Where.

Gus: What’s to love? Where is the Whopper? Or the soul that jumps in the living river – where is it? And where are these sages and buddhas holing up, now that we really need them?

Titus: Would you know one if you met one? Have you even looked? How hard did you look? How easy should they be to find? Look, Gus: why can’t a duffer like me catch fish? Isn’t the answer obvious? Isn’t it because at my present level of skill the fish would have to be so damned dumb and easily duped and utterly unelusive that they wouldn’t be worth catching? How much more elusive should a thing so wondrous as the soul be? It’s not a hatchery trout! And are you sure it’s never flashed inside you? What was it in you that loved to watch Thomas Bigeater fish? What healed you and made you happy the night you remembered Bill Bob’s pine knot and our elusive twins? What nearly jumped out of your rib cage and ravaged your brain the day you met the elusive Eddy?

Fisherman should be the easiest of men to convince to commence the search for the soul, because fishing is nothing but the pursuit of the elusive. Fish invisible to laymen like me are visible to anglers like you by a hundred subtle signs. How can you be so sagacious and patient in seeking fish, and so hasty and thick as to write off your soul because you can’t see it?

David James Duncan, from The River Why, an excellent book.

"Waltz Whitman"

Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, and His Royal Highness of Histrionics pay tribute ...

Look!

Wasse, Through the Window, 1926

CHILDHOOD'S RETREAT

It’s in the perilous boughs of the tree

out of blue sky    the wind

sings loudest surrounding me.

And solitude,   a wild solitude

’s reveald,  fearfully,  high   I’d climb

into the shaking uncertainties,

part out of longing,  part   daring my self,

part to see that

widening of the world, part

to find my own, my secret

hiding sense and place, where from afar

all voices and scenes come back

—the barking of a dog, autumnal burnings,

far calls,  close calls—the boy I was

calls out to me

here the man where I am “Look!

I’ve been where you

most fear to be.”

Robert Duncan

Cosmos.

Wyeth, N.C., Thoreau Fishing at Walden, 1936

A native is a man or creature or plant indigenous to a limited geographical area - a space boundaried and defined by mountains, rivers, or coastline (not by latitudes, longitudes, or state and county lines), with its own peculiar mixture of weeds, trees, bugs, birds, flowers, streams, hills, rocks, and critters (including people), its own nuances of rain, wind, and seasonal change. Native intelligence develops through an unspoken or soft spoken relationship with these interwoven things: it evolves as the native involves himself in his region. A non-native awakes in the morning in a body in a bed in a room in a building on a street in a county in a state in a nation. A native awakes in the in the center of a little cosmos - or a big one, if his intelligence is vast - and he wears this cosmos like a robe, senses the barely perceptible shiftings, migrations, moods, and machinations of its creatures, its growing green things, its earth and sky. Native intelligence is what Huck Finn had rafting the Mississippi, what Thoreau had by his pond, what Kerouac had in Desolation Lookout and lost entirely the instant he caught a whiff of any city. But some have it in cities - like the Artful Dodger, picking his way through a crowd of London pockets; like Mother Teresa in the Calcutta slums. Sissy Hankshaw had it on freeways, Woody Guthrie in crowds of fruit pickers, Ghandi in jails. Almost everybody has a dab of it wherever he or she feels most at home.

David James Duncan, from The River Why

Guy Clark, "To Live is To Fly"

Think of all the poetry

And the pickin' down the line

Stuart Duncan, fiddle ...

Happy Birthday, Lovett

Lyle Lovett was born on this day in 1957.

"Pantry," with Stuart Duncan on fiddle ...

Wild.

You were once wild here. Don’t let them tame you.

Isadore Duncan

To be painted on the classroom wall.

Uphold.

Unknown, Opening day, Bennett Park, 1911. Tigers vs. White Sox, Davy Jones at bat, Billy Sullivan catching. Game played in snow storm, 1911

Baseball is not life. It is a fiction, a metaphor. And a ballplayer is a man who agrees to uphold that metaphor as though lives were at stake.

David James Duncan

Guy Clark, "Better Days"

A young Stuart Duncan on fiddle ...

 

Time.

