Rilke Conference

The 35th Annual meeting of the International Rilke Society takes place in Boston this weekend.  I am beside myself, because in terms of poetry (and thus life) Rainer Maria Rilke has truly been a patron saint to me over the past several years.  Faced by the breadth of my gratitude and poverty of language, I guess it's best just share one of my favorite poems of Rilke's.  Enjoy.

                                          Aus unendlichen Sehnsüchten steigen
                                          endliche Taten wie schwache Fontänen,
                                          die sich zeitig und zitternd neigen.
                                          Aber, die sich uns sonst verschweigen,
                                          unsere fröhlichen kräfte—zeigen
                                          sich in diesen tanzenden Tränen.

                                          Out of infinite longings rise
                                          finite deeds like weak fountains,
                                          falling back timely and trembling.
                                          And yet, what otherwise remains silent,
                                          our happy energies—show
                                          themselves in these dancing tears.

Hellenic Aspirations and Poetic Constrictions: A Sestina

How long can I sit with this drink
and roll the glass in my hand as smoke
floats around this study,
where the bookcases are dingy
and dusty as my notebook lies open
where crossed-out stanzas are wildly riddled?

Wondering what exactly to write has left me riddled.
Right now words and their ink are not my kind of drink
and I see my schedule has gone up in smoke
and I would love to drop it and go back to bookish study.
My pipe helps my imagination’s corners become less dingy
as I blow smoky frustrations out in the open.

A chill runs up my arm as I see I left the window open,
and shaking it off I see my shelves riddled
with books I’ve read and how I last shared a drink
with Nikos Kazantzakis and Alexi Zorba, who both smoke
every morning over coffee and tell me I can study
life best in tabernas and alleys which are thoroughly dingy.

To wipe the sweat of dancing off my forehead on a dingy
handkerchief and hold my arms wide open
as the evening wind billows in the folds of my sweat-riddled
shirt is a joy few people have the opportunity to drink
in.  There are few who know that the taste of salt and smoke
mingling in meat cooked on the beach is truly worth some study.

The wind blows across my roof and crashes in my study
like waves breaking and scattering the seashells of dingy
papers filled with poems which I ignorantly left out in the open.
Picking them up, I had no idea how my fingerprints had riddled
and blurred the pencil marks nor how my drink
left a ring on the edge of this faintly scribbled poem apparently written in smoke.

So at the end of the day all my study has yielded is this dingy
sestina wrestled from a mind riddled with thoughts telling me to open
the door, step out, and dance in with some poets who like to drink and smoke.

My Study: A Study

 

 

Two Burning Poets

I. Jeremiah 20: 8-9

For the word of the LORD
has become for me a reproach
and derision all day long.

If I say, ''I will not mention him,
or speak any more in his name,''
there is in my heart as it were
a burning fire shut up in my bones,
and I am weary with holding it in,
and I cannot.




II. In Silence
     by Thomas Merton

Be still.
Listen to the stones of the wall.
Be silent, they try
to speak your

name.
Listen
to the living walls.

Who are you?
Who
are you? Whose
silence are you?

Who (be quiet)
are you (as these stones
are quiet). Do not
think of what you are
still less of
what you may one day be.

Rather
be what you are (but who?)
be the unthinkable one
you do not know.

O be still, while
you are still alive,
and all things live around you

speaking (I do not hear)
to your own being,
speaking by the unknown
that is in you and in themselves.

“I will try, like them
to be my own silence:
and this is difficult. The whole
world is secretly on fire. The stones
burn, even the stones they burn me.
How can a man be still or
listen to all things burning?
How can he dare to sit with them
when all their silence is on fire?”

Allegan in Evening

The gentle blur of a sunset,
rests on Allegan's wooded horizon
and I sit with cool summer air,
trembling with the mingled tones
of dew coated frog throats trilling
and hidden insect wings flitting.

This is Nature's loving call across
this amphitheater of fields to me
and I offer a sip from my mug
as a response to her invitation.

As this coffee's strength and sweetness
adorn my mouth's with new decor
my eyes close in order to savor.
For the blaring cicada's siren
signals me that summer is
coming to a close,
so drink it in
deeply.

Taken by my old friend Matt Hallgren

Rilkekonferenz

So I after I decided not to take Dr. Resler's Goethe und Schiller course, I still asked him if he knew any Rilke scholars, who I should check out for my own research interests.  He specialized in older German Romantics and unfortunately Rilke was too modern to be in his field.  Then I got an email from him saying he had a poster for a Rilke conference and so there are a bunch of Rilke scholars on there.  I picked it up today and lo and behold, it's taking place in Boston at the end of the month; Gott sei Dank! 

The 35th Annual Conference of the International Rainer Maria Rilke Society is being hosted by Boston and Harvard Universities this Sept 22-25th and I will be Rilking my brains out.  The theme is "Rilke's Uncollected Poems 1906-1911" (Verstreute Gedichte), which are at the back of my Rilkean volumes and so I've never really gotten into them, though I've been interested in the changes he takes in form.  The conference covers topics specifically pertaining to Rilke's Uncollected Poems (Stimme und Stummheit in ,,Die Auslage des Fischhändlers", Das Ungebildete im Bild) and also metatopics concerning Rilke and the international community (Rilke in Amerika, Rilke in English, Rilke and Wallace Stevens).

The conference is free for students ($120 for normal folks), so if you're in Boston at the end of September and have any interest in Rilke, German, poetry, philosophy, beauty, mystery, romance, love, breathing, or just plain life, you should probably come.

The Summa in My Pocket

Thank God for the printing press.

