“Today” is a beautiful poem written by William Stafford, selected from his book My Name is William Tell by Beth Atchison and contributed to Panhala, which is how I found out about it today.
Today
The ordinary miracles begin. Somewhere
a signal arrives: “Now,” and the rays
come down. A tomorrow has come. Open
your hands, lift them: morning rings
all the doorbells; porches are cells for prayer.
Religion has touched your throat. Not the same now,
you could close your eyes and go on full of light.
And it is already begun, the chord
that will shiver glass, the song full of time
bending above us. Outside, a sign:
a bird intervenes; the wings tell the air,
“Be warm.” No one is out there, but a giant
has passed through town, widening streets, touching
the ground, shouldering away the stars.
Below are a few of many quotes by famous writers on writing found in Learning by Teaching, Selected Articles on Writing and Teaching, by Donald M. Murray. When I volunteered to become a writing facilitator at MIU in the mid-80s, this was our bible. It had a huge transformational effect on me. I used these writing principles when I helped young students write at the Sylvan Learning Center in North Vancouver, BC, Canada. I also learned writing techniques from Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg, and shared them with my students, and later in other writing workshops with older animation students, and friends.
The whole idea is to facilitate the writing process, to see what it would reveal to the writer, rather than focus on producing a specific piece of writing. I remember reading what Donald Graves had to say about teaching writing, something like: “If you take care of the writer, the writing will take care of itself.” Donald Graves studied with Donald Murray, and went on to conduct research in the classroom on how to teach children to becoming writers. His seminal book, Writing: Teachers & Children at Work, has become a classic and revolutionized the teaching of writing in schools.
Here’s what some famous writers, poets, and playwrights have to say about their writing process.
Edward Albee: Writing has got to be an act of discovery. . . .I write to find out what I’m thinking about.
C. Day Lewis: First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it….we do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.
William Faulkner: It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.
E. M. Forster: Think before you speak, is criticism’s motto; speak before you think is creation’s.
Donald Hall: A good writer uses words to discover, and to bring that discovery to other people. He rewrites so that his prose is a pleasure that carries knowledge with it. That pleasure-carrying knowledge comes from self-understanding, and creates understanding in the minds of other people.
William Stafford: I don’t see writing as a communication of something already discovered, as “truths” already known. Rather, I see writing as a job of experiment. It’s like any discovery job; you don’t know what’s going to happen until you try it.
Writing is a series of letting go’s
of our preconceived notions of how it goes
and allowing a deeper part of you to tell you what it knows;
when the writing’s good, it shows.
Because, ultimately, when we do,
that recognition of what’s true,
comes from the deepest part of you.
So let the writing speak to itself,
and let the writer listen, for
I glanced at her and took my glasses
off—they were still singing. They buzzed
like a locust on the coffee table and then
ceased. Her voice belled forth, and the
sunlight bent. I felt the ceiling arch, and
knew that nails up there took a new grip
on whatever they touched. “I am your own
way of looking at things,” she said. “When
you allow me to live with you, every
glance at the world around you will be
a sort of salvation.” And I took her hand.
They want a wilderness with a map—
but how about errors that give a new start?—
or leaves that are edging into the light?—
or the many places a road can’t find?
Maybe there’s a land where you have to sing
to explain anything: you blow a little whistle
just right and the next tree you meet is itself.
(And many a tree is not there yet.)
Things come toward you when you walk.
You go along singing a song that says
where you are going becomes its own
because you start. You blow a little whistle—
Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.
I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.
The moral dilemma most often thrust in the face of those who oppose war goes something like this: What would you do if the lives of your loved ones were being threatened right in front of you? Would you not grab any weapon available in order to protect them? So why not fight to defend your country?
National Book Award-winning poet and World War II conscientious objector William Stafford (1914-1993) wrote in his journal: “The question, ‘Wouldn’t you fight for your country?’ begs the real question which is, ‘What is the best way to behave here and now to serve your country?’ So the real answer would be, ‘If it was the right thing to do, I would fight for my country. Now let’s talk about, what is the right thing to do?’ ”
This was one of the quandaries I discussed recently on the phone with Haydn Reiss, producer and director of Every War Has Two Losers: A Poet’s Meditation on Peace, a thoughtful and beautifully crafted documentary based on the writings of Stafford, and Rumi: Poet of the Heart, a previous work about the life of the Sufi mystic poet. Both films feature comments from a number of well-known poets, writers, and thinkers, including Robert Bly, Coleman Barks, Michael Meade, Alice Walker, Huston Smith and Deepak Chopra.
Reiss, a self-confessed “producer for hire,” has been involved in a range of visual media from Hollywood features (JFK and Jacob’s Ladder) to TV shows, but it is obvious his real passion lies in his work about these two poetic masters, separated in time by more than 700 years, and the potential of their words to move the hearts and minds of men away from conflict.
Reiss believes Stafford, like many of his fellow conscientious objectors, was no starry-eyed idealist. He accepted that conflict is always a possibility in the course of human affairs, says Reiss. But Stafford didn’t believe war was inevitable or even advisable. In Stafford’s view the consequences of war are rarely, if ever, beneficial to humanity. He encouraged everyone to consider the motives of those who urge us to war before getting caught up in the fever of victory. “How do we know war is the answer?” asks Stafford in his journal. “How can there be a nation we don’t like? That’s a fiction put onto a million different people. It has been created by interests you might well do to analyze.”
“It would be very satisfying to think,” says Reiss in an interview on the film’s website, “that after viewing the film you would ask yourself, at a deep level, what you really believe about war. And the follow-up question of ‘How did I come to believe that?’ ”
“I think we have been very successfully indoctrinated into accepting that war is a given, it’s what human beings do,” Reiss continues. “The distinction is, and I think this is what Stafford is saying, is ‘Yes, we do and can make war. But what else can we do?’ The undiscovered possibilities in human behavior are what we should pursue. The die is not cast; imagination and creativity are not in short supply. That this is the real, pragmatic work of the world.”
