The Buddha in Glory

A blogger friend – one I’ve never met in person but with whom I share a blogging enjoyment – is fond of the Buddha and his wisdom.
by Charlie Leck

I’ve told you before that I’m reading, on a daily basis, A Year with Rilke (a collection of Rainer Maria Rilke’s writings put together by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows). Today’s reading, “The Buddha in Glory,” is from New Poems…

“Center of all centers, innermost core,
almond sweetening in its self-embrace –
all of this, out to the stars,
is the fruit of your body. We greet you.

You feel how little clings to you now.
Endlessness is your shell,
and there, too, the strength.
It is summoned by the radiance

of the full and glowing suns
that wheel around you.
Yet those stars will be outlasted
by what you have begun.”

I’ve been enriched by these Rilke readings. Santa left this small book beneath the tree this past Christmas. A wise man, this Santa! As for Rilke, he’s no Milton, Yates or even Dylan Thomas, but he is complex and mysterious and I find myself enchanted by his thinking. I keep reminding myself that I am reading him in translation and he was likely even better in his original language. Translations usually slaughter poetry. I’ve tried to read a few of the poems in the original German (it’s too tough for me after all these years).

Tony Rugare, in Cleveland, blogs almost daily. He writes what he feels like writing and it seems so often that he feels what he writes quite strongly. He’s a quiet, wise sort of fellow and I think the Buddha has had some significant impact on him. Whenever I think of Tony, I see the traditional image of the Buddha in my mind – so much so that I had to sit down here and do the above computerized etching of Tony to remind me what he really looks like. I’ve added meeting Tony and having a beer with him to my bucket list. Getting to Cleveland oughtn’t be that difficult. Maybe when the Twins are there to play a ball game or two at Jacob Field.

Keep your eye on him (Tony, Rilke, the Buddha -- or all three of them). You might also have some fun along the way.

_________________________

Why not become a follower?
If you read my blog regularly, why not become a follower? All you have to do is click in the upper right hand corner and establish a simple means of communication. Then you'll be informed every time a new blog is posted here. If all that's confusing, here's Google's explanation of how to do it! If you don’t want to post comments on the blog, but would like to communicate with me about it, send me an email if you’d like.

Once in a while, tired of the daily paper and the constant haranguing it brings, I must rely on better sources to fill me up (re-energize myself) and get me going again.
by Charlie Leck

I read this yesterday in my daily Rilke readings (taken from the Ninth Duino Elegy) and I liked it very much…

“A hunger drives us.
We want to contain it all in our naked hands,
our brimming senses, our speechless hearts.
We want to become it, or offer it – but to whom?
We could hold it forever – but, after all,
what can we keep? Not the beholding,
so slow to learn. Not anything that has happened here.
Nothing. There are hurts. And, always, the hardships.
And there’s the long knowing of love – all of it
unsayable. Later, amidst the stars, we will see:
these are better unsaid.”

It’s a nice break (no?) from the daily head-slaps that we get from the newspapers – especially on this day following the horrible storm in Oklahoma and the sorrow that the reports are bringing.

_________________________

Why not become a follower?
If you read my blog regularly, why not become a follower? All you have to do is click in the upper right hand corner and establish a simple means of communication. Then you'll be informed every time a new blog is posted here. If all that's confusing, here's Google's explanation of how to do it! If you don’t want to post comments on the blog, but would like to communicate with me about it, send me an email if you’d like.

Learn to do Good! Seek Justice! (Isaiah)

     iPhone photograph, Charles Leck, 30 April 2013

As I get older, moving into my mid-seventies, I find I need to create some disciplines for myself in order to keep my mind alert and to continue acquiring understand. Having daily readings from certain books or writings helps. So does keeping  a daily journal in which I record activities of the day or thoughts I’m having. Another discipline is to read scripture at least every few days. I didn’t think it would amount to much but it’s having a major impact on me – and my mind – and my attitudes.
by Charlie Leck

Does anyone out there read the Bible anymore? Or is it passé? Sometimes I find a little scripture can go a long way.

