So you can marvel

Give Your Writing The Edge's Nugget No.26, November 2022 reflects upon the value of work done with the hands. 

Not everyone has hands, not everyone has the use of both. 

Ever since I penned that Nugget, however, Brian Walter's poem Workman #2 has hummed in my brain. It's a perfect demonstration of how a man's mind, heart and body are integrated and fully engaged, as he is "grounded in his purpose, balanced in his humanity."

Workman #2

i.

I have to choose today

- whether to walk the forests

or get on with house repairs,

and soon I find myself out

buying a window frame,

a tad too big, so I must devise

ways to fit the casement to its space:

this cottage window, small

and pretty, for our bathroom.

I like to repair, to set things

to rights. I may turn from words

to maintenance, but am a dreamer,

too, and I wonder at the roads

I will not take today,

the paths I am not getting to pick,

between the right, untrodden,

or the well-worn left.

ii.

I glaze the window,

setting glass into the mullions,

tapping home the glazier's points,

thumbing in the softened putty:

I've been working this repair for days

and now it's almost done,

a new window frame set

and glazed so that one day

upon a time, morning bathed, you

can slip the bathroom window open

and marvel at the fresh outside,

at what metaphors do in spring.

 - by Brian Walter, in What It Is, Ecca Poets, Plettenberg Bay: 2020

The unhurried momentum of these lines speaks so well the non-machine, the un-preprogammed, living action emerging out of a moment's instinctual choice - "soon I find myself out/ buying a window frame"; which leads, then, to the work of blood and flesh - and continuous, self-conscious thought - "I wonder at the roads/ I will not take today".

This dreamer's dreaming does not delay his action, he glazes, sets, taps home, thumbs in - what a lovely roll of verbs to tell the process; even as the poet joys in the jargon and techniques of "mullions," "glazier's points" and "softened putty". Steady, patient, he gets there - "now it's almost done".

The penultimate stanza creates a garden of fairytale charm, allowing the sensual dreamer his in as he imagines his loved one "upon a time, morning bathed" opening the window he has fitted. The word "slip" in the third-last line adds the most delicate degree of mischief, as the poet at work slips himself into the frame, as it were, and walks off with the prize: the window glazed and set, the loved one bathed, it's the marvel at "what metaphors can do in spring" that flowers the finale.

It's the dignity of fulfilling work, creative action saves our souls and makes us smile.

Photo by Fredrik Öhlander on Unsplash

 

 

The cross

It was at one of John Homewood's talks that I first encountered the figure of the cross as a living articulation between our breath and time itself. 

The timeline of our lives creates the horizontal axis of the cross, made up – if you jot down the events of your life – of the buzz and chaos, with its joys and trials, of every human’s count of days on earth. 

When I inspect my own timeline, I have to admit that it’s a pretty ragged thread of sorrows and misfortunes. Until recently, I was embarrassed by the fact that, in terms of actual incidents, my life seems to be peppered by what most of us would, I guess, call misfortune, bad luck and sorrow. I’ve lost that embarrassment as a result of chronologically listing the basic events of my circumstances, and then reflecting on what endures, as follows. 

During a materially comfortable childhood, I witnessed harsh human dissent and loss of self-control as a given.

My family moved to South Africa, where we lived literally on the edge of a military zone called Voortrekkerhoogte (now Thaba Tshwane). The State at that time promoted and defended racist practices by policy, causing my father to declare that he would be quite content if my sisters and I failed Afrikaans at school – that seemed to be the way he felt he could best contribute to the anti-Apartheid struggle. Friends and boyfriends were conscripted and suffered abuse and violence on all levels.

I left home, and experienced armed soldiers searching my room, friends being sjambokked by police, a pregnant lecturer imprisoned without trial. I taught in violent townships, and in tiny sanctuary spaces offered to township children. I lost my sanity, benefited from the balm of therapy.

Mandela was released and the New South Africa came into being.

I married and experienced the gift of motherhood. My husband and I were economically on the margins, however, to save money I did not eat properly, suffered from overwork, broke down and succumbed again to mental illness, from which, again, I managed to recover. My husband was unwilling to continue the marriage and eventually we divorced.

My second marriage gave me deep spiritual fulfilment, my husband and I published many poetry books together, but he was frail, his failing health was ever a shadow over us. Economic pressure was a constant, he carried much debt.

Then my fit, nimble mother suffered a stroke and was consigned to total physical helplessness. My sister lost her sanity, and my beloved husband died.

I published two poetry books solo.

I was required to sell my late husband's house and leave the village that had become my home. At the same time, Trump was making headlines with his tweets.

