Continued Connections

TOWN & GOWN BISTRO
A PUB WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

"Making your way in the world today
takes everything you got
Taking a break from all your worries
sure would help a lot.
Wouldn't you like to get away? . . .
Sometimes you want to go
Where everybody knows your name
And they're always glad you came
You want to be where you can see
The troubles are all the same
You want to be where everybody knows your name . . .
You want to go where people know
The people are all the same
You want to go where everybody knows your name. . . "

~ Song from Cheers ~

****************
At some level, isn't that what we all want -- to be known? It's what Hafiz calls "that great pull to connect," to be in synch, to harmonize, to be part and parcel of the universe. Think of the photographer in The Memory Keeper's Daughter, placing one photograph beside another, hoping to find that "the entire world is contained within each living person. . . . he yearned to capture on film: these rare moments where the world seemed unified, coherent, everything contained in a single fleeting image" (similar project).

I know I've posted this poem before, but it [Red]bears repeating:

With That Moon Language

Admit something:

Everyone you see,
you say to them,
“Love me.” [Choose Me!]

Of course you do not do this out loud,
otherwise someone would call the cops.

Still, though, think about this,
this great pull in us to connect.

Why not become the one who lives
with a full moon in each eye
that is always saying,

with that sweet moon language,
what every other eye
in this world
is dying to hear?

Hafiz (1325 – 1389)
14th - Century Beloved Persian poet and lyrical genius

****************
Writing six centuries after Hafiz, the Irish poet, priest, and philosopher John O'Donohue (1956 - 2008) looks at "this great pull" in a different, unsettling way. Yes, of course, we all want to feel connected, but is that always such a good thing? In Anam Cara: A Book of Celctic Wisdom, O'Donohue analyzes our craving for connection. Like Hafiz, O'Donohue asks us to search our souls and "Admit something":

We assume too readily that we share one world with other people. It is true at the objective level that we inhabit the same physical space as other humans; the sky is, after all, the one visual constant that unites everyone’s perception of being in the world. Yet this outer world offers no access to the inner world of an individual. At a deeper level, each person is the custodian of a completely private, individual world. Sometimes our beliefs, opinions, and thoughts are ultimately ways of consoling [does he mean "deceiving"] ourselves that we are not alone with the burden of a unique, inner world. It suits us to pretend that we all belong to the one world, but we are more alone than we realize.

I feel somewhat dismayed yet intrigued by Donohue's suspicion that we are fundamentally disparate beings, despite our yearning for connection. Do I deceive myself that connection and coincidence govern our mutual existence? Possibly. Do I write essays and blog posts not so much in celebration of our similar outlooks but to console myself over a mutual failure to "connect, only connect" (see also: Commonplace Book, King & Queen, Handful of Dust, Heroine of Sensibility)? I hope not. Still, O'Donohue's words are haunting.

The Cheers song says we want to see that "troubles are all the same" and be where "people are all the same," but maybe, as O'Donohue suggests, we are incorrect in our assumption that this could ever be our reality. Perhaps such a place exists only on television or deep in our romantic imaginings. Yet, after ten years of blogging on this topic, beginning with my E. M. Forster - inspired Mission Statement, the connections keep on coming! They appear of their own accord, neither imaginary nor forced, woven daily through the Great Conversation. Only recently, after having all three read the same novel -- Jodi Picoult's Small Great Things [more on this later] -- my sisters and I were discussing our shared perceptions of literary coincidence:

Kit: Do you ever notice that sometimes when you read a book or see a movie or learn a new word -- all of a sudden it's everywhere!

Peg: I know what you mean about universe coincidences. I’ve sometimes wondered how this is possible because it seems to happen on such random topics.

Kit: Precisely!

Di: I love when things like that happen! Sometimes Tom and I will be talking, and one of us says something, then the person on TV will say it. Like the universe is singing together.

[Or as another friend put it: this infinite symphony of existence.]

