February 5, 2008

New York Times headlines:  Time Runs Out for Afghan Held by U.S. 

Kabul, Afghanistan — Abdul Razzaq Hekmati was regarded here  as a war hero, famous for his resistance to the Russian occupation in the 1980-‘s and later for a daring prison break he organized for three op[ponents of the Taliban government in 1999. 

            But in 2003, Mr. Hekmati was arrested by American forces in southern Afghanistan when, senior Afghan officials here contend, he was falsely accused by his enemies of being a Taliban commander himself.  For the next five years he was held at the American military base in Guantanamo Bay, where he died of cancer on Dec. 30.

            SuperTuesday:  24 states voting.

            Bush’s budget:  a 7 ½ % increase for the Pentagon, which doesn’t even take into consideration additional funds that will be needed for the Iraq war.  And in Washington State, according to today’s Seattle Times, Seattle will lose $50 million under the Bush budget, including cuts in state health, education and environmental projects – in particular the elimination of the Urban Indian Health Program. 

            Just back from AWP in New York, over 7\000 in attendance at the Hilton and Sheraton in midtown Manhattan, just blocks from the Museum of Modern Art and Carnegie Hall.  Listening to poets and novelists and essayists, to panelists and plenaries, talking to strangers and friends at my publishers table where I’m hawking my book, selling a few, signing a few. 

            Joseph Kommakakao, poems of war, Vietnam and beyond.  Penelope and Odysseus.  Imagining Charon there at the river’s bank waiting for the lost souls, waiting to take them home.  A room with a view in New York.  A thousand people silent, listening to one poet.  The hum of the heater’s fan, words, the oldest prayer, a prisoner reading.  The one who died.  A woman’s name.  Words.  A prophecy.  We are writing Jerusalem.  We are writing Beirut.  We are writing Tehran in a dead language.

            A full house, people on the floor literally at the feet of an old Louisianan Black man singing of love in a time of war, singing of birds witnessing what we do to each other.

            A pilgrimage?  Not so much the conference as returning to MOMA and then, on Sunday, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art,  caught up this time by the North Europe Renaissance, as its called: Van Eyck, Gerard David, Bosch, Durer, Brueghel’s Harvesters, an entire world, a cosmos there on the canvas, from the massive sky to the sea to the distant fields and ponds (monks swimming, casually undressing in the open air) to the immediate foreground where the peasants harvest the wheat while others, in a circle, rest and eat under the shade of a tree. 

            A pilgrimage to this painting, seeing it as if for the first time, even though I used it as an image in my Work and the Life of the Spirit anthology, to accompany the Williams poem based upon it. But of course when I was doing the anthology I wasn’t in New York, wasn’t standing 6 inches away from the oil paint that Brueghel laid down upon this canvas some 400 years ago.  To be in the presence – that’s all that pilgrimage is about.  To be there, fully there, in the presence.

            Pilgrimage is on my mind, as it often is.  Remembering a conversation last week with a student in my office who’s applying for a Christian outreach/mission program in Appalachia.  She’s going to serve – but a pilgrimage is not so much about service as it is about listening: just being there, and knowing that one always has more to learn than to teach, more to receive than to give: the universe is a wide place.

            And as we were talking I was thinking of Christ in Jerusalem, wandering throughout Galilee, and how and why he ‘served.’  I think in fact that he just loved these people, in particular the marginalized, in part because they’re out there on the edge, in that liminal space, vulnerable – available .  Real.

            I’m not trying to sentimentalize poverty or the poor.  I don’t doubt that there were plenty of nasty characters on the streets of Judea – shysters and hucksters, just as there are now on our own city streets.  There are plenty who want to stay victims.  And yet – there were, and are, those others; the ones left over, the ones without wings, without masks.  And when he met this, wherever he met this, he loved what he saw.  He came for this:  just to be here, wherever the truth is. 

          Pilgrimage:  meeting the world where it is.  Listening.  The healing work derives from the listening –and to a great extent the healing is the listening. 

          New York.  Garbage trucks down on 53^rd street 25 floors below us in the middle of the night, horns like ships at sea, like foghorns in the night.  The streets are canals, rivers, arteries flowing to the sea.  The city’s veins, energy flowing always to the sea.

Does a country have a soul? I believe so. I believe we are knit together as a nation; it is part of our human and creaturely identity, just as the salmon are part of our identity in the northwest, or cedar or douglas fir. It is not our ultimate identity but it is part of who we are — and we are all accountable for that soul and to that soul.

And King named our crisis: a spiritual failure, a failure to live into the truth we are called to, whether that’s as Christians, Buddhists, Jews, Muslims, atheists. We are called to truth –together, with each other, and with creation itself.

and we fail daily and deeply.

I needed those words this summer, and appreciate still the vision that King brought to us — a man who died at 39! Astonishing what still might have been had he been supported.

1/25 08

So it’s Friday morning, end of January, sun is shining in Seattle. I’m listening to the soundtrack to Juno and thinking that there are certain small pleasures that make one very happy just to be alive.

Yesterday I sat in my cluttered office –it was another beautiful day, blue skies, a Midwestern clarity to the air – with two students talking about Leslie Silko’s novel Ceremony. This was officially a class, an Independent Study. We took two hours and could have gone on forever – or so it felt to me. Such pleasure sitting with these two, enjoying their engagement with the text, with each other, just enjoying. Kingdom was at hand. There was nowhere further to go.

That, in part, was what we were talking about: this paradox of time that we live within, that we swim within, and the strong sense of needing to get somewhere, and enjoying that sense, at our best: that sense of the journey, being on the road and delighting with where we are, passing through the small towns of Iowa, of Minnesota or Washington or Oregon, on our way somewhere of course and yet loving where we are.

Somewhere to go and yet knowing that there’s nowhere further to go.

Small pleasures. A summer morning. A Beethoven sonata, or a moment in The Magic Flute. So much great music! So much to learn!

And thinking that it’s worth remembering them, listing them even, just like Woody Allen does in Manhattan (which would be on my list of small pleasures).

And I agree with him about Louis Armstrong, about Fred Astaire and a number of other things.

Screwball comedies from the thirties– The Awful Truth, Bringing Up Baby, Holiday, His Girl Friday, It Happened One Night…. For those who want critical support read Stanley Cavell’s Pursuit of Happiness or James Harvey’s beautifully written Romantic Comedy in Hollywood.

Small pleasures do not mean trivial pleasures – usually in fact they resonate and stay with us because there’s something true in them. No grand statements – this is not U2 or Springsteen or Blonde on Blonde; more like Jonathon Richman or The Kinks in certain moods.

Little gifts. Small slices of mystery. Reasons to live.

Add your own.

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