The Kingfisher
Deen, Rosemary
against cultural relativity, hermeneutics raises the truth question and challenges one's own horizon of meaning. For hermeneutics, all religions are meaningful. Some, however, can be truer...
...Jorie Graham grew up in Italy...
...Privacy is what we are leaving as we move toward eternity, tragedy...
...Rosemury Deen A SIMPLE introductory contrast between these poets: Amy Clampitt, the older woman, was brought up in Iowa...
...The best big poems of the book, "Beethoven, Opus 111" and "Imago," get closer to high style, which in English is the plain style of something like the Sermon on the Mount...
...Yet the place was such a variety store, its ambitions so outsize - - nothing less than to put East-West, science and religion, the whole Humpty Dumpty together again - - criticisms could always be assured of hitting their mark somewhere, and did...
...A LAND OF TWO PEOPLES Martin Buber on Jews and Arabs Edited with Commentary by PAUL R. MENDES-FLOHR "Buber's politics...set forth in Mendes-Flohr's brilliant anthology...[are] never simply visionary.., but [are] tactically sound, precisely because [they are] morally just and compassionate...
...HE CATHEDRAL BASILICA OF ST...
...This infant daughter, buried, no name, suggests the child emerging in the next stanza, who feels so out of her element that she identifies hersef with Anderson's mermaid...
...Errand into the wilderness THE UPSTART SPRING ESALEN ANB THE AMERICAN AWAKENING Walter Truett Anderson Addison-Wesley, $11.95 paper, 320 pp...
...Labor goes between factory and stillborn...
...The place is staggeringly beautiful, and about the only metaphysical thing Esalen initiates are likely to agree on is that Selig Morgenrath, its now deceased gardener, was an authentic wise man...
...The opening action of the poem at first invites us in...
...Much of Wilber's criticism of hermeneutics, in this discussion, is directed against the sociology of Robert Bellah...
...JAMES ill sponsorship with SISTERS OF SAINT ]OSEPH, Brentwood, N.Y...
...But the mind is wholly grave as well...
...David Toolan C ALIFORNIA: a place where the American expansionist ethos once reached its outer limit...
...Air, with the help of heart, gives us breath...
...But there are no gaps, no unearned garden, no garment put on that the poem hasn't materialized, patterned, cut, and sewn: "Bruna is teaching me/to cut a pattern./Saturdays we buy the cloth./ She takes it in her hands/ like a good idea, feeling/ for texture, grain, the built-in limits./ It's only as an afterthought she asks/ and do you think it's beautiful...
...The " I " sees to think or thinks to see--it is mind-seeing and sight-minding...
...Inside, at the heart, is tragedy, the present moment forever stillborn, but going in, each breath is a button coming undone, something terribly nimble-fingered finding all of the stops...
...Amy Clampitt begins and sustains The Kingfisher as a rhapsodist (in its root meaning of one who stitches together) but she's apparently turning to poetry drawn directly out of parent/childhood experience which is serious and therefore seeks a plainer, higher style than her descriptive poems...
...To some, Esalen is Babylon West...
...This was Great Mother country, permissive, sensual, and nurturing...
...The commonness of the words undoes us...
...It convinced me, more than ever, of just how much conventional Western sociology of religion has been tied to concepts (e.g., the sacred vs...
...Readers will have to judge for themselves whether Wilber's "deep structures" are not, when unmasked, really Vedanta or Buddhist structures, not so "deep" after all but culture-bound...
...Holy grave" is a translation of 'San Sepolcro," of course, a small town and the home of Piero and, for a few years, of his Madonna del Parto...
...Though light plays on her face, "changing her," "she has no care" for that: "she is at/her work...
...Few will also be convinced by his fundamental reduction of myth to the pre-rational level...
...To many the obstacles seem insurmountable, but Martin Buber proved time and time again during his fifty years of political activism that practical political solutions could be found which satisfied the needs of both peoples...
...announce I.ENTEN VESPERS " . . . But The Lord Looks Into The Heart'" -I Samuel 16:8 March 11 GERARD SLOYAN Professor, Department of Religion, Temple University March 1B PENNY LERNOUX Journalist, Latin American Affairs, NCR...
...The next time I returned, in 1977, information theory wizard Hans von Foerster and dolphin researcher John Lilly were bringing cybernetics to lotus land, a harbinger of science conferences to come, and people like Daniel Ellsberg, Andrew Young, and California assemblyman John Vasconcellos were passing through regularly...
...Zaehner, that monistic mystical experience is "higher" than theistic mysticism...
...The scrubbing may be true of tides but certainly not of head nurses...
...There are lots of these: "theology of wax," "reprieve of nightmare," "dim tropisms of avoidance...
