09 Jun 09 Pray to your Father

“But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.” Matthew, 6.6

I was very young when I first read these words of Christ. I knew they were true, felt them deeply, as I still do. They guided me the right  way, when much else was often in doubt. They guide me now too. They teach humbleness and sincerity before God, closing the door to the distractions of the  world, communion with Him alone. All the prophets and teachers of the great religions, including  Baha’u’llah and Abdu’l-Baha, similarly extol prayer and meditation. The guidance and example of the Bahai prayers deepened, strengthened, opened my soul to the Divine.

In times when we are lost, the best thing we can do is follow Christ’s teaching, withdraw into prayer, find our way through worship of the Divine Essence, the peace and stillness found in surrender to the Mystery of Being; await there for the still small voice to pick us up and lead aright. As Plato wrote, first a shudder, and then the old awe pours over one.

Rereading this spring the four Gospels, I savor again transcendence and its vision of spiritual and moral perfection, the surest guide, down to earth, while reaching to the stars.

Frederick Glaysher

Tags: Abdu'l-Baha, Baha'u'llah, Gospel of Matthew, prayer, Whirlpool Galaxy M51

22 May 09 Gravity

 

The struggle, so intense. I had thought it would be relatively easy to write about the exclusive religions, since I had spent my whole life in their cultures, reading, steeped in their scriptures, theology, art, and literature. Yet now I find perhaps the opposite is the case. I know all too much, making it difficult to see and select what is essential or evocative in the right way, though that’s not really it, either. Rather, the scope is so challenging, the embrace so wide, the view from the moon so vast, it’s often overwhelming. And it’s the pain, pain and despair, of facing the blank page every day, trying to resolve the many strands into one. The enormous study and reflection required, so many years, solitary, my study feeling at times like a dungeon, a deep, dark, black pit. Easier to walk away, avoid it, the feeling of talking only to one’s self, dispiriting. Weakness and the dread pull of inertia. Gravity, even on the moon.

Frederick Glaysher

Tags: Gravity, Moon Ground, The Black Pit

25 Mar 09 Back on the Moon

 

Past the Kingdom of Silla, to the mountains of Lake Biwa, where Basho and Saigyo rested from their long journeys. Like all of Japan, the view of the lake has changed since Basho was interred at the Temple of Gichu-ji on its southern shore. Saigyo guided me back to his great metaphor, the moon:

In the mountains’ deep
Places, the moon of the mind
Resides in light serene:
Moon mirrors all things everywhere,
Mind mirrors moon . . . in satori now.

(Tr. William R. LaFleur)

Basho too taught me the oneness of his vision, a Vinegar Drinker in his own way:

Four gates
And four different sects
Sleep as one
Under the bright moon.

(Tr. Nobuyuki Yuasa)

Frederick Glaysher

Tags: Basho, Japan, Lake Biwa, Saigyo

09 Mar 09 Soaring above Mt. Tai

It was an arduous, overwhemling journey from Bagan, Burma, up over Lhasa, Tibet to Dunhuang. Sun Wukong was my able guide, having traveled the way, though a different route. He led me into the Mogao Caves, his guiding presence understood a fellow seeker. From there, he took me to Chang-an, where Du Fu led me up the many stairs of the Big Wild Goose Pagoda, taught me a sweeping view of China, coming down from that tower, a different man. In the courtyard, Bai Juyi lifted me up to Mt. Tai and the Azure Clouds. I imbibed the beverage of the Three Vinegar Drinkers, savored its harmonizing nature.

Not yet back to the moon, but closer, heading east, into the rising sun.

Frederick Glaysher

Tags: Bagan, Bai Juyi, Burma, Chang-an, China, Du Fu, Dunhuang, Lhasa, Mt. Tai, Sun Wukong, Three Vinegar Drinkers, Tibet

20 Jan 09 A Walk around the Galleries of Angkor Wat

As I’ve journeyed through Angkor Wat and Cambodia, the antinomies have further clarified, on numerous fronts, including modernity. Broadly speaking, I can now see as never before the three major traditions of exclusivism and those of non-exclusivism in sharper detail, contrast, and comparison. That wasn’t really my intention, so I’m  surprised that it’s happened. Partly, I think, it’s in the material itself. The attempt to find and give it form brought it all out.

