oriana-poetry

TO HEAVEN AND BEYOND

2012-02-26T11:05:00.005-08:00

Why the Inferno is the most interesting part of Divine Comedy

While the Purgatorio and especially the Paradiso tend to bore the modern reader, the fascination with the Inferno, that “Canticle of Pain,” only keeps growing. One reason for its literary success is vivid imagery wed to a concise narrative. When we call a landscape or a scene “Dantesque,” we mean something resembling the Inferno – never his tedious Paradiso.

Let’s consider this passage showing Bertrand de Born, a famous troubadour (1140s – 1215) who finds himself in hell for ‘sowing discord.” The sowers of discord are paraded before us in various degree of mutilation (“as they tore others apart, so they are torn”). The most mutilated of all is the prophet Muhammad, whom Dante regarded as a sower of religious discord. But let’s turn to Bertrand de Born, met by Dante the Pilgrim and his guide Virgil in the 8^th Circle of Hell:

I saw it there; I seem to see it still –

a body without a head, that moved along

like all the others in the spew and spill.

It held the severed head by its own hair,

swinging it like a lantern in its hand;

and the head looked at us and wept in despair.

It made itself a lamp of its own head,

and they were two in one and one in two;

how this can be, He knows who so commanded.

And when it stood directly under us

it raised the head at arm’s length toward our bridge

the better to be heard, and swaying thus

it cried: “O living soul in this abyss,

see what a sentence has been passed upon me,

and search all Hell for one to equal this!

When you return to the world remember me:

I am Bertrand de Born, and it was I

who set the young king on to mutiny,

son against father, father against son

as Achitophel set Absalom and David;

and since I parted those who should be one

in duty and in love, I bear my brain

divided from its source within this trunk;

and walk here where my evil turns to pain,

and eye for an eye to all eternity:

thus is the law of Hell observed in me.

Canto 28, tr. John Ciardi

Gustave Doré

“It” is the headless body, no longer a “he.” In Italian, “lantern” is the beautiful word “lucerna.”

The “law of hell” in Dante’s Commedia is contrapasso – “counter-suffering” or maybe “equivalent suffering” or “symbolically correct suffering.” What Bertrand de Born actually says is Cosi s’osserva in me lo contrapasso.

Francesca and Paolo da Rimini were once unlawfully joined; now they are stuck together, unable to separate, tossed by the whirlwind (which reminds me of the song by Charles Aznavour: “Love at last you have found me. Now the storm begins.”)

Below: another example of contrapasso: the circle of fortune-tellers in Canto 20. Now their heads are twisted backwards, so they see only what’s behind them. In life they tried to see into the future. Now their sin is “reversed” – some might say, not reversed but literalized, since now they can’t see what’s immediately before them, compelled to walk backwards for all eternity.

Giovanni Stradano: The Fortune Tellers

Of special interest in Canto 20 is Dante’s show of pity for the sinners and Vergil’s reproach:

Reader . . . ask yourself

how I could check my tears, when near at hand

I saw the image of our humanity

distorted so that the tears that burst from their eyes

ran down the cleft of their buttocks. Certainly

I wept. I leaned against the jagged face

of a rock and wept so that my Guide said: “Still?

Still like the other fools? There is no place

for pity here. Who is more arrogant

within his soul, who is more impious

than one who dares to sorrow at God’s judgment?

The modern reader is of course moved by Dante’s weeping. The Commedia was written during hard-hearted times when public executions by disemboweling, being broken on the wheel, and the like hideous tortures were popular entertainment, the whole town or village gathering at the market square, the on-lookers jeering at the victim. The idea of compassion was centuries in the making; life had to become more secure first, less filled with suffering.

It’s only natural that when earthly life is mostly unhappy, people yearn for bliss in heaven. But Christian heaven was never depicted with any specificity. For one thing, humans need variety, and that’s just where images of heaven are deficient. Duration of any mental state is an important determinant of the pleasure it can provide. If pleasure lasts too long, it becomes painful. Unless there is sufficient variety, an eternity of harp-twanging heaven morphs into hell. William Blake spoke about this:

Time is the mercy of Eternity.

Without Time’s swiftness,

Which is the swiftest of all things,

All were eternal torment.

A TRAGEDY FOR THE IMAGINATION?

Has it really been a tragedy for the imagination, the loss of Satan and hell for many (perhaps most) of educated readers? Milosz lamented that we lost the metaphysical “second space” – in John Lennon’s famous words, “Above us, only sky.” Heaven and hell are now thought to be states of mind, and not actual places (actually Milton said much the same, noting that the mind can make “heaven of hell, and hell of heaven”). Wallace Stevens lamented it too, though not from a believer’s viewpoint. Yet his lament is even more poignant:

Phantoms, what have you left? What underground?

What place in which to be is not enough

To be? You go, poor phantoms, without place

Like silver in the sheathing of the sight,

As the eye closes . . . How cold the vacancy

When the phantoms are gone and the shaken realist

First sees reality.

~ Walace Stevens, “Esthétique du Mal”

Of course for an astrophysicist, and basically for any scientist, this world – the reality of matter and energy – is totally fascinating and rich with mystery, beyond what believing in ghosts and angels and devils could provide.

TO HEAVEN AND BEYOND: “SPIRITUAL NO MORE”

Let me mention that recently I happened to be in Encinitas, that Mecca of New Age eclectica. In one of the several Lotus-something bookstores, I saw the title “To Heaven and Beyond.” This totally amused me, something I needed at the end of a day full of idiotic frustrations it would be a sin against the reader to enumerate.

“To heaven and BEYOND.” Heaven is not enough any more. Heaven is so yesterday!

I stood there with a smile on my face – and suddenly the title of my third book came to me. You see, years ago I had an unforgettable dream of trying to save the manuscripts of my three wisdom books from the fire – then realized I’d have to re-create them. The title of the first one was The Serpent and the Dove (“Be ye as subtle as the serpent and gentle as the dove”).

It took me many years after the dream to “see” the titles of the other two books. The title of the second book was to be Letters to a Middle-Aged Poet. The third book remained a puzzle until the doors of perception were cleansed that evening in Encinitas and I saw it: Spiritual No More.

And the weight I didn’t even know I was carrying fell off me, and a feeling of great joy enveloped me as I ascended into clarity.

Now I can agree with Mary Oliver’s “You don’t have to be good” if I translate it into “You don’t have to be spiritual.”

Furthermore, I’d like to translate “what the animal of your body loves doing” to “what your mind loves doing.” If my mind is happy, my body is also happy.

I had this thought before, but now the realization was complete: instead of attending lectures on emptiness, chanting, meditation classes and the like (all wonderful for those who find nourishment in those activities), I needed to spend more of my time doing what I love doing. Insights tend to have a stunning simplicity: forget “spirituality.” Just do what you love doing.

The energy and sense of effortless accomplishment that comes from doing what you love, and afterwards, blissfully tired, falling asleep smiling to yourself – it’s a magnificent surprise. It’s “beyond heaven.”

JOSEPH CAMPBELL’S “SPIRITUAL PRACTICE”

Some people are likely to ask, “But isn’t writing your spiritual practice?” No. To me writing is writing. It’s not a ritual. It’s not the least bit like prayer (at least as I’ve experienced prayer – practically the opposite of writing).

For me writing is writing, just as a tree is a tree, and not a manifestation of the Spirit. Others are welcome to see the Spirit in it, or the Earth Goddess, or Intelligent Design. “It’s a free country,” as people in Milwaukee like to say (at least that’s where I learned the saying, along with all the “bad words” in English). I see only the tree and the wind in the leaves, and love the tree as a tree and the wind as wind.

From a poem of mine:

The same moon moved between

darkness and light-wounded clouds,

winter’s hungry Wolf Moon,

adding phantom beauty to beauty.

“That is all,” a Zen master said.

That is all but it is splendid” –

Below: as I see the Spirit of Milwaukee

I don’t have any special time set aside for writing. It’s not a practice – it’s writing. I write whenever quiet opens up and I feel like writing. In the case of poetry, I write if the knocking of words inside my head becomes too painful to ignore.

Deep reading actually comes ahead of writing. Joseph Campbell was once asked, “What kind of spiritual practice do you have?” He replied, “I underline in pencil sentences in a book.” Now that brings a big smile to my face. Yes, that’s my “spiritual practice” too.

