Seeking a Solitude of Self
I feel lost. There was a time when the future held something, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but whatever it was felt hopeful, even for a perpetual pessimist. Lately I have not been able to see or sense that future. Perhaps it is partially due to advancing age, but I don’t believe that’s the case here. More likely it is the world at large, the chaos of humanity scrambling for meaningless goals, be it money, fame, power, or a desperate need to be right about their own skewed perspective.
So instead of writing a long essay about this loss of well-being, I’m offering four poems that bring back some of that feeling. The first is mine, written back when the muse of poetic inspiration helped me place pen to paper. Unfortunately, I have not written a poem for many years now. Some of my friends will no doubt recognize this one especially since I recently posted it on social media.
Anyway, I wish us all a better path forward.
The Floating Forest
On the wings of a
morning’s summer breeze,
a million cottonwood seeds
float past my window.
Lifted from branches,
released into hope, they drift.
Each seed weighted
with the blueprint of a tree,
I wonder; what if they all sprouted,
growing eighty feet tall
and spreading shade
across ten thousand acres?
I imagine this forest’s moist
and darkened ground
where Hepatica and Bloodroot
find homes among last season’s
brown and faded leaves.
And there would be quiet.
Not silence, but tranquility.
That easy, purring sound of nature
that lifts my battered life
allowing me, once again,
to hear myself
over the din of too much.
There are such places.
I’ve seen them.
Not just in dreams,
but in long lost pages
of childhood memories
that gather in subconscious dust.
So each summer,
when the cottonwoods
release their offspring
to pass before my window,
I am reminded once again
to breathe and sigh and listen.
Tobin Fraley
________________________________
Alone on the River
I listen to the river sounds,
The easy sign of willows,
The dialogue of roots
Reaching out of the current
Drifting with rolling clouds
Past islands of white sand,
I lean with the dark shadows
Of trees reaching into afternoon.
Something in the warmth of sun,
The chill of distance of stars
Draws me from myself like a blossom
Spawned from a dry husk.
I am part of dawn, sunset, night
A dream turning on a wheel of time,
One grain rolling in the current,
A single note in the cricket call.
Gene Kimmet
________________________________
A Rescue
Today I wrote some words that will see print.
Maybe they will last forever
and that someone will read them there,
ink making a light scratch on his mind or hers.
I think back with greater satisfaction
upon a yellow bird,
a goldfinch that had flown
into the garden shed and could not get out,
battering its wings on the deceptive light
of the dusty, warped, shut window.
Without much reflection for once,
I stepped to where its panicked heart
was making commotion,
the flared wings drumming,
and with clumsy, soft hands
pinned it against a pane,
held loosely cupped
this agitated essence of the air,
and through the open door
released it like a self-flung ball
to all that lovely, perishing outdoors.
John Updike
________________________________
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Wendell Berry
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You have received NO comments on this offering? I’m sorry. There is so much there. But maybe it’s a piece that calls for quiet, in order to take it in.
The poems put me in the place where I feel one with the natural world — the spider, the river, the tree. God grant me the favor, when I am separated from “myself,” to be in that place of kinship and knowing.
But nature isn’t nice. It rips and grinds, obliterates and buries. It breeds loneliness, grief, and despair. What’s in it for me tomorrow?
Verna – Thank you for reading my weekly posts. The audience for my words has been slowly diminishing over time and there are now only a handful of people who read them. Knowing that even a few people get something out of my writing is enough to keep me going.
In terms of humans’ perception of the brutality of nature, it is our subjectivity that makes those judgement calls. Nature is what it is. It is not cruel or unkind or mean-spirited, but we perceive it as such because we anthropomorphize almost everything.
And as for loneliness, certainly we are a social creature at heart. The vast majority of our species craves companionship and interaction with others. On the other hand most of us also desire quiet moments where we are able to listen to our own thoughts and “reboot” without the cacophonous noise from the tsunami of information constantly bombarding us. Walking alone through nature’s landscape offers that respite, at least it does for me.
” it is our subjectivity that makes those judgement calls. Nature is what it is. It is not cruel or unkind or mean-spirited, but we perceive it as such because we anthropomorphize almost everything.”
I think what we’ve bumped up against here is philosophically “the problem of pain.” How/why must it be that death — the phase that all life must go through — is usually accompanied by pain? I don’t think that when a fish is caught in a net and dies, for example, that the fish doesn’t experience pain. That all its struggling is brought on by — perhaps merely fear. –And I perceive it as pain because I anthropomorphize the fish.
