Ten Precepts

Whoever’s arms are crossed in the end
loses. If you hug a child tight enough,
your soul will grow slightly bigger than your body
and the camera will steal what it can see.

If someone’s kicking the fence, let him.
When the dust storm comes, run.
It will look like it is standing still. Be like the fly
and avert the slow motion hand of wrath.

When I get to Virginia, I wait for the tremble
of colliding continents to find the waterfall.
I avoid the young men’s hands. The God feeling can
sometimes be lust in disguise. When I get caught
in the cathode glow of twilight, I stand still and breathe
the toxicity. I will know how to save you.

For every walnut you find in the dark hills, forgive
yourself twice. Follow the flying crow back to Kansas.
The dust storm is now a rainy wind. The twilight
is now a river. I will take them back with me.
Don’t return until your open wounds have healed.

Filed under: Advice , Ten Precepts

A New Place for Us: A Critical Look at New Urbanism

Suppose one day, gasoline will jump in price again—this time, to a price unaffordable to most people. Suppose it jumps to ten dollars a gallon. The US has had jumps in fuel cost and fuel shortages before, so we know that there will be more stealing, food prices will increase, that general mayhem will occur. But beyond this initial catastrophe, supposing the price never went back down again, what would happen to our landscape? Many Americans live and prefer to live in suburb areas. The convenience of driving to get groceries, to church, knitting club, grandma and grandpa’s, school, and work, would no longer be convenient. Many families would not be able to afford living in their houses, because to get out of their houses at all, even for a gallon of milk, they must drive.

The United States rebuilt its economy after the Great Depression and World War II in large part using the automobile industry. The nation needed to be rebuilt. “Everyone wanted everything to be new,” city planner of Holland, Mark VanderPloeg, explained. Since cars were mass produced and cheaper, they were a financial miracle for farmers, and they redefined life and leisure for all working Americans. They enlarged horizons and gave more independence. Roads were built—millions of dollars went into highways and parking lots and wider roads with more lanes—all in homage to the liberator of the people: the car. This fifty-year-old tradition is wearing out in the new millennium. Oil dependence has become a political danger, car pollution wears on the environment and atmosphere, and, most insidiously, communities have crumbled and people find themselves with road rage and depression, partly due to their living environments. Even scarier, the rights of mobility for people who cannot drive are incredibly restricted—what does freedom mean for a nation that requires a car for each citizen? To change our landscape from a home for cars back to a home for people will take a comprehensive change in thought across our nation. Architects, developers, and planners have caught onto and named this new school of thought New Urbanism. It is also called Traditional Neighborhood Development (TND), which ironically contradicts the name “New Urbanism.” What is this new idea, a nostalgic overhaul or a completely new way of living? I will try to answer this later. We will also examine New Urbanism: its vision, flaws, and strengths. The only way to prevent ourselves from reacting too strongly to the last generation’s mistakes is to self-criticize and discern what we will keep and what we will change for our future home.

The main principle of New Urbanism or TND is that towns should be built on a human scale, not a car scale. To build towns and cities for humans again, New Urbanists put garages and driveways in the backs of houses, build radiating streets from a town center, mix public, private, commercial, and institutional uses to be within walking distance, create public greenspace, control traffic by narrowing streets and reducing car speed, and set buildings closer to the roads. It can be called Traditional Neighborhood Development because back before cars, many of these elements were naturally built into towns to ease the movement of people who walked and used slower vehicles: the horse and carriage. Some of these towns still exist, and TND is there to recognize the merits of spaces such as these. Andres Duany, in his book called Suburban Nation, lists some rules of TND: “1. The center….The five-minute walk….The street network….Narrow, versatile streets….Mixed use….Special sites for special buildings” (Duany et al 15-17). These rules would put a sense of place back into our towns, which lack special places and special buildings.

New Urbanism has undergone scrutiny by developers and planners. There are considerable dangers with building and revising our towns and cities. One problem that people find with New Urbanism is the most visible: the architecture. James Kunstler describes Seaside, a town on Florida’s east side that was created by a developer named Robert Davis from 80 acres of land his grandfather left him when he died, and planned by Andres Duany, a large player in the New Urbanism movement, as a place where “all the houses are made of wood with peaked tin roofs and deep porches. No two are alike, but all share a congruity of design that is soothing to the eyeballs….The pastel-colored houses stand along a coherent network of narrow streets paved with brick” (Kunstler 253-4). Architecture, at first glance, can give strong impressions. The danger is getting carried away with how a house or building looks and ignoring how it operates with the mixed uses of the neighborhood. The writers of Suburban Nation, the comprehensive look at our nation’s development and its problems, strengthen this point: “it is the architectural style of most Traditional Neighborhood Developments that causes them to be dismissed as ‘nostalgic’ by much of the design profession” (Duany, et al 209). This prejudgment could cloud a nation’s perspective on New Urbanism, associating it with the pushing of ideals. Duany explains that “style takes on moral overtones” (209). By building houses that look like older houses, it may look like America is retrogressing and not moving forward, as a name like New Urbanism suggests.

