From an interview with Vanity Fair, Andrew Garfield on his ‘favorite love story’:
“This is an obscure answer, but I have been reading a series of essays from the poet Mary Oliver called Upstream, and it’s about the love of life, the love of nature, love of the world . . . but a love in solitude. She writes about love in such a mysterious way that I found very inspiring to read, about how she’s in love with a duck or a fox or a tree or a blade of grass. There’s something about being in love with the world that right now is really inspiring me.”
Apparently, Mary Oliver won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984 for her fourth book, American Primitive.
Upstream by Mary Oliver (the first essay entitled Upstream) was assigned for the first class of HUMBIO 128U: Upstreaming Health, along with the first chapter of Upstream: How to Solve Problems Before They Happen by Dan Heath.
Section One
Upstream
“Do you think there is anything not attached by its unbreakable cord to everything else? Plant your peas and your corn in the field when the moon is full, or risk failure. This has been understood since planting began.”
Everything is (inter)connected.
“Sometimes the desire to be lost again, as long ago, comes over me like a vapor. With growth into adulthood, responsibilities claimed me, so many heavy coats. I didn’t choose them, I don’t fault them, but it took time to reject them. Now in the spring I kneel, I put my face into the packets of violets, the dampness, the freshness, the sense of ever-ness. Something is wrong, I know it, if I don’t keep my attention on eternity. May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe, tiny but useful. May I stay forever in the stream. May I look down upon the windflower and the bull thistle and the coreopsis with the greatest respect.”
“Teach the children. We don’t matter so much, but the children do. Show them daisies and the pale hepatica. […] The lives of the blue sailors, mallow, sunbursts, the moccasin flowers. […] Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms.
Attention is the beginning of devotion.”
My Friend Walt Whitman
“But first and foremost, I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple — or a green field — a place to enter, and in which to feel. Only in a secondary way is it an intellectual thing — an artifact, a moment of seemly and robust wordiness — wonderful as that part of it is. I learned that the poem was made not just to exist, but to speak — to be company.”
Oliver describes Whitman as her friend, brother, uncle, and best teacher. This short essay made me want to read his works.
Staying Alive
“Adults can change their circumstances; children cannot. Children are powerless, and in difficult situations they are the victims of every sorrow and mischance and rage around them, for children feel all of these things but without any of the ability that adults have to change them. Whatever can take a child beyond such circumstances, therefore, is an alleviation and a blessing.
I quickly found for myself two such blessings — the natural world, and the world of writing: literature. These were the gates through which I vanished from a difficult place.”
…and then a really weird little passage about licking her cat?
…and then a brief description of how she felt walking on all fours in the woods for about an hour, which she concludes with, “You must not ever stop being whimsical.” // My reaction: Mary was a quirky gal. I can kinda see what Andrew Garfield was referring to when he talks about her love for foxes.
Of Power and Time
On creativity
“Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart — to pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again.
But just as often, if not more often, the interruption comes not from another but from the self itself, or some other self within the self, that whistles and pounds upon the door panels and tosses itself, splashing, into the pond of meditation.”
“In creative work — creative work of all kinds — those who are the world’s working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward.”
^ “intellectual work sometimes, spiritual work certainly, artistic work always […] must travel beyond the realm of the hour and the restraint of the habit.”
“Especially at the beginning, there is a need of discipline as well as solitude and concentration.”
“There is a notion that creative people are absentminded, reckless, heedless of social customs and obligations. It is, hopefully, true. For they are in another world altogether.”
“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”
^tick, tick… BOOM! /Jonathan Larson vibes. Inspiring but also smells like (white) privilege :/
On the self
“I am, myself, three selves at least […] the child (powerful, egotistical, insinuating) […] the attentive, social self (the smiler and the doorkeeper; fettered to a thousand notions of obligation) […] the self that is out of love with the ordinary, out of love with time (has a hunger for eternity)”
Section Two
Blue Pastures
…musings about fish and fishing
The Ponds
migration of birds
“Occasionally I lean forward and gaze into the water. The water of a pond is a mirror of roughness and honesty — it gives back not only my own gaze, but the nimbus of the world trailing into the picture on all sides.”
nimbus:
- a luminous vapor, cloud, or atmosphere about a god or goddess when on earth;
- a cloud or atmosphere (as of romance) about a person or thing
- an indication (such as a circle) of radiant light or glory about the head of a drawn or sculptured divinity, saint, or sovereign
- a rain cloud
Sister Turtle
Oliver’s been vegetarian for ‘some years now’; being an omnivore means having this ‘other-creature-consuming appetite’
Inherited responsibility… “For it is precisely how I feel, who have inherited not measurable wealth but, as we all do who care for it, that immeasurable fund of thoughts and ideas, from writers and thinkers long gone into the ground — and, inseparable from those wisdoms because demanded by them, the responsibility to live thoughtfully and intelligently. To enjoy, to question — never to assume, or trample. Thus the great ones (my great ones, who many not be the same as your great ones) have taught me — to observe with passion, to think with patience, to live always caringly.”