At the same time, I am happy to announce a new arrival in my scriptorium: a heart geode – it could also be called a womb geode. It’s gorgeous: beautifully polished, lined with a wealth of amethyst crystals. It’s the most beautiful thing in the house, the most beautiful thing I’ve ever owned. We carry on little conversations, the geode and I. “Amethyst” means “not intoxicated.” In the past, my chief intoxication has been delusional, depressive thinking. Amethyst, a rationalist stone, keeps me cool-headed. How can I sweat the small stuff with such beauty next to me showing me what’s really important?

A friend observed, “So you too are a crystal-waving rationalist. Welcome to the sisterhood.”

At last I belong.

My special thanks to Sarah for the lines by Blake and for the “crystal-waving rationalist sisterhood.”

And thanks to Marjorie for "Fish of the Day."

EARTHLY PARADISE

2012-02-19T15:59:00.002-08:00

FELINE PLEASURE

It happened on Valentine’s Day, or rather night. I “laid me down to sleep” and experienced a wave of total bodily delight just stretching out and feeling the coziness of being cocooned in my comforter. (Comforter! I love the word. Not the Holy Ghost, but something light and fluffy that keeps you warm.)

It was perhaps as close as I can ever come to mystical ecstasy. The revelation, alas, was modest: my favorite place in the world is my own bed. Not original, I know. Not even new to me, though for the first time confirmed by the feline pleasure of the body. But every bit of clarity counts. Old grudges against life have been falling into oblivion, the way one kind, supportive lover can heal the wounds caused by a number of previous narcissists.

GOD IS AFFECTION

A more original insight was that “God is affection” is something I could buy, were I to redefine God as well. I never cared for “God is love” – not only because it’s a cliché, but because love carries so much darkness. Even parental love is not free from narcissism and possessiveness, or from the desire to punish when expectations are not met and the child’s values and interests turn out to be “wrong.” Even when a parent tries to be tolerant, the disappointment in a mother’s or father’s face still shows and weighs on the child (regardless of the child’s age). Affection, on the contrary, seems entirely positive. Only affection can forgive and forget (love may forgive, but does it ever forget?) Only affection is not “ego-invested.” Tell me that God is affection. I could run into the arms of affection.

I’m going over Tranströmer again, in Bly’s marvelous volume, The Half-Finished Heaven. Just the title should alert us that a lively poetic sensibility has presided over this selection. Here is a passage from “Below Freezing”:

One can’t say it out loud, but there is a lot of repressed violence here. That’s why the furniture seems so heavy. And why it is so difficult to see the other thing present: a spot of sunlight that moves over the house walls and slips over the unaware forest of flickering faces, a biblical saying never set down: “Come unto me, for I am as full of contradictions as you.”

THE JOY OF THE FOCUSED LIFE

One of the things I’ve learned by living and making mistakes (like posting on Facebook) is that I don’t want to spread myself too thin. I enjoy doing just a few things, but doing them well. I’ve just re-read the marvelous New York Times article on the benefits of concentration: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/05/science/05tier.html Let me just toss some quotations your way:

William James: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” You can lead a miserable life by obsessing on problems. Or you can recognize your brain’s finite capacity for processing information, accentuate the positive and achieve the satisfaction of . . . THE FOCUSED LIFE.

People don’t understand that attention is a finite resource, like money. Do you want to invest your cognitive cash on endlessly Twittering, [posting on Facebook], or Net surfing or couch potato-ing? You are constantly making choices, and your choices determine your experience."

Why is the focused life so conducive to happiness? Because it’s much more likely to include periods when we are in FLOW. Flow is also known as being “in the zone”; I prefer flow, a beautiful, liquid word that suits this state of being so immersed in what we are doing that we cease to be aware of time, self, and other such childish things.

It is a truth universally accepted that you can achieve flow even if you never learn how to pronounce Mihaly Tsikszentmihalyi.

Flow, like heaven and hell, is a state of mind. Milton: “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”

TROTSKY, PARADISE, HAPPY CHILDHOOD

On and off I’ve been reading a biography of Leon (or Lev, the Russian variant) Trotsky (real name: Leiba Davidovich Bronstein; a Moscow rabbi remarked, prophetically as rabbis seem to, “It’s Lev Trotsky who signs the mortgage, but it’s Leiba Davidovich Bronstein who will have to pay the price.”). No prophet of the ironies of history, it was Trotsky who said, “We want to create on this earth a real paradise for people.” The author of the biography, Robert Service, is hostile to Trotsky. Yet in the Introduction he also says, “More than any other leading Bolshevik he conserved in his head a vision of a future world where each man and woman would have the opportunity for self-fulfillment in service of the collective good. He proclaimed this with passion to the day he died” [assassinated in 1940 by a Stalinist agent].

The idea of that paradise on earth included free or nearly free access to education (including university education) and cultural life (by “nearly free” I mean that anyone could afford to go see an opera, for instance, and not just in terms of having to be content with the worst “student seats”). Now, I’d be the last to praise the Soviet system just because in Warsaw I could afford to go to the opera – or even because of free higher education and free medical care and other well-known features of socialism (which in its moderate form is not totalitarian, but can, and does, co-exist with democracy). Yes, that spoils you, but for the whole Eastern bloc the word became tainted with dictatorship.

It gives me a melancholy pause, the fact that the dream of the kind of paradise of earth that isn’t just the elimination of hunger and poverty, but also “the opportunity for self-fulfillment in service of the collective good,” is no longer spoken of. Oddly enough, the last time I read about it was in a class on Victorian literature, where I did a paper on Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891).

In it, he says, “Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” Wilde imagined a system that would make it possible for everyone to realize their talents. Who, then, would do menial work? Wilde assumes that in the future, machines would: “The fact is that civilization requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.” (To this a woman writer replied that there will never be a machine that can change a baby’s diapers.)

Let me swerve even more and give you this little-known Wilde quotation: “Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.”

A quotation from Trotsky’s Autobiography that I can’t resist – its opening paragraphs:

“Childhood is looked upon as the happiest time of life. Is that always true? No, only a few have a happy childhood. The idealization of childhood originated in the old literature of the privileged. A secure, affluent, and unclouded childhood, spent in a home of inherited wealth and culture, a childhood of affection and play, brings back to one memories of a sunny meadow at the beginning of the road of life. The grandees of literature, or the plebeians who glorify the grandees, have canonized this purely aristocratic view of childhood. But the majority of the people, if they look back at all, see, on the contrary, a childhood of darkness, hunger, and dependence. Life strikes the weak – and who is weaker than a child?

My childhood was not one of hunger and cold. My family had already achieved a competence at the time of my birth. But it was the stern competence of people still rising from poverty and having no desire to stop half-way. Every muscle was strained, every thought set on work and savings. Such a domestic routine leaves but a modest place for the children. We knew no need, but neither did we know the generosities of life – its caresses.”

(I’m thrilled by the phrase “life’s caresses.” I feel infinitely grateful to my mother for flowers on the table. And for taking me to the High Tatra mountains in springtime, just to show me wild crocus blooming in the snow.)

The passage by Trotsky is a translation from Russian, and an imperfect one, to put it mildly (I assume “competence” means “financial security”) – and yet Trotsky’s intelligence shines through. He was a born writer – later pages show a gift for vivid detail as well. He was a stylist; he could not bear writing an ugly sentence. If only he’d confined himself to writing, becoming a harmless novelist and/or essayist. I’m coming to the strange conclusion that an education in the arts might serve to keep the gifted from going into politics, where they could do real harm. But get a young man seriously interested in poetry, and he’ll be harmless. Poetry will keep him off the street, including Wall Street.

Trotsky before he became Trotsky. If only he’d become a poet instead.

OLDER = HAPPIER

As for what Trotsky says about childhood, I don’t remember ever believing that it was the happiest time of life (incidentally, Lenin seems to have had the kind of affluent happy childhood that Trotsky mentions as the privilege of the few – including summers at his [Lenin’s] grandparents’ country estate).

