Ugliness and holiness
[ by Charles Cameron ]
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I’m taking a break from my usual Zenpundit fare this time around, and posting some poems about the ugliness and holiness I see most evenings.
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When my capacity for writing about religious violence and apocalyptic fever has abated, and I want to set my mind on pause before I go to sleep, I often watch crime-thrillers: it’s a sort of meditation for me. And because it’s a sort of meditation, I find that odd things – single shots, often the ones film-makers call “establishing shots” – catch my eye and send me into poetry mode, where what I’ve seen triggers a clearer sense of what I intuit.
The secular sacred: i
In the relative darks of early darkness
a train crosses on a raised rail above the houses
where sleeping is beginning, its
windows and windows and windows lit up
with empty interiors, here and there
a person, but windows, mainly, and their
lights passing in sequence with a rhythm like
the rhythm of breathing, of the late train.And how to get that in poetry, how to get
what the camera sees, the slightest of slightest
parts of the daily routine, entirely secular,
where plain people have transmuted
metal to transportation system? Tta-cha,
this passing of lights, lights, lights in the night.
It goes this way: the films show me something of the scope and range of human activity, and the scope – the sheer size of numerous cities – is so huge, and the range – from the heroic, the creative and even the saintly to the crazed, the dulled, the bereft and the vicious – is so great that my sense of how wide and deep the world is gets expanded way past its limits.
And the part of me that has experienced (and continues to experience) something that I can find no words for outside the religious vocabulary — “grace” and “radiance” – the part of me that is enormously thankful now and always for the privilege of human being, of sight, friends, speech, friends, books, friends, music, travel, the internet… that part of me, precious to me, somehow must come to grips with the gritty, the grimy, the “real”.
I have no theories about heaven, no belief or creed beyond a non-verbal assent, but it’s my sense that the condition of joy we call “heaven” – much like the condition of insight we call “poetry” – reaches “down” from whatever lofty spires or Himalayas we may suppose it abides in, into the dust beneath our wheels, beneath our feet… dust that my mind, at least, could easily sweep under the carpet.
And so, watching thrillers to put my mind on pause, I have to put the films on pause to write the poems…
The secular sacred: ii
How many gravestones can a camera’s eye
pass in a single sweep, and you think
God any less able to see? The sacrament
of cinema surpasses, pushes words
into admission of strange holiness way
past the tolerances of the religious,
way and away past any sense of what sacred
might mean except only the sacred itself,felt fully in belly and brain of the city, the
splintered, splendored city. Nor, in
these needle-strewn streets, this broken
flesh and blood, is there mercy room
beyond pity of such pettiness, the
shattered dreams — so ugly, small, so holy.
After writing those two on successive nights, I made a note for some friends…
Those two, the “secular sacred” poems, are part of something I’m working towards by watching “gritty” films most nights, and triggered in particular by helicopter long-shots of freeways intercut with goings on at street level — giving me the feeling the world is far larger (and uglier) than (my) religious imagination usually reckons, with holiness in the discarded condoms.
So I’m trying to make room conceptually for a god or emergent world or mirroring pool wide and deep enough for gritty realism in these poems…
The secular sacred: iii
Now you think of it, someone must have
wanted him to walk down those steps from
the whore’s house round the corner
into the shadow and to his car, the street
laid out just the way it happens
in the film, someone put the camera
there or the street corner, setting
up a street corner is less effort thangrowing a city from scratch and gives
greater freedom, so there was some intent,
some design to his coming down
those steps at that speed and time with
that look on his face, and directors
are not necessarily lacking in street smarts.
And I’m far from sure what sort of God, mirror or emergence will emerge from all this at the end, but it’s unlikely to have curls in a beard and be supremely nice, at least not just nice…
The secular sacred iv
The fact that there’s holiness in needles
glinting in the sun and discarded condoms in
the shade, and the fact there’s often
more shade than sun, and other facts I
might mention shouldn’t dissuade us from
the glint of clinics and the shade of
discarded habits, there’s holiness there
too, in the turning around of a life, and ifgrass needs to break through asphalt to
prove a metaphysical point, you can be sure
some kind of holiness is reaching up
for sky and to get our attention, which,
too, is a locus of the sacred, humming in
time with the heartbeat of world and heaven.
May 13th, 2011 at 9:29 pm
I really like these.
I can only say that poetry for me is something so joyful, and also so difficult, but still deeply addicting to write. Parsing words, moving them here and there, cutting and honing, then burnishing until the imagery and emotions conveyed are precisely the ones you wanted. And today, was very poignant in that at a funeral of a friend, they read Wordsworth’s "Daffodils," which was just so apropos. So poetry is all around me today.
Anyway, keep going. I like the rhythm, the pace, the observation, the solitary melody that is searching. I’ve shared this with another poet, and maybe we’ll toss the link onto the Poetry Foundation as well.
May 13th, 2011 at 10:01 pm
And would you please contact me? We have a chapbook we’re putting together and would like to include your work. Just find me on Facebook.