There are many things worth telling that are not quite narrative. And eternity itself possesses no beginning, middle or end. Fossils, arrowheads, castle ruins, empty crosses: from the Parthenon to the Bodhi tree to a grown man's or woman's old stuffed bear, what moves us about many objects is not what remains but what has vanished. There comes a time, thanks to rivers, when a few beautiful old teeth are all that remain of the two-hundred-foot spires of life we call trees. There comes a river, whose current is time, that does a similar sculpting in the mind.

David James Duncan

Worship.

Strategic.

STRATEGIC WITHDRAWL

any movement inward
            -- as into a chair by a window the light of which you use only to stare into a cup of tea
            -- or as into a habit of tea-drinking, as opposed to coffee, because the former behaves so much more quietly within the body, so softly helps open the eyes and the mind
            -- or as in letting the eyes come to a standstill, in some space on the page of a book you’ve been reading, in order to stare at nothing, or at something inside, or at something neither inside nor out – an association-sprung scene, an entire small world, maybe; a place so pungent you leave your body to stand in it for a time
            -- or as turning over a handwritten letter, before or after you’ve read it, to run your hand across a blank side, the written words invisible now, yet palpable in the impressions the pen left in the paper, the strange backward slant you never think of as being there, the earnest weight of the writer’s departed hand, physical track of her thought still traceable, the “handicraft” evident in the paucity of words, the whole page, though we think of paper as “smooth,” as idiosyncratically and subtly bumpy as the skin of your love’s body, in which also dwells a reverse side, unseen side, of breath, blood, inchoate words, nonverbal language
            strategic withdrawal: any movement backward, away from the battle lines of one’s incarnation (as in the phrase “spiritual retreat” but without the once-in-a-blue-moon connotations of those two words, because the backward movement needed, the spiritual retreat required, is moment to moment, day to day)
            strategic withdrawal: any refusal to man our habitual political or psychological trenches or to defend our turf, for though the turf may be holy, our defenses, when they grow automatonic, are not
            any refusal to engage with that testy or irritating or ideologically loud or theologically bloated person in your life – you know the one: the agitatedly racist or religionist, politically powerful or compulsively processing pedant, coworker, parent, friend, or (God help you) spouse whose opinions are too poorly formed, too loudly held, or just too incessantly divulged to allow you to achieve peace in the presence of so much clanging banging editorializing mental machinery
            any retreat (however ignominious it may seem to the will or the mind or the ego) not just from all such exchanges but from the underlying tensions and history that launch the exchanges (your side of the tensions and history, anyway: the side you’ve an inalienable right to retreat from)
            any movement away from one’s “urgencies,” one’s “this-is-who-I-am” nesses, one’s responsibilities, agitations, racial guilt, sworn causes, shames, strengths, weaknesses, memories, workaday, identity, public or secret battlefields
            any movement toward formlessness
            silence
            emptiness
            primordiality
            any movement toward a beginning, as in Genesis 1, John 1, Quran Tao Te Ching Diamond Sutra Mahabharata Kalevala Mumonkan Ramayana Torah Gita 1
            and toward one’s own “in the beginning”
            toward one’s origin (root of originality); toward one’s ignorance (that underrated state the embracing of which precedes every influx of fresh knowledge); toward one’s amorphousness (state of all clay before the potter conceives a form, wedges the clay, centers it, and begins throwing the cup or bowl); toward one’s interior blankness (the state of the paper preceding every new idea, drawing, poem); toward one’s wilderness (wild: the condition of all worlds, inner and outer, before the creation of the man-made bewilderments from which we are endeavoring to withdrawal0
            strategic withdrawal:
            any attempt to step from a why, however worthy, into whylessness
            as in an extemporaneous walk to a destination unknown; a walk during which everything but your movement through God-knows-where becomes the God-knows-what you’re doing
            or as in going fishing without the desire for fish so that desirelessness becomes the prey you’re catching
            or as in a stroll to a neighborhood café or tavern one or more neighborhoods removed from any in which you’re known, which establishment you then enter not to socialize, read the paper, or eat the (probably bad) food, but just to nurse a single slow drink as you soak, without judgment, in the presence and riverine babble of your city and native tongue
            strategic withdrawal: any act you can devise, any psycho-spiritual act at all, that embodies a willingness to wait for the world to disclose itself to you, rather than to disclose yourself, your altruism, your creativity, skills, energy, ideas, and (let’s face it) agenda, myopia, preconceptions, delusions, addictions, and inappropriate trajectories to this world
            willingness to drop trajectories; willingness to boot up with all extensions OFF; willingness not to save the world but simply to wait for it to disclose itself to you, whether anything seems, even after long long waiting, to be disclosing itself or not
            an act of faith then, really; faith that the world is always disclosing itself; faith that lack of disclosure is impossible; faith that what blocks Creation’s ceaseless flow of disclosure is, invariably, our calluses and callousness, our old injuries and injuriousness, our plans, cross-purposes, neuroses, absurd speed of passage, divided minds, ruling manias, lack of trust, lack of faith – overabundance of faith, cf. Thomas Merton: ‘Prayer is possible only when prayer is impossible”
            strategic withdrawal: to step back, now and then, from the possible to take rest in the impossible: to stand without trajectory in the God-given weather till the soul’s identity begins to come with the weathering: to get off my own laboriously cleared and maintained trails and back onto the pristine hence unmarked path by moving, any old how, toward interior nakedness; toward silence; toward what Buddhists call “emptiness,” Christians “poverty of spirit,” Snyder “wild,” and Eckhart “desirelessness: the virgin that eternally gives birth to the Son”
            strategic withdrawal: this prayer: When I am lost, God help me to get more lost.  Help me lose so completely that nothing remains but the primordial peace and originality that keeps creating and sustaining this blood-, tear-, and love-worthy world that’s never lost for an instant save by an insufficiently lost me
            “We’re all in the gutter,” said Oscar Wilde in the throes of just such a withdrawal, “but some of us are looking at the stars”
            strategic withdrawal:
            look at the stars

