Review of Gary Whited's Being, There
By Rich Borofsky

Gary Whited's second book of poems, Being, There, more than lives up to its title. The 40 poems and 18 translations are an in-depth, intimate experience of Being-in and Being-with the world—in this case, the vivid world of his boyhood on a family farm in eastern Montana. The book is also a teaching on what Being is—spoken in the 2600 year-old voice of pre-Socratic philosopher, Parmenides, sensitively translated here. His versions of Parmenides are interspersed among his poems creating what is an extraordinary lecture-demonstration about what Being, there means and what it feels like when Being is embodied in the particularity of one's own lived experience in a particular place.

Parmenides' entire surviving corpus is just a few fragments. Despite their brevity, they create an exquisitely succinct statement of what he was teaching. Parmenides' view is a no-frills view of the philosophy of being, called ontology. Unlike Heidegger's Being and Time or Sartre's Being and Nothingness, which seem absurdly prolix and abstruse by comparison, Parmenides' ontology is nothing if not concise:
The name for what, alone, is fully untroubled is to be. (Fragment XX)

This is the epigraph for the whole book and, in a sense, these poems are an explication de texte of this one line. But also they are much more than that. They are a virtuoso demonstration of what Parmenides' teaching looks, sounds, and feels like in a particular place, in a particular life, at a particular time.

Specifically, the ground of being which Parmenides describes—the beginningless, endless, infinite, omnipresent, and abundant Beingness that is immanent in everything—is in these poems literally the ground, the earth, the dirt, stones and dust of a small family farm on the east Montana prairie, with a creek running through it. The farm is a place of magic—revealed by the miracle of intimate listening that hears the silent voices of stones, and cherishing attention that sees the "clear water catch the light as it spills," and loving touch that can palpate the inner mysteries of fenceposts.

This prairie homeplace is the poet's Locus Amoenus—a Latin phrase meaning an idealized place of safety or comfort, with connotations of Elysium. He uses this phrase as the title of a poem with these lines:
I had no name for this delight that leapt from my eyes,
went out to meet things of the prairie I loved as a child.

But this is not an idealized place. It is a place of
...earthly things
that give themselves fully, not spent in their giving,
but some way added to.

We are transported to a place inhabited by many beings—"a barn, home to the unseen ghosts I feared, "along with spiders, flies, feral cats, cows, and horses named "Goldie, Red, Lighting, Lucky, Blue, Babe, and Spike"—each fed in its own way:

Bucket of oats
To the horses. Dusty, ground grain
To the cow. Fresh milk to feral
Cats. Hay to all the four-leggeds.
Water, always water, to us all.

Especially vivid is a poem which describes his assisting for the first time the birth of a calf:

One foot appears, not two;
naked to the shoulder, between contractions
I reach in...fingers swimming upstream,
       as if entering a dream....
I've become part of her,
       smell of winter's straw, manure,
dirt and wet cow's tail—all of it so close to my face
       there is no room to doubt this world.

An unexpected peace enters my body.

Likewise, we are invited into the landscape of his prairie homestead, where we are introduced to places like Bull Butte,
Standing still as long as always
It spoke legends from up high.
Always there. North and west
Of our barn. Looking over us.
How I knew I was there.
Not not-there.

On this farm, there are wheat fields that sing:
...the young green shoots
Of wheat making their way to August, ripening
Into bone white, when the softest breeze sets
The dry heads to singing, to singing their
Shimmering harvest song

There are big-picture images, like the "drunken lights" of the Aurora Borealis, that
"Dance wild over the prairie night sky,"

and close-ups:
Someplace a grasshopper nibbles on the tender wheat
Stops to spit, chews, leaps to the next stalk.

What I admire so much in reading these poems is how completely the poet is anchored to "my part of earth / What North Star was to my slice of sky."
These poems teach us that when a place is thoroughly inhabited by our sensory presence—seeing, listening, and touching—it becomes a sacred space, a spiritual home and forever memorable. These poems are memorable precisely because they are so completely rooted in this one place and so deeply felt. Indeed, you could say this book is a poetic memoir. It is actually the most beautiful and touching memoir of a boyhood I have ever read.

These poems are suffused with all the hallmarks of authentic being—a wakeful attentiveness, a sacredness, an alive stillness, omnipresence, connectedness, empathy, love and wisdom.