How appropriate that they should both pick a musical metaphor to describe this phenomenon of universal synchronicity!

I am particularly fond of literary connections that fall into the category of "connections about connections." Take, for example, One Good Turn, a delightfully dense British mystery in which the endearing private dectective Jackson Brodie becomes obsessed with puzzling out the distinction between a connection and a coincidence:

Jackson: There's a connection between the two girls, there has to be. . . .

Louise: "Could just be a coincidence."

Jackson: "You're playing devil's advocate. And I don't believe in coincidence . . . A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen." (343 - 44)

Jackson: "You say coincidence . . . I say connection. A baffling, impenetrably complex connection, but nonetheless a connection. . . . he could see something that made sense. A tangible connection, not just a coincidence." (369, 374)

Louise: Jackson had been . . . Making his bloody 'connections' everywhere. (435)

Jackson: "You say connection, I say connection." (448)

****************
dialogue from One Good Turn (2006)
by Kate Atkinson (b 1951),
scholarly, spell - binding British novelist
****************
. . . and lastly . . .

"Boxes within boxes, dolls within dolls, worlds within worlds.
Everything was connected. Everything in the whole world."
(463)

This closing thought on interiority & connection . . .
TO BE CONTINUED . . .
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS ON MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Sunday, April 14th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST ~ Open Your Mind!
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

He Said She Said

CALYPSO'S ISLAND
WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Odysseus And Calypso (1630 - 35)
by Jacob Jordaens (1593 - 1678)
According to Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus was ten years away at the Trojan War, then futher delayed by an additional ten years of misadventures, the last seven or eight of which were spent with the nymph Calypso, on the island of Ogygia.

Odysseus remained enchanted by the singing and perpetual weaving of Calypso -- a touching parallel to his wife Penelope who was tirelessly weaving -- and unweaving -- while awaiting his return. Eventually Calypso relented and helped Odysseus build the boat (depicted above by Jordaens) that would take him back to his wife on the Island of Ithaca.

In this heart - breaking poem by Archibald MacLeish, Odysseus bids Calypso farewell and explains the rationale for his departure and his choice:

Calypso's Island

I know very well, goddess, she is not beautiful
As you are: could not be. She is a woman,
Mortal, subject to the chances: duty of

Childbed, sorrow that changes cheeks, the tomb --
For unlike you she will grow gray, grow older,
Gray and older, sleep in that small room.

She is not beautiful as you, O golden!
You are immortal and will never change
And can make me immortal also, fold

Your garment round me, make me whole and strange
As those who live forever, not the while
That we live; keep me from those dogging dangers --

Ships and the wars -- in this green, far-off island,
Silent of all but sea's eternal sound
Or sea - pine's when the lull of surf is silent.

Goddess, I know how excellent this ground,
What charmed contentment of the removed heart
The bees make in the lavender where pounding

Surf sounds far off and the bird that darts
Darts through its own eternity of light,
Motionless in motion, and the startled

Hare is startled into stone, the fly
Forever golden in the flickering glance
Of leafy sunlight that still holds it. I

Know you, goddess, and your caves that answer
Ocean's confused voices with a voice:
Your poplars where the storms are turned to dances;

Arms where the heart is turned. You give the choice
To hold forever what forever passes,
To hide from what will pass, forever. Moist,

Moist are your well - stones, goddess, cool your grasses!
And she -- she is a woman with that fault
Of change that will be death in her at last!

Nevertheless I long for the cold, salt,
Restless, contending sea and for the island
Where the grass dies and the seasons alter:

Where that one wears the sunlight for a while.”

Archibald MacLeish (1892 - 1982)

Calypso And Odysseus
by Sir William Russell Flint (1880 - 1969)

Anne Sexton makes no allusion to The Odyssey, yet her words in this poem could just as easily spring from the resigned heart of Calypso as from a stoic modern heroine. She understands the rationale, the choice, "the call":

For My Lover, Returning To His Wife

She is all there.
She was melted carefully down for you
and cast up from your childhood,
cast up from your one hundred favourite aggies.