I grew up with the myth that youth is the happiest time of life. My parents and others gladly reminisced about their youth (until its sudden end with the outbreak of WWII). In novels and most movies, the protagonists were usually young, beautiful, and in love. Love songs were almost all about young love, before marriage (no song ever advised, “All you need is marriage”). Since I had a miserable youth, I thought I was a pathological exception. The confidences of women friends eventually made me see that a lot of us were “exceptions.” By now scores of studies have established that older adults are happier than younger adults. The older = happier relationship holds until the “elderly” stage sets in, with its accelerated aging and sickness. Thus, new research indicates that, on average, the years past fifty are the happiest time of life. People begin to revel in life. Seeing that the future is not what it used to be, they begin to live for the moment. This, maybe, is the happy second childhood, without the derogatory overtone. Happiness! Not for pigs after all, but a sacred calling. Let’s enjoy it while we can.

**

Charles:

Another beautiful blog, effortlessly written.

Oriana:

Thank you. I’m glad it seems effortless. This one essentially was. I scribbled down “thoughts from all over,” and realized that they were all related to happiness in some way. One of those mysteries of how writing comes together. The less conscious effort, the better it is.

Another reason for the effortless feeling is that my mind has grown richer, I feel. I’ve gained clarity about my values, my real interests. For me the danger is that I have such an abundance, I have to restrain myself from writing on and on.

Here is what Rilke says in his letters (My thanks to Lois Petit for posting this): For the more we are, the richer everything we experience is. And those who want to have a deep love in their lives must collect and save for it, and gather honey.

Hyacinth:

You've said about what I would have said. I did find among my notes this: well-being equals happiness for me. An out of body experience I get from music or nature and art, as if I'm looking down on myself from an elevated place.

About childhood:

Childhood is so brief a thing

a time of crayons and comics and fireflies against

a blurred background of war, polio, breadlines; against

the undertow of fear, nightly shouting, thuds, the final

snores. Some childhood memories should be burned,

with respect, like a flag, full of stains and tears. And even

then we’d carry around the ashes. The end of childhood

is sudden. No longer scuffing through

the fragile architecture, now we are responsible

for keeping things upright like building blocks.

And the rest of our lives we suffer a vague

homesickness for a time when we could believe

we left our missing sock in a dream.

Oriana:

It’s only in the recent decades that Western society started owning up to the fact that a lot of children have an unhappy childhood – some seriously so. Interestingly, this happened at the same time as child rearing became more affectionate and less oppressive. I wonder about the future generations: will they interact with electronic devices more so than with parents and peers?

Isn’t it time to admit that our Hyacinth is a better poet than Ruth Stone, for instance? Now, I’m glad that Ruth Stone got to be famous, but Hyacinth has more striking lines and more lyricism (not this particular poem, but those with nature imagery).

That the ending is fabulous goes without saying. I also especially like

. . . Some childhood memories should be burned,

with respect, like a flag, full of stains and tears. And even

then we’d carry around the ashes.

~ how is that for an unexpected simile?

I wish Hyacinth could be declared a national treasure.

Scott:

Your statement about your bed being your favorite place reminded me of mine: my chair in the living room beside a lamp stand where sit several books that I am reading and a coaster for my coffee cup (a close second is looking out my French doors observing my bird feeder). It brings to mind too that line about being surrounded by a 'warm river of books and black coffee' in Robert Morgan's poem 'White Autumn'.

Trotsky was an interesting fellow, a biography about him and the rest of the early Russian revolutionaries would make great reading; too bad they were not poets and chess players!

I can't help but concur with the 'oldest = happiest' conclusion. As I am almost 50, it is so much better being 50 than 15; to be secure in one’s own skin is a worthy goal I think.

Oriana:

OMG, what a nightmare: to be 15 again! On the other hand, I’d love to stop aging. In fact some rejuvenation would be wonderful, but we all know the irony of the human condition . . . it seems that life gets richer in various ways just as the body starts declining. Only today I had yet another profound insight that led to even more self-acceptance – but it was about something in the past, and I can only smile a melancholy smile at wisdom coming late, as usual (Hegel: “The owl of Minerva flies only at dusk”).

Alas, the revolutionaries were poets and chess-players only on the side; their true dedication was, naturally, to the revolution. I grew up with the portraits of Marx, Lenin, and Engels arranged like a new holy trinity in every classroom (Marx’s facial hair outclassed everyone else’s) – that’s why I say they feel like a family to me. Of course we studied the Communist Manifesto in high school, and knew the biography of Lenin in some detail (not about his mistress, to be sure). We knew all kinds of details about the October Revolution – the warship “Aurora,” the Winter Palace, the fact that the Smolny Institute (the first revolutionary headquarters) used to be a boarding school for aristocratic girls – BUT! Trotsky was never mentioned, and we had no idea that the revolution would have never succeeded without him. Long after Stalin’s death, history books still never mentioned him. To do so would have been a thought crime, to use Orwell’s magnificent coinage.

As for the revolutionaries in general, it’s only now that I stop and think, stunned – these men, and some extraordinary women like Rosa Luxemburg (lots of streets in Poland were named after Rosa, since she grew up in Poland, and Polish remained the language of the heart for her) – these incredibly bold men and women decided that capitalism had to be overthrown, and eventually, thanks to superhuman-seeming will power (some would say: fanaticism) and courage and self-sacrifice (and, to be fair, their willingness to sacrifice others as well; Rosa was perhaps the least inclined that way, being pro-liberty and pro-democracy) – in the end, in some countries they succeeded. The results proved disastrous, but I’m stunned that the experiment was even tried! Maybe it had to be tried, so that we could see how a balanced approach is needed, with creative capitalism encouraged, but predatory capitalism restrained, and some mechanism in place to moderate the boom-bust cycle (already described by Marx).

Just a quick note on Trotsky. Trotsky started out as an anti-Bolshevist, correctly predicting that the “dictatorship of the proletariat” would soon turn into a dictatorship OVER the proletariat. Alas, Lenin had legendary powers of persuasion, and managed to convince Trotsky to join him. Not that Trotsky is to be excused for having been persuaded; once he starts defending, advocating, and in fact exercising “revolutionary terror,” he loses my sympathy. As one of his biographers put it, he was a brilliant man who became a “prisoner of an idea.”

FIVE REGRETS OF THE DYING

2012-02-08T12:45:00.000-08:00

TOP FIVE REGRETS OF THE DYING (according to a hospice nurse)

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

2. I wish I hadn't worked so hard.

3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

What's your greatest regret so far, and what will you set out to achieve or change before you die?

This comes from a fascinating article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/feb/01/top-five-regrets-of-the-dying

This may change, but at this point I agree most whole-heartedly with # 5: I wish I had let myself be happier. In my case, I wish I’d let myself be happier sooner in life. My philosophy used to be, “Happiness is for the pigs.”

Where I diverge is in thinking, “I wish I had worked harder.” This is pretty much the same as letting myself be happy, since the harder I work, the happier I feel (I mean what a friend called “soul work”: writing and teaching). When I think of the time I wasted on depression when I could have been writing or otherwise been productive, or even just reading, developing myself – or, if nothing else, enjoying myself in some other manner, though nothing makes me as happy as doing the work I love – this waste of time is something I can hardly bear to think to think about. (So I don’t; living in regret would also be a waste of time, that is: of life.)

I also differ when it comes to “I wish I had the courage to express my feelings.” I wish that in my earlier years I’d had the courage to keep my mouth shut instead of so readily expressing my feelings, without thinking how it might hurt another person. This mistake is long behind me, except that, I’m told, my facial expressions still give me away (and my feelings are intense, including disgust – at least I don’t do that deliberately any more).

Finally, it’s possible that I’ve stayed in touch with friends a bit too much. I used to write long letters, and I do write a lot of email. It’s quick, facile writing, but it does take up time. And time is the greatest wealth. I treasure friendship, but I need to guard my time more carefully. (It’s beyond me how Henry James could write those 16-page letters and still have time to compose his long novels. Maybe that’s part of the “energy of genius.”)

My greatest regret is having wasted a lot of time, mainly but not only on being depressed. I wonder where I might be intellectually if I’d been more self-disciplined in the use of time. It’s only now that I ask myself, “Do I really need to browse through the New York Times every day? or Psychology Today? Or is this kind of reading simply my television? (Susan Sontag delighted me by saying, “Reading is my television.”)

You may say, “But everyone needs some R&R. Don’t be so hard on yourself. Go ahead and browse the New York Times.” I’m sure I will, now and then, out of sheer curiosity. But mostly, after a browsing session, I feel no gain at all. Only rarely does anything stay in my mind and makes me think. And if there is a truly important article, friends will let me know.