Some people in my life, when I was young, innocent and not very adventurous, convinced me that reading the Bible was very important. Preachers and sunday-school-teachers – and even kin – sold me a bill of goods that, even in my current freethinking days, somehow sticks with me. Whatever it was that was implanted in me, it still causes me to reach regularly for one of the various translations of scripture that sits on the shelf just to my left. Not daily, but regularly, I read “the word” and contemplate its significance and relevance to life in the twenty-first century. Has it any? I refuse unthoughtful, reflexive replies! As much as Shakespeare, certainly! In many cases, it seems, I am certain, more.

So today, the Sojourners organization sent me some scripture (from Isaiah) to contemplate…

“Learn to do good;
seek justice,
rescue the oppressed,
defend the orphan,
plead for the widow.”

I sit quietly after reading it. What thoughts come to mine?

Learn to do good!
Learning to do good is like exercise.
It has no benefit unless we do it habitually and dedicate ourselves to it.
And, like playing the piano, we need to practice it in order to do it well.

Must we seek justice?
Is it not apparent? Obvious? At hand?
Is it difficult to discover? Does it avoid us?
Is it also like exercise? Must we practice it and do it regularly?

What happens, when we seek justice,
if we find unfairness, transgression and villainy?
We were not searching for such; therefore, shall we simply move on?

We find the oppressed.
We discover uncared for orphans.
Widows abound. They, unsupported, have been left to care for a family.
How, in God’s name (I mean it!), do we rescue them?

Liberty and justice for all!
Really? Here? All around us? Really?

Scripture often tires me. There are simpler things to read. Less challenging! Less threatening!

I shall relax and read some Kirkegaard!

"… so the only thing that can save him is the absurd, and this he grasps by faith. So he recognizes the impossibility, and that very instant he believes the absurd; for if, without recognizing the impossibility with all the passion of his soul and with all his heart, he should wish to imagine that he has faith, he deceives himself, and his testimony has no bearing, since he has not even reached the infinite resignation.

Faith therefore is not an aesthetic emotion but something far higher, precisely because it has resignation as its presupposition; it is not an immediate instinct of the heart, but is the paradox of life and existence."

This absurdity? It makes me wonder!

Can we avoid sin? Escape injustice?
Is sinfulness a natural part of existence,
confronting us wherever we turn? Abundant? Dominant?”

I intend to play golf today, among the 15 percent. I have no time to seek justice. I simply wouldn’t know where to search for it. And, if I found it, then what? Why am I not commanded to seek injustice? Is it because such an assignment is not a challenge?

Am I being too pessimistic? This infinite resignation of which Kirkegaard writes? Is he on to something? Is it resignation that is at the heart of faith?

Daily Rilke Reading…

“Impermanence plunges us into the depth of all Being …in a sheer earthly, deep earthly, sacred earthly consciousness: that what we see here and now is to bring us into a wider – indeed, the very widest, – dimension. Not in an afterlife whose shadow darkens the earth, but in a whole that is the whole.”
                                               Rainer Maria Rilke in a letter to Witold Hulewicz, 1925

NEWS NOTE
(from this morning’s local newspaper):
It is estimated that the 2011 famine in Somali killed a quarter of a million people and that approximately half of those were aged five or under. This is according to a report, heavily funded by Great Britain and the United States, which will be published within a day or two. Contrary to the report, it will be argued by some that less than two-hundred thousand were killed.

Oh, absurdity!

_________________________

Why not become a follower?
If you read my blog regularly, why not become a follower? All you have to do is click in the upper right hand corner and establish a simple means of communication. Then you'll be informed every time a new blog is posted here. If all that's confusing, here's Google's explanation of how to do it! If you don’t want to post comments on the blog, but would like to communicate with me about it, send me an email if you’d like.

Rilke, Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn and Other Men’s Wars

I’m a sensitive guy. Some people who know me wouldn’t agree with that. I am, however. When I praise a book and then have a friend tell me he thought it was not a very good read, I cringe and wonder about myself. I recoil and wonder if I need to rethink things.

by Charlie Leck

In my Rilke readings (A Year with Rilke), I just finished reading the Spanish Trilogy (III) that comes from Uncollected Poems. I was so moved by them. I recall that a friend, and reader of my blog wrote, saying he did not like Rilke at all. When I finished reading these three wonderful works, beautiful even in their translation, I wondered how it is possible not to like his gentle poems. The third of the trilogy is printed below.

When I re-enter, alone, the city’s crush
and its chaos of noise
and the fury of traffic surrounds me,
may I, above that hammering confusion,
remember sky and the mountain slopes
where the herds are still descending homeward.

