Robert Hass, "Meditation at Lagunitas": Ways of Being and Saying

Meditation at Lagunitas by Robert Hass : The Poetry Foundation

There are two kinds of language, two kinds of experiencing, two ways of being in the world in Robert Hass’s “Meditation at Lagunitas.”  The first mode begins in the opening two lines; it’s all about the left brain and analysis, cognition, deduction, intellect, abstraction. The very subject is “thinking” in a meditation that’s the beginning of a comparison essay:

            All the new thinking is about loss.

            In this it resembles all the old thinking.

In this mode, some of Hass’s declarations are downright aphoristic when separated from the whole poem, and, to take a negative view of aphorisms, we might say they’re like fortune cookies or bumper stickers—apparent truths without benefit of discussion or examples and experience from the tangible, palpable world, or the world of intuition, ambiguity, mystery, magic, sensuous delight.

If there’s a positive view of aphorisms, it’s probably based on the way they pin down a piece of Truth in a precise, pithy, and seemingly valid way. Some synonyms or related terms might be epigram, axiom, platitude, maxim. Here are some fairly aphoristic lines from Hass that tend toward elegance, subtlety, complexity and loftiness more than most axioms do: 

            All the new thinking is about loss.

            In this it resembles all the old thinking.

                                                each particular erases

            the luminous clarity of a general idea.

            a word is elegy to what it signifies.

            talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,

            pine, hair, woman, you and I.

                                                            desire is full

            of endless distances.

Red-Bellied Woodpecker, Faver-Dykes S.P.,FL

These lines are clearly going for big wisdom and philosophical insight, and they might be faulted for trying too hard. But Hass truly fleshes out the poem with vivid, often gorgeous images of the physical world.

                                                       the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk

of that black birch

                                                                                    holding

            her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,

            I felt a violent wonder at her presence

            like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river

            with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,

            muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver                                     fish

            called pumpkinseed.

                                    the way her hands dismantled bread,

            the thing her father said that hurt her,

In these quotations, I hope the differences between abstract, aphoristic expression and concrete imagery are clear as two different modes of being and awareness.

Moreover, at the center of the poem, Hass offers two lines that encapsulate the two kinds of mental operation.

     talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,

     pine, hair, woman, you and I.   

Pike's Pond, Lenox, MA

The first line is general, summarizing, abstract declaration, ending in one of the greatest abstractions of all, “justice.” But immediately the following line plunges completely into the physical, concrete, immediate world, so that a dualism is clear. 

Of course, the most emphatic image of sensuousness, and the victor if there’s been a contest, is the single, italicized, repeated word and physical image, blackberry. Can the “good flesh” continue? 

Hass is too wise to choose between black hats and white hats, but he would like a world and a life in which “numinous” flesh could go on and on, physical and mortal on the one hand, spiritual, mental, and endless on the other. And he imagines a third “numinous” hand, which contains both ways of being—the temporal and the eternal—and thus requires no choice by the human. To try to articulate that world, all he can do, ironically, is repeat a single word, the odd, beautiful center of sensuality:  blackberry.

I don’t mean to force some happy (or haughty) ending about Thanksgiving when I say Hass might be giving us something good to be thankful about—something more elevated and meaningful than gorging on turkey or lining up at 1:00 a.m. to gather more stuff.


Meditation at Lagunitas by Robert Hass : The Poetry Foundation

Wordsworth, "The World Is Too Much With Us," More on Hirshfield and Romanticism

The World Is Too Much With Us by William Wordsworth : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.



“Most wild American Crows live for about 7–8 years. Captive birds are known to have lived up to 30 years.” (Wikipedia)

Jane Hirshfield’s “The Woodpecker Keeps Returning” has me thinking once again that seemingly over-simplified writing and/or flat language can be deceptive. There is an important difference between the merely descriptive word, “simple,” and “simplistic,” which judges something as over-simplified or simple-minded.

I’m not sure which word or concept describes Hirshfield in “Woodpecker” or elsewhere. I've also felt that the simplicity of Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver, for example, shifts from profundity and power in one passage to puerile self-parody in the next. Ditto the quality of their work from story to story.

I've often wondered about this business of simplicity as it relates to the ancient Eastern forms and the West's enchantment with them since about 1920 (William Carlos Williams and James Wright, to name two, and now Jane Hirshfield; but the list is much longer than that and includes some of nineteenth-century American transcendentalists.).

Some people say that to understand Nirvana we should think of still water and silence. OK. I kind of get that—the absence of conflict and complexity as a sublime. But if that's paradise or some such perfection, how is a writer supposed to convey it and make it feel desirable as an ideal rather than boring or dead?

