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1 — Facing the guild

‹With but the index pointing at the moon
there's three fingers
keep on staring
back at me;

ease
of an open hand.›
Measured nodding;
then the sages
gently grin.


2 — Travelling years

Two kinds of empty-handedness.

A non-horse
is not a non-pasture
is not a non-moon.

And is a new-born baby
a non-smoker?
Or illiterate?


3 — Coming home

"Mother, I've been to the moon."
"Oh boy, and I told you not to!"
"Not in one of their contraptions, don't worry;
to the real one: here I am."
"That's good.
And what are you going to do?"
"Get myself a job in astrophysics,
open a crack,
let light come in."
"I love you, my little one!
You've become a man indeed."


4 — Submitting his masterpiece

It feels like this set of poems has been carefully crafted. I like how, as it progresses, the form changes and seems to simplify.

4 - I really enjoyed the image and words printed on the image.

1 - I like the visual image this creates. Makes me think of the saying that when you point your finger at someone, three fingers are pointing back at you. a threefold rule.

2 - Infant illiteracy rates have posed a long time concern. I suspect that there is a connection to the high infant joblessness rate.

I'm a bit lost here . Perhaps the horse bit ( ) is like a Janis Joplin freedom thing - that you don't need a horse to enjoy a field or moon.

3. I like the dialogue and lighter feel here, N. does sound a little ... off balanced here, moonstruck with the idea of moon itself.

Thanks for your (questioning) comments, Cate.

The "crafting" went astonishingly well — took me no more than three or four months, part 1 being the lengthiest one (getting the lines to size, due to my limited English abilities).

I'm glad that 1 and 3 seem to work nicely, the lunatic becoming a real lunatic.
(No news as yet from the Lunatics Guild in what concerns 4...)

Knowing almost nothing about Janis Joplin (nor about Van Morrison, I'm sorry to say)
"[since I] don't care too much for music, do " — except for what Leonard Cohen says in his two "Chelsea Hotel" songs —, your association in 2 is lost on me. It's in 3, however, that I might see a parallel between her "We are ugly but we have the music" and their "We are madfolk but we know the real moon".

In 2, I had hoped to present a mirror of 1 (reduction versus growth). My speculation had been that the accentuation(s) of the four titles might induce the technical question whether (for example) being "a new-born baby" is rather a process or rather a state.

Infant joblessness seems a good thing to me — if it means that they go to school.

(The traditional Travelling Journeymen are a pedestrian species (today, besides their bundle, they might own a car, which needs no pasture). They are paid for their work by the different masters they go to (instead of paying the master during apprenticeship), but not enough to keep a horse. And a horse, anyway, would only be useful on the way from one master to the next, not during their stay, possibly lasting weeks or even up to one full year.
The masterpiece is submitted between two sets of travelling years in France, or after the travelling years in German-speaking countries.)

Maybe: Non-horse ≠ non-pasture ≠ non-moon — versus "True love leaves no traces" (with yet the word "traces" in it).

(But then I long quit putting bits into horses' mouths, and even longer nailing iron or gold to their feet. Halters and ropes (and no saddle) are quite sufficient for the three of us (an English full blood, the Camargue on my avatar, and me) to travel freely together (gallop and all) inside the world as it is, including road traffic and whatever.
And of course there is Pat Parelli's "When you take off the halter and lead rope, you're left with one thing: the truth". In that sense I still have a pretty long way to go from horsemanship to real horsemanship — even if I put that stuff on them mainly in order to reassure other people.)

Horses — a third kind of empty-handedness?
And do they point at the moon?

The traditional Travelling Journeymen are a pedestrian species (today, besides their bundle, they might own a car, which needs no pasture). They are paid for their work by the different masters they go to (instead of paying the master during apprenticeship), but not enough to keep a horse. And a horse, anyway, would only be useful on the way from one master to the next, not during their stay, possibly lasting weeks or even up to one full year.
The masterpiece is submitted between two sets of traveling years in France, or after the traveling years in German-speaking countries.

That's interesting and something that I didn't know about, it actually helped me quite a bit in reading your poem as I now imagine it as one of these traveling journeymen - so his 'masterpiece' that he presenting to the guild is the moon realization. So I guess after the person submits his/her masterpiece to the guild they themselves can become a master (as long as the guild accepts it).

Knowing almost nothing about Janis Joplin (nor about Van Morrison, I'm sorry to say)
"[since I] don't care too much for music, do " — except for what Leonard Cohen says in his two "Chelsea Hotel" songs —, your association in 2 is lost on me. It's in 3, however, that I might see a parallel between her "We are ugly but we have the music" and their "We are madfolk but we know the real moon".

