That which is much bigger II

There is a moment in the Mabinogion when Gwydion, trickster and uncle to the Welsh hero Llew Lagh Gyffes, must enter the underworld to find his lost nephew. This is my favorite moment in the story, because in an instant, Gwydion disappears into the earth as he chases a mysterious pig that flees from his pen every morning. This animal leads him to a broad river, which in turn leads him to his nephew. This moment is fairly significant, as it charts the cosmogenic elements of the Welsh, one that I cannot relay, but one that weaves its way through your entire being.

A group of my students gave a presentation on water as a sacred element and water as a commodified resource. They were very articulate in their religious depictions of water, offering examples of how water is sacred element from a Judaic, Muslim and Christian background, and how the sacred essence that these traditions convey are greatly diminished when water is bottled. One student commented that, 'the sacred essence of water leaves when it is left standing and concealed' in a bottle. I appreciated this sentiment, and I think Gwydion would as well, for the river he follows is moving considerably, just as the pig that leads him on. There is a sense of uncontained movement, or as Steve Martin and John Candy once noted, Martin: "I know, I know, just go with the flow," Candy: "Like a twig on the current of a mighty stream."

I offered my students another perspective on water, this one from Stephen Mitchell's translation of the Tao Te Ching

15
The ancient Masters were profound and subtle.
Their wisdom was unfathomable.
There is no way to describe it;
all we can describe is their appearance.

They were careful
as someone crossing an iced-over stream.
Alert as a warrior in enemy territory.
Courteous as a guest.
Fluid as melting ice.
Shapable as a block of wood.
Receptive as a valley.
Clear as a glass of water.

Do you have the patience to wait
till your mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
till the right action arises by itself?

The Master doesn't seek fulfillment.
Not seeking, not expecting,
she is present, and can welcome all things.

I think they appreciated the subtlety of the Tao and its dual descriptions of movement and stillness, and how both are elements of water. I also told them of a Buddhist saying, "all boats lead to the same shore." The last quote is quite revealing about the role of water, and the vessels we use to navigate it. To exemplify the tradition this last sentiment comes from, I found a trailer to a film I really want to see, Dharma River, which seems quite evocative to me of the movement of water and people.

That which is much bigger

Stephen Mitchell writes a wonderful introduction to the 2000 translation of the Bhagavad Gita (LINK), in which Mitchell asks the reader to consider the story as taking place before a great battle (as it does), but to imagine a great event unfolding in that one moment before battle when the adrenaline is high and when both sides survey the opposing force in those moments of fear and uncertainty. In that moment, Mitchell suggests,

everything is still. The armies have halted in their tracks. Even the flies are caught in midair between two wingbeats. The vast moving picture of reality stops on a single frame, as in Borge's story "The Secret Miracle." The moment of the poem has expanded beyond time, and the only characters who continue, earnestly discoursing between the silent, frozen armies, are Arjuna and Krishna.

Krishna, of course, happens to be much more than Arjuna's Charioteer, he is also God. He picks a fairly significant moment to reveal the cosmos to the hero. 'Whether or not he should fight,' says Mitchell,' is secondary to the question he faces through Krishna, and that is, 'how should we live?'

At his lowest moment, Arjuna crumbles from the pressure, and Krishna teaches him about being, and in closing, Krishna speaks of wisdom, sacrifice, of facing that which needs facing and letting go that which needs letting go,

The man whom desires enter
as rivers flow into the sea,
filled yet always unmoving -
that man finds perfect peace.

There are moments like this, when the veil between the profane and that which is much bigger is revealed, if even between the wingbeats of a fly. I recall reading a couple of years ago that serves a similar role. It was by an anyonomous author about a river near where I grew up, the Snye, which at one time was known as the Chenal Ecarte (which in French means the Lost or Blind Channel). This also happens to be the river I centered my Masters research on, so it was nice to find that someone, some settler perhaps, dreamt of this river as I did, as something much bigger. The poem appears in Frank Mann's 1968 book A History of Wallaceburg and Vicinity,

Chenal Ecarte
(the Lost channel)

Bright, eddying, shimmering, current.
Have you really lost your way?
From the course of common torrent,
Of the lake, the river, bay?

