"Against Advice"
for Veronica Furner
Her apple tree felled
Became logs for our fire.
Let them dry out she said
And use them next year.
As I stacked them I noted
Their moist mottled bark
But my usual impatience
Soon put them to work.
Reluctant to kindle
They sizzled and spat
Like the right words in waiting
But not ready yet.
Then after a while
Smoke turned into flame
And with sudden combustion
The poem came.
--John Mole
From P. J. Kavanagh's review of The Great Books by the philosopher Anthony O'Hear:"...O’Hear points out for example that the Greek heroes in Homer (whom Simone Weil called ‘ killing-machines’) were attacking a culture that was domestic and civilised. Andromache was preparing a hot bath for her husband Hector, not knowing that he was being dragged, dead, behind the chariot of Achilles. Homer tells us this, but amid the blood and clamour we might overlook the contrast. In the Aeneid Vergil can be sensed flinching at the violence of the pax romana — even ‘pious Aeneas’ could be guilty. This ‘piety’ is O’Hear’s theme."All the books he describes and examines, from Homer to Goethe’s Faust, exist in an order that contains some form of transcendence, above and outside man. This order, essential to understanding the books themselves, O’Hear contends that we now too often push aside, treating ‘the mythology and mysticism of Plato’s thought as if these things were too naive and embarrassing even to notice’. Against this impoverishment O’Hear, unfashionably, goes doughtily to war."
Friends of ours just sent this snapshot of their beautiful new granddaughter, Thalia Sky, born yesterday afternoon. I was struck by the infant's open stare, and went scrambling for a passage from a book I'd read recently, The Power of Eye Contact. In a chapter on intimacy, it talks about how "appreciating really brings presence":Presence is a major nutrient that people need lifelong. If you think of babies, we just gaze at babies and look at them, and we don't need to do anything; we just exchange gazes. ...Your essence, who you really are, is so available just from gazing, giving and receiving attention. (K. Hendricks, p173).Uninhibited by the cultural taboo against staring, a baby's eyes express that deep yearning we all have to relinquish the condition of separateness:
...they just can't take their eyes off yours. ...It's utterly natural. We're all seeking this communal experience of union. (W. Johnson, p187)Thalia Sky, with her innocent stare, reminds us of what Zen Buddhists call beginner's mind: experiencing the world without preconceptions, without filters and blinders, appreciating it anew, with the freshness and wonder of a baby's eyes.
Some books look irresistible. Those of us enamored of the ancient Greeks will have difficulty passing up this one: ALL THINGS SHINING, Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age. According to Eric Ormsby in his WSJ review, the authors--philosophers Hubert Dreyfus at Berkeley and Sean Dorrance Kelly at Harvard--"view the ancient Homeric gods as hidden presences still susceptible of invocation. Indeed, they hold out 'Homeric polytheism' as a solution to the 'lostness' of the contemporary world."The authors' general theme, and lament, is that we are no longer "open to the world." We fall prey either to "manufactured confidence" that sweeps aside all obstacles or to a kind of addictive passivity, typified by "blogs and social networking sites." Both are equally unperceptive. By contrast, the Homeric hero is keenly aware of the outside world; indeed, he has no interior life at all. His emotions are public, and they are shared; he lives in a community of attentiveness. He aspires to what in Greek is termed "areté," not "virtue," as it is usually translated, but that peculiar "excellence" that comes from acting in accord with the divine presence, however it may manifest itself.The two philosophers describe a fascinating notion they call "whooshing up:"
Whooshing up is the sensation we enjoy at a sporting event when the crowd rises to its feet as one to register a communal sense of awe and admiration before some astonishing athletic feat.
Whooshing up is communal, it is public and it is shared; and so, according to the authors, it is close to the kinds of sensations the ancient Greeks admired and cultivated. Throughout the book, such great athletes as Bill Bradley, Lou Gehrig and Roger Federer are invoked as supreme examples of such shining, almost instinctive, grace. Their greatness lies not solely in their skill, the authors argue, but in their ability to let some outside force course through them, just as the heroes of old were exquisitely attuned to the power of a god working through their bodies.
I could use some of that in my tennis game--I got whipped this morning. Look out, Stephan-I'm ordering this book!
I have always assumed that my surname, Angsten, was derived from the German Angst, with its negative connotations of fear and anxiety. While not exactly inspiring, it seemed suitable to a writer of adventure thrillers. In researching my latest novel, however, I've discovered a more positive spin on the name. It now appears perfectly--even cosmically--appropriate for an author named Angsten to be writing what I'm currently writing: a contemporary thriller about the origins of eastern mysticism and the age-old quest for liberation.
In this regard--as well as in their fondness for gambling--the Vedic people resembled the cowboys of the 19th-century American West. They were driven, like their vast herds of horses, "to move on, always to move on, to new lands." This insatiable urge for expansion was supported by their religion and expressed in their collection of spoken prayer known as the Rig Veda--the oldest religious poetry in the world."The opposite of this word prithu is the word for a tight spot, in both the physical and the psychological sense; that word is amhas, signifying a kind of claustrophobia, the uneasiness of being constrained in a small space. (Amhas is cognate with our word 'anxiety' and the German Angst.) In this context, amhas might well be translated, 'Don't fence me in,' since it occurs in a number of Vedic poems in which the poet imagines himself trapped in a deep well or cave, from which he prays to the gods to extricate him."For these ancient cowboys, then, the term from which the name 'Angsten' is derived was less an expression of fear and anxiety than of the inherent human yearning for freedom.
We have drunk the soma; we have become immortal; we have gone to the light; we have found the gods. What can hatred and the malice of a mortal do to us now? The glorious drops that I have drunk set me free in wide space. (8.48.3)
