All leaflife and starshower

A couple of weeks ago I came across this extraordinary little poem by the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, whose translater is the American poet Christian Wiman - of whom, more soon.

In 1934, Mandelstam was arrested for writing an epigram critical of Stalin. He and his wife were exiled, then later given a reprieve. He wrote that only in Russia was poetry taken seriously: "Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?" During the Great Purge, he was again arrested for anti-Soviet views, and sent to a Siberian concentration camp where, in December 1938, he died.

This poem was written on 4 May, 1937. It's one of the best expressions I've ever seen of the fleeting fitful beauty of being alive, the futility and absolute urgency of trying to say what it is. It has added plangency given Mandelstam only lived another nineteen months. This poem, ‘And I was Alive,’ is going straight to the top shelf of poems that help me live. 

And I was alive in the blizzard of the blossoming pear,
Myself I stood in the storm of the bird–cherry tree.
It was all leaflife and starshower, unerring, self–shattering power,
And it was all aimed at me.

What is this dire delight flowering fleeing always earth?
What is being? What is truth?

Blossoms rupture and rapture the air,
All hover and hammer,
Time intensified and time intolerable, sweetness raveling rot.
It is now. It is not.

Not unwelcome waves the wood

It's undoubtedly time for some Autumn poetry. There's Keats, of course, and Shelley and Blake. There's Rossetti and Browning and Stevenson and Frost. Almost everyone who's put poem to paper has written about this stirring season. One of the lesser known offerings comes from eighteenth-century Scottish minister and editor, John Logan. His ecstatic poem (the full version contains no fewer than 26 exclamation marks), "A visit to the country in Autumn" contains some of the cliches of Autumn, but has I think some fine and lovely phrases, and deserves a place at Autumn's altar. These are five of its nine stanzas.

'Tis passed! No more the summer blooms!     
Ascending in the rear, 
Behold congenial Autumn comes,     
The sabbath of the year! 
What time thy holy whispers breathe, 
The pensive evening shade beneath,     
And twilight consecrates the floods; 
While Nature strips her garment gay, 
And wears the vesture of decay, 
O, let me wander through the sounding woods.  

Ah! well known streams! Ah! wonted groves,     
Still pictured in my mind! 
Oh! Sacred scene of youthful loves,     
Whose image lives behind! 
While sad I ponder on the past, 
The joys that must no longer last;     
The wild flower strown on Summer’s bier, 
The dying music of the grove, 
And the last elegies of love,  
Dissolve the soul and draw the tender tear!

Alas! misfortune's cloud unkind      
May summer soon o’ercast;  
And cruel fate's untimely wind      
All human beauty blast!  
The wrath of Nature smites our bowers,  
And promised fruits, and cherish'd flowers,     
The hopes of life in embryo sweeps;  
Pale o’er the ruins of his prime,  
And desolate before his time,  
In silence sad the mourner walks and weeps!   

Relentless power! whose fated stroke      
O’er wretched man prevails!  
Ha! love's eternal chain is broke,      
And friendship's covenant fails!  
Upbraiding forms! a moment's ease  
O memory! how shall I appease      
The bleeding shade, the unlaid ghost?  
What charm can bind the gushing eye?  
What voice console the incessant sigh,  
And everlasting longings for the lost?  

Yet not unwelcome waves the wood  
That hides me in its gloom,  
While lost in melancholy mood      
I muse upon the tomb.  
Their chequered leaves the branches shed,  
Whirling in eddies o’er my head,      
They sadly sigh, that Winter’s near:  
The warning voice I hear behind,  
That shakes the wood without a wind,  
And solemn sounds the death-bell of the year.

Avatars

I'm not much given to personal vanity, but a traumatic passport photo has unmasked a hidden streak of narcissism. It made me think about how in this digital age, where private, public and celebrated are on a compressed continuum, we all exercise control over our image. We painstakingly construct online personas (I'm doing it now) and make our happy snaps the avatars onto which we project our constructed selves. We press our social intercourse between the leaves of a book of faces.

