Oliver, Transcendentalism and ...

Today is Mary Oliver's birthday. Her poems are really important to me. I recently read her first book. I've read 15 of her books. I have a few pdfs of some hard to find books to read and I'm currently reading her final anthology. I really get something from her poems. 

Two days before was the birth of Transcendentalism anniversary on September 12, 1836, in 2 days. Oliver has some reverence for what may be the first literary movement in America, and references Emerson and Thoreau.  

Smack in between these two important days is 9/11, the day America had an illusion of isolation shattered. We could just remember we're all interconnected, there's interbeing, and that some disgruntled people are willing to wage asymmetrical wars that they can't win, just want some attention for their concerns. Not a great way to get things done, but it does get one's attention. 

There's a similarity to October 7th in Israel last year, but that surprise was more about an unwillingness to work for change through peaceful methods and Arafat walking away from peace accords in 2001.

I wish to draw my attention to positive things like Mary Oliver's poetry, and the birth of literary movements in America. 

What does that have to do with walking in nature? I suppose Mary Oliver's nature poetry and the transcendental movement are vital to walking in nature. 

Tecumse by Mary Oliver

I went down not long ago
to the Mad River, under the willows
I knelt and drank from that crumpled flow, call it
what madness you will, there's a sickness
worse than the risk of death and that's
forgetting what we should never forget.
Tecumseh lived here.
The wounds of the past
are ignored, but hang on
like the litter that snags on the yellow branches
newspapers and plastic bags, after the rains.

Where are the Shawnee now?
Do you know? Or would you have to write
to Washington, and even then
whatever they said,
would you believe them? Sometimes

I would like to paint my body red and go out into
the glittering snow
to die.

His name meant Shooting Star.
From Mad River country north to the border
he gathered the tribes
and armed them one more time. He vowed
to keep Ohio and it took him
over twenty years to fail.

After the bloody and final fighting at Thames
it was over, except
his body could not be found.
It was never found
and you can do whatever you want with that, say

his people came in the black leaves of the night,
and hauled him to a secret grave, or that
he turned into a little boy again, and leaped
into a birch canoe and went
rowing home again down the rivers. Anyway,
this much I'm sure of: if we ever meet him, we'll know it,
he will still be
so angry.'

Like Thoreau, she's interested in Native American experience, maybe wishes she could know more about them. 

Tecumseh (1768-1813) "was a Shawnee chief and warrior who promoted resistance to the expansion of the United States onto Native American lands. A persuasive orator, Tecumseh traveled widely, forming a Native American confederacy and promoting intertribal unity. Even though his efforts to unite Native Americans ended with his death in the War of 1812, he became an iconic folk hero in American, Indigenous, and Canadian popular history." 

John Chapman by Mary Oliver

He wore a tin pot for a hat, in which
he cooked his supper
toward evening
in the Ohio forests. He wore
a sackcloth shirt and walked
barefoot on feet crooked as roots. And everywhere he went
the apple trees sprang up behind him lovely
as young girls.

No Indian or settler or wild beast
ever harmed him, and he for his part honored
everything, all God's creatures! thought little,
on a rainy night,
of sharing the shelter of a hollow log touching
flesh with any creatures there: snakes,
racoon possibly, or some great slab of bear.

Mrs. Price, late of Richland County,
at whose parents' house he sometimes lingered,
recalled: he spoke
only once of women and his gray eyes
brittled into ice. "Some
are deceivers," he whispered, and she felt
the pain of it, remembered it
into her old age.

Well, the trees he planted or gave away
prospered, and he became
the good legend, you do
what you can if you can; whatever
the secret, and the pain,
there's a decision: to die,
or to live, to go on
caring about something. In spring, in Ohio,
in the forests that are left you can still find
sign of him: patches
of cold white fire.

Johnny Appleseed (1774-1845) was alive when Thoreau was alive, though he was much older, and died when Thoreau was on Walden Pond. Leominster MA is 24 miles from Concord, where Chapman was born.

I think of John Chapman as an American Bodhisattva, the way Hotai, the fat laughing Buddha, became a Buddha, though he was perhaps a folk hero before Buddhism came to China. The way Kwan Yin evolved from Avalokita, from Green Tara. 

Supposedly he noticed insects were killing themselves in his fire, so he put it out. That seems like a Bodhisattva move. He planted a lot of trees, and I'm sure many of those trees really sustained the world for many years. He was into planting apple trees for cider, there was an element of intoxication to his work. Maybe divine madness of a sort. He was an American Dionysus.

He planted nurseries of trees, he didn't just plant seeds and keep wandering, he would fence off and tend to his nurseries. 

