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My Natural History

12 Jul

I look out at Jackson Park.

Where elms and oaks, locusts and maples 

now stand arching over grassy spaces,

guarding beds of daffodils and pansies and petunias,

coleus and daisies.

This was water not so long ago.

When Lincoln’s funeral train traveled on the tracks

a few yards to the west, 

—on its way to Chicago, where he lay in state—

it traversed a bridge over the water.

We have photographs to prove it.

Landfill, we call it.

I’m looking through the window 

of a grand hotel, built in the 1890s

to greet the hordes that came to a World’s Fair.

The Fair was reason enough 

To transport soil from Lake Michigan’s bottom

to form the park 

and erect the buildings where I live today

and house the cafe where I sit now to reflect,

with the dogs and squirrels and grasshoppers,

who play beneath the trees.

My park, my companions,

my natural history.

(c) Phil Hefner      11 July 2018 

Footprints

30 Apr

Two companion poems

Footprints

“You leave no footprints. No one is watching you, but you’re part of history.”  Lt. Bill Lee–Marine guard at JFK grave at Arlington Cemetery.

City streets,

throngs walking–

some with canes,

joggers, 

soldiers in military stride,

shuffling homeless,

stylish gal, stiletto heels,

button down suit,

uniformed nurses and nuns.

Step by step,

each one puts a foot down.

Track those footsteps,

count them—

beyond counting,

naming them even more

unlikely.

But those who passed

were there,

their steps

as real as if they were

cast in bronze.

They pass by

caught for a moment

then gone—

but each one knows they were there,

however history 

unfolds,

is written down,

or explained.

They hear the word:

“You are that history.”

 

Footprints-2

Potawatomi and Kickapoo,

Illiniwek and Miami walked their paths

around the swampy, marshy swaths

bordering the lake; Chicago

 

not even in the realm of dreams.

Paths left by the Ice Age sheets

served them as streets,

ridges raised above the streams,

 

else they’d have to slog through the muck.

Today those same trails carry us.

We pave over where they have trod. In car and bus,

and diesel powered eighteen wheeler truck,

 

we roar along their trails; now they 

bear our names: Ogden Street, Milwaukee

Avenue. But though their prints we’ll never see,

they’re here, their history is ours, still today.

 

(c) Phil Hefner   30 April 2018

Reflections on life and the joy of Cajun food

16 Oct

This is the 55th installment in this blog—hardly possible, it seems to me.

I begin with two reflective poems, followed by commentary and a poem of pure fun.

* * *

The Philosopher’s Report

 “The truth is so unclear, 
our time on earth so short”—
the philosopher’s report
in brief describes with near
precision what frustrates
the quest that makes us who we 
are—to know with certainty
and properly respect our fates.

Yet along a path we walk,
free in spirit when the way allows,
oft constrained by circumstance.
As if the path itself could talk—
in its own strange way it shows
our life’s a not unpretty dance.

 

Get Ready

Molecules: Get ready, my little ones,
you tiny ones–
you were not together before we met,
you will not be together much longer,
you will find new friends,
you will travel to places you do not know,
and you will be part of something
very big and new.

Memories: Never bound in time and space,
you will be even more on your own,
reaching places never imagined.
You already know how to live in contradiction,
but it will be even more intense as years pass.
You will comfort some and bring strength.
Live with the fact that you will anger others
and disappoint.

Deeds: Etched, incised,
implanted where you really matter,
freeing and imprisoning–
anonymous as you are effective.

Me, I, soul, center, how shall I name you?
You will be carried to terra truly incognita
where your life will be
novel beyond present telling.

All transported,
carried in arms
as real as they are metaphor.

* * *

Writers are advised to write what they know, write their experience. My experience parallels that of the response I recently received to these poems:

“At age 85, I too am beginning to acutely feel the coming end of my life, with all of its accumulated memories and experiences. This awareness adds a new note of urgency to my motivation to contribute as much as I can out of my memories, experiences, reflections, and the like before passing the baton to those who will come after me and those who have shared in my life here. It’s a new phase of life with new kinds of experience. And it is a spur to meditation.”

