These Ithakas

Rilke reminds me of Cavafy (that is Wiki, but this site looks better). "Ithaka" is a poem that has reappeared throughout my life on a number of occasions, mainly thanks to a former teacher who reminds me of it every half decade or so. It floats, as John Irving once said about sorrow (or actually "Sorrow", as it was a stuffed dog; or stuffed bear?). Anyway, it floats. So here is the ending of the never-ending journey to Ithaka:

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you're destined for.
But don't hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you're old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you've gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won't have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you'll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

-C.P. Cavafy, from Ithaka

Free advice

I don't usually have the patience to read other people's letters. For one thing, other people's problems are tedious by definition. And if a letter is not about a problem, then it is probably tedious in a more direct way. When a letter is presented in a book as part of the story, I usually skip it. But Rainier Maria Rilke's letters are different.

Rilke was a sort of personal secretary to sculptor Auguste "The Thinker" Rodin before becoming one of the 20th century's best known poets (Duino Elegies; Sonnets to Orpheus). But his 10 letters to a struggling young poet, written in response to the latter's requests for advice on poetry and life, have always been among my favorite pieces of writing. And I just realized that Letters to a Young Poet is online. Cool.

I think Rilke would like Ashberry's line about the view being distant and severe:

Of course, you must know that every letter of yours will always give me pleasure, and you must be indulgent with the answer, which will perhaps often leave you empty-handed; for ultimately, and precisely in the deepest and most important matters, we are unspeakably alone; and many things must happen, many things must go right, a whole constellation of events must be fulfilled, for one human being to successfully advise or help another.

Among other things, perhaps more interesting, I am moved to say that here is a man who can use a semicolon. The knight of faith! Le Roi de Coeur!

[By the way, whoever put "Letters to a Young Poet" online can't be all bad - and they are doing this bicycle ride fund-raiser next May.]

Triple happiness

James Lileks' blog is fun. And humorous. Where else could you read about the fading ubiquity of matches? It's like Double Happiness* for gweilos. And as Wallace Stevens said (ok, this is a bit stretched), "I don't know what I like more, the blackbird whistling, or just after". Just after, of course (elegy!). So, voila, triple happiness.

*Google returns zero on the iconic Double Happiness matches; where is the Chinese Andy Warhol? Maybe if i knew how to use Baidu. Thanks to HJ for the pic.

Welcome new perspective #2

Ha! Here's how they find enlightenment in Oregon.

"Things just look different from up there. You're moving so slowly. The best thing is the peace, the serenity."

Sounds good. Perhaps he even met someone better informed, in the higher echelons, where the view is distant and severe, the ground blue as steel. That would be good, too.

But I think the balloon man had more tangible things to focus on. "I'm not stopping till I get out of state." Maybe he just wanted to hear someone say "You're not in Oregon anymore".

But if he never got to hear that, I am sure he heard a lot of this -

The world's a nicer place in my beautiful balloon
It wears a nicer face in my beautiful balloon
We can sing a song and sail along the silver sky
For we can fly we can fly
Up, up and away
In my beautiful, my beautiful balloon.

Spice

Here is one person who doesn't need to suffer to be content. In fact, just the opposite. "India’s spiritual traditions have become one of the country’s most visible exports," says the FT.

And Sri Sri Ravi Shankar is the best-selling product (although he looks a lot better in his Wiki pic). At least he knows how to make an entrance:

When he arrives [on stage], he is tailed by a fleet of beaming young women who bounce along, bent low behind him, reaching for a trailing corner of his white cotton robes.

Sounds good. But barbs aside, his Art of Living organization certainly seems ambitious.

Maybe part of Sri Sri's appeal is knowing the zeitgeist, or maybe the karma. The article notes that his "prescription for happiness is perfectly tailored to modern life; it does not demand years of penance. In fact, the gist of the Art of Living can be learnt in a weekend – 16 hours for $300 or so. The breathing should then be practised every day for half an hour." It is sadly mute on attaining the bowing women; maybe there is a platinum package.

But it's all for naught, anyway:

Despite the adoring looks he draws from his female adherents, Sri Sri insists he remains celibate, achieving all the physical ecstasy he needs through meditation. Besides, says his sister: “If he married, a wife would not be able to cope with all that goes on around him.”

Me thinks she protests a bit too much?

But I fear Sri Sri may be hot air after the breathing; this is the type of sound-byte that no doubt sells, but also is vacuous:

There is a need to secularise religion, spiritualise politics and socialise business.

Yes, and I believe squares should make an effort to be more round, and four should move closer to six. What's with all the definition anyway? Here's another view, also from a spiritual figure:

Salt is good, but if salt itself loses its taste, with what can its flavor be restored? It is fit neither for the soil nor for the manure pile; it is thrown out. Whoever has ears to hear ought to hear.

* Bonus track: salt in the bible.

