October 13: "A Meeting," Louise Glück, To Everything

Mary Oliver sees a beautiful woman . . .

A Meeting

by:  Mary Oliver

She steps into the dark swamp

where the long wait ends.

The secret slippery package

drops to the weeds.

She leans her long neck and tongues it

between breaths slack with exhaustion

and after a while it rises and becomes a creature

like her, but much smaller.

So now there are two.  And they walk together

like a dream under the trees.

In early June, at the edge of a field

thick with pink and yellow flowers

I meet them.

I can only stare.

She is the most beautiful woman

I have ever seen.

Her child leaps among the flowers,

the blue of the sky falls over me

like silk, the flowers burn, and I want

to live my life all over again, to begin again,

to be utterly

wild.

Ecclesiastes 3 is one of my favorite Biblical passages:

For everything there is a season, a time for every activity under heaven. A time to be born and a time to die. A time to plant and a time to harvest. A time to kill and a time to heal. A time to tear down and a time to build up. A time to cry and a time to laugh. A time to grieve and a time to dance. A time to scatter stones and a time to gather stones. A time to embrace and a time to turn away. A time to search and a time to quit searching. A time to keep and a time to throw away. A time to tear and a time to mend. A time to be quiet and a time to speak. A time to love and a time to hate. A time for war and a time for peace.

I have to believe that Mary Oliver was well-acquainted with these verses.  Tonight's poem is all about a time to be born--the beautiful doe bringing a secret slippery package into the green world.  Her child soon leaps in pink and yellow flowers, and the new mother walks with her under the dream of the trees.  Seeing them, Oliver wants to be reborn as something untamed and untamable.

Of course, if there is a season of birth, there's also a season of death.  On this Friday the 13th, poet Louise Glück died.  I've always thought of Glück as a poetic cousin to Mary Oliver, both women writing in plain, spare language about nature and love and loss and joy and grief.  Glück was 80-years-old and had won just about every award a writer can win, including the Nobel Prize in Literature three years ago in the middle of the pandemic.

Tonight, as I sit in a hotel room in Calumet, Michigan, typing this post, I am still a little shocked by the news of Glück's passing.  People die every day.  I know this.  It's a 100% certainty--we are all going to stop breathing eventually and become fertilizer or dust or compost.  There are some people, however, who seem as ageless as Betty White.  You just expect them to live forever.  Mary Oliver was one of those people for me, and so was Louise Glück.  (Let's not even go near the fact that she only lived for three years after receiving the Nobel--that kind of sucks.)

But it seems appropriate that Glück took her final bow in October--autumn in the United States--when the maples blaze and morning air bites the throat with coming frost.  It is a perfect time to bid farewell.  That doesn't make the farewell any easier, but a poet knows when to end a poem--what image or word to leave in the mind or on the tongue.  And Glück was a hell of a poet.

So, I raise Louise Glück up to all of my faithful disciples this evening.  She made the universe better, more beautiful with her words.

Saint Marty hopes someone says the same thing about him one day.

A poem by Glück:

Vespers

by:  Louise Glück

In your extended absence, you permit me 

use of earth, anticipating 

some return on investment. I must report 

failure in my assignment, principally 

regarding the tomato plants. 

I think I should not be encouraged to grow 

tomatoes. Or, if I am, you should withhold 

the heavy rains, the cold nights that come 

so often here, while other regions get 

twelve weeks of summer. All this 

belongs to you: on the other hand, 

I planted the seeds, I watched the first shoots 

like wings tearing the soil, and it was my heart 

broken by the blight, the black spot so quickly 

multiplying in the rows. I doubt 

you have a heart, in our understanding of 

that term. You who do not discriminate 

between the dead and the living, who are, in consequence, 

immune to foreshadowing, you may not know 

how much terror we bear, the spotted leaf, 

the red leaves of the maple falling 

even in August, in early darkness: I am responsible 

for these vines.

December 2: Miracles Cannot Happen, Be a Match, Life I was Meant to Live

Merton enters graduate school . . .

Ultimately, I suppose all Oriental mysticism can be reduced to techniques that do the same thing, but in a far more subtle and advanced fashion: and if that is true, it is not mysticism at all. It remains purely in the natural order. That does not make it evil, perse, according to Christian standards: but it does not make it good, in relation to the supernatural. It is simply more or less useless, except when it is mixed up with elements that are strictly diabolical: and then of course these dreams and annihilations are designed to wipe out all vital moral activity, while leaving the personality in control of some nefarious principle, either of his own, or from outside himself. 

It was with all this in my mind that I went and received my diploma of Bachelor of Arts from one of the windows in the Registrar’s office, and immediately afterwards put my name down for some courses in the Graduate School of English. 

The experience of the last year, with the sudden collapse of all my physical energy and the diminution of the brash vigor of my worldly ambitions, had meant that I had turned in terror from the idea of anything so active and uncertain as the newspaper business. This registration in the graduate school represented the first remote step of a retreat from the fight for money and fame, from the active and worldly life of conflict and competition. If anything, I would now be a teacher, and live the rest of my life in the relative peace of a college campus, reading and writing books. 

That the influence of the Huxley book had not, by any means, lifted me bodily out of the natural order overnight is evident from the fact that I decided to specialize in eighteenth century English Literature, and to choose my subject for a Master of Arts Thesis from somewhere in that century. As a matter of fact, I had already half decided upon a subject, by the time the last pile of dirty snow had melted from the borders of South Field. It was an unknown novelist of the second half of the eighteenth century called Richard Graves. The most important thing he wrote was a novel called the Spiritual Quixote, which was in the Fielding tradition, a satire on the more excited kind of Methodists and other sects of religious enthusiasts in England at that time. 

