Feeds:
Posts
Comments

I should have thought

3 December 2025 by Ben Howard

Many years ago, when I was still an undergraduate, I traveled from eastern Iowa to the North of England to study English literature at the University of Leeds, a so-called “redbrick” university in West Yorkshire. There I lived for a year in a village on the outskirts of that soot-laden city in a hall of residence built in 1865 from Yorkshire gritstone. Most of my fellow residents were English, but others hailed from such faraway countries as Ghana, South Africa, Iceland, and Rhodesia.

Sometimes in the evenings I would walk down the hall to have a chat with my friend Asmundur (“Asi”) Jonsson, a husky, deep-voiced, older student from Keflavik. Asi smoked an ornate Meerschaum pipe. Sometimes, after I’d offered up a fresh opinion—or, no less likely, a callow misperception—he would sit back in his chair and patiently puff on his pipe as he formulated his response. “I should have thought,” he would finally say, and proceed to address whatever I’d said. More than once, his views differed from mine. I have long since forgotten our opinions, but I recall his opening phrase as vividly as I do the sweet fragrance of his tobacco. I had never heard it before and have rarely heard it since.

“I should have thought” is a verbal phrase cast in what grammarians call the conditional past tense. It places the action, in this case having a thought, in a time prior to the present, before a subsequent event has occurred. In this instance, the subsequent event is the voicing of a different or contrary opinion. For example, were Geoffrey to observe that “I’ve heard that it’s better to brush your teeth first, then floss afterward,” Nigel might reply, “I should have thought it was the other way around.” As this innocuous exchange illustrates, “I should have thought” provides a vehicle for polite disagreement. But even when engaged in more charged conversations, especially those concerning politics and religion, this now rare usage can serve to open the conversational space, establish an appropriate distance between conversationalists, and set a distinctive tone.

In contemporary American life, we have grown accustomed to living in cramped conversational spaces, where there is often little room for a variety of perspectives or a divergence of views. If one participant says something the other finds erroneous, ill-informed, or otherwise objectionable, the conversation may soon be abruptly over. Or worse, it might escalate into an angry confrontation.

By contrast, “I should have thought” expands the conversational arena to accommodate multiple, differing, and opposing views. And it opens the possibility of a “both/and” rather than a “right/wrong” or “either/or” resolution. Even views that stood in polar opposition at the beginning of the conversation may, by its end, prove compatible and even complementary.

By the same token, “I should have thought” widens the emotional distance between the participants in a conversation. It establishes an appropriate space between them. As the Zen teacher Norman Fischer has observed, in any relationship between two people, two components are ever present: their connection and their essential solitude. The two participants may be intimately connected by such bonds as family, friendship, country, or affiliation. At the same time, each has a private inner life that the other has no way of knowing. In the Japanese martial arts, an appropriate combative distance (known as ma-ai) is strictly maintained. Analogously, an appropriate distance in conversation honors both the speakers’ interconnection and their respective solitudes. And, as Fischer puts it, it also creates “[a] space charged with openness, silence, and mystery.”

And that is not all. In its very formality, “I should have thought” forges a link between contemporary usage, which tends to be casual and all too often careless, and the long history of the English language. Asi’s first language was Icelandic. He learned English in a school, where the old rule regarding “should” rather than “would” was still taught and enforced. According to that rule, “should” must be used when speaking in the first person. However archaic, Asi’s locution conjured a linguistic universe in which the observance of such fine distinctions imparted precision to ordinary speech. By extension, it also heightened the beauty and dignity of a conversation.

Today, no one I know would say “I should have thought,” except perhaps ironically or in a role-playing context. The phrase would come across as a pretentious affectation. But might there not be other ways by which the space, distance, and tone once created by that turn of phrase could be re-imagined, if only as a welcome alternative to the rude interruptions and abrupt dismissals, the in-your-face confrontations, and the unnecessary misunderstandings that afflict contemporary American discourse? I should have thought so.

Posted in 1 | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

A peaceable heart

19 November 2025 by Ben Howard

Like the word silly, which once meant “innocent” (“the silly sheep”) but now means “foolish, frivolous, lacking in common sense,” the word contention has a distinctive history. Derived from the Latin contentio, it once meant “striving, struggle, competition.” But sometime in the sixteenth century, contention came to mean “disagreement, argument, fighting.” Unlike silly, contention has retained its earlier meaning, but today it most often conjures scenes of conflict, dysfunction, and disharmony—or, at its most extreme, mortal combat. A contentious person is someone inclined to instigate division, discord, and outright feuding—and, in the worst case, incite violent action.

