Mindfulness

Jane Hirshfield, fortunate poet, was a friend to Czeslaw Milosz from their meeting in 1987 until his death in 2004. She was 34 when they met; he, 76. She was an American Buddhist; he, an embattled Polish Catholic. Hirshfield discusses her unlikely friendship with Milosz and his wife, Carol, in this story at the Poetry web site, and in her most recent book, After, she includes a four-page elegy to Milosz, “Letter to C.” Here’s an excerpt:

“Living memory holds the dead as a hand holds water,
As a dry window keeps the traces of rain.
And still we speak.

“I write in these lines what I hear myself saying to others –

“that you wanted most, it seemed, to preserve
the dresses and potions of women, an unmetaphysical spider and cat.
Against the age’s erasures
praising a blacksmith’s forge, a dish of olives set on a table.

"Other writers you praised by rebuking,
though I recall no complaint against Whitman,
whose capacious lists and tenderness must have seemed
to you the path of a mirroring soul, if less singed by self-judgment.”

I like Hirshfield referring obliquely to specific Milosz poems, including the great “Blacksmith Shop.” I like her homely images, and I like her mention of Whitman, who must have eased Milosz’s long American exile. In his introduction to a Polish translation of Hirshfield’s work, Milosz wrote:

"The subject of her poetry is our ordinary life among other people and our continuing encounter with everything Earth brings us: trees, flowers, animals, and birds. Much depends on whether we can treasure each moment in this way, and whether we are able to respond to cats, dogs, and horses with a friendliness equal to that we bring to people. The sensuality of her poetry equally illuminates the great Buddhist virtue of `mindfulness.’”

In Polish, the Hirshfield collection is titled Uwaznosc – “mindfulness,” which Milosz defines in Milosz’s ABC’s as “a stance of attentive good will toward nature and people, so that we notice in every detail what is happening around us, instead of passing by in distraction.” Then he mentions the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh and his essay “Interbeing,” which lends all of this a pleasing personal circularity. In 1975, Nhat Hanh and Daniel Berrigan published The Raft is Not the Shore: Conversations Toward a Buddhist-Christian Awareness. In a letter he wrote me in 1993, Berrigan suggested I adopt a stance of "mindfulness" toward the world, recommending it as “the foremost Buddhist virtue.” He also urged me to read more Thomas Merton, who briefly met Nhat Hanh in 1966, at the Gethsemani Trappist monastery in Kentucky. In “Letter to C.,” Hirshfield writes:

“Near the end, you could not lift you head,
But offered a visitor this:
`At least I am conscious.
I have been arguing all morning with your Puritans, I must tell you,
In their strange hats.’

“It is good to think you fought to the last with those who would narrow the mind.”