The Diver’s Clothes Lying Empty

A week ago I attended a writing workshop at the Omega Institute with Lynda Barry, called “Writing the Unthinkable.” It was a powerful and transformative five days. Her approach to writing is emotional, psychological, spiritual, rather than intellectual. I think this method saved her life; at any rate, it has helped her to pass on what it is about any kind of art that makes life worth living.

For instance, she emphasizes the experience of capturing an image over the product of that experience. We are not to look at what we create for at least a week, preferably a month, because we will not be able to look at it without undue, unfair judgment before then. She likens art-making to the serious, fully-engaged play of children. The structure of her workshop was to guide us on a journey back to that open state of mind, in which the drawbridge can come down and images like ponies can cross over onto the field to play. These are Lynda’s words, Lynda’s metaphors; but I love them. I feel they could have been mine.

Every morning and every afternoon, we wrote three short pieces. Part of our preparation for each was to draw a tight spiral, or some other doodle, while she recited the same poem to us from memory. I heard this poem about twenty times. I came to love it. It is a poem by Rumi.

The Diver’s Clothes Lying Empty

You are sitting here with us,
but you are also out walking in a field at dawn.

You are yourself the animal we hunt
when you come with us on the hunt.

You are in your body
like a plant is solid in the ground,
yet you are wind.

You are the diver’s clothes
lying empty on the beach.
You are the fish.

In the ocean are many bright strands
and many dark strands like veins that are seen
when a wing is lifted up.

Your hidden self is blood in those,
those veins that are lute strings
that make ocean music,
not the sad edge of surf
but the sound of no shore.

Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks

For me, the work was to ride the current, even as it pulled me through rough, dark waters, beyond the “sad edge of surf” to “the sound of no shore.” What is the sound of no shore? I think it is the experience of the world beyond the hurts and upheavals of my own personal history, my own self as I have known myself. It is the experience of story beyond “my story.” One of the promises of the workshop was to move from memory into fiction, which is why I was drawn to it. She took us there – it was an exhilarating journey.

I chose not to write down the poem during that week – I wanted to experience it only as something heard while in an open state of mind. Once I got home, I looked it up on-line (my own Rumi collection has gone missing) and found another translation of the poem. It seems so different, to me, it almost seems like a different poem. Or at least a different poet. I wonder which is closer to the original Persian.

Clothes Abandoned on the Shore

Your body is here with us,
but your heart is in the meadow.
You travel with the hunters
though you yourself are what they hunt.

Like a reed flute,
you are encased by your body,
with a restless breathy sound inside.

You are a diver;
your body is just clothing left at the shore.
You are a fish whose way is through water.

In this sea there are many bright veins
and some that are dark.
The heart receives its light
from those bright veins.

If you lift your wing
I can show them to you.
You are hidden like the blood within,
and you are shy to the touch.

Those same veins sing a melancholy tune
in the sweet-stringed lute,
music from a shoreless sea
whose waves roar out infinity.

Rumi, translated by Kabir Helminsky

Between the two translations, I have a preference. I suppose I can’t help but have a preference. I prefer the version that I heard Lynda recite to us. The second version has its moments, but that word “infinity” just ruins it for me.

About Rumi:

Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Balkhī (Persian: جلال الدین محمد بلخى), also known as Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī (Persian: جلال‌الدین محمد رومی), and popularly known as Mowlānā (Persian: مولانا) but known to the English-speaking world simply as Rumi (30 September 1207 – 17 December 1273), was a 13th-century Persian poet, jurist, theologian, and Sufi mystic. Rūmī is a descriptive name meaning "the Roman" since he lived most of his life in an area called Rūm because it was once ruled by the Eastern Roman Empire. (from Wikipedia)

Poetry Friday: Why

This poem pushed itself on me while I was meditating (or trying to meditate). It has the form of a children's book -- the questions children ask -- but the answers aren't the type we usually give to children. Maybe we should.

Why

Why is the sea so deep?

The dark to keep.

Why is the ocean wide?

To mend the divide.

Why does the river run?

No gain is long won.

Why do the leaves turn red?

To dress the dead.

Why do the earthworms writhe?

In labor blithe.

Why do the birds fly?

To mystify.

Why do the waves churn?

To cool the burn.

Why is the sky blue?

To buoy you.

Why do the clouds not fall?

Pretenders, all.

Why does the wind blow?

The more to show.

Why does the thunder roar?

To hasten the oar.

Why does the sun rise?

To lure our eyes.

Why does the sun set?

To nurse regret.

Why does the world go on?

This rhyme is done.

-- Lauren Thompson

I think of my dad, who is a scientist through and through. He would say that what we can't measure, we can't really know. He would probably say that we ask the wrong questions. We may ask, why is the sky blue, but we can only discover how the sky is blue. There may be no "why," no objective reason. I'm saying, "Yes, but we always create subjective reasons. Just because they are subjective doesn't make them less interesting." But then we leave the domain of science and enter that of poetry. Or, the dharma.

Poetry Friday: Why I Am Not a Painter

Something by Frank O'Hara, who grew up in the town in which my father now lives, Grafton, Massachusetts -- not far from where I grew up, in Holden.

Why I Am Not a Painter

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

(1971)

Both Frank O'Hara and I left Massachusetts for New York. But beyond that, the comparisons gets thin. I was never in the Navy, and I have never been to Fire Island. He died there in 1966 as the result of a bizarre accident, at the age of forty.

"Anchovies Too" by L Thompson


Visit the Smithsonian site to see "Sardines":















Poem credit: Frank O’Hara, “Why I Am Not a Painter” from The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. Copyright © 1971 by Mauren Granville-Smith, Administratrix of the Estate of Frank O'Hara. Used by the permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc, www.randomhouse.com/category/poetry/.

