I started reading this book in the summer after years of having it in my wish list. I read it in small chunks. I’ll use the expression you have used in from now on. It will be my quiet reading book.
Love the Gita. I don’t know if I was ready before I turned 40, but the pandemic slowed me down enough to read philosophy and (shudder) poetry. I most likely also needed some distance from the fundamentalism of my youth before being willing to read a Hindu text. But oh man! I haven’t read the Mitchell translation but I’ll check it out. Thanks!🙏
Hah! I appreciate the shudder. You've put me in mind of a couple of poets to try in future posts who might be palatable to poetry shudderers. :-) I like Mitchell's account of his efforts to find the right meter for his translation. He decided not to imitate the Sanskrit rhythm but instead to use a 3-beat (trimeter) line with a flexible number of total syllables, so there's a hint of poetic regularity but also the sound of natural speech. It's not a scholar's edition, but for a reader who wants to hear characters speaking with a little lift of verse, it's engaging and accessible.
Such an interesting concept, Tara. After thinking about it (quietly) fro some time, I think of it as pace. What can slow down written words? Spacing, as you demonstrate. Punctuation. Vocabulary, e.g., the adverbs we're often advised to avoid.
It's another technique of both reading and writing as well.
Thank you, David. It's risky to slow down any writing in our speedy time, but I love reading something that manages speed here and slowness there, with the varied pace that feels like life. What's remarkable about The B. Gita is the way time itself just freezes, these two characters conversing in the midst of a frozen tableau of warriors.
You allude several times to slowing down to digest what we read in the lines, and the thoughts that arrive between them. So it is with poetry and also with life . . . if we can actually slow down.
Yes! And music. I wonder what else. Vertebrae? Synapses. Synovial fluid? Everything?? 😳 Hmm. I think we’ve found a new driving game for the next family car trip! Missed headline opportunity: Mind the gaps. Ah well.
I'm going to tell you about my favorite meditation from Martha Beck about going into the space behind our eyes! It's wonderfully peaceful. I won't write it out here but remind me to tell you:)
You made me think of three more writers/poets who are pause-finders. Henry Thoreau captured some delicious pauses in Walden:
“In warm evenings I frequently sat in the boat playing the flute, and saw the perch, which I seem to have charmed, hovering around me, and the moon travelling over the ribbed bottom, which was strewed with the wrecks of the forest. Formerly I had come to this pond adventurously, from time to time, in dark summer nights, with a companion, and, making a fire close to the water's edge, which we thought attracted the fishes, we caught pouts with a bunch of worms strung on a thread, and when we had done, far in the night, threw the burning brands high into the air like skyrockets, which, coming down into the pond, were quenched with a loud hissing, and we were suddenly groping in total darkness. Through this, whistling a tune, we took our way to the haunts of men again. But now I had made my home by the shore.
“Sometimes, after staying in a village parlor till the family had all retired, I have returned to the woods, and, partly with a view to the next day's dinner, spent the hours of midnight fishing from a boat by moonlight, serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from time to time, the creaking note of some unknown bird close at hand. These experiences were very memorable and valuable to me -- anchored in forty feet of water, and twenty or thirty rods from the shore, surrounded sometimes by thousands of small perch and shiners, dimpling the surface with their tails in the moonlight, and communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below, or sometimes dragging sixty feet of line about the pond as I drifted in the gentle night breeze, now and then feeling a slight vibration along it, indicative of some life prowling about its extremity, of dull uncertain blundering purpose there, and slow to make up its mind.” Walden, from Chapter 9
Also, this passage, by which he means wildness as a state of mind rather than a humanless place:
“We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.”
Wendell Berry from his poem The Peace of Wild Things, but certainly not limited to one poem only. His Sabbaths poems are full of pauses.
