May 27: "Sometimes," 90 Years, Tragedies and Miracles

Mary Oliver sometimes feels awe, sometimes sadness, sometimes love . . .  

Sometimes

by:  Mary Oliver

1. 

Something came up

out of the dark.

It wasn't anything I had ever seen before.

It wasn't an animal

     or a flower,

unless it was both.

Something came up out of the water,

     a head the size of a cat

but muddy and without ears.

I don't know what God is.

I don't know what death is.

But I believe they have between them

     some fervent and necessary arrangement.

2.

Sometimes

melancholy leaves me breathless.

3.

Later I was in a field full of sunflowers.

I was feeling the heat of midsummer.

I was thinking of the sweet, electric

     drowse of creation,

when it began to break.

In the west, clouds gathered.

Thunderheads.

In an hour the sky was filled with them.

In an hour they sky was filled

     with the sweetness of rain and the blast of lightning.

Followed by the deep bells of thunder.

Water from the heavens!  Electricity from the source!

Both of them mad to create something!

The lightning brighter than any flower.

The thunder without a drowsy bone it its body.

4.

Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.

5.

Two or three times in my life I discovered love.

Each time it seemed to solve everything.

Each time it solved a great many things

     but not everything.

You left me as grateful as if it had indeed, and 

thoroughly, solved everything.

6.

God, rest in my heart

and fortify me,

take away my hunger for answers,

let the hours play upon my body

like the hands of my beloved.

Let the cathead appear again--

the smallest of your mysteries,

some wild cousin of my own blood probably--

some cousin of my own wild blood probably,

in the black dinner-bowl of the pond.

7.

Death waits for me, I know it, around

     one corner or another.

This doesn't amuse me.

Neither does it frighten me.

After the rain, I went back into the field of sunflowers.

It was cool, and I was anything but drowsy.

I walked slowly, and listened

to the crazy roots, in the drenched earth, laughing and growing.

I think this poem is one of the few by Oliver I've encountered where she admits to breathless melancholy.  She doesn't often speak of that kind of darkness.  Of course, she experienced sorrow and grief.  She was human, making her way through a broken world.

Even people who seem very in-touch with their spiritual sides aren't immune to sadness or doubt or fear.  Like everyone else, these emotions are often mixed up with wonder or joy or or awe.  For me, every day is a grab bag of feelings.  I may wake up tired and sad, move on to excited after breakfast, transition to bored or anxious post lunch, and end up stunned or confused by bedtime.

I'm like Oliver, standing on the shore of a pond, seeing something I can't quite identify emerge from and glide along the surface of the water.  Not a cat.  Not a lillypad.  It's a part of creation completely new to me, yet also as familiar as the scar on my pinky.

At church tonight, we celebrated the ninetieth birthday of a longtime parishioner.  She was in attendance with her extended family.  At the end of the Mass, the priest raised his arms and blessed her.  After Mass, she lingered at the front of the sanctuary, posing for pictures and basking in the love and attention.

This woman was born in 1933.  Adolf Hitler was just coming into power.  FDR was sworn in for his first term as President of the United States.  It was the height of the Great Depression, with the unemployment rate hovering around 25 percent.  That means one in four people didn't have jobs.  The original King Kong was the number one movie.  Prohibition was repealed.  

In her 90 years, she's experienced several wars, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, many genocides and famines, a worldwide energy crisis, race riots, global warming, and a deadly pandemic.  She's also witnessed humans walking on the surface of the moon, the rise of the Internet, Star Wars and Harry Potter, and the first African American to serve in the Oval Office.  

All lifetimes are filled with these kinds of tragedies and miracles.  Creation and apocalypse.  Sometimes, we don't even know how to describe or name these things.  Atom bomb.  Holocaust.  Apollo 11.  Google.  iPhone.  AIDS.  Artificial intelligence.  They're all catheads in the dark dinner-bowl of the pond.

Mary Oliver's three rules for living a lifetime are pretty simple and profound: 

1.  Pay attention.

2.  Be astonished.

3.  Tell about it.

Something astounding happens every day.  Small and large wonders.  

The lilacs in my backyard just started blooming.  I am surrounded by their scent.  Two days ago, they were just ideas, tiny little green fists waiting to beat the air up with beauty.  Tonight, my little portion of the world is drunk with purple.  

Saint Marty paid attention.  He's astonished.  Now, he's telling you about it. 

March 1: His Greatness and His Glory, Wonder, King Kong

Santiago makes a vow to kill something greater and more glorious than himself . . . 