Janis Joplin had sung that 'Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose', the still having a pasture and moon without a horse reminded me of that (I should have quoted the line)
here's a Janis Joplin introduction - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7hk-hI0JKw

Cate, your continuing interest in the "Lunatic" honours me.
(It would be perfectly legitimate to say that 2 is too compact, and leave it at that.)
And thanks for the link to Janis Joplin.

You are right about the lunatic (hopefully) becoming a master of the guild, and it's indeed the reason why the kind of work in 4 is named "masterpiece" — as opposed to "journeyman's piece", which is submitted at the end of apprenticeship, either "Facing [a group of masters of] the guild" (as he does in 1), or simply to the teaching master, who then acts on behalf and in the name of the guild.

If the journeyman's piece is accepted, the now-no-more-apprentice is declared "unbound" from his teaching master, which means that he is free to work under any master; and he is given his travelling book, which is both a kind of passport (proving that he's not a vagabond) and a register where the different masters declare what period of time the journeyman worked for them, and sometimes what new skills were transmitted to or fro between the two of them, and sometimes the masters' appreciations.

After a given number of years, the journeyman is allowed to submit his masterpiece. If it is accepted, he thereby becomes a master of the guild and (in France after three more travelling years) is allowed to establish his own shop or to work as a master in a firm — or to keep on roving as he will —, and to teach apprentices.

The travelling stuff is not compulsory any more, but some craftsmen (and today craftswomen as well) still do it. They are generally considered as the elite of their craft — and be it only because after all this effort they are pretty unlikely to dishonour themselves and the guild by botching a job as long as there is no absolute necessity to do so.

Now in the case of our lunatic (Guild Masters being what they are), they're still discussing the danger that this masterpiece might be interpreted as an excuse for laziness.
My guess is that they will eventually validate it — but maybe keep it hidden in a secret part of the Guild's Museum, along with other honest but potentially subversive pieces.

There is one of those hidden pieces I know of, for example, which claims that the moon is not a disk (and it's only if you get too close to the rim that you might fall off), but a ball, like the ones which circus clowns balance on — implying an incomparably higher risk, up there in the sky.
They don't want no needless panicking either, do they?

●

As for the "Janis Joplin freedom thing", I'm still stuck. At first I had thought that "harpoon" might be a slang term, let's say for a musical instrument like a Jew's harp or something, but according to my dictionaries that doesn't seem to be the case.
However, this "Me and Bobby McGee" doesn't actually strike me as a slapstick song featuring two inadequately armed desperados hijacking a truck by means of whaling equipment concealed in a neck-cloth either.
The deeper meaning quite obviously escapes me.
So I'll just try my best with "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose":

Taken for itself, out of context, that's the position of the arhat, "with but the index pointing at the moon", whose "nothing" isn't free. He's holding it prisoner, clamped in those three fingers.
(As opposed to "I am the one who loves changing from nothing to one".)

In the first kind of empty-handedness in 2, the lunatic's theoretical three fingers from his journeyman's piece, way back in the shelter of his master's place, have now become three very real monsters glaring at him:

— No travelling companion, no horse nor Bobby McGee — not here nor elsewhere.
(The journeyman is given his travelling book only after it has been clearly established that he has no social ties nor obligations which he might be trying to run away from (no spouse, no children, no debts...). The travelling years are carefully protected from misuse as a loophole to escape an unpleasant past.)
He is alone.

— No material possessions except his clothes, his staff, his bundle, his travelling book, his 5 € travelling money which he set out with and which are precisely what he is supposed to come back home with (not more and not less), his golden earring as a reserve to be sold in case of hardship, and his golden bracelet to pay for his funeral in case he dies.

— No enlightenment. "No moon to get [him] through this dark, this very smoky night" of an ever-growing comprehension just how far away from real lunacy he still is, and possibly always will be.

Such monsters are the "traces" which true love doesn't leave, and they are ready to engulf him.
(Negations are extremely tricky human operations. The other animals call them "lunacy", and they have a deep-rooted natural apprehension whenever such twisted things pop up someplace.)

And the new-born baby in 2 might very well fit into the suggested conceptual drawers — isn't it small enough to fit into just about any category? — and become a prisoner of such unloving "traces"...
unless the lunatic turns out to be able to "realise" (make real) the second kind of empty-handedness;
unless "The Prophet" by Gibran Khalil Gibran is right: "Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself (...) You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you";
unless Life, with the "ease of an open hand", invites us to live.
(Or call it: interdependence.)