The Peace of Wild Things
“When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
And last but not least, Mary Oliver in her Wild Geese, as one example out of many:
“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
And because Tara’s ruminations made mean think of my own deliberate pauses, which I didn’t have a name for before, I realized I unconsciously try to describe those pauses in some of my own poetry:
Switter! There you go again, using up my supply of exclamation points. That poem. That first stanza. That expert pause between the door, the dog, and the mountain (“I stood without a thought...”). I heartily agree with you about your holy trinity of pause-finders, but *your* poem is the greatest delight of all. Thank you for sharing it.
That was a kind comment. (I’ll send you a $3 off coupon from Flying Pie for your trouble.)
The more I think about your idea of pauses, the more I understand how, because of the chaos I experienced in my life and career, I sought out every little piece of peace I could find and because peace resides in peacefulness, those pauses were something I sought. When I found them, I thought of them as gifts of grace.
During those years of unceasing travel, I often thought of Odysseus as he fought his way home to Ithika, that the journey was his striving for a pause from his own chaos. Once, as the Mediterranean laved upon my feet at a beach near Thessaloniki, Greece, I thought about Odysseus crossing that same “wine dark sea” toward home, Penelope, and their wedding bed. I felt a twinge of my own longing to be home, to be settled, and to find a pause from it all.
I’ve read three translations of the Mahabharata, and indeed the Bhagavad-Gita is a lovely resting place in the midst of so much conflict. It always seems like a bewitched magic trick that all the action stops as Krishna takes the time to talk with Arjuna, and allows him the time to contemplate Krishna‘s words.
“ Arjuna needs these pauses to decide against his inclination.” Indeed. We all do.
hmmm my books are all still packed... and, if I'm honest, probably the shortest one. The conflict and battles are hard for me to read. I think that may be Buck? But that's not necessarily the best translation of the Baghavad Gita - I have another translation of just that which I really like, and again, I'll tell you when I unpack! :)
Thank you! I was hoping someone would share other notes on translations. Mitchell does not claim to make his own translations from Sanskrit, so that's a weak spot. His strength is retaining the poetic beauty so it carries into English. I've seen the one by ISKCON but don't have it on my shelf. I'll check it out.
I know about a good university in a state that is always confused with a couple of other states that grow a lot of corn. It’s the state that grows a lot of potatoes. I graduated from that university a long time ago and can vouch for it.
P.S. On my recent return from another state that is not far enough away, I considered sticking a piece of masking tape over the word “Potatoes” and using a Sharpie to write “Corn” instead. Below, I planned to tape over the name of the state and with the Sharpie, write “Iowa.” It turned out I needed to rent a car instead, and it sported license plates from that certain state, so when I got within sniper distance from my home state, I taped a piece of cardboard to the tailgate where I Sharpied “rental car” and changed into a Bronco jersey and a pair of camo pants. Survival 101.
I once saw a pickup truck (aren’t they all?) in a parking lot next to the old motel complex on the corner of College Blvd and Capital Blvd. On the doors of the truck were signs that advertised “John Doe, Equine Dentistry.” Not so exceptional on the face of it, but it reminded me of the encounter between the Bearman, Mattie, and Rooster Cogburn beneath a hanging tree in the remake of True Grit. The Bearman announces himself as “a practitioner of the veterinarian arts and upon people for those who will have me.” I don’t know why I was reminded of that, but was, and it amused me.
You asked us to read a poem, listen to its silences, and let you know what happens. It isn't much, but this is what I have.
I landed on an excerpt from Matthew Arnold's poem, "The Buried Life:"
.
.
But often, in the world's most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us—to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.
.
.
With this poem in particular, and perhaps with most poems, the silences are everything. The reader fills them with imagination, with thoughts and emotions that resist and transcend the suffocating tyranny of words and numbers. The silences then bleed onto those words to give them the color and meaning they could not otherwise have. The silences give the words their soul, and that soul looks back at us and winks.
Oh, good choice! I haven't read this poem in the longest time. Arnold's iambic pentameter is very stately and spacious. I like to think he would approve of a soul with a wink. After his gravitas, it's an image full of fun. Thank you for the refreshing lines. :-)
I will never forget this fabulous phrase: "plump with pauses."