Men call you "Waif stretch of water,
That has run from other astray,
Your Neptune, the old Sea God's daughter,
A madcap, so blithesome and bray"

We've drifted with boat songs as lovers,
Gay, heedless of rudder or sail,
We have whistled to keep up our courage,
When the breezes were blowing a gale.

Thru' marshland and glade we have wondered,
The sport of the winds and tide
The days of that light childhood laughter
Are lost in the gulf deep and wide.

I'm drifting from my moorings, fair water,
From the banks that in childhood I plied,
I'm drifting on Time's swift flowing river,
And needful as you are my guide.

We are both sweeping to the ocean,
Through channels chance fortune has made,
We shall fade at last in its bosom
As inifinities in infinate fade.

Only someone kin to Arjuna could appreciate the Chenal Ecarte, in that one moment you are told it eventually flows into the ocean, bringing everything with it. This is perhaps the irony of the settler who wrote this (if it was a settler), for he or she realizes that the body of water that settled their childhood is the very same body of water that carries them home on time's swift current. Tide and wind, arms on the geological clock are also there, part of that which is much bigger, non-linear, absolute, and always wavering in its cyclical rhythms.

The nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

This is quite an appropriate poem by Wallace Stevens, given the date is January 9th, 2007, and this is the first day since late November that snow is falling in my part of Ontario. I think the most interesting line is the one he concludes with. This seems to be quite a task, at present, to behold the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. To me, this is the place where stories emerge, the ambiguous and murky place that is both outside and inside ourselves, demanding to find expression through words. At the same time, however, it is a nothing zone that cannot ever really be quantified, which is good. Terms like alpha state, seratonin, baggage and reference have little power when they are compared to what Stevens is asking.

There is a line in Robert Bringhurst's new book The Tree of Meaning in which he states the old star maps of Babylon and Alexandria are full of stories, with stars that sometimes overlap and sometimes have gaps between, to which he says, "They are full of fictions, full of stories, but the sweet wind of reality blows through them." These stories change, however, when astronomers sought to arrange star maps in order, accounting not for the richness in the stories of the stars, but in a celestial reasoning that brought us to our current understanding of the night sky. I can only hope that whenever this change happened that it occured at about the same time a more important question was being asked, and that is, "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?"

The overlapping of ideas, experiences and voices can quickly lead us to stories of great cacophony, the kind of stories with 18 hour shelf lives in the newsroom that by their very nature must have further negative contribution to breathe more life in them. Resolution in these stories is bittersweet. There is no sweet wind of reality, and there is a definitive something that leads us away from the nothing that is not and the nothing that is. In this world, only 1 angel is on the head of a pin.

I believe the overlapping of waves, snow and time provides a foundation for the best stories to stand on. They survive in the recesses of the people who best know what time is, and what time is not.

Li Po and Wallace Stevens

I came across this poem a few years ago, Alone Looking at the Mountain by the classical Chinese poet Li Po.

Alone Looking at the Mountain

All the birds have flown up and gone;
A lonely cloud floats leisurely by.
We never tire of looking at each other -
Only the mountain and I.

For some reason I find myself frequently going over it in my head, line by line. For me at least, its a four line meditation that I can't help but get sucked into. The first two lines quite nicely portray an occurence anyone can imagine, there go the birds, and there go the clouds, and then there is this moment in the last two lines that both defies and defines groundedness. I wonder if the mountain and Li Po are still looking at each other, they would have to be because they never tire. But of course we know that Li Po drowned trying to embrace the moon's reflection in the water. For me, at least, the resonance is the moment that is not now, back when, or yet to be, its just Li Po and the mountain.

I found a great website called poet seers that includes Li Po's poetry, and for those visual thinkers, photos that correspond. There was one for Alone Looking at the Mountain, but I'll leave it out, because I already had an idea of the mountain in my mind, as well as the moment when he may have written the poem.

Unfortunately I could not find Rilke on the page, but I did find Wallace Stevens, who I think is by far the best writer to have come from 20th Century America besides Kurt Vonnegut.



Like Li Po, he has a humble appreciation of a moment that both defies and defines what it means to be grounded. For Stevens, I imagine, he may have been looking out at a Pine in the middle of a January blizzard from his study window when he wrote Snow Man, another of those moments where there is a fluidity of being between humanity and the world.

Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.