That note was fun. I always enjoyed it as a teacher when students saw more and better than I did. After all the point of teaching is to present a way of seeing or thinking, not to tell anyone what to think, though I’m sure I did my share of that too. I just got a note from a former student, now 70, telling me I was still wrong about Prufrock. Ha!
TIME OUT: Simon just threw up some overdone sausage that our resident carnivore had given him. Nasty. Down the front of the chair, onto the floor. Made me forget what I was about here. Ah, pond life.
I thought I would go back to the small pond to see how the ladies were doing. When I got there, Bella, in the pond, slid into the water from the island in the middle of the pond; across from me, on top of the rocks lining the pond, lay Esmerelda. Impressive. She did not slide or dive into the distant (well, 2 feet down) water; she stayed there. I was silent and did not move, except my head, as she moved hers to check the surroundings. Standing there, I remembered another quote from a work on contemplation, either Thomas Merton or Charles Williams: Feels like Williams: contemplation requires “stillness, attention, discipline.” It may be from the mind of a central character in The Greater Trumps, but I am not certain, though I was practicing that at the pond this morning.
Stillness: Esmerelda didn’t move from her perch on the rocks, except at one point to turn toward me. Now it looked as though a good sized rock with two stout legs and a head was facing me. I stayed quiet, didn’t move. Stillness.
Attention: In the pond, Bella came up on my side of the island, glared at my unmoving self, ducked back under the island and stuck her head out on the south side, to my left. There was a piece of food there, an inch from her head; she ignored it. Three blue dragonflies flitted over the pond, left, came back, two, then one, then all three again. The dance of the dragonflies. One settled on a strand of the yellow iris growing out of the pond. I wanted to lie and say it sat on my shoulder for an instant, but it didn’t, though when it was still I could see that its head was green and not blue like its body. Attention is the first key to good reading too. Why does the smoke, the fog, in Prufrock behave like a cat? Are the “you and I” in Prufrock two people or two aspects of one person?
Next, the falling water hit by the sun. I love running water and the way it sparkles with sunlight, even the curb water after a rain as it runs down the slope on Fairway, past four houses, to disappear at the cul-de-sac at the bottom of the street. Like the merry stream in Hawthorne’s woods in The Scarlet Letter. What does water reveal, the thing as image? What does it point to?
Finally, I noticed a strand of silk spider thread running from a long leaf of the iris on my left to a rock on my right. Over the water. How does a spider build a bridge for itself like that, over water? The only way I could see the thread was when the sunlight hit sections. Two inch bars running here and there across the water. Lean from left to right a bit or right to left and the bars moved as the sunlight changed position. Attention.
Discipline: In a way, discipline is easy to understand, difficult to do. Discipline simply involves taking the time to go to the pond in the first place, or anywhere meaningful, to attend to what is really there, in silence. Thinking about discipline and contemplation reminded me of a book I received for my birthday: The Shattering of Loneliness: On Christian Remembrance by Erik Varden. A book well worth reading, which is a form of discipline too. Reading. Going to the pond. Taking the time to attend to what is there, in silence. Discipline.
Pond life. The place. “Stillness, attention, discipline.”
Esmerelda or Esme, facing south with strands of the yellow iris. The island on Esmerelda’s right.