O Pen -- October 4 -- 3 brains...

Poems for October 4
Trying to finish up the September batch!
My favorite : 4 poems from from Turkish Pears In August, by Robert Bly (published in 2007)
THE WATCHER OF VOWELS [Ramage #9]
Sound, music leads us to an energy that goes to what Bly refers to "the third, new brain".
Not the reptilian brain, (survival) and beyond the mammal brain (emotion). In Charles Fair's book "The Dying Self", he sugests that what Freud meant by the "Id" was the reptile and mammal brain, and what the ancient Indian philosophers meant by the "self" was the new brain.
What feeds this new brain is wild, spiritual ideas. Often the Reptilian and Mammalian brains don't understand it... but it is here, that mystery is perceived. Interesting that Bly said you cannot leap from the reptilian brain to the "new brain". Experience beyond an "I".


Brought in a new book called “A spicing of Birds” which has Audubon drawings of birds matched with Dickinson’s poems.

Here is one, In light of our discussion of Bly’s “Ramages”.

The Bird her punctual music brings
And lays it in its place –
Its place is in the Human Heart
And in the Heanvenly Grace –
What respite from her thrilling toil
Did Beauty ever take –
But Work might be electric Rest
To those that Magic make.
-- Emily Dickinson

And a few Seamus Heaney lines from his book, Human Chains.

p. 42
If you know a bit/
About the universe
It’s because you’ve taken it in
Like that,
Looked as hard
As you look into yourself,
Into the rat hole,
Through the vetch and dock
That mantled it.

p. 58:

Or doubting the solid ground
Of the riverbank field, twilit and a-hover
With midge drifts, as if we had commingled
Among shades and shadows stirring on the brink
And stood there waiting, watching,
Needy and ever needier for translation.

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