I was to work under Professor Tyndall, and this would have been just his kind of a subject. He was an agnostic and rationalist who took a deep and amused interest in all the strange perversions of the religious instinct that our world has seen in the last five hundred years. He was just finishing a book on D. H. Lawrence which discussed, not too kindly, Lawrence’s attempt to build up a synthetic, home-made religion of his own out of all the semi-pagan spiritual jetsam that came his way. All Lawrence’s friends were very much annoyed by it when it was published. I remember that in that year one of Tyndall’s favorite topics of conversation was the miracles of Mother Cabrini, who had just been beatified. He was amused by these, too, because, as for all rationalists, it was for him an article of faith that miracles cannot happen. 

I was once like Thomas Merton, heading into graduate school, so certain of what I was going to do.  Who I was going to become.  In graduate school, I was influenced by a lot of people, friends and teachers and mentors.  For Merton, it was Professor Tyndall, agnostic, skeptic, non-believer in anything miraculous.  Merton had an idea of who he was going to become, too.  Just like me.  And, of course, just like me, he turned out to be someone completely different.

You see, I thought I was going to be an important intellectual.  A college professor.  Best-selling writer.  Nobel Prize-winning poet.  I was going to set the world on fire.  With myself.  I was going to be a match, igniting everything and everyone with my light.  

Now, decades later, I realize how stupid I was.  I'm sure Merton thought the same thing.  Time has a way of doing that.  Making you reevaluate.  I'm sure there are thousands of failed bestselling writers out there.  People who dreamed they were going to be the next Stephen King.  Just like there are probably a lot of former English graduate students out there who thought they were going to be Seamus Heaney or Louise Gluck.

Here's the thing:  there is only one Stephen King.  One Louise Gluck.  And there is only one me.  We can spend years and years and years trying to be someone else.  I was like that.  I fought being the person I was supposed to be.  I wanted to be a fiction writer.  A full-time professor at a big university.  Rich, famous, loved.  A big shot, as my dad used to say.  

The universe had different plans for me.  Better plans.  I became a teacher.  That gives me purpose.  A poet.  That gives me empathy, insight.  A church musician.  That gives me spiritual connection.  A husband and father.  That gives me love.  I have a better life than I ever imagined when I was in graduate school.

You see, unlike Merton's mentor, I do believe in miracles.  I think we are surrounded by them, all day, every day.  We live them.  Live with them.  My wife is a miracle, for all the struggles we have.  My daughter and son.  Miracles.  Every poem I write--a gift, a miracle.  Sitting here, writing this blog post.  A miracle. 

This life I was mean to live.  A miracle.

Saint Marty gives thanks for that.

November 29-30: Supernatural Order, Mother COVID-Positive, Mystery

 Merton learns something about the supernatural order of the universe . . . 

Moral theologians say that the mendacium jocosum in itself does not exceed a venial sin. 

Seymour and Lax were rooming together in one of the dormitories, for Bob Gibney, with whom Lax had roomed the year before, had now graduated, and was sitting in Port Washington with much the same dispositions with which I had been sitting in Douglaston, facing a not too dissimilar blank wall, the end of his own blind-alley. He occasionally came in to town to see Dona Eaton who had a place on 112th Street, but no job, and was more cheerful about her own quandary than the rest of us, because the worst that could happen to her was that she would at last run completely out of money and have to go home to Panama. 

Gibney was not what you would call pious. In fact, he had an attitude that would be commonly called impious, only I believe God understood well enough that his violence and sarcasms covered a sense of deep metaphysical dismay—an anguish that was real, though not humble enough to be of much use to his soul. What was materially impiety in him was directed more against common ideas and notions which he saw or considered to be totally inadequate, and maybe it subjectively represented a kind of oblique zeal for the purity of God, this rebellion against the commonplace and trite, against mediocrity, religiosity. 

During the year that had passed, I suppose it must have been in the spring of 1937, both Gibney and Lax and Bob Gerdy had all been talking about becoming Catholics. Bob Gerdy was a very smart sophomore with the face of a child and a lot of curly hair on top of it, who took life seriously, and had discovered courses on Scholastic Philosophy in the graduate school, and had taken one of them. 

Gibney was interested in Scholastic Philosophy in much the same way as James Joyce was—he respected its intellectuality, particularly that of the Thomists, but there was not enough that was affective about his interest to bring about any kind of a conversion. 

For the three or four years that I knew Gibney, he was always holding out for some kind of a “sign,” some kind of a sensible and tangible interior jolt from God, to get him started, some mystical experience or other. And while he waited and waited for this to come along, he did all the things that normally exclude and nullify the action of grace. So in those days, none of them became Catholics. 

The most serious of them all, in this matter, was Lax: he was the one that had been born with the deepest sense of Who God was. But he would not make a move without the others. 

And then there was myself Having read The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy and having discovered that the Catholic conception of God was something tremendously solid, I had not progressed one step beyond this recognition, except that one day I had gone and looked up St. Bernard’s De Diligendo Deo in the catalogue of the university library. It was one of the books Gilson had frequently mentioned: but when I found that there was no good copy of it, except in Latin, I did not take it out. 

Now it was November 1937. One day, Lax and I were riding downtown on one of those busses you caught at the corner of 110th Street and Broadway. We had skirted the southern edge of Harlem, passing along the top of Central Park, and the dirty lake full of rowboats. Now we were going down Fifth Avenue, under the trees. Lax was telling me about a book he had been reading, which was Aldous Huxley’s Ends and Means. He told me about it in a way that made me want to read it too. 

So I went to Scribner’s bookstore and bought it, and read it, and wrote an article about it, and gave the article to Barry Ulanov who was editor of Review by that time. He accepted the article with a big Greek smile and printed it. The smile was on account of the conversion it represented, I mean the conversion in me, as well as in Huxley, although one of the points I tried to make was that perhaps Huxley’s conversion should not have been taken as so much of a surprise. 