Ditto, for me at least, Classicism’s ideals like order, symmetry, balance, rationality, restraint. That's why I've always been drawn to the Romantics and their passion for dynamism, tumult, eerie, scary mysticism, “the one soul within us and abroad.” That seems so much more alive than pale reason and order. But then I’ve never lived or taken part in a revolution. America’s mini-revolution that we call The Sixties had some admirable purposes, but also a lot of phony bullshit, as the advent of Yuppiedom has verified.

Similarly, those old English Romantics proved to be only a short step from Wordsworth's wind-baggery and others' emotional, spiritual quackery in general. Just around the corner was the late Romantic oozing into Gothicism, which could get downright silly. And what about our squeamishness over the question of just how noble the Noble Savage is? I think it was Joan Baez who wrote, “A hero’s a nuisance to live with at home.”

In any case we're back to Classicism and Romanticism—and that icky business of one’s way of being in the world. Once again, it’s not either-or, but in which ways is this or that person or characteristic Romantic and in which ways Classical? For example, most think of Keats as the most classically inclined of the major Romantic poets. Or maybe Picasso as cubist is Romantic in his revolutionary, individualistic new way of seeing the world, but in the geometric shapes he uses to portray what he sees, he is mathematical, precise, drawing between the lines—that is, Classical.

With that to chew on, I offer Wordsworth’s “The World Is Too Much with Us,” an orderly poem inasmuch as it’s a sonnet, with classical allusions, but a very Romantic celebration of the Natural, the definition of which might require a tome.


The World Is Too Much With Us by William Wordsworth : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

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New Year's Resolutions and Existentialism

Didn't mean to leave you hanging . . . .


So, first and foremost, Brenda, BobG, Farmchick, Pierre, Ken, Jeff M, Susan, anonymous, Barbaro—and others?—I think I have found, posted, and tried to respond to your comments from the last three weeks or so. I’m not sure what went wrong, but I think see how to prevent it in the future. Thank you for your patience, and please don’t hesitate to email me at “corndogj@gmail.com” if I ever seem to be ignoring you again.

Now back to everyone’s favorite topic, One’s Way of Being in the World. One more reason it fascinates me, I think, is that we presume for ourselves a lot of free will, maybe more in the U.S. than in other parts of the world. We are the children of Sartre; some of us even believe we chose to be born. With the notable exception of religious fundamentalists, it’s been awhile since it was fashionable to speak of destiny or fatalism.

Compared to most other parts of the world, we have political freedom, and we figure, apparently, that this translates into psychological or philosophical freedom, or freedom in planning a business, or personal finances, or diet and exercise, or selection of a career, or selection of a mate. “Billy, you can be anything you want to be. This is America.”

Evidence accumulates concerning brain chemistry, genetics and DNA; it seems to support the notion that “biology is destiny,” but we don’t like accepting limits on what we can do or become (or spend). We are 21st century Americans, still saving the world for democracy and Walmart, still living the dream.



The lady in purple is “The Communicant,” by Gari Melchers, around 1900.


A quarter-century earlier, Renoir gives us “Woman in an Armchair” (below, left). I’m imagining Lady Purple telling her shrink about her dyspepsia, insomnia, headaches, and anxiety attacks. Dr. Frood hands her an 8 x 10 postcard of Renoir’s woman in an armchair and says, “Here, be her. If you'll just change everything, your symptoms will vanish, and you will be happy.”

Can she do it? Should she try?

How much change can she impose upon her current Way of Being in the World? How would you guide and support her, step by step in the process of her transfiguration?

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Robert Graves, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Julius Stewart, Two Movies

Don’t Let That Horse ... by Lawrence Ferlinghetti : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

The Naked and the Nude by Robert Graves



left: Julius Stewart,
The Glade, 1900.
Detroit Institute of Art

















"A way of being in the world": does that phrase ring for you? Viggy, The Philosophy Merchant, tells me it's common, tosses it off the way he might say, "Your shoes are brown." However, I think it speaks, or implies, volumes. It resonates. It reeks, and it perfumes.

What material object, including the material human, does not have a way of being in the world? The banana? The typewriter? The blind grandmother with her blanket and her rocker?

In this time of holiday shopping, are you not picking out a present for Logan because of her/his way of being in the world? If he loves rap, will you give him The Mormon Tabernacle Choir? Because you're a provocateur? Is that your way of being in the world?

Based on his poem, "Don't Let That Horse," how would you describe Lawrence Ferlinghetti's way of being in the world?

And here again is Robert Graves' "The Naked and the Nude," this time black print on white background for easier reading, a more accomodating way for it to be in the world. (So even if you saw it here December 2, please give it another chance).