This focus on architecture is also tricky because New Urbanist have put strict regulations on how houses should be built. Mark Vanderploeg says the restrictions are necessary to keep new houses from looking like current houses with garages sticking out, among other problems. These rules are as minutely detailed as the codes and ordinances guiding the development of today’s suburbs. It is generally enforced that garages should take up one third of a houses’ frontage. Typical housing standards force new houses to be set back twenty-five feet from the sidewalk, even in neighborhoods where the older houses are breaking these rules. No exceptions allowed. No blanket code works for every area. New Urbanism must be careful of this, too—their prized deep porches and stairs are not handicap-accessible. Diversity in buildings, including residential buildings, is a must.

Kunstler quotes Randall Arendt, who says “The law is the major problem with the development pattern. Developers don’t fight it, they go with the flow” (Kunstler 263). Zoning laws and ordinances are unique to America and encompass everything from how houses look to where they can be built. They are blind to the unique places that make up our nation—they make our towns homogenous. This is an existing problem, but it is also a danger for New Urbanism, which requires throwing out suburban codes writing completely new ones. Could this merely create a new-looking homogeny, barring us from creative solutions to specific problems?

This homogeny is hard to avoid when creating new communities. A major problem is the word “new,” of which urban prophet Jane Jacobs warns us is a downfall of neighborhoods. When no old buildings exist in a neighborhood, she argues, no one will want to be there. It will be blighted and boring (Jacobs 258). Also, Jacobs points out that old buildings serve as incubators. They keep new businesses safe with their established walls. The sense of history gives a sense of place. Also, creating completely new towns is risky. There is a chance no one will move to them due to poor placement or timing. There is also a chance that everyone will move to them, out of love for new things, and leave existing cities behind, as if we have not been already doing that for the past five decades. Development is necessary, but when it eats up green space without economic reason, it is a waste. The government gives subsidies to those developing on vacant lots, sites that have been built on before. New Urbanism never claimed to only build brand new towns like Seaside, but is it flexible enough to work with existing development?

One of the largest reasons development needs to turn away from suburban zoning is the distance it puts between economic classes. In our system, one can live wherever they can afford to live. Developers set up suburbs so that houses of certain value stick around other houses of the same value: “one cluster consists entirely of houses that sell for $350,000 and up. The second cluster contains houses costing about $200,000. The third cluster is made up of apartments priced at less than $100,000….we are now experiencing ruthless segregation by minute gradations of income” (43). This, coupled with the fact that one can only drive to get to these houses, is a deliberate separation from the inner city. It is more than white flight, for other races that can afford to move to the outskirts do, too. It is an attempt to forget the problems of the city, and to focus inward on the nuclear family.

The law may attempt to protect people who are left behind by this system, and therefore fall short economically, but there is no law stopping those with enough money from getting almost anything they want. The wealthy buy old apartment buildings in large cities with more money than the owners had ever seen. The residents are then told they must move out and find new places to live. The old buildings are torn down and rebuilt: part of the process of gentrification. New Urbanism, which celebrates diversity in building use and value, makes an effort to abolish this compartmentalization of economic class. Affordable housing is one of the keys to a New Urbanist town. Duany gives two rules of affordable housing, learned from a rocky history of attempting this in the US: do not experiment on the poor, and do not concentrate affordable housing in too large of quantities (Duany et al 53). It is a challenge to imagine Duany’s idea of “market-rate housing” being sparsely interrupted by affordable housing. A college town can be a good indicator of this: Hope College runs into problems by mixing its student cottages with citizen houses—the college students are loud and disrespectful, letting the historic houses deteriorate. The neighborhood gets lower in value—it becomes less of a neighborhood and more of an extension of the campus.

In the same way, the poor’s inability to do their own expensive upkeep of their housing and differences in lifestyles may create friction within newly-mixed neighborhoods. New Urbanist towns like Seaside, which have seen much success and proven good places to live, gain popularity and thus become competitive places to live. Prices will naturally rise, especially when supply is much smaller than the growing demand. How do we keep these places affordable? In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs spells out a plan for a hypothetical program that works naturally with the ecosystem of a city neighborhood.

If a household’s income improved, its proportion of the rent would go up, and the proportion provided by the subsidy would go down. If and when a household reached the point of paying a full economic rent, it would thereafter—for as long as this was true—be no concern of the ODS (Office of Dwelling Subsidies). Such a household or individual could stay on in the dwelling forever, paying economic rent. (Jacobs 425)

This only explains part of Jacob’s complex hypothetical program, but it illustrates a new way of housing those who want to work their way up economically. Place buildings with programs like these near private dwellings and apartment buildings with common commercial and institutional buildings, and you will have a diverse neighborhood in more ways than one.