Huxley had been one of my favorite novelists in the days when I had been sixteen and seventeen and had built up a strange, ignorant philosophy of pleasure based on all the stories I was reading. And now everybody was talking about the way Huxley had changed. The chatter was all the more pleasant because of Huxley’s agnostic old grandfather—and his biologist brother. Now the man was preaching mysticism. 

Huxley was too sharp and intelligent and had too much sense of humor to take any of the missteps that usually make such conversions look ridiculous and oafish. You could not laugh at him, very well—at least not for any one concrete blunder. This was not one of those Oxford Group conversions, complete with a public confession. 

On the contrary, he had read widely and deeply and intelligently in all kinds of Christian and Oriental mystical literature, and had come out with the astonishing truth that all this, far from being a mixture of dreams and magic and charlatanism, was very real and very serious. 

Not only was there such a thing as a supernatural order, but as a matter of concrete experience, it was accessible, very close at hand, an extremely near, an immediate and most necessary source of moral vitality, and one which could be reached most simply, most readily by prayer, faith, detachment, love. 

Apprehending God concretely.  I think we all spend most of our lives trying to do that.  Some people through poetry.  Others through science.  It's all about trying to understand mystery.  Things we just can't figure out in our normal, limited, human way.  It takes a force that transcends kitchen tables and bills and jobs.  Merton hits the nail on the head here, to use that hackneyed expression.  It's about faith and prayer.  And love, most of all.

I received word yesterday afternoon that my mother has tested positive for COVID.  She's in the nursing home and has been moved to the COVID wing.  She's out of my reach.  Out of all of our reaches.  We can't visit, so we have to rely on reports from the nurses and managers.  Feeling this powerless is a painful thing.  Poet Louise Gluck writes, "From the beginning of time, in childhood, I thought that pain meant I was not loved.  It meant I loved."

Love.  This is where mystery comes in.  I have no idea what is going to happen with my mother.  She has terrible asthma.  Diabetes.  Alzheimer's.  Macular degeneration has taken much of her eyesight, and her hearing is almost gone, as well.  If I were to walk into her room tonight, I'm not sure she would know who I was.  Yet, I have to trust that she will be well.  Trust in God.  Poetry.  The universe.  Love.

Everything is going to be alright.

That doesn't mean there won't be pain.  To be alive means you will experience pain.  It's inevitable.  In some way, my mother will be healed.  The form of that healing is, again, out of my hands.  As with most powerful forces--hurricanes, blizzards, tidal waves, avalanches, love, healing--there is some devastation left in its aftermath.  Relief sometimes--homes spared from fire, lost children found.  Tears other times--neighborhoods blown into splinters, loved ones taken away.  It depends how the wind blows, the water rises, the healing manifests.

That is the greatest mystery that we all face.  We can try to hide from it, which is futile.  Or we can embrace it.  Open ourselves up.  Wade into the storm.

Tonight, I am waist-deep in flood water, sending faith, hope, and love to my mother.  I know that I sound like I'm paraphrasing Corinthians.  However, Saint Paul got things right every once in a while.  The greatest force in the universe is love, and all the pain that accompanies it.

Saint Marty loves.  Therefore, Saint Marty hurts.  That is the mystery.  That is the miracle.

October 9: Vague Spilling of the Emotions, Matter of Choice, "After Judith Minty"

Merton speaks more about Mark Van Doren . . . 

Mark would come into the room and, without any fuss, would start talking about whatever was to be talked about. Most of the time he asked questions. His questions were very good, and if you tried to answer them intelligently, you found yourself saying excellent things that you did not know you knew, and that you had not, in fact, known before. He had “educed” them from you by his question. His classes were literally “education”—they brought things out of you, they made your mind produce its own explicit ideas. Do not think that Mark was simply priming his students with thoughts of his own, and then making the thought stick to their minds by getting them to give it back to him as their own. Far from it.  What he did have was the gift of communicating to them something of his own vital interest in things, something of his manner of approach: but the results were sometimes quite unexpected—and by that I mean good in a way that he had not anticipated, casting lights that he had not himself foreseen. 

Now a man who can go for year after year—although Mark was young then and is young now—without having any time to waste in flattering and cajoling his students with any kind of a fancy act, or with jokes, or with storms of temperament, or periodic tirades—whole classes spent in threats and imprecations, to disguise the fact that the professor himself has come in unprepared—one who can do without all these non-essentials both honors his vocation and makes it fruitful. Not only that, but his vocation, in return, perfects and ennobles him. And that is the way it should be, even in the natural order: how much more so in the order of grace! 

Mark, I know, is no stranger to the order of grace: but considering his work as teacher merely as a mission on the natural level—I can see that Providence was using him as an instrument more directly than he realized. As far as I can see, the influence of Mark’s sober and sincere intellect, and his manner of dealing with his subject with perfect honesty and objectivity and without evasions, was remotely preparing my mind to receive the good seed of scholastic philosophy. And there is nothing strange in this, for Mark himself was familiar at least with some of the modern scholastics, like Maritain and Gilson, and he was a friend of the American neo-Thomists, Mortimer Adler and Richard McKeon, who had started out at Columbia but had had to move to Chicago, because Columbia was not ripe enough to know what to make of them. 

The truth is that Mark’s temper was profoundly scholastic in the sense that his clear mind looked directly for the quiddities of things, and sought being and substance under the covering of accident and appearances. And for him poetry was, indeed, a virtue of the practical intellect, and not simply a vague spilling of the emotions, wasting the soul and perfecting none of our essential powers. 

