Category Archives: Spirituality

Spirituality

How to Hold Your Remorse: Maira Kalman’s Illustrated Meditation on Wresting Defiant Joy in Living from an Imperfect Life

Leave a comment

By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

Each time we have tried to elevate ourselves above the other animals by claiming singular possession of some faculty, we have been humbled otherwise: Language, it turns out, is not ours alone, nor is the use of tools, nor is music. Elephants grieve, octopuses remember and predict, crows hold grudges.

Perhaps one day this too will be snatched from us, but for now there seems to be one tumult of being pulsating in the human breast alone: the capacity to be sorry, to feel the soul-ache of remorse as the penitent past fangs the flesh of the present.

How to hold our remorse, how to make of it a catalyst for creation, is what the philosopher-artist Maira Kalman explores in her small and splendid book Still Life with Remorse — a collection of miniature essays, poems, and painted vignettes reckoning with remorse through Maira’s own family story, punctuated by glimpses of the lives of some of her muses: Leo Tolstoy, Clara Schumann, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Henri Matisse.

Objects in Matisse’s Studio by Maira Kalman

Defining remorse as “deep regret implying shame, implying guilt, implying sorrow,” Maira observes that “in still lifes and interiors there must be a certain amount of remorse lurking among the bowls of fruit, vases or flowers and objects scattered about the room.”

Rising from the pages is the intimation that memory is the still life of living, that while remorse may haunt the mental images of our recollections, we can find in it an occasion for beauty, for creative vitality, for defiant joy.

Tolstoy Eating Breakfast by Maira Kalman

Opening with an allusion to that immortal line from Anna Karenina — “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” — she considers the half-life of sorrow across generations:

Happy families,
Unhappy families.
All the same, right?
Ach. ach. ach.

To begin
You are born.
To a long line of ancestors
who are long gone
but still yell or whisper
in your ear
in the depths of night.
A game of telephone played
from one generation to the next.

Garbled and confused.
Glimmers of light.
Misunderstandings.
Errors.

And now, here you are.
With the ones you love.
Or the ones you don’t.

The ones you cannot live without.
The ones you would like to smite.

Those who have disappointed you
or betrayed you. Those who have
been kinder than you deserve. And
the kind ones who inevitably die.
And leave you feeling very much
alone. They are what you have.

And if you think, at any given point,
that you know what is going on,
you are sorely mistaken.

And yet.

With an eye to the complicated marriage of Sophia and Leo Tolstoy (so different from that of Anna and Fyodor Dostoyevsky) — the initial mutual infatuation, the thirteen children, the selflessness with which Sophia transcribed all of Leo’s writings, the mutual resentment of the end — she writes:

When trying to understand why human beings do what they do, a fog descends.

The verse to which Mahler wrote music becomes a quiet animating chorus for the book:

Dark is life.
Spring is here.
The birds are singing.

Virginia Woolf’s Writing Table by Maira Kalman

From the personal stories — her grandparents killed in the Holocaust, her father delivering milk as his cover while working for a Palestine liberation underground, Kafka’s troubled relationship with his own father, Clara Schumann’s tenacity and her tender unclassifiable relationship with Brahms — emerges a universal lens on suffering, remorse, and redemption, shining a sidewise gleam on what makes life worth living despite the almost unbearable brunt of being alive.

Your family.
My family.

Your remorse.
My remorse.

All the same, right?

Vast skies full of remorse.
Oceans of remorse.
But enough.

There should be merriment.
And good cheer.
Good tidings. Well wishing.

Tables laden with food.
Children playing.
Gathering of kinfolk.

Like Clara would have wanted.
Seeing the best.
Forgiving the worst.

If there is remorse,
let there be a limit to remorse.
A way to shake off the heavy weight.

But how can we make this happen?
How to do this?

Dark is life.
Spring is here.
The birds are singing.

In the strangeness of life, LIVE.

Yellow Vase by Maira Kalman

Couple with “Antilamentation” — poet Dorianne Laux’s antidote to regret — then revisit Maira Kalman’s wonderful Women Holding Things and her illustrated love letter to Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein’s love.

Spirituality

Zadie Smith on the Courage to Be More Than Yourself

Leave a comment

By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

Every act of learning is an act of intellectual appropriation, incorporating someone else’s knowledge into your own mental library. Every act of empathy is an act of emotional appropriation, modeling the reality of another into your own in order to fathom it. I have appropriated the English language — not my native — in order to write these words.

