W.S. Merwin’s Now

When I was a teenager I often sat by a lake in thought. I read Alan Watts and translations of the Tao Te Ching, then crossed my legs on weekends by the water and reflected. In those times I pursued an anchor in the moment, even as the water wrinkled in the wind and striders cut the surface. In my adolescent way, I was reaching toward a perception beyond the labels of a world I hardly knew. Before I had even constructed a stable sense of self, I drenched my mind in a wisdom that dismantled the mechanisms of identity and definition. But there were moments I felt certain I connected with something more than the world’s distinctions, a clarity beyond weekly and monthly plans, appointments and deadlines. This same connection surfaces with a multiplicity of facets in W.S. Merwin’s poem “The River of Bees.”

In a dream I returned to the river of bees
Five orange trees by the bridge and
Beside two mills my house
Into whose courtyard a blindman followed
The goats and stood singing
Of what was older

Soon it will be fifteen years

He was old he will have fallen into his eyes

I took my eyes
A long way to the calendars
Room after room asking how shall I live

One of the ends is made of streets
One man processions carry through it
Empty bottles their
Image of hope
It was offered to me by name

Once once and once
In the same city I was born
Asking what shall I say

He will have fallen into his mouth
Men think they are better than grass

I return to his voice rising like a forkful of hay

He was old he is not real nothing is real
Nor the noise of death drawing water

We are the echo of the future

On the door it says what to do to survive
But we were not born to survive
Only to live

Stripped of all punctuation, discrete thoughts within the poem bleed into each other, giving the mind no point of rest, no chance to linger. This is not the expansive embrace of Whitman’s lines, but a kind of fleeing from or racing toward something. The poem sheds everything as quickly as it picks it up. The relentlessly enjambed lines and basic anapestic rhythm and occasional run-on sentence intensify this onrush. There is a sense of leaning into the poem.

The first line locates us in a dream. Merwin was a Buddhist and doubtlessly aware of the story of Chuang Tzu and his dream of being a butterfly and its implications of the ambiguity of conscious reality. Chuang Tzu dreamt he was a butterfly and didn’t know he was a man. When he woke, he wasn’t sure if he was then a butterfly dreaming he was a man. The anecdote asks, “What is real? What is the nature of consciousness?” In Merwin’s poem, the fertilizing figures are bees, their work rendering the image of a river that is nearly a metaphorical overload in asserting the force of the creative moment to be both always local and endlessly flowing. Much of the poem is an unpacking of that initial force, a struggle to remain present in a moment that is always rushing ahead. Although we are in a dream, the poem declares that “nothing is real.” Therefore, everything is on an equal plain, and the question of remaining present in the moment is relevant whether inside or outside a dream.

All these questions connect to ideas found in Alan Watts, D.T. Suzuki, Lao Tzu, and others. I had similar considerations sitting by the lake thinking about a world that resists being named or pinned down without dying in one’s mental grasp. My own fertilizing figures were dragonflies. They skimmed the lake surface and I wondered about the nature of my own perception, if it had an above and a below the surface, elements that could not be held in place without losing them. Like those thoughts and like river water, and like Merwin’s poem, these things won’t stay still, they exist in flight.

Perhaps it will seem excessive to say the poem moves like a river, but it does flow forward ceaselessly, bank, pool, carrying its images and metaphors like driftwood. In the poem’s current, a blind man enters singing “of what was older.” The verb here is interesting, because it doesn’t only place this older subject in a simple past tense but suggests it is now nonexistent. Whatever this was no longer is. At least, that is one possible reading of it: that is, having passed in time, the song’s subject is now outside time. This also verges on a lyric problem that returns later, a conflict between the living moment and the act of naming, the very practice of the poet.

The figure singing may, in fact, be an older version of the poet himself. So why is he blind when Merwin wasn’t? The blindness of the singer/poet is not necessarily a physical ailment but the state of the older self who, having past the living moment, is now blind to it. This is important because to “have fallen into his eyes” is not a restatement of the figure’s blindness but a different characteristic or perhaps a different dimension of the blindness. It’s a phrase that recalls the look on a dead person’s face. As Dickinson put it, “The film upon the eye / Mortality’s old Custom.” It conjures the sense of “do I wake or sleep?” The poem straddles the worlds between dreaming and waking, living and dead, not because it maintains an absolute divide, but because it questions the reality of that divide. It ponders what the speaker of Rilke’s first Duino Elegy claims,

the living are wrong to believe in the too-sharp distinctions which
they themselves have created.
(trans, Stephen Mitchell)

Whatever is not now is dead and dead is as old as we get. Or to put it in Alan Watts’s words, “there is never anything but the present, and if you cannot live there, you cannot live anywhere.” The single line “He was old he will have fallen into his eyes,” is not only one of those run-on constructions to produce speed in the poem but grammatically enacts the tensions between which the poem occurs. The first statement is in the past tense “he was old,” which is followed by the future perfect construction “will have fallen into his eyes.” Like a grammatical echolocation, it pinpoints the occurrence of the poem itself between them, in the present. And here, in the present, the current of the poem piles association on association to carry it along and also to allow the renewal of the singer of the poem as it dies away. Thus, the old man’s eyes fallen into themselves relocates the speaker back in the present declaring of his past:

I took my eyes
A long way to the calendars
Room after room asking how shall I live

So the present speaker of the poem speaks of the past. The calendars here bring in the world of facts and events, of dates and schedules. We plan our days by calendars, set dates with dentists and family and friends, mark birthdays and anniversaries. Those days open like rooms, which is not a too unlikely way of understanding time. As Joseph Brodsky put it, “From Time’s point of view, there is no ‘then,’ only ‘there.’” Or as Philip Larkin put it, “Days are where we live.” In other words, they are a kind of space. But what is the shape of the life lived there? “How shall I live?” Of what does that room consist? What is its layout? How do I move through it? The questions are not to be answered in the usual sense. Life grows into them by moving through the realm of potential and locality the poem is trying to enact. The “long way” to those calendars is the time traveled and which is itself the shape of that life. We live the shape of them rather than construct them. The next stanza pivots on a succession of paradoxes.

One of the ends is made of streets
One man processions carry through it
Empty bottles their
Image of hope
It was offered to me by name

This is a similar perception to that in Stevens’ “Metaphors of a Magnifico.”

Twenty men crossing a bridge,
Into a village,
Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges,
Into twenty villages,
Or one man
Crossing a single bridge into a village.

Perspective here echoes back and forth from a singularity to a multiplicity of realities. But whereas Stevens guides us through the semantic multiplicity that, at the end of the poem, leaves the intellect ultimately incapable of fixing a singular meaning, Merwin provides paradoxes that augment the singularity of potential in every moment. The end made of streets in Merwin’s poem is not a dead-end, but a path constructed of more continuations. These streets are temporal spaces, which is to say that time goes on. “One man processions” could have been lifted from Stevens, depicting, as it does, a changing figure singular in each depiction, embodying and carrying a symbol of hope: empty bottles. The one-man processions are the processions of the speaker reborn in each moment as he passes through it. The emptiness of the bottles is not the vacancy we associate with emptiness but rather potential, possibility, even the ground of spirit that dwells in each moment.

The 9th century Zen sage Te-Shan said, “Only when you have no thing in your mind and no mind in your things are you vacant and spiritual, empty and marvelous” (qtd. in Watts, trans., Ruth Sasaki). In his book, The Way of Zen, Alan Watts explains in a footnote to this quote, that in context, “spiritual” here means “beyond expression in words.” Merwin’s poem strikes to the heart of this ineffability. Hope, he says, “was offered to me by name.” What was that name? We don’t get one. We are shuttled along to the next stanza which, if the opening is taken as answer to what that name is, we find ourselves at the heart of the poem’s tensions.

Once once and once
In the same city I was born
Asking what shall I say

The opening line of this stanza asserts and even insists on the renewal of every moment. Each moment we are born into is a rebirth, unique each time. Each time is “once.” It’s Heraclitus’s river but with language so insistent, it struggles to remain in step with the rush of time. It’s because the renewal the stanza grasps for is also erasure, wiping clean the old self, that which “was older” but now is no longer. Simultaneously, this repetition is an enactment of the eternal now, the only place life is lived, as in the Alan Watts quote. It is what, in Merwin’s poem “The Different Stars,” he calls “wisdom” and “the loss that has not left this place.” It is the moving target in his collection The Moving Target. It is the moment that brings the tree shadow to life to avenge the earth in his poem “The Last One.”

Well cutting everything they came to water.
They came to the end of the day there was one left standing.
They would cut it tomorrow they went away.
The night gathered in the last branches.
The shadow of the night gathered in the shadow on the water.
The night and the shadow put on the same head.
And it said Now.

In this moment, this repeated now, this “same city” in which the self is perpetually reborn, the speaker asks, “what shall I say?” We here come upon the poet’s lyrical problem. If, as Nietzsche said, “Whatever we have words for, that we have already got beyond,” and the poet’s job is to name, what words are there to use for this moment? The utterance of song is outdated, even dead, the moment it occurs. So what is the poet’s actual job: merely to produce a trail of dead things? The poem continues:

He will have fallen into his mouth
Men think they are better than grass

The construction of the first line recalls “he will have fallen into his eyes,” that phrase which contains the constant imminence of death but here articulated to refer metonymically to the poet’s craft of song and all utterance. It suggests silence has fallen or will always be about to fall. That is the end of all song. The song being sung will end, as surely as the person alive will die. But there is another reading of the line, which is that the singer dies into his song as it is sung. In this reading, the poet’s song is not his way of naming the moment but of living it. It is closer to what Auden meant in his often-misquoted lines,

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

Although the language here is not as desperate to keep the attention within the “valley of its making,” it carries the same spirit as Merwin’s line. In a sense, to speak more to Merwin’s Buddhism, the song or poem as utterance is the poet’s experience of enlightenment. It is the dwelling of the self in the moment without clinging to it. In the words of Chuang-tzu,

“The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror. It grasps nothing; it refuses nothing. It receives but does not keep” (qtd in Watts, trans.).