In its context, however — "Little lady, you're in luck, ["Me and Bobby McGee" was written by] Kris Kristofferson" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-J7mLyD3yc —, the sequence "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose" occurs twice:

— "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose,
Nothing ain't worth nothing but it's free"

Here I couldn't agree more: "Nothing ain't worth nothing but it's free".
All those things we lost would have become worthless if we had refused to let them go.
That's why he lets Bobby "slip away".
That's why he lets "Nothing" slip away, too.
Bobby, and Nothing, and all the rest, must be free — otherwise they are worthless.

That's the position of the bodhisattva's open hand.

— "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose,
Nothing left is all she left for me."

Here the narrator has those three fingers staring back at him. His generosity is superseded by his ego-centricity.
To my limited comprehension (what with weaponry and all...), this song shows the reverse development of that of the lunatic in 2.

(Possibly something like this came to Kris Kristofferson's mind, too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCUKw2XMANQ)

The Olive Garden

Rainer Maria Rilke
(written in Paris, May-June 1906)

Der Ölbaum-Garten

Er ging hinauf unter dem grauen Laub
ganz grau und aufgelöst im Ölgelände
und legte seine Stirne voller Staub
tief in das Staubigsein der heißen Hände.

Nach allem dies. Und dieses war der Schluß.
Jetzt soll ich gehen, während ich erblinde,
und warum willst Du, daß ich sagen muß
Du seist, wenn ich Dich selber nicht mehr finde.

Ich finde Dich nicht mehr. Nicht in mir, nein.
Nicht in den andern. Nicht in diesem Stein.
Ich finde Dich nicht mehr. Ich bin allein.

Ich bin allein mit aller Menschen Gram,
den ich durch Dich zu lindern unternahm,
der Du nicht bist. O namenlose Scham...

Später erzählte man: ein Engel kam — .

Warum ein Engel? Ach es kam die Nacht
und blätterte gleichgültig in den Bäumen.
Die Jünger rührten sich in ihren Träumen.
Warum ein Engel? Ach es kam die Nacht.

Die Nacht, die kam, war keine ungemeine;
so gehen hunderte vorbei.
Da schlafen Hunde und da liegen Steine.
Ach eine traurige, ach irgendeine,
die wartet, bis es wieder Morgen sei.

Denn Engel kommen nicht zu solchen Betern,
und Nächte werden nicht um solche groß.
Die Sich-Verlierenden läßt alles los,
und sie sind preisgegeben von den Vätern
und ausgeschlossen aus der Mütter Schooß.


The Olive Garden

He went up there beneath the grey foliage
all grey and scattered in the olive country
and then he laid his forehead full of dust
deeply into the dustiness of the hot hands.

After everything this. And this, it was the end.
Now I'm to go, while I am growing blind,
and why is it Your will that I must say
You are, when I myself no more can find You.

I can find You no more. Not in me, no.
Not in the others. Not here in this stone.
I can find You no more. I am alone.

I am alone with all the human woe
which I undertook to relieve through You,
You, who are not. O unspeakable shame...

Afterwards people said: an angel came —.

Why an angel? Ah the night did come,
and it leafed indifferently through the trees.
At times disciples would stir in their dreams.
Why an angel? Ah the night did come.

The night which came was in no way uncommon;
thus hundreds of them go on by,
with dogs that sleep and stones that lie about there,
ah just a sorry one, ah one like any,
waiting till it be morning once again.

For angels are not coming to such prayers,
and nights don't become great surrounding such.
Of those who lose themselves all things let go,
and they're abandoned, disowned by the fathers
and they're excluded from the mothers' womb.

♫You got me thinking
Like those people of the past♫

vimeo.com/32371643
The link is dead.
Here's another one, without the — shall we say, "experimental" — music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoSBMdAh_eY

If the human race survives, future men will, I suspect, look back on our enlightened epoch as a veritable age of Darkness. They will presumably be able to savor the irony of the situation with more amusement than we can extract from it. The laugh's on us. They will see that what we call 'schizophrenia' was one of the forms in which, often through quite ordinary people, the light began to break through the cracks in our all-too-closed minds.

Ronald David Laing, "The Politics of Experience" (1967)

quoted from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._D._Laing

When the wise man points at the moon, the fool looks at the finger.
(Proverb)

Taught me the importance of looking about with the eyes of a fool.