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Living within a living, loving planet
Archive for November 2, 2012
An Interview with Jorie Graham III
Nov 2nd
An Interview with Jorie Graham Issue 2 (August 2012)
Earthlines Magazine
“People were clearly not meant to live as they
wished to live on the planet, as I could see it. The mismatch
between this species – with its needs and desires – and this
place was evident everywhere … Native Americans, in their
early history, knew how to live on land. But we took care
of that. Oh it made me and makes me half-crazed at times
with grief, then with rage, then with just total bafflement.
Most of my poetry has spent its time trying to figure out what
‘being’ is – human ‘being’ and non-human ‘being’. How do
they go together. Can they. What on earth is human desire. I
knew even then desire was our illness, as well as our stunning
spark. It has turned out to be more our illness. Our terminal
illness. What can I say. That is what I write from and about.”
An Interview with Jorie Graham II
Nov 2nd
An Interview with Jorie Graham Issue 2 (August 2012)
Earthlines Magazine
“I feel that the en plein air descriptions of Never, a book written to
deeply make myself see, and thereby to bring into others’
vision, the natural world – from its microscopic life to its far
reaches of ‘evolution’ ( a word I still used in that book – a
number of poems are titled by that term) – are still, in spite
of their ‘understanding’ of the eco issues, innocent. I mean by
this that I had not fully downloaded it into my soul – and
also that I had not yet really gone deeply into the science. Sea
Change registers that shock. Place tries to recover a necessary
innocence from which to live and act. A ‘higher innocence’,
to avail myself of Blake’s terms. One that follows ‘experience’.
It is from there that we must act. Or can act. This has nothing
to do with explicability or inexplicability. Nature is not in
the realm of explication. So I do not engage with it on those
terms. I do bring language and mind up against it, into it, I
suffuse us with each other –but that is a matter of awakened
sensation, and its attendant awakened consciousness. From
there too one can, perhaps, act. But surely it is a prerequisite.
Nature cannot become an abstraction. That has been the
whole deficit in our souls which has brought us to this.”
The passage above reminds me of the situation where, to my mind,
we have not developed a language of spirit. Now I don’t mean the
spirituality of sky gods, the spirit of churches. I am trying to bring
to awareness an Earthen Spirituality but am humbled by my inability
to find a satisfying expression. Earthen Spirituality can be explicated,
but not in the accepted ways of knowing or expressing. Almost five
centuries of materialism has dominated the accepted worldview and
imprinted a template of what “is” and what “is not.” Again, I will not
accept that spirit cannot be explicated. As of the moment, it appears
to me that art holds the key. I have said that music is the language of
the soul. the Hsin Hsin Ming says: “Stop thinking and there is nothing
that you will not be able to understand.” One of my limitations is
that I keep thinking about how to stop thinking. I keep thinking about
what it is to not think. So, I am in a cage of my own construction, with
doors and windows yet stuck inside pushing at the door instead of
turning the door knob.