October 11: "The Fish," Elizabeth Bishop, Beatrice

One of my favorite poems of all time is Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish."  I remember the first time I read it when I was in middle school, I think.  It blew me away.  I had no idea that you could write poems about catching a fish on a lake.

Bishop paints the scene so vividly that you can almost smell the marshy water and see the fish gilling the air in her boat.  And I love the moment, near the end of the poem, where the speaker and the fish stare into each other's eyes before she lets him go.

Billy Collins sort of conjures up Elizabeth Bishop in today's poem . . . 

The Fish

by: Billy Collins

As soon as the elderly waiter
placed before me the fish I had ordered,
it began to stare up at me
with its one flat, iridescent eye.

I feel sorry for you, it seemed to say,
eating alone in this awful restaurant
bathed in such unkindly light
and surrounded by these dreadful murals of Sicily.

And I feel sorry for you, too—
yanked from the sea and now lying dead
next to some boiled potatoes in Pittsburgh—
I said back to the fish as I raised my fork.

And thus my dinner in an unfamiliar city
with its rivers and lighted bridges
was graced not only with chilled wine
and lemon slices but with compassion and sorrow

even after the waiter removed my plate
with the head of the fish still staring
and the barrel vault of its delicate bones
terribly exposed, save for a shroud of parsley.

I haven't done much fishing in my life, and I can't remember the last time I held a fishing pole in my hands.  It was never one of my favorite things--standing at the edge of a lake or river, waiting for something scaled to bite my hook.  I'm not saying I hated the experience.  It just wasn't for me.

But then again, a lot of people wouldn't think typing a blog post or scribbling in a journal is fun.  I do.  Stringing words together on a page relaxes me and allows me to feel a little in control of my life.  (This may be a false sense of security, but it works for me.  It relaxes me.)

It's Friday night.  I had dinner with both my kids this evening.  We ate pizza and played some video games.  When I got home, I took my puppy for a long walk.  I just stepped outside to check out the aurora situation.  Didn't see much except stars and the moon.  The air smelled like autumn--leaf mold and coming frost.

I could write a poem about tonight, like Bishop wrote about catching the fish or Collins about eating fish in Pittsburgh.  Mine would be about a three-meat pizza and Trivial Pursuit, my kids loving on each other through insult, and my wife, my beautiful wife of almost 29 years, on the couch beside me, drowning happily in family.  Then the stars appear, like they do for Dante at the end of the Inferno and Purgatorio and Paradiso, always shining with holy hope.

Saint Marty give thanks for the Beatrice of his life.

December 15: Physical Push, Poetry Reading, Hunger

 Merton begins writing his thesis  . . , 

When I got back to New York, one of the first things I did was to break away, at last, from the household in Douglaston. The family had really practically dissolved with the death of my grandparents, and I could get a lot more work done if I did not have to spend so much time on subways and the Long Island train. 

One rainy day in June, then, I made a bargain with Herb, the colored taximan at Douglaston, and he drove me and all my bags and books and my portable vie and all my hot records and pictures to put on the wall and even a tennis racquet which I never used, uptown to a rooming-house on 114th Street, just behind the Columbia library. 

All the way up we discussed the possible reasons for the mysterious death of Rudolph Valentino, once a famous movie star: but it was certainly not what you would call a live issue. Valentino had died at least ten years before. 

“This is a nice spot you got here,” said Herb, approving of the room I was renting for seven-fifty a week. It was shiny and clean and filled with new furniture and had a big view of a pile of coal, in a yard by the campus tennis courts, with South Field and the steps of the old domed library beyond. The panorama even took in a couple of trees. 

“I guess you’re going to have a pretty hot time, now you got away from your folks,” Herb remarked, as he took his leave. 

Whatever else may have happened in that room, it was also there that I started to pray again more or less regularly, and it was there that I added, as Bramachari had suggested, The Imitation of Christ to my books, and it was from there that I was eventually to be driven out by an almost physical push, to go and look for a priest. 

July came, with its great, misty heats, and Columbia filled with all the thousands of plump, spectacled ladies in pink dresses, from the Middle-West, and all the grey gents in seersucker suits, all the dried-up high-school principals from Indiana and Kansas and Iowa and Tennessee, with their veins shriveled up with positivism and all the reactions of the behaviorist flickering behind their spectacles as they meditated on the truths they learned in those sweltering halls. 