In its healthiest manifestation, contention is fair-minded competition, physical or intellectual. The Bills and the Chiefs contend for victory on the playing field. Olympians contend for the gold. Nations contend in an open, if regulated, market. But in its unhealthiest forms, contention is first and last a ruthless power struggle. Fairness goes by the board, as do such norms as lawfulness, decency, and respect. Oxford debaters contend, but unless they are prepared to be disqualified, they adhere to established rules. But contending parties in an ungoverned dispute may simply fight to the bitter end, verbally or physically, with no holds barred. All that matters is winning or being in the right, or both.

Contention is often understood to be an existing condition, akin to the temperature of a room or the quality of the air. Likewise, a propensity toward contention is commonly viewed as an aspect of temperament, a trait of personality more likely to harshen than mellow with age. But from the standpoint of Zen practice, contentiousness is a mental and emotional capacity susceptible to changing conditions. With sufficient self-awareness, we can choose at any time to nourish or actively neglect it. At the same time, we can also cultivate a peaceable heart: a heart inclined toward peace.

Toward that end, classic Zen teachings offer a practice known as the Four Great Efforts, an aspect of the Noble Eightfold Path. Practitioners are encouraged to “water the seeds” of such “wholesome” states of mind as mindfulness, patience, kindness, and wisdom, as distinguished from such “unwholesome” states as greed, hatred, and vindictiveness. The first “effort” is to cultivate wholesome states that have already arisen. The second is to nourish wholesome states that have yet to arise. The third is to allow unwholesome states that have already arisen to languish. And the fourth is to do the same with unwholesome states that have yet to arise. These efforts are to be conducted methodically, their aim being the perfection of character. In monastic settings, the practice of the Four Great Efforts may include the recitation of vows and the contemplation of such virtues as patience, kindness, and compassion. For lay practitioners, it may be enough to regularly stop whatever one is doing and check one’s heart for currents of aversion. Bringing contemplative attention to such currents can lessen their destructive power and forestall future harm.

Robert Thurman, an emeritus professor of Indo-European Buddhist Studies at Columbia University, once noted that throughout our everyday lives we are feeding one state of mind or another. We may be doing so habitually and unconsciously, with neither a beneficent nor malevolent intent. But whether we are listening to a quiet, contemplative piece of music or watching a violent, blood-drenched action film, we are directing our attention to a particular object. We are engaging, as it were, in a form of meditation. In the first instance, the mental state being fueled is one of tranquility, harmony, and accord. In the second, it is one of destructive, ego-driven action. But whatever our present state of mind may be, for good or ill we are at once sustaining and strengthening it.

In an old Jewish story, a man is strolling along a sandy beach when a bottle floats by. Out pops a genie, who invites the man to make a wish. Without hesitation, he blurts out, “world peace.” “Oh, I’m sorry,” replies the genie. “A lot of people ask for that, but I’m afraid it’s out of the question. Please make another wish.”

Not everyone would agree with that genie. In the views of such prominent peace advocates as Desmond Tutu, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Thomas Merton, and the Ven. Thich Nhat Hanh, peace between peoples and nations is an attainable, if distant, objective. But, as Thich Nhat Hanh often reminded ardent pacifists back in the 1970s, any serious effort toward peace must begin with ourselves. At any moment, we can examine the presence of contentiousness in our hearts and minds, and, if we so choose, deprive it of favorable conditions. We can practice what the Dalai Lama has called “inner disarmament,” even as we tend a peaceable heart.

Image: Fred Easker, Mississippi Meditation

Posted in 1 | Tagged , , , , | Leave a Comment »

The practice of veneration

22 October 2025 by Ben Howard

In the closing line of his poem “Sandstone Keepsake,” the Irish poet and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney describes himself as “one of the venerators.” That line is striking, not only because the verb venerate has largely disappeared from everyday discourse but also because the spirit of veneration itself, like water in certain parts of the world, is becoming as scarce as it is precious.

Veneration derives from the Latin root veneratio¸which means “reverence or profound respect.” In his poem, which was written during the Troubles, Heaney depicts himself wading on a beach on the Inishowen Peninsula, at the border between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland. There he finds a “chalky, russet” chunk of sandstone, which he subsequently likens to the “long venerated” heart of a 13th-century martyr. And he portrays himself as a humble countryman, out for an evening walk and no threat to the wary British authorities of Northern Ireland, who may well be watching him with binoculars.

Humility is an essential component of veneration. It can be expressed physically through the acts of bowing, kneeling, or prostration. No less important than these outer forms, however, is a mental attitude of selfless regard. In Zen parlance, this attitude is sometimes described as “lowering the mast of the self.” Often it is accompanied by silence, stillness, and a profound sense of gratitude.