It also made me think about a line I gleaned from somebody else's online persona, that the self has replaced the soul in modern culture. This goes beyond social media. It's about the way the good life has come to mean organic food, exercise and calorie counting, renewable energy, work-life balance, self-help in its manifold forms. The good life used to be much more to do with the ground of being than the mechanics of living. And almost nothing to do with faces.

So, as photos become the avatars of our constructed selves, our constructed selves become the avatars of our neglected souls: the projection of who we would like to be onto what we think the world demands of us. A bad passport photo becomes far more traumatic than it would be if I accepted that it was not, nor was ever meant to be, a window on my soul.

Life of our life, the garden lives and sings

Another great American environmentalist has been since early last year among my favourite poets. Wendell Berry is a Kentucky farmer, essayist and poet who has had much to say about conservation, climate and creation. Like Ansel Adams, he calls beauty as witness to our responsibility. Here's his “Speech to the Garden Club of America” - a speech in verse. 

Thank you. I’m glad to know we’re friends, of course;
There are so many outcomes that are worse.
But I must add I’m sorry for getting here
By a sustained explosion through the air,
Burning the world in fact to rise much higher
Than we should go. The world may end in fire
As prophesied—our world! We speak of it
As “fuel” while we burn it in our fit
Of temporary progress, digging up
An antique dark-held luster to corrupt
The present light with smokes and smudges, poison
To outlast time and shatter comprehension.
Burning the world to live in it is wrong,
As wrong as to make war to get along
And be at peace, to falsify the land
By sciences of greed, or by demand
For food that’s fast or cheap to falsify
The body’s health and pleasure—don’t ask why.
But why not play it cool? Why not survive
By Nature’s laws that still keep us alive?
Let us enlighten, then, our earthly burdens
By going back to school, this time in gardens
That burn no hotter than the summer day.
By birth and growth, ripeness, death and decay,
By goods that bind us to all living things,
Life of our life, the garden lives and sings.
The Wheel of Life, delight, the fact of wonder,
Contemporary light, work, sweat, and hunger
Bring food to table, food to cellar shelves.
A creature of the surface, like ourselves,
The garden lives by the immortal Wheel
That turns in place, year after year, to heal
It whole. Unlike our economic pyre
That draws from ancient rock a fossil fire,
An anti-life of radiance and fume
That burns as power and remains as doom,
The garden delves no deeper than its roots
And lifts no higher than its leaves and fruits.

Live lifted up in light

Ben’s Autumn photos made me think of his favourite photographer, Ansel Adams, who died on 22 April 1984, and Adams’ collaboration with writer and critic Nancy Wynne Newhall. She also worked with Edward Weston, but it was the text she wrote for the 1960 exhibition This is the American Earth that earned her the most acclaim. Adams’ photographs of the American West, particularly of Yosemite, made an inestimable contribution to conservation in the middle decades of the last century - and all in black and white. He combined a conservationist’s zeal with an extraordinary sensitivity to the spiritual and the sublime. He complained that sublime photographs were all too often accompanied by lacklustre text. So when he found Nancy Newhall, he rejoiced. He called the text she wrote for American Earth “paeonic and evocative ... explicit and miraculous.” Her lines should be read “as though they were parts of Genesis.” She certainly added lustre to Adams’ already luminous world.

You shall know the night - its space, its light, its music.

You shall see earth sink in darkness and the universe appear. 

No roof shall shut you from the presence of the moon.

You shall see mountains rise in the transparent shadow before dawn.

You shall see - and feel! - first light, and hear a ripple in the stillness.

You shall enter the living shelter of the forest.

You shall walk where only the wind has walked before.

You shall know immensity,

and see continuing the primeval forces of the world.

You shall know not one small segment but the whole of life, strange, miraculous, living, dying, changing.

You shall face immortal challenges; you shall dare,

delighting, to pit your skill, courage, and wisdom

against colossal facts.

You shall live lifted up in light;

you shall move among clouds.

You shall see storms arise, and, drenched and deafened,

shall exult in them.

You shall top a rise and behold creation.

And you shall need the tongues of angels

to tell what you have seen.

Were all learning lost, all music stilled, 

Man, if these resources still remained to him,

could again hear singing in himself 

and rebuild anew the habitations of his thought.

Tenderly now

let all men

turn to the earth.