Some people may say such thoughts are just for older folks, not relevant for younger people. My own experience leads me in another direction. After college, I studied in Germany, where I was attracted to Existentialist thinking. Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, Albert Camus—these were major thinkers. They were convinced that in confronting our death, we begin to understand how to live our lives now—as Kierkegaard put it, in every moment, we live “towards our death,” and how we do so determines our future. In that moment our lives make the existentialist leap, diving into the depths, floating over 20,000 fathoms of water.

Later, I encountered the psychologist Ernest Becker, who characterized our American culture in his term, “denial of death.” Turning Kierkegaard on his head, Becker insisted that many of us live as if we can deny death, and he described the destructive consequences of our denial. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Becker. Also, http://ernestbecker.org/).

* * *

However, lives that are lived toward death also include moments of pleasure, sheer fun—even for 85 year-olds. That can happen for me over a dish of great Cajun cooking.

My favorite Cajun eatery

And on the sixth day
the Lord God said
let there be gumbo
and jambalaya
fried pickles and red beans
and rice
etouffe and blackened
catfish
collard greens and grits–
and Tabasco

Then God turned to
Adam and Eve
and said
there I have kept my promise
your lives will be rich and full—
and zesty

 

(c) Phil Hefner   10/16/2017

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Something more than politics

7 Mar

Something “more” than politics–

Patricia’s poem

“Listen
after I have set the table
folded the scottowel into napkins cooked
this delicious eggplant stuffed with bulghur wheat
then baked the whole thing under careful
covering of mozzarella cheese
and
said my grace

don’t you bring Anita Bryant/Richard
Pryor/the Justices of the Supreme Court/don’t
you bring any of those people in here
to spoil my digestive processes
and ruin
my dinner

You hear?”

June Jordan wrote this poem in the late 1970s. If you substitute different names for Anita Bryant (singer and anti-Gay/lesbian spokeswoman) and Richard Pryor, it expresses what I have felt many times in the last six months. Miroslav Volf wrote, “Politics touches everything, but politics isn’t everything, not by a long shot.”

There is something more than politics–what is this “more”?

The more–family, faith, religion, personal integrity, the recovery of loved ones from cancer, art, cookouts in the backyard, the Cubs, the Packers–we all can names places in our lives that are “more” than politics–even though they may well be touched by politics.

In these comments, I’m focusing on art. When his novel, Underground Railroad, received the National Book Award, Colson Whitehead responded, with his eye on the current political situation, “Be Kind to everyone, make art, and fight the power.”

Why should we make art? The poet, Joy Harjo, gave an answer to this question when she bestowed the National Book Award for poetry: “Poetry carries the spirit of the people and is necessary at the doorways of transition and transformation.”

The words of George Steiner have stuck in my mind: Journalists insist the present moment has the most urgent claim on us–it is the hub of our universe; for artists, to the contrary, it is the longer view that counts, and the deeper view.

The politics of the day is mean and cheap. June Jordan’s Patricia has worked carefully and lovingly to prepare the meal for her guests–and she wants to contrast sharply with “mean and cheap.” Her mozzarella and eggplant transcends politics, and she means for her guests to share that transcendence–at the same time, the poem opens up other possibilities for transcending politics.


Consider Pablo Picasso’s painting, “Guernica” (see above). Rooted in a current event, it probes deeply to portray the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica by the Nazi German Air Force in April 1937. Picasso cries out that bombing was the rending of creation. And not just bombing that town, but also Srebinica in 1995 and Aleppo from 2012 until the present and Palmyra in 2016–all war, in other words. The list of “Guernicas” is endless.

Even the best journalistic treatment cannot convey the depth and breadth of Picasso’s painting. Wilfred Owen did the same in his poems from World War I. In “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (“it is sweet and right to die for your country”–in other words, it is a wonderful and great honor to fight and die for your country), written in 1917, he foreshadows the bombing of Guernica in his description of a soldier dying of a mustard gas attack:

“If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.”

Dripping with irony and sarcasm, Owen calls irrevocably into question the “old lie.” The journalist’s task is to report the soldier’s suffering and death in vivid terms, as TV news brought the Vietnam casualties to our dinner tables in the ’60s and ’70s. The artist’s message is a different one: war is a violation of the created order, and smoothing it over as noble sacrifice is a lie. This is not a condemnation of the soldiers who fight and die, but of the societies and their leaders who send soldiers into war.

