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HOW DO I LOVE THEE?

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.

I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.

I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.

I love thee with a passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, --- I love thee with the breath,

Smiles, tears, of all my life! --- and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

from Sonnets from the Portuguese

solitude II

This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself.

While I enjoy the friendship of the seasons I trust that nothing can make life a burden to me. The gentle rain which waters my beans and keeps me in the house today is not drear and melancholy, but good for me too. Though it prevents my hoeing them, it is of far more worth than my hoeing. If it should continue so long as to cause the seeds to rot in the ground and destroy the potatoes in the low lands, it would still be good for the grass on the uplands, and, being good for the grass, it would be good for me.

Some of my pleasantest hours were during the long rain-storms in the spring or fall, which confined me to the house for the afternoon as well as the forenoon, soothed by their ceaseless roar and pelting; when an early twilight ushered in a long evening in which many thoughts had time to take root and unfold themselves.

In one heavy thunder-shower the lightning struck a large pitch pine across the pond, making a very conspicuous and perfectly regular spiral groove from top to bottom, an inch or more deep, and four or five inches wide, as you would groove a walking-stick. I passed it again the other day, and was struck with awe on looking up and beholding that mark, now more distinct than ever, where a terrific and resistless bolt came down out of the harmless sky eight years ago.

Men frequently say to me, "I should think you would feel lonesome down there, and want to be nearer to folks, rainy and snowy days and nights especially." I am tempted to reply to such — This whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell the two most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our instruments? Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way? This which you put seems to me not to be the most important question. What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary?

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows.

The really diligent student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge College is as solitary as a dervish in the desert. The farmer can work alone in the field or the woods all day, hoeing or chopping, and not feel lonesome, because he is employed; but when he comes home at night he cannot sit down in a room alone, at the mercy of his thoughts, but must be where he can "see the folks," and recreate, and as he thinks remunerate himself for his day's solitude; and hence he wonders how the student can sit alone in the house all night and most of the day without ennui and "the blues"; but he does not realize that the student, though in the house, is still at work in his field, and chopping in his woods, as the farmer in his, and in turn seeks the same recreation and society that the latter does, though it may be a more condensed form of it. 1

Henry David Thoreau

from Walden, Chapter 5

a thesis of weaves and hallows

Beware of gnawing
the ideogram of nothingness:
Your teeth will crack. Swallow it whole, and you’ve a treasure
Beyond the hope of Buddha and the Mind. The east breeze
Fondles the horse’s ears:
how sweet the smell of plum.

Karasumaru-Mitsuhiro (1579-1638) 1

PINE

The first night at the monastery,
a moth lit on my sleeve by firelight,
long after the first frost.

A short stick of incense burns
thirty minutes, fresh thread of pine
rising through the old pine of the hours.

Summer is trapped under the thin
glass on the brook, making
the sound of an emptying bottle.

Before the long silence,
the monks make a long soft rustling,
adjusting their robes.

The deer are safe now. Their tracks
are made of snow. The wind has dragged
its branches over their history.

Chase Twichell

“Pine” by Chase Twichell from The Snow Watcher published by Ontario Review Press. © 1998 by Chase Twichell.

THIS LITTLE GLADE, REMEMBER

When lying beneath a ponderosa
pine, looking up through layers
of branches, mazes of leaf-spikes

and cones—contemplation grows
receptive to complexity,
the pleasant temptation of pine-
scented tangle. Sky as proposition
is willingly divided and spliced
into a thesis of weaves and hallows.

Name them something else
if you wish, but needled shadow
and substance are, in this hour,
an architecture of philosophy.

And a rising wind, called ”a rough
and bawdy wind“ by a rough and bawdy
voice, is that wind and that voice
transformed. The structure of words
sways and bends in the blow.

Looking away into the clear sky, expectation shifts. Vision becomes/ a welcome to guests
of crows in new/ dimensions who themselves become/ not only depth and horizon
in a circus/ of wings but old vision’s startling visitors.

Not soul alone, but soul consumed
by a single bee descending into the center
of a purple mountain lily is soul
to a soul suckled in sleep.

Earth and human together
form a unique being. A brief era
of immortality is lent to each
by the other. Move momentarily
now—with hovering granite cliff,
with sun-stripe flick of perhaps
vagrant shrew, with raised tack
of mightly larkspur—into this company.

Pattiann Rogers

“This Little Glade, Remember” from Generations.
Copyright © 2004 by Pattiann Rogers.

in honor of

Monday, November 5, 2007.