The books piled higher and higher on my desk in the Graduate reading room and in my own lodgings. I was in the thick of my thesis, making hundreds of mistakes that I would not be able to detect for several years to come, because I was far out of my depth. Fortunately, nobody else detected them either. But for my own part, I was fairly happy, and learning many things. The discipline of the work itself was good for me, and helped to cure me, more than anything else did, of the illusion that my health was poor.

Merton is really on his own for the first time in his life.  Free to make his own decisions, follow his own heart.  So, in the midst or writing his graduate thesis on William Blake, Merton also begins to pray, explore Christian writings, and, eventually, feels a strong urge to seek out a priest.  A "physical" urge, as he describes it.  Something from deep inside him.

As you all can probably tell, I've felt quite reflective these last several days.  In a season that, in many major religions, is dedicated to light and hope, my little family unit has been the recipient of much love and help from friends.  I haven't had to look very far to see grace at work in my life.  (This is saying quite a lot, as I tend toward a darker view of the universe a lot of the time.  I'm a poet,  What can I say?)

Tonight, I gave a Zoom poetry reading for my local library in the town where I grew up.  I do it every year--Christmas-themed poems, stories, and essays.  I spent most of the late afternoon and evening preparing for it, after working eight hours for the library (a different one--yes, I know this is getting confusing).  I guess you could say that my whole day was dedicated to libraries and books and literature.  Not a bad gig.

The way I prepare for events like this is fairly intuitional.  I start reviewing poems and essays, reading and rereading what I've written.  And, like Merton, if I feel a kind of physical push, I print out what I'm reading.  I usually end up with 15 to 18 pages worth of material.  Once I have that pile, I start rereading it all again.

I've been using this process for years, and it never fails that a theme starts emerging as I review everything that I've selected.  A strong metaphysical current, if you will.  I can't explain how this happens.  Perhaps it's my subconscious at work, as I've usually been thinking about the reading for days.  Or perhaps--just perhaps--it is something stronger, deeper.  Something outside of myself, telling me what I need to say.

Either way, the theme that emerged tonight was "hunger."  During this pandemic, I think we all are experiencing various forms of hunger.  Hunger for friends and family.  For food from a favorite restaurant.  The ability to walk into a theater, sit down, eat popcorn, and watch the latest Tom Hanks movie.  Or go to a library for a live poetry reading, with musicians singing Christmas carols.  The whole world is hungry for this kind of normalcy.

So, I spoke to that hunger tonight.  Tried to address those kinds of urges we all have in our lives for what gives us comfort, feeds our souls.  The holiday season sort of lends itself to this kind of meditation, as much of it centers around the concept of hope.  

And, as I read, looked into the faces of all the people on my computer screen, I felt hope.  Yes, I'm stuck in COVID isolation.  Yes, my daughter has lost her ability to smell or taste anything.  And yes, my normal frenzy of Christmas preparation is greatly curtailed.  Yet, hope was present tonight.  

I have no idea if anybody else felt it, this thing with feathers, perching in their souls, as Emily Dickinson described it.  But I did.  I felt its wings beating against my ribcage.  Its plumes were all the people who were at the reading tonight. who have dropped off groceries these last few days, who have reached out by phone or text or email to express concern and love.  

Human beings are driven their whole lives by hunger for various things.  Hamburgers.  Poetry.  Sex.  Love.  Wine.  Friendship.  Art.  Cheetos.  God.  It's what gets us up in the morning, keeps us moving throughout the day.  Each 24 hours are an exercise in chasing and finding hope.  Filling the emptiness around and inside ourselves.  

I am filled up tonight.  Satisfied.  However, I will certainly wake up hungry again tomorrow morning.  That's the way it works.  Nobody throughout human history has escaped this cycle.  Even Jesus Christ.  Buddha.  Mohammed.  They may all have been incarnations of the Creator.  God made flesh.  But, they were still fully human. subject to all the same pulls and urges and hungers.

