Poetry is an Island

Poetry is an Island

“My first friend was the sea,” is a line from a Derek Walcott poem.  In his 1992 Nobel Prize address, he said “Poetry is an island that breaks away from the main.”  

Poet, playwright, painter, Walcott died last week beside his first friend, where he painted this watercolor, in his birth and death place, the island of Saint Lucia, in the Antilles. 

The sea is the muse of many a poet.  Ocean depth, motion and mystery compelled Walcott, and so many others, to put poetic pen to paper.  Here’s just one of Walcott’s many sea poems – check them out, and the documentary “Poetry is an Island” about his life.

After the Storm

There are so many islands!
As many islands as the stars at night
on that branched tree from which meteors are shaken
like falling fruit around the schooner Flight. 

But things must fall, and so it always was,
on one hand Venus, on the other Mars;
fall, and are one, just as this earth is one
island in archipelagoes of stars. 

My first friend was the sea. Now, is my last.
I stop talking now. I work, then I read,
cotching under a lantern hooked to the mast.
I try to forget what happiness was, 

and when that don't work, I study the stars.
Sometimes is just me, and the soft-scissored foam
as the deck turn white and the moon open
a cloud like a door, and the light over me 

is a road in white moonlight taking me home.
Shabine sang to you from the depths of the sea. 

In his Nobel speech, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory,” he describes the “dialects of my archipelago;”

“Antillean art is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent….

“Poetry, which is perfection's sweat but which must seem as fresh as the raindrops on a statue's brow, combines the natural and the marmoreal; it conjugates both tenses simultaneously: the past and the present, if the past is the sculpture and the present the beads of dew or rain on the forehead of the past.

“There is the buried language and there is the individual vocabulary, and the process of poetry is one of excavation and of self-discovery. Tonally the individual voice is a dialect; it shapes its own accent, its own vocabulary and melody in defiance of an imperial concept of language, the language of Ozymandias, libraries and dictionaries, law courts and critics, and churches, universities, political dogma, the diction of institutions.

“Poetry is an island that breaks away from the main. The dialects of my archipelago seem as fresh to me as those raindrops on the statue's forehead, not the sweat made from the classic exertion of frowning marble, but the condensations of a refreshing element, rain and salt.”

Groups that come to Pacific Grove for our Blue Theology mission trips and pilgrimages read and write poetry at Point Lobos State Reserve, and like Walcott we often experience the sea as our first friend and home.   May 9 is a special Blue Theology Retreat and Resource Day for clergy and religious educators, with a sustainable seafood lunch.  Dive in!  Bluetheology.com

My Cousin Sal

My Cousin Sal

Here’s a lovely photo of my cousin Sal.  Actually Sal is your cousin, too. 

Sal is the cousin of every human, because Sal, like us, is a chordate, with the very beginnings of a backbone.  Sal’s a salp (hence the name), which is a kind of tunicate, also called sea squirts.  Tunicates in their very early stages have a tiny backbone and look like a tadpole.  (So do humans at that stage.)  Sal might seem more like a jelly fish or a sea slug, but Sal’s branch in the tree of life is very near ours, the chordates.

Hi, Cuz!

As I got to know Sal (we have tunicates at the Aquarium) I found I liked Sal a lot.  My kind of cousin – simple yet very complex, liberated from old fashioned categories, and trying to make the world a better place. 

In Sal there is neither male or female; Sal’s a sequential hermaphrodite, beginning as female then becoming male.  But Sal’s even more complex than that.  As Sal develops, there are stages when Sal is one solitary individual.  But then s/he transforms into what biologists call a “colony,” one organism made up of many many interconnected, mutually dependent organisms, divided into different tasks, unable to live without each other. 

So Sal is made up of many different members, but is also one body.  Some of the individual parts do the feeding, some the breathing (pulsing water through each unit for oxygen), some the motion (together propelling the whole colony.)  If all were the eating parts, where would be the motion?  (This photo shows both the one and the many.)

While Sal lives in the deep sea Sal does not curse the darkness, but rather brings its own light into the darkness.  Sal bioluminesces, creating its own light.  Indeed Sal’s a particular kind of salp called a pyrosome, which means literally “fire body.”  Sal can light up the deep dark ocean for 50 feet.  19^th century scientist Thomas Huxley and many other sailors have seen Sal on an ocean night.   "I have just watched the moon set in all her glory, and looked at those lesser moons, the beautiful Pyrosoma, shining like white-hot cylinders in the water."

We often insist on giving living things a restricting label, forcing them into separate categories – male/female, vertebrate/invertebrate, individual/group, dark/light.  Sal won’t let us.  S/he is all of that, both, everything.  And more.  Thanks, Cousin Sal, for transcending our limiting labels.  Thanks also for your deep beauty.

Photo by Nick Hobgood of a pyrosome off East Timor. 

We have salps in Monterey Bay also.  Visit our Blue Theology Mission Station for a family reunion with your tunicate cousins. May 9 a special Blue Theology Day for clergy and religious educators with a sustainable seafood lunch included.  Still some summer openings here for youth groups and adult pilgrimages. Bluetheology.com

When God Drew a Circle

When God Drew a Circle

The geometry of water is circle, not square. Water curves. A puddle on the counter is round. Rain drops are bulbous. Ponds don’t have corners.  When I survey the wondrous Big Sur horizon, where ocean meet sky,sthere’s the faint hint of a curve.

 “I was there when God set the heavens in place, when God drew a circle on the face of the deep.”

The speaker is Woman Wisdom, the divine female, a central character in the Book of Proverbs. “I was God’s first act of creation,” she says, “and I was ever beside God, like a master worker, and daily I was God’s delight.”  (God delights in Wisdom!)

I was there on that first water circle day, she declares, standing beside God who puts the heavens in place, and drew the big ocean, the circular deep. (Prov. 8)

Too bad William Blake’s painting shows only God, and not Lady Wisdom (as her name was then translated, also called Sophia.)  But I adore how Blake puts in God’s hand a compass, to make the circle on the horizon face of the deep just right.  (The Hebrew phrase is literally “to use a tool to draw a circle” - God uses technology on Day One!)

For God so loved the ocean that God drew its circle, and the ocean gives us everlasting life.

Maybe Blake had read St. Augustine: “God is a circle whose center is everywhere, and circumference nowhere.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote an essay, “Circles” in 1841.  Some highlights:

“Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a new beginning, and under every deep a lower deep opens.”

“There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees. Our globe seen by God is a transparent law, not a mass of facts.” 

“We can never see Christianity from the catechism: — from the pastures, from a boat in the pond, from amidst the songs of wood-birds, we possibly may.”

The circle of God, the circle of water, the circle of ocean.  May the circle be unbroken.

I write these Blue Theology “Tide-ings” each Wednesday to celebrate ocean spirituality and stewardship.  Can you tell I’ve lately been immersing myself in mysticism?  Check out www.bluetheology.com for info on our youth mission trips and adult pilgrimages in Pacific Grove.  Please share.