Monday
morning’s sky
features a beautiful
pairing
of the waning
crescent moon
and the
blazing planet
Venus at dawn. 1


Venus
and the moon
Will be matched to each other,
The parrot with sugar.
The most beautifully-faced Beloved
Makes a different kind of wedding every night.
rumi

.おぼろ月松出ぬけても出ぬけても

hazy moon in the pine--
passing through
passing through


.年よりや月を見るにもなむあみだ

growing old--
even while moon gazing
praising Buddha!

frog - a - woo

THE FROG WHO WOULD A WOOING GO

A Frog he would a-wooing go,
Whether his mother would let him or no.

Off he set with his opera-hat.
On the road he met with a Rat.



"Pray, Mr. Rat, will you go with me,
Kind Mrs. Mousey for to see?"

They soon arrived at Mousey's hall.
They gave a loud tap, and they gave a loud call.

"Pray, Mrs. Mouse, are you within?"
"Yes, kind sirs, and sitting to spin."

"Pray, Mrs. Mouse, now give us some beer,
That Froggy and I may have good cheer."

"Pray, Mr. Frog, will you give us a song?
Let the subject be something that's not very long."

"Indeed, Mrs. Mouse," replied the Frog,
"A cold has made me as hoarse as a hog."

"Since you have caught cold, Mr. Frog," Mousey said,
"I'll sing you a song that I have just made."

As they were in glee and merrymaking,
A Cat and her kittens came tumbling in.

The Cat she seized the Rat by the crown,
The kittens they pulled the little Mouse down.

This put Mr. Frog in a terrible fright,
He took up his hat, and he wished them good night.

As Froggy was crossing it over a brook,
A lilywhite Duck came and gobbled him up.

So here is an end of one, two, three--
The Rat, the Mouse, and little Froggy.

THE END

this tale is so very odd, one begins to wonder who these critters are meant to symbolize, and what the 'backstory' is. i couldn't find it, though i found a wonderful bit of very serious satire about it, as well as various versions of the poem itself (and a short story-ization as well).

this, like yesterday's tale, does not have a happy ending. it and the illustrations are a bit perverse (he's kissing her tail?). are there other cultures with much the same story (as we've seen with others)?

and why do all our frogs wear trousers? do we have graphics, as do the japanese, that allow for the simple grace of this worthy creature?

well, then, there is always this.

the coburn and the dow

it's difficult for our eyes to even see it now, but the transition in art from depicting the literal to depicting the subjective was wildly revolutionary (as we've already seen). and this goes for photography as well as painting. for many years after their introductions both painting and photography were 'required' to reflect reality 'accurately.' at least that was true in the west.

in japan, it was different. it was just understood that the reality the artist produced was what he made of it. when arthur wesley dow suddenly realized this, supposedly while reading a book on japanese prints at the fine arts museum library in boston, it changed his work forever. he felt that this is what he had been looking for, what his work had been needing. dow realized that he did not want to be copying the prints, something he came to criticize whistler for doing, but rather creating his own style using the principles he had learned from viewing the japanese work.

it is our loss that dow spent far more time teaching, from his school in ipswitch to columbia, to the pratt institute in new york, with many stops in-between, than he did making art, and yet he bequeathed us the wonders of the work of his students.
one student, alvin langdon coburn, wasn't a true beginner when he came to ipswitch in 1903. (he would go



on to begin to photograph many of the 'men of mark' in europe the following year). he and dow became more than strictly student and teacher, as they twice went to the grand canyon together to shoot photographs, or paint.

coburn said of dow's ipswich school, "we were taught painting, pottery, and woodblock printing, and i also used my camera, for dow had the vision, even at that time, to recognize the possibilities of photography as a medium of personal artistic expression. i learned many things at his school, not least an appreciation of what the orient has to offer us in terms of simplicity and directness of composition....i think that all of my work has been influenced to a large extent and beneficially by the oriental background, and i am deeply grateful to arthur dow for this early introduction to its mysteries." the world was learning this from the japanese artists who, until being 'taught' otherwise by the westerners they were so enthusiastically trying to emulate, did not make a distinction between 'crafts' and 'art.' in europe the nabis embraced this philosophy (more on this later); additionally part of this was establishing photography's place as a fine art as well.

many thanks to pinholeman for turning me on to coburn!!

picture info: top right: 'salt marsh' dow; top left: 'moon over cherry trees' hiroshige. 2r: 'the blue dragon' dow's painting of the scene out his studio door; 2l: 'the dragon' coburn's photo of the same spot. (here i've stuck in dow's 'ipswitch meadows' because it struck me that this was essentially the same painting as his 'grand canyon'!) 3r: 'grand canyon' dow; 3l: 'grand canyon' coburn. 4l: 'oh-hashi bridge' koho shoda; 4r: 'london bridge' coburn.
blueinall