"I had better re-bait that little line out over the stern," he said. "If the fish decides to stay another night I will need to eat again and the water is low in the bottle. I don't think I can get anything but a dolphin here. But if I eat him fresh enough he won't be bad. I wish a flying fish would come on board tonight. But I have no light to attract them. A flying fish is excellent to eat raw and I would not have to cut him up. I must save all my strength now. Christ, I did not know he was so big."

"I'll kill him though," he said. "In all his greatness and his glory."

Although it is unjust, he thought. But I will show him what a man can do and what a man endures.

I think human beings have a kind of innate urge to kill or eliminate wonder.  That's what Santiago is talking about doing in this passage.  He admires the great fish.  Knows that what he is about to do is, perhaps, wrong.  Like erasing a charcoal study by Leonardo da Vinci.  

Think of all the things that used to exist that no longer exist because of humankind.  The dodo.  Atlas bear.  Laughing owl.  Caribbean monk seal.  Caspian tiger.  Western black rhinoceros.  Golden toad.  I'm not even going to get into all the places on this planet that we have maimed  and mined and mutilated.  Close to 30 years ago, I visited Hanauma Bay in Hawaii.  It was beautiful, but, even then, the coral was bleaching white because of tourism and climate change.

Humans cannot simply admire and appreciate.  They must exploit and monetize the wonders of the world.  One of my favorite movies as a kid was King Kong.  The old one, with Fay Wray, although I got into the whole striptease Jessica Lange did with Kong in the 1976 remake.  That movie, for me, sort of encapsulates what is wrong with human beings.  Rather than simply being stunned and awed by Kong, Carl Denham has to capture and drag him to New York City, where he turns Kong into a Broadway sideshow attraction.  

There it is:  a human being putting a price tag on something wondrous and, in the process, destroying it.  It's a pretty good metaphor for our world today.  

I'm a poet.  I will never make a whole lot of money as a poet, unless something miraculous happens like Joe Biden choosing me as the poet at his next inauguration.  Or I win a Pulitzer or Nobel Prize.  Other than that, nobody is looking to put a price tag on what I do.  

But here's the thing:  poetry itself is the wonder business.  The best poems, the ones that leave me breathless and changed in some way, are all about capturing (in words) that feeling of seeing Kong for the first time.  Fearful.  Frightened.  Awestruck.  Dumbstruck.  Money does not even come into the poetic equation.  I can count on two hands the number of times I have received monetary compensation for being a poet.  Most poets are thrilled with a good brownie and a nice glass of wine as payment. 

I try to believe that humans can do better.  Be better.  Yet, wars are fought over oil.  Climate change continues practically unabated.  Every hour, three species disappear from the planet.  If you do the math, that's between 18,000 and 55,000 species vanishing a year.  All because humans prefer dollars over poems.

I have been writing poems about Bigfoot for close to five or six years now.  Because Bigfoot represents, to me, everything that is wondrous and mysterious in the world.  Bigfoot is my Kong.  If everyone had some kind of Bigfoot in their lives--something miraculous and indescribable--the world would be in much better shape.

If you have a Bigfoot or Kong, Saint Marty hopes you write a poem or song about it.  Or paint its picture.  Preserve the wonder in wonderful.

April 22-24: Something I Have Never Forgotten, Wrapped in Darkness, King Kong

Merton experiences a spiritual revelation . . . 

When I went back to Havana, I found out something else, too, and something vastly more important. It was something that made me realize, all of a sudden, not merely intellectually, but experimentally, the real uselessness of what I had been half deliberately looking for: the visions in the ceiba trees. And this experience opened another door, not a way to a kind of writing but a way into a world infinitely new, a world that was out of this world of ours entirely and which transcended it infinitely, and which was not a world, but which was God Himself. 

I was in the Church of St. Francis at Havana. It was a Sunday. I had been to Communion at some other church, I think at El Cristo, and now I had come here to hear another Mass. The building was crowded. Up in front, before the altar, there were rows and rows of children, crowded together. I forget whether they were First Communicants or not: but they were children around that age. I was far in the back of the church, but I could see the heads of all those children. 

It came time for the Consecration. The priest raised the Host, then he raised the chalice. When he put the chalice down on the altar, suddenly a Friar in his brown robe and white cord stood up in front of the children, and all at once the voices of the children burst out: 

“Creo en Diós...” 

“I believe in God the Father Almighty, the creator of heaven and earth...” 

The Creed. But that cry, “Creo en Dios!” It was loud, and bright, and sudden and glad and triumphant; it was a good big shout, that came from all those Cuban children, a joyous affirmation of faith. 

