Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

You're a poet
and don't know it,
but your feet show it--
they're Longfellows!


I don't remember when I first heard this silly little rhyme, but I heard and said it lots growing up. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) remains one of the most recognized names in American poetry, but his reputation faded throughout the 20th century. Readers in the middle years of the 1900s began to value complexity over clarity, and "serious" literature was divorced from "popular" literature, just as if the two couldn't coexist in one work or author. Longfellow fell victim to this split.


But he was wildly popular from the middle of the 19th century well into the 20th. His was the leading name among the group known as the "Fireside Poets," because they were so popular that, back in the days before we had the CSIs and the Law and Orders on every night, people actually sat by the fire and read to each other. The group was also know as the "Schoolroom Poets," because one or all of their pictures could be found on the walls of most any given classroom in America's schools.


Fortunately for Longfellow and his work, recent years have seen a revival of interest in his work as new schools of thought about literature—what it is and what it does—open (or in this case, reopen) works for enjoyment, appreciation and analysis.


This is "Mezzo Cammin," an adaptation of the Italian sonnet form, written when Longfellow was 35 years old, halfway through what he might have considered to be his likely longevity.


Half of my life is gone, and I have let
The years slip from me and have not fulfilled
The aspiration of my youth, to build
Some tower of song with lofty parapet.
Not indolence, nor pleasure, nor the fret
Of restless passions that would not be stilled,
But sorrow, and a care that almost killed,
Kept me from what I may accomplish yet;
Though, halfway up the hill, I see the Past
Lying beneath me with its sounds and sights,—
A city in the twilight dim and vast,
With smoking roofs, soft bells, and gleaming lights,—
And hear above me on the autumnal blast
The cataract of Death far thundering from the heights.


Today, 27 February 2007, is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 200th birthday.

Saturday in the Park

Rather than go to the gym today, I went to Willow Springs park near my house and enjoyed being outside. A good breeze blew through the park, and the gray sky kept things comfortable.

Things I saw:

• kids playing at the edge of the frog pond (where they weren't supposed to be playing, of course)
• a young couple from my church--Cherokee United Methodist--and their two small children
• another couple I've seen at church but don't know
• a waitress from El Torito
• a woman, a friend, from my church, my Sunday School class even, who also works at ETSU
• bluebrown Buffalo Mountain and its range
• smoke from a fire over in the Cherokee Road area, I think
• a father playing guitar on a blanket in the grass, his little boy--close to a year old, maybe--sitting in the grass nearby in a striped shirt and overalls and a bright red cap
• three young men and a girl playing basketball
• an honors student from ETSU
• a young woman who met me on a bicycle several times and smiled every time
• lots of little piles of dog poop either by the trail or on it (watch this blog for an upcoming "Meditation on Poop")

What I listened to: Speaking of Faith's "Approaching Prayer"

http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/approachingprayer/index.shtml

The program included the following: Here's a reading from a collection of Rilke's most religious poetry, translated here by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows.

"I love you, gentlest of Ways, who ripened us as we wrestled with you. You, the great homesickness we could never shake off; you, the forest that always surrounded us; you, the song we sang in every silence; you, dark net threading through us. On the day you made us, you created yourself, and we grew sturdy in your sunlight… Let your hand rest on the rim of Heaven now and mutely bear the darkness we bring over you."

Fridays @ Barberitos

No matter how long or wrong the week has been, no matter how physically or spiritually off kilter I might be, my Friday lunch at Barberitos makes it all seem a little better. The Friday feature is fish--some kind of flaky white fish blackened on the grill with a little jerk sauce. Barberitos advertises the special as fish tacos, but I always get my fish in a burrito made with a spinach tortilla: a "skinny," they call it, with rice, pinto beans, fish, a little cheese, salsa, cilantro, onion, black olives, a spray of lime and a little of their southwestern vinaigrette. I get some chips and salsa verde and a Diet Coke. I eat this lunch alone most of the time, so rather than take up one of their booths or tables, I sit in one of the tall chairs at the window counter. I sit and eat and think and watch the people moving all around the parking lot. People park poorly. They come out of their cars laughing or arguing or not speaking to one another. Many are coming into Barberitos; others are going next door to one of those joints where for six dollars everybody gets the same cut no matter what he or she asks for. Big ones waddle; little ones wriggle. Smokers throw their unfinished cigarettes on the ground as if that weren't littering. They come through the door to eat together in twos and threes and mores, reminding me that I'm there alone. But it's all right. It's okay. When it all nearly breaks in on me, I just take a bite of my green burrito, and the rush of flavor for a moment erases the world. Or becomes the world. It's hard to tell which. And then it's all over but the belching, and I toss my trash and hit the door, calmer in body and spirit than when I came in, almost completely calm but for that little part already anxious for next Friday.