So there are vistas I’ve never realized before. As with Hinduism, the complexities and teachings of Buddhism have been fascinating to study once again, its various interpretations and flavors. Another surprise has been that the Internet has proven an invaluable tool for study and for finding the right historical nuance and detail, especially on the more human level of lived thought and belief, opening the antinomies ever deeper into the soul.

Though only on the way to Dunhuang, now in Bagan, Burma, I look forward to the Mogao Caves, visiting them again, as with Chang-an, and Japan. Saigyo shall guide me back to his great metaphor.

Frederick Glaysher

Tags: Add new tag, Angkor Wat, Antinomies, Dunhuang, religions of exclusivism, religions of non-exclusivism, Saigyo, universality

06 Jan 09 A Journey through India

Beyond in medias res, I’ve traveled on through India, from the field of Kurukshetra to Shiva Nataraja, Kabir, and the epic struggles of the Ramayana. Hanuman has guided me now to Angkor Wat. From there I shall walk with the elders and ride the greater ferry to Dunhuang and China, on to Korea and Japan.

Though daunted by the immensity of the trip before me, I trust my guides shall sustain me through the jungles and mountains and deserts. They have brought me thus far, cannot fail me now.

Frederick Glaysher

Tags: Angkor Wat, Hanuman, Kabir, Kurukshetra, Mahayana, Ramayana, Shiva Nataraja, Theravada

04 Dec 08 In Medias Res

It was the in medias res that took me decades to figure out, repeatedly pouring over Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton, and every other epic poet and form, struggling again and again for the right structure. I knew the plot of The Parliament of Poets was the backbone of the book itself, the very crux, first and foremost, for it to work, to draw the reader into it, and to play on the great tradition, evoke it, honor it, raise everything to a higher level of seriousness and import. It proved to be the hardest part of the epic form, a seemingly insurmountable challenge over which I stumbled, trying one idea after another, rejecting sketch after sketch, setting my notes aside knowing that way and that idea wasn’t it, wouldn’t work.

And then it came to me, while I was doing some trivial task of life, and I rushed to my study to write it down, lest I lose it after all these years. I knew I had it with the certainty of that’s it! get it down on paper, before the phone rings or whatever, before it’s gone forever–surprise, relief, elation.

With a rough draft written of the first three books, I now sense that I can finish writing The Parliament of Poets, see my way to the end of it, a sense of confidence I’ve never had before, since it was always entirely in the future, the book I would write, God willing, one day, as notes accumulated, as decades went by.

Now the challenge has become time, acquiring it, holding on to it, and worrying over the unpredictability and evanescence of life, of completing what’s begun.

Frederick Glaysher

Tags: Add new tag, Dante, epic poetry, Homer, in media res, Milton, Virgil

24 Nov 08 World Bible. Religions of Man.

It was as a young student in high school that I first encountered the scriptures of other peoples, in a class on world religions, which used The Portable World Bible. Instead of historicism, I believe I got the real message, since I did the reading, of the writings themselves, the universalism at their core. And it may have been that I was fortunate in the teacher of the class, who may have introduced me to a new style and way of manhood. Looking back, I see an intellectual man, more sophisticated and nuanced in sensibility.

And then, a year or two later, after more and wider reading, I took a college class that included Huston Smith’s The Religions of Man. That book opened new vistas, ordered things in a new way for me, even as I couldn’t really relate to the instructor, dropping the course before the end. But I had the book. And read it.  And re-read it. It was true to my experience. For soon, I had “gone off hiking into Baha’i.” But it was not “too quickly” of a decision. I had spent a few years reading and thinking about virtually every Baha’i book that had been published up until that time, 1976. I searched through several libraries from the suburbs to downtown Detroit to find them, and thought and prayed, prayed and thought, while continuing to read widely in the poets and literature.