I hope to develop further as a poet and writer (I love doing my blog), and to grow in wisdom, which automatically means growing in kindness too. I hope to keep on working as long as possible (Christopher Hitchens is my role model here – this is how an atheist dies with grace).

Work is my lifeline, but it has to be quality work, something at which I can excel. Producing excellent work takes time. Thus I had to take a good look at my time wasters, such as Facebook and New York Times and Psychology Today.

The reason that Christian heaven has always struck me as BBB (“boring beyond belief”) is that there is no productive work there. For me that would be hell.

One time, when I spoke of being busy with work, a male friend objected, “What you do is not work. It’s play. You get to use your talent. You enjoy it.” I could have told him of the bloody sweat aspect of writing poetry, and the chores and headaches that come with both writing and teaching. But I let him think he was right: my work was play. Or rather, a privilege. In my youth I worked at various “survival jobs” that I did not enjoy, such as being temporary office help, and I realize that people who say they wish they hadn’t worked so hard mean jobs that did not feel like soul work.

However, one lesson I learned from my survival jobs was that even those jobs became more satisfying if I worked with dedication. Dedication energizes; boredom makes one tired. The Preacher knew it well: “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might” (Ecclesiastes 9:10). And the hospice nurse who interviewed the dying about their regrets is most likely a very dedicated person, like all the hospice workers I’ve met. I don’t think she will ever say, “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.”

But I am truly grateful that my work utilizes my talents. Everyone has some kind of talent. Ideally, schools should help a young person discover that talent, and start developing it. Job satisfaction is one of the best predictors of health and longevity.

And of course “work” and “job” are not necessarily synonyms. I remember one time when I went to the lab for blood tests, and the technician told me right away, somewhat out of the blue, “This is what I do for a living, but my real work is photography” (yes, that was in Los Angeles, where the perennial joke is that every waitress is an actress-in-waiting).

Like everyone, I have seen a lot of older people merely vegetating, even when they are still healthy. They have failed to discover what it is they love doing, so they watch TV a lot, and grow more and more depressed. I think that’s tragic.

MY “LENIN ENVY”

I had an interesting experience in the late fall of 2011. I read a biography of Lenin, mysteriously and wonderfully available at the give-and-take book shelf at the Y (or not so mysteriously, since it was part of Reader’s Digest condensed books). I wasn’t prepared for the feeling of intense envy that I experienced, especially while reading about Lenin’s quiet life abroad, when pretty much all he did was read, write, and take long walks. Of course he read and wrote with a terrific sense of purpose, and I envied him that more than anything. I knew that his dedication was to the wrong cause, that what he wrote was wrong, that the world would be a better place had Lenin never been born. And yet . . . I admit I was consumed with envy. The deliberate, dedicated life. The clarity of purpose. The regular daily output – here was a man who obviously loved working very hard.

The paragraph above is not meant as an homage to Lenin. I repeat: the world would be a better place if Lenin had never been born (I don’t think Trotsky and Stalin would have accomplished the revolution by themselves; young Trotsky wasn’t even interested in setting up a dictatorship, inclining to democracy). It’s only that reading about Lenin’s daily routine opened my eyes to how much I loved that kind of focus and simplicity.

It would be fascinating to know what kind of regrets Lenin had toward the end of his life – when he could still think clearly, before his three strokes damaged his brain. He probably had some regrets about mistakes such as the 1920 invasion of Poland or the appointment of Stalin to high office . . . but I truly wonder about was whether he missed the quiet life he had in Switzerland. He loved being an intellectual, a writer; party meetings exhausted him (if only he had “followed his bliss” and remained a theoretician!). Whatever his regrets might have truly been, I don’t think he ever thought, “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.”

Nor have I ever heard an artist say, “I wish I hadn’t spent so much time in the studio.” When work and vocation are synonyms, work is life’s greatest blessing, ahead even of love and friendship. Ahead, but by not a great deal. After all, even though I’m a work person rather than a people person, where would I be without people who appreciate my work?

AND JUST PLAIN WORK

But I don’t mean to elevate “creative work” at the price of putting down what might be called “ordinary work.” Deep respect for any work that’s useful has been one of America’s gifts to me. Europe is definitely more elitist, and yet it was Britain’s Philip Larkin who, in the last line of his famous “Aubade,” wrote what for me is the most moving tribute to the healing role of work:

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Larkin’s biographer, Andrew Motion, writes, “Larkin had died at 1:24 a.m., turning to the nurse who was with him, squeezing her hand, and saying faintly, I am going to the inevitable.” Larkin always knew that the inevitable would prevail. I am glad that he didn’t die alone – there was at least the nurse whose hand he could take. And above all I am glad that he managed to leave us his poems, including “Aubade,” whose last lines were the first praise of work in poetry that I ever remember reading.

Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

By the way, besides being a poet, Larkin was a dedicated librarian, admired by his staff. To quote the Preacher in full: Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.

“Above us, only sky” ~ John Lennon, “Imagine”

P.S. ACCEPTING THE GOOD YOU’VE DONE

I found this in a fascinating article posted on the Psychology Today website:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/just-listen/201012/dying-styles-the-rich-and-famous

Terminally ill movie mogul: I don’t know if I’ve ever done anything important.

Mark Goulston: How can you say that? You have a hospital wing named after you, you’ve created many jobs and the public loved you.

Patient: I have all the love that money can buy and that’s all it’s worth. I also have some ex-wives that I screwed over financially, a bunch of kids who can’t support themselves, and the utter foolishness to think I could beat the odds by smoking two packs a day… and now I’ve dying of lung cancer at 54.

Eventually Mark succeeds with this approach:

MG: Look you aren’t evil. You’re flawed, but so what? Everyone else is. So you were an a**hole. Big deal. You did do a lot of good. Just let it go.

Patient: Maybe you’re right.

After two weeks and a handful of subsequent meetings to spackle together as much peace of mind as possible, my patient died peacefully.

This man certainly had regrets . . . and they were creating hell for him in the last weeks of his life. I am so glad that the right healer came along with the correct antidote. It’s so interesting that the man who created jobs and delighted the public was refusing to see the good things he did. This is in line with the observation that we often project our good qualities on others, instead of owning up to them. Everyone seems to know that we project our own bad traits (e.g. the tendency to procrastinate, or being indecisive) on others, but we probably go the other way just as much if not more. I hope that the hospice nurse who interviewed patients about their greatest regrets also asked them about the best things those patients did. Some people have tremendous trouble acknowledging themselves (having been raised in a culture that frowns on self-praise as boasting and the deadly sin of pride, I know this well). Ideally, this post would have a companion post about the five top things that the dying are happy they did. Now, that might turn out to be a truly inspiring post.

I’ve also just recalled the Interfaith Panel on Death and Afterlife. Both rabbis said that never talked to the dying about “going to heaven.” Instead, they tried to make the person remember his or her accomplishments, and the love this person gave to and received from others.

Scott:

Your comments on the Lenin bio were very interesting. I have read Lenin was an enthusiastic chess player and poetry reader. At first glance the two would seem to be opposing interests but chess is structured and orderly and of course poetry in various forms is just as formal. But chess can be played with abandon too, just like a free verse poem. You are so right, if only Lenin had remained a theorist.

Oriana:

Nothing surprising about Lenin’s love of chess and poetry: he obviously loved structure, strategy, clear outlines. Yes, if only he had remained a theorist.

I am somewhat embarrassed about having felt my “Lenin envy” while reading his biography – especially the years in Switzerland. The modest, orderly, quiet life of reading, writing, and long alpine walks (my vision of paradise, I confess). Tranströmer begins his poem “Citoyens” with this invocation of the type of person Wallace Stevens would later call a “rational lunatic”:

The night after the accident I dreamt of a pockmarked man

who walked along the alleys singing.

Danton!

Not the other one – Robespierre took no such walks.

Alas, his walks over and the October Revolution begun, Lenin turned into Robespierre – except worse. “Revolutions are the locomotive of history,” he wrote, as if not aware that soon they become runaway locomotives and a reign of terror follows. “Revolution devours its children” – those famous words are attributed to Danton, himself in the end one of the devoured. But I digress.

Lenin was known for exceptional dedication and single-mindedness – some might call it obsession and narrow vision. Reading about his hard work, I envied that kind of sense of purpose, forgetting that it might be blinding. Christopher Hutchins, remembering his loss of Marxist beliefs, brought me back to reality:

“There are days when I miss my old convictions as if they were an amputated limb. But in general I feel better, and no less radical, and you will feel better too, I guarantee, once you leave hold of the doctrinaire and allow your chainless mind to do its own thinking.”