Emily D. Welcomes Spring

According to the calendar, "official" spring is about a month away. But outside my window this morning the birds are singing and whistling and screeching and doing who knows what when no one's looking. These choristers put me in mind of Emily Dickinson's poem 348. . . .


I dreaded that first Robin, so,
But He is mastered, now,
I'm some accustomed to Him grown,
He hurts a little, though--

I thought if I could only live
Till that first Shout got by--
Not all Pianos in the Woods
Had power to mangle me--

I dared not meet the Daffodils--
For fear their Yellow Gown
Would pierce me with a fashion
So foreign to my own--

I wished the Grass would hurry--
So--when 'twas time to see--
He'd be too tall, the tallest one
Could stretch--to look at me--

I could not bear the Bees should come,
I wished they'd stay away
In those dim countries where they go,
What word had they, for me?

They're here, though; not a creature failed--
No Blossom stayed away
In gentle deference to me--
The Queen of Calvary--

Each one salutes me, as he goes,
And I, my childish Plumes,
Lift, in bereaved acknowledgment
Of their unthinking Drums--

Ash Wednesday

T.S. Eliot, from "Ash Wednesday"

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man’s gifts and that man’s scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?

Because I do not hope to know again
The infirm glory of the positive hour
Because I do not think
Because I know I shall not know
The one veritable transitory power
Because I cannot drink
There, where trees flower and springs flow, for there is nothing again

Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessed face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice.


Karen Armstrong:

The center of that poem is when Eliot says, "because I do not hope to turn again, consequently I rejoice, having to construct something upon which to rejoice." And it seemed to me that now my project was if I couldn’t get joy spontaneously anymore, I was going to have to construct my well-being and my life, and even try to manufacture joy as carefully as an engineer will put together an airplane or a piece of intricate technology. This was to be my project, giving up hope of some salvation coming at me from outside myself. And things did take a turn for the better after that. They really did.

Armstrong's comment from the Speaking of Faith program, "The Freelance Monotheism of Karen Armstrong"
http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/armstrong/index.shtml

Text of the entire poem:
http://www.msgr.ca/msgr-7/ash_wednesday_t_s_eliot.htm

Hear Eliot read the poem:
http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/armstrong/ashwednesday.shtml

Things I Don't Like at 48

What follows is a list of things I don't like about being 48. These are, of course, only the mentionable things--

that I have to put on my glasses just to see what I'm putting on this list

that I'm never sure what body part will protest loudest when I roll out of bed in the morning

that my memory won't hold as much as I want or need it to, that it has apparently been full for a while now and that I can't expect an upgrade

that my older son is grown and my younger is nearly so

that time truly flies and that it gets faster as it goes

that almost all the music I like is 15-20 years old, at least

that at work I feel constantly threatened with being sucked into administration

that I have precious little time to read or write and that the little time I have I manage poorly

that friendships from the easy days of childhood are all but gone

that the deeper friendships developed in the days before work and marriage have settled comfortably into the distance

that new and deep friendship seems impossible to establish in the face of the demands of work and home

that it's time for my midlife crisis and that I can't tell what shape it's going to take

that after 9/11 I can no longer trust a clear blue sky

that the world seems to be getting worse rather than better and that this shouldn't have been totally unexpected

that I wrestle with God more than I want to

that I have to leave this list and head out the door to meet yet another commitment

World of Wonders

To some extent I've gotten used to the Internet's wonders. Electronic modes of communication — this blog, for example — have come to seem second nature to me. So have things like browsing the web and "googling" and even, once upon a time, "instant messaging." But, for me, it's all silent communication—brain and nerves and muscle working together down through my arms and to my fingers and out into the massive system of tubes that makes up the Internet.

Until just recently, however, my son has had little interest in the Internet. He rarely does email or anything like that. He does a little research for school when he must, and he plays a few 'net-only games. Mostly, as far as the computer and the Internet go, he searches guitar tabs that help him learn to play parts of his favorite songs.

But he has begun an interesting online experience through his new XBOX 360 and its program "XBOX Live." Through this system, he plays his games just like he would at home. But through his "Live" subscription he is able to play with other people who subscribe. He plays alongside friends in his class at school. He plays alongside gamers from places like New England and "Old" England and Belgium. The "Live" gaming experience includes a headset and microphone so that he can actually talk with these people. He loves to tell me what the British gamers say as they play and how they pronounce his name. Yesterday he got home from school and had a "Live" voice message waiting for him from his friend in Belgium.