She has always been there, my darling.
She is, in fact, exquisite.
Fireworks in the dull middle of February
and as real as a cast-iron pot.

Let's face it, I have been momentary.
A luxury. A bright red sloop in the harbor.
My hair rising like smoke from the car window.
Littleneck clams out of season.

She is more than that. She is your have to have,
has grown you your practical your tropical growth.
This is not an experiment. She is all harmony.
She sees to oars and oarlocks for the dinghy,

has placed wild flowers at the window at breakfast,
sat by the potter's wheel at midday,
set forth three children under the moon,
three cherubs drawn by Michelangelo,

done this with her legs spread out
in the terrible months in the chapel.
If you glance up, the children are there
like delicate balloons resting on the ceiling.

She has also carried each one down the hall
after supper, their heads privately bent,
two legs protesting, person to person
her face flushed with a song and their little sleep.

I give you back your heart.
I give you permission —

for the fuse inside her, throbbing
angrily in the dirt, for the bitch in her
and the burying of her wound —
for the burying of her small red wound alive —

for the pale flickering flare under her ribs,
for the drunken sailor who waits in her left pulse,
for the mother's knee, for the stockings,
for the garter belt, for the call —

the curious call
when you will burrow in arms and breasts
and tug at the orange ribbon in her hair
and answer the call, the curious call.

She is so naked and singular.
She is the sum of yourself and your dream.
Climb her like a monument, step after step.
She is solid.

As for me, I am a watercolor.
I wash off.

Anne Sexton (1928 - 1974)

N. C. Wyeth (1882 - 1945)
Odysseus And Calypso (1929)

SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS ON MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Thursday, March 28th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts ~ Old Letters & Notebooks
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com ~ He Said She Said

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Baan Suan Ampond Residence

A HOUSE WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS
AMPOND'S GARDEN ~ PARK ~ HOME

~ At the Baan Suan Ampond Residence ~
a few miles from the busy city center of Bangkok, Thailand,
we found a delightful balance between urban and rural,
privacy and company, land and water, relaxation and stimulation.

Perhaps for you too Baan Suan Ampond will be the perfect spot
for gathering with family, enjoying a Thai massage, and
contemplating the wisdom of the Modern Thai philosophers,
all of whom discourage grasping:

Proverbs from Ajahn Chah (1918 - 1992)

"One day some people came to the master and asked:
How can you be happy in a world of such impermanence,
where you cannot protect your loved ones
from harm, illness or death?

The master held up a glass and said:
Someone gave me this glass;
it holds my water admirably,
and it glistens in the sunlight.
I touch it and it rings!

One day the wind may blow it off the shelf,
or my elbow may knock it from the table.
I know this glass is already broken,
so I enjoy it -- incredibly.

When I accept that the glass is already broken,
every minute with it is precious."

"Do not try to become anything.
Do not make yourself into anything.
Do not be a meditator.
Do not become enlightened.
When you sit, let it be.
When you walk, let it be.
Grasp at nothing. Resist nothing.

When sitting in meditation, say,
'That's not my business!'
with every thought that comes by."

"Try to be mindful, and let things take their natural course.
Then your mind will become still in any surroundings,
like a clear forest pool. All kinds of wonderful,
rare animals will come to drink at the pool,
and you will clearly see the nature of all things.
You will see many strange and wonderful things come and go,
but you will be still. This is the happiness of the Buddha."

********************

Proverbs from Buddhadasa (1906 -1993)

"The entire cosmos is a cooperative.
The sun, the moon, and the stars live together as a cooperative.
The same is true for humans and animals, trees, and the Earth.
When we realize that the world
is a mutual, interdependent, cooperative enterprise --
then we can build a noble environment.
If our lives are not based on this truth,
then we shall perish."

"What is the world full of?
It is full of things that arise, persist, and cease.
Grasp and cling to them, and they produce suffering.
Don't grasp and cling to them, and they do not produce suffering.