Yes, I do feel better now that Catholicism is a semi-nostalgic, semi-hateful memory, and no blind obedience to absurd doctrine weighs on me, no suppression of thought. My most common sin was what Orwell wonderfully called “thought crime” – my mind seemed to have a “mind of its own,” prone to wondering and “sinning in thought.” So at least as the Church goes, no regrets about leaving it. And no regrets about all the subsequent spiritual seeking having come up empty, rejecting every theology – but gaining a belief in kindness, generosity, and moderation. No regrets about no longer being on a spiritual quest.

My fervent energy has never quite found a fully satisfying outlet, but the positive side of that is that I haven’t become a fanatic of any cause. As my friend Hyacinth pointed out, potential regrets can morph into blessings. Not having total faith in something, anything, once seemed a loss, but now I see it as intellectual freedom. I am not a prisoner of any idea. Kindness and generosity are guiding ideals, but so is moderation – I don’t try to be a saint (at the height of my Catholicism, I did nurse that secret ambition, though worried it too might be a thought crime, the deadly sin of pride).

So, in the end, no “Lenin envy.” True, I have an inkling of the tremendous energy and enthusiasm of fanaticism. My mother often remarked that I had the temperament of a fanatic, but blessedly I have developed detachment and the ability to see many sides to every issue. Let me quote Tranströmer again, the middle section of “Below Freezing”:

If only we had such an honest biblical saying. If only we stopped yearning for blind submission to a “great cause” and noticed the wonderful small beauties of a spot of sunlight slipping over the flickering faces. Imagine, if the closed medieval mentality truly receded and true, difficult thinking came to be appreciated rather than Tertullian’s credo quia absurdum – “I believe because it’s absurd” or “it’s impossible, therefore it must be true” (that’s why the “leap of faith” is needed to reach that blind submission that makes Abraham willing to kill his son). I know I am a dreamer. But imagine: nothing to kill for or die for. Yes, sooner Lennon than Lenin.

Darlene:

A great post, Oriana, but aren’t you overdoing the work part? What happened to the idea of a “balanced life”?

Oriana:

Did any great artist or scientist or business genius ever live a “balanced life”? Would anyone say to Dickens, “Come on, you’ve written enough novels. Time to take it easy”? Great achievers have always been, above all, workaholics. It’s much more appealing to believe that all it takes is talent, but in fact it takes talent and all the focus, self-discipline and endless practice that’s humanly possible, ideally starting at the age of nine. True, some people can be too compulsive and not get enough sleep, for instance; chronic shortage of sleep will exact its toll. And yet I never sleep better than after a day in which I’m truly satisfied with the amount and quality of work I’ve accomplished. When I lie in bed smiling to myself, I know I’ll sleep well.

In a recent article, Seinfeld and Glee Won’t Make You Healthy http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/secrets-longevity/201104/seinfeld-and-glee-won-t-make-you-healthy , Howard Friedman says the following:

Our striking findings in The Longevity Project upend the common advice from the lands of laugh therapy, self-esteem clinics, and indulgent parents. In fact, sometimes worrying turned out to be a very good thing. Many of the boys, girls, men and women we studied for so many years were happy and healthy because of the meaningful lives they led—that is, lives full of dedicated work, genuine friends, and dependable lifestyles. Laughter from the joys of accomplishment and involvement turned out to be an indicator of thriving, but watching the funniest TV shows all evening while you sit alone and eat is definitely not the ticket to health. "Cheer up and live long" is a dead-end myth. (emphasis mine; I assume that by “dependable lifestyles” the author means a settled lifestyle and a steady routine).

Dedicated work means going the extra mile. But “genuine friends” come as a close second. That’s really what Freud said is most important in life: “love and work.” I interpret “love” here to include deep friendship and the “true love” that follows the initial infatuation stage for the lucky few among lovers. And I strongly suspect that by “work” Freud (an intense workaholic) meant the kind of work that you love and find meaningful. Perhaps the happiest life is the kind in which you’d never even think of saying, “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.”
But yes, you have to time for friendship. At least in between creative retreats.

A. R. AMMONS: THE MOUNTAIN AND I

2012-01-31T13:20:00.000-08:00

Moro Rock, Sequoia National Park

Mountain Talk

I was going along a dusty highroad

when the mountain

across the way

turned me to its silence:

oh I said how come

I don’t know your

massive symmetry and rest:

nevertheless, said the mountain,

would you want

to be

lodged here with

a changeless prospect, risen

to an unalterable view:

so I went on

counting my numberless fingers.

This is one of those stunners that are best left uncommented on, since anything one may say after the magic of “so I went on / counting my numberless fingers” will be just prosy babble.

But this little masterpiece made me think of the statues of Buddha seated in meditation, and how those images fail to touch my heart – maybe because I like flow rather than stasis. I like the way that, if you take a close look at anything, it blossoms into infinity.

And I love it when poets talk with mountains, wind, dogs, river, and so on (“Lead, why did you let yourself / be made into a bullet?” ~ Simic; unforgettable). We can get away with it in poetry; we are allowed to be like little children and holy fools.

Matterhorn and Riffelsee

WHO CAN MOURN THOSE THE DEAD MOURNED

In another conversation with the mountain, Ammons takes up the eternal theme of transience and time. If your eyes have just glazed over, have some coffee and continue with “Continuing” – it’s the wonderful way humus is compared to human life that matters.

Continuing

Considering the show, some prize-winning

leaves broad and a firm, a good year,

I checked the ground

for the accumulation of

fifty seasons: last year was

prominent to notice, whole leaves

curled, some still with color:

and, underneath, the year

before, though paler, had structure,

partial, airier than linen:

but under that,

sand or rocksoil already mixed

with the meal or grist:

is this, I said to the mountain,

what becomes of things:

well, the mountain said, one

mourns the dead but who

can mourn those the dead mourned;

back a way

they sift in a tearless

place: but, I said,

it’s so quick, don’t you think,

quick: most time, the mountain said, lies

in the thinnest layer: who

could bear to think of it:

I scooped up the sand which flowed

away, all but a cone in the palm:

the mountain said, it

will do for another year.

My favorite passage:

is this, I said to the mountain,

what becomes of things:

well, the mountain said, one

mourns the dead but who

can mourn those the dead mourned;

back a way

they sift in a tearless

place: but, I said,

it’s so quick, don’t you think,

quick: most time, the mountain said, lies

in the thinnest layer: who

could bear to think of it:

The mountain here has surprising understanding of human concerns and emotions:

well, the mountain said, one

mourns the dead but who

can mourn those the dead mourned;

back a way

they sift in a tearless

place:

Then “who / could bear to think of it” continues the mountain’s breaking away from aloofness. From the advantage of its tall and quite durable majesty – one could also posit the “wisdom of great age” – the mountain suddenly speaks with human understanding of how our psyche cannot bear all this passing and vanishing.

There is also an element in humor in the very fact that the mountain speaks to the tiny human, and that alone creates a certain emotional uplift.

Zugspitze, Germany
Photo: Christian Nawroth

THE PURITY OF EMPTINESS VERSUS SURVIVAL

Let me quote another “the mountain and I” poem that I find quite charming:

Classic

I sat by a stream in a

perfect – except for willows –

emptiness

and the mountain that

was around

scraggly with brush &

rock

said

I see you’re scribbling again:

accustomed to mountains,

their cumbersome intrusions,

I said

well, yes, in a fashion very

like the water here

uncapturable and vanishing:

but that

said the mountain does not

excuse the stance

or diction

and next if you’re not careful

you’ll be

arriving at ways

water survives its motions.

Here, instead of transience, we end of survival – water survives its motions.

Also, here both the mountain and the human are dismissive of each other. The mountain says, “I see you’re scribbling again.” He assures the reader that he is “accustomed to mountains / their cumbersome intrusions.”

These conversations between a man and a mountain are so marvelous that I want to swat at the thought that buzzes by: how lonely the poet must have been to have these talks. I love the mountain’s “cumbersome intrusion”; I know about a necessary, creative solitude, the kind that gave us Dickinson’s genius; I know about long solitary walks and writing love letters to the wind; but still . . .

