‘I wonder sometimes if the teacher is not the real student and beneficiary’ (George Steiner)
The sparrows are spinning
warmth into the winter world.Their delicate, clear chirps
bring with them a crisp joy,
making me not so afraid
of the howling wind.So, too, the friends of my heart.
Joyce Rupp, My Soul Feels Lean: Poems of Loss and Restoration
A poor life is this, if full of care
we have no time to stand or stare.
W. H. Davies, ‘Leisure’, as quoted by Clare Bryden in Third Way, June 2013.
Time for some more of Rumi’s poetry, again in the translation of Coleman Barks, from Bridge to the Soul: Journeys into the Music and Silence of the Heart.
I am sure I have said this before, but Rumi has been an amazing discovery for me. There is profound spiritual insight in the words of this Sufi master, and there is so much here that speaks to me at such a deep level. Some of it puts into words my own recent journey in ways that I could never have managed myself. Other parts express some of my deepest hopes and longings. And then there are many wonderful insights about God, love, friendship etc.
If only more people would read Rumi’s poetry. It would open their eyes to quite a different side of Islam. But then, he apparently is the most widely read poet in America today. There is still hope then …
We must die to become true human beings.
From gardens to the gardener,
from grieving to a wedding feast.We tremble like leaves about to let go.
There is no avoiding pain,
or feeling exiled, or the taste of dust.
I can truly relate to those reflections on dying, grieving, letting go, experiencing pain and the taste of dust.
When someone feels jealous,
I am inside the hurt and the need to possess.When anyone is sick,
I feel feverish and dizzy.
This I find comforting: that God is inside the hurt of those who need to possess others. And that he is inside our sickness.
For the grace of the presence, be grateful.
…
Imagination cannot contain the absolute.
These poems are elusive
because the presence is.
‘Imagination cannot contain the absolute’. Quite. No point to even try!
No more holding back. Be reckless.
Tell your love to everybody.…
Stand up. The prostrating
part of prayer is over.…
the beloved is absence
as well as this fullness.
I love that attitude to praying and loving God.
Be a helpful friend,
and you will become a green tree
with always new fruit,
always deeper journeys into love.
Worth aspiring to …
Learned theologians do not teach love.
Love is nothing but gladness and kindness.…
When you see a scowling face,
it is not a lover’s.
Rumi really does understand true love.
Lovers find secret places
inside this violent world
where they make transactions
with beauty.Reason says, Nonsense.
I have walked and measured the walls here.
There are no places like that.Love says, There are.
…
Lovers feel a truth inside themselves
that rational people keep denying.
This is just brilliant stuff, so true and so well expressed. Secret places in a violent world where you make transactions with beauty – that’s truly wonderful and how I wish to live.
The inevitable happens …. Geryon meets Herakles again, with predictable consequences:
The effort it took to pull himself
away from Herakles’ eyes
could have been measured on the scale devised by Richter.
But things are not the same, for Herakles is with another man.
Volcanoes and earthquakes make repeated appearances in Carson’s work. They also feature in Autobiography of Red, where they symbolise some of the effects of a (troubled) love relationship. So when Ancash, Herakles’ new friend, notes that ‘aftershocks can go on for years’, Geryon laconically replies, ‘I know’, thinking not of tectonic movements but of the aftershocks of his relationship with Herakles, which are still troubling him many years on.
It is all too much for him. After a while, Geryon can’t cope with the company of the two friends any more. He ‘threw himself out the door’, we are told in typical ‘Carsonesque’ fashion, only to end up ‘in his hotel room on the end of the bed staring at the blank TV screen’.
It was seven a.m. Total agitation possessed him. He had held off phoning Herakles
for two days. Even now he was not
looking at the telephone (which he had placed in the bottom of his sock drawer).
…
when from deep in its cave of socks the telephone
rang. Geryon dove for it.
Some time later, Herakles, Geryon and Ancash visit a Peruvian volcano, which, in ancient times, used to be worshipped as a deity. People were thrown into it, Ancash explains, not for sacrifice but as a testing procedure:
They were looking for people
from the inside. Wise ones.
‘People from the inside’ – like Geryon, in other words, who not only is an inside person, an introvert, but has shown himself to be of considerable intellectual and emotional depth.
Then, in one of the book’s most poignant moments, Ancash explains to Geryon that some of those who had been thrown into the volcano return. They manage this due to their wings:
Wings? Yes that’s what they say the Yazcamac return as red people with wings,
all their weaknesses burned away –
and their mortality.
Like Geryon again, who is red and has wings, two features that have been troubling him all his life but are here shown to be something rather special. In a book that has layers upon layers, Carson plays with the ancient story upon which it is based and which features a red monster. But who is the monster in this story, deep, thoughtful Geryon, the wise inside person, or Herakles, who comes across as shallow and selfish, oblivious to the feelings of his two friends?
Geryon, we read, ‘thought about thoughts’.
Even when they were lovers
he had never known what Herakles was thinking.
…
What Geryon was thinking Herakles never asked. In the space between them
developed a dangerous cloud.
Or consider the following conversation, which illustrates so well how people can be together and yet not be together at all:
Geryon what’s wrong? Jesus I hate it when you cry. What is it?
