News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness

Rating:
Summary: The Seat of the Soul
Review: "The seat of the soul is where the inner world and the outer world meet. Where they overlap, it is in every point of the overlap."

"News of the Universe" was originally issued as a Sierra Club book and contains poems selected (and sometimes translated) by Robert Bly. The book is worth buying just for Bly's introduction and his analysis of 'Dover Beach'. Frequently, I find myself dipping into "News of the Universe" for inspiration (like a Protestant choosing a random verse from the Bible). I keep this book at work for the times when I feel really out of touch with the Natural World. Then I open up "News of the Universe" and find (for instance):

"In the heart of man/There sleeps a green worm/That has spun the heart about itself,/And that shall dream itself black wings/One day to break free into the beautiful black sky" - Galway Kinnell.

Somehow as I sit in this dry little cubicle, surrounded by gray cloth, plastic plug-ins, and Corporate slogans, the poems that Bly selected for this book make me feel less isolated from the true Universe. The poems ring True. They refresh. Since that was Bly's stated intention when he collected the poems, you ought to try them yourself and see if they work for you.

Rating:
Summary: Re-tuning to the UNIVERSE.
Review: Most of the books we read, no matter how startling they may be and no matter how much seeming "News" they may bring us, somehow end up fitting quite comfortably into our mind. We read them, we may be excited about them for a while, but they are soon set aside and we move on, quite unchanged, to fresh pastures.

Rarely, very rarely however, a book will happen along that truly rocks us, a book that has the power to shift our mind into a different register, to provide us with a whole new way of seeing. Such books have the effect of somehow altering our mind, re-structuring it, opening up new synapses, and thereby enabling or empowering us see the world in a wholly new and different light. These are golden books, bearers of striking truths, of real "News." Perhaps we need to be intellectually and emotionally ready for them, but when they do come they can effect a radical change in our outlook on life.

Despite many years of intensive reading, I can think of only two or three books that have affected me in this way. One of them was by the British writer, Douglas E. Harding. Another was the present book.

One of the things Bly's 'News of the Universe' taught me to see was that modern human beings are a very strange lot, a life-form that is totally and utterly obsessed with just one thing - itself. Most of our waking moments are occupied with people-related matters. We are almost manically people-obsessed. We read books about people, watch movies about people, think and talk incessantly about people. And we don't find this odd.

We are concerned with what people are saying, thinking, feeling, doing, wearing, drinking, eating, buying, building, plotting, loving, fearing, suffering, etc. But always it's people that our attention is focused on, and we often completely overlook the fact that people are just ONE among the many MILLIONS of earth's interesting life-forms, and that even the earth itself is just one of an infinite number of worlds.

In other words, in our constant people-centered busy-ness what we overlook is - THE UNIVERSE. People, of course, are important. But what about the rest of the universe? Robert Bly's invaluable book has been written to redress the balance. He seems to want us to see just how totally wrapped up we are in ourselves, and that this obsession is neither wholesome nor realistic. It is in fact a form of madness and extremely dangerous.

'News of the Universe' is a book of some 300 pages and is divided into six main parts. Each of these six parts consists of a brief essay followed by a generous selection of poems which serve to illustrate the themes of the essay.

Bly's book would be worth having for the poems alone. He has brought together a rich collection of both the familiar and the unfamiliar, from many periods and cultures, and the non-English poems have been very well-translated. I often return to my own well-thumbed copy, purchased about fifteen years ago, to re-read my favorites.

One of these is the poem 'GOLDEN LINES' by Gerard de Nerval, a poem which could serve as a manifesto for the book. It is preceded by this epigraph from Pythagoras : "Astonishing! Everything is intelligent!" Here are the opening lines, slightly adjusted since they should be set out as poetry:

"Free thinker! Do you think you are the only thinker / on this earth in which life blazes inside all things? / Your liberty does what it wishes with the powers it controls, / but when you gather to plan, the universe is not there. // Look carefully in an animal at a spirit alive; / every flower is a soul opening out into nature; / a mystery touching love is asleep inside metal..." (page 38).

These lines bear careful pondering by our manically people-obsessed world, as do many others in Bly's carefully culled selection. But almost as impressive as the poems are Bly's introductory essays themselves. Personally I consider them to be minor masterpieces, and I find myself often returning to them also. Despite their brevity, it would be impossible here for me to convey an adequate idea of the sheer freight of true "News" content that they carry, real "News" that is vastly more important for us to become aware of than the trivia which passes for 'news' in our popular media.

Basically what the essays and poems set out to do, and they do it very effectively indeed, is to demonstrate that what Bly calls the "Old Position," the "pride in human reason" and "the conviction that nature is defective because it lacks reason" has had the effect of "deforming all poetry and culture" (page 3).

What we must learn to realize and to fully embrace is the notion that human consciousness is only one of the many kinds of consciousness operating in the universe. We cannot continue to deny consciousness, and therefore value, to the non-human, and on the basis of this fundamental error proceed to separate humans out and pretend that the rest of earth's living matrix doesn't matter. Such a procedure has led to a grotesque deformation of our civilization, and it can only end in the complete destruction of all life.

This, needless to say, is not the sort of news that most of the inhabitants of our media-befuddled world want to hear. And this because collisions with reality are usually painful. But for the few thoughtful and courageous and concerned who are still out there, and who would like to re-tune to the Universe, I would urge you to acquire a copy of Robert Bly's book. It's a luminous book, and definitely one of the most important books I've ever read. It may just give you a new and more realistic outlook on life.