Then, there's this (that Priya highlighted as well): "the utterance of words can expand the space of quiet."
What grabbed me first was this: "the hush in hats and scarves while November’s Beaver moon crosses the sky tonight."
But I've deviated from the quiet space between the words between Krishna and Arjuna. You have awakened me(!) to reading the Gita as a writer. I also wonder now about other sacred texts, too, and pause. My thinking on this would take us down a Jean Gebser rabbit hole and the Mythic epoch of the human, and so, I will go down that hole quietly . . . in my own reading room . . . and refrain from dragging along you and everyone else reading these comments.
It sounds like a subject for a whole season’s reading, doesn’t it - reading sacred texts for their orchestration of quiet? I’ll be interested to hear Gebser’s take on human pauses when it suits you. :-)
I started reading this book in the summer after years of having it in my wish list. I read it in small chunks. I’ll use the expression you have used in from now on. It will be my quiet reading book.
I like your strategy. It's not a book to rush through. Small chunks allow lots of time to let the words reverberate. :-)
Love the Gita. I don’t know if I was ready before I turned 40, but the pandemic slowed me down enough to read philosophy and (shudder) poetry. I most likely also needed some distance from the fundamentalism of my youth before being willing to read a Hindu text. But oh man! I haven’t read the Mitchell translation but I’ll check it out. Thanks!🙏
Hah! I appreciate the shudder. You've put me in mind of a couple of poets to try in future posts who might be palatable to poetry shudderers. :-) I like Mitchell's account of his efforts to find the right meter for his translation. He decided not to imitate the Sanskrit rhythm but instead to use a 3-beat (trimeter) line with a flexible number of total syllables, so there's a hint of poetic regularity but also the sound of natural speech. It's not a scholar's edition, but for a reader who wants to hear characters speaking with a little lift of verse, it's engaging and accessible.
Such an interesting concept, Tara. After thinking about it (quietly) fro some time, I think of it as pace. What can slow down written words? Spacing, as you demonstrate. Punctuation. Vocabulary, e.g., the adverbs we're often advised to avoid.
It's another technique of both reading and writing as well.
Thank you, David. It's risky to slow down any writing in our speedy time, but I love reading something that manages speed here and slowness there, with the varied pace that feels like life. What's remarkable about The B. Gita is the way time itself just freezes, these two characters conversing in the midst of a frozen tableau of warriors.
..the utterance of words can expand the space of quiet. - I love this!
Thank you, Priya. I love feeling that spaciousness when I read.
Hard to find these examples. But I'm on the lookout now!
Oh good! I'll share more ... but with enough infrequency that other pause-finders can have a fair shot at catching some in the wild. :-)
You allude several times to slowing down to digest what we read in the lines, and the thoughts that arrive between them. So it is with poetry and also with life . . . if we can actually slow down.
Yes! I find it takes so much more intention to slow down lately, especially all the way to silence. It's a big "if"!
Well done Tara! The impact is in the space. I’ve heard that said about drawing too.
Yes! And music. I wonder what else. Vertebrae? Synapses. Synovial fluid? Everything?? 😳 Hmm. I think we’ve found a new driving game for the next family car trip! Missed headline opportunity: Mind the gaps. Ah well.
I'm going to tell you about my favorite meditation from Martha Beck about going into the space behind our eyes! It's wonderfully peaceful. I won't write it out here but remind me to tell you:)
You made me think of three more writers/poets who are pause-finders. Henry Thoreau captured some delicious pauses in Walden:
“In warm evenings I frequently sat in the boat playing the flute, and saw the perch, which I seem to have charmed, hovering around me, and the moon travelling over the ribbed bottom, which was strewed with the wrecks of the forest. Formerly I had come to this pond adventurously, from time to time, in dark summer nights, with a companion, and, making a fire close to the water's edge, which we thought attracted the fishes, we caught pouts with a bunch of worms strung on a thread, and when we had done, far in the night, threw the burning brands high into the air like skyrockets, which, coming down into the pond, were quenched with a loud hissing, and we were suddenly groping in total darkness. Through this, whistling a tune, we took our way to the haunts of men again. But now I had made my home by the shore.