May 14th, 2011 at 12:10 am
I’m glad you like the poems, Kanani.
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And I know whose funeral it must have been, and wonder whether you were in London. You were kind enough to get me invited via Zen to the Restrepo pre-showing in Chicago, and just in the last few days I shed some tears after picking up a copy of the DVD, explaining to my sons why I was so moved by the film, so saddened by Tim Hetherington’s death.
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It’s not often that a film moves me so much — so thank you, again.
May 14th, 2011 at 2:34 pm
I second Kanani Fong’s comments, Charles. These are wonderful. I especially like:
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In the relative darks of early darkness
a train crosses on a raised rail above the houses
where sleeping is beginning, its
windows and windows and windows lit up
with empty interiors, here and there
a person, but windows, mainly, and their
lights passing in sequence with a rhythm like
the rhythm of breathing, of the late train.
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"Windows and windows and windows lit up," reminds me of a children’s book (or a book for "tweens," can’t remember the book exactly, only the remembered mental image) that I once read in which the main characters – two girls growing up in Minnesota, maybe, during the early part of the last century – turn old boxes into little train cars. They cut in windows, cover the windows with thin paper so that a light can be shown through from the inside and make little cardboard cutouts of people to past inside the windows they’ve created.
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The image of their innocent fun and creativity has stayed with me and it is echoed for me in the opening lines of your poem.
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– Madhu
May 14th, 2011 at 2:47 pm
Maybe it was a Maud Heart Lovelace book?
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http://www.maudhartlovelace.org/
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Yeah for this thread and online writers!
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I’ll trade with you. Here is something I wrote some time back:
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I drove south on Lake Shore Drive toward Hyde Park the other day, on my way to the University of Chicago Hospitals. To the left of me, Lake Michigan was a flat blue plain. The sky clear, the air soft, rushing-rushing alongside cars and trucks, traffic thinning out the further south I drove. Still, the best part of my afternoon trip to Hyde Park was the drive back. Why? I’ll tell you.First, the view of the city as I drove north. The road turns just a little, a gentle curve, and then you see it! The city displayed along Lake Michigan, buildings lined up along the water, fronted by a low dash of green-tree, skyscrapers tinged with blue at their peaks, and everything, everything, sky and water and tall columns reaching. Second, a little rainbow within the gushing waters of Buckingham fountain. Lovely. Lovely and beautiful.(It felt good to feel something, feel that old tug at the heart. Lovely! Lovely and beautiful! It’s a bit wrapped in cotton-wool these days, the heart, I mean. A bit dull, a bit quiet – is that the way it goes as you get older, the emotions more secure and more calm, but also, a little flattened? Is this good or bad? Good, yes? Maturity, yes? Still, youth has it’s up-and-down-feeling advantages, doesn’t it?)
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From one of my old blogs I am cleaning up so that I can start posting there again.
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Another one of my old blogs has turned into a disgusting spam magnet. Haven’t checked in in years and before I stopped paying for the typepad hosting, I forgot to turn off the comments and import the thing onto wordpress.
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And now no-one at Typepad returns my messages or emails.
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Arrgh. I’m at the point I’m going to just print it out on paper and forget the thing ever existed.
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The horrible digital graffiti of our modern age.
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🙂
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– Madhu
May 14th, 2011 at 5:42 pm
Hi, Madhu:
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I was quite timid about posting the poems here, to be honest — but your favorable response and Kanani’s definitely leave me thinking of posting others from time to time… I’m very glad you liked them.
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Children has such vivid imaginations — why do we so often try to beat it out of them (or bore it out of them if beating is no longer encouraged)?
May 14th, 2011 at 5:55 pm
Ah. I hadn’t seen your second comment when I posted.
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That business of the heart in cotton-wool… and aging, maturing… fascinating question. I’ll have to think on that one!
May 14th, 2011 at 8:22 pm
Hi Charles, I like your poems. I particularly liked the second stanza of number four. The grass and asphalt combination reminds me of a line from the book Crazy in Alabama. Placed in the Civil Rights era, part of the story included a swimming pool that had been filled with asphalt to keep blacks from sharing with whites. The little boy narrators "knows" that under all that tar, there is blue water; that juxtaposition in a single sentence turned a mediocre story into a memorable story. (When I find the reference, I’ll send along.)
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Keep the poetry coming, please!
May 15th, 2011 at 9:43 pm
Hi Charles, Here’s the quote I mentioned: "But I know the secret. There is water at the bottom of that pool. That solid-seeming mass of asphalt floats on a core of swimming pool water, the same water that Nehemiah Thomas swam in when he opened the pool up for everybody—three inches of water as blue as Aunt Lucille’s eyes, trapped under there for all time. What looks solid is not necessarily so." For a brief moment, a work of pulp fiction turned poetic—and I’ve loved the book ever since.
May 16th, 2011 at 3:28 am
Not necessarily so, indeed!
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Thanks, Scott.