Blessed ones, whole ones

Two poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, the Austrian turn-of-the-century spiritualist poet, came to me in answer to my sense that being is more than breath. In the first, one's breath joins a larger breathing, and we find by losing. In the second, the senses are not the most blessed; rather it's the mystery at their crossroads.  

Part One, Sonnet IV

You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathing
that is more than your own.
Let it brush your cheeks
as it divides and rejoins behind you.

Blessed ones, whole ones,
you where the heart begins:
You are the bow that shoots the arrows
and you are the target.

Fear not the pain. Let its weight fall back
into the earth;
for heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.

The trees you planted in childhood have grown
too heavy. You cannot bring them along.
Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.

Part Two, Sonnet XXIX

Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent Earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

Matins

“If we don’t breathe, we die,” she said. “So we want to keep that breathing going.”

I'm all for breathing. Breathing is swell. But what I find in these situations - whether it's Saturday morning Pilates, or “mindfulness” training at work - is that concentrating on the workings of my respiratory system or musculature does not relax me; it makes me nauseous. Even thinking too acutely about my toes makes them curl. I think the idea of all this is to be in the moment, to exclude the abstract, to return to something primal, as though breathing were the elementary mode of being. To me this is like trying to squeeze the consciousness of a higher being into the mere sentience of a lower being, and it freaks me out.

I'd rather think of breath as spirit, and spirit as the very thing that allows me not to be 'in' my body at every moment. As Leon Wieseltier says, “the pure present is for infants.” Bobby McFerrin says for him breath is not enough. Breath joined to spirit and made into song - ahh, that's another matter.

So instead of watching my breath while lying on my mat, maybe I'll lift my voice in a joyous morning hymn. I wonder if my fellow Pilatists would mind? 

Raising the brow bar

Sometimes when you check back in after a break, things have moved, often at a swifter pace than you thought possible. Like when you don’t own a tv, and then you catch some and think ‘was tv always this loud, crass and fatuous?’

Today it was eyebrows. I’ve always had a casual approach to eyebrow maintenance, and haven’t put them in for a service in quite a while. Feeling a tad unkempt about the brows, I had a look online to find a neighbouring brow shop. There are plenty, and since I last looked, they’ve experienced what can only be described as profession creep.

With a few clicks of the mouse, I stumbled unawares into a world of brow shapers, sugarers, designers, stylists and – I kid you not – brow whisperers. At a brow bar that looks more like a Byzantine kasbah, your ‘Arch Angel’ will perform a ‘face reading’ to gain an understanding of your personality and idiosyncracies. (I wonder, does one’s face have to be straight for this to work?) ‘Using the brow whispering technique they can then determine a perfect brow shape to suit each individual.’ Once you’ve had your brows whispered, you move on to your consultation with a brow artist, who’ll (eventually) give you a ‘wax, tweeze and alignment’ for just $70. If you prefer something more radically intrusive, you can pay considerably more for a browlift, which surgically removes excess fat and skin in your brow area, and tightens the muscles to give you the perfect arch of the permanently surprised.

It’s not really the money that troubles me, nor the possibility that if I were so inclined I could have my face surgically rearranged. Tempora mutantur, after all. It’s the spin: the psuedo-spiritual quasi-psychological lily-gilding that blurs a service industry with the helping professions and the arts.  Such spinning elevates beyond reason both the nature of the transaction and – it must be said – the participants. Removing hair with hot wax is not an art; the person who does it, however well, is not an artist. This wouldn’t bother me so much if I, as the buyer of these services, was not drawn into the pretence. Because that’s the worst part.  Going along with the elaborate charade that my eyebrows somehow deserve this much attention, this much gilt. That I care about them this much.

Maybe I should ask my brow artist to give me the ‘dead pan.’  I think I’m going to need it.

In libris

I’m sitting in the National Library, sucking down latte and wi-fi in about equal quantities. This is because we have moved house and so far have no internet at home. Hence the blog silence. I’ll be back soon with more posts and a fresh look for the blog; apologies in the interim.

I’ve posted about moving before, since I seem to do it about annually. Being married to a minimalist has curbed my tendency to keep everything in case it matters later. His view is: if in doubt, throw it out. So this move was a bit leaner than previous ones. And it was, I admit, pretty cathartic to throw away letters, papers, notes that I’ve been carting for a couple of decades that really won’t ever matter again.

I also threw away some books (gasp!) but I find books are a bit like the magic pudding. No matter how many you give away, you always seem to have just as many – way too many to make moving easy. But it’s good to keep one’s book collection dynamic. As you add to it, you can cut away some of the dead wood. You can think seriously about whether this or that book matters now in the way it did then, and if it ever did at all. You can audit your reading habits and history. You can cleanse your reading palate, and thus your intellect, and your imagination. It’s a way to ensure your books live and breathe in your life, that your library is not a museum.

In the quiet evening hours

Thinking of Isabel's sad wandering in Rome made me think of one of my favourite Christina Rossettis: 'An End'. To me it speaks about an ending that's not tempestuous or anguished, but quiet and still, sad and soft.  There's even almost relief, after the heat of death-strong love, in the coolness of it.

Love, strong as Death, is dead.
Come, let us make his bed
Among the dying flowers:
A green turf at his head;
And a stone at his feet,
Whereon we may sit
In the quiet evening hours.

He was born in the Spring,
And died before the harvesting:
On the last warm summer day
He left us; he would not stay
For Autumn twilight cold and grey.
Sit we by his grave, and sing
He is gone away.

To few chords and sad and low
Sing we so:
Be our eyes fixed on the grass
Shadow-veiled as the years pass,
While we think of all that was
In the long ago.