New Urbanism’s largest hurdle to jump will be shaking its Seaside-associated reputation. It is the first town people think of when New Urbanism is mentioned. In a web-casted interview with James Kunstler, Kuntsler calls Seaside “the original iconic New Urbanist project,” explaining that “it became the model for what traditional neighborhood development would be.” This reputation has been taken too far, and the public has expected it to be a “coal miner’s town for the working class,” Kunstler explains. Diane Portfleet, an English professor at Hope College, lived in Seaside for awhile as part of a program in which she could live in one of the houses to write while its “residents” were at their other home. She said she did not feel comfortable living there—the kitchen was upstairs, the “corner grocery store” was too expensive to get real food, and she was starving for “real community” while there. It felt like an empty resort town to her. This is a frightening reaction to a place meant to encourage community and walking. Seaside gets a more widespread image-association with nonrealistic living with the film The Truman Show, which was taped partly in Seaside. Jim Carrey’s character lives in a perfect town called Seahaven, until he finds out that it is really a large set for a television show starring him, and even the sky is fabricated to ensure complete control over his life. What message does this send about Seaside, which claims to be a better form of community?

Perhaps it is unfair to ask for realistic and perfect answers to such a widespread problem. Kunstler argues for Seaside, in answer to popular criticisms which reflected Portfleet’s experience:

Its aim is to demonstrate how good relationships between public and private space may be achieved by changing a few rules of building. It never pretended to be anything else. It did make the important point that if you change the rules of building, you can reproduce these good relationships anywhere. (257)

Kunstler also stresses, “it’s a beach town. Of course people don’t live there year round,” and that Seaside never pretended to be a perfect community (KunstlerCast). In the end, Seaside is an illustration of what can be done (throwing aside zoning laws that encourage driving) and what to avoid (creating unrealistic houses that become too competitive and expensive) at the same time. Seaside should be, and is, followed by many other experiments and risk-takings. This is what differentiates New Urbanism from Traditional Neighborhood Development—it is a look into the future, into trying new things, instead of looking back nostalgically at the way things were.

Another praised example of New Urbanism is Kentlands, in Gaithersburg, Maryland, which is fifteen miles north of Washington DC. This New Urbanist area is in the middle of the DC suburbs, rather than isolated like Seaside (Stoel). Comparing a photograph of Seaside to a photograph of Kentlands, one will see that the Kentlands look much more like a city and less like a resort town. Also, studies have shown that Kentlands real estate sells houses at comparable prices to houses in suburban districts—there is a demand for New Urbanist neighborhoods, whether or not the buyers know that there is a name to the charming neighborhood they are visiting (Tu). Examples like Seaside and Kentlands are the public’s first glance at New Urbanism.

As written before, first glance is important to Americans. Duany describes the McMansion in the current developer’s world as the twenty-minute house. These large, impressive houses use creative architecture and lots of space to win over the buyer within twenty minutes (Duany 76). New Urbanist communities, with less perceived space and privacy, may take more than twenty minutes for Americans to fall for, unless there is a shift in values and ideals for homebuyers, or developers find sneaky ways to trick buyers for these developments, too.

An early criticism claims that New Urbanism does not address environmental concerns enough. Other than encouraging walkability and discouraging driving, what can New Urbanism do to protect the environment? New Urbanism started in the 80s, with Seaside. Back then, Duany and Davis were not concerned with public transportation, because it was unrealistic for Seaside and because gas was cheap—there was no predicted problem with cars. Most environmentalists, who were wary that any development should happen at all, have now adopted the anti-sprawl argument since we all have seen the land that is wasted, the pollution from cars, and runoff pollution from fertilizers and pavement. New Urbanism, especially if it uses sustainable materials and systems, is a good structure for decreasing driving, which in many ways is the number one concern, as it affects the atmosphere, the oil industry, and use of resources while creating massive waste. Today’s New Urbanists stress the necessity of public transportation systems being within a five-minute walk from any living space. New Urbanism represents a shift America would take, and it would be a shift in more than planning and development. It would be an overhaul of how things are done. The sprawling, international food system Americans are subject to, and the lack of cross-continental transportation will change, too. This kind of shift will make more of a difference than anything else an environmentalist can do.