Some snapshots from my day:

• My beautiful daughter is still achy and tired.  She has fully lost her sense of smell and taste.  
• My beautiful puppy was my office mate all day, coming over to my chair every once in a while when I needed a break to pet her.
• My beautiful wife made dinner tonight.  Hamburger Helper.  Delicious.
• I had a beautiful phone conversation with my writer friend, Ronnie, about art and faith and music and poetry.
• I gave a Christmas poetry reading to a group of beautiful people.
• I played a game of Trivial Pursuit with my beautiful family, as we watched Ratatouille.
• The bottom element inside my stove burned out tonight as I was trying to cook a pizza for my handsome son.  I have to call an appliance repair place tomorrow.  I have a feeling nobody will step foot in our house until after we are done quarantining.

As you can tell from those snapshots, my day was filled with things that nourished my soul and things that left me craving more.  That is the nature of the universe.

Saint Marty gives thanks tonight for the miracle of hunger.

January 1: A Spiritual Millionaire, Thomas Merton, Finding Happiness

The opening of Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain:

On the last day of January 1915, under the sign of the Water Bearer, in a year of a great war, and down in the shadow of some French mountains on the borders of Spain, I came into the world.  Free by nature, in the image of God, I was nevertheless the prisoner of my own violence and my own selfishness, in the image of the world into which I was born.  That world was the picture of Hell, full of men like myself, loving God and yet hating Him; born to love Him, living instead in fear and hopeless self-congratulatory hungers.

Now many hundreds of miles away from the house where I was born, they were picking up the men who rotted in the rainy ditches among the dead horses and the ruined seventy-fives, in a forest of trees without branches along the river Marne.

My father and mother were captives in that world, knowing they did not belong with it or in it, and yet unable to get away from it.  The were in the world and not of it--not because they were saints, but in a different way:  because they were artists.  The integrity of an artist lifts a man above the level of the world without delivering him from it.

My father painted like Cezanne and understood the southern French landscape the way Cezanne did.  His vision of the world was sane, full of balance, full of veneration for structure, for the relations of masses and for all the circumstances that impress an individual identity on each created thing.  His vision was religious and clean, and therefore his paintings were without decoration or superfluous comment, since a religious man respects the power of God's creation to bear witness for itself.  My father was a very good artist.

Neither of my parents suffered from the little spooky prejudices that devour the people who know nothing but automobiles and movies and what's in the ice-box and what's in the papers and which neighbors are getting a divorce.

I inherited from my father his way of looking at things and some of his integrity and from my mother some of her dissatisfaction with the mess the world is in, and some of her versatility.  From both I got capacities for work and vision and enjoyment and expression that ought to have made me some kind of a King, if the standards the world lives by were the real ones.  Not that we ever had any money:  but any fool knows that you don't need money to get enjoyment out of life.

If what most people take for granted were really true--if all you needed to be happy was to grab everything and see everything and investigate every experience and then talk about it, I should have been a very happy person, a spiritual millionaire, from cradle even until now.

If happiness were merely a matter of natural gifts, I would never have entered a Trappist monastery when I came to the age of a man.

Thomas Merton wrote his conversion memoir as he was studying to become a Trappist monk.  Therefore, his life was a fairly regimented one--divided between prayer time and work time and contemplation time and prayer time again.  The only difference between Merton and the other monks or soon-to-be monks was that Merton used writing as a source of contemplation.  The written word was one of his his main methods of communicating with God.  At least, that's the deal he worked out with Dom Frederic Dunne, the abbot who oversaw Merton as a postulant at the Abbey of Gethsemani.  Somehow, Dom Frederic understood the importance of the writing life to Merton's spiritual growth.  Thank God.

It was my intention today to write this post much earlier.  Unfortunately, it didn't happen the way I planned it.  I played the pipe organ for Mass this morning, and then I came back home and took a very long nap.  (I got to bed at around 3:30 a.m. after celebrating on New Year's Eve.  Therefore, many of my good intentions remained simply good intentions.)  I try to be regimented.  I like schedules.  Unfortunately, my life can be unpredictable, as well.  When I finally woke up from my nap, I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening helping my sister make a turkey with all the fixings for New Year's dinner.  That meant peeling potatoes and stripping the turkey carcass and cooking corn and fluffing stuffing.  And then, after dinner, I helped clean up.  My eleven-year-old son wanted to play some board games with me, so I found myself in a contest of Trivial Pursuit with my son, wife, and sisters.  Then Dictionary Dabble.