Due to circumstances I won't go into here, our family travel has been in fairly narrow circles these last 15 years (although we're hoping to begin expanding). This XBOX experience is opening his eyes to the fact that a world really exists out there beyond the confines of Tennessee, Virginia and North and South Carolina. He's been warned about the dangers of the online world, of course, and I'm watchful. But I'm also excited by his excitement, his discovery of folks like himself, of friends he might never meet in any other way, in any other place. They go on the battlefield in Gears of War, and they strategize and wreak havoc and laugh, and I find it fun to listen through the door of his game room.

This really is more a world of wonders than I ever imagined it was when I was his age.

For S--- A-------

A friend died late last night, and we didn't find out until this morning. Conversation about this woman's energy reminded me of these lines from section six of Whitman's "Song of Myself" (in Leaves of Grass):


. . . The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life and doest not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

Dark Shadows

[Blogger is not paragraphing right tonight.]

* * * This is Barnabas Collins, a 200-year-old New England vampire. He's from Maine, I think. Barnabas is the centerpiece of a 1960s afternoon soap opera called Dark Shadows. The show came on ABC every afternoon--right after General Hospital--for four or five years. I used to run home every afternoon to get the wits scared out of me in broad daylight!

* * * In the early days the show seemed much like a regular soap opera, except for the presence of the vampire. It offered love stories and intrigue, the lives of folks from the coffeeshop waitress to the matriarch of the wealthy Collins family. Later in its run, however, Barnabas was joined by ghosts and witches and werewolves and other vampires. The show even offered time travellers as it took long narrative leaps into New England's Puritan past.

* * * Watching Dark Shadows changed the way I slept. After a time or two of getting scared silly--running outside onto the porch and watching through a window--I began to sleep with heavy cover. I needed to feel the weight of quilts on top of me in order to feel safe in the night. I pulled these up around my throat--winter and summer--and wrapped them around my head like a hood. This has stuck with me to some extent. I still find it difficult to sleep with only a sheet, even in the hottest weather.

* * * Recently I've been renting episodes of Dark Shadows on DVD. It's a silly show. Most of the things the creators thought hip back in the 1960s (and early 1970s) are purely campy now. It's a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants production. And it seems to have been done live, or almost so. Actors stumble over their lines. The lighting is usually bad, and the microphone is often in the shot, either in shadow or in reality.

* * * Dark Shadows is a piece of nostalgia, and, believe it or not, the only thing that scares me these 40 years later is the fact that it scared me in the first place.

Nashville Changes

So, a little more on Nashville. Yesterday, after I left my hotel to go meet Mark and jb for what has become our traditional meeting at Cancun in Bellevue, I drove down 17th Avenue South (the western portion of Nashville's famous Music Row), heading for 21st and a meandering route toward my friends. Almost nothing was as it had been when I lived there in the 1980s. New construction has been squeezed into lots on both sides of the street. Old places have been torn down and new ones erected, often housing the same company. Places have been remodeled to the extent that they're no longer recognizable. My first Nashville abode--1025 17th Avenue S.--still stands, but it's mostly recognizable only by its number. I called a friend who now lives in downtown Knoxville but who used to run around Nashville with me more than anybody else. I was in the midst of leaving on his answering machine a cryptic message about nothing being the same as we used to know it when I was stopped by the red light at the corner of 21st Avenue South (Hillsborough Road) and Blair Blvd. I looked to my right and there sat Brown's Diner, looking exactly like its old self, and I told my friend so in the message. If I hadn't been on my way to eat lunch with old friends, I might have parked and gone in for a cheeseburger and a beer. Maybe I will the next time I'm in town.

P.S. Synchronicity? In a few minutes my Knoxville friend called back, saying that he'd just been somewhere talking with somebody else about the changes in Nashville over the last couple of decades, and he wondered if he'd recognize anything there were he to go back. Then he came home and found my message about Nashville and Brown's Diner on his machine. Since 1983, our friendship has been like that . . . like my friendship with Mark and jb . . . like Brown's Diner.

Nashville

Yesterday I did some work around the office, then drove home and packed and left for Nashville at around 11:00 EST. I had a good sunny drive down through Knoxville and, because I was in something of a hurry, went through a Wendy's drive-thru at I-40's exit 347 (the Rockwood/Harriman exit). As I sat there looking at the menu board, I suddenly realized that I've been stopping at this exit to eat--most often at Wendy's--during my Nashville comings and goings for some 25 years now. That amazes me.