It was because of this virtual scholasticism of Mark’s that he would never permit himself to fall into the naive errors of those who try to read some favorite private doctrine into every poet they like of every nation or every age. And Mark abhorred the smug assurance with which second-rate leftwing critics find adumbrations of dialectical materialism in everyone who ever wrote from Homer and Shakespeare to whomever they happen to like in recent times. If the poet is to their fancy, then he is clearly seen to be preaching the class struggle. If they do not like him, then they are able to show that he was really a forefather of fascism. And all their literary heroes are revolutionary leaders, and all their favorite villains are capitalists and Nazis. 

It was a very good thing for me that I ran into someone like Mark Van Doren at that particular time, because in my new reverence for Communism, I was in danger of docilely accepting any kind of stupidity, provided I thought it was something that paved the way to the Elysian fields of classless society.

Merton seems to agree with Mark Van Doren's understanding of poetry as a "virtue of the practical intellect." Poetry is something that perfects the human condition, or expresses aspects of the human condition practically, without the messiness of human ideologies that seek to define the universe in terms of economic or class distinctions. Of course, Merton is a Trappist monk. Therefore, his understanding of the universe is seen through the lens of Catholic monasticism. Poet Kathleen Norris writes of Merton, "Merton has a mystic's sense of unity, and in his poems, he wants to bring as much together as he can. Sometimes he does it with monastic simplicity . . . but Merton can also insist on plenitude, and a wild extravagance flowers in much of his work."

Simplicity and wild extravagance. I don't think there is a better description of poetry than this. Poetry, through its razor-sharp language, pares truth down to its elements. But poetry embraces all the beauty and ugliness of life, as well--joy, grief, ecstasy, despondency. It's all there. That's why, in the lowest times of my life, I've turned to poetry for solace, and, in the highest times, I've sought out poetry to give voice to my abounding happiness.

Today has been good. And by good, I mean that nothing terrible has happened, and a lot of small blessings have filled my hours. I worked, picked up Thai food for dinner, listened to a poetry reading by new Nobel Laureate Louise Glück on my way home. My son went to school (which may not sound like a huge accomplishment, but it was). My daughter's Covid test came back negative (after a week of symptoms). In the evening, I cleaned a church with my wife, and we listened to a good channel of 1980s music as we disinfected and sanitized. When I got back to our house, I took a shower and then napped.

All these little blessings added up to a day of grace. I think a lot of people look for happiness in huge things. Like winning the lottery or the Nobel Prize in Literature. Don't get me wrong. Those things are wonderful, and I wouldn't turn either of them down. However, real happiness has nothing to do with these externals. I saw a short video of Louise Glück leaving her house on the afternoon she won the Nobel, after a day that I'm sure was filled with non-stop phone calls and e-mails and whatnot. She looked absolutely frazzled as she faced the hoard of reporters and photographers outside her home, and she wasn't very gracious in answering their shouted questions. She just wanted to get into the waiting SUV and escape. She didn't look like she was enjoying herself very much.

Now, part of me thinks, "Suck it up. You've just been given the most prestigious literary prize in the world, and over a million dollars to boot." But the other part of me (the nicer part) thinks, "Yeah, I get it. You had a comfortable, ordered life, and it's never going to be the same again. No more anonymous trips to Starbucks or McDonalds. I'm sorry." Louise Glück, from here on out, is Nobel Laurate Louise Glück, with all the accompanying trappings wherever she goes.

Me? I have been granted 18 or so hours of small goodnesses, leading up to me writing this post. It wasn't a perfect 18 or so hours. I didn't get a phone call from the Swedish Academy in the early morning. Wasn't hounded by phone calls and reporters all day. All of my current problems are still problems. But I didn't let all of these small annoyances avalanche into a Sisyphean boulder.

Because happiness really is a matter of choice,

And today, Saint Marty chose happiness, in all its poetic simplicity and wild extravagance.

And a poem of feathered happiness . . .

After Judith Minty

by:  Martin Achatz

for Helen and Gala

Two people.  Two poets.  Two friends.  Surrounded by the long sunlight of coming dusk.  By a lake.  Wind.  Water rucked like a slept-on bed.  Green everywhere.  Clover.  Birch leaves with palms waving.  And green sounds.  Happy kid screams.  The squeal of swing chains.

I watch these two people, two poets, two friends bent over notebooks, pens moving, creating something out of nothing on the winter of their paper.  Great looping somethings.  Smaller, lined somethings.  This July night, in this place, with these two, somethings that haven't drawn breath before will take form--skeleton, muscle, organ, skin, thought, emotion.

It will be something feathered, like Emily said.  Something purple, like Judith said.  It didn't exist yesterday, might not exist tomorrow.  But tonight, it sits in the branches of my ribs, beats against my lungs with its wings.

I will name it, even though I rarely allow myself that luxury.  I will open my mouth, and let it fly from between my lips.  To my friends, my poets, my people.  I will let it flit between us with its lilac-ness, violet-ness, grape-ness.

Listen.  Hear it.  It's there. 

Hope.

October 5-8: Mark Van Doren, Saint Marty's Day, Good News

 Thomas Merton meets one of his heroes . . . 

Soon I was full of all the economic and pseudo-scientific jargon appropriate to a good Columbia man, and was acclimated to the new atmosphere which I found so congenial. That was true. Columbia, compared with Cambridge, was a friendly place. When you had to go and see a professor or an advisor or a dean about something, he would tell you, more or less simply, what you needed to know. The only trouble was that you usually had to wait around for about half an hour before you got a chance to see anybody. But once you did, there were no weird evasions and none of the pompous beating about the bush, mixed up with subtle academic allusions and a few dull witticisms which was what you were liable to get out of almost anybody at Cambridge, where everybody cultivated some special manner of his own, and had his own individual and peculiar style. I suppose it is something that you have to expect around a university, this artificiality. For a man to be absolutely sincere with generation after generation of students requires either supernatural simplicity or, in the natural order, a kind of heroic humility. 