I was lucky in love and did not have to move alone. Within weeks of our move, Covid and hard lockdown razed human lives and economies. I lost work and marketing opportunities for my new book. Friends and family fell ill.

My father’s memory began to fail and he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, requiring me to run my parents’ household and take responsibility for their daily needs and overall care.

War continued to ruin the beauty of the Middle East.

My sister is currently in a mental institution and I am praying constantly for her. My Beloved’s heart has urged him to leave me for crucial time to himself – whether temporarily or forever is uncertain.

Russia has invaded Ukraine and I hear alternatingly tragic and hopeful details of the victims from friends who have connections there.

So much for the horizontal axis of my personal cross in a broad sweep – living such a timeline is great training in patience, I’ll say that much. And patience – please consider this carefully – does not mean simply waiting for undesirable situations to pass. Patience is the active (gracious) carrying of an unwanted load towards its end. It’s notable that, except for love and marriage, motherhood, the recovery from my illnesses, and the activities of teaching and poetry publishing, none of the other events on my timeline were chosen by me! I couldn’t have asked for a better, or harder, school than this life to teach me a little graciousness.

I wonder, if you were to make a list of events on YOUR timeline, what the ratio of chosen to unchosen would be. How would you rate YOUR ability to carry unwanted burdens?

♥

Now for the vertical axis – the one, which, I recall John Homewood observing, you plumb when you stop focusing on the “school”, that milling chaos called ‘the wheel of life’. I tried to outline it in poem form –

The vertical axis of my cross

is prayer, my heart –

vessel of joy,

 

my pen standing up

for me in spite of trouble,

noting my small noticings –

 

fine sword of God, ensuring anchorage

in places

of peace.

 

Thus, I write

of deer, of dew, of weather and birds –

they are my breath,

 

preserving me, wrapped

in Christ’s playful smile,

on my cross.

 ♥

The loveliest insight, for me, which the above reflections yield is that my chosen, voluntary WORK – my writing (published and unpublished) and my visual art – by and large expresses not the vicissitudes of my timeline, but the spiritual anchor of my self in the vertical axis. I realise that my life’s work, mainly my artistic output, has never not been first and foremost a spiritual path and practice.

All of what I have done and continue to do is subordinate to the naked flame that has steadily been alchemising my soul beyond the edge of time. 

♥ 

As for you – I’d be curious to hear where you feel the ‘vertical axis’ on your cross breathes most freely.

 ♥

Prior to milk and bread

Mariss Stevens' Containment series caught my eye on Instagram. The series is a set of quilted images created over the past weeks. Her latest blogpost, On Containment (22nd May 2020), describes the process from conception to finish, including a definition of 'containment' as holding (holding back) and 'restraint'.

"The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self", the poet Ilya Kaminsky recently (14th May 2020) quoted Stravinsky speaking about musical composition, on Twitter - "And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision."

In Mariss' series, vases contain and constrain flowers, which are pulled into captivity by the mouths of vessels, thence to fountain out their blossoms the more -

Containment #3

Containment #7

 Tree trunks operate similarly.

Containment #1

The constraints of format and resources, in this series, expands in the fifth work - not only to flip the orientation of of the work from portrait to landscape, but also beyond inward - house and garden - motifs, to reach quite literally for the moon.

Containment #5

Mariss judges the connection between it and the theme to be "nebulous", but I question that judgment. The series consists of eight works - the number which, flipped sideways, represents infinity in mathematics; and the one that in the arcane realm symbolises balance between heaven and earth. Five is understood to bring chaos and conflict, but also transformation and change.

Mariss' moon in this series is pregnant with the potency of the time-piece, which that heavenly body is, in relation to the earth: determining our calendar, the tides and feminine cycles. The exquisite fabricated image, contained upon the background in its frame and constrained by its position in the series overall, reflects an undertow of truth, which penetrates the boundaries of the lockdown in utter peace.

'Time as a task' during quarantine has recently been found by Parul Seghal - in an essay entitled In Search of Time Lost and Newly Found (19th May 2020) - to be a slippery and bewildering challenge; but these little textile works demonstrate the power of working with time, working within its natural limits. The crafter-artist flowers again and again inside her hours and her works are pollen grains, or little moons, from the hands of her soul.

All our days are numbered, that is to say: limited, but each day contains its own potential. I pondered the practicalities of this mystery in a pollen grain of my own, a blogpost from about a year ago, entitled Time as an organic fact (14th May, 2019).

