Anima

[Image: Isle of the Dead (third version), by Arnold Böcklin]

From whiskey river:

Life is a garden,
not a road
we enter and exit
through the same gate
wandering,
where we go matters less
than what we notice

(Bokonon [source: see note below])

…and:

Walking to Oak-Head Pond, and Thinking of
the Ponds I Will Visit in the Next Days and Weeks

What is so utterly invisible
as tomorrow?
Not love,
not the wind,

not the inside of a stone.
Not anything.
And yet, how often I’m fooled —
I’m wading along

in the sunlight —
and I’m sure I can see the fields and the ponds shining
days ahead —
I can see the light spilling

like a shower of meteors
into next week’s trees,
and I plan to be there soon —
and, so far, I am

just that lucky,
my legs splashing
over the edge of darkness,
my heart on fire.

I don’t know where
such certainty comes from —
the brave flesh
or the theater of the mind —

but if I had to guess
I would say that only
what the soul is supposed to be
could send us forth

with such cheer
as even the leaf must wear
as it unfurls
its fragrant body, and shines

against the hard possibility of stoppage —
which, day after day,
before such brisk, corpuscular belief,
shudders, and gives way.

(Mary Oliver, from What Do We Know [source])

Not from whiskey river:

We are nowadays accustomed to the idea that a computer can be set up to solve a mathematical equation. The mathematician means by this that the behaviour of the computer is determined by the equations he wants to solve; were it not so, it would be of no interest to him. On the other hand, if we were to ask a computer engineer to explain what is happening in the computer, he could easily demonstrate that every physical event in it was fully determined (same word) by the laws of physics as applied to the physical components. Any appearance of conflict here would be quite illusory. There is no need for a computer to be open to ‘non-physical influences’ in order that its behaviour may be determined by a (non-physical) equation as well as by the laws of physics. The two ‘claims to determination’ here are not mutually exclusive; rather they are complementary.

(Donald MacKay, from “Brain Science and the Soul,” The Oxford Companion to the Mind (1987))

…and:

Bone

1.
Understand, I am always trying to figure out
what the soul is,
and where hidden,
and what shape —

and so, last week,
when I found on the beach
the ear bone
of a pilot whale that may have died

hundreds of years ago, I thought
maybe I was close
to discovering something —
for the ear bone

2.
is the portion that lasts longest
in any of us, man or whale; shaped
like a squat spoon
with a pink scoop where

once, in the lively swimmer’s head,
it joined its two sisters
in the house of hearing,
it was only

two inches long —
and thought: the soul
might be like this —
so hard, so necessary —

3.
yet almost nothing.
Beside me
the gray sea
was opening and shutting its wave-doors,

unfolding over and over
its time-ridiculing roar;
I looked but I couldn’t see anything
through its dark-knit glare;

yet don’t we all know, the golden sand
is there at the bottom,
though our eyes have never seen it,
nor can our hands ever catch it

4.
lest we would sift it down
into fractions, and facts —
certainties —
and what the soul is, also

I believe I will never quite know.
Though I play at the edges of knowing,
truly I know
our part is not knowing,

but looking, and touching, and loving,
which is the way I walked on,
softly,
through the pale-pink morning light.

(Mary Oliver,  from Why I Wake Early [source])

If you search the Web for information about the British band Lucky Soul, you’ll find a lot of references to things like “retro-pop,” “1960s girl groups,” and so on. (Wikipedia just goes with plain old “pop.) Not all their music seems to fit into this neat pigeonhole; they’ve got a talented songwriter in Andrew Laidlaw, and it’s hard to imagine him submitting indefinitely to such a label. But “Upon Hilly Fields,” from their 2010 album A Coming of Age, is so easy to listen to that you could easily overlook the subtext of heartbreak. (Lyrics below, per usual. Note: I cribbed these from the site of Elefant Records, which displays them as a single paragraph. If anyone knows for sure where the line breaks are supposed to go, please let me know!)

Lyrics:

Upon Hilly Fields
(Lucky Soul)

Ride a blue eyed horse far away from home,
far away from fear into the fields I go.
I took the road less run,
took a lover on a long, cold lonely night
and now sorrow, sorrow wears me like a badge.

But my heart was yours to steal,
as long as the grass grows upon Hilly Fields,
where you took my arms and taught them how to feel.

How I loved you. Put my faith in words,
bet my life on harmony and when the bubble burst
I felt the pain wash over me,
see how the branches bow,
a sad reflection of a love that weighed too much
and toppled, strangled by its wanderlust.

But my heart was yours to steal,
as long as the shadows upon Hilly Fields,
where you took my arms and taught them how to feel.

How I loved you. Sunset and fields turn sepia,
dusk settling deep in your arms,
how could I come to any harm?
But my heart crushed beneath your heel,
and scattered like ashes upon Hilly Fields

where you took my heart, ain’t made of steel,
it cracks when the sun falls upon Hilly Fields,
but if you asked me now if I would do it all again, how I’d love to.

Update: Love that cold lonely nigh,igh,ight effect.

__________________

Note on the “Bokonon” quotation: Bokonon was the pseudonym of a fictional character, Lionel Boyd Johnson, created by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., in Cat’s Cradle. A religion or cult sprang up around his (sometimes harsh, sometimes absurd) epigrams, which frequently pointed up the harsh absurdities of life. (You can find a good collection of the sayings of Bokonon which Cat’s Cradle references here.) The quotation at the top of this post is cited around the Web (not just at whiskey river) as being from Bokonon, sometimes from a work of his called The Lost Book. But I can’t find any such book anywhere — not by Bokonon, anyhow. I suspect the little poem may be the work of someone using “Bokonon” as an online handle/nickname.

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