To have great faith in a seed

There’s a persimmon plant that my family has been giving our attention to, encouraging for two years. It took one year of hibernation in our refrigerator, needing the mix of cold, dark, sand, and soil to germinate, another to slowly grow in the swings of light that we too try to adapt to. I’m glad that M is a botanist because otherwise, I would have loved it to death long ago.

Thoreau—that problematic curmudgeon—wrote “I have great faith in a seed.”

I read last week—I wish I could remember where— that what we are collectively feeling these past years—watching so many almost-apocalypses—is the burden of overwitness. We are overwitnessing.

I wrestle with whether that is right, or if there is an inherent flaw behind the idea—it seems to negate a bit the significance and meaning of bearing witness. In some definitions, over means finished, done, past. I also means to cover a whole surface, which implies a moving on from, a shutting down from, an obscuring of what is happening in the world. Bearing witness is also an act that is always something over because it is an act of connection—it goes above, beyond, more—to move beyond the concern or boundary of ourselves. I see you—an offering that confirms a shared reality. We are here together, both in this moment. I see you. Sometimes I think that there might be no other real purpose to life as we know it.

Watching events right now, my thoughts keep returning to Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem, written in a bold act of bearing witness to what is known as the Yezhov terror, Stalinist incarcerations—17 months of waiting outside prison walls, to hear of her husband and son, waiting in line with other women all waiting to hear of their loved ones. Of the woman who turned to her and said “Can you describe this?” and Akhmatova returning her gaze saying “Yes, I can,” writing “…then something like the shadow of a smile crossed what had once been her face.”

Women memorized her words—to be found writing about what was happening would mean death. The women committed them to memory, to share with others. To bear witness to the act of bearing witness.

Why is our century worse than any other?
Is it that in the stupor of fear and grief
It has yet plunged its fingers in the blackest ulcer,
Yet cannot bring relief?

Westward the sun is dropping,
And the roofs of towns are shining in its light.
Already death is chalking doors with crosses
And calling the ravens and the ravens are in flight.
                                                                   1919.
 --Anna Akhmatova

In a book that one of you dear readers recommended to me last week—a book I’ve now fallen in love with—Gillian Osborne writes about the color green through essays of green as material, through its different manifestations in history and in personal account. It’s a beautiful, lyric mediation. And of course, much of one essay is based on close readings of Dickinson—because lately, it seems I can’t escape Dickinson’s powerful eternal ghost (not that I would ever want to).

Osborne writes of reading and re-reading Dickinson since she was young, thinking of it as “Close reading as spiritual survival, oriented towards a vicinity of others.” 

Close attention as a religious, spiritual act—and how it reflects an attention oriented towards others. It’s part of why the term overwitness feels imprecise. The over suggests an excess, and yet how can any suffering be deemed excessive, ever? Suffering is suffering—it is life and death and pain and agony and as soon as it begins we want it to stop. And yet whether we overwitness it or not, it is suffering that needs to be seen, known, acknowledged. There is no connection in denial. We need to offer bearing witness to all others—and hopefully to do more whenever we can. But the act of witness is powerful—a dual act beyond our own reality in service and deference of others. It’s an act of care.

In alchemy, art and nature, philosophy and religion, chemistry and medicine are inseparable. It has been pulled apart into pieces and called knowledge, but there’s wisdom in its belief in mystery. Some of it is ancient and refers to weights and measures, metals, and language that can no longer be identified with certainty. A mystery created through grasping at mystery.

Writing an interpretation of alchemy, heavily influenced by Jung, Marie Louise von Franz wrote:

Religion, in our definition, in its most basic form, would simply be constant alert attention directed towards these [unconscious] facts, instead of ruling and deciding one’s life by conscious rational decision and reasoning of the pros and cons.

What she’s hinting at is the feelings beyond the calculations of the mind—the intuitive hunch, the gut feeling, the hair raising, the simple awareness of a reaction that your mind had not had time to reason. Paying attention to these superrational feelings—a kind of close reading of the world that becomes a spiritual act. Our attention beyond the weights and measures of the rational is missed when we dismiss or seed doubt about such responses to situations. 

Marina Tsvetaeva—modern poet, admirer of Akhmatova, writing at similar times in similar situations and experiences—wrote: 

What shall I do, by nature and trade
a singing creature (like a wire--sunburn! Siberia!)
as I go over the bridge of my enchanted 
visions, that cannot be weighed, in a
world that deals only in weights and measures?

What shall I do, singer and first-born, in a
world where the deepest black is grey,
and inspiration is kept              in a thermos
with all this immensity
in a measured world?
                                                           1923

While the term ‘religious’ as a means of paying attention feels a bit incongruous, Franz writes that within the etymology of religion there is some ambiguity. There is the same root of legere, meaning to pick up, as if collecting wood. But legere also means to read—to collect, gather together individual letters, and collect them into words, as children learn to read. Religere, would then mean careful consideration; the re meaning backwards—to look backwards over the collection of letters, words, as a way to understand and project forwards. Backwards to move forwards.

We collect words as testament to memory—to collect the experiences of the past, to try and understand the present and future, to bear witness to the now in service to those suffering and to a future who should never forget. To write and read as a spiritual act oriented towards a vicinity of others. 

Osborne also writes of the minister and botanist Edward Hitchcock, who gave sermons on winter and spring in Amherst when Dickinson was writing her internal, eternal bombs. Hitchcock—in the manner that was prevalent in the mid-nineteenth century, looked at nature as a metaphor for the teachings of Christianity, and wrote that “seeds aren’t dead, though they’re ‘nourished by, the decaying cotyledon.” He argued that the plant ascends from the decaying seed into the air and sun, while also descending further into the earth for nourishment from the soil. Two sources of expansion, of life, no longer with any resemblance to the seed. “Yet that seed was indispensable to its germination.”

Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Dickinson’s mentor, friend, correspondent, and posthumous editor—who should also be more remembered for his abolitionist, suffragist advocacy, as well as his writing—described Dickinson’s poems as

torn up by the roots, with rain and dew and earth still clinging.

Poems, bearing witness, with earth still clinging. Unsure of resurrection, or what shape they will take in the future. Poems torn up by the roots—that is what I think of when I hear the word overwitness. To feel the thrum of bearing witness in the veins, spilling onto the page, as Tsvetaeva wrote:

I opened my veins.           Unstoppably
life spurts out with no remedy. 
Now I set out bowls and plates.
Every bowl will be shallow.
Every plate will be small.
                                   And overflowing their rims,
into the black earth, to nourish
the rushes unstoppably
without cure, gushes
poetry...

Overwitness is feeling it in one’s veins memory is what is needed, to remember, to write so that future others can also hold those memories. To engage with the world in ways that are beyond what can be measured—the mess, the rain, the sun, the dew, the earth still clinging to the roots that pull it out of the moment and into eternity—to leave for future others to also tend to. And not forget.

The persimmon we’ve been nurturing with rapt attention embodies this feeling—the manifestation of a poem made material, the growth from bearing witness in the face of oversuffering—its seed comes from a plant that survived the bombing of Hiroshima. I found it through an artist who has been sending seeds out by request, but there are projects like it throughout Japan, to spread the seeds from these few plants that survived to places around the world—an act of bearing witness to that suffering, and of the continued need to care for that peace. An attention oriented towards the vicinity of others. Out of that seed of suffering and death, resilience towards expansion, above and below.

Silent witness beyond the measure of words, earth surrounding its roots. And we pay close attention to it.