In formal religion, the objects of veneration have most often been spiritual leaders, saints, martyrs, texts, statues, and sites regarded as sacred. A short list might include the Cross, the Shroud of Turin, the Torah, the Koran, Bodh Gaya, Mecca, and Bethlehem. Informally, however, those unaffiliated with organized religion can elect to venerate an art such as painting, sculpture, or poetry; an institution, such as higher education, medicine, or law; a trade, vocation, or profession; the wild natural world; blood or spiritual ancestors; or, not least, the person or persons standing before them. In traditional Asian cultures, an attitude of veneration may be expressed by pressing the palms of one’s two hands together and making a nod or bow. More subtly, it can be expressed by offering a friend a gift with both hands.

In the Zen monastic tradition, a sense of veneration extends to the familiar objects of everyday life, such as one’s cushion, eating bowls, garments, and utensils. Beyond that, it also encompasses such tasks as cooking, cleaning, gardening, and temple maintenance. And in Japanese Zen, it is closely associated with two specific practices.

The first of those practices is known as ma, which roughly translates as “giving [an object] appropriate space.” Whether the activity be the tea ceremony, flower arranging, calligraphy, or one of the martial arts, this principle enjoins the practitioner to honor both the objects of attention and the space around them. In his notebooks the writer and Zen practitioner Peter Matthiessen spoke of the “fierce cleanliness” of Dai Bosatsu Zendo, the monastery where he learned the practice of Zen. Having trained there myself, and having washed its windows, vacuumed its tatami mats, and washed its floors by assuming a deep crouch and running down its Tasmanian oak floors with a wet cloth, I can attest to the cleanliness of its interiors. But equally important were the austerity and minimalism of its décor. The objects to be dusted and meticulously arranged were few and far between, and the spaces between them felt as present as the objects themselves. Both their presence and the space between them embodied the “Way” of ma.

As the conscientious, if temporary, steward of those objects, I learned to embody the second principle of veneration, known in Zen as menmitsu-no-kafu. Derived from roots meaning “interwoven” and “family,” menmitsu refers to a warm, wholehearted, and intimate quality of attention to the objects in one’s care. However humble or precious, those objects are to be treated with what is sometimes called “grandmother mind,” as though they were members of one’s family. Whether the items in question be the three bowls used in oryoki (formal Zen meals), the towels folded and placed on the beds of incoming guests, the exact, woodpecker-like striking of the han (wooden block) to initiate a sitting, or the placement of one’s hands when engaged in zazen (seated meditation), the Way of menmitsu may be understood as a form of kinetic, daily veneration.

John Daido Loori Roshi, an American Zen master, once noted that it was impossible to bow in gratitude and complain at the same time. Analogously, it is difficult, if not impossible, to nurture the spirit of veneration while in pursuit of riches, importance, power, and conquest. The two sets of values are incompatible. But even at a time when our cultural ethos has sharply veered toward the latter way of being, it is still possible to become, like Seamus Heaney, one of the venerators. At any given moment, it is still possible to choose.

—–

To read the full text of “Sandstone Keepsake,” see https://voetica.com/poem/7555.

Photo: Dai Bosatsu Zendo

Posted in 1 | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Decent ordinary life

8 July 2025 by Ben Howard

If you follow the national and international news, you may be forgiven for concluding that current political, economic, and military developments are the most important things in this turning world. Next to them, the ordinary activities of daily life may seem slight, undramatic, and banal. But two paintings, both of them focused on everyday life, suggest otherwise.

Johannes Vermeer’s A View of Delft (c. 1660-1663) is by common consensus a great work of art. When Marcel Proust, author of Remembrance of Things Past, viewed the painting in a museum in the Hague, he pronounced it “the most beautiful painting in the world.” Over the past two centuries, the collective estimate of art critics and historians has not been far behind.

A View of Delft is a cityscape. The painting portrays the city of Delft, Holland, as seen from a southeastern perspective. From the position of the sun, it is evident that the time is early morning. In the foreground is the harbor, normally a bustling venue, but at this hour it is nearly empty, with only a stationary barge, two herring boats, and a few sailing vessels occupying its waters.  In the middle distance, the walls of the city’s brownstone and brick buildings are darkened by shadows. Its famous gates and fortifications, one of Delft’s distinctive features, are also enshadowed, their rough textures rendered by dots of paint. Higher up, however, the morning sunlight bathes the city’s roofs and steeples. Most striking is the white spire of Nieuwe Kirk, where Vermeer was baptized, a spiritual center of a thriving commercial city. Above the city are scudding clouds.

