The Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius finds–almost categorizes–beauty in nature’s inadvertencies.
The way loaves of bread split open on top in the oven; the ridges are just by-products of the baking, and yet pleasing, somehow: they rouse our appetite without our knowing why.
Or how ripe figs begin to burst.
And olives on the point of falling: the shadow of decay gives them a peculiar beauty.
Stalks of wheat bending under their own weight. The furrowed brow of the lion. Flecks of foam on the boar’s mouth.
The categories–whetting flaws intrinsic in completion, dim overripeness, holy frightening function that follows form–are meant to instill calm, not ecstasy. Aurelius instructs us on a “deeper sensitivity” to what calls constantly out to us and draws us in; this sensitivity is one we’re to look calmly on. Ecstasy, contrarily, decategorizes, displaces (ek stasis) and unifies.
“Summer is late, my heart: the dusty fiddler
Hunches under the stone; these pummelings
Of scent are more than masquerade; I have heard
A song repeat, repeat, till my breath had failed.
As flowers have flowers, at the season’s height,
A single color oversweeps the field.
Stanley Kunitz, past fifty, ended “As Flowers Are” with these lines. It took me four years of carrying his Collected Poems from apartment to apartment to figure out that Kunitz wrote these lines wild with love (as he put it, much later, in his poem “Touch Me”) and torn almost in two: four years to feel his cathartic, mystical throb under the wrought pentameter, to feel the pressure and insistence. His middle poems are as hot and prayerful as late Yeats or early Rilke. I love them. Don’t most readers of poetry have a favorite poem it took them years to crack?
For me (for now) (for April), reading and observation–recording things from the senses in my notebook, trying to stay out of the way–passes for ritual. More fields, fewer single colors. My concession to ritual action had been a string of mala beads a friend brought back from Dharamsala, 108 around the wrist, for the number of times one counts one’s mantra. But the bracelet snapped, skittering beads all over my office floor like candy or globes. They’ve lived since in a sandwich bag.
Bulgarians (reading tells me) celebrate baba marta, Grandmother March (a fickle old lady) by wearing red-and-white-threaded bracelets, martenitsas, from March 1 until they see the first blossoming tree or flower of spring, when they take off their bracelet, and leave it hung around the budding limb, or stalk.
Any single gesture a whole wish (ekstasis?), any single bud a spring, as flowers have wars, as flowers tell lies, as flowers shoot stars, as flowers have flowers. My beads would be Grandmother April–what would I take them off for?–till they broke. What time of year most urges you to invent something, a ritual? There are times the deeper sensitivity of observation and reading feels plain.