May my courage be like those rocks
and the shepherd’s daylong work seem possible to me –
the way he drifts and darkens, and with a well-aimed stone
hems in his flock where it unravels.
With slow and steady strides, his posture is pensive
and, as he stands there, noble. Even now a god might
secretly slip into this form and not be diminished.

In turn, he lingers and moves on like the day itself,
and cloud shadows pass through him, as though all of space
were thinking slow thoughts for him.

I shouldn’t be so disturbed that a good friend doesn’t like something I find so remarkable, but here I am this morning, asking how anyone could not like something so beautiful.

The same friend questioned my taste in reading because I so liked Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. Again, I wonder how, when there is such meaning in beautiful writing like this (for which, by the way, the author won numerous literary awards and was a finalist for the National Book Award), that this friend cannot avidly applaud its author, Ben Fountain. The following excerpt quotation comes after Billy Lynn and his fellow hero-soldiers, all of whom have become quite famous, are shown on the big video-tron screen at a Dallas Cowboy NFL football game.

“No one spits, no one calls him baby-killer. On the contrary, people could not be more supportive or kindlier disposed, yet Billy finds these encounters weird and frightening all the same. There’s something harsh in his fellow Americans, avid, ecstatic, a burning that comes of the deepest need. That’s his sense of it, they all need something from him, this pack of half-rich lawyers, dentists, soccer moms, and corporate VPs, they’re all gnashing for a piece of a barely grown grunt making $14,800 a year. For these adult, affluent people he is mere petty cash in their personal accounting, yet they lose it when they enter his personal space. They tremble. They breathe in fitful, stinky huffs. Their eyes skitz and quiver with the force of the moment, because here, finally, up close and personal, is the war made flesh, an actual point of contact after all the months and years of reading about the war, watching the war on TV, hearing the war flogged and flacked on talk radio. It’s been hard times in America – how did we get this way? So scared all the time, and so shamed at being scared through the long dark nights of worry and dread, days of rumor and doubt, years of drift and slowly ossifying angst. You listened and read and watched and it was just, so obvious, what had to be done, a mental tic of a mantra that became second nature the war dragged on. Why don’t they just … Send in more troops. Make the troops fight harder. Pile on the armor and go in blazing, full-frontal smackdown and no prisoners. And by the way, shouldn’t the Iraqis be thanking us? Somebody needs to tell them that, would you tell them that, please? Or maybe they’d like their dictator back. Failing that, drop bombs. More and bigger bombs. Show these persons the wrath of God and pound them into compliance, and if that doesn’t work then bring out the nukes and take it all the way down, wipe it clean, reload with fresh hearts and minds, a nuclear slum clearance of the country’s soul”

I remember when I first read that long paragraph. I had to stop and lower the book into my lap and tremble just a mite and give thanks that I'd never had to go to war. Coward! Draft-dodging bastard! Commie shit!

“…a slum clearance of the country’s soul.”

Oh, my! Had I ever heard it spoken or written so well? Did the readers of the book understand? Who fights – really fights, I mean – America’s wars?

“…a slum clearance of the country’s soul.”

“No man (or woman),” I thought aloud, talking to myself, “should be sent to war unless we, as a nation, are absolutely certain there is no possible alternative. The motives for war, in my adult lifetime, have all been too unclear and fragile to support such actions.”

It isn’t the only time I shuddered while reading this book. It isn’t the only time I paused and thought long and hard. The men of Bravo are Fountain’s way of describing the massive innocence of boys at war – boys called to sacrifice themselves because the grown men who make the decisions of war don’t need to.

How do I rate Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, the book? A strong A and nearly an A+ -- and a book that America needs to read and digest (but won’t of course).

Not everyone has to like the book. I know that! For some, it is more than one wants to read. I remember having the same feeling – asking myself why I was reading this – when I devoured Tim O’Brien’s extraordinary books, In the Lake of the Woods, and his tour de force, The Things They Carried.

I shouldn’t be so sensitive about criticism. It’s a new resolution as my time winds down. Word came today that a dear friend and classmate, from high school days, has died. A bit of criticism about my reading tastes is not so vital. I hope you are resting among the stars, Mike.

Read, if you dare, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk [Harper Collins, New York, 2012].

