Your letter and last email were welcome words that I've taken to stand as gifts received in prelude to an as-of -yet unnamed occasion worthy of celebration. To what could I be referring? I'm not sure, although I expect some sort of “happening” to rise up out of the formerly frosted soil, freshly prepared and seeded. It has been my profit in reaching up to the moment of expectation, where one draws down near neat planted beds in all manner of brown and post-wintertime, but should (or can) I say anything more about it? Must I concern myself with seeding when there's still so much to harvest? Furthermore, is not soil anything more than the residues of a recycled world brittled and broken down into the stuff that all new things are made of? Can I expect a substance such as that to provide any sort of shelter to which whatever requires it? Only time will tell whether the seeds that I've sown were ones worthy of the fruits that my labor (thus far) has required. In any event, may the roots dig deep if the branches brag a bounty capable of satisfying my appetite for “all things new.”
Simply put, its been hard for me to see just what Maine (my journey?) has meant thus far.
As I had mentioned in my last email, things are both very different and very similar to what I left in Pittsburgh. The work is new, even in some cases exciting, and I am learning much about what it means to be a farmer, a “career” path that I remain (if not more so) interested in pursuing. Yet a surprising number of habits (if that's what they can be called) that I took to be the conditions of a more urban and unsatisfying lifestyle remain. These habits, as they pursue me across time, space, and place have challenged me into a more sober appraisal of myself and my motives. You wrote in your April 13th letter that “I envy you the adventure you are having, though my kind of adventure at more or less your age was much less a choice in the service of mankind,” continuing, “I would of course like to know, once you have spent time living there, if you find greater peace of mind in walking or bicycling through the countryside, and if by planting seeds or seedlings you find a sense of self you had never previously experienced.” In answer, I believe that I have begun to “find a new sense of self” quite unlike what I had expected prior and yet it seems as though I've traveled over 1000 miles so simply to pierce the mere thickness of my skin, which in terms of cost, while questionable, has so far been the best bargain my economy has endeavored to purchase. Come what may, I'm here hearing the birds and “seeing the light” of the sun in ways unwitnessed at home, abroad. Therefore my “discoveries” if revealing, will hopefully make all the pain of leaving friends (you included), family, and pre-conceptions worthwhile. As they say “the spirit is willing but the flesh is so weak.”.... but then again aren't we not “by the stripes of wounds, healed?”
If one, in the words of Thoreau, were to keep “three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society,” my own abode would have 3, yet one would find 2 typically empty; in truth such is the case with regard to the appointment of my chairs. Would I say that I'm lonely? As with most of what I've been through, Yes and No. I sometimes find the solitude most welcome, as it gives me the space I need to further my studies into the realms of the interior (oh really?). Thoreau himself preceded the above quoted analogue for community by stating “Why should one feel lonely? Is not our planet in the Milky way? What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary? I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to another.” In many cases, a single chair will (and does) do. But as you know me well and even once described me as “gregarious,” I admit that I do sometimes wish for another individual. Such seems the way of any new environment, but I do not blame the countryside for not offering any further guests at the moment. The chairs remain in place more in expectation than for any other purpose.
I have just finished reading Walter Arndt's translation of Goethe's Faust and have enjoyed it a great deal. Are you acquainted with the story and of Goethe's take on the Faustian bargain? In my opinion, Goethe's subsequent recasting of the myth outside its traditional rubric of a simple conjurer's “deal with the devil” for wealth and power, his Faust constitutes one of the most powerful and early literary examples of the archetypal human experience.
In the moment right prior to his Wager (pact) with Mephistopheles (Satan), Faust states:
“My Curse I hurl on all that spangles
The mind with dazzling make-belief,
With lures and blandishments entangles
The soul within this cave of grief!
Accursed, to start, the smug delusion
Whereby the mind itself ensnares!”
Cursed, brash phenomenal intrusion
That blinds the sense unawares!
Cursed, what in lying dreams assures us
Of name and glory past the grave!