This is the difference between “making something happen” and being “a way of happening.” So, it is no wonder that Merwin’s poem rushes onward. Nor is it puzzling that the next line echoes Psalm 103 where we are told, “As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth.” The illusion of permanence is belied by the poet’s song itself and his experience of dying into the song as he sings it, holding nothing, grasping nothing. It also harkens back to that Te-Shan quote because it has to do with what is done with the mind. With all the thinking, planning, considering, the self inflates into an ego that believes it contains past and future, a place it gets lost in, missing the only place life truly occurs: now. But the self of Merwin’s poem, the speaker, is not so trapped. He returns because, as it turns out, naming isn’t the poet’s task but singing.

Silence is the context and necessity of all song. Out of it comes song and to it, it returns. Out of it comes enlightenment and to it, it returns. It is similar to what happens to the main character, Abel, in House Made of Dawn. In the wake of his grandfather’s death, he goes out and runs “with no reason to run but the running itself.” He could “see at last without having to think.” In this condition, he goes on and “under his breath he began to sing. There was no sound, and he had no voice; had only the words of a song. And he went running on the rise of the song.” The self in these moments dissolves because all sense of subject and object drops away; there is only a singular event. And thus we are told in the Buddhist text of the Visuddhimmagga,

Suffering alone exists, none who suffer;
The deed there is, but no doer thereof;
Nirvana is, but no one seeking it;
The Path there is, but none who travel it.
(qtd in Watts, trans.)

In this way Merwin has no words, but the poem continues rising on that song:

I return to his voice rising like a forkful of hay

Of course, that hay recalls the grass that men think they are better than. The song dies as it is sung. The moment is a furnace consuming both hay and song. Yeats’s dancer and the dance are here enacted as singer and song. It is the self he sings, but it is not a historical self. Rather, like Whitman, it is the self that stands “apart from the pulling and hauling.”

He was old he is not real nothing is real
Nor the noise of death drawing water

We are the echo of the future

On the door it says what to do to survive
But we were not born to survive
Only to live

The present moment lived as a tension between past and future carries through to the very end of the poem. So too does the poet’s innate struggle with language as a vehicle of living the enlightened moment. Mnemosyne, or memory, is the mother of the muses. Yet any name affixed to what passes immediately dies as it passes the moment of song. The name becomes part of what is dead. This inability to truly name anything living is part of the declaration of “nothing is real.” It’s a limitation of language. And Merwin has declared in other poems the problem of believing too much in words. But it is also another fundamental tenet of Buddhism, i.e., that nothing is real. Even the flow of time is considered illusory, akin to the way waves on the ocean appear to be water moving across it when in fact it’s just water going up and down in place. It is movement but apparent motion, and it doesn’t stop at any point, like the poem, existing only in the singing. The self and the song dies into the moment and thus the “noise of death drawing water.”

While also declared to be not real, that “noise” opposes itself implicitly to what the blind man stood singing and which the poem itself sings. The next line gives weight to the reality of everything present, the incredible line, “We are the echo of the future.” We’ve traveled from past to future in 3 lines: the singer in a past, to Death depicted as a farmer at his well, dropping the bucket down, drawing water. The future that echoes toward the living self in the present is the echo of that bucket dropping down, hitting the water, and then pulling someone out of the common pool of humanity, out of the living moment. We travel toward the center of that echo until we arrive where time and movement stop for us. Something here is kin to Eliot’s still point of the turning world, a point followed in the next section of The Four Quartets about language and movement.

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now.

The simultaneous arrival and departure in the poem echoes Merwin’s tension between past and future or Roethke’s line in “The Waking,” “What falls away is always. And is near.” The constantly dying present is ever present with us and as we sing it, the words too die away.

Merwin’s final stanza makes explicit the dualism that has been implicit in the poem’s unfolding. That is, to survive and to live are contraries because survival is about the future, never about today. Survival is about planning, storing, protecting, and thus having the attention fixed outside the moment. Living is about singing, dancing, watching a sunset, the attention dwelling in the moment. And life is what we are born to. That beautiful word, “only,” means not just “merely” or “nothing more than,” but “exclusively.” Survival is not in the cards for us. Life can only be lived now. Those many years ago by the lake, while I sat reflecting, it was this life, here in this moment, that I occasionally managed to dwell within, without naming it in any way. Those were the moments I could see what was right in front of me, not obscured by expectations or regrets. For the poem, that is the true moment of song. In those long-ago days, someone had said to me that, in all my intense consideration of things that I should not forget to “stop and smell the roses.” A friend standing nearby said, “That’s what he’s doing.” A Zen proverb tells us that the mind should be like the moon reflecting on a stream. The stream does not grasp at the water to stop its flow. Merwin’s poem moves this way, flowing without grasping the flow. The river of bees continues, and we should never stop singing the joy of that witness, breathing and moving with the living moment.