As the critic Karl Schutz has noted, A View of Delft, for all its masterly illusionism, has the feeling of a snapshot. Unlike a tranquil pastoral landscape, such as John Constable might have painted, Vermeer’s picture conveys a sense of activity frozen in time, an illusion created in part by the momentary ripples in the waters of the harbor. And though the painting possesses a serenity of its own, it is that of normal, everyday life. That effect is further enhanced by the presence of human figures in the immediate foreground, near the water. On the left, two well-dressed burghers, accompanied by two women, are waiting for the barge; not far away, two women in peasant attire are engaged in conversation. I have a reproduction of A View of Delft in my study, and whenever I stop to look at it, I am drawn to the image of those men and women and the activity they represent: casual human interaction, unhindered by the currents of political and social conflict.

James McIntosh Patrick’s The Tay Bridge from My Studio Window (1948) conveys a similar impression. McIntosh Patrick’s paintings are well-known in his native Scotland, and this picture is his most iconic work. Set in the city of Dundee, where McIntosh Patrick lived and worked, it balances a sense of intimacy against a panoramic vista.

It’s late afternoon. Long, parallel shadows thrown by a wrought-iron fence traverse the lawn in the foreground. At the gate of the fence stands the painter’s wife, who is returning from her errands. On the street, a cyclist (identified as the artist’s son) is pedaling past. A greengrocer making deliveries in his horse-drawn cart has momentarily paused. His horse stands still. On the sidewalk on the far side of the street, a man is walking his dogs, and a mother is pushing a stroller. Beyond them lies a wide sward known as Magdalen Green. Above it, the Tay Railway Bridge winds like a serpent above the Tay Estuary, where a cargo ship is making its slow passage across the water. Two locomotives pulling trains send white plumes of smoke into the overcast sky.

As the essayist Chris Arthur has observed, McIntosh Patrick’s painting creates a compelling illusion of arrested activity. In Arthur’s words, the picture leaves “a strong impression of capturing a moment.” The figures and objects in motion in the painting, particularly the cyclist, the dog walker, the cargo ship, and the steaming locomotives, though “captive in paint,” are “replete with a sense of movement.” McIntosh Patrick’s art “emphasizes the interruption of a flow.”

That it does. But like A View of Delft, it also honors the beauty waiting to be discovered in daily activities and common things. It is no accident that I also have a framed reproduction of McIntosh Patrick’s painting on my wall, where it quietly reminds me of the dignity of everyday life. The social, political, and economic ethos within which these paintings were created was no less fraught than our own, if not more so. But just as Zen monastics train themselves daily to remain in the present and to attend respectfully to ordinary things, the creators of these timeless paintings invert the news media’s conventional hierarchies of interest and value, giving precedence not to the mighty, the rich, and the warlike but to decent ordinary life.

Karl Schutz, Vermeer: The Complete Works. 45th ed. (Taschen, 2021).

Chris Arthur, What Is It Like to Be Alive? (Eastover Press, 2024), 237-258.

Posted in 1 | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

The inside story

27 May 2025 by Ben Howard

Continue Reading »

Posted in 1 | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Wrens’ nests

30 April 2025 by Ben Howard

In the opening lines of his poem “Gauze,” Ted Kooser, a former Poet Laureate of the United States, asks a provocative question: “Can a man in his eighties, with cancer, / be happy?” In the remaining lines, he provides a tentative answer:

                        It seems that he can, cutting

            yesterday’s gauze dressing in pieces

–

            to scatter over the grass for the wrens

            who’ve come back again after another

            long winter and are building their nests

–

            in his birdhouses built with old boards

            that he salvaged in happiness, which he

            hammered together in happiness too.

If Kooser’s response to his own question sounds surprising, even startling, it is probably because it runs athwart conventional assumptions. In contemporary Western culture, old age is not commonly regarded as a time of exceptional happiness. On the contrary, it is often characterized as a kind of sunset: a time of loss, regret, physical indignity, and relative incapacity. Likewise, a critical, if not incurable, disease would seem incompatible with a general mood of happiness. Kooser’s pivotal use of the verb seems suggests that even he cannot quite believe what he is experiencing.

            From the vantage point of Zen teachings, however, Kooser’s experience of happiness amidst adverse conditions is not all that unusual. It seems entirely plausible. This is because Zen teachings sharply distinguish between external events and our internal responses. The former are often well out of our control. The latter are often a matter of choice, however conscious or unconscious.

            Usually, this distinction is framed as the difference between pain and conditioned suffering. Pain is what happens to us. Conditioned suffering is what we inflict upon ourselves through our reactions and responses, as when we catastrophize without sufficient evidence or engage in fearful speculation. Classical Buddhism likens the pain attendant to harsh external conditions to an arrow piercing our bodies. Our negative, conditioned responses are like a second arrow shot into the open wound.