There was—and still is—one man at Columbia, or rather one among several, who was most remarkable for this kind of heroism. I mean Mark Van Doren.

The first semester I was at Columbia, just after my twentieth birthday, in the winter of 1935, Mark was giving part of the “English sequence” in one of those rooms in Hamilton Hall with windows looking out between the big columns on to the wired-in track on South Field. There were twelve or fifteen people with more or less unbrushed hair, most of them with glasses, lounging around. One of them was my friend Robert Gibney. 

It was a class in English literature, and it had no special bias of any kind. It was simply about what it was supposed to be about: the English literature of the eighteenth century. And in it literature was treated, not as history, not as sociology, not as economics, not as a series of case-histories in psychoanalysis but, mirabile dictu, simply as literature. 

I thought to myself, who is this excellent man Van Doren who being employed to teach literature, teaches just that: talks about writing and about books and poems and plays: does not get off on a tangent about the biographies of the poets or novelists: does not read into their poems a lot of subjective messages which were never there? Who is this man who does not have to fake and cover up a big gulf of ignorance by teaching a lot of opinions and conjectures and useless facts that belong to some other subject? Who is this who really loves what he has to teach, and does not secretly detest all literature, and abhor poetry, while pretending to be a professor of it? 

That Columbia should have in it men like this who, instead of subtly destroying all literature by burying and concealing it under a mass of irrelevancies, really purified and educated the perceptions of their students by teaching them how to read a book and how to tell a good book from a bad, genuine writing from falsity and pastiche: all this gave me a deep respect for my new university.

We've all had people like Mark Van Doren in our lives--people we look up to, who teach us how to be better than we are.  For Merton, Van Doren is the embodiment of everything a student of literature should be.  It's all about the text.  No external psychological or sociological or political distractions.  Just words on a page.  Only words on a page.

I apologize for my long absence.  It has been an eventful Saint Marty's Day week.  Lots to celebrate.  Cupcakes to eat.  Presents to receive and open.  I am a man who has been blessed with family and close friends who really care about me.  So, these last few days have been a true affirmation of all the grace present in my life.  Yes, I sometimes struggle and curse and stare into the abyss.  I'm a poet.  That's what I'm supposed to do.  However, in spite of it all, above all, I am incredibly lucky to love and be loved.  

On Saint Marty's Day, I announced to the world the good news that I will be starting a new job in the middle of October.  In many ways, it's a dream job, utilizing all of my creative skills.  I will be the Adult Programming Coordinator at Peter White Public Library in Marquette, Michigan.  That means I get to plan cool events like readings and concerts and presentations and podcasts and art exhibitions.  In a year that has been characterized by so much strife and grief, I am holding onto this moment of light.

Another moment of light came to me the day after Saint Marty's Day.  I was driving my son home from a doctor's appointment, listening to Garrison Keillor's latest book, The Lake Wobegone Virus.  My son asked me to turn off the sound system in the car.  I did.  Then, my son shared a truth about himself with me.  (I will not talk about this truth.  That is my son's story to tell.)

After he was done talking, I told him that I loved him, would always love him.  I told him he was surrounded by love, would always be surrounded by love.  And then I said, "You know what?"  

He said, "What?" 

"You're my hero," I said.  

He looked at me as if I had just recited a Shakespearean sonnet.

"What you just did was really brave," I said, "and you're a hero for doing it."

I'm not sure if he really understood what I was saying, but I wanted him to hear me say it.  He said, "You can turn your book back on."

I shook my head.  "I don't really want to," I said.  And I didn't.  Instead, we rode the rest of the way in each other's silences.  A comfortable silence, unencumbered by unsaid things.  It was another Saint Marty's Day blessing.

And today, this morning, American poet Louise Glück won the Nobel Prize for Literature.  I was kinda hoping it was my year to be named, but, alas, it was not meant to be.  Instead, I celebrate that a poet won.  A poet that I admire greatly, with a view of the universe that it uncompromising and starkly beautiful.

Tonight, Saint Marty gives thanks for this week of blessings and graces.  For opening doors.  For feast days and inspired words.  But, especially, Saint Marty gives thanks for his son's bravery and honesty.  Thank you, Lord.

October 28: Hermione Granger, Louise Gluck, "All Hallows"

A good friend of mine has really liked my Halloween poems, but she has been troubled that one particular Halloween denizen has not received attention:  the witch.

This omission is not due to any kind of hetero-normative male agenda on my part.  I fully support feminist causes.  My best friends are female.  My favorite Harry Potter character is Hermione Granger.  I voted for Hillary.  My wife often tells me that I'm practically a woman.

Saint Marty gives the witch her due today.

All Hallows

by:  Louise Gluck

Even now this landscape is assembling.

The hills darken. The oxen

sleep in their blue yoke,

the fields having been

picked clean, the sheaves

bound evenly and piled at the roadside

among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:

This is the barrenness

of harvest or pestilence.

And the wife leaning out the window

with her hand extended, as in payment,

and the seeds

distinct, gold, calling

Come here

Come here, little one

And the soul creeps out of the tree.

June 26: Glass of Whiskey, My Plan, Louise Gluck, "Utopia," New Cartoon

Walking back from the park the day he had been told of his son's decision about the priesthood, he [Ives] went upstairs to his apartment.  His head aching, he drank a glass of whiskey with water and took a couple of aspirins, a twisting feeling shooting through his stomach when he realized his son was serious about his vocation.  Two whiskeys and Ives almost started to feel better.  Then he decided to watch some television, with its unpleasant war news, and--just like that--a quickly consuming bout of stomach cramps came over him.  Washing up, he decided to visit with Ramirez.