The practice is to make the non-arising of grasping
and clinging absolute, final, and eternally void,
so that no grasping and clinging can ever return.
Just that is enough. There is nothing else to do."

********************

Proverbs from Ajahn Sumedho (b 1934)

"The problem is grasping the clock.
So what do I do? Let it go, lay it aside --
put it down gently without any kind of aversion.
Then I can pick it up again, see what time it is,
and lay it aside when necessary."

"Of course we can always imagine more perfect conditions,
how it should be ideally, how everyone should behave.
But it is not our task to create an ideal.
It's our task to see how it is,
and to learn from the world as it is.
For the awakening of the heart,
conditions are always good enough."


"Whatever you think you are, that's not what you are."

********************

Many thanks to our wonderful hosts for creating
an environment filled with so much restful beauty!

Mickie & Nick Carriker

Open for Business ~ Give them a call!

SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS ON MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Thursday, March 14th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST ~ You Can Read Anywhere You Go
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Our Favorite Snowman

STUFFED TOYS, ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Snow Family
In case you are not familiar with the good - natured Snowman pictured above (in sextuplicate!) now is the perfect time to beat the midwinter blues and blahs by acquainting yourself with the delightful animated film, including lovely music by Howard Blake, from which these plush toys are derived. Some viewers prefer the original introduction, featuring the artist / author Raymond Briggs; others like the expanded version by David Bowie. I have never understood why The Snowman is not as popular and widely marketed in the USA as it is in England. I would choose it over Frosty the Snowman any day.

How did I come to possess so many? Well, back when I first mentioned the Snowman on my blog, it never occurred to me that this endearing, puffy stuffed toy, one of our all- time favorite book / movie tie - ins, was soon to become an endangered species, even on good old reliable amazon. My friend Barbara recently recalled purchasing a Snowman exactly like these "at CVS a long time ago!" I remember getting some at Kohl's a few years back, and for a good twenty years (1995 - 2015) I ordered numerous Snowmen from amazon to give as baby presents, such as this well - worn, well - loved one for my brother Aaron's grand-daughter Mia.

Over the holidays, Aaron and I were reminiscing
about a charming old poem from favorite childhood:

His Bunny

Poor, grey bunny --
Once you were white,
But Jimmy drags you all around,
And sleeps with you at night.

He drags you to his sandbox,
And hold you in his crib,
And sits you i his highchair
To use you for a bib.

Poor, grey bunny --
With one eye gone -- how sad --
and one ear slightly turned askew,
But, bunny, aren't you glad

That out of all the things he has,
Of every single toy,
You'd get to be the favorite one
Of such a precious boy!

~ by Marilyn Jean Fais

Aaron wrote: "I showed Lindsey [Mia's mom] the copy of 'Poor Grey Bunny' and told her all she had to do was change 'Bunny' to 'Snowman' and 'boy' to 'girl' and that is 100% Mia. She still carries that Snowman with her everywhere she goes!! Lindsey loved the poem (she actually took a picture of it) and doesn't know what they are going to do if Snowman falls apart before Mia finally outgrows him. They've tried switching him out with a newer one, but Mia wants nothing to do with a 'replacement' Snowman."

Lindsey said: "That [collection of Snowmen] is awesome! We bought a replacement when Mia was about one year old just in case she lost the original. She wasn’t interested -- I think it’s the different fabric for the scarf and hat. Can you tell he’s loved?!"

Awwwww! Yes, we sure can!

I love the story of Mia and her "poor, grey Snowman." A number of other friends also share with us from time to time that the Snowman we gave them at some point in the past has become a family favorite. I even sent one to my mom so that she could see what it was that dear little Mia was so attached to, and now she keeps him all year round, propped up right beside her television. Then there was the fun year when three of my sweet hair-dressers all had babies around the same time and all received a Snowman for Christmas for their little ones.