Time can be felt as "a natural sequence of moments blossoming their opportunities", I wrote, and I still agree with me about this. Too fine a plan or regimen will scorch them; take no action and they will drown.

The hours we are given are our nourishment prior to milk and bread. Eat, drink, enjoy!

I thank Mariss Stevens for allowing me to use images of her works for this post. To see the full set, including the mesmerising process of how she created the moon, as well as the surprise coup of the eighth work, click The Containment series.

- Silke Heiss, 27th May 2020

Labour is blossoming or dancing where?

I have always loved to work. The work I have done - I mean here in the main my art and writing - has built, and over and again repaired, my mind, body, heart and soul.

The following small, personal selection of poems and extracts are a tribute to the beauty of committed human work. Whether it be sewing or carpentry, web design, computer programming, mining, gardening, catering or trading. There is no end to human talent and no end to the quest to get whatever it is you are doing right. To begin with, I've chosen one of my favourite stanzas from my old master, Yeats, for you to enjoy -

Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

- from Among School Children by W.B.Yeats 

Not bruised, not born of despair, not blear-eyed, but dancing and at one: that is when a human being can attain a wholeness that compares to the completeness in the life of a tree.

I've always loved Herman Charles Bosman's poem, Seed, which be-sings the integration of a farmer's body, mind and soul by means of the process of working -

Seed

The farmer ploughs into the ground
More than the wheat-seed strewn on the ground
The farmer ploughs into the ground
The plough and the oxen and his body
He ploughs into the ground the farmstead and the cattle
And the pigs and the poultry and the kitchen utensils
And the afternoon sunlight shining into the window panes of the voorhuis
And the light entangled in the eyes of the children
He ploughs into the ground his wife's brown body
And the windmill above the borehole
And the borehole and the wind driving the windmill.
The farmer ploughs the blue clouds into the ground;
And as a tribute to the holocaust of the ploughshare -
To the sowing that was the parting of the Juggernaut -
The earth renders the farmer in due season
Corn.

- Herman Charles Bosman 

The shock of not being able to work anymore, due to a stroke, and the frailty of illness and old age, hit my mother and my husband respectively very hard - both were people who had been hard-working, who grieved the loss of their capacities to do even menial chores. My husband's frailty loaded on me more than is usual, and taught me - 

Beautiful body

My fingertips -
rough
from washing and rubbing -

rust in the whorls,
from scrubbing the pan, my back aches
from cleaning the floors,

my neck and shoulders are stiff
from sitting at the computer.
or maybe

from peeling and coring the apples;
my underarms sweaty and fragrant
from labour.

How beautiful
when your body
can work.

I think of my mother -
helpless after her stroke;
my husband so frail it's an effort to walk.

I shan't complain
about work, but give thanks
my body can.

- Silke Heiss 

Norman [Morrissey, my late husband] often quoted the following line from one of his favourite books and authors, and his passion for their meaning engraved itself into me -

"[They] came and went without fear of necessity, working hard because of the life that was in them, not for want of the money."

- from The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence

The great emphasis, with which Norman used to pronounce the phrase working hard because of the life that was in them leaps me straight to Maria Montessori's exploration of the human instinct to work - 

"The most important discovery is that a child returns to a normal state through work. Countless experiments made upon children of every race throughout the world have shown that this is the most certain datum that we have in the field of psychology and education. A child's desire to work represents a vital instinct since he cannot organise his personality without working: a man builds himself through working. There can be no substitute for work, neither affection nor physical well-being can replace it. [...] A child's instinct for work is a proof that work is instinctive to man and characteristic of the species."

- from The Instinct to Work in The Secret of Childhood  by Maria Montessori 

None of the above eulogies and thoughts about work concern themselves with forced labour, or with ugly struggles between "deviated men" (in Montessori's words) who have "lost the proper motives for work".

Just about every human has it in them to do something well. Each human has something to offer, which will help in however small a way to serve the whole. I never believed those who told me it's only about filling my stomach: they were trying to reduce my spirit to a machine.

Photo by Clark Young on Unsplash

Wine in the spirit (extract from Between the Realms)

So happy. Am over the halfway mark with the fourth draft of Greater Matter. Having to re-read and work with the poems, it's making me miss Norman more again and simultaneously feel him closer than ever. I actually feel guilty for the irreverence of Life: at how hard I have to slog to stay close to what matters. This is slog like I've never allowed myself: not the usual duty and drudgery that's helped build my life in the past, it's more vital, but harder than anything I've ever experienced before. Destiny-type stuff. Even a mouse has a destiny ... each day, my own weakness is a revelation. And yes: I'm happy.