Then, as sudden as the shout and as definite, and a thousand times more bright, there formed in my mind an awareness, an understanding, a realization of what had just taken place on the altar, at the Consecration: a realization of God made present by the words of Consecration in a way that made Him belong to me. 

But what a thing it was, this awareness: it was so intangible, and yet it struck me like a thunderclap. It was a light that was so bright that it had no relation to any visible light and so profound and so intimate that it seemed like a neutralization of every lesser experience. 

And yet the thing that struck me most of all was that this light was in a certain sense “ordinary”—it was a light (and this most of all was what took my breath away) that was offered to all, to everybody, and there was nothing fancy or strange about it. It was the light of faith deepened and reduced to an extreme and sudden obviousness. 

It was as if I had been suddenly illuminated by being blinded by the manifestation of God’s presence.

The reason why this light was blinding and neutralizing was that there was and could be simply nothing in it of sense or imagination. When I call it a light that is a metaphor which I am using, long after the fact. But at the moment, another overwhelming thing about this awareness was that it disarmed all images, all metaphors, and cut through the whole skein of species and phantasms with which we naturally do our thinking. It ignored all sense experience in order to strike directly at the heart of truth, as if a sudden and immediate contact had been established between my intellect and the Truth Who was now physically really and substantially before me on the altar. But this contact was not something speculative and abstract: it was concrete and experimental and belonged to the order of knowledge, yes, but more still to the order of love. 

Another thing about it was that this light was something far above and beyond the level of any desire or any appetite I had ever yet been aware of. It was purified of all emotion and cleansed of everything that savored of sensible yearnings. It was love as clean and direct as vision: and it flew straight to the possession of the Truth it loved. 

And the first articulate thought that came to my mind was: 

“Heaven is right here in front of me: Heaven, Heaven!” 

It lasted only a moment: but it left a breathless joy and a clean peace and happiness that stayed for hours and it was something I have never forgotten. 

Merton experiences an epiphany here.  A vision of God's presence in the world--a light that is both completely ordinary and completely transcendent.  It's available to everybody.  I suppose all you have to do is open yourself to it, the way Merton does at this moment he's describing.

Most people aren't that open to this experience.  I know I'm not.  Most days, I keep my head down, blinders on, focused on myself and my problems.  That pretty much describes the human condition.  Instead of seeing the light, I see the dark.  

Merton, himself, admits that this divine vision he experiences is fleeting.  He simply can't sustain it.  I suppose it's like striking a match.  The flame springs up, blue and brilliant, then settles down, gutters for a minute or so, and disappears into smoke.  And what Merton is left with is an intense physical memory of God.  But it sustains him for a long time.,

Tonight, I'm sort of wrapped in darkness.  Like a blanket around my shoulders.  Just like Merton can't shake the light of God's grace from his eyes, I can't quite shrug off these shadows.  Instead, I'm sitting here trying to make friends with them.

That probably sounds crazy.  I mean, who wants to invite darkness to take a seat on the couch next to you?  Really, though, that is the only way I know how to overcome these feelings.  By living with them, talking with them, trying to understand them.  Sort of like what Hemingway wrote:  "Write the best story you can and write it as straight as you can."

You don't need to ornament the dark.  Ascribe all kinds of big words to it.  Darkness is simply the absence of light.  And it's also what comes before sunrise.  My darkness comes from a kind of aloneness.  Being surrounded by people, yet unable to talk about the big hairy ape that's stalking my thoughts.  (Yes, that's a King Kong allusion.  Stick with me.)  There are things in life that are difficult to put words to.  Because if you put words to them, it makes them real, and, if they're real, then you have to deal with them.  And who wants to deal with a 40-foot tall gorilla?

You just have to wait out the darkness.  Stay in the cave until the sun shows up, however long that takes.  Get used to the monkey.  Maybe find out it's not all that frightening.  Tame it.  Maybe take a trip to the Empire State Building with it.  Visit the Statue of Liberty.  Take in a Broadway show.  Maybe Hamilton.  

Sometimes the things that frighten us the most turn out to be angels instead of monsters.  Or maybe God, putting you to the Job test.

Saint Marty is sitting in his dark living room, ready for anything--Job or Kong or angel or God.

May 11: Bright Angel Point, Empire State Building, Dance Trip

Moments after that, the saucer entered a time warp, and Billy was flung back into his childhood.  He was twelve years old, quaking as he stood with his mother and father on Bright Angel Point, at the rim of the Grand Canyon.  The little human family was staring at the floor of the canyon, one mile straight down.

"Well--" said Billy's father, manfully kicking a pebble into space, "there it is."  They had come to this famous place by automobile.  They had had seven blowouts on the way.