Sadly, around that time, the lovely plush Snowman just started disappearing from the market, so I ordered as many as I could find from ebay; most were imported from England, "new with tags," though a couple of them were slightly worn -- still, better than none. Hopefully, new ones will reappear in the stores in the future, but it did not happen this Christmas. No matter what your age, if you ask me, there is no nicer present than a Snowman book, movie, and toy all wrapped up together!

Shopping Spree ~ 2014

Do You Want to Buy a Snowman?
Yes, I do!
But I just don't know where to get one!

P.S.
You can also buy china figurines
and children's breakfast dishes
from Royal Doulton.
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS ON MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Thursday, February 28th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Ghost of the Girl in the Pepsi Ad

PEPSI ~ COLA, ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

In my post two weeks ago, "Ghost of Myself," I compared two poems -- "i am running into a new year" by Lucille Clifton and "in celebration of surviving" by Chuck Miller -- in which the poets look back on their younger selves, comparing youthful goals and expectations to present - day reality. It was theme that I recalled from the poetry of Larry Levis. I was lucky enough to hear him give a reading years ago, when I was an undergraduate in Missouri. I wrote three of his poems down in my notebook (Fall 1976) and have never forgotten them.

1. First, you may remember this one from a previous blog post:

We'll go on as always harvesting walnuts
on our hands and knees,
and die voicelessly
as a sedan full of cigar smoke
sinking under a bridge.
We'll turn slowly, flowers
in the mouths of drowned cattle
In a dawn of burned fields,
the sun disappoints you,
and the blight you begin to remember
is me.
Like an Alp overlooking a corpse
I explain nothing.

2. Next comes the second half of a poem entitled "Rhododendrons." For the entire poem, check out this essay, and this poetry blog which, like mine, strives to make connections.

Speaking of connections, you can see why I was reminded of my old Larry Levis favorites when reading the hopeful late - night epiphany of Chuck Miller's narrator:

". . . standing in the winter night
emptying the garbage and looking at the stars
you realize that although the odds are fantastically against you
when that single January shooting star
flung its wad in the maw of night
it was yours
and though the years are edged with crime and squalor
that second wind, or twenty-third
is coming strong . . ."
and why I thought of Levis when Lucille Clifton's narrator admits her concern:

". . . it will be hard to let go
of what i said to myself
about myself
when i was sixteen and
twenty-six and thirty-six . . ."
Miller thanks the stars for a another chance; Clifton hopes that her previous selves will forgive; Levis wishes he could offer a helping hand. Though he would have been only 30 when I heard him read this poem, he thinks back to himself at 20 and longs to connect with that ghostly young man, in need of money and sleep:

As I write this,
some blown rhododendrons are nodding
in the first breezes. I want
to resemble them, and remember nothing,
the way a photograph of an excavation
cannot remember the sun.
The wind rises or stops
and it means nothing.
I want to be circular;
a pond or a column of smoke
revolving, slowly, its ashes.
I want to turn back and go up
to myself at age 20,
and press five dollars into his hand
so he can sleep.
While he stands trembling on a street in Fresno,
suddenly one among many in the crowd
that strolls down Fulton Street,
among the stores that are closing,
and is never heard of again.

3. Finally, in "The Double," the ghosts are "the elderly drunks" and "the girl in the Pepsi ad," all "dead now." Sadly, very sadly, the poet who wrote those words is dead now too, for Larry Levis died young, in 1996 at age 49. In a poem filled with ghosts, the poet says, "This poem so like me / it could be my double":

The Double

Out here, I can say anything.
I can say, for example, that a girl
disappearing tonight
will sleep or stare out
fixedly as the train moves her
into its adulthood of dust
and sidings.

I remember watching wasps
on hot evenings
fly heavily over chandeliers
in hotel lobbies.
They’ve torn them down, too.
And the elderly drunks
who seemed not to mind anything,
who seemed to look for change
in their pockets, as they gazed
at the girl in the Pepsi ad,
and the girl who posed for the ad,
must all be dead now.