The tyranny of our time is that, because the hero of the modern myth is the victim, our catalogue of ways to be wounded has swelled to untenable proportions. The arsenal of possible offenses is so immense that we are left in a state of paralyzing hyper-vigilance, ever on the defensive, ever trying to preempt grievance and avoid indictment. Because it is hard to create from a defensive place, no region of life has suffered more by this than our arts — trembling before the whip of cultural appropriation, artists are left with narrower and narrower parameters of permission for whom and what they can imagine. We seem to have forgotten that the word empathy itself is just a little over a century old, invented by Rilke and Rodin to describe the imaginative act of projecting yourself into a work of art that represents something other than yourself. We seem to have forgotten that, at its best, art is not a mirror but a kaleidoscope, casting on the walls of our own lives a thousand hues of experience we never could have lived. As a little girl in the mountains of Bulgaria in the early 1990s, I would have never known what it is like to be a little boy in the prairies of North America in the early 1900s had I not read a German woman’s novel about a Lakota father and son. You may never know what it is like to be the long-suffering wife of a Siberian serf, but you have Dostoyevsky.

Troubled by this tyrannical paralysis, Zadie Smith offers an antidote of uncommon potency and poignancy in one of the essays collected in Dead and Alive (public library), anchored in a recognition of the absurdity of turning identities into warfare given how mutable the self is, how inconstant, how tessellated a thing to begin with. She writes:

I’ve always been aware of being an inconsistent personality. Of having a lot of contradictory voices knocking around my head. As a kid, I was ashamed of it. Other people seemed to feel strongly about themselves, to know exactly who they were. I was never like that. I could never shake the suspicion that everything about me was the consequence of a series of improbable accidents — not least of which was the 400-trillion-to-one accident of my birth. As I saw it, even my strongest feelings and convictions might easily be otherwise, had I been the child of the next family down the hall, or the child of another century, another country, another God.

Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)

An epoch after Walt Whitman — a person utterly unlike her by all the unchosen variables we mistake for personhood — celebrated his contradictory multitudes, she considers the making of her own, borrowed from the lives of others, real and imagined:

I rarely entered a friend’s home without wondering what it might be like to never leave. That is, what it would be like to be Polish or Ghanaian or Irish or Bengali, to be richer or poorer, to say these prayers or hold those politics. I was an equal-opportunity voyeur. I wanted to know what it was like to be everybody. Above all, I wondered what it would be like to believe the sorts of things I didn’t believe… And what I did in life, I did with books. I lived in them and felt them live in me. I felt I was Jane Eyre and Celie and Mr Biswas and David Copperfield. Our autobiographical coordinates rarely matched. I’d never had a friend die of consumption or been raped by my father or lived in Trinidad or the Deep South or the nineteenth century. But I’d been sad and lost, sometimes desperate, often confused. It was on the basis of such flimsy emotional clues that I found myself feeling with these imaginary strangers: feeling with them, for them, alongside them and through them, extrapolating from my own emotions, which, though strikingly minor when compared to the high dramas of fiction, still bore some relation to them, as all human feelings do. The voices of characters joined the ranks of all the other voices inside me, serving to make the idea of my “own voice” indistinct. Or maybe it’s better to say: I’ve never believed myself to have a voice entirely separate from the many voices I hear, read, and internalize every day.

Art by Beatrice Alemagna from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader.

But if the purpose of art is to offer us, in Iris Murdoch’s perfect phrase, “an occasion for unselfing,” then it is not a defect but a natural advantage for an artist to have so unbounded a self, to be so indiscriminately curious about the interiority of other lives, about even the remotest reaches of possible experience. She offers an alternative to our culture’s antagonistic model of interpersonal curiosity:

What would our debates about fiction look like, I sometimes wonder, if our preferred verbal container for the phenomenon of writing about others was not “cultural appropriation” but rather “interpersonal voyeurism” or “profound other-fascination” or even “cross-epidermal reanimation”? Our discussions would still be vibrant, perhaps even still furious — but I’m certain they would not be the same. Aren’t we a little too passive in the face of inherited concepts? We allow them to think for us, and to stand as place markers when we can’t be bothered to think… I do believe a writer’s task is to think for herself, although this task, to me, signifies not a fixed state but a continual process: thinking things afresh, each time, in each new situation. This requires not a little mental flexibility. No piety of the culture… should or ever can be entirely fixed in place or protected from the currents of history. There is always the potential for radical change.

