Winter hours
Feb. 9th, 2025 07:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mickiFinishing Mary Oliver's Winter Hours, which seems appropriate since it is quite cold this morning. I always celebrate the cold in Chico; when spring warms too soon I fear the fire season and the endless days when I am trapped indoors by plus 110 heat. Though since losing so much weight I get colder easier and enjoy the winter walks somewhat less--I can of course layer up, but if the base layer is too warm I get more hot flashes in the heated indoors of work. The joys of changing bodies! I should appreciate a body that can change, I guess.
The chapters I read today were a mix of poems, reflections on the natural world, and reflections on the goals of her poetry. Sometimes her writing reminds me of Annie Dillard, another keen observer of the beauties and cruelties of the natural world. She has a chapter on a spider in her vacation house, laying eggs and eating a cricket, that to me was a call back to the chapter earlier in the book that made me ponder a theology of a Creator who set it up so beings eat other beings. That chapter ended with the sort of ethical dilemma I often experience: she didn't want to hurt the spider, but she knew the housecleaners would, so she contemplated relocating it. In the end she decided to leave it alone and tell the housecleaners not to clean the staircase--a temporary solution until the next residents arrived. But that is everything we do in life, is it not--a temporary aid until change happens. It makes actions both easier and harder to think that. We cannot anticipate all the consequences of what we do since the future is ever uncertain.
I want to pull out some of my favorite passages about her poetic process. "Morning, for me, is the time of best work. My conscious thought sings like a bird in a cage, but the rest of me is singing, too, like a bird in the wind. Perhaps something is still strong in us in the morning, the part that is untamable, that dreams willfully and crazily, that knows reason is no more than an island within us." That is a fascinating metaphor for the self/the mind. If reason is an island, are the surrounding waters instincts? Emotions? Our connection to the natural?
"In the act of writing the poem, I am obedient and submissive. Insofar as one can, I put aside ego and vanity and even intention. I listen. What I hear is almost a voice, almost a language. It is a second ocean, rising, singing into one's ear, or deep inside the ears, whispering in the recesses where one is less oneself than a part of some single indivisible community. Blake spoke of taking dictation. I am no Blake, yet I know the nature of what he meant. Every poet knows it. One learns the craft and then casts off. One hope for gifts. One hopes for direction. It is both physical and spooky. It is intimate, and inapprehensible. Perhaps it is for this reason that the act of first-writing, for me, involves nothing more complicated than paper and pencil. The abilities of a typewriter or computer would not help in this act of slow and deep listening."
This is such a fascinating description of the act of creation--deep listening that leads to something emerging from some aspect of the self that is part of a larger whole. It makes me think of the conversation about divine doubles we had in my reading group, where Vervaeke was trying to think of a "transjective" self, something that mediated between objective and subjective, participating in both. Or that there is something between the ordinarily perceived self and Atman. Not annihilating the small s self but listening to the capital S self to create, perhaps. The act of creation comes from listening the the Self, the world, the broader community, in a radical way.
"I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple. Under the trees, along the pales slopes of sand, I walk in an ascendant relationship to rapture, and with words I celebrate the rapture. I see, and dote upon, the manifest....When I write about nature directly...I mean landscapes in which we are reinforced in our sense of the world as mustery, a mystery that entails other privileges besides our own, and also, therefore, a hierarchy of right and wrong behaviors pertaining to that mystery, diminishing or defending it."
The chapters I read today were a mix of poems, reflections on the natural world, and reflections on the goals of her poetry. Sometimes her writing reminds me of Annie Dillard, another keen observer of the beauties and cruelties of the natural world. She has a chapter on a spider in her vacation house, laying eggs and eating a cricket, that to me was a call back to the chapter earlier in the book that made me ponder a theology of a Creator who set it up so beings eat other beings. That chapter ended with the sort of ethical dilemma I often experience: she didn't want to hurt the spider, but she knew the housecleaners would, so she contemplated relocating it. In the end she decided to leave it alone and tell the housecleaners not to clean the staircase--a temporary solution until the next residents arrived. But that is everything we do in life, is it not--a temporary aid until change happens. It makes actions both easier and harder to think that. We cannot anticipate all the consequences of what we do since the future is ever uncertain.
I want to pull out some of my favorite passages about her poetic process. "Morning, for me, is the time of best work. My conscious thought sings like a bird in a cage, but the rest of me is singing, too, like a bird in the wind. Perhaps something is still strong in us in the morning, the part that is untamable, that dreams willfully and crazily, that knows reason is no more than an island within us." That is a fascinating metaphor for the self/the mind. If reason is an island, are the surrounding waters instincts? Emotions? Our connection to the natural?
"In the act of writing the poem, I am obedient and submissive. Insofar as one can, I put aside ego and vanity and even intention. I listen. What I hear is almost a voice, almost a language. It is a second ocean, rising, singing into one's ear, or deep inside the ears, whispering in the recesses where one is less oneself than a part of some single indivisible community. Blake spoke of taking dictation. I am no Blake, yet I know the nature of what he meant. Every poet knows it. One learns the craft and then casts off. One hope for gifts. One hopes for direction. It is both physical and spooky. It is intimate, and inapprehensible. Perhaps it is for this reason that the act of first-writing, for me, involves nothing more complicated than paper and pencil. The abilities of a typewriter or computer would not help in this act of slow and deep listening."
This is such a fascinating description of the act of creation--deep listening that leads to something emerging from some aspect of the self that is part of a larger whole. It makes me think of the conversation about divine doubles we had in my reading group, where Vervaeke was trying to think of a "transjective" self, something that mediated between objective and subjective, participating in both. Or that there is something between the ordinarily perceived self and Atman. Not annihilating the small s self but listening to the capital S self to create, perhaps. The act of creation comes from listening the the Self, the world, the broader community, in a radical way.
"I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple. Under the trees, along the pales slopes of sand, I walk in an ascendant relationship to rapture, and with words I celebrate the rapture. I see, and dote upon, the manifest....When I write about nature directly...I mean landscapes in which we are reinforced in our sense of the world as mustery, a mystery that entails other privileges besides our own, and also, therefore, a hierarchy of right and wrong behaviors pertaining to that mystery, diminishing or defending it."