The New Urbanism focus on architecture, zoning, and how things look also takes away focus from social, economic, and political problems which are truly at the heart of city and suburban issues. New Urbanism makes some bold claims at fixing problems of isolation simply by changing the buildings and roads of isolated communities. Dan Kaline, in a column discussing the book The Lost City, by Alan Ehrenhalt, writes

While these design ideas can help create a feeling of community, they represent just one aspect of solving the isolation problem. The core of a community is its people. Common values and a commitment to each other’s welfare are the keys to making an area look and feel like a community for the people who really live there. (Public Management)

New Urbanism cannot solve social issues of racial segregation, economic segregation, prejudice, isolation, crime, and homogeny any more than suburban planning did. Still, the shift in planning does reflect a shift in mindset, even if it is a minority mindset for now. Like most movements in our culture, changes happen physically, intellectually, and emotionally at the same time. The physical is the last to show change, but it does show change. If and when people decide they want community back, that they want to live in a pleasant place where they can walk and bike safely, only then will New Urbanism come into effect in a consuming way.

These criticisms recognized, the most dangerous part of redeveloping America will be striving for perfection. Americans must realize that they do not want to live in a perfect place. The Truman Show’s Seahaven cannot exist. We do not want it. Suburbia is the wasteland from years of developers trying to create perfect places for children to grow up, families to thrive, and privacy to endure. The result is tragic. Duany, the developer of Seaside and Kentlands, stresses that the roadblocks he has hit and the compromises he has had to make with car-oriented developers will not bring him down. Kunstler writes about him:

he argued that design imperfections would make the town more memorable, reflecting it is, after all, part of the real world. He cited nearby Annapolis as an example: ‘Annapolis is full of lessons. One of them is how imperfect urbanism can be and still make a really great town. Everywhere you look in Annapolis things are off, things are imperfect. Yet it all adds up to a really magnificent place.’ (258)

Who knew that the most magnificent places are full of imperfections and imperfect people? When people embrace their community and its quirks, putting their time and energy into it, they create a place of real worth. This rejection of perfection does not dismiss Daniel Burnham’s one-hundred-year-old slogan, “make no little plans.” Planning will need to be large, imaginative, and risky. Mistakes will be made. But the most important outcome is that we will be straying further away from the suburbs and turning back to our cities and towns—back to each other.

Works Cited

Duany, Andres, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck. Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream. New York: North Point P, 2000.

Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. 3rd ed. New York: Modern Library, 1993.

Kentlands. CoolTown Studios. 04 Aug. 2004. 30 Apr. 2009 <http://www.cooltownstudios.com/category/housing-lofts/P75/>.

“KunstlerCast #51: Seaside Revisited.” Interview with Duncan Crary. The KunstlerCast. 12 Feb. 2009. 1 May 2009 <http://kunstlercast.com/shows/KunstlerCast_51_Seaside_Revisited.html>.

Kunstler, James Howard. Geography of Nowhere The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape. New York: Free P, 1994.

Seaside. Chapter 10: Architecture. University of Evansville. 30 Apr. 2009 <http://faculty.evansville.edu/rl29/art105/sp04/art105-10.html>.

Stoel, Thomas B., Jr. ”Reining in urban sprawl.” Environment 41.4 (May 1999): 6(1). General OneFile. Gale. Hope College Library. 30 Apr. 2009
<http://0-find.galegroup.com.lib.hope.edu/ips/start.do?prodId=IPS>.

Tu, Charles C., and Mark J. Eppli. ”Valuing new urbanism: the case of Kentlands.” Real Estate Economics 27.3 (Fall 1999): 453(2). General OneFile. Gale. Hope College Library. 30 Apr. 2009
<http://0-find.galegroup.com.lib.hope.edu/ips/start.do?prodId=IPS>.

Filed under: Academic Paper

Jane Jacobs: The City as Ecosystem

After reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities, read Jane Jacobs’ foreword to the book, which she wrote 31 years after the first edition was published. Here she adds insight that help with the understanding of the book. In this foreword, she writes “Cities are in a sense natural ecosystems too—for us. They are not disposable. Whenever and wherever societies have flourished and prospered rather than stagnated and decayed, creative and workable cities have been at the core of the phenomenon; they have pulled their weight and more” (xviii). Her love and respect for diverse and thriving cities is like one’s true respect for nature. At the end of the book, she writes of the American’s tendency to sentimentalize nature—to idealize it enough to subdue it—and consequently destroy it. This dangerous pattern has created the suburban sprawls and edge cities across the country and now have become a sort of wasteland.

Jacobs clearly had spent years observing city life. Unlike the Koyaanisqatsi-esque big picture of urban life, which seemed to condemn and defamiliarize the practices of downtowns, she made cities look ultimately good again by explaining the workings of neighborhoods. Unlike Walt Whitman’s long lists of human observations, which became a work praising without critique the human population within New York, Jacobs admitted cities’ problems, what goes wrong, and how to deal with it. She had more sense than to over-praise this ecosystem, or, in the cultural context of her time, push an urban lifestyle on suburb lovers.

Not only does Jacobs give explanations of how cities work, she makes the city neighborhood a desirable place to live, which went against the suburb-loving grain of the time. She compares the order of a city neighborhood to a ballet: “This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance—not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time…but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose and orderly whole” (65).