THE SUPREMACY OF THE MIND

But before we start feeling sorry for the poet, one more poem to remind us that, for all his supposed envy of the mountain, he is the one who feels superior:

Apologetics

I don’t amount to a thing, I said to the mountain:

I’m not worth a tuft of rubble: I come from

nothing, that’s where I’ll go: you take, like, from

my elevation, everything rises, slopes with huge

shoulders barreling and breaking up as if out of

melt-deep ground: when I look out I don’t see

a scope falling away under prevailing views

into ridges, windings, plots, stream-fields: sir,

the mountain noticing me below and fixing

me in view said, what you don’t have you nearly

acquire in the telling, there is a weaving

winding round in you lifting you buzzardlike up into

high-windings: just a minute, I said to the

mountain: exaggeration is not your prerogative:

you have to settle for size: eminence is mine.

The cleverness of this poem lies in how it starts with the assertion of human worthlessness: “from dust to dust” here becomes even more radical: from nothing to nothing. The speaker continues with self-effacement by praising the mountain’s superior view from above, while the speaker’s view is from below, where “everything rises, slopes with huge / shoulders barreling and breaking up.” The mountain, impressed with the poet’s eloquence, replies

what you don’t have you nearly

acquire in the telling, there is a weaving

winding round in you lifting you buzzardlike up into

high-windings

This competing eloquence on the part of the mountain makes the speaker reveal his true feelings about which of them is superior:

just a minute, I said to the

mountain: exaggeration is not your prerogative:

you have to settle for size: eminence is mine.

This ending might be hubristic, but humor saves it from that. Thus we arrive at the opposite pole from humility. Both extremes are true: compared to a mountain, we are momentary, dust to dust, nothing to nothing. At the same time, there is an undeniable greatness in humanity, even in just one human being. Simply having a language (thanks to which we are capable of exaggeration) is magnificent.

Thus, Ammons doesn’t let nature have the last word. The mountain has greatness, but that greatness is confined to size; human greatness has to do with the infinitude of the human mind.

This is not to say that Ammons is a great singer of the human. No, he is primarily a singer of nature:

. . . paradise was when

Dante

regathered from height and depth

came out onto the soft, green level earth

into the natural light

SIMIC, WHITMAN, AND SISTER LOUISE

2012-01-24T14:45:00.000-08:00

Tamara Lempicka, Adam and Eve

THE OLD WORLD

I believe in the soul; so far

It hasn’t made much difference.

I remember an afternoon in Sicily.

The ruins of some temple.

Columns fallen in the grass like naked lovers.

The olives and goat cheese tasted delicious

And so did the wine

With which I toasted the coming night,

The darting swallows,

The Saracen wind and moon.

It got darker. There was something

Long before there were words:

The evening meal of shepherds . . .

A fleeting whiteness among the trees . . .

Eternity eavesdropping on time.

The goddess going to bathe in the sea.

She must not be followed.

These rocks, these cypress trees,

May be her old lovers.

Oh to be one of them, the wine whispered to me.

~ Charles Simic

“The Old World” is one of my favorite poems. I am particularly delighted by the last line of each stanza, but especially the first and the last stanza, starting with “Columns fallen in the grass like naked lovers.” The “Saracen wind and moon” makes me think of Lorca’s ballads, stylized and passionate at the same time (so what if some professor tells you never to write about the moon? I say all true poets have the inalienable right to write about the moon).

Then “A fleeting whiteness among the trees” – which could be simply the light, but might also be a nymph or the goddess that’s mentioned soon afterwards, probably Aphrodite, since she had the closest connection with the sea (and of course with love and sex). And what is a moment of transcendent delight except a fleeting whiteness, and “eternity eavesdropping on time”?

The last stanza is perfection:

The goddess going to bathe in the sea.

She must not be followed.

These rocks, these cypress trees,

May be her old lovers.

Oh to be one of them, the wine whispered to me.

Who can resist that Dionysian whisper? The line is funny and moving at the same time. That is a rare feast: humor may delight us, but it’s rare that something can simultaneously amuse us and touch our hearts. But Eros has that power. (The marriage proposal scene in The Iron Lady is comic and yet touching.)

Simic interests me because his best poems are both cerebral and sensual, erotic. It’s the marriage of Logos and Eros. The gods mingle with the mortals, characters out of myth are everywhere along with the ever-present butcher, angel-child, and the blind beggar (who’s of course also Tiresias). I don’t think Simic could ever be popular with poets who write mainly about their immediate family. He actually does have some mother-and-father poems. One of them, “Romantic Sonnet,” starts:

Evenings of sovereign clarity –

Wine and bread on the table,

Mother praying,

Father naked in bed.

The combination of Eucharistic symbols and sex is irresistible to this lapsed Catholic. There is a strong connection between religion and sex, but it’s not what the religious right would have us believe.

Sociology of religion is an established field, but psychology of religion remains somewhat undeveloped, it seems to me – maybe precisely because it would mean treading into the erotic. We are reasonably comfortable with it when dealing with classical or Asian mythology: yes, of course, the phallic gods, fertility rituals, virgins and serpents everywhere, and gods and goddesses mating with mortals. When it comes to Chrisitanity, however, (or, to use the more inclusive and intellectually chic term, “Abrahamic religions”), we tend to pull back.

In a stark break with polytheistic religions, the Abrahamic god is sexless, so Eros has to enter through the back door, disguised. In a Hasidic midrash, Shehkina (arguably the feminine divine) joins Yahveh each Sabbath, and they make love – hence there is a special blessing for married couples making love during Sabbath. This, of course, is not in the scriptures. But we have to have some sacred marriage somewhere . . .

But what am I saying, “we” . . . it’s poets and writers who tend to infuse Eros into everything they write about, including matters that others might label “spiritual.” Here is Whitman, erotic not just in imagery, but also in the seductive use of sound – “Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.”

I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,
And you must not be abased to the other.

Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not
even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.

I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,
How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn'd over upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue
to my bare-stript heart,
And reach'd till you felt my beard, and reach'd till you held my feet.

Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass
all the argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women
my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love,
And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,
And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap'd stones, elder, mullein and
poke-weed.

~ Walt Whitman, Section 5 of Song of Myself

It’s best to leave intellectual literary criticism out of this, lest we sound like theologians writing chaste commentaries on the Song of Songs. I’ll only say that I love the inclusion of brown ants and mossy scabs and weeds in this mystical experience. And yes, it is a typical mystical experience in its mention of peace and knowledge:

Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass
all the argument of the earth

You may object that this Whitman is speaking about the union not with the divine, but with his own soul. But that soul is externalized and divinized in a manner that reminds me of Rumi and Hafiz. The god of the mystics sounds more like the ultimate “twin soul.” (When I come home to my twin soul, there he is at the piano, playing Schubert like a virtuoso. Mystically enabled myself, I sit down on the piano bench next to him and say, “Let me take the left hand.”)

No, the erotic will not be shut out of religion, and the love of the devotee for the deity does not stay platonic. The longing for a union with the Beloved keeps reappearing in most religions, and it’s a longing for touch, for the sound of his voice. However, it’s the soul that is the Beloved, a former nun, Sister Louise (no longer a “sister,” but it was impossible to think of her except as Sister Louise) explained it to us during her lecture on Progressive Catholic Thought. “If the soul is the Beloved, then God is – what?” Sister Louise asked. None dared reply. She repeated the question. Silence.

Slightly rolling her eyes at our ignorance about something so basic, Sister Louise knew that, again, she’d have to tell the obvious to the befuddled listeners. “If the soul is the Beloved, then God is the Lover,” she announced. It was, in the parlance of those years, “mind-blowing” to hear this. Our Lover, who art in heaven?

The fact that someone, especially a woman who used to be a nun and thus likely taught catechism, with its fussy categories of sin, could define God as a Lover – now, that was more radical than any religious idea I’d ever heard. And the former nun did not seem to mean “platonic love” either. Smiling at our astonishment, she calmly kept using terms usually associated with erotic union, including “God makes love to the soul.” (Later, I overheard a professor say, “She’s really grown since she left the convent.”)

Sister Louise explained that the soul, the Beloved, is more passive and lets herself (the word for soul is feminine in those languages in which nouns have gender) be possessed by God when he comes to visit. The union is rapturous: there is ecstasy and a great feeling of peace, intoxication and yet complete clarity of inner vision, the shedding of rational control in favor of the feeling of blissful fulfillment. What we want from religion is not commandments but paradise.