It was more than a decade later that I heard of Joseph Campbell, through Bill Moyers’ The Power of Myth on PBS, another powerful influence, one I immediately recognized as true to my experience, re-watching it many times, reading some of his books. By 1983, I had already begun to make notes for The Parliament of Poets. Campbell’s work was startlingly congruent with where I already found myself to be, confirmed me in the direction I would take. But it wasn’t until about 1993 that I had written down, perhaps, I think now, as a result of his interview with Moyers, where I would travel.

Frederick Glaysher

Tags: Add new tag, Baha'i Faith, Huston Smith, Joseph Campbell, The Portable World Bible, The Religions of Man

20 Nov 08 What is Art for

What is Art for? It’s a commonplace thought that we used to know, but have lost, the answer to, along with God and other deeper dimensions of life. Materialism, commercialism, politics in the worst sense, anomie, nihilism, solipsism, and all the other fare out of the intellectual soup kitchen of modernity now provide the meager gruel of our existence. As though there were only one thing that art was for.

Before there was art, beyond the modern panoply, there was worship of the Unseen Essence, and human beings of all tribes, in every aspect of their lives, expressed, recorded, honored, intimated, found metaphors for their experience of what the Lakota Indians, for one, called Wakan Tanka, the Great Mystery.

We’ve been colleged. We’d never fall for that. After all, what was Marx and Freud and the great Enlightenment all about? What were they for? It’s either one or the other…. One is either an educated person or one is….

Frederick Glaysher

Tags: Add new tag, Lunar Orbiter 1966, Wakan Tanka, What is art for?

14 Nov 08 Unity of Being

W. B. Yeats struggled for, but never achieved, Unity of Being, seeking it throughout A Vision. For all his phantasmagoria, he could not create or renew a convincing vision, a Unity of Being.

I believe a vision can be achieved but on the moon, or from the moon–our time has seen and felt the impact of the great symbol, Mother Earth, her circling embrace, as her arms wrap around us, a celestial Rose Image, terrestrial oxymoron of the Universe.

Viewing our homeland from space, who can doubt that Unity of Being begins to return?

Frederick Glaysher

Tags: Rose Image, Unity of Being, W. B. Yeats

05 Nov 08 Footprints on the Moon

The Detroit News headline for Monday, July 21, 1969, reads, “Footprints on the Moon!” I can still vividly recall watching, as a young boy, it happened on black and white TV, along with my family and the many millions around the world. It fired my young fifteen-year-old imagination like nothing else I had known. I had always been thrilled by the entire space program, my father having worked on making the heat shield for one of the re-entry capsules. And then the incredible event itself, in prime time TV, “one giant leap for mankind.” I was there with the astronauts, walking on the moon.

My family saved the complete front-page section of The Detroit News for that day. Eventually, it became my copy of the great event that dad and all the nation had worked for, the greatest technological achievement of human history. As the years went by, I found myself still thinking about our human visit to the moon, going back and re-reading that section of The Detroit News, as it has increasingly yellowed and frayed and brittled. The writer of the main front page article made one revealing comment which he seemed to think everyone would understand and agree with: “it was not necessary to send poets to the moon.” What? The falsehood and injustice of that comment increasingly struck me, as my study of poetry and culture deepened with the years. Who did these Johnny-Come-Latelys think they were? The hubris and arrogance of scientism seethed in that one sentence, the “two cultures” implicit in it.

Poets have been on the moon for millennia.

Frederick Glaysher

Tags: Beyond Postmodernism, Beyond Postmodernity, Footprints on the Moon, Man on the Moon

03 Nov 08 Searching for the Path

It was, I suppose, out of my reading, partly, in high school, of the religious scriptures of the world religions that my consciousness began to open up to other ways of life and thought, belief and faith, practice and sensibility. Later, in college, other classes in world religions and religious studies, Christian and otherwise, with continual reading of and beyond poets and writers, broadened my worldview, especially once I had found my way to the writings of Baha’u'llah.

Now I can clearly see that even back then I sensed the exclusivism implicit in the usual thinking about religion was not part of Abdu’l-Baha’s Interpretation of his father’s writings.  Abdu’l-Baha’s outlook was a wide and open embrace of humanity and all the great religions. He located “The Path” in all the great faiths, without the subsequent attempts by some Bahai denominations to claim an exclusive authority and interpretation. It was Abdu’l-Baha’s emphasis on the unity and universal truth of all the ways to the Divine Being, the Great Mystery, that attracted me and struck a deep resonance in my soul.

