That Is Magic!

[Note to long-time readers of RAMH: To the extent that I follow anything like a schedule here, I have a tradition of posts appearing on or around April 20 each year (e.g., here and here and here, and of course here (hence the traditional date)). For various reasons, my “April 20” post this year will appear tomorrow, appears here, i.e., on April 21.]

[Image: “As if he grew there, house and all — Together,” by Carol Jacobs-Carre. (Found on Flickr, naturally, and used here under a Creative Commons license; thank you!) After quoting the poem by Thomas Cowper from which she drew the image’s title, the photographer explains: “These snails grab a bit of needles and so forth when they retreat into their shells, making the shell appear ‘dead’. If you look above the snail you can see where it was lying as well as a very small snail shell in the litter.”]

From whiskey river (italicized lines — from the July, 1999, issue of Poetry):

Tomorrow

I

Tomorrow I will start to be happy.
The morning will light up like a celebratory cigar.
Sunbeams sprawling on the lawn will set
dew sparkling like a cut-glass tumbler of champagne.
Today will end the worst phase of my life.

I will put my shapeless days behind me,
fencing off the past, as a golden rind
of sand parts slipshod sea from solid land.
It is tomorrow I want to look back on, not today.
Tomorrow I start to be happy; today is almost yesterday.

II

Australia, how wise you are to get the day
over and done with first, out of the way.
You have eaten the fruit of knowledge, while
we are dithering about which main course to choose.
How liberated you must feel, how free from doubt:

the rise and fall of stocks, today’s closing prices
are revealed to you before our bidding has begun.
Australia, you can gather in your accident statistics
like a harvest while our roads still have hours to kill.
When we are in the dark, you have sagely seen the light.

III

Cagily, presumptuously, I dare to write 2018.
A date without character or tone. 2018.
A year without interest rates or mean daily temperature.
Its hit songs have yet to be written, its new-year
babies yet to be induced, its truces to be signed.

Much too far off for prophecy, though one hazards
a tentative guess—a so-so year most likely,
vague in retrospect, fizzling out with the usual
end-of-season sales; everything slashed:
your last chance to salvage something of its style.

(Dennis O’Driscoll [source])

…and (italicized portion of last paragraph):

Zen was known for its cavalier, if not dismissive, attitude toward words. “To talk about it is to go right by it,” those old Zenmen were fond of saying. And yet no school of Buddhism has generated as much literature. Thousands of books have been written, in the East as well as in the West, about what cannot be expressed by language. I wanted to circle around from behind and maybe catch it unawares…

Whenever I say Zen, people are always correcting me: “It’s Ch’an/Chan (the Wade-Giles and Pin-yin romanizations of the word).” They say, “Zen is the Japanese form of Ch’an. Chinese Ch’an is different from Japanese Zen.” That’s one way of looking at Zen, as a cultural phenomenon. But Chinese Ch’an, Japanese Zen, and Korean Son all point to the same moon of the mind. And there aren’t two kinds of mind.

The reason I like to point with Zen, as opposed to Ch’an, is that I love a good Z… Besides, Zen isn’t Chinese or Japanese anymore. It belongs to anyone willing to see their nature and become a Buddha, anyone who lives the life of no-mind and laughs in these outrageous times.

(Bill Porter [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Beneath the Surface

In a fish cleaning station near the equator,
off the coast of Africa, summer stretches
over the barracudas, their long mirrored-chrome
bodies heaped like eel fillets, slung jaws gaping,
red canine teeth exposed as if they still crave
meat and muscle. Even dead, they are a melancholy fish,
never satisfied, always wanting to bite off
more than they can chew, their curious white eyes
in a lidless showdown with an existence
beyond the visible. Maybe they are the spawn
of the serpent who prowled and tempted Eve,
cast into the saltwater. They are terrifying and defiant,
their pointed heads hammering towards the light,
waiting for the first sign of weakness. The fishermen
catch them hovering just beneath the surface.
What is it like to die with your eyes wide open
in the bright sun?

(Priscilla Lee [source])

…and:

You know, we open up the newspaper in the morning and we focus our eyes on these little inert bits of ink on the page, and we immediately hear voices and we see visions and we experience conversations happening in other places and times. That is magic!

It’s outrageous: as soon as we look at these printed letters on the page we see what they say. They speak to us. That is not so different from a Hopi elder stepping out of her pueblo and focusing her eyes on a stone and hearing the stone speak. Or a Lakota man stepping out and seeing a spider crawling up a tree and focusing his eyes on that spider and hearing himself addressed by that spider. We do just the same thing, but we do it with our own written marks on the page. We look at them, and they speak to us. It’s an intensely concentrated form of animism. But it’s animism nonetheless, as outrageous as a talking stone.

In fact, it’s such an intense form of animism that it has effectively eclipsed all of the other forms of animistic participation in which we used to engage — with leaves, with stones, with winds. But it is still a form of magic.

…our sensing bodies are our direct contact with the rest of the natural world. It is not by being abstract intellects that we are going to fall in love again with the rest of nature. It’s by beginning to honor and value our direct sensory experience: the tastes and smells in the air, the feel of the wind as it caresses the skin, the feel of the ground under our feet as we walk upon it. And how much easier it is to feel that ground if you allow yourself to sense that the ground itself is feeling your steps as you walk upon it.

(David Abram [source])