Month: July 2004

Rapaccini’s Garden of Delights

You know you’ve been away from home too long when you come home to find strange flowers blossoming on your front doorstep:

I haven’t really decided whether I love or hate this flower, but I better make up my mind soon because the plant producing it is nearly four foot tall and loaded with blossoms.

Judging from its appearance, I’m mildly concerned that it may be an invasive species from another planet, which may explain why Skye keeps running up to the den window and growling half the night (of course, an alternative theory may be simply that the cat next door misses its owners and is constantly meowing in order to get some much-needed attention).

If it is an invasive species, it would seem to hold the potential to reproduce rapidly, judging from its rather bold display, though the large bumblebees that are so attracted to other flowers in the bed seem to purposefully avoid this particular flower. Perhaps it reminds them of Rapaccini’s Daughter, as it does me.

Barack Obama and the American Dream

Like Dave at Groundhog Day I must “confess I’m not paying very much attention to the convention, and only slightly more to the webloggers who are paying attention to themselves, pretending to pay attention to the convention.”

After all, I’ve never been too enthralled with those who merely preach to the congregation, telling them what they already “know” and what they want to hear, true or not.

Still like Raye at By Sand and Sea, who I borrowed the following link from, I’m glad I heard the powerful speech by Barack Obama, a relatively young politician from Illinois.

Obama who would seem to embody the American Dream through his own personal success, has not forgotten his roots or those things that made his success possible.

If you need some inspiration, go listen to or read Obama’s speech.

If you’re still here, and you shouldn’t be, let me just note that the following excerpt seemed the essence of his speech for me:

That is the true genius of America, a faith in the simple dreams of its people, the insistence on small miracles. That we can tuck in our children at night and know they are fed and clothed and safe from harm. That we can say what we think, write what we think, without hearing a sudden knock on the door. That we can have an idea and start our own business without paying a bribe or hiring somebody’s son. That we can participate in the political process without fear of retribution, and that our votes will he counted or at least, most of the time.

It is this ability to empower all of its citizens, to provide an equal opportunity for success that has made America the most successful country in the world, even if that “success” has too often been measured in material success for my own tastes.

The Mountain Poems of Meng Hao-jan

In my continuing attempts to better understand Chinese and Japanese poetic traditions, I recently bought David Hinton’s book The Mountain Poems of Meng Hao-jan, a Chinese poet who lived from 689 to 740 C.E.

Hinton’s short but informative introduction clearly places Meng within the “wilderness (literally rivers-and-mountains) tradition that is the heart of Chinese poetry” while also showing how he fits within the Taoist and Ch’an Buddhist tradition:

Rather than subject himself to the strictures of a conventional life, which for the intelligentsia in ancient China meant city work in the government bureaucracy, or perhaps the monastic life of a Ch’an (Zen) Buddhist monk, Meng cultivated the independence of a simple life in his home mountains. There, far from the cultural centers of the time, his poetry developed outside of prevailing literary taste, and in direct response to the mountain landscape he inhabited.

and

Meng was admired not for the bucolic romance of his life, but for the singular way he inhabited the sage philosophical ground shared by all of ancient China’s great poets: the Taoist cosmology described by the originary masters, Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu. The central concept in their cosmology is Tao, or Way, by which they meant the process (hence, a through which the “ten thousand” living and nonliving things arise and pass away, each emerging out of nothing, flourishing for a time, and finally returning to nothing.

My favorite poem in the eighty-one-page collection is probably:

OVERNIGHT AT KINGFISHER-HUE MONASTERY
IN THE WHOLE-SOUTH MOUNTAINS

At Whole-South Mountain’s Kingfisher-Hue,
fallen rain perfects the failing flare of dusk.

After so long deep in closed-gate meditation,
I take staff in hand, hike up into open vistas,

and soon, following along to a recluse home,
fathom tranquil dwelling’s quiet mystery.

Confucian and Taoist: though different ways,
they merge here in all this forest and cloud,

our two minds joined together in such joy
as we talk and laugh in the day’s last light.

Ready for sleep, we return to high twilight
windows, gaze across distant peaks aflame:

it carries thought back to red-cliff beacons,
brings memories of towering coastal peaks.

With a creek’s windswept sound so crystalline,
who needs the tune of a silent mountain sage?

Although I was first struck by the lines “though different ways,/ they merge here in all this forest and cloud,” which obviously resonates with my own views, I’m sure Hinton’s notes

Whole-South Mountains: just south of the capital, Ch’ang-an, the Whole-South Mountains are legendary in the poetic tradition because Wang Wei wrote his most famous poems at his recluse home there.

… throughout the recluse tradition “gate” often carries the metaphoric sense of “awareness,” that through which the empirical world enters consciousness. This added dimension harks back to a passage in Chapter 52 of the Tao Te Ching, where a kind of meditative practice is described:

If you block the senses
and close the gate,
you never struggle.
If you open the senses
and expand your endeavors,
nothing can save you.

contributed to my appreciation of the poem, particularly because I found much to admire in my earlier readings of the Tao Te Ching.

Truthfully, though, the poem stands on its own because it captures feelings I’ve experienced when hiking the mountains after spending many hours reading, not too different from the sense of elation I felt recently while hiking the Indian Peaks Wilderness in Colorado. I’m sure I’m not the only person whose deepest thoughts and beliefs can often be found deep in the wilderness.

Another favorite is:

ON RETURNING TO MY MOUNTAINS, FOR
THE CH’AN ABBOT CLARITY-DEEP

I heard the unborn inner pattern young
and always practiced seeing through self,

but we rarely follow mind’s deep impulse:
this life’s rugged path is often full of dust.

Now, back to old canyons in my twilight,
I find myself a neighbor to Clarity-Deep.

Amid forests, rejoicing in kindred spirits,
we sit perfecting the mat’s jewel together,

contemplate this drift on seas of suffering,
teachings lost in a surging swelling world.

Using dharma’s subtle mystery, you guide
us into that crystalline purity of origins,

where karma’s travail ends in tranquility,
mountain-and-forest feelings flourishing.

I come at dawn asking after some answer,
and by dusk our talk touches clarity whole,

like your dark brush exhausting ancient
truths, its words startling human realms.

Compassing a bamboo hut’s empty silence,
herbs and flowers blur winter into spring

here. Cascade-spray flecks cap and robe.
lnkstone and chin perch atop tablerock.

To fathom the erasure of insight, we watch
dusk and dawn composing the wild gulls.

You could almost imagine that Wordsworth must have read the first lines of this poem before writing “Intimations of Immortality” with its famous lines “But trailing clouds of glory do we come/ From God, who is our home:/ Heaven lies about us in our infancy!” if such feelings weren’t almost universal. I sometimes suspect that my love of children is an attempt to recover those lost feelings, magical feelings lost in the everyday “dust” of life that threatens to besmirch our very existence.

Perhaps like the Chinese poets in the wilderness tradition, I return to the mountains and rivers to renew that magic, to recapture that sense of awe that too often has given way to mere boredom and ennui, to experience directly the mystery of life that we spend too much time merely reading about.