One striking uniformity that emerges is the mystics’ complete lack of fear of hell. Theirs is not a fear-based faith. Their god-concept seems based on a totally loving and forgiving deity. Their focus is not hell, but paradise. And apparently even a fear-based believer can experience a moment of mystical joy. William James, in his lectures on religious experience, quotes this: “When a fellow-monk," said Luther, "one day repeated the words of the Creed: 'I believe in the forgiveness of sins,' I saw the Scripture in an entirely new light; and straightway I felt as if I were born anew. It was as if I had found the door of paradise thrown wide open.” Alas, that moment of mystical vision passed quickly, and Luther for the most part reverted to his obsession with sin and Satan.

I realize that Luther’s idea of God remained parental, and he’d probably be horrified at a former nun (he’d approve of her having left the convent) defining God as a Lover. But Saint Teresa of Avila, as well as various Sufi and other ecstatic mystics, are more likely to see God as a Lover or Friend. There is, of course, St. John of the Cross, whom I quoted in a previous blog entry

http://oriana-poetry.blogspot.com/2011/02/emil-cioran-on-mystics.html

and who is worth quoting again:

Stanzas of the Soul

1. One dark night,
fired with love’s urgent longings
– ah, the sheer grace! –
I went out unseen,
my house being now all stilled.

2. In darkness, and secure,
by the secret ladder, disguised,
-- ah, the sheer grace! --
in darkness and concealment,
my house being now all stilled.
3. On that glad night,
in secret, for no one saw me,
nor did I look at anything,
with no other light or guide
than the one that burned in my heart.
4. This guided me
more surely than the light of noon
to where he was awaiting me
– him I knew so well –
there in a place where no one appeared.
5. O guiding night!
O night more lovely than the dawn!
O night that has united
the Lover with his beloved,
transforming the beloved in her Lover.
6. Upon my flowering breast
which I kept wholly for him alone,
there he lay sleeping,
and I caressing him
there in a breeze from the fanning cedars.
7. When the breeze blew from the turret,
as I parted his hair,
it wounded my neck
with its gentle hand,
suspending all my senses.
8. I abandoned and forgot myself,
laying my face on my Beloved;
all things ceased; I went out from myself,
leaving my cares
forgotten among the lilies.

**

We know that ecstatic experiences, be they erotic, musical, or spiritual, all seem to originate in the right temporal lobe. This may explain to some degree the similarity of these various kinds of rapture, but it’s the poets who have given us the fallen temple pillars like lovers and always a variety of flowers, including the sexiest lilies.

Morgan:

Simic’s "The Old World" is wonderful, so mysterious as the poet pulls reader along with him through abstractions into a concrete, partly mythic, timeless past. "Eternity eavesdropping on time" is my favorite line.

Oriana:

While the clergy try to stay with the abstract, the mystic experiences sensations, sometimes described as “waves of liquid love.” Simic stays just sufficiently understated to have me feel that no, he does not reduce anything to sex; he elevates sex, makes it more beautiful with his imagery and words like “eternity.”

And the wine, so often mentioned in mystical poetry that it’s even been called the “wine of the mystic”? The rational faculties must be dampened so that an ecstatic vision can take place.

Hyacinth:

About Simic's poem:

I noticed that he used the word "soul" with no apologies and we have been avoiding it in modern poetry. I especially like "columns fallen the grass like naked lovers" and "there was something long before there were words." Fascinating. Made me wonder about what goes on in a baby's mind before language.

Long ago when I studied the Bible there was much emphasis on the "Word" being with god at the beginning of the world.

I also enjoy WW's "the lull, I like the hum of your valved voice."

And I’m intrigued by the image of the piano. "Let me take the left hand” reminds me of playing with my mother.

Oriana:

“At the beginning was the Logos” – that’s usually translated as “the Word,” but Logos also means mind, logic, design, concept. Anyway, Hesiod says that in the beginning was Chaos, Gaia (Earth), and Eros. I think poets want to say, “In the beginning was Eros.” Or at least they want to balance Logos with Eros.

I don’t think I will ever see fallen columns as anything but naked lovers from now on. Simic eroticizes the whole landscape, even the rocks and the cypresses.

An interesting query about the baby’s preverbal mind. Images, I suppose, but even those are probably different than ours. It’s possible that language affects neural function in a global manner.

Scott:

I have been reading more by and of Whitman. As you know, my literary world is heavily colored by Melville, and he and Whitman share many similarities. Their lives parallel each other in that they lived in the same era and region; the poet Jay Parini even has them meet in his novel on Melville. Melville was too troubled by his Calvinistic background to have related to much of Whitman’s poetry. The Catholic Kiwi poet James K Baxter could have better related to Whitman; his brand of mystical/liberal Catholicism was very unorthodox. I think Whitman was a true free spirit and saw the human condition as one to be fully embraced, in all its aspects. His Civil War service had to have been very unsettling to someone of his frame of mind. I also think Whitman was influenced by his interaction with the Quakers. I like their official title 'The Society of Friends'....if only we could all be in such a society truly.

Oriana:

You are right: Melville and Whitman, two giants of American literature, lived in the same era. I think both of them spread the message of tolerance (curious, how many centuries it’s taken us to arrive at the current still imperfect level of acceptance of people who are different). Melville gave us the wonderful figure of Queequeg, for whom Ishmael has so much affection and admiration – a message against racism (which must have been quite radical at the time, especially given the frequency with which the word “cannibal” is used in the novel). Whitman’s embrace of humanity was Christ-like – note his compassion for prostitutes and the mentally ill. I think that has something to do with Whitman’s mystical streak – he seems to have liberated himself from the toxic concept of the divine prevalent during his times, when religion was still very much founded on psychological terrorism, i.e. the threat of hellfire. Mystics are very alike in being love-based rather than fear-based. The neural substrate of mystical experience is apparently the same regardless of whether the person starts out as a Buddhist or a Catholic.

My own “conversion experience” (a moment that did change my life, though from the outside it would have looked as though nothing happened: it literally was all inside my head) has been to a productive life as opposed to chronic depression, and it too bore the fruit of much greater acceptance of others, and great love for the earth. (Animals I always loved; it’s people I had trouble accepting.) I tended to see Whitman as too effusive; now I understand him and enjoy him more. He was incredibly radical, and even today, as I’ve heard from professors of American literature, some college students simply can’t accept what he is saying (or what the American transcendentalists are saying).

Thanks for pointing out the influence of Quaker views on Whitman. Here is an interesting link:

http://www2.gol.com/users/quakers/walt_whitman.htm

John:

I like the Simic but he's a man who can never love the soul the way Whitman does. For Whitman, the soul is always present, for Simic it is a memory.

Oriana:

Yes, for Simic and probably for most educated readers, soul is a pretty meaningless word. It's startling to realize that Freud wrote of die Seele -- German for "soul." His translators seem embarrassed by it and usually render Freud's Seele as "psyche" or "mind."

HASS'S DRAGONFLIES

2012-01-13T12:54:00.000-08:00

from DRAGONFLIES MATING

This morning in the early sun,

steam rising from the pond the color of smoky topaz,

a pair of delicate, copper-red, needle-fine insects

are mating in the unopened crown of a Shasta daisy

just outside your door. The green flower heads look like wombs

or the upright, supplicant bulbs of a vegetal pre-erection.

The insect lovers seem to be transferring the cosmos into each other

by attaching at the tail, holding utterly still, and quivering intently.

I think (on what evidence?) that they are different from us.

That they mate and are done with mating.

They don’t carry all this half-mated longing up out of childhood

and then go looking for it everywhere.

And so, I think, they can’t wound each other the way we do.

They don’t go through life dizzy or groggy with their hunger,

kill with it, smear it on everything, though it is perhaps also true

that nothing happens to them quite like what happens to us

when the blue-backed swallow dips swiftly toward the green pond

and the pond’s green-and-blue reflected swallow marries it a moment

in the reflected sky and the heart goes out to the end of the rope

it has been throwing into abyss after abyss, and a singing shimmers

from every color the morning has risen into.

My insect instructors have stilled, they are probably stuck together

in some bliss and minute pulse of after-longing

evolution worked out to suck that last juice of the world

into the receiver body. They can’t separate probably

until it is done.