Ives' life is not turning out the way he imagined.  His son, Robert, has just told him he's planning to enter the priesthood.  His artistic ambitions have been sidelined by the responsibilities of family.  His work isn't gracing the walls of MoMA.  Instead, it's selling furniture polish in magazines.  Like most people, Ives had dreams, and those dreams have given way to reality.  And that reality is by no means utopian.

Life rarely turns out the way you expect.   I never saw myself working in the health care profession.  I hate being around hospitals and nursing homes and sick people.  Yes, a few dreams have come true for me.  I am a published author.  I teach at a university.  In my spare time, I play in a church praise band.  Music and poetry are a big part of my life.  All those things were a part of my plan.

However, God had other plans for my life.  I have two beautiful kids.  Didn't plan that.  I have a wonderful wife who happens to have bipolar disorder.  Didn't plan that.  My house is small and in need of a lot of repairs currently.  Didn't plan that, either.  Yet, like Ives, I've learned that God's plans for me are bigger and better than anything I could have imagined.

For instance, if it weren't for my daughter's wanting to study ballet, I never would have realized how much I love the art of dance.  If it weren't for my wife, I never would have developed my passion for educating people about mental illness.  If it weren't for my son, I wouldn't know my capacity for love is so bottomless.  Better plans.

So, the upshot of my post today is that perfect lives don't exist.  Movie stars die of drug overdoses.  Siblings get seriously ill.  Presidents start wars.  Parents come down with Alzheimer's.  Terrorists behead humanitarian workers.  Utopia is a fallacy.  But God can take any pile of manure and make daffodils grow.

Saint Marty tries to keep his eyes on the flowers instead of the shit.

Utopia

by:  Louise Gluck

When the train stops, the woman said, you must get on it.  But how will I know, the child asked, it is the right train?  It will be the right train, said the woman, because it is the right time.  A train approached the station; clouds of grayish smoke streamed from the chimney.  How terrified I am, the child thinks, clutching the yellow tulips she will give to her grandmother.  Her hair has been tightly braided to withstand the journey.  Then, without a word, she gets on the train, from which a strange sound comes, not in a language like the one she speaks, something more like a moan or a cry.

Confessions of Saint Marty

June 26: Eucharist, Visions of God, Silent Fairy Tale, Louise Gluck, "The Horse and Rider"

His [Ives'] strongest feelings about Him, it seemed, came about on Sundays, when, at around eleven, all the church bells in the neighborhood rang.  On his way to High Mass with his family, he always felt as though they were partaking in a special ceremony, like a royal wedding or a pharaonic rite out of ancient Egypt.  In the good weather a crowd always gathered on the church steps, the ladies in their bright dresses and white gloves, their light blue and pink and white hats with bird pins and veils; the men in suits; a special occasion, the marriage of the spirit to the flesh, Ives would later think in those dramatic moments when, closing his eyes, he knelt by the communion rail and awaited the Eucharist.

Ives pictures God in many ways.  He sees God as the vaporous goodness of people; an all-knowing Eye watching over the human race; colored winds circling in the sky; and the Charlton Heston version, with white beard and booming voice.  But his favorite vision of God comes at Christmas--a little infant in a manger, surrounded by adoring people and animals.  Above all, Ives sees God as a force of love.

I think that's the reason I'm drawn to Mr. Ives' Christmas. The different versions of God.  Through the centuries, Christians have depicted God in many ways.  The European version was closely related to the ancient Greek depictions of Zeus--bearded and bare-chested, stretching His arm out across the heavens.  Of course, the Europeans also painted Christ as sandy-haired and blue-eyed and white-skinned.

I'm not sure I have a clear notion of what God looks like.  I'm not against a God that's feminine.  After all, God is the Creator of all things.  S/he gave birth to the universe and everything in it.  The only reason we say "Our Father, who art in heaven" instead of "Our Mother, who art in heaven" is because ancient Israel was a patriarchal society.  Men ruled and women served, for the most part.

Currently, I have a more inclusive vision of God in my mind, a Being Who is both female and male.  After all, God created man and woman in His/Her likeness.  That means that Adam and Eve were both reflections of God's image.  Don't misunderstand me.  I don't think God has breasts and a penis.  No.  I mean that God is an Entity of both male and female spirit.

I know this is pretty deep stuff for a Friday night.  I'm sorry.  I've been thinking about God a lot this week.  My sister, the one who's been so ill, is back in the hospital in ICU.  This time a neurologist has been consulted, and she determined that my sister has swelling in both ventricles of her brain.  That would account for my sister's rapidly changing mental status and her inability to focus or keep her eyes still.  Today, my sister had an MRI, and tomorrow she will undergo a lumbar puncture.  The neurologist wants to determine the source of the brain infection.

So, I've been talking to God a great deal these last few days.  God the Father.  God the Mother.  God the Son.  God the Spirit.

Once upon a time there was a friar named Humboldt.  Humboldt lived a simple life in a monastery, getting up to pray before sunrise, eating oatmeal for breakfast, praying all morning, eating oatmeal for lunch, praying all afternoon, eating oatmeal for dinner, and then praying all evening until he went to bed.

Humboldt had taken a vow of silence.  He hadn't spoken in almost 60 years.  One night, Humboldt fell very ill and took to his bed.  The other friars of the monastery nursed him, tried to make him eat oatmeal and drink cold water.  However, after a few days, it was obvious that Humboldt was dying.

The head of the monastery came to Humboldt's bedside and said, "Friar Humboldt, you have been a good and faithful servant of God all your life.  Please, before you go to heaven, impart on me the wisdom you have gained from all your years of silent devotion."

