BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs -- Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
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Today it was really was/is really hot, which led me to think about Maine, specifically Sonny, the almost 80-year-old ex-mechanic who was Connie across the street's boarder.
He may have been "ex," but he worked at a recycling place just across the river in Randolph (his birthplace, a slightly different country). Recycling centers in Central Maine are also liquor stores and gathering places. There's bottle and can redemption in Maine, so people pick them up to get cash. (In fact, when I moved to PA and first saw an Amish guy on a bike with a cart behind him, I automatically thought it was someone who had lost his license because of DUI and was now picking up cans to survive). On hot days I so love remembering how Sonny would wheel up the street in his beat up F150 on the wrong side of the road, then leap out brandishing a giant bottle of something so he and C could have cocktails. (Once in a great while I joined them on their porch, for a G&T, but typically would have to go home and take a nap for several hours; they were that strong. Meanwhile these 78- and 85-year-olds could carry on for hours). Not long after I moved in, Sonny asked me out. I turned him down, which caused Connie to be very PO'd for years. Sonny was okay about it. I think of him, now also dead, because he hated the heat so much. Connie was difficult in a lot of ways and when she imbibed, could be mean. At first, she made many remarks about "educated people," until one day in an Irish way I set her straight on that point. The turning point with C. came when I wrote her a Christmas card one year saying that she was a "great lady," which she was. Not in the sense of being witty and likeable, like my Aunt Gabe, but Connie had Gabe's sense of service. She was active in the Methodist church and took care of Alberta, a 90-year-old recluse who lived down the street with her pug (he peed on newspapers) and spent most of her days listening to police radio. The house stunk, but Connie washed Alberta's linens and shopped for her. When they were younger, they had socialized a lot together, when their husbands were still alive. But the neighborhood had changed and people were as isolated looking at their screens in small town Maine as elsewhere. Connie lost her husband Bill, a former Nova Scotia potato farmer who worked at the grocery store. He was a great guy and she missed him but carried on. She also had had a first husband who died young of Hodgkin’s disease. She longed for Minnesota, where he was from. She called it "The Promised Land." Connie and her first husband had had three daughters. Two of them died of cancer while I lived across from Connie. One of them, Vicki, went back and forth to Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston for a couple of years. Eventually she lost both legs. Connie had a ramp built, and I remember her pushing/walking with Vicki in her wheelchair up it. Later her second daughter also died; sadly, I cannot remember her name. Connie carried on, baking pies for church suppers. We had chats in her crowded den about politics and God and the town. She died about eight years ago and I saw online that Sonny also died around four years ago. He called her "Mother"--he had been her boarder for at least 40 years. He felt she had been "so good to him." When I think of Connie, I think of that Seamus Heaney line in "The Cure at Troy," that "people get hurt and they get hard." That is one of the truest things I’ve ever heard, and it is a great call to love. She wasn't easy, but I also think I was somewhat of a Boston snob when I moved there, which faded over the years. I could have done much better, I see now. How much people want to be seen, loved and honored for their "ordinary" lives. Today there can be so much instant stereotyping of people. We live in a disconnected age. But I remember now these good neighbors and how they were made up of so much nuance. I honor nuance and complexity. I’ve had so many discoveries of their character, which only occur when one knows people over time. I'm glad I knew them, and though long dead, I know they would be with me complaining on hot days, longing for the cool air of Maine. From The Cure at Troy -Seamus Heaney Human beings suffer, They torture one another, They get hurt and get hard. No poem or play or song Can fully right a wrong Inflicted and endured … History says, don’t hope On this side of the grave. But then, once in a lifetime The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up, And hope and history rhyme. So hope for a great sea-change On the far side of revenge. Believe that further shore Is reachable from here. Believe in miracle And cures and healing wells. Call miracle self-healing: The utter, self-revealing Double-take of feeling. If there’s fire on the mountain Or lightning and storm And a god speaks from the sky That means someone is hearing The outcry and the birth-cry of new life at its term. News Feed posts Active Ann Conway 4m · Shared with Public "There are seconds, they come only five or six at a time, and you suddenly feel the presence of eternal harmony, fully achieved. . . . The feeling is clear and indisputable. As if you suddenly sense the whole of nature and suddenly say: yes, this is true. God, when he was creating the world, said at the end of each day of creation: “Yes, this is true, this is good.” This . . . this is not tenderheartedness, but simply joy. You don’t forgive anything, because there’s no longer anything to forgive. You don’t really love—oh, what is here is higher than love!"