Art by Rockwell Kent for a rare 1937 edition of Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print and more.)

Invoking Whitman’s timeless exhortation to “re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book [and] dismiss whatever insults your own soul,” she adds:

Full disclosure: what insults my soul is the idea — popular in the culture just now, and presented in widely variant degrees of complexity — that we can and should write only about people who are fundamentally “like” us: racially, sexually, genetically, nationally, politically, personally. That only an intimate authorial autobiographical connection with a character can be the rightful basis of a fiction. I do not believe that. I could not have written a single one of my books if I did.

What a lovely reminder that art’s invitation to imagine what it is like to be another is precisely what allows us to discover the doom and glory of who we are and what we are. What a lovely insistence that far greater than the courage to be yourself is the courage to be more-than-yourself, the courage to remember that but a thin veil woven of chance events stretching all the way back to the Big Bang falls between you and not-you, a veil we have found a way of parting — literature — in order to allay the fundamental loneliness, isolation, and plain tedium of the self.

Spirituality

Swimming and the Meaning of Life

Leave a comment

By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

One of my earliest and most vivid childhood memories is of swimming in a cool pool bounded by boulders in the middle of a river in the mountains of Bulgaria, the late-afternoon sun casting komorebi on the water through the rustling leaves. I can still hear the feeling-tone in my body, the strange and lovely simultaneity of absolute presence and absolute peace. I didn’t yet know the word for transcendence.

Not long after that, I began swimming competitively in a chlorinated Olympic pool, investing long hours in perfecting my stroke and bettering my lap times. Those four years became a hard initiation into a culture that prizes productivity above presence. At eleven, I was beginning to see how the moment we incline action toward achievement, we drain the activity of joy; how anything we approach transactionally will never yield transcendence. I stopped swimming abruptly, disaffected and worn out. It would take me a quarter century to return to the water — it was only when I was drowning in the 800-page manuscript of my first book that I began swimming daily in the open ocean to think through the edits, to feel myself in the womb of the world while trying to birth something bigger than myself.

This spiritual dimension of swimming in wild nature comes vividly alive in Roger Deakin’s delicious book Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Through Britain (public library).

Illustration by Margaret C. Cook for a rare 1913 edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)

“Such indelible swims are like dreams, and have the same profound effect on the mind and spirit,” he writes of the transcendences he discovered when, suffused with sadness at the end of a long love, he began swimming in rivers, scribbling in his notebook:

All water, river, sea, pond, lake, holds memory and the space to think.

Our profound response to water appears to be our evolutionary inheritance — we came out of the ocean, of course, but never fully. Drawing on marine biologist Sir Alister Hardy’s aquatic theory of human evolution, later deepened by evolutionary historian Elaine Morgan in her classic The Descent of Woman, Deakin writes:

We spent ten million years of the Pliocene era of world drought evolving into uprightness as semi-aquatic waders and swimmers in the sea shallows and on the beaches of Africa. We went through a sea change to become what we are, and our subsequent life on dry land is a relatively recent, short-lived affair. Apart from the proboscis monkey of Borneo, we are the only primate that regularly takes to the water for the sheer joy of it. We are also singularly hairless like dolphins and, alone amongst the primates, have a layer of subcutaneous fat analagous to the whale’s blubber, ideal for keeping warm in the water.

Hardy had arrived as his theory by way of a single, startling insight — that the vestigial hairs on our bodies are arranged in a pattern completely unique among apes; that when a human swims through a water tunnel, the hydrodynamic lines representing the trajectory of water flow map exactly onto the lines drawn by the pattern of body hairs. In consonance with Rachel Carson’s recognition that because “our origins are of the earth… there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity,” Swimming appears to be our most direct way of contacting our creaturely belonging with the world. Deakin writes:

When you swim, you feel your body for what it mostly is — water — and it begins to move with the water around it… The swimmer experiences the terror and the bliss of being born. So swimming is a rite of passage, a crossing of boundaries: the line of the shore, the bank of the river, the edge of the pool, the surface itself. When you enter the water, something like metamorphosis happens. Leaving behind the land, you go through the looking-glass surface and enter a new world, in which survival, not ambition or desire, is the dominant aim… You are in nature, part and parcel of it, in a far more complete and intense way than on dry land, and your sense of the present is overwhelming.