            With respect to aging, anyone of a certain age can confirm that the first arrow and its impact are all too real. Beyond the maladies already mentioned, there may be cognitive impairments, the risk of taking a life-altering fall, or the eventual need for joint replacements, to name a few. These and other infirmities can make the lives of elderly people challenging, to say the least.

            At the same time, we have a choice. We can deny, resist, exaggerate, or otherwise worsen our afflictions.  Or we can acknowledge them, seek treatment, and, if possible, accept them for what they are. If the former response is akin to the second arrow, the latter affords at least a possible end to conditioned suffering.

            With respect to illness and disease, true acknowledgment and acceptance may be a far more complex and difficult matter. And it is also an individual one, dependent on temperament, overall health, and many other variables. For those with high pain thresholds and a cultivated tolerance for the uncertain and the unknowable, it is one thing. For those with neither, it is quite another.

            What Ted Kooser’s poem distinctively reflects is an open and curious but realistic sensibility discovering, as if for the first time, that happiness can co-exist with the realities of aging and the presence of a serious illness. It is not as if he is fully accepting either. Rather, he is implying that what Zen teachings would call contentment is ultimately not determined by externally imposed conditions. Its sources are within.

            For Kooser those sources would appear to include the pleasures of making and making do with what is at hand; the sense of being an integral part of nature rather than merely an outside observer; the exercise of imagination in returning a manufactured, disposable fabric to the natural world; and, not least, the neighborly company of wrens, one of the most comely and sonorous of North American birds.

—

Read the full text of “Gauze” in Raft (Copper Canyon Press, 2024), Ted Kooser’s most recent book.

Posted in 1 | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

It’s about the music

2 April 2025 by Ben Howard

Andres Segovia once called the classical guitar a small orchestra. Traditionally, its back and sides are made of rosewood, its soundboard of spruce or cedar. Together with these resonant woods, its six nylon strings, three or four of them wire-wound, can produce a rich variety of tones, ranging from the velvety to the brilliant, the smoky to the metallic. Depending on where the player’s right hand is positioned, the guitar can imitate instruments as diverse as the clarinet, the cello, the flute, and the snare drum. Notes on the so-called open strings (E, A, D, G, B, E) can be played on multiple places on the fingerboard, each placement creating a distinctive timbre. Notes can also be played as harmonics, natural or artificial. Like stops on a pipe organ, these technical options greatly expand the expressive potential of the classical guitar. At the same time, they make it one of the more difficult instruments to play well. And for some players, that difficulty is only compounded when an audience is listening.

For many years, I taught classical guitar at Alfred University. I also took part in the Performing Arts Division’s annual faculty recitals. Most often I played solo pieces from the Renaissance, Baroque, Romantic, and modern repertoires. But one year I invited an advanced student to join me in a duet. For our offering I chose “My Lord Willoughby’s Welcome Home” by John Dowland (1563-1626), a stately, lyrical piece originally composed for Renaissance lute. The arrangement for guitar included an optional second part, which I asked my student to learn. That the second part was optional proved crucial to our public performance. Halfway through, my student lost his way and had to drop out, leaving me to finish the piece alone. As we left the stage, he whispered, “I’m sorry, Ben.”

There was no need to apologize. Stage fright is far more common than one might think. It has afflicted not only inexperienced amateurs but also seasoned professionals of the stature of Frederic Chopin, Vladimir Horowitz, Glenn Gould, Laurence Olivier, and Pablo Casals, to name a few. And it can strike when least expected. Those who suffer from chronic stage fright can either cease to perform publicly, as Gould chose to do, or find reliable ways to settle their nerves. Proven stratagems include controlled breathing, yoga, Tai Chi, and the repetition of a mantra.

For performers who are also Zen practitioners, the daily experience of zazen (seated meditation) can also create a foundation for dealing with stage fright, not so much by enabling a performer to “conquer” it as by learning to integrate anxiety and its physical symptoms into one’s present experience. The deep breathing developed during sitting meditation can of course be beneficial. It stimulates the vagus nerve and helps the body relax. No less important, however, are three practices intrinsic to Zen meditation, namely the cultivation of awareness, the development of presence, and the discipline of selfless contemplation.

Zen practice trains us to bring awareness to every moment of our lives. This begins with mindfulness of breathing, posture, and state of mind, but it also extends to the immediate environment: its temperature, lighting, ambient noises, and so on. For a performing soloist, the experience of stepping on stage and suddenly facing a darkened, hushed auditorium can all too easily precipitate anxiety. Becoming aware of it as soon as it arises can forestall its spiraling into a debilitating attack. Conversely, being caught unawares, as my student evidently was, can subvert and even abort the most well-rehearsed performance.