_________________________

Why not become a follower?
If you read my blog regularly, why not become a follower? All you have to do is click in the upper right hand corner and establish a simple means of communication. Then you'll be informed every time a new blog is posted here. If all that's confusing, here's Google's explanation of how to do it! If you don’t want to post comments on the blog, but would like to communicate with me about it, send me an email if you’d like.

God Speaks

I rose early on this Sunday morning and did a lot of writing and some significant reading. I came upon something that seemed very special, especially for a quiet day like this.
by Charlie Leck

So far in this new year, I’ve been very faithful about my daily readings from A Year with Rilke, a book I received for Christmas. I found today’s reading especially good and meaningful and I felt certain it belonged as today’s blog. It follows.

God Speaks

I am, you anxious one.

Don’t you sense me, ready to break
into being at your touch?
My murmurings surround you like shadowy wings.
Can’t you see me standing before you
cloaked in stillness?
Hasn’t my longing ripened in you
from the beginning
as fruit ripens on a branch?

I am the dream you are dreaming.
When you want to awaken, I am waiting.
I grow strong in the beauty you behold.
And with the silence of stars I enfold
your cities made by time.

                [Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours I, 19]

Nothing more! Silence!

_________________________

Why not become a follower?
If you read my blog regularly, why not become a follower? All you have to do is click in the upper right hand corner and establish a simple means of communication. Then you'll be informed every time a new blog is posted here. If all that's confusing, here's Google's explanation of how to do it! If you don’t want to post comments on the blog, but would like to communicate with me about it, send me an email if you’d like.

A Year with Rilke

My intention is to spend all of 2013, beginning on 1 January, with Rainer Maria Rilke.
by Charlie Leck

In a blog a few days ago, I listed the books that I received for Christmas this year and into which I’m very excited about jumping. One little item that Santa gave me, I forgot to mention. It’s a clever little book edited and translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows called: A Year with Rilke (Daily Readings from the Best of Rainer Maria Rilke).

Macy and Barrows laid the book out with daily readings taken from Rilke’s letters, journals, prose and poetry. The entries begin on January 1 and run throughout the year. They look to be no more than a page each day and often a lot less than a page. I have not read much Rilke and I have always felt left out when some of my more literary and well-read friends talk about his work or quote him. Here’s my chance to get to know the fellow, at least, a little better than I currently do. In anticipation of enjoying my introduction to Rilke (1875-1926), I’ve also ordered (from my favorite on-line used book dealer, ABE (American Book Exchange), a copy of Letters to a Young Poet, and that ought to be here in a week or so. It’s supposed to be his most influential work and it’s much beloved by writers. It was also translated by Macy and Barrows.

The pair that presented this book to us also translated Rilke’s most respected and admired work, The Book of Hours. It was published when he was only in his twenties.

If we surrendered
to Earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.
      [Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours]

Reading the authors’ short introduction to their little book gives me some hope that I am going to like this Rilke guy and that I will find some philosophical and theological kinship with him.

Often when I imagine you
your wholeness cascades into many shapes.
You run like a herd of luminous deer
and I am dark, I am forest.

You are a wheel at which I stand,
whose dark spokes sometimes catch me up,
revolve me nearer to the center.
      [Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours]

Who? What is God?
It is a question with which I struggle more and more in these aging, aching days. Rilke writes of God as the Unsayable and the Invisible. He is the Coming One. Rilke is acquainted with the world’s religions and he can bring to his poetry stories from Greek mythology, or the Bible, or from Budda and Mohammed to help us understand the God he is defining.

God speaks to each of us as he makes us
then walks with us silently out of the night.

                    [Rainer Maria Rilke, Love Poems to God]

Thus, I begin. I am entering another adventure with great excitement. The Earth is blanketed in white here in Minnesota and large (half dollar sized) flakes of snow are falling now and a strong wind blows them hither and yon. In this light of mid-morning the stars are invisible, but our loved-ones long gone are there, looking down upon us even in our most private moments. There is no embarrassment among those out there with the stars; and neither is there judgment. They are free of such things.

_________________________

Why not become a follower?
If you read my blog regularly, why not become a follower? All you have to do is click in the upper right hand corner and establish a simple means of communication. Then you'll be informed every time a new blog is posted here. If all that's confusing, here's Google's explanation of how to do it! If you don’t want to post comments on the blog, but would like to communicate with me about it, send me an email if you’d like.