I recently visited Block Island, off the RI coast, Concord, MA, and parts of NH and VT, all my native countries, as I lived in Southern New England for half my life, and the rest in Maine. (If you click on the first photo, you will see arrows that allow you to navigate the rest).
It was kind of a memory tour (photos above)which was fine. After coming in via upstate ny (I stayed in a very cheap suites hotel both ways w/ very nice Indian proprietors) I went to see my relatives at st Ann’s cemetery in Cranston ri. 160,000 dead Catholics! I had not been there to see Gabe and Fr Joe, ma, dad and terry in almost a year and a half and lay flowers. I went to solitros bakery nearby to get ri delicacies and ate a pizza strip and spinach pie while chatting with the rel’s. I had missed my visits very much. It was great. Then I drove down to Galilee, RI to board the ferry which thank God I did as I was nervous re parking, procedures etc. I had never been to Block, but I have traveled a lot, so my nerves were weird to me, as everything works out eventually. That was a main blessing of the trip...getting past/ real about covid anxiety. Block island was fantastic. We never went there when I was a kid, which kind of angers me, but my parents were older and kind of out of gas re excursions by that point. It’s absolutely gorgeous ...a Victorian beach town with much preserved architecture and beautiful empty beaches the entire perimeter of the island. There are a lot of restaurants and a few bars but nothing trashy. I attach some pics of my hotel and the architecture. There was one place with a different classic rock cover band every nite and I wish I’d gone there. Thursday’s were karaoke/ drag queens🤪 Everyone was very friendly including the young international staff at my hotel. I had a great chat with the barista from South Africa. I also became enamored of the nespresso machine and might possibly buy one tho I’m resisting thus far. Finally I also visited the site of the ocean view hotel where my grandparents met in 1890...he was the stable master and she was a chambermaid. It was a huge place w/ 300 rooms...just some ruins (staircases and foundations) remain, overrun by roses and beach plums. I never met them but I do know about those paths to the beach and I saw the view of the Atlantic they would have seen.... So I was there for a couple of days then saw friends in Boston and went out to see again some very dear people in Concord, with whom I have been friends for many years. It was wonderful to catch up, lovely party in back yard, walked and visited gardens etc. Later the trip east to west thru vt and ny is very lovely as you’re going thru the green mountains and by many sparkling rivers. When I drive through some hideously overdeveloped commercial strip, this is the landscape I escape to. Quiet, spare, with the new life returning subtly, hard won and valuable. (And people driving correctly, for in New England, he who hesitates is lost. IMHO, only the cops drive right in Pgh.) I wrote this a long time ago, when I still lived in Central Maine, but I thought about it this Lent.
Since then, so much has happened. But this, for me, is truth. Recently, I attended an “Eco-Christianity” class at an area congregation. It was not for me. The minister who led it was well-intentioned, trying to bring the sacred alive. A dozen or so of us attended the first meeting—a couple who ran an organic farm, an elderly woman, a therapist. It was cold in the spartan church hall. Once full of prosperous Calvinists, the congregation had dwindled to almost nothing. We would start out each class with a hymn to “Gaia,” the minister said, which we did, awkwardly; it was set to the melody of “Be Thou My Vision.” I don’t like rewritten hymns; for me, they have the air of failure, reminding me of the folk masses of the Seventies, tortured attempts at relevance. “Our subject tonight is ‘lamentations for the earth,’” she continued. “We’ll start with a ‘Universe Walk’ around the hall.” We gamely shuffled the perimeter, listening to her narrative history of the world, taken from an ecological curriculum. It was about creation itself: a vast topic for this small and tired space. We walked past the tables where we had eaten our potluck supper, littered now with cake crumbs and spilled tomato sauce. From the beginning we walked, from the lurching creation of the air, water, the permutations of the earth, spinning through cells and amoebas, the first forms, birds, the movement of land and ice over earth, the stars, the genesis of man, the progress of civilizations, wars, the worship of images, moving over and over, the woman said, from one lost civilization to another, falling and rising. Finally, we moved closer to our time. “Four thousand years ago,” she said, “sects emerged: Islam, Judaism, Christianity.” Maybe I was just exhausted; I’d gotten back from Indiana at two a.m., crazy air travel leaving me feeling as fragile as a panicked bird. I suddenly felt empty, frightened. Just a sect? I thought. How banal. What was wrong with me? After all, the diminution of Christianity was part of my daily life—just recently a woman snarled “It’s dead! Dead!” at a