She then describes this ballet. It is a usual morning in the neighborhood, starting with Jacobs putting out her garbage can. The junior high schoolers enter stage right and leave behind candy wrappers which Jacob sweeps up. Plenty of other dancers make their entrance: “Mr. Halpert unlocking the laundry’s handcart from its mooring to a cellar door, Joe Cornacchia’s son-in-law stacking out the empty crates from the delicatessen, the barber bringing out his sidewalk folding chair, Mr. Goldstein arranging the coils of wire which proclaim the hardware store is open, the wife of the tenement’s superintendent deposit[s] her chunky three-year-old with a toy mandolin on the stoop….Now the primary children, heading for St. Luke’s, dribble through the south; the children for St. Veronica’s cross, heading to the west, and the children for P.S. 41, heading toward the east…” (66). This movement and diversity sounds like one of Whitman’s mantras. It is the morning meditation of a city street. Jacobs is celebrating the same diversity as Whitman, while acknowledging that one does not need intimacy with each of these people, but each player needs public responsibility and cooperation. One can still have privacy in a dense neighborhood such as this. Not only does Jacobs make a good visual here, but she goes on to describe how neighborhoods like these keep businesses successful and children safe.

This ballet requires not only diversity of people but density. She was aware that this idea was not popular at the time. Think about this era—after the GI Bill, the Second World War, a time when gas was cheap and cities were heavy with industry. Dreams of creating a safe backyard for their children to grow up in grew from this time of prosperity. Planners and architects put more thought into creating organized communities: houses in one area, shopping in another, one family per building. High density came to equal “overcrowding” (268). Jacobs could see already the economic and social consequences of these suburb plans. She poked at the planners’ ideas of organization and offered instead diversity and problem solving. Just as her idea of “attrition” for cars encouraged walking, her case for cities discouraged suburban living.

Jacobs pointed out that the problems of cities (the failure of the projects, the slums, the blighted neighborhoods) are not for lack of effort on the government’s part. What she calls the Great Blight of Dullness is in fact the result of efforts to create beauty in cities. Again we are reminded that cities are their own ecosystems—trying to mold them to the human idea of beauty and order will destroy their natural workings. Though a city is not “natural” in many senses, what happens in it economically and what happens within each neighborhood (not by a planner’s manipulation) is the natural progress of a community. The kind of help neighborhoods need, Jacobs says, is not usually determined correctly by an educated man who has not lived there.

As long as city planners, and the businessmen, lenders, and legislators who have learned from planners, cling to the unexamined assumptions that they are dealing with a problem in the physical sciences, city planning cannot possibly progress. Of course it stagnates. It lacks the first requisite for a body of practical and progressing thought: recognition of the kind of problem at issue (573).

An ecosystem like a city, Jacobs explains, has a problem of organized complexity. Statistics and direct or indirect relationships fail at solving this kind of problem. They are good at keeping planners busy, but they do not accomplish much.

Jacobs warned against putting nature on a pedestal by writing “There are dangers in sentimentalizing nature. Most sentimental ideas imply, at bottom, a deep if unacknowledged disrespect” (580). Sentimentalizing great cities, something one might accuse Whitman of doing, will also destroy the city. Her analysis of the self-destruction of diversity thus applies to a theory of domination: when neighborhoods get too successful from their good balance of differing uses and varied-aged buildings, people take notice and want to live there, the balance soon gets thrown off and the neighborhood declines.

Only in the past few years has a trend grown back to cities. In most cities (but not Detroit yet), the middle to upper class are moving back into the inner city and the ones without a choice are being pushed to the outskirts. Planners are fascinated with New Urbanism, the idea behind small walking communities with diverse uses on every street. During the forty years since Jacobs’ book, the American population has continued to separate into compartments: cities, suburbs, or rural. Jacobs, in writing this book, wrote a beautiful prophecy for the consequences of this sprawling pattern. If only America had listened – its addiction to oil, its disastrous food system, and now failing economy – one cannot avoid placing partial blame on the structure of our communities.

Filed under: Academic Paper

A Muslim’s Heart: Poetry in the Islamic Tradition

Poetry is the emphatic and sometimes reluctant denial that life is meaningless. Poetry concedes and asserts, listens and speaks, tells us what we did not know we knew. In differing cultures created by Islam and Christianity, poetry can tell us our essence, and by expressing who we are, we can find out how different we really are. Our view of Islam comes from studying its doctrine, observing its practice, and learning about its history and current events. But if Muslims only looked at our doctrines, our church services, and our history, would they know who we are? Muslims live a life of servitude that Westerners translate to mean slavery—tedious, depressing slavery. The poet Rumi, a mystic, Islamic jurist, and poet, writes poems that celebrate life. Western Christians’ attempt to learn about Islam is good. Many have come to understand that Islam is not a religion of violence or oppression but a religion that is young and whose people are faithful–it is not much different from Christianity centuries ago. We will look at a few of Rumi’s poems and see elements of Muslim life we have looked over.

