Gyrovagueness

(reflections on an article in the November 2007 issue of WEAVINGS by Mark S. Burrows, and a poem in POETRY by Dean Young from the same month.)

"Gyrovague," I learned today, is St. Benedict's term for the kind of monk who never settled into one monastery. Compounded from gyro "to spin" and vague, the foam on a wave, it's a perfect word for those who "drift . . . slaves to their own will and gross appetites." And who, today, doesn't?

Restless on this day of rest, I flipped idly through one journal, then another, happening on two articles germane to this topic.

First, a poem by Dean Young struck me as a kind of secular psalm celebrating the world's constant movements, its tectonic churning and the "sluggish seeth[ing]" of ice bergs and tides. Young's own lines demonstrate how the mind flits from one things to another, associating sounds (mouse, house, moon, mood, "sadness heaving" and "gladness somersaulting... like a kid's drawing of a snowflake"). Even when the poem seems to be settling down into a love lyric, it flies off again with a fantasia on terminology shared between cars and guns:

...No matter
how stalled I seem, some crank in me
tightens the whirly-spring each time I see
your face so thank you for aiming it
my way, all this flashing like polished
brass, lightning, powder, step on the gas,
whoosh we're halfway throught our lives . . . .
- "Easy as Falling Down Stairs" by Dean Young

A few lines after that, watching the sleeping loved one's face as she has a "galloping dream," the poet muses, "Maybe even death will be a replenishment."

That dovetailed with the next article I picked up in the journal WEAVINGS. Through time, in both life and death, the author writes, a "stream" flows "like a winter river buried beneath layers of ice." That thought, expressed by church history professor Mark S. Burrows, takes off from lines by Rilke about "the eternal flow" of time -- identified as an aspect of God -- that connects past and present, living and dead, in one continuum or community.

Burrows writes in the context of an article, "Vigils and the Rest," about life in the slow lane, a monastery he visits. He writes of "stability of place" experienced by monks who don't "gyrovague" around. In opposition to the life of constant motion that Dean Young seems to celebrate, Benedict's discipline offers a life of cyclical regularity in prayer and song, chores and simple meals, a stability of life that allows one to be attentive.

Just writing that, the in-born Protestant side of me shouts, "Attentive? If that's all you're doing with your life, there's nothing to be attentive to!"

So one source says, life's in constant flux, and just enjoy that. The other one says, all this motion is keeping us from ever being "present" in our own lives, and keeping us from ever knowing God's presence.

I guess both sources would agree that whooshing through our lives isn't a good thing, and they agree that something important is moving in us, "replenishing" us even in repose. The essential thing, if we can do it, is to pay attention, so that something other than drift and appetite directs us.

Of course, "paying attention" is what poetry, the arts, prayers, and this blog, are for - to hold our fleeting moments up to scrutiny, for appreciation.