It’s not a matter of escaping politics, but nourishing the deep places of our lives. I have tried to cultivate these deep places in my own life. I visit friends in our second-floor rehab unit. I read newspapers, but watch little TV news. I bought a small volume of Christian Wiman’s poems, “Once in the West,” and found these wonderful lines:

“Too many elegies elevating sadness
to a kind of sad religion:

one wants in the end just once to befriend
one’s own loneliness,

to make of the ache of inwardness–

something,
music maybe. . .”

Make the decision now to befriend the deep places of your life and make them into music. Share your music with us.

(c) Phil Hefner. March 7, 2017

Your life is a poem–part 2

19 Feb

A poem is made up of words and lines–some rhyme, some don’t. Some poetic forms are very tight, like villanelles and sonnets. On occasion, these poems are uptight and awkward, while other times they sing so melodically that we scarcely notice the complex structure.

Poems come in stanzas–think of them as chapters in a book. The last stanza of a sonnet or a limerick can take a surprising or ironic twist.

Our lives are like this, too. They have forms and shapes, they flow melodically, singing songs of exultation and also stalling at times, dipping into sadness, even tragedy.

There are angry poems and protest poems that continue to ring out long after their poets have gone.

When I think of life as a poem–my own life and the lives of those around me, it changes my perspective. I see the people around me as a community of poets.

Our life-poems are spelled out for all to read. Your poem embodies the rhythms of where you’ve been and what you’ve done, what you’ve fought against, how you’ve loved and where you’ve been disappointed. You have to help us interpret, to discover how the stanzas have unfolded, to learn how simple rhymes rest on deeper feelings, how inscrutable verse unlocks a world only you have seen.

In our dining room, entertaining limericks sit beside Shakespearean sonnets; paeans of praise beside tightly framed lamentations. Although it’s clear our poems have been written by diligence and craft, it’s also clear we don’t write our poems by ourselves. We are co-authors–families, co-workers, even our foes have taken their turns writing our lines, giving our poems unexpected twists. At times, death, tragedy, and illness take up the pen and write.

In certain situations we may think we are writing the later stanzas of our poem. But our poem never stops. Our actions and words are carried on in the lives of those we have touched. Consider the dance of the atoms and molecules that make up our bodies–they do not die. They may have originated in the far reaches of space before they took up residence in us, and who knows where they will travel next, what shapes they will take? We don’t even know what our future poems will look like.

I tried to convey this in a poem of my own–

I go back light years–
the dust of stars
floats in my flesh.
Orang and Neanderthal are
my kin.

Primeval stuff
and primate
genes
do not halt their
flow because this pulse
stops.

Shattered in a thousand shards
by earth’s grinding
blows
is not death
but a thousand more
openings–

paths through
cosmos, shapes as
yet unseen,
undreamt.

(c) Phil Hefner 2/18/2017

Your life is a poem–1

1 Feb

The poem in my previous blog was entitled, “The art of dying.” But the basic idea is that our lives are the works of art. Our lives are poetry written in our living day by day. We are the poets.

Our dying is part of the poem–an especially important segment, the end of a stanza, you might say. Our poem goes on after our death, but we are the poets who craft the epic as long as there is breath in us.

I think of this quite a lot since we moved into a retirement community, where everyone, in one way or another, is moving toward death in a relatively short time. Death is a more frequent experience than in other demographic communities. This is not a pessimistic or morose observation–it’s simply factual.
You might say that here we have a concentration of poets working on the final stanzas of their life-poems. Since this idea occurred to me, I have a different perspective on my fellow residents. I tried to express this in my poem:

Waiting in a large room,
And though we’re not alone

We practice our art–
Inwardly and outwardly, both.

We see each other, but
Mostly miss the signs that

Each is creating
An art of dying,

Never knowing when
The project will be complete.

The first response I received was: “I hope you haven’t had bad news that has placed you in the position of focussing on the art of dying.” I thought to myself, “Yes and No.” I consider the poem to be reflective, not morose or depressed. Two other readers, one who is close to my age and the other a former student, thirty years younger, both said they find themselves in the poem.