“Sometimes, after staying in a village parlor till the family had all retired, I have returned to the woods, and, partly with a view to the next day's dinner, spent the hours of midnight fishing from a boat by moonlight, serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from time to time, the creaking note of some unknown bird close at hand. These experiences were very memorable and valuable to me -- anchored in forty feet of water, and twenty or thirty rods from the shore, surrounded sometimes by thousands of small perch and shiners, dimpling the surface with their tails in the moonlight, and communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below, or sometimes dragging sixty feet of line about the pond as I drifted in the gentle night breeze, now and then feeling a slight vibration along it, indicative of some life prowling about its extremity, of dull uncertain blundering purpose there, and slow to make up its mind.” Walden, from Chapter 9
Also, this passage, by which he means wildness as a state of mind rather than a humanless place:
“We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.”
Wendell Berry from his poem The Peace of Wild Things, but certainly not limited to one poem only. His Sabbaths poems are full of pauses.
The Peace of Wild Things
“When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
And last but not least, Mary Oliver in her Wild Geese, as one example out of many:
“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
And because Tara’s ruminations made mean think of my own deliberate pauses, which I didn’t have a name for before, I realized I unconsciously try to describe those pauses in some of my own poetry:
Night Sounds
In the deepest, most
primeval time of night
when wilderness is only
a thin pane of glass away,
I awoke to the barking
of the young, black dog,
a plaintive bark, tinged
with fear and loneliness.
I pulled myself
from a ragged sleep
and slipped out the door
toward the mountain.
By then the dog had quieted
and I stood for awhile,
also quieted
from troubled dreams,
but now fully awake
in the immense stillness
of a mid-October night,
now fully immersed in the cold,
a watcher,
primitive,
alive,
beneath a sky
vast, clear,
and awash in ancient light
from stars unthinkable distances past.
I heard the river rushing
so softly, soothing
behind the house,
and I stood without a thought,
the night penetrating me.
I stood until the dog,
now settled,
slept,
until my own troubled mind quieted,
the dark dreams past.
As I closed the door behind me,
the wilderness once again
only a thin pane of glass away,
the old clock on the wall
chimed twice.
Switter! There you go again, using up my supply of exclamation points. That poem. That first stanza. That expert pause between the door, the dog, and the mountain (“I stood without a thought...”). I heartily agree with you about your holy trinity of pause-finders, but *your* poem is the greatest delight of all. Thank you for sharing it.
That was a kind comment. (I’ll send you a $3 off coupon from Flying Pie for your trouble.)
The more I think about your idea of pauses, the more I understand how, because of the chaos I experienced in my life and career, I sought out every little piece of peace I could find and because peace resides in peacefulness, those pauses were something I sought. When I found them, I thought of them as gifts of grace.
During those years of unceasing travel, I often thought of Odysseus as he fought his way home to Ithika, that the journey was his striving for a pause from his own chaos. Once, as the Mediterranean laved upon my feet at a beach near Thessaloniki, Greece, I thought about Odysseus crossing that same “wine dark sea” toward home, Penelope, and their wedding bed. I felt a twinge of my own longing to be home, to be settled, and to find a pause from it all.
Now I understand why. Thank you.
Beautiful.
I’ve read three translations of the Mahabharata, and indeed the Bhagavad-Gita is a lovely resting place in the midst of so much conflict. It always seems like a bewitched magic trick that all the action stops as Krishna takes the time to talk with Arjuna, and allows him the time to contemplate Krishna‘s words.
“ Arjuna needs these pauses to decide against his inclination.” Indeed. We all do.
Thank you for a lovely contemplation.
