Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem, “Renaissance”

All I could see from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood;
I turned and looked another way,
And saw three islands in a bay.
So with my eyes I traced the line
Of the horizon, thin and fine,
Straight around till I was come
Back to where I'd started from;
And all I saw from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood.
Over these things I could not see;
These were the things that bounded me;
And I could touch them with my hand,
Almost, I thought, from where I stand.
And all at once things seemed so small
My breath came short, and scarce at all.
But, sure, the sky is big, I said;
Miles and miles above my head;
So here upon my back I'll lie
And look my fill into the sky.
And so I looked, and, after all,
The sky was not so very tall.
The sky, I said, must somewhere stop,
And -- sure enough! -- I see the top!
The sky, I thought, is not so grand;
I 'most could touch it with my hand!
And reaching up my hand to try,
I screamed to feel it touch the sky.
I screamed, and -- lo! -- Infinity
Came down and settled over me;
Forced back my scream into my chest,
Bent back my arm upon my breast,
And, pressing of the Undefined
The definition on my mind,
Held up before my eyes a glass
Through which my shrinking sight did pass
Until it seemed I must behold
Immensity made manifold;
Whispered to me a word whose sound
Deafened the air for worlds around,
And brought unmuffled to my ears
The gossiping of friendly spheres,
The creaking of the tented sky,
The ticking of Eternity.
I saw and heard, and knew at last
The How and Why of all things, past,
And present, and forevermore.
The Universe, cleft to the core,
Lay open to my probing sense
That, sick'ning, I would fain pluck thence
But could not, -- nay! But needs must suck
At the great wound, and could not pluck
My lips away till I had drawn
All venom out. -- Ah, fearful pawn!
For my omniscience paid I toll
In infinite remorse of soul.
All sin was of my sinning, all
Atoning mine, and mine the gall
Of all regret. Mine was the weight
Of every brooded wrong, the hate
That stood behind each envious thrust,
Mine every greed, mine every lust.
And all the while for every grief,
Each suffering, I craved relief
With individual desire, --
Craved all in vain! And felt fierce fire
About a thousand people crawl;
Perished with each, -- then mourned for all!
A man was starving in Capri;
He moved his eyes and looked at me;
I felt his gaze, I heard his moan,
And knew his hunger as my own.
I saw at sea a great fog bank
Between two ships that struck and sank;
A thousand screams the heavens smote;
And every scream tore through my throat.
No hurt I did not feel, no death
That was not mine; mine each last breath
That, crying, met an answering cry
From the compassion that was I.
All suffering mine, and mine its rod;
Mine, pity like the pity of God.
Ah, awful weight! Infinity
Pressed down upon the finite Me!
My anguished spirit, like a bird,
Beating against my lips I heard;
Yet lay the weight so close about
There was no room for it without.
And so beneath the weight lay I
And suffered death, but could not die.


Long had I lain thus, craving death,
When quietly the earth beneath
Gave way, and inch by inch, so great
At last had grown the crushing weight,
Into the earth I sank till I
Full six feet under ground did lie,
And sank no more, -- there is no weight
Can follow here, however great.
From off my breast I felt it roll,
And as it went my tortured soul
Burst forth and fled in such a gust
That all about me swirled the dust.


Deep in the earth I rested now;
Cool is its hand upon the brow
And soft its breast beneath the head
Of one who is so gladly dead.
And all at once, and over all
The pitying rain began to fall;
I lay and heard each pattering hoof
Upon my lowly, thatched roof,
And seemed to love the sound far more
Than ever I had done before.
For rain it hath a friendly sound
To one who's six feet underground;
And scarce the friendly voice or face:
A grave is such a quiet place.


The rain, I said, is kind to come
And speak to me in my new home.
I would I were alive again
To kiss the fingers of the rain,
To drink into my eyes the shine
Of every slanting silver line,
To catch the freshened, fragrant breeze
From drenched and dripping apple-trees.
For soon the shower will be done,
And then the broad face of the sun
Will laugh above the rain-soaked earth
Until the world with answering mirth
Shakes joyously, and each round drop
Rolls, twinkling, from its grass-blade top.
How can I bear it; buried here,
While overhead the sky grows clear
And blue again after the storm?
O, multi-colored, multiform,
Beloved beauty over me,
That I shall never, never see
Again! Spring-silver, autumn-gold,
That I shall never more behold!
Sleeping your myriad magics through,
Close-sepulchred away from you!
O God, I cried, give me new birth,
And put me back upon the earth!
Upset each cloud's gigantic gourd
And let the heavy rain, down-poured
In one big torrent, set me free,
Washing my grave away from me!