That reminds me of when I was a child and my dad ran over my cat. My dad said my cat didn’t experience pain because cats don’t experience pain the way we do. That didn’t wash when I was a kid, and it still doesn’t. So somehow the cat’s screaming was not due to pain?
I have a similar response to your thought about loneliness. The fact that most humans desire quiet moments will not comfort the multitudes of people that, according to today’s media, daily suffer from a pandemic of loneliness.
Verna – Thanks for your thoughts on this subject. I believe I understand your points with regard to loneliness. My sense is that there is a big difference between choosing to be “alone” and experiencing “loneliness”. And I agree that our culture is in the midst of an epidemic of loneliness. People (for the most part) no longer appear to able to connect with one another on a deeply personal level.
As for pain, of course your cat felt pain. But there is emotional pain and physical pain, very different from each other. Physical pain is a part of our survival mechanism, telling us critters when something is not right. That is a part of the natural process and is neither intended as cruel nor intentional. Though humans can use pain as a weapon such as in torture. This seems to be a uniquely human trait though I know cats like to play with their prey.
Hope all of this makes sense.
Tobin, the four poems are exquisite expressions of what is common to all. Not just to our species but to every single element included in the idea – “world.” The four poems intersect with beauty and sadness over and over.
I am reading The Ethics of Authenticity by Charles Taylor (a Canadian philosopher I recommend to everyone because he writes easy-to-read prose as you’d expect from a Canadian). Taylor references a poem by Ranier Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies to support his characterization of our wide spread loneliness. There are ten Elegies, so I read three of them before settling-in to write this comment. Rilke meditates upon the texture of life and freedom. There is no ascendance without release and decline, a yin-yang, all leaving us with a bitter sweet wistfulness. I’ll leave you with the initial lines from The First Elegy.
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic
Orders? And even if one were to suddenly
take me to its heart, I would vanish into its
stronger existence. For beauty is nothing but
the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear,
and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains
to destroy us. Every Angel is terror.
And so I hold myself back and swallow the cry
of a darkened sobbing. Ah, who then can
we make use of? Not Angels: not men,
and the resourceful creatures see clearly
that we are not really at home
in the interpreted world.
Okay. I am not much into the whole poetry thing, but I understand why people, like my brother, want to express themselves in a way that flows with a particular liberal mindset.
That being said, it seems to me that our basic need for the feminine side via “poetry” needs expression. Not that poetry is a feminine thing, but there is always a tendency for people, especially non-educated right wing individuals to think poetry is a “liberal” non-masculine soft hearted way to view the world.
Of course this is not always the case. Poetry and muse has, throughout the ages, been a way to express many mindsets, often empirical and transcendent, depending on the period of history and the story told by the source of inspiration. Marcus Aurelius in his “Meditations” would site situations that seemed relevant to humanity, often embracing a view that transcends common life, but then how do we justify his enslavement of those he conquered.
Often sources are dictated by the times, revealing and expressing a way of thinking that reflects the way people felt during periods of time. To kill the beast that one has conquered that has been assigned by a “god” to protect a forest, after he begs for forgiveness, would be considered by most to be evil. Yet we often overlook historical references to past mindsets as just the way things were.
In my mind, I see our present liberal way of thinking in a general way, as rather pitiful, as a non-aggressive mindset that leaves our perspective open for attack from right wing nut jobs like trump. If we, as a combined force, can overcome our inherent soft-hearted and often non-aggressive view of the world, eventually we will find our roots are based on pro-active actions, not standing by and waiting for change that will never come without action.
Carl we are not personally acquainted. I am an old friend of Tobin’s. Your advocacy of a more aggressive mindset caught my attention. Of course we would need to speak face to face in order to flesh out what you mean to say in more detail. My thought is that aggression by itself just provokes a heightened like response from the other side which already conceives of themselves as being engaged in warfare. I also feel inclined toward a more active posture, even though the ideas that come to mind no doubt would significantly increase the violence which we have already witnessed in our cities.
To conclude I think that we are the victims of good fortune, un-contested access to markets in the aftermath of WWII as well as the belief in our own mythos, that America is the example to everyone else of “the brightest and best” that the trajectory of history has produced, etc., etc.. We have neglected maintaining our own house for several generations, while drinking the koolaid of our own “success.” And that’s how madmen have come into power in Washington…
Be well.