This attentiveness is evident in the opening poem, "First Astonishments:"
I cannot name what carries itself
In the curl of the pigs' tails trembling
As they arrive at the V-shaped feed trough

When I come near, bucket full of ground oats
Heavy against one leg, bucket of kitchen slop
Splashes at the other. Oats first, slop on top.
And later in the same poem, these lines:
...the soft,
Steady voice of wind sings above this slurping,
Presses its shoulder against the windmill's blades.

Reading this, I have the vivid feeling of Being, There. I feel, in e.e. cummings' words,
       now the ears of my ears awake and
              now the eyes of my eyes are opened.
These poems teach us that true Being is ever awake, unblinking wakefulness, not clouded by thought. Each of these marvelous poems creates an awakening—roused by startling images like "glistening spittle from cows' mouths as they walk to water", or surprising metaphors like "harvesting your delight" and "this thin sip of light," or by delicious phrases like, "Wind against the weight of things," or the poignant vulnerability of lines like, "So many things /we could not know from here, /though what we knew / kept us faithful to our task, waiting for the light /to return."

How wonderful to be awakened into this intimate, attentive, ever-present experience of Being and Being-with. The flashes of awakened Being in each of these poems are surprising and delightful-like the flashes of fireflies on a dark summer night.

Also, we can see in these poems how pure Being consecrates and sanctifies. Being is both the simplest and the most essential element of all spirituality. Simone Weil wrote, "Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer." I take this to mean that attention that is sustained and patient, that is undiluted, undistracted and wholly devoted to the object of attention sanctifies it—irrespective of whether it is God or a fly:
on the edge of the milk bucket
when I was learning to milk the cow,

and I watched her walk
all around the pail's edge

feeling intimate with this creature
as she made her way around the rim held tight

between my knees, the milk hissing
and foaming into itself.
This intense seeing is a kind of salvation. It is life saving:
your gaze fixed there, /As though your life depends on it.

Along with this, there is a pure and reassuring stillness in these poems, which deepens the sense of sacredness and offers a glimpse of deep mysteries. Here is part of a poem about the stillness of fenceposts:

Wind whistled through the narrow slits between
The fencepost's long splinters, where there was nothing
That I could see, only a flute's sound of nature's making

From the long standing in dry prairie air of any
Wooden post and a farmer's need to have the post
Stand still long enough that, to my young boy sense

Of things, seemed to be forever. It delighted my eyes
And my fingers to touch something that lived
Right there inside where forever might arrive,

And there I'd go on many days to touch,
To listen, to see that very nothing and hear
That single forever, and on days when I needed to

That were many, I'd hold my cheek right there
Where nothing and forever mingled....
Or in another poem,
I stand still
As a stone, look for where it all begins or ends.

Further, we learn that anything seen or heard or felt in the light of Being becomes omnipresent in time and space. In Fragment VIII Parmenides says:

Being is birthless and indestructible,
For it is whole-limbed and unmoved and without
End; not ever was it or will it be, since
It is now all at once, one, continuous.

In other words, Being is eternal and forever. It can neither be created or destroyed. It has no past or future—only a timeless present. Most of the poems here are written in this timeless present tense. Indeed, there is hardly any mention of past or future in these poems at all. (One lovely exception is a poem about a fly who would likely spend her entire life in the barn, "while I had not yet begun /to imagine mine.")

Likewise, in the light of Being everything is connected, Parmenides in Fragment IV says,
       ...the Being
Of things is never far off, nor is it separate
From the things themselves, but always
Everywhere, here, now.
He is saying that no place or thing is separate from any other place. Everything connects to everything else in a great chain of Being. Because we all share this Being-presence we, too, are all connected. We are all Being blood relatives, part of the vast Being Family. Being is everyone's and everything's last name—Bird Being, Mountain Being, Fencepost Being, Stone Being, and, of course, Human Being. And we are all, to use Thich Nhat Hahn's beautiful neologism, "Interbeings" who are ceaselessly interbeing with each other, connected through a single nervous system—so that even the lifting of one tiny twig sends ripples into the entire universe and back:

One step at a time amidst the sun-warmed everything,
my gaze, by chance or not, catches on that place
where my one hand one twig lifts,

riles the dirt dried mud has made, sends tiny tremors
I cannot not imagine to a nearby tree, whose roots so slight
a shift might feel through the shared dirt,

then shiver up her roughened bark, and into each inner ring
that shudders just a bit 'til each high leaf in every vein
receives the unexpected tremor....

and by that one act maybe change everything for as far as anything
touches what next by it lay, which I imagine never stops
'til China and on beyond all our gravity

and back around to where I stand, not anyplace,
but this place, where, by this one touch it all
begins again to move.