Art by Monika Vaicenavičienė from What Is a River?

That bewildering sense of aliveness comes aglow in the book’s final pages as Deakin reflects on how absurd the lengths he goes to for a transcendent swim may seem from the outside, yet how to him it is “always an entirely serious enterprise, if at times surrealist,” and one that always leaves him “enriched.”

I turned off down a timeless sandy avenue of oaks, potholed by rabbits, to a distant farmhouse on a promontory jutting into the wide Blyth marshes… I cycled by the woods where George Orwell made love to Eleanor Jaques, his neighbour when he lived at Southwold, and into the village past the ruined church where he used to sit and read. I passed the house of Freddy the fisherman (“The Sole Plaice for Some Fin Special”). It was a quarter past six, and the sun, which already shared the sky with the blushing new moon, was beginning to go down. I hurried out over the little wooden bridge where they hold the annual crabbing contest in summer, and printed faint tyre-tracks across the last two hundred yards of cracked saltpan desert mud on Walberswick marsh. Scaling the sand-dunes, I ran down the deserted beach, flung off my clothes and waded into the surf. I felt the sweetness of tired limbs and fell headlong into the waves, striking towards the horizon that appeared intermittently beyond the breakers. I had left my rucksack and clothes beside a beautiful pebble starfish on the beach, another echo of the Scilly Maze. Perhaps I had at last swum my way through it. When I reached the relative calm of unbroken swell, I looked back towards the shore. A crimson mist lay over the sea as a red-hot sun dropped over the pantiled roofs behind the sand-dunes. The sea-fret shaded to a deep purple along the curve of the bay where Dunwich should have been, and obscured the giant puffball of Sizewell B. One of the beauties of this flat land of Suffolk is that when you’re swimming off the shore and the waves come up, it subsides from view and you could be miles out in the North Sea. An orange sickle of new moon hung above the chimneys in a deep mauve sky. Autumn bonfires glowed in the mist and floated white smoke-rings above it. The beach shone in the gathering dusk as the tide fell and the sea grew less perturbed. I turned and swam on into the quiet waves.

Such homilies on presence are also an act of resistance, of reclamation, of revolutionary rapture against the tyrannies of our present:

Most of us live in a world where more and more places and things are signposted, labelled, and officially “interpreted.” There is something about all this that is turning the reality of things into virtual reality. It is the reason why walking, cycling and swimming will always be subversive activities. They allow us to regain a sense of what is old and wild… by getting off the beaten track and breaking free of the official version of things… [to access] that part of our world which, like darkness, mist, woods or high mountains, still retains most mystery.

Complement Waterlog with Bill Hayes on swimming as the poetry of the body and artist Lisa Congdon’s illustrated celebration of the joy of swimming, then revisit Robert Macfarlane’s superb reckoning with the aliveness of rivers.

Sexuality, Spirituality

ChatGPT on Teresa of Ávila’s sex life

Leave a comment

ChatGPT:

There is no reliable historical evidence that Teresa of Ávila had a sexual life in the ordinary sense of the term. She was a Carmelite nun who took vows of chastity and spent most of her adult life in religious communities.

The question often arises because her writings describe intense mystical experiences that can sound erotic to modern readers. In her autobiography, she recounts a vision in which an angel pierced her heart with a fiery spear, producing both great pain and spiritual ecstasy. This experience inspired the famous sculpture The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa by Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