I ceased; and through the breathless hush
That answered me, the far-off rush
Of herald wings came whispering
Like music down the vibrant string
Of my ascending prayer, and -- crash!
Before the wild wind's whistling lash
The startled storm-clouds reared on high
And plunged in terror down the sky,
And the big rain in one black wave
Fell from the sky and struck my grave.
I know not how such things can be;
I only know there came to me
A fragrance such as never clings
To aught save happy living things;
\A sound as of some joyous elf
Singing sweet songs to please himself,
And, through and over everything,
A sense of glad awakening.
The grass, a-tiptoe at my ear,
Whispering to me I could hear;
I felt the rain's cool finger-tips
Brushed tenderly across my lips,
Laid gently on my sealed sight,
And all at once the heavy night
Fell from my eyes and I could see, --
A drenched and dripping apple-tree,
A last long line of silver rain,
A sky grown clear and blue again.
And as I looked a quickening gust
Of wind blew up to me and thrust
Into my face a miracle
Of orchard-breath, and with the smell, --
I know not how such things can be! --
I breathed my soul back into me.
Ah! Up then from the ground sprang I
And hailed the earth with such a cry
As is not heard save from a man
Who has been dead, and lives again.
About the trees my arms I wound;
Like one gone mad I hugged the ground;
I raised my quivering arms on high;
I laughed and laughed into the sky,
Till at my throat a strangling sob
Caught fiercely, and a great heart-throb
Sent instant tears into my eyes;
O God, I cried, no dark disguise
Can e'er hereafter hide from me
Thy radiant identity!
Thou canst not move across the grass
But my quick eyes will see Thee pass,
Nor speak, however silently,
But my hushed voice will answer Thee.
I know the path that tells Thy way
Through the cool eve of every day;
God, I can push the grass apart
And lay my finger on Thy heart!


The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide;
Above the world is stretched the sky, --
No higher than the soul is high.
The heart can push the sea and land
Farther away on either hand;
The soul can split the sky in two,
And let the face of God shine through.
But East and West will pinch the heart
That can not keep them pushed apart;
And he whose soul is flat -- the sky
Will cave in on him by and by.








the photo of the red-shouldered hawk was found at Share the Road

Drawing - a window into seeing what is

Aman-Jean, 1883

Georges Seurat (French, 1859–1891)

Conté crayon on paper

The earth shifts beneath our feet (literally or figuratively speaking) and sets off vibrations in each of us.  How do we receive, even embrace these vibrations, these rumblings?  How do we see them, know them, work with them, and create with them?

Drawing offers a window into what is, a window into new possibilities.  When we work honestly and sincerely we live more deeply inside the present moment and inside our true selves.  To see well and clearly and to express what is seen has its own powerful vibration in the world, affecting change far beyond what we might imagine.

The space "in between" is the shaping "force" - the "between" is the relationship, the character or quality of that which comes together in any given moment to make a particular color, shape, value, drawing.... what lies between makes a life, what lies between is the vast and intricate network of interconnections that weave our world.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

drawing by Georges Seurat, found in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC

24 1/2 x 18 11/16 in. (62.2 x 47.5 cm)

Bequest of Stephen C. Clark, 1960 (61.101.16)

Source: Georges Seurat: Aman-Jean (61.101.16) | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/seni/hd_seni.htm

Château Noir by Paul Cezanne

Merleau-Ponty discussing Valéry’s and Cézanne’s reflections on the activity of oil painting: 

“The painter ‘takes his body with him,' says Valéry. Indeed we cannot imagine how a mind could paint.  It is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into paintings...  ‘Nature is on the inside,’ says Cézanne.  Quality, light, color, depth, which are there before us, are there only because they awaken an echo in our body and because the body welcomes them.  Things have an internal equivalent in me...  I would be at great pains to say where is the painting I am looking at.  For I do not look at it as I look at a thing; I do not fix it in its place.  My gaze wanders in it as in the halos of Being.  It is more accurate to say that I see according to it, or with it, than that I see it.  Rather than looking at it, I enter into an interplay with it.  In so doing, I begin to look beyond it or through it to see other things in my world in its light; it can become, one could say, a guiding or directing agency in my looking; it gives me a new and unique way of looking.  I look at other things now with it as my guide.  This is not to say that I see other things by following its contours, but I see them in accord with the same invisible anticipations it responsively arouses in me.  Thus, as (G.) Steiner suggests, “the streets of our cities are different after Balzac and Dickens. Summer nights, notably to the south, have changed with Van Gogh...  It is no indulgent fantasy to say that cypresses are on fire since Van Gogh or that aqueducts wear-walking shoes after Paul Klee”.

this passage found in the essay titled: 

Goethe and the Refiguring of Intellectual Inquiry:

From ‘Aboutness’-Thinking to ‘Withness’-Thinking in Everyday Life

by John Shotter

Janus Head 8

http://www.janushead.org/8-1/Shotter.pdf

transformation

   inspired by a recent, fantastic face-to-face with a cecropia caterpillar and my own ruminations on transformation, among other collaborative elements, here's Nabokov speaking on the subject of transformation as experienced by a caterpillar/butterfly.  may we all take heart and inspiration, and have courage.

the cecropia

On Transformation   (Vladimir Nabokov)

There was a Chinese philosopher who all his life pondered the problem whether he was a Chinese philosopher dreaming that he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming that she was a philosopher.