Cursed, pride of ownership that lures us
Through wife and children, plow and slave!
Accursed be Mammon, when his treasure
To deeds of daring eggs us on,
For idle self-indulgent leisure
Spreads a luxurious divan!
Cursed be the balsam of the grape!
Curesed, highest prize of lovers' thrall!
A curse on faith! A curse on hope!
A cure on patience, above all!”
And the wager itself:
“Faust: Beyond to me makes little matter;
If once this earthly world you shatter,
The next may rise when this has passed.
It is from out this earth my pleasure spring,
It is this sun shines on my suffering;
If once from these I dram asunder,
Then come to pass what will and must.
I do not further choose to wonder
If hate may then be felt or love,
or whether in those regions yonder
They still know nether or above.
Mephistopheles: So minded, you may dare with fitness.
Engage yourself; these days you are to witness
Examples of my pleasing arts galore.
I'll give you what no man has seen before.
Faust: What is, poor devil, in your giving?
Has even human mind in its high striving
Been comprehended by the likes of you?
What's yours but food unsating, the red hue
of gold which, shifting and untrue,
Quicksilver will like through the fingers run,
A game which always stays unwon,
A girl who at my very breast
Trades winks already with another's eyes,
but honor's fair and godly zest
Which like a meteor flares and dies?
Show me the fruit which, still unplucked, will rot,
Trees freshly green with every day's renewal!
Mephistopheles:such a commission daunts me not,
I can provide that sort of jewel.
But nonetheless, there comes a time, my friend,
When good things savored at our east give pleasure.
Faust: Should ever I take ease upon a bed of leisure,
May that same moment mark my end!
When first by flattery you lull me
Into a smug complacency,
When with indulgence you can gull me
Let that day be the last for me!
This is my wager!”
Literary scholar Cyrus Hamlin has commented that “What Faust has in mind as the condition for his wager is not only a sense of satisfaction, which would complete and negate his striving, but also an absolute fulfillment of desire, where the temporal and experiential process involved in such striving would e gathered together within such a single moment, so that time itself would transcend,” and ultimately, “what unites the drama of Faust as a whole is the fundamental attempt by Faust to comprehend human existence in its constantly varying temporal dimensions and its constant dependence on shifting forces of mind and will, which motivate all action and thought, with reference to some ultimate and absolute power of spirit or divinity, either within nature and thus accessible to human experience or else above and beyond the natural world, transcending all knowledge and understanding.” I see some of Faust in me and wonder, as far as the language of my third paragraph is concerned, if I've made any infernal bargains myself (surely.... not?).
Your descriptions of the 2 movies were very interesting. As you correctly surmised, I would have found Il Posto or The Sounds of Trumpets a worthwhile watch. I wonder: does the film end on a positive note and did the character of the office clerk find what he was looking for? Or like Faust (and even Ulysses, at least as far as Dante's cosmology was concerned) was his striving the force behind an undoing? I should point out that in Goethe's interpretation of the myth, Faust was eventually saved from damnation because in the words of a heavenly chorus of Angels:
“Pure Spirits' peer, from evil coil
He was vouchsafed exemption;
“Whoever strives in ceaseless toil,
him we may grand redemption.”
And when on high, transfigured love
Has added intercession,
The blest will throng to him above
With welcoming compassion.”
I apologize for the ambiguity but I am in transition; I remain committed to forward furtherances into the mysteries of this place.
For now, I leave you with a poem written by a good friend of mine from the bank, Josh Andreyo:
Heavy Spring
The stripped chest, heavy like soaked cloth.
Arms all green in
Springtime's spongemoss
Wet and cool in the undersides (where)
A newborn bettle and a bird, lay eyeing
One another near an exposed, thawed boned elbow.
Winter's old, comfortable snow
Entirely gone.
And quick in that sunlight too.
Morbid melting, really.
I found at my feet today.
At my rocky, rooty trunkfeet.
(nothing is the same now)
We hope for snow
to bring hope soon.
No comments:
Post a Comment