This sense of interconnection inevitably creates a profound sense of empathy. The boy in these poems is not a separate observer or admirer of what he sees, but rather he becomes everything he sees. He is, like Walt Whitman, a gifted empath, as described in Whitman's poem, "There was a Child Went Forth:"
There was a child went forth every day,
And the first object he looked upon and received with wonder or pity or love or dread, that object he became, And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day...or for many years or stretching cycles of years.
The early lilacs became part of this child,
And grass, and white and red morning glories, and white and red clover, and the song of the phœbe-bird, And the March-born lambs, and the sow's pink-faint litter, and the mare's foal, and the cow's calf, and the noisy brood of the barn-yard or by the mire of the pond-side....
These became part of that child who went forth every day, and who now goes, and will always go forth every day.
Just so, the boy in these poems, by becoming each thing he sees, is
not separate and not
Part of everything,
But everything.
He is the allness that has no opposite—because it includes everything. He is the "I" who is "Us."

If love is the capacity to create a larger Us, then these poems are surely love poems. They are full of love's delight and love's plenitude and generosity, love's open-hearted kindness, as well as exposing love's most intense vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities include seeing his father beat his older brother with a thick piece of firewood for not wearing an extra flannel shirt to walk a mile and half to school in a blizzard. There is the heartbreak of having his mother sent to a mental hospital in Denver, whose infrequent letters made her "feel farther away than the sound of the word, Denver." (I can't help thinking that to a small boy this might have sounded like "never.")

Yet alongside this there are so many comforts and delights—the soothing sound of his mother playing the accordion, the sounds and sights of the farm which are "astonishments" for this boy, who has the sensibility of a poet-philosopher and the attentiveness of a zen monk. This mix is precisely what makes me fall in love with this boy. I expect that when you read these poems you, too, will fall in love with him.

Lastly, there is something equally as essential as love in these poems—which is wisdom. In Fragment IX Parmenides tells us:

So, when all things are named day and night,
And all things according to their powers are
Assigned to one or the other, then all is full
At once of bright day and lightless night,
Of both in equal measure, since nothing
Is left over from either.

He is saying that night and day are equal. Of course, this is literally true. No matter where you live on the earth, over the course of a year, day and night will be equal. But I think Parmenides is saying something much more than this. We tend to think of day and night as mutually exclusive. Except at dawn and dusk, it is either day or night. But from the right angle in space we now can see from astronauts' photographs that day and night are always occurring at the same time. This is Parmenides' perspective. He is saying, I believe, that day and night, light and dark, positive and negative appearances and experiences peacefully coexist as equals and balance each other—if we are connected to Being. Being is the balance point, the center of life's see-saw. Being creates a perfect balance of positive and negative, without preference for one or the other.

This is the Buddhist view of wisdom and compassion and the prescribed path to freedom from suffering—which is caused by the ceaseless reaching for more positive experiences while trying to avoid unavoidable negative ones. The experience of simply Being enables one to free oneself from this futile struggle. ("The name for what, alone, is fully untroubled is to be.")

Included among these poems about the joy of pure Being, there are also poems expressing the boy's deep longing for this sense of balance that only pure Being can provide:
It seemed maybe only to me...
That if I longed for what was far away
My longing could soothe me, starting at my

Cheek where it touched a body that knew to stand
Still and to wait and to sing, and singing, to weave
Nothing and forever into dancing somewhere

That was nowhere but in that longing.
Rather than feeling this longing as frustrating or futile, I understand the longing in this poem as the very evidence of his connection to Being (there would be no longing if there was no Being) and it is the very thing that pulls him more closely towards it.

I really love these poems. Among many reasons, I love them because they illustrate the truth of psychologist Carl Rogers' statement, "what is most personal is what is most universal." These poems are very personal. In each poem the poet speaks to the reader as a trusted confidant. At the same time, I feel I am privileged to witness something universal and essential here.

I love these poems also because they beautifully illustrate Ralph Waldo Emerson's advice to writers: "Let the writing be the thing itself. Every sentence should be its own evidence." Every poem in this book manifests and transmits through the sound and sense of each line the experience and the evidence of Being. The poems brilliantly illustrate Archibald MacLeish's dictum in his Ars Poetica:
        "A poem should not mean / But be."

I have now read Gary Whited's Being, There several times. Each time I come to the last page, I feel overflowing love for the boy in these poems and a vast gratitude to the man who wrote them. I feel just what Rilke wrote at the end of his Ninth Duino Elegy:

Exuberant, bountiful Being
wells up in my heart.