Geryon thinks hard.
I once loved you, now I don’t know you at all. He does not say this.
I was thinking about time – he gropes –
you know how apart people are in time together and apart at the same time – stops.
All the while, Geryon keeps on struggling, as my last two examples, both couched in language that only Carson could manage, illustrate:
It is all wrong.
Wrongness came like a lone finger
chopping through the room and he ducked.
He slid off the bed quickly. Thorns all around him black and glistening
but he passed through unhurt …
.
A wonderful description of life in Lima:
Ancash’s mother had the roof divided into living,
sleeping and horticultural areas.
Beside the water tank was where guests slept. Next to that was ‘Ancash’s room,’
an area bordered on one side by the clothesline,
where Ancash had neatly arranged his T-shirts on hangers, and on the other side
by a scarred highboy inlaid with mother-of-pearl.
Beside the highboy was the library. Here were two sofas and a bookcase packed
with books. On the writing desk stood
piles of paper weighted down with tins of tobacco and a gooseneck reading lamp
that plugged into a cracked extension cord
running across the desk and over the roof and down the ladder to the kitchen.
Ancash had made a ceiling of palm fronds
above the library. They moved and clicked in the wind like wooden tongues.
Next to the library was a squat structure
built of clear heavy plastic and some pieces of dismantled telephone booth.
Here Ancash’s mother grew a cash crop
of marijuana and herbs for cooking. She found a type of strain that helped her treat her nightmares and her back pain, it was unbelievable the percentage amount of relief she got from this, she looked for a lot of recipes and started to learn more about it, even the marijuana laws by state so she would know where were the best medical marijuana dispensaries. She finally called the adventure Festinito (‘Little Feast’) and said it was her favorite place.
in the world. Plaster figures of St. Francis and St. Rose of Lima were placed
encouragingly among the plants.
She herself slept next to the Little Feast on a cot piled high with bright blankets.
From Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse
eryon struggles on in Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, grieving for the devastating loss of a lover. But we also learn about other aspects of his life. Like Carson herself (there are strong autobiographical references in this story), he is a linguist. And so, sat in a café in Buenos Aires, ‘he rummaged inside himself for Spanish phrases’. Yet what he found was that
German irregular verbs
were marching across his mind as the waiter drew up at his table and stood …
Two key issues that pervade the narrative are Geryon’s difficulties with self-acceptance (being red and endowed with wings, he is noticeably different from everyone else) and how he is perceived by others. Thus there is
the fear of ridicule,
to which everyday life as a winged red person had accommodated Geryon early in life …
as well as this telling dialogue with a woman he met in a bar:
Who can a monster blame for being red?
What? said Geryon starting forward.
I said looks like time for you to get home to bed, she repeated, and stood,
pocketing her cigarettes.
One of his endearing character traits is a desperate need for order. As he enters a lecture room, we are told:
Geryon disliked a room without rows.
His brain went running back and forth over the disorder of desks trying to see
straight lines. Each time finding
an odd number it jammed then restarted.
On another occasion, he struggles when someone he has enjoyed a good conversation with leaves the bar, abandoning him to the company of virtual strangers.
Oh don’t go, thought Geryon who felt himself starting
to slide off the surface of the room
like an olive off a plate. When the plate attained an angle of thirty degrees
he would vanish into his own blankness.
And so:
Geryon subsided into his overcoat
letting the talk flow over him warm as a bath.
Once more, I am finding myself amazed at how well Carson captures the panic an introvert might face in a situation like that.
But loss and grief remain his main problems. In a conversation with another stranger the issue of emotionlessness or artaraxia comes up, which Geryon defines as ‘absence of disturbance’ but which so evidently eludes him. Whatever he does,
Under the seams runs the pain.
In his desire to come to terms with his struggle and life generally, he eventually takes up philosophy:
We would think ourselves continuous with the world if we did not have moods.
It is state-of-mind that discloses to us
(Heidegger claims) that we are beings who have been thrown into something else.
Something else than what?
Geryon leaned his hot forehead against the filthy windowpane and wept.
Something else than this hotel room …
Geryon sat on his bed in the hotel room pondering the cracks and fissures
of his inner life. ……
Yet Geryon did not want
to become one of those people
who think of nothing but their stores of pain. He bent over the book on his knees.
Philosophic Problems.
‘… I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it.
But this separation of consciousness
is recognized only after a failure of communication, and our first movement is
to believe in an undivided being between us ….’
Carson so brilliantly exposes the autobiographical dimension that inheres in our work and study. Geryon, for obvious reasons, is particularly intrigued by the notion of redness. More generally though he is concerned with perception (how we perceive ourselves and are perceived by others), consciousness and the impossibility of communication.
His reading also leads him to explore the nature of depression:
‘Depression is one of the unknown modes of being.
There are no words for a world without a self, seen with impersonal clarity.
All language can register is the slow return
to oblivion we call health when imagination automatically recolors the landscape
and habit blurs perception and language
takes up its routine flourishes.’ He was about to turn the page for more help …
Yet again, Carson offers such an intriguing perspective in these lines. There are quite a few fascinating angles here, but I particularly love the final words, ‘he was about to turn the page for more help’.
And then the inevitable happens …
Karl Möller 