the rats that built it. You can’t kick the snake out when you find yourself curled up next to it, because that’s the snake’s nature to devour rat’s young, you can only decide what you do next.
Bly uses various fairy tales about ashes, Cinderella is the best known, that most ancient cultures recognize ash as part of the rite of passage, of both men and women. Ancient cultures sometimes had young men they called “cinder-eaters” who would stop bathing, sleep on the ground next to fire, reject their mother’s attempts to clean them up, to get them to come back to her bedside, and watch them harden into a dirty mess. The 90’s punk version might be a clothes pin in the cheek, ripped jeans with an attitude of I don’t care what anyone thinks of me because I stink, figuratively, metaphorically and literally. Today’s version might be the young men addicted to video games who refuse to come out of the basement. Young people in this state can be accurately described as a hot mess. It is not surprising in older cultures they would have had an affinity for ash.
Ashes are what’s left after we have burned. Ashes are what remains when the fire has gone out. We can still read the writing sometimes on ashes before a puff of air disintegrates the fine greasy remnants. Ashes are more than symbols. Ashes are what we keep in our house of our beloved family members who have passed on leaving grief that has no where to else to reside but in that urn. Grief is not soul robbing. It is not life sustaining either. It is a remnant of love. If you truly love something we grieve its loss. We honor its memory, we preserve its ashes.
Rosenwald’s essay is about the conference that Robert Bly organized (with lots of help) for 35+ years starting in 1975 called The Great Mother and The New Father. It was a traveling circus of writers, artists and intellectuals, looking to commune with each other for a week of detoxification and rejuvenation, generally somewhere beautiful. Various writers, teachers, poets, dancers, singers would encourage the participants to expand their possibilities. Joseph Campbell taught mythology from the very beginning and was one of the few speakers who could attempt to match Bly’s intensity as a speaker, along with Marion Woodman. Rosenwald recounts some of the highlights over the years, including performances by Bly that would be 3 and 4 hours in length, scripted and unscripted, much of it coming from Bly’s incredible memorization skills.
The annual conference was always on the brink of breaking up or financially folding in early years. Bly often made up the deficit by making it up himself or working without pay when it had been promised. Payment was in the experience, it was sufficient to not worry about the finances. It is the opposite of Burning Man, which began as a celebration of spirit and has turned into corporal greed. This conference stayed true to its roots.
Attendees over the years read like the who’s who of the best of the poetry in the 20th century. Mary Oliver, Bill Holm, William Stafford, James Wright, Ethridge Knight, Galway Kinnell, and on and on and on. Bly befriended Mary Oliver early in her career. He showcased her in numerous anthologies, published her work, before she became one of the most read female poets of the second half of the 20th century. The Great Mother and New Father conference was the summer camp for the titans of literary nerds of all time. It was a place that artistic endeavors could be shared in spite of the risks. It was a place to workshop material and get feedback, identify your blind spots. Bly led by example and brought a draft of The SiblingSociety one year and set up a reading for those that would like to hear it. Some of the young people in the group were offended and groused about it that evening. Bly heard the grumbles and set up a listening session with the younger members of the conference who were outraged by his assessment of their generation, of their music, of their culture. Bly listened. The feedback didn’t change his mind. But he listened. I would be curious to ask the attendees who were young then, 30 years later, what their impression of The Sibling Society is today? Has their outrage transformed into something else? More outrage, but directed in a different way?
Today’s poems are a shout out to the longtime friendship and bromance between Robert Bly and William Stafford. Bly was deeply inspired by Stafford’s poetry and by his example of fatherhood that was so different than Bly had experienced in his own life. They traveled and did poetry readings together, shared conferences and enjoyed each other’s company. I had written today’s blog post before I stumbled across Asher Packman’s well written blog regarding their friendship. I highly recommend it; Where the Water Goes, the enduring friendship of William Stafford and Robert Bly.
I am preparing for action in 2024 and for the possibility of defeat, the possibility that I will have to grieve for four more years of what could have bin and what’s been lost because of the failure of leadership, regardless of what political party prevails in November.
P. S. The Great Mother and New Father conference is still going strong. I am registered and attending this May for the first time.
What Stafford Was Like
by Robert Bly
With small steps he climbed very high mountains And offered distinction to persuasive storms, Delicacies at the edge of something larger, A comfort in walking on ground close to water.
Something large, but it wasn’t an animal snorting In a cave, more like the rustling of a thousand Small-winged birds, all together, comfortable, In a field, feeding. One felt at home nearby.
There are many possible ways to see the world (To whom we should be fair). When someone Spoke, his face thought, and his eyebrow Said it. The words weren’t always comforting.
But calculated to nudge us along to that place -Just over there–where we would be safe for the night.
Fourteen Lines 