He was also a preacher of Swedenborgian faith, he would preach to avoid extravagance. Even though he had some money to buy land, he wore rough clothes and walked barefoot, even in the snow.To me one of the coolest things about Buddhism is the middle way. You don't have to go nuts in either direction on the extravagance to asceticism continuum. And the practice of meditation helps you see the power of minimalism and asceticism, it doesn't just prescribe it or foist it on you, you can evolve towards it. 

I find it so fascinating that Swedenborg (1688-1772) was so popular in early America and yet you rarely hear of him outside that context. Swedenborg was an inventor and scientist until he was 53, when he switched to spirituality and wrote 18 books.

Johnny Appleseed heard a horse was about to be put down so he bought it, and put it on some of his land. He was also single. Supposedly he was a vegetarian at times during his life. 

I love monsoon weeks

“It is one of the perils of our so-called civilized age that we do not yet acknowledge enough, or cherish enough, this connection between soul and landscape- between our own best possibilities, and the view from our own windows. We need the world as much as it needs us, and we need it in privacy, intimacy, and surety. We need the field from which the lark rises bird that is more than itself, that is the voice of the universe: vigorous, godly joy. Without the physical world such hope is: hacked off. Is: dried up. Without wilderness no fish could leap and flash, no deer could bound soft as eternal waters over the field; no bird could open its wings and become buoyant, adventurous, valorous beyond even the plan of nature. Nor could we.”

Mary Oliver, Long Lives p. 91

pp. 90-91

"And here I build a platform, and live upon it, and think my thoughts, and aim high. To rise, I must have a field to rise from. To deepen, I must have a bedrock from which to descend. The constancy of the physical world, under its green and blue dyes, draws me toward a better, richer self, call it elevation (there is hardly an adequate word), where I might ascend a little where a gloss of spirit would mirror itself in worldly action. I don't mean just mild goodness. I mean feistiness too, the fires of human energy stoked; I mean a gladness vivacious enough to disarrange the sorrows of the world into something better. I mean whatever real rejoicing can do! We all know how brassy and wonderful it is to come into some new understanding. Imagine what it would be like, to lounge on the high ledge of submission and pure wonder. Nature, all around us, is our manifest exemplar. Not from the fox, or the leaf, or the drop of rain will you ever hear doubt or argument."

pp. 92-3

Carrying The Snake To The Garden

In the cellar

was the smallest snake

I have ever seen.

It coiled itself

in a corner

and watched me

with eyes

like two little stars

set into coal,

and a tail

that quivered.

One step

of my foot

and it fled

like a running shoelace,

but a scoop of the wrist

and I had it

in my hand.

I was sorry

for the fear,

so I hurried

upstairs and out the kitchen door

to the warm grass

and the sunlight

and the garden.

It turned and turned

in my hand

but when I put it down

it didn't move.

I thought

it was going to flow

up my leg

and into my pocket.

I thought, for a moment,

as it lifted it's face,

it was going to sing.

And then it was gone.

Mary Oliver

"Once, years ago, I emerged from the woods in the early morning at the end of a walk and it was the most casual of moments_ as I stepped from under the trees into the mild, pouring-down sunlight I experienced a sudden impact, a seizure of happiness. It was not the drowning sort of happiness, rather the floating sort. I made no struggle toward it; it was given. Time seemed to vanish. Urgency vanished. Any important difference between myself and all other things vanished. I knew that I belonged to the world, and felt comfortably my own containment in the totality. I did not feel that I understood any mystery, not at all; rather that I could be happy and feel blessed within the perplexity-the summer morning, its gentleness, the sense of the great work being done though the grass where I stood scarcely trembled. As I say, it was the most casual of moments, not mystical as the word is usually meant, for there was no vision, or anything extraordinary at all, but only a sudden awareness of the citizenry of all things within one world: leaves, dust, thrushes and finches, men and women. And yet it was a moment I have never forgotten, and upon which I have based many decisions in the years since."

(pp. 33-34 Long Life)

Radiance and Results

Mary Oliver writes in Long Life p.23, "The mountain and the forest are sublime but the valley soil raises richer crops. The perfect gift is no longer a house but a house, or a mind divided. Man finds he has two halves of his existence: Leisure and occupation, and from these separate considerations he now looks upon the world. In leisure he remembers radiance; in labor he looks for results."

She knows that appreciation of nature is over run by the struggle for existence. A tree isn't beautiful, it's timber or firewood. 

"...the experience led him, led his mind, from simple devotion of that beauty which is harmony, a kindly ministry of thought to nature's deeper and inexplicable greatness. The gleam and tranquility of the natural world he loved always, and now he honored also the world's brawn and mystery, it's machinations that lay beyond our understanding--that are not even namable. What Wordsworth praised thereafter was more than the arrangement of concretizations and vapors into appreciable and balanced landscapes; it was, also, the whirlwind."