This World Which Is Made of Our Love for Emptiness

Praise to the emptiness that blanks out existence. Existence:
This place made from our love for that emptiness!

Yet somehow comes emptiness,
this existence goes.

Praise to that happening, over and over!
For years I pulled my own existence out of emptiness.

Then one swoop, one swing of the arm,
that work is over.

Free of who I was, free of presence, free of dangerous fear, hope,
free of mountainous wanting.

The here-and-now mountain is a tiny piece of a piece of straw
blown off into emptiness.

These words I’m saying so much begin to lose meaning:
Existence, emptiness, mountain, straw:

Words and what they try to say swept
out the window, down the slant of the roof.

This poem, quite directly, talks about freedom.  In class we have discussed freedom and how Islam views serving God as the ultimate freedom. Rumi illustrates this in his poem. He first sets up life as a void, a place of emptiness. It is only our choice to embrace this space that makes our lives worthwhile: “Existence: / This place made from our love for that emptiness!” Then he spells out the patterns humans tend to fall into: filling the emptiness with inflated senses of self (“for years I pulled my own existence out of emptiness“), instead of being an empty vessel for God to fill—a nothingness Rumi praises and hopes for in the rest of the poem. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, in his book Ideals and Realities of Islam, writes

Islam is a Divine Revelation which was placed as a seed in the heart of man who was the receptacle of this Divine message. Man is the container. He cannot break this container; he can only purify it and empty it of the pungent substance that fills it so that it can become worthy of receiving the Divine nectar. (38)

Rumi upholds life as a state of emptiness but also as something that needs to be emptied. There are two types of emptiness here–the type that comes from trying to find meaning in earthly things, and the type that washes away all earthly things, making the path clear.  This means that we are containers, as Nasr describes, who can only be filled by first being emptied.

In American culture, we have freedom to pursue our happiness, or to do what makes us happy—an idea that one could easily interpret to striving for our desires. Our founding fathers saw those desires as pure and noble. But in this poem, the speaker hopes for freedom from these desires, and from the fear and disappointment that comes from having them: “Free of who I was, free of presence, free of dangerous fear, hope, / free of mountainous wanting.” Eastern thought tends to recognize the absence of things as much as the presence of things—both are equally important. Without space, we could not move around. The shape of space needs to be considered. It is only in this space that freedom can exist. How, then, could trying to fill one’s life with desires and dreams be freedom?

The poem then turns to the meaninglessness of what is present. The speaker realizes suddenly that even words are meaningless. The very words of the poem become foreign characters with focus. This is a joyful discovery: “Words and what they try to say swept / out the window, down the slant of the roof.” This sounds Ecclesiastical, a book of the Bible which repeats a phrase “meaningless, everything is meaningless.” It is in recognizing this meaninglessness that the author can acknowledge God, who gives everything meaning.

Ghazal 314

You who are not kept anxiously awake for love’s sake, sleep on.
In restless search for that river, we hurry along;
you whose heart such anxiety has not disturbed, sleep on.
Love’s place is out beyond the many separate sects;
since you love choosing and excluding, sleep on.
Love’s dawn cup is our sunrise, his dusk our supper;
you whose longing is for sweets and whose passion is for supper, sleep on.
In search of the philosopher’s stone, we are melting like copper;
you whose philosopher’s stone is cushion and pillow, sleep on.
I have abandoned hope for my brain and head; you who wish for
a clear head and fresh brain, sleep on.
I have torn speech like a tattered robe and let words go;
you who are still dressed in your clothes, sleep on.

This poem, being a Ghazal, already displays a different way of thinking to a Westerner. American poets love this form of poetry as a departure from their usual form—it is more of a circle than a story line, which many poems from the Western tradition feel they must have. There is no beginning or end, no linear progression. Each line ends with the same word or idea. This repeating creates an incantation or chant.

This poem seems it could be addressed straight to a Westerner. There are two ways of living life in this poem, and while one is acknowledged and tolerated, it is not condoned. The command “sleep on” accuses the addressed of ignorance, a state of lower consciousness, of blindness. We see a different attack on particularity with the line “Love’s place is out beyond the many separate sects; / since you love choosing and excluding, sleep on.” Western Christians may say Islam is too specific—the Qur’an’s strict language barriers, the spelled-out Five Pillars, and the laws that govern all of Muslim life—these elements may seem too excluding, but Rumi argues that individuals picking and choosing what is right and wrong is much worse.

