Issue IV Meditations

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Root - Jill McCabe Johnson

The Invention of Death - Amy Olberding

Poems - Aaron Novick

The Yellow Rat - Roger Sedarat

Just Birds - Kent Meyers

INTRODUCED BY EDITOR-IN-CHIEF MARIANNE JANACK

Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations was, he said, a book that he wrote for himself. It contains exhortations and reminders, and lessons he wanted to capture. St. Ignatius of Loyola composed a series of spiritual exercises which have been called a collection of prayers, contemplations, and meditations that can be used as “retreats” in the midst of ordinary, day-to-day doings.

Montaigne’s Essais include such entries as “Of Smells” and “Of Vanity” which usually signal a meditation or reflection, though Montaigne’s meditations often lead toward skepticism rather than toward certainty. In this they are often contrasted with the work of René Descartes.

Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy represent both a forward-looking and a backward-looking expression of faith in the powers of reason. Descartes’s meditations are backward-looking in so far as they draw on (and in many ways replicate) the ancient and medieval tradition of the meditation. There is, in this tradition, the recognition of God’s will and grace in the workings of human life; an embrace of the idea of a mental retreat narrated by a particular author; spiritual exercises that anyone could do, but that the author says are primarily for his own use—we find these in Descartes’s Meditations, and so we could read these as part of the ancient tradition of the meditation. But Descartes’s Meditations are also forward-looking: Descartes’s Meditations are taken to presage and provide a model for the Enlightenment’s faith in science and rationality in the pursuit of truth and knowledge.

While our sensory experiences might lead us to skepticism and to the idea of constant change, Descartes leads his readers through an examination of those experiences to deliver us to the conclusion that our knowledge of mathematics and of “necessary truths” provides a firm foundation for our knowledge, and we need not despair.

In the English tradition, the form of the meditation offered possibilities for women as well as men to “think out loud”. Lady Elizabeth Delaval meditated on the experience of pain from having “worms in her gums” and having them removed. This leads her, as is usual in such meditations, to the idea of repentance and of God’s will. Lady Grace Mildmay, who lived between 1552 and 1620, is the author of one of the few surviving autobiographical works by women of this period, and this includes her meditations, which seem to be both private devotional exercises and advice to her daughter.

The works we’ve chosen for this issue of Book XI include meditations in which the author goes from an ordinary object or experience, to larger issues, as in the classic meditation. It also includes a send-up of that genre, in which the author contemplates the appearance of a yellow rat in a can of paint and tries to get his money back. It is, like Lady Elizabeth’s meditation, a story of trial and tribulations, but with a less-than-satisfying conclusion.

In “Just Birds” the narrator meditates on birds, a ditch, an invasive weed, and deer in order to think about human goals and values. “Root” looks at tree roots to reveal new ways of looking at human lives. “The Invention of Death” is a meditation on the meanings that material objects take on after a person’s death. In the poems “Row, row, row”, “(the deathless poem will be made of words)” and “Scene (3)” the narrator takes us through an experience of seeing irises, poems, words, matter, mud, mirrors, and elements of the sensory world in new ways—as Descartes does in his meditation on a melting piece of wax-- revealing to us that, though we might just think that we see a duck, if we look closer, we can see the rabbit, too. It depends on how you look.

And though we might think that the genre of the meditation or reflection has leaky boundaries—that it blends in with poems, essays, and spiritual exercises—looking at it as a tradition of writing that aims to help us see both figure and ground, or to see in new ways, allows us to follow these narrators through these exercises. The looking is sometimes painful, sometimes not. Nonetheless, that new way of looking is revelatory. Or at least funny.