In The Frame

Iris--Paper and Stones

I'll let these fly, as Iris did at the beach, by The Sea the sea...excerpts spoken by Iris Murdoch in the movie "Iris"

"It's like music what we do, the music of the angels; love's the only language everyone understands."

"Language--reading, writing and preserving the eloquence and beauty that language is capable of is terribly important to human beings because it is connected to thought. This is why we must teach students to read and write with great care and attention.

Education doesn't make you happy, nor does freedom. We don't become happy just because we're free, nor if we've just been educated. Education may be the means by which we realize we're happy. It opens our eyes and ears, tells us where delights are lurking, convinces us that there is only one freedom that is essential to happiness, the freedom of the mind. And education gives us the freedom to walk the path we forge to our own happiness.

Human beings love each other in sex, friendship, and when they're in love, and they cherish animals, plants, and our natural surroundings. Our quest for happiness is held in all of this and in the power of our imagination. Every human soul has seen perhaps even before birth the pure forms of justice, temperance, beauty, love and all great qualities of humans. We are moved toward what is Good by the deeply held memory of these pure qualities. We saw these once in a pure light, because of being pure once before, ourselves.

We need to believe in something divine, without necessarily the need for God, something you might call Love or Goodness. As the Psalm 139 says:

Whither shall I go from thy spirit
Whither shall I flee from thy presence.
If I acsend up in to heaven, thou art there:
If I make my bed in hell, behold thou art there.
If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the outermost parts of the sea,
even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.

Kindness

Two nights ago I went to hear Naomi Shihab Nye give a poetry reading. She was delightful and by that I mean brimming with seeming serendipity, deep appreciation and a certain feeling that this woman enjoys her moments full and many. Her poems, mostly short, spontaneous, starting you in one spot and then seeming to do a flip and land you somewhere else, reminded me of something Iris Murdoch once said, "One of the secrets of a happy life, is continuous small treats." More than a thousand people showed up for her second night of reading. This woman from Texas who is the daughter of a Palestinian storyteller journalist and an American painter, uses words to form a mystic container of reality and a support for the soul. What follows is the last poem she read to us, a longer piece, one from thirty years earlier in her career, which she wrote while on her honeymoon in South America after being robbed of everything they had.

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.

--Naomi Shihab Nye