In response to the first reader, I wrote that I wasn’t prompted by bad news. There is a lot of my philosophy of life embedded in the poem. I have been influenced by Soeren Kierkegaard’s teaching that we “live towards our death”–that in an important way our lives are defined by our death and what we consider worthy to die for–as was the case with Jesus. Kierkegaard was reflecting on how we live our lives–in the awareness that our dying is connected to the way we live.

As I was working on the poem, I was reminded of the anthropologists’ opinion that the ability to reflect on life and death–being aware that we will pass away–is a mark of the human species. Anthropologists sift through pre-historical remains for signs of burial practices, for example.

I’ve also been influenced by Erik Erikson’s discussion of Gandhi and the Hindu understanding of the life cycle. The four stages in this cycle are: growing up, the householder phase, the achiever phase, and the growing old/dying phase. The final stage challenges us to prepare ourselves for finishing our lives in an appropriate way. The final years should be an appropriate capstone.

A major point in my poem is that medical science (“the voice in a white coat”) complicates the final stage, because our lives are extended, often in unexpected ways that render our “art of dying” more complex, but also contribute to the distinctiveness and beauty of our lives:

Like a great cathedral

Altered, added to
In every age,

The beauty of our art lies
Not in what we once conceived

But in the unmistakable
Add-ons time lays upon us.

I think of the great Chartres Cathedral. The current cathedral was begun in 1194, and it had to take into account the remnants of four earlier churches that had been built on the site, only to be destroyed by fire and other calamities. Consecrated in 1260, a major addition was built seventy-five yeas later at the east end. In 1506, lightning destroyed the north steeple, only to be replaced by a flamboyant structure totally different from the steeple to the south. The magnificent choir, with its frieze depiction of the life of Mary, was completed in the early 1700s. Yet the whole of the cathedral, six hundred years in the making, is a thing of beauty and inspiration. Our lives are like that.

There is a tradition of reflecting on the art of dying. The ancient Romans, particularly the Stoic philosophers, discussed the theme. Death was a motivation for leading an honorable life, since they believed that our reputation is all that survives–immortality is in what others remember of us after we are gone. Stoics considered suicide to be an option in cases where life is no longer useful.

The Christian tradition of the art of dying goes back at least to the early 1400s. “The Art of Dying” is the title of two writings “which offer advice on the protocols and procedures of a good death, explaining how to “die well” according to Christian precepts of the late Middle Ages. They were written within the historical context of the macabre horrors of the Black Death 60 years earlier and consequent social upheavals of the 15th century. Very popular, they were translated into most West European languages and were the first in a western literary tradition of guides to death and dying.”

In contrast to the Stoic emphasis, the Christian tradition reassures us that God’s grace accepts us, whatever our condition, whether useful or not, and urges dying people to intensify their faith in Christ.

This blog installment will be extended into a Part II. As ever, your reactions are eagerly awaited.


(c) Phil Hefner 1/31/2017

.

The art of dying

27 Jan

The art of dying

This art is made
While one is waiting,

Else it’s not art,
Just a falling over dead–

And that’s not ballet,
No pas de deux.

Waiting in a large room,
And though we’re not alone

We practice our art–
Inwardly and outwardly, both.

We see each other, but
Mostly miss the signs that

Each is creating
An art of dying,

Never knowing when
The project will be complete.

It becomes more difficult,
More tangled,

When the voice in a white coat
Rings out, “You’ve been granted

More time.” No matter that
The artistic process is riven–

The time can’t be declined.
Like a great cathedral

Altered, added to
In every age,

The beauty of our art lies
Not in what we once conceived

But in the unmistakable
Add-ons time lays upon us.


When I sent an earlier version of this poem to a group of friends recently, the responses prompted revisions of the poem and further reflection. The discussion that followed will be included in my next installment–coming very soon. I’d like you to read the poem with your mind uncontaminated by after-thoughts!

The discussion raises points that were not in my mind as I wrote. In fact, the poem poured out, and I had no idea where it was going. The discussion enriched me, however, even if it wasn’t part of my original experience.

I’ll appreciate your responses.

(c) Phil Hefner 1/26/2017