...Few Christian readers, I surmise, will be persuaded, despite appeals to a logic of deep ,structure, of his argument, against R.C...
...Commonweal: 156 Erosion contains thirty three poems of this extraordinary quality...
...Imago of unfathomable evolvings, living only to copulate and drop its litter, does it know what it is, what it has been, what it may or must become...
...Just at the time when left critics, in particular, were shelling the place for being intellectually lightweight, nonpolitical, ahistorical, and narcissistic, it was beginning to recover some of the intellectual tone it had had at the start, when people like Arnold Toynbee, S.I...
...I reread them as slowly as they could bear it to find the rhythm of the voice that generated them: it is a slow, steady stepping forward...
...By the end of the poem, on prayer-meeting night, the water clock of time "distils its drop: a luna moth, the emblem/of the born-again...
...These poems are at their work, leaving their long afterthought to their readers...
...Here's an example from a poem in which sea corridors are scrubbed "twice daily by the indefatigible tidal head nurse...
...And the dress keeps opening from eternity to privacy, quickening...
...With this language "Imago ~' brings together its landscapes, their layers of past times, with personal history...
...When she retains the writing habits of the rhapsodist, this turn isn't easy for Miss Clampitt...
...This is not inviting...
...Light-pierced expresses the ecstasy even as it puts out the point of view...
...Hayakawa, Gardner Murphy, and Paul Tillich ran seminars there...
...descriptions...
...Is there any hope for the Middle East...
...Strangely, although I profoundly disagree with his fundamental intellectual moves, I found the book intriguing, challenging to my Western assumptions in sociology of religion and, in places, very illuminating...
...a rational and trans-rational appropriation of myth, a conscious enterNo unearned garden EROSION Jorie Grahm Princeton University Press, $6.95, 83 pp...
...Together the images say the impossibility of surviving without metamorphosis...
...Yes, said Martin Buber, but only a sound and just settlement between Jewish and Arab interests will bring lasting peace...
...Esalen was a moving target, rather like a snake shedding skins...
...The image of the beautiful moth fuses with plain questions in which the verb to be evolves to may and must, an evolution that the choice of such an emblem implies...
...Lines packed with gorgeous sounds, language, images, seem to rush or tumble forward in continuous movement...
...Surely opening suggests being born, we think, and that is to come out, into the open air...
...By that time, Will Schutz's sometimes brutal "encounters" - - lampooned in the film Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice - - were already on the wane...
...Selig, Morgenrath created a garden of Eden...
...The simplest language and a slow, steady movement...
...r a m - - Send check or money order to: Quantity _ _ Buber/Mendes-Fiohr: A LAND OF TWO PEOPLES OXFORD #503426-0 paper $7.95 UNIVERSITY r~s rR,NT: PRESS Name 2De00~Mrtment EC, Address adison Ave...
...Quickening with its suggestion of life beginning, runs into still, which readies us for the terrible part of nimble...
...The "hum" of such poems (indefatigible tidal) probably diverts the poet and keeps her from noticing inaccuracies...
...Mendes-Flohr did not intend his constellation of Buber's view.., to serve political ends, but inescapably a document that bespeaks such personal urgency and moral leadership cannot help but be political in the finest sense...
...To others again, Esalen was and is a fast-food American monastery, a secular counterpart to the mountaintop Camaldolese monastery down the road a piece...
...Light and eye are there, but you can see how point of view disappears--indeed, the blue "can't be looked at...
...To others, like the Kali temple I once visited in Calcutta, it's a three-ring therapeutic circus, all-forgiving, a place of refuge and healing...
...we try the poem again...
...To live is to be mantled in "weather," the "blue dress" of this earth, to breathe--and each breath is a button coming undone...
...San Sepolcro," the first poem, begins, "In this blue light/I can take you there" and continues, "This/is my house,/ my section of Etruscan wall, my neighbor's lemon trees, and, just below the lower church, the airplane factory...
...The Cove" ends: a curtain wall just frescoed indigo, so immense a hue, a blue of such majesty it can't be looked at, at whose apex there pulses, even in daylight, a lighthouse, lightpierced like a needle's eye...
...the profane...
...Author, The Cry of the People March 25 JOAN DeLOURDES LEONARD, CSJ Judge, Diocesan Tribunal of the Rockville Centre Diocese April 1 WILLIAM SLOANE COFFIN Senior Minister, The Riverside Church April B EDWARD BRAXTON Theologian, Author, The Wisdom Community April 15 JOHN TRACY ELLIS Historian...
...More information is available by calling (212) 8,55-6390...
...The Cathedral is on Jay Street near Ttllary...
...New York, N.Y...
...It's easy to take pleasure in her lyric ing into the world of the pre-conscious...
...Some, however, can be truer than others...