That is how I came to be typing this post at ten o'clock at night.

My takeaway from the little Merton passage above is simple:  you don't need money to enjoy life.  This is something that I have to remind myself about a lot.  I mean, A LOT.  Perhaps that's what my Merton journey in 2020 is going to be about:  looking for happiness.  Finding happiness in unexpected places.  Realizing that happiness isn't a matter of things or people or money or fame.

Who knows?  Maybe Saint Marty will end up being a Trappist monk.

August 4: Farewell, Hello, Close Friend, Grief

Billy Pilgrim says now that this really is the way he is going to die, too.  As a time-traveler, he has seen his own death many times, has described it to a tape recorder.  The tape is locked up with his will and some other valuables in his safe-deposit box at the Ilium Merchants Bank and Trust, he says.

I, Billy Pilgrim, the tape begins, will die, have died, and always will die on February thirteenth, 1976.

At the time of his death, he says, he is in Chicago to address a large crowd on the subject of flying saucers and the true nature of time.  His home is still in Ilium.  He has had to cross three international boundaries in order to reach Chicago.  The United States of America has been Balkanized, has been divided into twenty petty nations so that it will never again be a threat to world peace.  Chicago has been hydrogen-bombed by angry Chinamen.  So it goes.  It is all brand new.

Billy is speaking before a capacity audience in a baseball park, which is covered by a geodesic dome.  The flag of the country is behind him.  It is a Hereford bull on a field of green.  Billy predicts his own death within an hour.  He laughs about it, invites the crowd to laugh with him.  "It is high time I was dead," he says.  "Many years ago," he said, "a certain man promised to have me killed.  He is an old man now, living not far from here.  He has read all the publicity associated with my appearance to your fair city.  He is insane.  Tonight he will keep his promise."

There are protests from the crowd.

Billy Pilgrim rebukes them.  "If you protest, if you think that death is a terrible thing, then you have not understood a word I've said."  Now he closes his speech as he closes every speech--with these words:  "Farewell, hello, farewell, hello."

There are police around him as he leaves the stage.  They are there to protect him from the crush of popularity.  No threats on his life have been made since 1945.  The police offer to stay with him.  They are floridly willing to stand in a circle around him all night, with their zap guns drawn.

"No, no," says Billy serenely.  "It is time for you to go home to your wives and children, and it is time for me to be dead for a little while--and then live again."  At that moment, Billy's high forehead is in the cross hairs of a high-powered laser gun.  It is aimed at him from the darkened press box.  In the next moment, Billy Pilgrim is dead.  So it goes.

So Billy experiences death for a while.  It is simply violet light and a hum.  There isn't anybody else there.  Not even Billy Pilgrim is there.

In Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse universe, death is not an end.  It's merely a moment that, like all other moments, has happened, is happening, will happen over and over and over.  Billy doesn't try to prevent his death.  He walks into it willingly, treats it like the opportunity for an afternoon nap.  And then he simply dies.

For the second time in about a week, I have a very close friend whose brother passed away.  I just found out this afternoon.  There really aren't any words that will provide comfort to my friend.  She is hurting.  I know.  No matter what I say, I'm not going to be able to make her feel any better.

Unlike Vonnegut, my version of death isn't non-existence.  As a Christian, I believe in the soul and heaven and angels.  So, I could say something to my friend like "he's in a better place now" or "he's free of all his pain" or "he's with God."  I firmly accept the truth of those statements.  That doesn't really make them comforting for my friend.

Grief is terrible.  It can keep you in bed with the covers over your head.  It can sneak up on you when you're playing a game of Trivial Pursuit with your daughter.  It can greet you at the front door when you come home from work.  It doesn't really go away.  Ever.  It may take vacations every once in a while, but it always returns, sometimes rawer than before.

So, my words to my friend tonight are, "It sucks.  Let's drink soon."

Saint Marty is thankful tonight for the laughter of his kids, and he prays for laughter to be in his friend's life soon, as well.