I can already tell that this
is no poem to show you,
this love poem. It’s so
flat spoken and ignorable,
like the man chain smoking
who discovers he’s
no longer waiting for anyone,
and goes to the movies
alone each Saturday, and grins,
and likes them.
This poem so like the hour
when the street lights turn
amber and blink, and the calm
professor burns another book,
and the divorcee waters her one
chronically dying plant.

This poem so like me
it could be my double.

I have stood for a long time
in its shadow, the way I stood
in the shadow of a dead roommate
I had to cut down from the ceiling
on Easter break, when
I was young.

That night I put my car
in neutral, and cut the engine
and lights to glide downhill
and hear the wind rush over
the dead metal.
I had to know what it felt
like, and under the moon,
gaining speed, I wanted to slip
out of my body and be
done with it.

A man can give up smoking
and the movies, and live for years
hearing the wind tick over roofs
but never looking up from
his one page, or the tiny
life he keeps carving over and
over upon it. And when everyone
around him dies, he can move
a grand piano into
his house, and sit down
alone, and finally play,
certain that no one will
overhear him, though he plays
as loud as he can,
so that when the dead come
and take his hands off the keys
they are invisible, the way air
and music are not. [emphasis added]

"Rhododendrons" and "The Double"
can be found in The Selected Levis

*************************

"Jackson had spent what was left of the afternoon wandering around . . . a city that seemed both familiar and at the same time utterly strange. He felt as though he was looking for something that he would only recognize when he found it. His lost youth perhaps. Or the lost youth that he himself had been. The dirty old town he remembered had been overlaid by somethng new and shiny. It didn't mean the dirty old town wasn't still there, of course."

from Started Early, Took My Dog
by Kate Atkinson (b 1951)

*************************
In another, perhaps surprising, connection, contemporary motivational speaker Dr. Jordan B. Peterson (b 1962) discusses the very topic which runs like a sad lament through the poems of Larry Levis: existential suffering. Thanks to my son Sam for recommending this lecture in which Peterson, a clinical psychologist and professor of abnormal, social, and personality psychology, explains how in order to function effectively with others and efficiently to meet our own goals, we need to remain on good -- even gentle -- terms with our past, present, and future selves:

"Plan a life you'd like to have, and you do that partly by . . . having a little conversation with yourself, as if you don't really know who you are because you know what you're like: you won't do what you're told; you won't do what you tell yourself to do; you must have noticed that!

It's like you're a bad employee and a worse boss. And both of those work, you know, for you. You don't know what you want to do, and then when you tell yourself what to do, you don't do it anyway. You should fire yourself and find someone else to be you!

. . . you have to understand that you're not your own servant, so to speak. You're someone that you have to negotiate with. You're someone that you want to present the opportunity of having a good life to. And that's hard for people because they don't like themselves very much . . . they're always cracking the whip and procrastinating . . . maybe you should do something else with your time [if] you think that your time's worthwhile . . . if you assume that your time isn't worthwhile what happens is you don't just sit around randomly in this sort of responsibility-less bliss, what you do is you suffer existentially . . .[emphasis added]

. . . you can probably have what you want, if you could figure out what the hell it was and then, you know, you diligently pursued it. So . . . you might think 'I can have what I want,' but you better well figure out what it is and you can't just wait for the have - what - you - want fairy to just show up on your doorstep and grant it because obviously that's not going to happen.

Here's how you know if someone is your friend . . . you can actually tell them bad news and they'll listen. That's a good thing, and then this is a weirder thing, you can tell them good news and they'll help you celebrate, and that's a really good way of deciding who you should have around you.

Jordan Peterson
On Goals, Scheduling, Negotiating & Friendship

Peterson's message echoes that of the poets (as well as Helen Reddy's song "Best Friend"): be kind to those ghosts of yourself who are so like you, they could be your double. One of them may be going to the future.

SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS ON MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Thursday, February 14th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Ghost of Myself

VICTORIAN HOUSE GHOST, ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

2014

Following Halloween, I like to change the bow on my ghost
and leave her out for the remainder of the year.
Thanks to my friends Claude & Sue who wrote:
"Your lace Ghost of Christmas Past
is one of best yard decorations we've seen!"
And to dear Victoria Amador
who inquires every year if the ghost is up!

2018

The following two poems -- "i am running into a new year" by Lucille Clifton and "in celebration of surviving" by Chuck Miller -- have appeared recently on several different blogs and New Year posts and websites. Yet, I've never seen them posted together. As my contribution to the conversation, I will compare and contrast, in keeping with my goal to provide "a poem for every poem."

Here they are side by side: Clifton's almost middle - aged narrator, "running into a new year"; Miller's almost elderly narrator standing outside in January, coming "through on the stretch in a photo finish." The two narrators contemplate various ghosts of themselves as they resolve to take the New Year and run with it. Even so, they spare a moment to reckon with the ghosts of "Auld Lang Syne" [literally: "old long since"; idiomatically: "long long ago," "days gone by," "old times' sake]. I like to think of these poems as "Auld Lang Syne" reveries, midnight resolutions to cut loose the old trappings and embrace the new energy of the present. As Robert Burns reminds us when we put his poem to music every New Year's Eve, we drink the cup of kindness now.

Clifton begs the ghosts of her old broken promises and her younger selves to forgive her for choosing the present over the past. Miller stands, however briefly, in the "golden envelope" of the present -- not the past, not the future. What matters more is history as we are living it moment by moment; not history as we look back on it. The present is real; the past and the future are imaginary. Or is the opposite: there is no Now; there is only Before and After?

Remember what Thomas Jefferson said:
“I like the dreams of the future
better than the history of the past."

Contemplative essayist and novelist Scott Russell Sanders (American, b 1945) has the perfect phrase for what is happening in these poems. He begins the new year by sharing this thought from a friend: "Memory grips the past and hope grips the future." In both poems, you can feel the icy wind of winter, and the exhilarating wind of change:

i am running into a new year
i am running into a new year
and the old years blow back
like a wind
that i catch in my hair
like strong fingers like
all my old promises and
it will be hard to let go
of what i said to myself
about myself
when i was sixteen and
twenty-six and thirty-six
even thirty-six but
i am running into a new year
and i beg what i love and
i leave to forgive me

~ Lucille Clifton (American poet, 1936 - 2010)

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in celebration of surviving
when senselessness has pounded you around on the ropes
and you're getting too old to hold out for the future
no work and running out of money,
and then you make a try after something that you know you
won't get
and this long shot comes through on the stretch
in a photo finish of your heart's trepidation
then for a while
even when the chill factor of these prairie winters puts it at
fifty below
you're warm and have that old feeling
of being a comer, though belated
in the crazy game of life

standing in the winter night
emptying the garbage and looking at the stars
you realize that although the odds are fantastically against you
when that single January shooting star
flung its wad in the maw of night
it was yours
and though the years are edged with crime and squalor
that second wind, or twenty-third
is coming strong
and for a time
perhaps a very short time
one lives as though in a golden envelope of light

~ Chuck Miller (American poet, b 1939)

Thanks to Katie Field for recommending Lucille Clifton;
and to Peter Bunder for recommending both Chuck Miller
and Scott Russell Sanders

More on this topic
and these poems next time . . .

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January: Always a Time for
Gazing Forward & Hearkening Back

Christmas Forward Backward ~ January 15, 2016

Perfect Twins: Going Out, Coming In ~ January 14, 2016

Janus, Orpheus, Obsolescing ~ January 30, 2011

January: Forward Vision, Backward Glance ~ January 28, 2011

Janus ~ January 8, 2010

Fast Away the Old Year Passes ~ December 28, 2009

SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS ON MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Monday, January 28th

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