...Faculty, The Catholic University of America Sunday Afternoons at 4 P.M...
...But I had to catch my breath by the end of poems because images seem to take a quantum leap--from seed to Eden in a step...
...What would he make of Paul Ricoeur's project of a second naivete, i.e...
...the noble savages who visited and inhabited the place promptly replicated the Fall...
...but it had spawned the anarchic human potential movement, a big, messy target like a church...
...We are the living, and the living go in...
...church-sect typology) of Western Christian provenance...
...A girl with a mantle of weather is not common, of course, but Miss Graham understands and renders in this way the monumental stillness of Piero...
...In Jorie Graham's Erosion a voice is speaking, an"I," but not about itself, though its experiences are the materials of the poems...
...Again showing his Vedanta-Buddhist starting point, Wilber nowhere makes room for authentic bhakti or devotional religion...
...I think he fundamentally misinterprets Bellah's work...
...The hum (a "motive f o r c e . . . all noise") doubtless leads her also into that modern poetry mannerism Frye calls the abstract-of-concrete or the concreteof-abstract...
...As to the rest, there are more questions than answers...
...It opens "to privacy," which we at first think is where we are going (we have begun with "unbuttoning...
...It's a long way...
...Early settlers moved on to California, leaving a "headstone BECOME A 1984 COMMONWEAL ASSOCIATE Patron Member: $200 or more Charter Member Sl00 Sustaining Member: $50 Commonweal Associates 232 Madison Ave...
...Bernard Lonergan distinguishes between bright ideas (interesting speculative hypotheses) and good ideas (hypotheses grounded in careful evidence...
...the pleasures of the ruined...
...unlike the "infant daughter...
...it is before the birth of god...
...9 March 1984:155 My pleasure in these poems was qualified partly by their "half-metaphors," images that sound like metaphor, but are only half true and therefore not fused in metaphor's truth...
...That is the central theme of this anthology of Buber's essays, speeches, letters, and unpublished writings on the subject of Arab-Jewish relations...
...I recall the women I see on Seventh Avenue, the soles of whose feet are blacker if not colder than the sidewalk they recline on...
...New York, NY 10016 City State Z i p . _ _ 9 March 1984:157...
...Tile rlN|FISliER Amy Clampitt Knopf, $6.95, 148 pp...
...10016 for the infant daughter, aged two days, no name, they also left behind...
...They multiply by proliferating analogies, references to each other, movement...
...Fingered and stops may suggest an instrument like an organ, but honestly enough, there's no suggestion of music...
...Arthur A. Cohen, Commonweal 336 pp...
...But then we realize that the governing point of view of the poem is situated within, "at the heart...
...Come, we can go in...
...I don't think so...
...Walter Anderson's Upstart Spring tells Esalen's riveting, unfinished story - - even-handedly, entertainingly, with sympathy, and yet holding little back...
...The ending knots the threads of the beginning: snug house and stitch are tied to lighthouse and needle...
...Apophatic (image-less) forms of mysticism are always preferred to the way of images, with no serious attention to the pitfalls and possibilities in each...
...It is this girl by Piero della Francesca, unbuttoning her blue dress, her mantle of weather, to go into labor...
...paper $7.95 At better bookstores or use this coupon to order direct...
...The heart of this new frontier, its laboratory center, was the hanging garden on the big Sur coast named after an extinct Indian tribe, the Esalen Institute...
...The clean language makes metaphor out of its simple steps forward that leave nothing behind...
...An old woman in one poem is "sorting chick peas from pebbles...
...From the beginning, Wilber never claims for his book more than that it represents a schema of bright ideas...
...Airplane gives us bodiesand wings (but no one is risen ye0 and then yields to open air...
...Here's how it ends: "How clean/the mind is, holy grave...
...No-one has risen yet to the museums, to the assembly line--bodies and wings--to the open air market.This is what the living do: go in...
...Saint James is located in the Downtown Business Section of Brooklyn, immediate to crossing the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges...
...Then this disturbed me: certain celebrations imperfectly identified...
...In the early seventies, straight from civil disobedience "action," I made my first pilgrimage there for a meditation workshop that was first-rate...
...in the sixties and seventies it became a state of mind, a mythic medium for charting inner spaces and untried human potentials...
...The Cove," the first poem in the book, begins this way:"Inside the snug house, blue wilioware/plates go round the dado, cross-stitch/ domesticates the guest room . . . . '" Things activate, and they override point of view...
...In "Salvage" a bag-laden scavenger is said to be "disencumbered/of a greater incubus,/ the crush of unexamined attitudes," and in mining our refuse she's said to be "re-establishing...
...Fingered brings back the focus of the painting...
Vol. 111 • March 1984 • No. 5
