Robinson and Bly (sounds like a law firm!)

So we had traces of snow in March – very unusual for Duluth, and no snow in April, also unusual. Today, May 7, it snowed over four inches. Earlier in the week I had thought I might get the lawn mower ready to roll tomorrow. Guess not!
Well if snow was an unwelcome event in my life, I have had two very pleasant and welcomed events this past week. Two authors whose works I’ve read and enjoyed were in town, and my schedule actually allowed me to hear them both. Last Saturday night Marilynne Robinson, novelist and essayist lectured at the College of St. Scholastica. Tuesday evening, the poet Robert Bly read at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. I have had the joy of hearing him before, at Southern Methodist University while I was working on my Ph.D.
Robinson’s lecture was rich, densely rich. I would have been glad to have a manuscript to follow along, but the basic theme was arguing against what she views as reductionistic and “scientistic” views of humanity which don’t really account for the wonder and mystery that is human existence. She is out with a new book, based on the Terry Lectures at Yale, and entitled Absence of Mind. Her lecture seems an extension of that book, as best I can tell, not having read it all yet. Here are a couple of excerpts from that work.
Recently I read to a class of young writers a passage from Emerson’s “The American Scholar” in which he says, “In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself; add observation to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach, and bide his own time, - happy enough if he can satisfy himself alone that this day he has seen something truly…. For the instinct is sure, that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind he has descended into the secrets of all minds.” These words caused a certain perturbation. The self is no longer assumed to be a thing to be approached with optimism, or to be trusted to see anything truly. Emerson is describing the great paradox and privilege of human selfhood, a privilege foreclosed when the mind is trivialized or thought to be discredited. (xvii-xviii)
Might not the human brain, that most complex object known to exist in the universe, have undergone a qualitative change as well? If my metaphor only suggests the possibility that our species is more than an optimized ape, that something terrible and glorious befell us, a change gradualism could not predict – if this is merely another fable, it might at least encourage an imagination of humankind large enough to acknowledge some small fragment of the mystery we are. (135)
Robinson wants to make greater room in our current intellectual and cultural space for the mystery that we humans are. Poetry helps explore that mystery, too, deepening it. A favorite Robert Bly poem of mine, one that has not found its way into most of his selected works, comes from his early book Silence in the Snowy Fields (and how appropriate for this day in Duluth!).

Afternoon Sleep

I
I was descending from the mountains of sleep.
Asleep I had gazed east over a sunny field,
And sat on the running board of an old Model A.
I awoke happy, for I had dreamt of my wife,
And the loneliness hiding in grass and weeds
That lies near a man over thirty, and suddenly enters.

II
When Joe Sjolie grew tired, he sold his farm,
Even his bachelor rocker, and did not come back.
He left his dog behind in the cob shed.
The dog refused to take food from strangers.

III
I drove out to that farm when I awoke;
Alone on a hill, sheltered by trees.
The matted grass lay around the house.
When I climbed the porch, the door was open.
Inside were old abandoned books,
And instructions to Norwegian immigrants.

Sleep, dreams, sex, loneliness, age, death, books – the human mystery indeed.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David