I have begun,
when I’m weary and can’t decide an answer to a bewildering question
to ask my dead friends for their opinion
and the answer is often immediate and clear.
Should I take the job? Move to the city? Should I try to conceive a child
in my middle age?
They stand in unison shaking their heads and smiling—whatever leads
to joy, they always answer,
to more life and less worry. I look into the vase where Billy’s ashes were—
it’s green in there, a green vase,
and I ask Billy if I should return the difficult phone call, and he says, yes.
Billy’s already gone through the frightening door,
whatever he says I’ll do.
‘My Dead Friends’
Marie Howe
Maps and charts are ways of seeing. They are ways of interpreting the world from my own viewpoint. They can also be a sign of my own cultural and linguistic norms. For example in Saving Time, Jenny Odell cites Tyson Yunkaporta, whose book Sand Talk attempts to tease out some of the different cultural norms inherent in indigenous thinking:
Yunkaporta complains that “it is hard to write in English when you’ve been talking to your great-grandmother on the phone, but she is also your niece, and in her language there are no separate words for time and space.” He explains that in his great-grandmother/ niece’s kinship system, there is a reset every three generations where your grandparents’ parents get classified as your children, because “the granny’s mother goes back to the center and becomes the child.” Furthermore, a question that translates in English as “What place?” actually means “What time?” According to the paradigm his great-grandmother/ niece uses, these two features are naturally intertwined: “Kinship moves in cycles, the land moves in seasonal cycles, the sky moves in stellar cycles, and time is so bound up in those things that it is not even a separate concept from space. We experience time in a very different way from people immersed in flat schedules and story-less surfaces. In our spheres of existence, time does not go in a straight line, and it is as tangible as the ground we stand on.
Odell draws my attention to that final phrase, ‘Note how different “the ground we stand on” is from abstract space. Yunkaporta’s “ground” is not a metaphor. It is referring to real ground, every bit as concrete as the Newtonian, imagined grid of space as empty, abstract, and “flat.”’ She goes on to explain how she was confronted by Yunkaporta’s complaint,
that the word nonlinear casts linearity as the default. He mentions a man who “tried going in a straight line many thousands of years ago and was called wamba (crazy) and punished by being thrown up into the sky,” adding that “this is a very old story, one of many stories that tell us how we must travel and think in free-ranging patterns, warning us against charging ahead in crazy ways.”
Is my Advent journey one of straight lines? No. I approach the celebration of the birth of Christ again, but also as if it were the first time. This year’s Advent retreat overlaps and spirals with the one before it, and the one before that. In this way my sense of time becomes a deep one. And it continues back (or forward) beyond my birth. In this way, the Wise-Ones become my ancestors. I journey across the ever-sifting sands of time as one of them, re-dreaming the world I wait for as I go.
I am waiting for my case to come up
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting for someone
to really discover America
and wail
and I am waiting
for the discovery
of a new symbolic western frontier
and I am waiting
for the American Eagle
to really spread its wings
and straighten up and fly right
and I am waiting
for the Age of Anxiety
to drop dead
and I am waiting
for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe
for anarchy
and I am waiting
for the final withering away
of all governments
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder
I am waiting for the Second Coming
and I am waiting
for a religious revival
to sweep thru the state of Arizona
and I am waiting
for the Grapes of Wrath to be stored
and I am waiting
for them to prove
that God is really American
and I am waiting
to see God on television
piped onto church altars
if only they can find
the right channel
to tune in on
and I am waiting
for the Last Supper to be served again
with a strange new appetizer
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder
I am waiting for my number to be called
and I am waiting
for the Salvation Army to take over
and I am waiting
for the meek to be blessed
and inherit the earth
without taxes
and I am waiting
for forests and animals
to reclaim the earth as theirs
and I am waiting
for a way to be devised
to destroy all nationalisms
without killing anybody
and I am waiting
for linnets and planets to fall like rain
and I am waiting for lovers and weepers
to lie down together again
in a new rebirth of wonder
I am waiting for the Great Divide to be crossed
and I am anxiously waiting
for the secret of eternal life to be discovered
by an obscure general practitioner
and I am waiting
for the storms of life
to be over
and I am waiting
to set sail for happiness
and I am waiting
for a reconstructed Mayflower
to reach America
with its picture story and tv rights
sold in advance to the natives
and I am waiting
for the lost music to sound again
in the Lost Continent
in a new rebirth of wonder
I am waiting for the day
that maketh all things clear
and I am awaiting retribution
for what America did
to Tom Sawyer
and I am waiting
for Alice in Wonderland
to retransmit to me
her total dream of innocence
and I am waiting
for Childe Roland to come
to the final darkest tower
and I am waiting
for Aphrodite
to grow live arms
at a final disarmament conference
in a new rebirth of wonder
I am waiting
to get some intimations
of immortality
by recollecting my early childhood
and I am waiting
for the green mornings to come again
youth’s dumb green fields come back again
and I am waiting
for some strains of unpremeditated art
to shake my typewriter
and I am waiting to write
the great indelible poem
and I am waiting
for the last long careless rapture
and I am perpetually waiting
for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn
to catch each other up at last
and embrace
and I am awaiting
perpetually and forever
a renaissance of wonder
‘I am waiting’
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
how to travel in cycles. (iPhone image)
image into ikon 