St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiæ is notorious in the theological world for being massive and complex.  Between today and the foundations of Western thought, Aquinas is the middle of the hourglass in that he synthesized ancient philosophy (Aristotle, Plato, Cicero), non-Christian philosophy (Ibn Sina, Ibn Roschd, Maimonades), Greek Fathers (Pseudo-Dionysius, John Damascene, Origen), Latin Fathers (Augustine, Ambrose, Boethius) within an astounding biblical background.  Besides being a 4-volume Mount Everest of theology, the Summa is also a challenge for some due to its dialectic form.  The quaestio form of the Summa is that each topic is approached with questions, which have arguments and conclusions posited and Aquinas replying to and correcting those positions. While the quaestio form underscores the profundity with which Aquinas considered the theological problems disputed within the Summa, it can also be as dizzying and exhausting as trying to decipher Aquinas' unintelligible handwriting.

My Way of Life was a book written by Frs. Walter Farrell and Martin J. Healy (1952) intended to be a pocket-sized version of St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiæ.  My Way of Life helps translate the Summa into a linear form, while also offering allowing the reader to reflectively enter Aquinas' theological thought.  What emerges is not a laborious work of erudition, but rather an approachable, lively and organic work that carries Aquinas' breadth of spirit, being both mystical and poetic.  This little volume's beauty is not a merely pleasant sprinkling on the Summa's aridity, but rather gives the average reader some insight into the explosive spring of spiritual richness in Aquinas' thought, which has been refreshing theology ever since it was written. 

I've read modern Thomistic scholarship and have a sense of the renaissance in Thomistic theology and the recovery of Thomas' mysticism, sense of beauty and lively dynamism that is thankfully occuring.  But I have to say, these scholars would've gotten it sooner, had they read this little pocket book.  It's a powerhouse and should probably be on every budding theologian's shelf.  The best way to describe this book is a distillation of the Summa.  My Way of Life gets the spirit of the original and like most distilled spirits, what is condensed is potent as Hell (or Heaven in this case).  Don't believe me? Check out the first couple pages and tell me they don't knock you on your ass . . .

CHAPTER I

The One God

THE ROAD THAT STRETCHES before the feet of a man is a challenge to his heart long before it tests the strength of his legs.  Our destiny is to run to the edge of the world and beyond, off into the darkness: sure for all our blindness, secure for all our helplessness, strong for all our weakness, gaily in love for all the pressure on our hearts.


IN THAT DARKNESS beyond the world, we can begin to know the world and ourselves, though we see through the eyes of Another.  We begin to understand that a man was not made to pace out his life behind the prison walls of nature, but to walk into the arms of God on a road that nature could never build.


LIFE MUST BE LIVED, even by those who cannot find the courage to face it.  In the living of it, every mind must meet the rebuff of mystery.  To some men, this will be an exultant challenge: that so much can be known and truth not be exhausted, that so much is still to be sought, that truth is an ocean not to be contained in the pool of a human mind.  To others, this is a humiliation not to be borne; for it marks out sharply the limits of our proud minds.  In the living of life, every mind must face the unyielding rock of reality, of a truth that does not bend to our whim or fantasy, of the rule that measures the life and mind of a man.

IN THE LIVING OF LIFE, every human heart must see problems awful with finality.  There are the obvious problems of death, marriage, the priesthood, religious vows; all unutterably final.  But there are, too, the day to day, or rather moment to moment choices of heaven or hell.  Before every human heart that has ever beat out its allotted measures, the dare of goals as high as God Himself was tossed down: to be accepted, or to be fled from in terror.


GOD HAS SAID SO LITTLE, that yet means so much for our living. To have said more would mean less of reverence by God for the splendor of His image in us.  Our knowing and loving, He insists, must be our own; the truth ours because we have accepted it; the love ours because we have given it.  We are made in His image.  Our Maker will be the last to smudge that image in the name of security, or by way of easing the hazards of the nobility of man.


THE GREAT TRUTHS that must flood the mind of man with light are the limitless perfection of God and the perfectibility of man.  The enticements that must captivate the heart of man are the divine goodness of God and man's gratuitously given capacity to share that divine life, to begin to possess that divine goodness even as he walks among the things of earth.  The truths are not less certain because they are too clear for our eyes.  The task before our heart is not to hold a fickle love but to spend itself.


WITHOUT THESE TRUTHS, and the others that fill out the pattern of a man's days, we are underfed weaklings, starving waifs, paralyzed in our living not only by lack of strength but even more by lack of light.  To live a man must move by the steps of his heart; and how can he move until he can see and be drawn by the beauty of Goodness and Truth?

So much glory, SPF 50 should be recommended.

Buy My Way of Life

An Elegy for Max (+ Sept 2, 2011)

Breaths are like friends.
     They refresh us
           fill our chests
     give us life
and set our hearts aflame.
      Coming and going,
           rising and falling
      and we tend to most take notice
when they are taken away.

You listened, Max, with eager ears
     and while lost in a conversation
         your bright eyes gleamed surprise
     as you found yourself
and decided to breathe.

        Your subtle gasps were like your friends
    You took neither for granted.
Every friend, a breath of fresh air
     (I remember you told me once
         that you sincerely looked up to me).

    But what do we do now?

    There’s a window open.
    But no breeze is blowing.
    Our lungs empty and heavy.
    There are stones in our chests.

        Our breath

        Our friend

    has been taken away . . .

In this moment
     I can see you
         all eyes and smile
     teaching us to gasp
and let Hope in.

Today your chair is empty
     as God guides your feet Home
         and we are sitting here as you
     go on before us all.
God has given you
     The Breath of Life,
         and while in this chair below
             you spent a life looking up at us;

Now we can spend our lives
     all eyes and smiles
         looking up at you.