"It was worth the trip," said Billy's mother raptly.  "Oh, God--was it ever worth it."

Billy hated the canyon.  He was sure  that he was going to fall in.  His mother touched him, and he wet his pants.

Billy, on a trip through space, shifts in time to . . . another trip.  His family vacation to the Grand Canyon.  I have not yet been to the Grand Canyon.  It's on my bucket list, along with Rome, London, and a performance of Hamilton.  Frankly, the odds of Hamilton aren't that good.  Twelve-year-old Billy isn't a big fan of the Grand Canyon.  It scares the piss out of him, literally.  I know what my reaction would be if I were standing on the lip of a mile-deep hole in the earth.

On my second trip to New York City, I went to the Empire State Building.  I was excited.  I'd seen the original King Kong many times as a kid.  I had visions of meeting Fay Wray, watching Kong swatting airplanes out of the heavens.  When I got to the top, I stepped off the elevator, into the gift shop.  It was crowded.  I pushed my way through the people and went out into the open air.

And I had a panic attack.  There are fences and barriers all around the perimeter of the top of the Empire State Building.  The chances of someone accidentally falling off the top are absolutely zero.  A stiff, cold wind was blowing.  I could see the panorama of city below, stretching out to the horizon.  The World Trade Center buildings were still standing at the time.  We were about seven months away from 9-11.

I stood with my back pressed against the windows of the gift shop, my heart roaring like King Kong in my chest.  I could not move.  I slowly pushed my way back inside the store.  I stood by a shelf of miniature Empire State Buildings in a cold sweat, panting.  If my wife had touched me on the shoulder, I probably would have wet myself, like little Billy.

Eventually, I forced myself to walk around the entire perimeter of the building, but it wasn't a pleasant experience.  I was nauseated by the time I got back into the elevator to descend to ground level.  I felt like kissing the sidewalk when I left the lobby.

I have never experienced fear like that since.  Then again, I've never been in a building that tall, either.  This weekend, I'm driving to Grand Rapids with my family.  My daughter has another dance competition.  The only difficult part of the journey for me will be crossing the Mackinac Bridge.  Don't like it.  My wife will be behind the wheel on that leg of the journey.  Again, it has to do with the height of the structure and the possibility of falling to my death.

An irrational fear, I know.  I can't control it.  That's why it's called irrational.  I won't be climbing any skyscrapers this weekend.  I will be sticking as close to the ground as I can.  No jumping off diving boards.  No monkey bars.  No scenic lookouts.

Saint Marty is thankful for flat earth this afternoon.

And the sudden stop on the cement sidewalk . . .

July 23: Ethos of the Moment, Kids in the Universe, "Zootopia"

Last summer some muskrats had a den under this tree's roots on the bank; I think they are still there now.  Muskrats' wet fur rounds the domed clay walls of the den and slicks them smooth as any igloo.  They strew the floor with plant husks and seeds, rut in repeated bursts, and sleep humped and soaking, huddled in balls.  These, too, are part of what Buber calls "the infinite ethos of the moment."

I'm not quite sure of the context of the quote from Martin Buber (although I admire anyone named Martin).  I think it has something to do with finding something eternal in every lived moment.  There's something both very present in the muskrats for Dillard, and there's also something very timeless.  Muskrats doing what they've done for hundreds (if not thousands) of years, following some kind of divine plan that was put into motion way back in the Garden of Eden, when Adam looked at the first muskrat (or the first muskrat's ancestor) and named it.

Today, I tried to live in the ethos of the moment.  I didn't have any particular plan for my time.  I didn't set an alarm.  Woke up around 9 a.m., which is a good five hours later than I normally do.  I took a shower, made breakfast for myself, and then sat outside and dined al fresco.  It was a lovely beginning to the day.  In the moment.  Listening to cicadas sawing the morning in two.

Eventually, I ended up at the water park with my son and wife for about four hours.  My daughter went on a zip line tour, soaring through the forest canopies for three hours (talk about living in the moment).  She had a great time.  My son had a great time.  I always try to imagine what kind of kid Jesus was.  Did he beg Mary to go swimming in the River Jordan on really hot days?  Or climb olive trees and scare birds out of their nests?  That's what kids do.  They carve places for themselves in the universe.

Tonight, at dusk, I went to an outdoor screening of the movie Zootopia with my family.  My fifteen-year-old daughter loved it.  My seven-year-old son, who suffers from a severe aversion to sitting still, got incredibly uninterested after about twenty minutes.  He and my wife and my sister left early while I stayed to watch the end of the film with my daughter.  It reminded me of the drive-in movies I saw as a kid.  King Kong with Jessica Lange.  Freaky Friday with Jodie Foster.  Orca with Richard Harris.  Everything huge and wondrous under the moon and stars.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that everything today felt really new and really familiar, as well.