recent community youth program meeting I attended (a meeting where we were told we couldn’t use the word “redemption” when talking about troubled kids—even though the kids themselves had suggested that word). But this, from a minister? There was no Triune God, she informed us. I knew where this was going. Christ as a nice guy, a small desert prophet—diminished, so He was easier to handle. I left without looking back. I felt guilty: too rigid, too Catholic, everyone says. But I had to; the wind was whipping through my bones. Spiritus mundi, I thought at home, recalling Yeats’ vision of the earth without Christ: a “shape with a lion body and the head of a man, a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun.” That was my vision too. In nature there was no “Divine Intelligence” for me. I did not trust the earth alone. I had seen too much of its shadows: my mother’s drinking, my brothers’ schizophrenia, drug-taking, cops coming to the door, calls in the middle of the night. The stain on the couch from my brother Terry’s greasy head, his last years stuffed full of Thorazine and Haldol by the smug psychiatrists who called him a “troublemaker.” This is what people on earth do, I knew. I went to bed, but throughout Lent, the walk stayed with me, a glimpse of life without the beliefs on which I had entirely based mine. It was a dead thing, and I was afraid. What if it’s all for nothing? I wondered—a fairy tale, as The New Yorker had implied in a commentary a couple of months ago, calling the Bible a patched-together book of absurd, fragmented stories. Not “the word of God is living and effectual, more piercing than any two-edged sword.” What if they were all right and I was wrong? But you to have to live, so I leaned into what has been given to me, a gift which sometimes feels like the caprice of God. Light restored, the men fishing off the breakwater, snow drops pushing their way up in the front garden. I went to Mass throughout Lent, for I believe in discipline, which brings its own reward. Monday night I went to Tenabrae, seeing the candle taken out of the silent church. My neighbors and I listening to a haunting aria, our breaths mingling. Small sobs as we leaned into the darkness. This is what you have to do, I finally saw, comprehending the past few weeks. Go all the way into it. And then I turned back with everyone else, to watch the flickering candle returning. This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills, Winds stampeding the fields under the window Floundering black astride and blinding wet Till day rose; then under an orange sky The hills had new places, and wind wielded Blade-light, luminous black and emerald, Flexing like the lens of a mad eye. At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as The coal-house door. Once I looked up - Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope, The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace, At any second to bang and vanish with a flap; The wind flung a magpie away and a black- Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house Rang like some fine green goblet in the note That any second would shatter it. Now deep In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought, Or each other. We watch the fire blazing, And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on, Seeing the window tremble to come in, Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons. Ted Hughes When I was a kid, my Aunt Gabe took me to Roger Williams Park in Providence. I've always thought about of Fanny, an elephant who lived chained in the elephant house. Round and round, no exit. She has always reminded me of my brother Terry, dead since 1977, who supposedly was "mentally ill", but actually was murdered by this world. Murdered by class and lack of love. Today, more than long gone Terry, watching this I am reminded of all we do not know, and of the beauty and grace of the same world. BY KENNETH REXROTH In the years to come they will say, “They fell like the leaves In the autumn of nineteen thirty-nine.” November has come to the forest, To the meadows where we picked the cyclamen. The year fades with the white frost On the brown sedge in the hazy meadows, Where the deer tracks were black in the morning. Ice forms in the shadows; Disheveled maples hang over the water; Deep gold sunlight glistens on the shrunken stream. Somnolent trout move through pillars of brown and gold. The yellow maple leaves eddy above them, The glittering leaves of the cottonwood, The olive, velvety alder leaves, The scarlet dogwood leaves, Most poignant of all. In the afternoon thin blades of cloud Move over the mountains; The storm clouds follow them; Fine rain falls without wind. The forest is filled with wet resonant silence. When the rain pauses the clouds Cling to the cliffs and the waterfalls. In the evening the wind changes; Snow falls in the sunset. We stand in the snowy twilight And watch the moon rise in a breach of cloud. Between the black pines lie narrow bands of moonlight, Glimmering with floating snow. An owl cries in the sifting darkness. The moon has a sheen like a glacier. |
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