Of course that raises the question (by the way, it does not "beg" the question! Make them stop saying that! What is their way of being in the world, which permits or causes them such endless parroting? What is a parrot's way of being in the world?) . . . .

I was going to say, before you interrupted, "Whom and what do you know that goes naked in the world, and who or what goes nude?"

I've recently seen the (compelling!) movies "Inside Job," about the recent Wall Street fiasco, and "Fair Game," about Victoria Plame and Joe Wilson's plight in the early months of the second U.S. invasion of Iraq (2001 - 2003). What could be a more classic and obvious case of nudity than politics, all that subterfuge, double-speak, and sociopathy, even when it comes to the lives and deaths of other people? Isn't it true that we like to see such fruit exposed in order to convert the nude to the naked?

Well, that ought to keep you off the streets for a day or two. I wonder if I'll ever let go of the topic, "way of being in the world." I guess I'm still teething on the Slim Jim of Life.

Don’t Let That Horse ... by Lawrence Ferlinghetti : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

The Naked and the Nude by Robert Graves

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Wallace Stevens' "The Snow Man," Take Two

The Snow Man by Wallace Stevens : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

Some poems are so linked to a season or occasion that they must be posted more than once. Last February, we had a good discussion going, but it fizzled. So here is "The Snow Man" again, along with our comments ten months ago.

http://banjo52.blogspot.com/2010/02/snow-man-by-wallace-stevens.html

Like most Stevens, "The Snow Man" is fairly cerebral and philosophical, maybe so much so that it's dry and heartless. Maybe I should argue that Stevens is the Picasso of 20th century poetry. But I like the poem's take on imagination and the possibility of empathic flights, along with the potential outcomes.

Also, I like the poem's effort to simply tell it like it is (whatever "it" might be). Maybe the ending is nihilistic, but maybe it's just cynical about fairy tales.

I also think "The Snow Man" touches on a phrase I haven't yet persuaded readers to respond to: one's "way of being in the world."

Last February, Brenda and I might seem to be disagreeing, but I think we were simply flipping seasons. Whether it's January in Stevens' Connecticut or July in Arizona, what does it mean to be a "snow man" or a "sun man"? What is the Snow Man's way of being in the world? And of course, ditto Sun Man?

Whatever the answer, should we fight it? Is it OK to resign ourselves to what obviously is, or should we reevaluate our way of being and try to alter it to the extent possible? Would that be a minor tweaking or a major overhaul?

Has each of us simply leaked, like Steven's Snow Man, into our environments and become as frigidly sunny or as suffocatingly hot as the landscape and atmosphere? If so, is that leaking into the larger Out There, that surrender of self, inevitable? Does it make sense to "rage, rage against the dying of the light" or should we, after all, "go gentle into that good night"?

The Snow Man by Wallace Stevens : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.


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Charles McGee, Barnett Newman, Picasso, Chick A. Dee

Here I go again, spouting without a license about subjects I do not know.

One day a friend said about some rather dark poem, “What is the gift of that poem?” My friend knows his poetry; he was not looking for sappy sunlight in every poem, but some new and plausible way of seeing and saying things that are worth reporting. And by the way, to be sure he wasn’t plagiarizing or going off half-cocked, he attributed the notion of Poem as Gift to a professor he’d had.

Since then, I’ve taken the liberty of spreading the idea to parts of poems and, always the daredevil, to all art and other objects of beauty. No gift, no beauty; no beauty, no gift and no truth.

Just to demonstrate my hip open-mindedness, I want to say that I can see, and could argue for, the gift in the first two of these paintings, “Spectral Rhythms” (1970s) by Charles McGee and “Be I” (1970) by Barnett Newman (in spite of its pretentious title).

However, I do not see much gift below in Picasso’s “Girl Reading” (1938). It’s likely I have never seen any Picasso painting as a gift, though he certainly shows us new ways of seeing things, and through that, potentially new ways of “being in the world” (a phrase common in the study of philosophy, I’m told, and I think it's a hugely important concept).

Am I the only one who sees Picasso’s girl as a pig? Yea or nay, how is his transmogrification of her a gift? Is it cruel comedy? Should it alter our perception of all females’ ways of being in the world? My own way of being in the world? The way of being in the world if you're a pig that reads?

What is the value of Picasso’s rendering of this subject, except that it’s new? If a surgeon could attach a hand to the top of her head, a hand with fingers that wiggle, that would also give us a new way to think about girls who read, girls who don’t read, and all humans. Wouldn’t it?

Here is young Fritz Chickadee, Certified Gourmand. With his big orange treat, he's pretty cocky; he's also rather common and quite a flighty guy. His way of being in the world is both everything and nothing like my own, which he invited me to think about. In late November, he was a gift.