… Oliver’s ‘great ones’: Shelley, Fabre, Wordsworth, Barbara Ward, Blake, Basho, Maeterlinck, Jastrow, Emerson, Carson, Aldo Leopold
…she ate turtle eggs?!
Section Three
Emerson: An Introduction
biographic details about Emerson… born in 1803, father died in 1811, 3 siblings died in childhood, first wife died when he was 29, which prompted him to stop preaching and travel to England…
“The best use of literature bends not toward the narrow and the absolute but to the extravagant and the possible. Answers are no part of it; rather, it is the opinions, the rhapsodic persuasions, the engrafted logics, the clues that are to the mind of the reader the possible keys to his own self-quarrels, his own predicament. This is the crux of Emerson, who does not advance straight ahead but wanders to all sides of an issue; who delivers suggestions with a kindly gesture — who opens doors and tells us to look at things for ourselves.”
I find it interesting how Oliver uses the pronouns ‘he/him/his’ to refer to an abstract person — a somebody — despite her own identity as a woman.
“That we are spirits that have descended into our bodies, of this Emerson was sure. That each man was utterly important and limitless, an ‘infinitude,’ of this he was also sure.”
in his journal he wrote: “I have confidence in the laws of morals as of botany. I have planted maize in my field every June for seventeen years and I never knew it come up strychnine. My parsley, beet, turnip, carrot, buck-thorn, chestnut, acorn, are as sure. I believe that justice produces justice, and injustice injustice.”
The Bright Eyes of Eleonora: Poe’s Dream of Recapturing the Impossible
The real subject of Poe’s work is “the anguish of knowing nothing for sure about the construct of the universe, or about the existence of a moral order within it — anything that would clarify its seemingly total and imperial indifference toward individual destiny.”
“Poe is no different from any of us — we all choke in such vapors, somewhat, sometimes. A normal life includes the occasional black mood. But most of us have had some real enough experience with certainty, which helps us to sustain ourselves through passages of metaphysical gloom. While Poe had none. Not little, but none […] Poe was without confidence in a future that might be different from the past.”
biographical details… mother died when Edgar was 2 years old… never legally adopted… in 1834, married cousin Virginia when he was 25 and she was 13… Virginia died in 1847 at age of 25. Poe had 2 years to live and dran his way through them ‘with terrifying gusto.’
damn… life in the early 19th century sounds pretty miserable
In Poe’s stories, “the eye is a critical feature.” And “the question of madness is always present. The actions of the narrator are often recognizably insane. But the definitions of madness and rationality have been thrown here into the wind; in Poe’s stories, such states are uncertainly bordered areas”
swooning
Some Thoughts on Whitman
William James on a mystical experience, in The Varieties of Religious Experience: an experience that “defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words.”
Whitman published Leaves of Grass in 1855, 12 poems and a prologue. “His message was clear from the first and never changed: that a better, richer life is available to us, and with all his force he advocated it both for the good of each individual soul and for the good of the universe.”
It would be interesting to come back to Oliver’s writing on Whitman after reading him myself.
Wordsworth’s Mountain
dawn is a gift.
“For me it was important to be alone; solitude was a prerequisite to being openly and joyfully susceptible and responsive to the world of leaves, light, birdsong, flowers, flowing water. Most of the adult world spoke of such things as opportunities, and materials, To the young these materials are still celestial; for every child the garden is re-created. Then the occlusions begin. The mountain and the forest are sublime, but the valley soil raises richer crops. The perfect gift is no longer a single house but a house, or a mind, divided. Man finds he has two halves to his existence — leisure and occupation — and from these separate considerations he now looks upon the world. In leisure he remembers radiance; in labor he looks for results.”
Section Four
Swoon
skimmed bc I’m sorry (not sorry) but I don’t care about spiders
Bird
Oliver took care of an injured black-backed gull… helped it recover but also tried to kill it at some point with sleeping pills?? Then tried to let him go back into nature/to the water but brought him back? “Did we do right or wrong to lengthen his days? Even now we do not know.”
Owls
skimmed bc I’m sorry (not sorry) but I don’t care about owls
Winter Hours
walking through the woods… “Stepping out into the world, into the grass, onto the path, was always a kind of relief. I was not escaping anything. I was returning to the arena of delight. I was stepping across some border. I don’t mean just that the world changed on the other side of the border, but that I did too. Eventually I began to appreciate — I don’t say this lightly — that the great black oaks knew me. I don’t mean they knew me as myself and not another — that kind of individualism was not in the air — but that they recognized and responded to my presence, and to my mood. They began to offer, or I began to feel them offer, their serene greeting. It was like a quick change of temperature, a warm and comfortable flush, faint yet palpable, as I walked toward them and beneath their outflowing branches.”
Building the House
inner state made manifest
Section Five
Provincetown
must have really loved living there, as she describes it as heaven.
I want to read American Primitive, her fifth collection of poetry for which she won the Pulitzer in 1984. As for Upstream, there were definitely some beautiful moments/passages/quotes, as well as some that were… a bit too quirky for me.
One Goodreads review said, “Her prose has the distinct voice of a poet which leads to some occasionally beautiful sentences and poignant observations. Generally, however, this eclectic mix of previously published snippets has little to say