Bewitched is right. It’s a brilliant literary conception to suspend time so long. Do you have a favorite translation?
hmmm my books are all still packed... and, if I'm honest, probably the shortest one. The conflict and battles are hard for me to read. I think that may be Buck? But that's not necessarily the best translation of the Baghavad Gita - I have another translation of just that which I really like, and again, I'll tell you when I unpack! :)
No hurry! Your hands are mightily full on two continents. Whew. 💪 😅
As a Hindu , i believe one must read the "Bhagvad Gita as it is "by ISKCON.
Thank you! I was hoping someone would share other notes on translations. Mitchell does not claim to make his own translations from Sanskrit, so that's a weak spot. His strength is retaining the poetic beauty so it carries into English. I've seen the one by ISKCON but don't have it on my shelf. I'll check it out.
So Tara, you should take up teaching! You are really good at it.
(ducks to avoid an erasure head shot.)
Haha! Why, thank you, dear Switter. When I finish this current career 🧌 🧙🏼♀️ I'll give that one some thought. (😳)
I know about a good university in a state that is always confused with a couple of other states that grow a lot of corn. It’s the state that grows a lot of potatoes. I graduated from that university a long time ago and can vouch for it.
P.S. On my recent return from another state that is not far enough away, I considered sticking a piece of masking tape over the word “Potatoes” and using a Sharpie to write “Corn” instead. Below, I planned to tape over the name of the state and with the Sharpie, write “Iowa.” It turned out I needed to rent a car instead, and it sported license plates from that certain state, so when I got within sniper distance from my home state, I taped a piece of cardboard to the tailgate where I Sharpied “rental car” and changed into a Bronco jersey and a pair of camo pants. Survival 101.
😂 I've heard good things about that university of yours. It might do. Might do.
I once saw a pickup truck (aren’t they all?) in a parking lot next to the old motel complex on the corner of College Blvd and Capital Blvd. On the doors of the truck were signs that advertised “John Doe, Equine Dentistry.” Not so exceptional on the face of it, but it reminded me of the encounter between the Bearman, Mattie, and Rooster Cogburn beneath a hanging tree in the remake of True Grit. The Bearman announces himself as “a practitioner of the veterinarian arts and upon people for those who will have me.” I don’t know why I was reminded of that, but was, and it amused me.
Hmm... from universities to True Grit via equine dentistry... Watch out, then, for professors of equine literature?
I think so.
You asked us to read a poem, listen to its silences, and let you know what happens. It isn't much, but this is what I have.
I landed on an excerpt from Matthew Arnold's poem, "The Buried Life:"
.
.
But often, in the world's most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us—to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.
.
.
With this poem in particular, and perhaps with most poems, the silences are everything. The reader fills them with imagination, with thoughts and emotions that resist and transcend the suffocating tyranny of words and numbers. The silences then bleed onto those words to give them the color and meaning they could not otherwise have. The silences give the words their soul, and that soul looks back at us and winks.
As promised, it's short and (hopefully) sweet.
Oh, good choice! I haven't read this poem in the longest time. Arnold's iambic pentameter is very stately and spacious. I like to think he would approve of a soul with a wink. After his gravitas, it's an image full of fun. Thank you for the refreshing lines. :-)
Tara,
I will never forget this fabulous phrase: "plump with pauses."
Then, there's this (that Priya highlighted as well): "the utterance of words can expand the space of quiet."
What grabbed me first was this: "the hush in hats and scarves while November’s Beaver moon crosses the sky tonight."
But I've deviated from the quiet space between the words between Krishna and Arjuna. You have awakened me(!) to reading the Gita as a writer. I also wonder now about other sacred texts, too, and pause. My thinking on this would take us down a Jean Gebser rabbit hole and the Mythic epoch of the human, and so, I will go down that hole quietly . . . in my own reading room . . . and refrain from dragging along you and everyone else reading these comments.
It sounds like a subject for a whole season’s reading, doesn’t it - reading sacred texts for their orchestration of quiet? I’ll be interested to hear Gebser’s take on human pauses when it suits you. :-)
Yes, it does. Winter, perhaps.
I will follow up on Gebser. There is much here.