Poetry Friday: Bamboo

In truth, Basho isn't my favorite haiku poet, but I like this one. It goes with my painting.

a cuckoo's cry --
moonlight seeping through
a large bamboo grove

[translation by Haruo Shirane]

“When composing a verse let there not be a hair’s breadth separating your mind from what you write; composition of a poem must be done in an instant, like a woodcutter felling a huge tree or a swordsman leaping at a dangerous enemy.” (Matsuo Basho)

Poetry Friday: from Auguries of Innocence

Is a difficult truth beautifully expressed made less difficult? Or, hearing it expressed beautifully, can we begin to accept it as the truth that it is?

Thay says, "No mud, no lotus," with a beauty that makes us smile.

William Blake says, with a beauty that makes us sigh:

It is right it should be so:

Man was made for Joy & Woe;

And when this we rightly know

Thro' the World we safely go.

Joy & Woe are woven fine,

A Clothing for the Soul divine;

Under every grief & pine

Runs a joy with silken twine.

(from "Auguries of Innocence")

I attended a retreat last Saturday with Sharon Salzberg and Cheri Maples. Cheri is a dharma teacher in Thay's tradition. One thing she talked about was how we all have our suffering; no one goes through life without experiencing suffering. Which is hard enough; then, on top of it, we are unhappy with the suffering we get. "We got the chicken shit, when we'd rather have the pig shit. Or the cow shit." Later, as a kind of gesture of compassion, she asked someone, "What kind did you get, the goat shit or the chicken shit? Mine's the goat shit." We all laughed. It was a way of saying, "Darling, I care about this suffering." Except that it came out sounding like, "Darling, I care about this shit." In the laughter was the silken twine, binding us together.

But about William Blake. There is so much more to him than "The Tyger." There is so much more to "The Tyger" than what is usually assumed when the poem is read to young children. Blake was a visionary, and by that I mean that he had visions. He trusted them utterly and this gave him great confidence. He was wrathful in his compassion for all beings.

From A Vision of the Last Judgment:

"What," it will be Question'd, "When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?" Oh no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying, 'Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord God Almighty.'

May every sunrise greet you chanting, "Holy, Holy, Holy, Svaha!"

Poetry Friday: Hymnus Ad Patrem Sinensis

Hymnus Ad Patrem Sinensis

by Philip Whalen

I praise those ancient Chinamen

Who left me a few words,

Usually a pointless joke or a silly question

A line of poetry drunkenly scrawled on the margin of a quick

                         splashed picture—bug, leaf,

                         caricature of Teacher

    on paper held together now by little more than ink

    & their own strength brushed momentarily over it

Their world & several others since

Gone to hell in a handbasket, they knew it—

Cheered as it whizzed by—

& conked out among the busted spring rain cherryblossom winejars

Happy to have saved us all.

I admit that this is the only Philip Whalen poem I have read. I loved this poem when I saw it in the Shambhala Sun (thank you, Shambhala Sun, for the artwork, which I scanned from your magazine -- consider this my request for permission) and I thereupon bought the Collected Poems. The book is two inches thick and runs 871 pages.

I think I could have done with a Selected Poems.

After a respectful number of days/weeks/months/years have passed, I will give the book away. Maybe to my neighbor, a poet himself whose livingroom walls are laid in poetry books, since he greeted the book with, "Hey, Philip Whalen! Great!"  (My husband is a poet as well, but I won't allow our livingroom walls to be more than partially composed of poetry books; also, he greeted the book with a calm indifference.) For now, it sits on my "Buddhist/Writing" shelf, along with One Continuous Mistake and Momma Zen.

Once upon a time, I used to write poetry myself. Now, just the occasional haiku.  However, when I write my children's books, they often take form, in my mind and on the page, as poems. Particularly Polar Bear Night and my latest, The Christmas Magic. But more on that some other time.

Propers due:

Philip Whalen, "Hymnus Ad Patrem Sinensis" text and art from The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen copyright © 2007 by Brandeis University Press and reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press. www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

Source: The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen (Wesleyan University Press, 2007) 

P.S. When my husband read this post, he exclaimed, "Don't give away the Philip Whalen! I do want to read it. I was waiting for you to be done with it." I've turned the book over to him.

Who knew how important blogging could be to marital harmony?

Poetry Friday: i once knew a man

One of my favorite blogs (by one of my favorite people) features "Poetry Friday." I'm following suit. Here is one by lucille clifton.

i once knew a man

i once knew a man who had wild horses killed.
when he told about it
the words came galloping out of his mouth
and shook themselves and headed off in
every damn direction. his tongue
was wild and wide and spinning when he talked
and the people he looked at closed their eyes
and tore the skins off their backs as they walked away
and stopped eating meat.
there was no holding him once he got started;
he had had wild horses killed one time and
they rode him to his grave.

Painting: "Wild Horses" by Chen Ming (this painting is for sale; click for info)

I taught this poem, many years ago, in first-year college composition classes as an example of complex use of metaphor. The students generally had a terrible time with it. So many wrote how awful it was that the horses came back to run him down. The poem to me is so clearly dream-like and mythopoetic, rooted in the literal world but branching extravagantly in the ether, as poetry will do. But my students were not very familiar with metaphor or ether. Of course, they were only seventeen or eighteen years old and more adept at being good students than at life.

I can't say, then, that I "taught them" this poem. I introduced them to it. Who knows, maybe some of them are haunted by its phrases and wish they could remember where they read it, or when.