Here and Now

A little late, here is David Henschel's Here and Now. There is no other reality. I think further commentary from me is not necessary.

Here and Now

Enjoy, oh do enjoy
The hereness and the nowness of it.
Whatever is beyond, behind
Be, if you must, aware of
But not too much – no more than serves
To measure by, to savour by
To live by grace within
The here and now.

It is the clumsy man we too much are
That cannot delicately hold the time
Within his juggling mind
And commandeer the chasing heart
Softly to send the blood like fingers
To touch and know the living hour
And store it richly by.

One day we die.
They say we scan
In the last living moments all our span.
We’d wish, I think, to go to Death
Or God
Like guests with gifts
Remembered and collected from our store
Of heres and nows
And say:
This trust of life’s fulfilled,
This gift’s returned, with more I found:
I was not poor.

Ideas

This month and next I shall be presenting two poems about ideas from David Henschel's Heres and Nows.

This will lead me to considering silence, the absence of ideas, thoughts or mind activity, which I shall argue is an accompaniment to the state of presence itself.

Then in May we shall have the whole poem Here and Now, which deals with being joyfully in the present. Perhaps later I shall post my own poem, In memoriam David Henschel, which discusses the same thing in relation to what lives on.

That is, we shall talk about the idea of eternity in relation to presence.

We have already touched on the question of what lives on and you can see all these blog entries together on one page by clicking the tag eternity at the foot of this blog entry.

For now, I shall quote a Sufi saying:
Ideas can lead you to the door but they can't take you through.

Ideas

Sometimes they come unexpected –
Ideas as clean as blessings:
Phrases, sentences, clues; keys
To doors to corridors with doors
And suddenly by passages of sight
To halls of understanding
Sunshot domes of light.

I never know why. Wherefrom
Puzzles me infinitely.
They come like birds with beaks of
Olive branches to my ark
From lands of hope and guesswork.

(If shot - an albatross of words
It may be or may seem no more
However others find it gives rewards;
If not – a flake from flying snows
That crystal came but shapeless goes.
How rare the bird which nestles, branch that grows.)

I don’t expect to reach their shore
But I can send their signal from my ark
Into the dark.

Prospero bettered

We talked about what lives on.

David Henschel's poem Prospero bettered quoted a line, I believe from Shakespeare, every third thought was my grave.

I think the correct line is every third thought shall be my grave, from The Tempest. In searching the internet for the source I came across the strange claim that Shakespeare's contemporary, the playwright Christopher Marlowe, had a fake burial in St Nicholas's Church, Deptford, with the implication that he didn't after all die in a pub brawl.

I mention this apparently irrelevant claim because, coincidentally this morning, before coming across this curious claim, I was in conversation with my sister and for some reason the song Dem bones dem bones dem dry bones... came up. I told my sister something she didn't previously know, that the words of the song are derived from Ezekiel chapter 37 in the Old Testament. I went on to say that there is a rather crude carving depicting all the skeletons coming together set into the wall inside St Nicholas's Church, Deptford.

(The carving is attributed to Grinling Gibbons, but if that is true then I imagine he was six years old at the time and was trying out his first pen-knife, because it certainly didn't look like the work of Gibbons to me.)

I also mentioned associatively that Marlowe was supposed to have been buried somewhere in the churchyard but the grave is unmarked (I looked).

So there we are. Did Marlowe die or did he live on? What of us dies and what lives on? Or as the Bible says, can these bones live? (Ezekiel 37:3)

Prospero bettered

Father and son walked by
holding hands
the elder balding, face lined, yet
showing in the boy's clear face
spring hair and summer-coming feet
as once he was.

At first I smiled at this; then
saddened by time's evidence my
'third thought was my grave.'

But who would languish there –
the fourth was like the first and surer
for the sense of what lives on
despite the single death: perhaps
to better Prospero every fourth thought
should be brave.

Confirming worth
came sun with shadow patterning
the present path.

What lives on

The theme of what lives on emerged several times.

I hadn't planned it that way, but that's how it was.

Of course, at the book launch of Heres and Nows three poems were in memory of David Henschel, and it was natural that the question of persistence should arise there. But the question arose in some of David's poems too, in a way that I hadn't thought about when choosing them.

John Torrance, in his poem Dimensions of remembrance, asked,

Who knows the rules? If not
pegged down by place to a date,
can 'when' be large as time,
wandering early and late,
could you be with us even now?


and said:

your voice all letters, poems, now.

David's own poem Prospero bettered asks and perhaps answers the same question more indirectly. He watches a father and son walking by, contrasting the boy's clear face with the father's lined one, referring to time's evidence.

At first I smiled at this; then
saddened by time's evidence my
'third thought was my grave.'

But he has a fourth thought. More on this topic next week.

Later this month I shall post the whole of Prospero bettered.