...

Transformation ... Transformation is a marvelous thing ... I am thinking especially of the transformation of butterflies. Though wonderful to watch, transformation from larva to pupa or from pupa to butterfly is not a particularly pleasant process for the subject involved. There comes for every caterpillar a difficult moment when he begins to feel pervaded by an odd sense of discomfort. It is a tight feeling -- here about the neck and elsewhere, and then an unbearable itch. Of course he has moulted a few times before, but that is nothing in comparison to the tickle and urge that he feels now. He must shed that tight dry skin, or die. As you have guessed under that skin, the armor of a pupa -- and how uncomfortable to wear one's skin over one's armor -- is already forming: I am especially concerned at the moment with those butterflies that have carved golden pupa, called also chrysalis, which hang from some surface in the open air.

Well, the caterpillar must do something about that horrible feeling. He walks about looking for a suitable place. He finds it. He crawls up a wall or a tree-trunk. He makes for himself a little pad of silk on the underside of that perch. He hangs himself by the tip of his tail or last legs, from the silk patch, so as to dangle head downwards in the position of an inverted question-mark, and there is a question -- how to get rid now of his skin. One wriggle, another wriggle -- and zip the skin bursts down the back, and he gradually gets out of it working with shoulders and hips like a person getting out of a sausage dress. Then comes the most critical moment. -- You understand that we are hanging head down by our last pair of legs, and the problem now is to shed the whole skin -- even the skin of those last legs by which we hang -- but how to accomplish this without falling?

So what does he do, this courageous and stubborn little animal who is already partly disrobed. Very carefully he starts working out his hind legs, dislodging them from the patch of silk from which he is dangling, head down -- and then with an admirable twist and jerk he sort of jumps off the silk pad, sheds the last shred of hose, and immediately, in the process of the same jerk-and-twist-jump he attaches himself anew by means of a hook that was under the shed skin on the tip of his body. Now all the skin has come off, thank God, and the bared surface, now hard and glistening, is the pupa, a swathed-baby like thing hanging from that twig -- a very beautiful chrysalis with golden knobs and plate-armor wingcases. This pupal stage lasts from a few days to a few years. I remember as a boy keeping a hawkmoth's pupa in a box for something like seven years, so that I actually finished high school while the thing was asleep -- and then finally it hatched -- unfortunately it happened during a journey on the train, -- a nice case of misjudgement after all those years. But to come back to our butterfly pupa.

After say two or three weeks something begins to happen. The pupa hangs quite motionless, but you notice one day that through the wingcases, which are many times smaller than the wings of the future perfect insect -- you notice that through the horn-like texture of each wingcase you can see in miniature the pattern of the future wing, the lovely flush of the groundcolor, a dark margin, a rudimentary eyespot. Another day or two -- and the final transformation occurs. The pupa splits as the caterpillar had split -- it is really a last glorified moult, and the butterfly creeps out -- and in its turn hangs down from the twig to dry. She is not handsome at first. She is very damp and bedraggled. But those limp implements of hers that she has disengaged, gradually dry, distend, the veins branch and harden -- and in twenty minutes or so she is ready to fly. You have noticed that the caterpillar is a he, the pupa an it, and the butterfly a she. You will ask -- what is the feeling of hatching? Oh, no doubt, there is a rush of panic to the head, a thrill of breathless and strange sensation, but then the eyes see, in a flow of sunshine, the butterfly sees the world, the large and awful face of the gaping entomologist.

In March of 1951, in the first year that Nabokov taught his Masterpieces of European Fiction course at Cornell, he included three stories involving transformation: Gogol's "The Overcoat" (with his habitual hyperprecision he preferred to translate the title as "The Carrick"), Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," and Kafka's "The Metamorphosis." Here he introduces the subject of transformation for his students.  -- Brian Boyd

published in the Atlantic Monthly in 2004:

http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2000/04/nabokovside2.htm

The Hyalophora CECROPIA! transformed to moth...

Check out the life progression of the Cecropia here.  The final stage of this process is happening in my backyard at the moment...       http://www.wormspit.com/cecropia.htm

first photo in this entry published by Michael Hodge on flickr:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/mhodge/1235150779/sizes/m/in/set-72157600801457373/

second photo found on http://lifecycle.onenessbecomesus.com/indepth.html