Autumn Walking (24 September 2013)

"We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return, — prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms.” (226)

- Henry David Thoreau Walking 
(Library of America Edition, 2001)

“Story creates order out of the flux of happenings by arraying them in (or, discerning in them – let the question remain unresolved) such a chain of connectedness that leads one to speak of the end as the goal and the middle as directed movements.” (105)

- David J. A. Clines 
The Theme of the Pentateuch (1978)

“Since ancient times, poetry and walking have seemed to go hand in hand. From Theocritus and Horace, Dante and Petrarch, Spenser and Milton to the present, poets have represented themselves as walkers, figures wandering in a landscape and translating their movement into poetry.“ (3)

- Roger Gilbert Walks in the World (1991)  

It’s the Equinox_ and the Autumn calls me out to engage in its wonders!

There is time for work, and there must be time for play. And then_ there is the time we must give to walking. Spiritual walking; meditative walking _Actual walks, as well as imagined walks. Walks around the Meditation Circle as well as forays out into Nature. My sense of walking and its role in the spiritual life has evolved through the whole of my wakening life, from the time I was first conscious of my self as a self. Going out on day-hikes is something I’ve done ever since I was able (since I was first ‘allowed’) to walk about on my own, trusted to my own reconnaissance. It started with walks down the block, then walks around the block, then walks stretching out from the grade school I attended into a little wood behind the school and then up over the hill behind it. I soon discovered that walking down the railroad tracks could take you somewhere interesting, and by the time I was thirteen I was venturing out into a wood that stood north of the town where I grew up.

A Dance in the Autumnwood (22 September 2013)

There’ll be a Dance in the Autumnwood tonight_
Sensuous thought in the Mooning Light!
There’ll be a Dance in the Autumnwood tonight_
Down by the Stream where the Deer take Flight!

Every breath_
Every Spark of Light_ 
    every cricket
singing death’s hallelujahs 
    into the dark of night!
Every toadstool mouldering_
Every spirit playing_
Every luminous sod
Shining in the mulch
Says:

There’ll be a Dance in the Autumnwood tonight_
Sensuous thought in the Mooning Light!
There’ll be a Dance in the Autumnwood tonight_
Down by the Stream where the Deer take Flight!

Every breath_
Every nibbling hare_
Every grasshopper
flying in the frosted air
tasting its own chilled flesh_
Every puddle shimmering
in the morning glare_
ice cracking under a walker’s feet_
Every whispering pumpkin_
declares:

There’ll be a Dance in the Autumnwood tonight_
Sensuous thought in the Mooning Light!
There’ll be a Dance in the Autumnwood tonight_
Down by the Stream where the Deer take Flight!

Every Breath_
every denuded bough_
every swimming salmon
laughing at mortal dross
in the shallow pools;
Every harvester in the fields_
every nut and seed
dying to be born again_
every chrysanthemum
in its composite glory_

chants:

There’ll be a Dance in the Autumnwood tonight_
Sensuous thought in the Mooning Light!
There’ll be a Dance in the Autumnwood tonight_
Down by the Stream where the Deer take Flight!
Nema!

Lovecraft and Cosmic Dread (2 August 2013)

“Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival... a survival of a hugely remote period when... consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity... forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds... “

 -        Algernon Blackwood

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

  -       H.P. Lovecraft, from The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

As I’ve said in an earlier blog, I have been intrigued by the Lovecraftian mythos for some time, now.  I’d heard about Lovecraft over the years, and took him to be – by reputation – a genius of poetry and prose that moved the horror genre way beyond Poe and other 19^th century writers.  But when I first read HPL last year, I was let down; with the stories themselves on one level, but also with the way in which Lovecraft limits the human mind and makes the universe out to be a forbidding place.  The early stories I read seemed very sophomoric; they were filled with gross generalizations; the prose lacking descriptive concreteness and specificity.  The narrator seemed to assume that the reader would be frightened just by being told that he or she should be afraid of what was confronting the characters in the story.  “Oh, there’s something unbelievably scary here; you’d better go insane!”  Really?