I arrived in Nashville between 2:30 and 3:00 CST and went to the Doubletree Hotel downtown on 4th Avenue North. The conference of the southeastern association of university writing centers was taking place there, and I was to participate on a panel called "Songwriters in the Writing Center," a panel organized by my friend Rob Russell, a rocker who runs the Writing and Communication Center at ETSU. The six of us on the panel--Rob, another Rob from Roan State Community College, Jill and Sam from the Everybody Fields, a Nashville recording artist and songwriter named Steve (I think) and I--each played a song and told about its composition. The two Robs and I--the "academics" of the group--talked about notions of reflection and collaboration that go on in the writing process, and the other three chimed in well on the topic. We had good questions and comments from the audience of 30 or so.

Later in the evening, after checking in at the Embassy Suites Nashville @ Vanderbilt University, I walked over to West End to meet my good friends Mark and jb at the Blackstone. We had a great meal with some great beer and conversation, staying at the place until almost midnight.

Our conversation, as it often does these days, revolved around politics and religion. My friends are much more well read on these topics than I. And they're much more passionate about them.

Maybe it's because I have so much other stuff to read and write that I'm unable to keep up with these kinds of things. Maybe it's because I don't trust politics or religion to interpret and manage this present world for me. I vote, but politics has more and more become like bad television, like roller derby or professional wrestling. It's flamboyant and noisy, going 'round and 'round without a point, strutting its steroid-enhanced muscle in the ring. Religion has become so divisive that on any scale grander than the individual human heart and its closest compadres, it seems to cancel itself out.

So what do I do? I don't know. but I'm reminded of a few lines near the end of a poem by Robert Penn Warren. I don't remember the exact title, but it's somethink like "An Old-time Childhood in Kentucky." The scene is something like this: three generations of males stand before a rock formation. They are an old man, his son and his grandson. The middle of these three looks at the fossil record embedded in the rock and says something that obviously goes against the idea of creation to which the old man--and through love of the old man, the boy--seems to adhere. When the middle man walks away, the boy says to his grandfather something like, "Well, what do we do now, things being what they are?" The following lines (slashes show the end of lines) are the old man's response:

. . . Love / Your wife, love your get, keep your word, and / If need arises die for what men die for. There aren't / Many choices. / And remember that truth doesn't always live in the number of voices.

At around 11:30 today, I was having lunch at Amigo, and on the restaurant's TV, a Super Bowl pregame show was on. Now, I haven't followed this event much in the last few years. I can't remember the last game I actually sat and watched. But I figured that the game must be coming on around 2:00 or so. Imagine my surprise to find out that the game isn't until 6:25! How many hours of pregame stuff is that? Seven, at least!

From the days of Bob Hayes, I've always been a fan of the Dallas Cowboys. My favorite teams were always chosen on the basis of a single player that I loved to watch: the Cowboys via Hayes, the Lakers via Elgin Baylor, the Cubs via Ernie Banks and the Giants via Willie Mays. All of them African-American men, which is interesting.

Anyway, although I didn't know what time today's Super Bowl game is to take place, I did know that it was between the Bears and the Colts. Neither team really moves me, but I'm going to pull for the Colts in memory of my father (1931-1996), who was a Baltimore Colts fan back in the days of Johnny Unitas.

Here's the question that's been somewhere in my mind--the back or the front--for some time now:

"The problem of the nature of faith plagues us all our lives. Is openness to other ideas infidelity or is it the beginning of spiritual maturity?" It's from the writing of Sister Joan Chittister and quoted on a Speaking of Faith installment called "Obedience and Action." Here's how Sister Chittister, in her interview, responds:

Well, you see, the old institutional answer was that it's infidelity. But if you move as a person of faith, immersed in your own — the best of your own spiritual tradition, then you can only come to the other end of that sentence, "It is openness to the best and to the wholeness." We don't have gods, we have God. We are all moving toward that God within the limitations and with all of the gifts that each of these great, seeking traditions gives us in our culture. Now, where all of that is going to come out, it doesn't even bother me. I just know that the Jesus story is my story, that I walk with Jesus, that I feel that presence, that I know that path, and that that path, the path I walk, to me seems very much like the path from Galilee to Jerusalem that Jesus walked, raising women from the dead and curing lepers. I am convinced that where I am going is on just the end of the path that I started years ago.