So it is with these “crumbs,” written after too much sativa, mindful observations of the particulars of life, hence the title of Harteis’s new book, “CRUMBS.”
In his book letters to a young poet, Rilke says that everything will become easier, “if you trust in Nature, and what is simple in Nature in the small things that hardly anyone sees, and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable, if you have this love for what is humble, and try very simply as someone who serves to win the confidence of what seems poor.” And Richard Wilbur has described how fruitful an aesthetic is that focuses on things. “Nothing but in things,” the bard from New Jersey reminds us.
In his book, the Power of Now, and later in The New Earth, Eckhart Tolle tells us that the goal is look at reality with full attention, full consciousness. And so these small crumbs.
In legend one leaves crumbs by the wayside to find our way back home. What happens if a bird or some creature eats the crumbs we have carefully left to guide us? Are we lost? It is in placing the crumbs that matters. Paying attention to our life, marking the moments that have caused us to stop and make sense of what has just happened. Only an exercise in observation perhaps, but fruitful one hopes, or at least pleasurable for a reader: getting to know another human being in language. All art is an attempt to overcome our physical limitations, to transcend ourselves, and greet another with love.