Mary Oliver

Lived 1935-2019. She was born in Ohio. Her first book came out in 1963. She worked for the estate of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Her wife Molly Malone Cook of 40 years died of cancer in 2005. Born in Ohio, she lived in Provincetown RI, and Florida, among other places. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for American Primitive, which seems to be a collection because the copyright has 6 dates. It's her 5th book.

The Fawn

Sunday morning and mellow as precious metal

The church bells rang, but I went

To the woods instead.

A fawn, too new

For fear, rose from the grass

And stood with its spots blazing,

And knowing no way but words,

No trick but music,

I sang to him.

He listened.

His small hooves struck the grass.

Oh what is holiness?

The fawn came closer,

Walked to my hands, to my knees.

I did not touch him.

I only sang, and when the doe came back

Calling out to him dolefully

And he turned and followed her into the trees,

Still I sang,

Not knowing how to end such a joyful text,

Until far off the bells once more tipped and tumbled

And rang through the morning, announcing

The going forth of the blessed.

                    -- Mary Oliver from Twelve Moons (1979)

This poem feels Transcendental to me because she's not going to church, she is finding the sacred in nature. 

Above From Blue Horses (2014)

Above and below from Felicity (2015)

Above and below from A Thousand Mornings (2012)

From Twelve Moons (1979), her 4th book.

So I'm reading all her slim volumes from the library. I check out her omnibus, and it felt overwhelming, too big. It's quite fun and I'm really enjoying it, but there's a sad little bit today:

4. Of The Father

He wanted a body

  so he took mine.

Some wounds never vanish.

Yet little by little

I learn to love my life.

Though sometimes I had to run hard--

  especially from melancholy--

not to be held back.

(p. 40-1 A Thousand Mornings)

Links:

Wikipedia entry on Mary Oliver

Maria Shriver Interviews the Famously Private Poet Mary Oliver 

"Maria Shriver: What about a favorite poet? 

Mary Oliver: I suppose it would have to be Whitman, unless it's Rumi or Hafiz. And I do love Emerson's poetry. And of course I named my dog Percy after Shelley. And how could anybody not love Keats."

page 2

page 3

On Being Podcast with Mary Oliver

Appreciation post

Wild Geese (read by Tom Hiddleston) on YouTube

The Pond

I've posted photos of her poems before.

Marginalia: Mary Oliver on Time, Concentration, the Artist’s Task, and the Central Commitment of the Creative Life

Other thoughts: I'm reading Baudelaire, and of course whatever other poems you're reading throw light on the other poet you're reading. "He coined the term modernity (modernité) to designate the fleeting experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility of artistic expression to capture that experience." He is considered the first modernist. Oliver caught the fleeting experience of going for a walk in nature. Baudelaire talks about a drunkenness about living, and Oliver tries to have intense experiences through her art as well.  

“Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually. Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken. And it sometimes, on the stairs of a palace, or on the green side of a ditch, or in the dreary solitude of your own room, you should awaken and the drunkenness be half or wholly slipped away from you, ask of the wind, or of the wave, or of the star, or of the bird, or of the clock, of whatever flies, or sighs, or rocks, or sings, or speaks, ask what hour it is; and the wind, wave, star, bird, clock, will answer you; "It is the hour to be drunken! Be drunken, if you would not be martyred slaves of Time; be drunken continually! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will."

“I love thee, infamous city! Harlots and Hunted have pleasures of their own to give, The vulgar herd can never understand.”

Poems:

Pink Moon--The Pond

You think it will never happen again.

Then, one night in April,

the tribes wake trilling.

You walk down to the shore.

Your coming stills them,

but little by little the silence lifts

until song is everywhere

and your soul rises from your bones

and strides out over the water.

It is a crazy thing to do –

for no one can live like that,

floating around in the darkness

over the gauzy water.

Left on the shore your bones

keep shouting come back!

But your soul won’t listen;

in the distance it is sparkling

like hot wires. So,

like a good friend,

you decide to follow.

You step off the shore

and plummet to your knees –

you slog forward to your thighs

and sink to your cheekbones –

and now you are caught

by the cold chains of the water –

you are vanishing while around you

the frogs continue to sing, driving

their music upward through your own throat,

not even noticing

you are someone else.

And that’s when it happens –

you see everything

through their eyes,

their joy, their necessity;

you wear their webbed fingers;

your throat swells.

And thats when you know

you will live whether you will or not,

one way or another,

because everything is everything else,

one long muscle.

It’s no more mysterious than that.

So you relax, you don’t fight it anymore,

the darkness coming down

called water,

called spring,

called the green leaf, called

a woman’s body

as it turns into mud and leaves,

as it beats in its cage of water,

as it turns like a lonely spindle

in the moonlight, as it says

yes.

8/15/23. I've read 4 of her books, have 2 on my pile, and have about 34 books left to read.

Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver (1935-2021) is considered a modern Transcendentalist or a neo-Transcendentalist.

Most poets aren’t into being put into boxes. She’s more than a label.