Somewhere in this poem is a longing to sleep. The lines “I have abandoned hope for my brain and head; you who wish for / a clear head and fresh brain, sleep on” speaks of some sacrifice, perhaps one that was painful. Who would not want a clear head? The speaker addresses the “you” somewhat bitterly, but throughout the Ghazal he refuses to sleep. The endless pursuit of “Love” is never questioned, there is no doubt that Love is worth it: “Love’s dawn cup is our sunrise, his dusk our supper.”

Another surprising element to this poem is the insistence that the speaker has not found the answer, just the question. To American Christians, Islam seems so final—performing the five Pillars will give someone salvation. What we fail to realize is that Muslims face questions and doubts daily, the same way Christians do. What kind of sleeping fool would claim he has found all of the answers? The nature of philosophy is that truth is elusive and arguable—why would one make it his pillow?

With poems like these, it is surprising that a religion can be so violent, that it is fighting for a non-violent name among all these terrorist acts. “Ghazal 314” has an urgency that beats with the speaker’s heart—a devotion to God that will inflict violence if need be. Yet Christians would do the same. Our nation has the same ideals: dying for the country’s honor and freedom is highly valued by many Christians. Both religions set up situations that call for violence because both religions acknowledge that war is a part of life. Ecclesiastes says there is a time for war and a time for peace. That has proven true in Christianity’s history. The Boroumand sisters, Roya and Ladan, offer up the idea that Muslims are on the road to freedom and peace:

Westerners faced the same obstacles that we face today on the road to democracy. Citizens in the West fought for their freedoms; in this fight they lost neither their souls nor their religion. We too must roll up our sleeves to fight for freedom, remembering that we are first and foremost free and responsible human beings whom God has endowed with dignity. (Boroumand 17-18)

How can we continue judging Islam so harshly for extremists’ actions when words like these and

Rumi’s poems exist?

Since Islam touches every part of a Muslim’s life, it is fitting that Rumi’s poetry has Islamic themes running through them. But, unlike American poetry, these themes have less chance of causing the poems to be labeled. Poetry in America is divided up in many ways, one type being Christian poetry, and it usually is not a good label for the poet. It puts limits on the audience; there is an assumption that not everyone will appreciate or relate to the poem. Rumi does not name Allah, writes about the Prophet, and Jesus, but mostly he writes about Love. His love poems are passionate and joyful. This joy and zeal is clearly a part of this Muslim’s life. Poets read Rumi for his philosophy. They love his directness, his ideas, his way of clearing the mind and centering the soul. Within the poetry world, religious terms and differences melt away and the essence comes forth. It is elusive, truth is slippery, but within such bare bones of language the search is the same with Western spirituality and Islam.

Works Cited

Boroumand, Laden and Roya Boroumand,. “Terror, Islam, and Democracy.” Journal of Democracy. Volume 13, Number 2. April 2002.

Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. Ideals and Realities of Islam. Kazi Publications. 2000. 38.

http://www.armory.com/~thrace/sufi/poems.html.

Rumi. “Poems by Rumi.” Rumi. 9 May 2004. 19 Apr. 2009 <http://www.khamush.com/poems.html>.

Rumi, tr. by Jack Marshall. “Ghazal 314.” Poet Seers. Sri Chinmoy. 19 Apr. 2009 < http://www.poetseers.org/the_poetseers/rumis_poetry/ghazal_314/>.

Filed under: Academic Paper

Shine little glowworm, burn.

I am not one to initiate.
I stare and fade. Juliana.
Wearing red. I chased her once,
in a fever in the fields.

I stand in my blue pajamas now,
next to my bed and plastic
nightstand. Wife’s asleep.
My kids’ dream spirits playing on the roof.

One little spark here in this dust bowl
would set my life ablaze.
I’d pace through the last kitchen
of my life with pupils glowing red.

I heard her singing to the glowworms
when our barn caught on fire late April,
wettest night of the year.
I ran into the dewy fields, mistaking
lightning bugs for ashes of her dress.

Now I stare and fade into July,
finding her in the lightning storms:
they choose to strike every speck of dust but me.

Filed under: Persona , Shine little glowworm

Giraffe

When a giraffe is born,
it must fall a distance

of six feet.  The fall breaks
the umbilical cord, gets
the heart beating,
and clears the lungs.

If you land on too soft a surface, it’ll be like you never fell.

There is always a risk
of injury: the baby could land
on his head, he could break
bones, his mother could fall
exhausted on top of him.

If you land on too soft a surface, it’ll be like you never fell.

I’m afraid today
has been already defined.  I’m afraid
I’m not standing on high enough
stilts.  I’m afraid my fall
won’t break me to breathe.

If you land on too soft a surface, you won’t survive your birth.

Filed under: Uncategorized

The Knot

I want (SO BADLY!) 
to create something beautiful.
Something completely new
Is this how God felt? Materialistic?