We live in such a culture of violence that sometimes it is hard to imagine how the actions or words of one person can be heard above all the clatter. Stafford believed peace is achieved gradually, created one person, one small step at a time. “Artists and peacemakers are in it for the long haul,” Stafford writes in his journal. “Redemption comes with care. Here’s how to count the people who are ready to do right: 1 . . . 1. . . 1.”
His chosen medium was poetry. In a poem entitled “A Ritual to Read to Each Other,” composed in Iowa City on June 23, 1953, he wrote:
For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
In Every War Has Two Losers, Stafford’s friend Michael Meade comments, “Something very deep in the human heart wants beauty, love, and relatedness more than it wants destruction, war and violence.” This theme is further explored in Rumi: Poet of the Heart, a tender and insightful portrayal of the life and work of Sufism’s most cherished poet. Reiss is a big believer in the power of poetry to take us to deeper understanding. “It’s alchemical,” he tells me, and quotes from William Blake’s poem “Jerusalem”: “I give you the end of a golden string, only wind it in a ball, it will lead in at Heaven’s gate built in Jerusalem’s wall,” a theme I discovered Stafford often used in his lectures. “Poetry can take us to a place where nations and newspapers are not so important as what is happening out in the fields and the birds and the wind,” says poet Coleman Barks in the film. His soulful translations of Rumi’s poems have made them famous worldwide. Deepak Chopra suggests that if more poetry was read to children we could substantially change the world for the better.
Stafford wrote a poem a day after rising before dawn and spending time in contemplation and reflection. “I have an appetite for finding the perfect language to describe the experience of life you’re having right now,” he once said. “Every now and then I break off a piece of that and call it a poem.” Rumi poured out thousands of lines of exquisite verse as he struggled to deal with the devastating loss of his friend and mentor, Shams of Tabriz.
“Rumi’s poetry emerged from grief, which we do our utmost to avoid,” comments Robert Bly when interviewed. It is as if his heart, in being broken open, became a container for an immense divine love. “I am so small I can barely be seen,” wrote Rumi. “How can this great love be inside of me?”
Rumi’s message of love described by Rumi: Poet of the Heart is so profound and essential it has the power to touch the soul within each of us. “Everyone loves Rumi. He has no enemies,” someone comments in Reiss’s film. “I fly with Rumi. I forget I am on the earth,” says another. It is a wonderful and revealing irony that in this time of widespread “Islamophobia,” Rumi, an Islamic mystic, should be the best-selling poet in America. He touches a universal nerve. The lesson to learn is this: if we can reach into our hearts and see the world through the eyes of a poet like Rumi, we can form bonds that unite us, whatever our culture or religion. Peace is the natural by-product of this experience. War, on the other hand, thrives on fear and division. “If loving everyone is too much to ask,” says Reiss, paraphrasing Kurt Vonnegut, “at least we should respect each other and maybe occasionally it will turn into love.”
“Love is the religion. The universe is the book,” says Coleman Barks, quoting a Sufi master. Stafford wrote on behalf of “the unknown good in our enemies,” comments one of his friends in the film.
Can the actions of one individual or a few well-chosen words really make a difference in this large chaotic world? Reiss believes so. On the website for Every War has Two Losers, he includes this quote from Stafford: “Every thought re-orders the universe.” And at the end of our conversation, he passes on this gem of wisdom from folksinger Pete Seeger. Seeger would say that life is like a seesaw and each of us is a grain of sand. It’s important which side of the seesaw you put your grain of sand. You never know which grain will be the one that tips it in the right direction.
Haydn Reiss will be visiting Iowa in spring 2010. Watch for upcoming announcements of his talk and film screenings.
Tony Ellis is a Fairfield-based writer and poet. He blogs regularly at www.iowasource.com. To read more of his work, visit www.tonyellis.com. This article appears as the cover story of the December 2009 issue.
Thank you for posting this intelligently written Op-Ed piece. Here are my comments for your consideration.
When asked about his new film, EVERY WAR HAS TWO LOSERS, a documentary based on the journals of American poet William Stafford, award-winning producer/director Haydn Reiss suggested it would be very satisfying to think that after viewing the film you would ask yourself, at a deep level, what you really believe about war. And the follow-up question of “How did I come to believe that?”
This Op-Ed, Australia Needs a Defence System Beyond “Extended Deterrence” is a fascinating approach to peace, one that should be seriously considered. I’ve just seen Mr. Reiss’s new film about war and peace, and this deeper solution is something that would resonate with both the poet and the filmmaker.
“I think we have been very successfully indoctrinated into accepting that war is a given, it’s what human beings do. The distinction is, and I think this is what Stafford is saying, is ‘Yes, we do and can make war. But what else can we do?’ The undiscovered possibilities in human behavior are what we should pursue. The die is not cast,” Reiss added; “imagination and creativity are not in short supply. That this is the real, pragmatic work of the world.”
Visit http://everywar.com to see the trailer, and think for yourself, about this question and this more rational scientific solution. At the same time, keep in mind what Einstein said about insanity—doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result; and what Schopenhauer said about the three stages that all truth passes through—”First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”
In watching his own struggle with the British Empire, Gandhi echoed a similar sentiment when he observed, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” I’d like to think that this ancient scientific approach founded by the great Vedic Science revivalist, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, would turn out to be a win-win situation for every nation on the planet. We now have the technology in our hands to finally fulfill this ancient hope for humanity—the ability to create and maintain permanent world peace.