Frederick Glaysher

Tags: Beyond Postmodernism, Beyond Postmodernity, Non-exclusivism in religion

30 Oct 08 The Globe. A Journal.

As long ago as a couple of decades I thought of creating a literary journal named “The Globe,” but the time never seemed right, and I knew the required effort and time would interfere with my own study and writing. Being a very solitary individual and writer, I knew too I did not possess the gregariousness and patience needed to draw together a group of people of similar worldview, literary, artistic, political, and so on, that a publication must have. From very early as a writer, I knew I was largely on my own. Only Robert Hayden and I were able to understand one another, and even then I felt he failed to confront many issues of the highest import, especially in terms of the Baha’i Faith and its cultural and historical implications. The few other young Baha’i would-be artists I knew or heard of were hopelessly naive and incapable of independent thought and reflection. There were no other people of sympathetic vision, aesthetic, moral, spiritual, political, in terms of the United Nations or a cooperative body like it, to which I could turn and work together to create “The Globe.” The prevailing ethos, as always, was entirely closed off in its conventional assumptions.

So I continued on my way. Solitude, study, reading and confronting the masters, wavering between the deepest ravages of self-doubt and despair and the highest exhilarations of vision and inspiration, writing as I could, struggling year after year to find and chart a different course, one true to my experience of life, attempting to embrace all of humanity, or as much of it as I might reach.

And now a new form comes along, over the last several years or decade, now well established, and the time is right for me to turn to and use it, enabling me to pick back up, as it were, in electronic form, the writer’s journal I left off from nearly thirty years ago, back then, after a decade of writing one. Perhaps this is The Globe I’ve wanted for so many years. And a way to speak to humankind.

Frederick Glaysher

Tags: Beyond Postmodernism, Beyond Postmodernity, Robert Hayden, The Globe, writer's journal

29 Oct 08 Crow Hunting

In my early chapbook of nine poems, Crow Hunting, from the 1970s, I found my voice and the worldview that was consonant with my experience of life, which I believe is why I’ve had to look back at it again, writing a preface for it, in order to move forward with The Parliament of Poets. It’s time I publish it now, perhaps before too long, in a limited edition.

Frederick Glaysher

Tags: Beyond Postmodernism, Beyond Postmodernity

28 Oct 08 A Tool An Instrument

Saul Bellow in his 1987 Bennington College address Summations refers to Osip Mandelstam’s comment that “a worldview is a tool and instrument, like a hammer in the hands of a stonemason.” The average reader, Bellow goes on to say, looks always for the worldview, thinking it is everything, filing away the summation, its neat, little abstractions. I would say, many writers, too, make the mistake of fixating upon the worldview, the struggle to achieve an understanding of one’s experience that is not derivative from the prevailing one, a mere reflection of the already thought and written, though so much writing merely reflects the fads of the academy and literati.

Osip Mandelstam and Bellow are right. It is the hammer in the hand of the genuine artist or poet. Painfully, laboriously forged, the tool, once achieved, is no longer to the poet what is of first importance. The work of art, beyond the abstractions and the banalities of “a worldview,” reigns supreme, leads to new states of consciousness that cannot be summed up. They are what art is about.

Art transcends worldview.

Frederick Glaysher

Tags: Apollo 11, Osip Mandelstam, Saul Bellow, Summations

27 Oct 08 By about 1973

By about 1973 I had already written, “my search for God continues.” Where had that come from? Culture? Nurture? My atrophied Catholic upbringing? Or the call of the soul within?

Frederick Glaysher

Tags: Beyond Postmodernism, Beyond Postmodernity

10 Oct 08 Beyond Postmodernism

Now I can see it. Now I understand. It was there from the beginning. In the earliest journals and poems that I wrote, more than thirty-five years ago.  It was the object of the vision itself that attracted me. The vision was the universal form, yet particular, and timely, capable of change and evolving, consonant with the experience of real, imperfect people in concrete situations, unique cultures and times.

Frederick Glaysher

Tags: Beyond Postmodernism, Beyond Postmodernity