https://images.openai.com/static-rsc-4/AeiU-g4u8MaxeCGEwVZmTg8UuTTChVPc963I-gfq5LqAs3o4zGgcxu-MdkDaeJRsF4t-1ZvMf5JwPAEggTSDJrwV_oJL6m5vFtWcU91g8lLAH5t-aCACWeH8CAsL0xrwjro4ozNEpANvTfKSsy7Zzt9IfZ-jSygWyP3ODOtk6fQp-Sbn1HBbLdUV_8-R8xcw?purpose=fullsize
https://images.openai.com/static-rsc-4/Qr75VCvhLYcmaORzcjdYmwD31NIKPfmU9cLJG9rDk5qdvhwrB6OMh90xWCuqg_NVc0e6Cs_qL1yj6G_xAUzWZYjtfdflJvlJQ7RKJINQVgvAPnCS8FbVu_c0_I2mMl4vD-zogDqA5hq422cbmSXtJSiQmL_ybNGxdJD4yUQppydZbYYH7_YUp9lwX62YStP0?purpose=fullsize
https://images.openai.com/static-rsc-4/C1hwsqoc9NVmxas2OkOLGJ_Dg2xoBY4J47o5KCJLUGqivKm1K0uQoLD1dAbe_2l_r_30UWWNfQAH41IjpGmJaZcrzwNh1Ovn0t_NDxvuOBrlWbljtqERcTgJz1nLy7CBbtkj7w5MQiehoNUlBQSaijPnKsAP960Y9UkBVTyZ4x7hRGdBH0Duc86XKoczlbii?purpose=fullsize
https://images.openai.com/static-rsc-4/GDIBpnGGDS_1UOVSU4XHAahDGnwrr7LSQxDAVPe-FD50WGJ_JuOBtXUMqgMaphOJ9A7y2RObwqY22y42hQ8t9Su82LxG7-fNRdW6Ms8zS5k1cml5_UEtkJ7EyWZges5z8PO4B7OCddp8SBmfLmk3UvpiiMXAAP8bKWyXjr0qbMYHxAEn2gc5eO9YXYe80m8r?purpose=fullsize

Some modern scholars, psychologists, and literary critics have interpreted these descriptions through the lens of sexuality, suggesting that mystical ecstasy and bodily sensation may overlap in human experience. Others argue that imposing modern sexual categories on a 16th-century mystic can be misleading, because Teresa herself consistently described the experience as a union with God rather than a physical or sexual event.

What can be said with confidence is:

  • There is no documented evidence of sexual relationships or sexual activity in her life.
  • Her writings contain vivid descriptions of spiritual ecstasy that use imagery of love, longing, and union.
  • Those descriptions have generated centuries of debate about the relationship between mysticism, the body, and sexuality.

If you’re interested, I can also explain how Teresa’s mystical experiences have been interpreted by figures such as Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and modern historians of religion.

Consciousness, Spirituality

Weekly Translation: After my mother was killed, my father made me his wife.

Leave a comment

By Mike Zonta, BB editor

Translation is a 5-step process of “straight thinking in the abstract” comparing and contrasting what seems to be truth with what you can syllogistically, axiomatically and mathematically (using word equations) prove is the truth. It is not an effort to change, alter or heal anything other than our consciousness.

The claims in a Translation should be outrageous and mind-blowing, but they are always (or should always be) based on self-evident syllogistic reasoning. Here is my Translation from this week. 

1)    Truth is that which is so.  That which is not truth is not so. Therefore Truth is all that is.  Truth being all is therefore total, therefore whole, therefore sated, therefore satisfied, therefore full, therefore fulfilled. I think therefore I am. Since I am and since Truth is all that is, I cannot be other than Truth, therefore the beingness of me is Truth.  Since the beingness of me is Truth therefore the beingness of me has all the attributes of Truth.  Therefore the beingness of me is total, whole, sated, satisfied, full, fulfilled.  Since there is no being without awareness of it, therefore Truth is awareness.  

2)    After my mother was killed, my father made me his wife.

Word-tracking:
killed:  to come to die, murder, mortal
mother:  matrix, womb
woman:  vibrate, to hover
wife:  to hover, help meet or appropriate match or fitting match
father:  patriarch, patriot, guardian
guardian:  guard, watch
watch:  vigor, sentinel, see
equal:  just, fair, right true

3)    Truth being all is therefore without limit, therefore immortal.  Being immortal, Truth cannot be killed (shown to be mortal), therefore Truth is immortal.  Truth being all that is is therefore one.  Being one, Truth cannot be divided into father and mother, mother and son, husband and wife. Therefore Truth is indivisible oneness propagating Itself. Truth being all that is, therefore true is all that is, just is all that is, fair is all that is, equal is all that is.  Truth being awareness/consciousness (being a guardian or watcher or sentinel) and Truth being all that is, therefore Truth is the only sentinel.  And Truth being whole, complete and perfect, and all that is, therefore wholeness, completeness and perfection is all that can be seen/watched.

4)    Truth is immortal. 
        Truth is indivisible oneness propagating Itself.
        True is all that is, just is all that is, fair is all that is, equal is all that is.
        Truth is the only sentinel. 
        Wholeness, completeness and perfection is all that can be seen/watched.

5)    Immortal Truth watches the perfection of its own making.