Zen practice also cultivates presence: the capacity to be continuously present for the present moment. David Russell, a contemporary master of the guitar, once noted that audiences rarely hear every note being played. It is the guitarist’s job to direct attention to the notes that matter most. And to do that, performers must themselves remain present for every note, phrase, and cadence they are playing. Doing so can make the difference between an anxious, lifeless performance and a fresh, expressive one. And because fear is so often future-based, returning to presence can also be a potent antidote to stage fright.

And last, Zen practice teaches us to align the self with things as they are, however pleasant or unpleasant. “When it’s hot, be completely hot,” one Zen master put it. In the case of musical performance, this means aligning ourselves with such intricacies as the crescendos and decrescendos, the legatos and staccatos, and, not least, the points of rest in the music we are playing. Under the pressure of performance, it is easy to forget that the activity in which we are engaged is not ultimately about ourselves. It’s about the music. And to the degree that we can forget ourselves and listen, selflessly and contemplatively, to the music’s pulse and flow, we will not only enhance our performance and garner deserved applause. We will also share with our audience the music’s inherent depth and beauty.

Photo: My 2023 Masaki Sakarai guitar

Listen to my rendition of J.S. Bach’s “Sleepers Awake” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4YbhKkq9Wk

Listen to “My Lord Wlloughby’s Welcome Home” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzYHqiZDUG4.

Posted in 1 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

An unexpected lightness

19 March 2025 by Ben Howard

In the summer of the year 2000, I had the good fortune to be spending the month of June in Ireland, where I was teaching Irish literature to American students at Trinity College, Dublin. One sunny afternoon, as I was walking down Nassau Street in central Dublin, I stopped to browse at a sidewalk bookstall.

Enclosed in wooden trays were dozens of used books, including hefty, well-worn volumes on Irish history, culture, literature, and topography; slim, tattered collections by obscure Irish poets; dated anthologies of Irish drama, short stories, and essays; and biographies of such luminaries as Michael Davitt, Michael Collins, and Éamon de Valera. Finding many books of interest but none I cared to buy, I was about to leave, when another book caught my eye. Lo and behold, it was a book of my own: my verse novella, Midcentury, which my Irish publisher, Salmon Poetry, had released three years earlier.

Midcentury is a book-length, blank-verse meditation, narrated by a middle-aged American lexicographer living alone in Ireland in the nineteen-forties. Down on his luck and overly fond of Irish whiskey, he is seeking solace in the Irish landscape and Ireland’s wartime neutrality. His dominant themes, interwoven through six, interrelated sections in the manner of a string quartet, include impermanence, dispossession, forgiveness, the roots of language, Ireland’s tragic history, and his own spiritual deracination and renewal.

I began the  the first section, “The Word from Dublin, 1944,” while in residence at Yaddo, the writers’ retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York. The remaining sections were written in multiple venues over the next three years. I completed the book in 1995 while staying at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre (Annaghmakerrig), the Irish writers’ retreat in Co. Monaghan. Before I had even begun this project, I might add, months of historical research into mid-twentieth-century Irish history and culture had laid its foundation. And there it was, my magnum opus, for sale on a Dublin sidewalk for less than a pint of Guinness.

“All conditioned things,” the Buddha is reported to have said, “are of the nature of vanishing.” Where books are concerned, those conditions include the vagaries of publishing, marketing, aesthetic fashion, critical opinion, and time itself, which can be cruel to unprotected ink and paper. With obvious exceptions, most authors should not be surprised to see their books vanish or be forgotten in due time—and often sooner rather than later. (With Midcentury I’ve had better luck: according to WorldCat, the worldwide library database, the book is currently in 89 libraries, here and abroad). No matter how many hours went into the making of a book, it can disappear quickly and with scarcely a trace, taking with it whatever ephemeral acclaim it might have accrued. In his poem “Provide, Provide!” Robert Frost puts the matter succinctly: “No memory of having starred / Atones for later disregard.”

What I am speaking of, of course, is the reality of impermanence, which the Zen teacher Norman Fischer has called the “cornerstone of Buddhist teachings and practice.” For Frost, the remedy was to “make the whole stock exchange your own,” which might increase the chances of having interested parties at one’s bedside as the end draws near. “Better to go down dignified,” he advised, “With boughten friendship at your side / Than none at all.” From the perspective of Zen teachings, however, the issue is neither so materialistically defined nor so easily resolved. Nor is impermanence something we can deal with later. It is immanent, if not always apparent, in things as they appear to us in the here and now. And, as Fischer puts it, “to understand impermanence at the deepest level, and to merge with it fully, is the whole of the Buddhist path.” Mindfulness, the central practice of Zen meditation, is “not a way to cope with or overcome impermanence. It is the way to fully appreciate and live it.”

