Christian Wiman:
And I was alive in the blizzard of the blossoming pear, Myself I stood in the storm of the bird-cherry tree. It was all leaf and star shower, unerring, self-shattering power, And it was all aimed at me.
What is this dire delight flowering fleeing always earth? What is being? What is truth?
Blossoms rupture and rapture the air, All hover and hammer, Time intensified and time intolerable, sweetness raveling rot. It is now. It is not.
That poem is by Osip Mandelstam, who died in 1938. It was one of his very last poems. It might even have been his last poem, and he knew what was ahead of him. Mandelstam was one of the millions whose death Stalin ordered. Just one.
Every generation tends to think that their own time is distinct, usually worse. Our visceral fears outweigh those of past people whose terrors are reduced to mere words. How many times has the end of the world come and gone by now? Even Jesus predicted it. But then Jesus was very human.
What is struggling to be born? Nothing new. Or at least nothing completely new. Vincent van Gogh once wrote that life is not linear, going from birth to death, but round. It was creating art that led him to that revelation. And it was a revelation.
Quantum physics is so weird. Matter that springs into being only when it’s observed. Particles that once entangled are forever linked together, no matter the distance or time. It’s as if reality were a constant storm of creation that we only freeze by seeing. It is now. It is not.
All of this matters for how we understand consciousness. If the world seems to respond to our attention, maybe that’s because the world is addressed to us, every one of us. And maybe consciousness is not something we possess, but something that we share with the rest of reality.
It’s not a new idea. All things are full of gods, said Thales six hundred years before the birth of Jesus. Mind is in all things, said Heraclitus, around the same time. Meister Eckhart pulled the two together in the thirteenth century. The eye with which I see God is the eye with which God sees me.
I believe we’ve entered a time in which the preservation of individual consciousness will be the great battle. It is essential to preserve individual consciousness if any feeling for and healing of collective consciousness is to occur. When the plane’s cabin pressure plunges, you have to put on your own mask first, or you will be no help or hope to others.
What is struggling to be born? I am. You are. And Heraclitus. And Thales. And Meister Eckhart. And Jesus Christ.
And I was alive in the blizzard of the blossoming pear, Myself I stood in the storm of the bird-cherry tree. It was all leaf and star shower, unerring, self-shattering power, And it was all aimed at me.
What is this dire delight flowering fleeing always earth? What is being? What is truth?
Blossoms rupture and rapture the air, All hover and hammer, Time intensified and time intolerable, sweetness raveling rot. It is now. It is not.
Amen.