Life

There is some seriously deranged stuff going on lately. The Amanda Knox thing being one (although it turns out that it is not so recent), the 12 year-old girl in Vermont thing being two, and this utterly diabolical event in London being three. I would guess drugs were involved in all of them; but who knows. Sometimes it seems that we are speed-walking towards Armageddon.

A welcome new perspective

This is a great story. So, Colombia can have good news.

"Suddenly I saw the commander who, during four years, had been at the head of our team, who so many times was so cruel and humiliated me, and I saw him on the floor naked with bound eyes."

Afterthought

I deleted the Leona Helmsley "bitch" post. It was catty.

New Orleans, revisited

My recent reading spell has got me into a slightly reflective mood, which usually means eventually I end up thinking about Binx Bolling in the Moviegoer. Binx first appeared in 1961 (here's the review from Time magazine - "Like Sartre's Nausea, but without the nausea"), the year Harper Lee won a Pulitzer for To Kill A Mockingbird.

Lately I have also wondered about the enigmatic Kate, Binx's distant cousin and eventual love interest. This person has similar thoughts I guess:

Kate is locked into the same world, and recognizes Binx as a kindred spirit -- "You're like me, but worse. Much worse." Kate takes the opposite tack from Binx: instead of avoiding ennui by searching for chance events ("certifications") and delighting in observation, she creates her own crises to jar the world out of its rut of ennui -- "she unfailingly turns everything she touches to horror." She insists early on "have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real?"

As for Binx himself, I think that Percy modeled him on Soren Kierkegaard's imagined man of faith in Fear and Trembling, or what he liked to call his "knight of faith". Kiergegaard's description of meeting this wacky character is hysterical. If you click on the "description" link, skip the cheery part about Abraham killing Isaac and go straight to this part:

I candidly admit that in my practice I have not found any reliable example of the knight of faith, though I would not therefore deny that every second man may be such an example. I have been trying, however, for several years to get on the track of this, and all in vain. People commonly travel around the world to see rivers and mountains, new stars, birds of rare plumage, queerly deformed fishes, ridiculous breeds of men -- they abandon themselves to the bestial stupor which gapes at existence, and they think they have seen something. This does not interest me.

But if I knew where there was such a knight of faith, I would make a pilgrimage to him on foot, for this prodigy interests me absolutely. I would not let go of him for an instant, every moment I would watch to see how he managed to make the movements, I would regard myself as secured for life, and would divide my time between looking at him and practicing the exercises myself, and thus would spend all my time admiring him. As was said, I have not found any such person, but I can well think him.

Here he is. Acquaintance made, I am introduced to him. The moment I set eyes on him I instantly push him from me, I myself leap backwards, I clasp my hands and say half aloud, "Good Lord, is this the man? Is it really he? Why, he looks like a tax-collector!" However, it is the man after all. I draw closer to him, watching his least movements to see whether there might not be visible a little heterogeneous fractional telegraphic message from the infinite, a glance, a look, a gesture, a note of sadness, a smile, which betrayed the infinite in its heterogeneity with the finite. No! I examine his figure from tip to toe to see if there might not be a cranny through which the infinite was peeping. No! He is solid through and through. His tread? It is vigorous, belonging entirely to finiteness; no smartly dressed townsman who walks out to Fresberg on a Sunday afternoon treads the ground more firmly, he belongs entirely to the world, no Philistine more so. One can discover nothing of that aloof and superior nature whereby one recognizes the knight of the infinite [another Kierkegaard archetype]. He takes delight in everything, and whenever one sees him taking part in a particular pleasure, he does it with the persistence which is the mark of the earthly man whose soul is absorbed in such things. He tends to his work. So when one looks at him one might suppose that he was a clerk who had lost his soul in an intricate system of book-keeping, so precise is he. He takes a holiday on Sunday. He goes to church. No heavenly glance or any other token of the incommensurable betrays him; if one did not know him, it would be impossible to distinguish him from the rest of the congregation, for his healthy and vigorous hymn-singing proves at the most that he has a good chest. In the afternoon he walks to the forest. He takes delight in everything he sees, in the human swarm, in the new omnibuses, in the water of the Sound; when one meets him on the Beach Road one might suppose he was a shopkeeper taking his fling, that’s just the way he disports himself, for he is not a poet, and I have sought in vain to detect in him the poetic incommensurability.

Toward evening he walks home, his gait is as indefatigable as that of the postman. On his way he reflects that his wife has surely a special little warm dish prepared for him, e.g. a calf’s head roasted, garnished with vegetables. If he were to meet a man like-minded, he could continue as far as East Gate to discourse with him about that dish, with a passion befitting a hotel chef. As it happens, he hasn’t four pence to his name, and yet he fully and firmly believes that his wife has that dainty dish for him. If she had it, it would then be an invidious sight for superior people and an inspiring one for the plain man, to see him eat; for his appetite is greater than Esau’s. His wife hasn’t it -- strangely enough, it is quite the same to him.