That is more easily said than done. A lifetime of Western conditioning militates against it. But having practiced Zen for more than three decades, I can report that eventually one can get the hang of living within, rather than outside, the reality of impermanence. And should that happen, you may find yourself experiencing an unexpected lightness of being. As the Vietnamese master Thich Nhat Hanh often noted, we suffer not because things are impermanent but because we expect them to be permanent when they are not. Truly releasing that expectation can lift a self-inflicted burden, offer a fresh way of seeing, and open a gate to the next new experience. And for Zen practitioners who are also creative artists, living in alignment with impermanence rather than habitually resisting it can both facilitate the process of artistic creation and make it far more enjoyable. “Long live impermanence!” Thich Nhat Hanh, a poet and the author of more than a hundred books, delighted in saying, with only the gentlest irony in his tone.

Norman Fischer, When You Greet Me I Bow (Shambhala, 2022), 99, 102.

Photo: “At the Bookstall,” by garryknight (Creative Commons)

 

Posted in 1 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments »

A chair in snow

24 February 2025 by Ben Howard

One afternoon not long ago, as I was walking in a local gym, I watched a student shooting hoops in an unusual way. On the fingertips of his right hand, he held a basketball. In the palm of his left, he held a cell phone. After taking a single-handed shot, and before the ball had even hit the backboard, he turned his attention to his cell phone. Repeated over and over, his toggling had a rhythm of its own. But it also divided his attention, which could not have been good for his game. And, unwittingly, he was repeatedly flouting a cardinal principle of Zen practice.

In Japanese Zen, that principle is known as ichigyo zammai, which means “doing one thing at a time.” As Zen masters ancient and modern have often reminded us, by giving full attention to whatever we might be doing we not only develop our powers of concentration. We also cultivate the grounded, peaceful state of samadhi: an equanimous, non-reactive, and natural alignment with the flow of reality. “Combust yourself entirely,” a familiar Zen saying, encapsulates this root tenet of the practice.

In classical Japanese poetry, the practice of ichigyo zammai undergirds that most familiar of Japanese poetic forms, the haiku:

A solitary

crow on a bare branch—

autumn evening.

— Basho

In this miniature word-painting, the duality of subject and object dissolves in the meeting of poet and crow. Rather than utilize the crow as a metaphor or symbol, Basho amplifies the bird’s singular presence. What might have been an act of ego-centered observation becomes a moment of life-centered, selfless contemplation.

In Western poetry, which tends to regard encounters with the natural world as occasions for moral, metaphysical, or psychological reflection (“I wandered lonely as a cloud”), there is no exact equivalent of the Japanese haiku. But a parallel may be seen in a sub-genre of lyric poetry known in German as the dinggedicht and in English as the “thing-poem.” As those labels suggest, poems of this kind concentrate on a single thing. And often the poet establishes, in Martin Buber’s famous formulation, an “I-Thou” rather than an “I-It” relationship with the object at hand.

In Rainer Maria Rilke’s “The Panther,” for example, the narrator’s consciousness merges with that of a panther confined to its cage. In Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Fish,” the narrator’s sporting, anthrocentric frame of mind morphs into one of reverence and awe. And in the poems of such Zen-trained American poets as Gary Snyder, W.S. Merwin, and Jane Hirshfield, the narrators typically treat their objects of attention with deep respect and disinterested regard.

Such is the case in Hirshfield’s poem “A Chair in Snow,” where the narrator contemplates a snow-covered chair, focusing on the quiddity, or “whatness,” of her subject. After observing that a chair covered with snow ought to be like any other object “whited / & rounded,” she distinguishes it from all other snow-covered objects primarily by virtue of its function:

more than a bed

more than a hat or house

 a chair is shaped for just one thing

 

 to hold

 a soul its quick and few bendable

 hours

 

 perhaps a king

 

 not to hold snow

 not to hold flowers

For Hirshfield, there is something melancholy in this scene. “[A] chair in snow,” she notes, “is always sad.” Presumably, this sadness stems from the chair being isolated and out of place in an alien environment. But the chair’s stark displacement is also an essential component of its singularity.

As a young woman, Jane Hirshfield spent eight years in Zen training, first at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in California’s Ventana Wilderness and subsequently at the San Francisco Zen Center and Green Gulch Farm. In 1979 she received lay ordination in Soto Zen. Reflecting on those early, intensive experiences, Hirshfield, now in her seventies, has remarked that they have influenced her life and work ever since. In its concentration, its intimacy with its subject, and its spirit of inquiry, “A Chair in Snow” vividly confirms that claim.

Beyond that, Hirshfield’s poem represents a quality of sustained, one-pointed attention that is growing increasingly rare in our culture, where millions of people experience their smart phones as vital appendages and frequent scrolling-and-swiping as a necessary, if not obsessive, activity. As Chris Hayes, in his book The Siren’s Call (Penguin, 2025), has noted, attention has become a commodity, which the titans of social media compete to manipulate and otherwise control. And the fragmentation of attention is fast becoming the norm.