For information about Translation or other Prosperos classes go to: https://www.theprosperos.org/teaching.

Or, if you have taken Translation class, join us each Saturday for Translation Saturday Meeting at 11 a.m. Pacific time for current, up-to-the-minute Translations on the issues of the day.  Email zonta1111@aol.com for the Zoom link.

Consciousness, Spirituality

Translation Saturday Meeting May 30

Leave a comment

May 30:  11:00 AM – 12:00 PM PST

Mike Zonta, H.W., M.

In a crisis — any crisis — The Prosperos offers Translation.  Translation Saturday Meetings is a weekly series of Translation presentations by veteran Translators, live and up to date on the issues of the day.

It is not a Translation workshop,  It is not a Translation class.  It is not a group Translation in the usual sense, though group participation is encouraged.

It is, however, restricted to those who have taken Translation class. So if you have never taken Translation class, check the calendar tab on The Prosperos website (TheProsperos.org) or get in touch with us and we will schedule a class.

Last week our sense testimony was:  Anger is the cause of disease.  And our conclusion was:   Truth is the undeniable cause of agreement with all there is.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – See you there!!! – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Here’s the link:  https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81749347119

For more info and link to join please email Mike Zonta at:

zonta1111@aol.com

Spirituality

The Third Self: Mary Oliver on Creativity and Time

Leave a comment

By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

“In the wholeheartedness of concentration,” the poet Jane Hirshfield wrote in her beautiful inquiry into the effortless effort of creativity, “world and self begin to cohere. With that state comes an enlarging: of what may be known, what may be felt, what may be done.” But concentration is indeed a difficult art, art’s art, and its difficulty lies in the constant conciliation of the dissonance between self and world — a difficulty hardly singular to the particular conditions of our time. Two hundred years before social media, the great French artist Eugène Delacroix lamented the necessary torment of avoiding social distractions in creative work; a century and a half later, Agnes Martin admonished aspiring artists to exercise discernment in the interruptions they allow, or else corrupt the mental, emotional, and spiritual privacy where inspiration arises.

But just as self-criticism is the most merciless kind of criticism and self-compassion the most elusive kind of compassion, self-distraction is the most hazardous kind of distraction, and the most difficult to protect creative work against.

How to hedge against that hazard is what beloved poet Mary Oliver (September 10, 1935–January 17, 2019) explores in a wonderful piece titled “Of Power and Time,” found in the altogether enchanting Upstream: Selected Essays (public library).

Mary Oliver

Oliver writes:

It is a silver morning like any other. I am at my desk. Then the phone rings, or someone raps at the door. I am deep in the machinery of my wits. Reluctantly I rise, I answer the phone or I open the door. And the thought which I had in hand, or almost in hand, is gone. Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart — to pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again.

But just as often, if not more often, the interruption comes not from another but from the self itself, or some other self within the self, that whistles and pounds upon the door panels and tosses itself, splashing, into the pond of meditation. And what does it have to say? That you must phone the dentist, that you are out of mustard, that your uncle Stanley’s birthday is two weeks hence. You react, of course. Then you return to your work, only to find that the imps of idea have fled back into the mist.

Oliver terms this the “intimate interrupter” and cautions that it is far more perilous to creative work than any external distraction, adding:

The world sheds, in the energetic way of an open and communal place, its many greetings, as a world should. What quarrel can there be with that? But that the self can interrupt the self — and does — is a darker and more curious matter.

Echoing Borges’s puzzlement over our divided personhood, Oliver sets out to excavate the building blocks of the self in order to understand its parallel capacities for focused creative flow and merciless interruption. She identifies three primary selves that she inhabits, and that inhabit her, as they do all of us: the childhood self, which we spend our lives trying to weave into the continuity of our personal identity (“The child I was,” she writes, “is with me in the present hour. It will be with me in the grave.”); the social self, “fettered to a thousand notions of obligation”; and a third self, a sort of otherworldly awareness.

The first two selves, she argues, inhabit the ordinary world and are present in all people; the third is of a different order and comes most easily alive in artists — it is where the wellspring of creative energy resides. She writes:

Certainly there is within each of us a self that is neither a child, nor a servant of the hours. It is a third self, occasional in some of us, tyrant in others. This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity.