David James Duncan
Shepardstown, West Virginia; on a cross country Delta jet; and Lolo, Montana: summer 1999

Suddenly.

Punctuationally speaking, wonder is a period at the end of a statement we've long taken for granted, suddenly looking up and seeing the sinuous curve of a tall black hat on its head, and realizing it was a question mark all along.

David James Duncan

Been.

Wyeth, Seated by a Tree, 1973

CHILDHOOD'S RETREAT

It’s in the perilous boughs of the tree   

out of blue sky the wind   

sings loudest surrounding me.

And solitude,   a wild solitude

’s reveald,   fearfully, high     I’d climb

into the shaking uncertainties,

part out of longing,   part daring my self,

part to see that

widening of the world,   part

to find my own, my secret

hiding sense and place, where from afar   

all voices and scenes come back

—the barking of a dog,   autumnal burnings,

far calls,   close calls—  the boy I was

calls out to me

here the man where I am   “Look!

I’ve been where you

most fear to be.”

Robert Duncan

Tim O'Brien, "Gentle on My Mind"

With Bryan Sutton, guitar, and Stuart Duncan, fiddle ...

Wild.

D-wight Lightnin', "Gone (That'll Be Me)"

Stuart Duncan, playing high-octane-racing-fuel fiddle ...

Wonder.

Punctuationally speaking, wonder is a period at the end of a statement we've long taken for granted, suddenly looking up and seeing the sinuous curve of a tall black hat on its head, and realizing it was a question mark all along.

David James Duncan

Work.

So.  What is "spirit-food" for us industrial/indigenous half-breeds?  What is a modern-day spirit offering?  I'd say that now, as ever, it is anything we truly value.  Our energy, our focus, the hours of our days.  Anything we respect so much that, as we pour it out on the finned, feathered and four-legged peoples' behalf, we kind of hate to see it go.  Maybe single-malt scotches from the literalists among us.  Prayers and mantras from the mystics.  Money, time, and trouble from the capitalists and activists.  Unflinching accuracy, no matter the political climate, from the scientists.  Stories from people from me.  The big blockade to change is lack of passion.  And the birth-house of passion is the heart.  A spirit-offering, then, is anything we can offer with a whole heart -- any song, dance, phone call, plea, letter, insight, gift, or prayer that helps determine the way we, and other humans, continue to create our world, rivers, hills, and forests.

It feels awkward, I know, to just stand up and do a "spirit thing."  But so does the Web of Life find our lethal industry and greed awkward.  Even a hokey offering expresses a dream, a hope a moment's love for another life-form.  If we don't get to work with the tools at hand, we may never get to work.

David James Duncan

Noam Pickelny & Stuart Duncan, "Tallahassee"