Humboldt opened his mouth and cleared his throat.  With much effort, he took a deep breath and spoke his first words in 60 years:  "Oatmeal is lumpy."

The head of the monastery looked at Humboldt and shook his head.  "All you ever do is complain."

Moral of the story:  Stir your oatmeal as you cook it.

And Saint Marty lived happily ever after.

The Horse and Rider

by:  Louise Gluck

Once there was a horse, and on the horse there was a rider.  How handsome they looked in the autumn sunlight, approaching a strange city!  People thronged the streets or called from the high windows.  Old women sat among flowerpots.  But when you looked about for another horse or another rider, you looked in vain.  My friend, said the animal, why not abandon me?  Alone, you can find your way here.  But to abandon you, said the other, would be to leave a part of myself behind, and how can I do that when I do not know which part you are?

What's your vision of God?

June 25: Tedious, Why I Write, Louise Gluck, "The Couple in the Park"

At first, the job in itself, as an illustrator, was not so hard as tedious, his hours spent with some rather dull assignments. . . 

Ives finally takes a full-time job with the Mannis Advertising Agency when he's a young husband and father.  He realizes he has to give up his artistic ambitions to be a struggling painter for more pragmatic ambitions:  a steady income and health insurance.  It's a choice many artistic people are forced to make.  Not everybody wants to live the life of William Faulkner or Vincent van Gogh.

Many years ago, I realized that I needed to alter my expectations.  I had a pregnant wife and was a part-time book store clerk and adjunct English instructor.  Everything about my life was unstable, transient.  I needed to provide for my family.  Do I sometimes play the game of "what if"?  Of course.  I sometimes feel like an absolute failure in the game of life.

Tonight, my book club met.  We read My One and Only Bomb Shelter, a collection of stories by my friend and colleague, John Smolens.  John is a fantastic writer and one of the most humble, articulate writers I know.  Every time I talk to him, invite him to my house, he reminds me why I write.  John quite matter-of-factly says that writing has saved his life, kept him sane through a lot of difficult times.  Writing helps him understand the world.

I don't have much to add to his answer.  I write because not to write would be something akin to death.  I think any writer would agree with John, including Louise Gluck.

And Saint Marty.

The Couple in the Park

by:  Louise Gluck

A man walks alone in the park and beside him a woman walks, also alone.  How does one know?  It is as though a line exists between them, like a line on a playing field.  And yet, in a photograph they might appear a married couple, weary of each other and of the many winters they have endured together.  At another time, they might be strangers about to meet by accident.  She drops her book; stooping to pick it up, she touches, by accident, his hand and her heart springs open like a child's music box.  And out of the box comes a little ballerina made of wood.  I have created this, the man thinks; though she can only whirl in place, still she is a dancer of some kind, not simply a block of wood.  This must explain the puzzling music coming from the trees.

Not really willing to lose an ear for my art just yet...

June 24: London, Youthful Passion, Louise Gluck, "The Open Window"

It had been a lovely trip, London everything they had wanted and imagined--for Annie, reading selections from several Dickens novels at the time, it was an enchantment; they took strolls through the Queen's gardens, fed the swans in Regents Park; tried to envision the shantytowns that Dickens had once written about, along the Thames, the city's architecture sometimes suspending their notion of modern time.  In fact, out of their usual context for a glorious period of several weeks, the veil of grief had somehow lifted from their hearts, Ives regaining a sense of childhood wonderment about many things.  Walking about the city with a black-bound sketchbook, Ives drew madly, as he once had as a kid . . . 

Ives' trip to Great Britain does something to him.  As a kid, he used to sit for hours with his sketchbook, drawing cartoons, people, buildings.  He was obsessed with art.  Everything he saw inspired him.  He sent samples of his work to Walt Disney, and Disney himself wrote back, encouraging him to continue drawing.  That's what Ives recaptures in London.  Passion.  Curiosity.  The love of life.

I used to have the same kind of youthful passion that Ives rediscovers in London.  Everything made me want to write.  I'd read a Stephen King novel, and it made me want to write about vampires in a sleepy Upper Peninsula town.  I'd go swimming, and it made me want to write about the moon climbing over Lake Superior.  I saw the original Star Wars (before the episodes and director's cuts), and I wanted to be Isaac Asimov.  I had that much enthusiasm and drive.

I still write every day.  During the course of my 14 or 15 waking hours, I still sometimes find inspiration.  Not as often as when I was a kid, though.  Life gets in the way.  Sick kids.  Broken windows.  Car troubles.  These things tend to stifle my passion.

Right now, I'm sitting in my office at the university.  I rode with my sister to work, and I have a couple hours before I have to punch the time clock.  So, I'm typing my blog post.  I did the same thing last Wednesday.  I find my mind much clearer at this time of the day.  The worries of job and home intrude less on my thoughts.  In the space of a half hour or 45 minutes, I'm done, and I've written something that I'm not ashamed to publish.

It makes me wish I had a life that allowed me to follow this writing practice every day.  I would be able to produce so much more work.  However, rising at four every morning, writing for three hours, and then driving to the medical office to work for eight hours is not a schedule I could maintain forever.  By 8 p.m. today, I know I will be exhausted.  Falling asleep on the couch.  I don't even know how I'm going to answer phones and deal with patients for the next nine hours.

I'm not complaining.  I'm just wishing I could somehow reclaim some of my youthful enthusiasm for writing.  I feel a little too old and too tired at the moment.

Maybe Saint Marty needs to take a trip to London.  It worked for Ives.