Art by Maurice Sendak for a special edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales

Oliver contrasts the existential purpose of the two ordinary selves with that of the creative self:

Say you have bought a ticket on an airplane and you intend to fly from New York to San Francisco. What do you ask of the pilot when you climb aboard and take your seat next to the little window, which you cannot open but through which you see the dizzying heights to which you are lifted from the secure and friendly earth?

Most assuredly you want the pilot to be his regular and ordinary self. You want him to approach and undertake his work with no more than a calm pleasure. You want nothing fancy, nothing new. You ask him to do, routinely, what he knows how to do — fly an airplane. You hope he will not daydream. You hope he will not drift into some interesting meander of thought. You want this flight to be ordinary, not extraordinary. So, too, with the surgeon, and the ambulance driver, and the captain of the ship. Let all of them work, as ordinarily they do, in confident familiarity with whatever the work requires, and no more. Their ordinariness is the surety of the world. Their ordinariness makes the world go round.

[…]

In creative work — creative work of all kinds — those who are the world’s working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward. Which is something altogether different from the ordinary. Such work does not refute the ordinary. It is, simply, something else. Its labor requires a different outlook — a different set of priorities.

Part of this something-elseness, Oliver argues, is the uncommon integration of the creative self — the artist’s work cannot be separated from the artist’s whole life, nor can its wholeness be broken down into the mechanical bits-and-pieces of specific actions and habits. (Elsewhere, Oliver has written beautifully about how habit gives shape to but must not control our inner lives).

Echoing Keats’s notion of “negative capability,” Dani Shapiro’s insistence that the artist’s task is “to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it,” and Georgia O’Keeffe’s counsel that as an artist you ought to be “keeping the unknown always beyond you,” Oliver considers the central commitment of the creative life — that of making uncertainty and the unknown the raw material of art:

Intellectual work sometimes, spiritual work certainly, artistic work always — these are forces that fall within its grasp, forces that must travel beyond the realm of the hour and the restraint of the habit. Nor can the actual work be well separated from the entire life. Like the knights of the Middle Ages, there is little the creatively inclined person can do but to prepare himself, body and spirit, for the labor to come — for his adventures are all unknown. In truth, the work itself is the adventure. And no artist could go about this work, or would want to, with less than extraordinary energy and concentration. The extraordinary is what art is about.

In a sentiment that calls to mind Van Gogh’s spirited letter on risk-taking and how inspired mistakes move us forward, Oliver returns to the question of the conditions that coax the creative self into being:

No one yet has made a list of places where the extraordinary may happen and where it may not. Still, there are indications. Among crowds, in drawing rooms, among easements and comforts and pleasures, it is seldom seen. It likes the out-of-doors. It likes the concentrating mind. It likes solitude. It is more likely to stick to the risk-taker than the ticket-taker. It isn’t that it would disparage comforts, or the set routines of the world, but that its concern is directed to another place. Its concern is the edge, and the making of a form out of the formlessness that is beyond the edge.

Above all, Oliver observes from the “fortunate platform” of a long, purposeful, and creatively fertile life, the artist’s task is one of steadfast commitment to the art:

Of this there can be no question — creative work requires a loyalty as complete as the loyalty of water to the force of gravity. A person trudging through the wilderness of creation who does not know this — who does not swallow this — is lost. He who does not crave that roofless place eternity should stay at home. Such a person is perfectly worthy, and useful, and even beautiful, but is not an artist. Such a person had better live with timely ambitions and finished work formed for the sparkle of the moment only. Such a person had better go off and fly an airplane.

She returns to the problem of concentration, which for the artist is a form, perhaps the ultimate form, of consecration:

The working, concentrating artist is an adult who refuses interruption from himself, who remains absorbed and energized in and by the work — who is thus responsible to the work… Serious interruptions to work, therefore, are never the inopportune, cheerful, even loving interruptions which come to us from another.

[…]

It is six A.M., and I am working. I am absentminded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be. The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame. Neither do I have guilt. My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely. It does not include mustard, or teeth. It does not extend to the lost button, or the beans in the pot. My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and howsoever it may arrive. If I have a meeting with you at three o’clock, rejoice if I am late. Rejoice even more if I do not arrive at all.

There is no other way work of artistic worth can be done. And the occasional success, to the striver, is worth everything. The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.

Upstream is a tremendously vitalizing read in its totality, grounding and elevating at the same time. Complement it with Oliver on love and its necessary wildness, what attention really means, and the measure of a life well lived, then revisit Jane Hirshfield on the difficult art of concentration.