I want to crochet a bear 
or an owl or a rabbit. Or a pear.
I want beauty I can touch. I want 
someone else’s perfect skin.
I want to form, mold, knit
something sparkling and gorgeous.  

Maybe He said these things. Or:
I want beauty that can love me 
back. A rebound of my beauty.

I want to have always existed. 
I don’t want to know your life before me.
Not the people, not the movies, 
no past phonecalls or boyfriends. 

 I didn’t exist then, but I do now,
ever since you spoke Amen.

So are rainbow-ridden cloud factories not real? 
Like global warming? Like the positive effects 
of yoga combined with organic granola?  
Is the world a  government of fairness 
and unfairness in equal parts? 
Or is it just a huge knot of a long kite string?

I used to vote and read the news. 
Now the most important thing 
to me are the funny pages.

I love the knot.

My trying to untangle was admirable, 
My idea to cut it apart was ridiculous.
How many angel arm-hairs would snap?

I absolutely adore the knot.

Filed under: Love , The Knot

High School Hearts

I want to go back in time
enroll at your high school
and walk the halls you walk.
I want to look for you
after chemistry because I
know you have it fifth period,
before you head over to European
History, your quick pace giving me
a reason to quicken mine, hiding
behind textbooks. 
 

I want to daydream about you 
after school, knowing you
are watching movies, reading 
books, racking up your
media-count as I blog
all the thoughts I want
you to read, I want to say
to you. 

 

I want to drop my pencil
in the class we have together,
American Lit, so you finally
talk to me about the books
you’re reading, after
so many classes listening to you
outsmart the teacher. When we study
plays, I want the teacher
to ask me to read Eliza and you
Henry, our banter pre-written
by Shaw but with a My Fair Lady
ending. 

 

I want you to secretly  
want me, realizing this
one day while eating pineapple
Jell-O, then later waiting for me
in the curtains of the stage
as I sing my high school heart
out the third-ever song I wrote.

And when you finally had kissed me,
I want all the purple high school glittering
stars to fall and bounce off my chest,
a thousand times more than the way
I feel when you walk into the classroom
every day at 10:55 a.m.

Filed under: Love , High School Hearts

Your husband got lost last night.

Your husband got lost last night.

He took a wrong turn
getting up from his desk
and fell into his laptop,
into the Microsoft word document
he had open.

The document was a poem.
He fell in and stumbled over its words.
His foot got stuck in a w
and he twisted his ankle.
He limped over the word
eradicate and passed out
on the line fold my time
like paper hearts. He got up,
fell off the line break
after the word birthday
and landed on mirth lay.

Holding onto the very edge
of the last word, garage,
the cursor blinking, threatening to delete,
he wondered what he could do
to get out and back into your arms.
He swung up over the e and rearranged
the letters from his poem into hOw do I
geT bac into yo r armS?
He had enough letters left over
to spell I am so soRry aBout last year
and I lo e yoU.

Filed under: Persona , Your husband got lost last night.

Melanie Was Made to Spin

 But once there was a world with people like us in it except the world was a mobile instead of a water sphere and people were hanging from its many wires and strings, dowels and rods. When a child was born her parents would let down their joy and pride on the end of string tied their dowel of marriage. Some children grew up, swinging in the breeze, into adults who swung in the wind until their string came undone, whether or not they were ready. Some couldn’t stop their string from spinning. Some cut their own string with their teeth.

Melanie was the spinning kind. Melanie found only one man to grab her hands and stop her spinning. Jack. Inevitably, Jack let go of Melanie. Jack cut his own string with his teeth. Melanie continued spinning constant dizzy spinning, this way then that way, growing frustrated. Melanie noticed a dark blue book lowering into her life by a string. Melanie read the book cover to cover and understood. Melanie climbed half of the way up her little string on this big mobile and ran out of strength and fell to spinning. Every day Melanie did this. Higher and higher every day. Melanie reached her knot one day. One day she saw her maker’s careful work on her little string on this big mobile. Melanie was made to spin. Melanie was angry. Her tears fell and hung from little strings off this big mobile. Melanie was made to spin.

Days swung.

Melanie spun. She spread arms in the wind, brought them in to speed her spin, sprawled out limbs to slow it, everyone beamed as she drew them in. Melanie got grace, grace lowered down on a little string and she grabbed it by the wide brim and put it on. Melanie’s fan club swung in the breeze beaming in the sun. Melanie let her fingers curl and her head fall back and saw Grandma above in the family mobile, hanging by a thread, so graceful like an ancient dangling doll. She smiled down proud as the sunlight beaming past her head. She smiled falling and Melanie watched white dress flutter, Grandma spinning down to heaven, realized Grandma spun too, back when her knot was still tied, how she never noticed how all she will always remember is a beaming ancient smile.

Filed under: Prose , Melanie Was Made to Spin