The Open Window

by:  Louise Gluck

An elderly writer had formed the habit of writing the words THE END on a piece of paper before he began his stories, after which he would gather a stack of pages, typically thin in winter when the daylight was brief, and comparatively dense in summer when his thought became again loose and associative, expansive like the thought of a young man.  Regardless of their number, he would place these blank pages over the last, thus obscuring it.  Only then would the story come to him, chaste and refined in winter, more free in summer.  By these means, he had become an acknowledged master.

He worked by preference in a room without clocks, trusting the light to tell him when the day was finished.  In summer, he liked the window open.  How then, in summer, did the winter wind enter the room?  You are right, he cried out to the wind, this is what I have lacked, this decisiveness and abruptness, this surprise--O, if I could do this I would be a god!  And he lay on the cold floor of the study watching the wind stirring the pages, mixing the written and unwritten, the end among them.

Charles Dickens wrote Great Expectations at this desk

June 23: Read Aloud, Novels and Poetry, Louise Gluck, "A Work of Fiction"

In the way that the inn, set up on a slight incline, was surrounded by woods, so were Mrs. Parsons' guests, gathered in the sitting room, surrounded by a fine and very old library of books.  Because there was not much else to do in the evenings, except to sip brandies and watch the fire, Mrs. Parsons, in the tradition in which she had been raised, would hobble over to a stately chair and, in a voice that was remarkably strong and in a manner that was theatrical, read aloud selections from certain volumes.

Ives and Annie take a trip to the British Isles in their old age.  They stay at an inn near Sherwood Forest.  It is a time of healing for them.  Reconnection.  Ives and Annie rediscover their passions, for art, literature, and each other.  One of the great pleasures of their sojourn is the innkeeper reading to them from Charles Dickens' novels.

I love hearing people read aloud to me.  I also love reading aloud.  I think that's why I became a poet.  It's the oral/aural part that appeals to me most.  Novel reading is a solitary endeavor for the most part.  One person sitting in a comfortable chair, building a relationship with the author, page-by-page.  Poetry, on the other hand, is more immediate, sort of begs for something more communal.

I've been getting rides to work from a friend every day since my car's been out of commission.  This afternoon, on the way home, I opened up a collection of poems by Billy Collins and started reading to her.  It was a great ride home.  She was laughing.  I was laughing.  When we got to my driveway, we sat there while I finished reading Collins' poem about 9-11, "The Names."  By the time I was done, I was crying.  My friend looked at me and said, "Isn't that a great thing?  That a person can use words and create something that moves you so much."

All Saint Marty could do was nod and smile.

A Work of Fiction

by:  Louise Gluck

As I turned over the last page, after many nights, a wave of sorrow enveloped me.  Where had they all gone, these people who had seemed so real?  To distract myself, I walked out into the night; instinctively, I lit a cigarette.  In the dark, the cigarette glowed, like a fire lit by a survivor.  But who would see this light, this small dot among the infinite stars?  I stood awhile in the dark, the cigarette glowing and growing small, each breath patiently destroying me.  How small it was, how brief.  Brief, brief, but inside me now, which the stars could never be.

Dickens made a butt load of money giving public readings

June 22: Dreams, "Ives" Dip, Poet of the Week, Louise Gluck, "Forbidden Music"

I have been thinking a lot about posterity--what I'm going to be remembered for when I shuffle off this mortal . . . Well, you get the idea.

Ever since I was a kid, I've dreamed of being a famous author.  While other kids were idolizing Superman and Clint Eastwood, I had a different set of heroes:  Kurt Vonnegut, Stephen King, J. D. Salinger, Harper Lee.  I wanted King's fame and Salinger's mystique.  I wanted Vonnegut's reputation and Lee's good fortune (a Pulitzer Prize for my first book).  I've never really lost this streak of literary hero worship.  I still want to be Flannery O'Connor and Robert Frost and Cormac McCarthy.  Preferably all three at once.

Of course, I've had to adjust my ambitions.  I can no longer be the youngest author to ever win the Nobel Prize in Literature (the title still belongs to Rudyard Kipling, who won at the age of 42).  A little concession.  Yet, I still sit down almost every day to write.  Some nights, it's just a blog post.  Other nights, I take out my journal and scribble in it for a while after I'm done posting.  It's a matter of holding onto a dream.  Dreams provide hopes for something better.

So tonight my Ives dip question is this:

Will my dreams of becoming a famous author ever come true?

And the answer from Oscar Hijuelos (who was 39 when he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction):

. . . Her "goodness" was something of a curse.  As a person of principle, who had put many years into her efforts, she could not turn her back on anything.  And yet, at the same time, she had become caustic in her approach to teaching--it took her a long time but the old indifference of the system had caught up to her.

Okay, Annie Ives eventually loses her youthful enthusiasm.  She no longer dreams of changing the world one student at a time.  I'm not quite there yet.  I still think there's hope for me.  Poem by poem.

I have chosen Louis Gluck as the Poet of the Week.  Gluck's latest collection, Faithful and Virtuous Night, won the 2014 National Book Award for Poetry.  At the age of 50, Gluck won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection Wild Iris.  She knows a little bit about making a name for herself. 

Saint Marty still has a few years to beat Gluck to the Pulitzer.

Forbidden Music

by:  Louise Gluck

After the orchestra had been playing for some time, and had passed the andante, the scherzo, the poco adagio, and the first flautist had put his head on the stand because he would not be needed until tomorrow, there came a passage that was called the forbidden music because it could not, the composer specified, be played.  And still it must exist and be passed over, an interval at the discretion of the conductor.  But tonight, the conductor decides, it must be played--he has a hunger to make his name.  The flautist wakes with a start.  Something has happened to his ears, something he has never felt before.  His sleep is over.  Where am I now, he thinks.  And then he repeated it, like an old man lying on the floor instead of in his bed.  Where am I now?

Rumor has it that Kipling slept with the King of Sweden to get the Nobel