Saint Marty is going to sleep in again tomorrow morning.  Maybe have some oatmeal al fresco for breakfast.

Eating in the moment--another thing I believe in

August 13: Michael David Madonick, "Iris," King Kong, Terrible Darkness, Adventures of Stickman

Iris

by:  Michael David Madonick

About the lip
there is an edge.  More
to the point, an edginess,
not so nervous as to be
construed as shy, but an
inclination, nevertheless,
toward the ascetic.  The clam
belly's undulant scallop, or
Jessica Lange that instant before
Kong came raging
through the wood.  Tied up
in beauty and in rope, it never
wants to give what it seems
to show.  And he, however
soft his hairy hand, is bound
by her music, to fall
asleep, then
dead.

Yes, I'm changing things up a little bit.  I wanted to start with Mike Madonick's poem, simply because it sort of captures the kind of day I've had.  The poem is about being on the edge.  The trees of the jungle trembling, hiding the giant ape about to burst through.  The lip of the flower hiding something pink and beautiful.  Or deadly.

Tonight, I went to the funeral home to make some preliminary arrangements for my sister's funeral.  It wasn't half as difficult as I anticipated.  The two sisters who accompanied me actually stuck to the plan we decided upon last night.  There wasn't bickering, raised voices, or name calling.  It took about 45 minutes.

Back at my parents' house, our parish priest came.  Father Larry brought a stole used by Frederic Baraga, first bishop of Marquette, who died in 1868.  Bishop Baraga is on the road to sainthood.  Currently, he has been given the title "Venerable," which is the first step toward canonization.

Father Larry wrapped Bishop Baraga's stole around my sister's head and chest.  We prayed over her.  Every person in the room (12 in all) laid hands on her.  Then Father Larry anointed her with chrism.  Finally, we recited a rosary. When I looked over at my dad, he was weeping.  It broke my heart to see him.

It was strange to go from planning my sister's funeral to praying for her recovery.  Like in Mike Madonick's poem, I feel like something's approaching.  Something huge.  But I can't see it in the trees.  It might be a miracle--my sister sitting up in her bed and saying that she's hungry.  Or it might be death--a phone ringing in the middle of the night in a dark room.

Ives and Annie experience something similar the night that their son dies:

As they happily walked to the subway, they were looking forward to spending a lot of time together at home during the holiday, in the company of family and friends.  Ives and Annie had stopped to peer into a window display of French linen when, just like that, a terrible darkness entered them, and they could not move and stood looking at one another stupidly, on the crowded and busy sidewalk.

Ives and Annie have no idea what the darkness means.  One minute, they're doing a little Christmas window shopping.  The next, they're filled with inexplicable dread.  Something big is approaching, and the trees are shaking.

Saint Marty is praying for a miracle, but he's preparing for something darker.  Heavier. 
King Kong-sized.

Adventures of STICKMAN

May 7: Death of a Giant

I'm going to take a little departure from the normal subject matter of Saint Marty to write about the death of a giant who created giants.

When I was a kid, my oldest brother took me to see the movie Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger.  Aside from displaying nearly naked women, the movie also had special effects created by Ray Harryhausen.  It had a walking, killing, bronze Minaton; an immense sabre-toothed tiger; and a goofy, giant troglodyte.  I was immediately hooked.

On the weekends, I watched Creature Features on TV, including other Harryhausen flicks like Mysterious Island and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.  By today's special effects standards, the stop-motion creatures in all of these movies are laughably unrealistic.  But that's what made them so great.  They didn't pretend to be real.  There was something magical about them.  Ray Harryhausen didn't aspire for realism with his work.  He aspired from something less tangible.  Call it what you want--imagination, fairy tale, myth.  Harryhausen didn't want to create horrifying life.  Rather, he wanted to create three-dimensional wonder.

Ray Harryhausen died today at the age of 92.  He did immense things in his lifetime.  He got to work with his idol, King Kong creator Willis O'Brien.  Harryhausen's work was the gold-standard of special effects for decades.  Even George Lucas paid homage to Harryhausen with a little chess game aboard the Millennium Falcon in the original Star Wars (before it was Episode IV:  A New Hope).

Not too many people know (or will remember) the name Ray Harryhausen.

But ten-year-old Saint Marty will never forget him, not to mention his troglodyte frolicking with a very nude princess on the shores of the lake in Hyperborea.

Ray and a few friends