To those pernicious social trends, the daily practice of ichigyo zammai offers a potent antidote. By their very nature, the twin disciplines of doing one thing and concentrating on one object at a time settle the restless mind and calm the anxious heart. And for those young people I have observed jaywalking across busy streets, their heads bowed and their eyes fixed on their cell phones, this venerable practice might prove as life-preserving as it is timely.

—

To read the full text of “A Chair in Snow,” see

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/56174/a-chair-in-snow.  

Posted in 1 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Judgment and discernment

29 January 2025 by Ben Howard

Imagine, if you will, that you are having lunch with a friend in your favorite diner. It’s a cold winter’s day, and both of you have ordered bowls of chili. Sampling a spoonful, your friend notes that the chili is spicier than usual. That’s fine with him but not so fine with you. It’s far too hot for your palate. But as you gingerly swallow another spoonful, you recall a question one Zen student asked another: “Are you tasting or judging?” And in the present instance, has the latter function superseded the former?*

Perhaps no modern Western poem more succinctly embodies the tension between tasting and judging—and, more broadly, between sensory experience and judgmental thought—than William Carlos Williams’ “This is Just to Say”:

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

–

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast

–

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

           

Williams wrote this haiku-like poem in 1934, when modernism in general and the poetic movement known as Imagism were in full flower. “No ideas but in things,” Williams’s aesthetic creed, became a slogan for that movement. Primarily through its imagery, the present poem establishes its setting, its dramatic conflict, and its confessional tone in its first two stanzas. In the third, however, the narrator’s attention turns to the taste of the plums, which overrides his compunctions. His sensory impressions take precedence over his concern for the fairness of his actions. Tasting, in short, trumps moral judgment.

If that is true in Williams’s poem, it is less often true in our interior lives. Quite the opposite. Unless we have trained ourselves to remain in the moment and to attend to what we are presently experiencing, more likely than not our minds will revert to what neuroscientists call their “default mode,” which is to say, to scattered, reactive thinking, much of it focused on a remembered past or an imagined future.  And no small part of that thinking will consist of judgments, whether trivial (“This tea is bitter”) or profound (“I have wasted my life”). Not infrequently, these judgments may be accompanied by a sense of separateness and by feelings of superiority or inferiority in relation to whatever is being judged. And all too often, our judgments will be reactive and dismissive, closing the door to any further inquiry.

To be sure, many situations in everyday life require us to make judgments and to act accordingly, often without sufficient time to consider every relevant factor. Parents, teachers, and administrators, for example, must frequently decide on the spot how to respond fairly and even-handedly to conflicts and crises as they arise. And without question, the quality of judiciousness is both a desirable personal trait and a sign of moral maturity.  But to cultivate judiciousness is one thing, and to adopt a judgmental attitude toward every new experience is quite another. That attitude can easily harden into a mental habit, and that habit can itself become an element of character. Just as the cultivation of sensory awareness can foster hyper-sensitivity, the virtue of judiciousness can calcify into the vice of self-righteousness, turning us into pale replicas of Shakespeare’s Polonius, whom T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock aptly describes as “full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse.”

Fortunately, there is a middle ground between those two extremes, namely the faculty of discernment. The word discern derives from a Latin root meaning “to separate,” but in its practical application, to discern means to distinguish one thing from another. Unlike a reflexive, judgmental response, discernment allows us to remain open to our present experience, as we watch, listen, smell, or taste and endeavor to distinguish this from that. As but one example, here is a poem by the late U.S. Poet Laureate Howard Nemerov (1921 -1991):

BECAUSE YOU ASKED ABOUT THE LINE BETWEEN PROSE AND POETRY   

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle

That while you watched turned to pieces of snow

Riding a gradient invisible

From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

–

There came a moment that you couldn’t tell.

And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

In these lines, a discerning critical intelligence in concert with a fertile poetic imagination observes a natural phenomenon, likening it to a distinction between literary genres. No judgment is expressed. Rather than expatiate on the traits and merits, respectively, of prose and poetry, Nemerov investigates his subject, which becomes the other half of an “I-Thou,” rather than an “I-It,” relationship. And his gentle, memorable poem, composed by a writer who was both a superb poet and a gifted essayist, becomes an act of disinterested, self-forgetful contemplation.

—-

* In her book Ordinary Wonder, the Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck reports overhearing this question while she was having lunch with her students. Charlotte Joko Beck, Ordinary Wonder (Shambhala, 2022), 157.

Posted in 1, meditation | Tagged , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Older Posts »