~ Robert Hass

I love the phrase “insect lovers.” “Lover” is already an appropriation of a term that isn’t normally applied to any species other than our own, but lately I’ve noted the trend in poetry not to be so human-elitist. Hass is envious of those insect lovers because they don’t drag their childhood trauma, say, into their mating process. They do it the clean and simple way, not smearing their love hunger over everything. “They can’t wound each other the way we do” is the crucial statement. Humans, let’s face it, have made a mess of romance, though we try to “church it up” (a new phrase I just learned, so I simply had to use it) and speak in lofty terms to cover up all the suffering that comes, sooner or later, with our sexuality.

“Supplicant bulbs” is wonderful too, and of course we humans are the ultimate supplicant bulbs, begging to be loved, then abandoning each other – only to beg again, “dizzy or groggy with [our] hunger.” And the wounds live on, and the soul gets to look like the scarred November fields before the peace of winter – if peace ever comes.

Now the poem just stayed with celebrating the dragonflies, or maybe ended by attacking us with a question, e.g. so, having seen such beauty, have you changed your life? But then it would be another forgettable nature poem with some nice description. Maybe for a while we’d be titillated by the phrase “vegetal pre-erection” to describe the unopened flower heads (flowers are, indeed, a plant’s sex organs – Georgia O’Keefe, for all her protesting too much, must have seen the connection).

But Hass is quick to correct his insect envy with the praise of human capacity for delight when we see something gorgeous” and the heart goes out to the end of the rope

it has been throwing into abyss after abyss, and a singing shimmers.” So it’s the agony and ecstasy again, can’t have one without the other, the price for being human and exiled from the Eden of being one with nature, etc. Note that the “insect lovers seem to be transferring the cosmos into each other” – wow, who wouldn’t envy that – but wait a moment, those beautiful dragonflies have no sense of beauty (that we know of), and it would be astonishing to learn that they watch the sunset (even dogs can’t do that; does anyone know if a chimpanzee or any other “higher primate” has ever been observed watching the sunset? I think their color vision would be adequate, but what about their sense of the sublime?)

But the last stanza ultimately affirms how mechanical dragonfly mating is after all: they probably can’t physically separate until the process is complete down to that last drop of the “juice of the world” (why say something as ordinary as semen if you have Hass’s cosmic metaphors? though isn’t it a tad aggrandizing, semen as the juice of the world? What about the quadrillions of bacteria in our intestines? They don’t need that juice to reproduce).

So Hass assents to being human, I assume, with some regret about the way we smear our longing over everything and can’t love without wounding (this really is pretty disgusting if you think about it; sure, we can protest that we didn’t mean to hurt, but how come there is so much hurting going on?)

Hass’s vegetal and insect musings reminded me of Rilke’s Third Duino Elegy, where he takes the long view, a supra-personal perspective:

Look, we don’t love like flowers, with only a single

season behind us; immemorial sap

mounts in our arms when we love. Dear girl,

this: that we’ve loved, within us, not One, still to come,

but seething multitudes; not just a single child,

but the fathers like ruined mountains

within our depths; but the dry river-bed

of ancient mothers; yes, and the whole of that

soundless landscape under its cloudy

or cloudless destiny – all this, dear girl, preceded you.

(I must be a tad pedantic here and confess that “dear girl” is a make-do for Mädchen. To translate it as “maiden” would seem archaic, as “girl” a little curt and unmusical in this case; “young woman,” while politically correct, is unappealing for other reasons. I think Mitchell as translator was right to let a little affection creep in.)

If this passage doesn’t remind us of the impersonal element in sex, then we’re lost in the delusion that it’s “all about me.” And we’re very prone to delusion, as Hass has already instructed us, if we’ve read his words correctly, without being overly distracted by our primary activity of smearing everything with longing.

Sigmund Freud, one of the ruined-mountain fathers

All this said, I must confess that neither the Hass nor the Rilke touch me. I’m tempted to say that both of them over-reach with their overblown metaphors, though in each case the message is insightful: yes, we pay a price for our complex human consciousness, and get to know both agony and ecstasy; yes, human love-making is still marked by millennia of the collective experience, and in a sense each lover is all the lovers. But neither Rilke’s eroded landscape of former mothers and fathers, nor Hass’s “juice of the world” moves me. This is fine writing, and in Rilke’s case a grand vision, but it’s emotionally detached.

Recently, however, I’ve come across a poem by Leonard Kress, one of the thousands of less-known American poets, tens of thousands, voices mostly lost in the static and excess of incessant contests and publishing. And I felt shaken by something human and real. This is the second half of Kress’s poem “Harmonium.” (to hear a harmonium – significantly, the title of the first book by Wallace Stevens – go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBMHV0IITVk

the sound seems to be a cross between an organ and an accordion, failing in grandeur but somehow true to life that way)

Here is the second half of Leonard Kress's “Harmonium”:

I found my instrument in the back room

of an Indian boutique on Walnut Street

in Philadelphia with money leftover from a summer trek

to Europe. I bought it instead of the fired beads

and long print skirt intended for my girlfriend,

who was then serving spritzers on the terrace

of the art museum (descending the stairs after work

like Duchamp’s nude, displayed inside) not knowing

I returned already. I hadn’t told her yet.

Because I wasn’t sure what to do about her,

barely sixteen, concentric circles of brown ringlets,

springing down to her phenomenal breasts—

her father threatening to bash my skull.

But it wasn’t just the waging war

between the beating and delights of her young body—

I wasn’t that much older—but something that happened

on my trip, the very end of it, a night

I spent on the pebbled Croatian coast

of the Adriatic. It’s gone now, whatever occurred:

sirens from an all night fire in Rijeka

or was it from the hot stones rising up

from the cold water, followed by dense silence?

And then a music I’ve been trying to replicate since

without success. In front of Ginsburg, too.

Thirty years later, still raw, my ex-girlfriend wrote,

“When you told me you didn’t want to see me

anymore, I walked into my house, cried out

for my mother and collapsed on the floor.”

“You don’t love your harmonium enough,”

Ginsberg said without judgment.

“I thought you had seen the core of me

and were repelled,” she wrote. What he really

meant was, “You don’t love enough.”

~ Leonard Kress, from Living in the Candy Store, 2011

Romantic passion can flare up and die as quickly as a straw fire. Here the speaker returns from his European trip transformed, having discovered creative stirrings within himself, and is no longer interested in his young girlfriend in spite of her “phenomenal breasts.” But as if to illustrate the French song about the pleasures of love lasting only a moment while the sorrows last a lifetime, the girlfriend is severely wounded by the break-up, probably the first one in her life.

The last three tercets shook me to the core. Does anyone still remember the pain of the first break-up, when you were still so young, so inexperienced and vulnerable, and vehemently in love, the kind of worshipful love that’s idolatry – and your lover tells you it’s over? It’s like being rejected by God. What the girlfriend writes thirty years later almost makes me collapse to the floor because of the traumatic memory it brings back.

Note the way Ginsberg’s pronouncement is marvelously interwoven with the letter from the ex-girlfriend. The way the poet’s words are transformed in the last line is masterful.

Thirty years later, still raw, my ex-girlfriend wrote,

“When you told me you didn’t want to see me

anymore, I walked into my house, cried out

for my mother and collapsed on the floor.”

“You don’t love your harmonium enough,”

Ginsberg said without judgment.

“I thought you had seen the core of me

and were repelled,” she wrote. What he really

meant was, “You don’t love enough.”

We love either too much or not enough. Still, it’s telling that a book titled Women Who Love Too Much becomes a best-seller, while no one ever writes about men who love too much. Self-help books chiefly try to free women of men who don’t love them enough, so the women don’t love themselves enough and can’t seem to “get a life.” Could there be a hard-wired biological snag here, or is it purely cultural, with women still singing “One day my Prince will come” until their dying day?

Of course once in a while we see a man hopelessly drawn to a woman cast into the role of a cruel mistress, uncomfortable to see that the wrong man loves her too much. “He sends me flowers every day,” one woman friend gasped to me in horror. We’ve come to see happy long-term marriages as miracles. There are those who argue that we as a species have not evolved for monogamy, especially the male of the species, and serial monogamy is the closest we can come to the romantic ideal – but then what about the kids? D.H. Lawrence said that marriage is about disillusionment – but we are meant to grow through that disillusionment. He resented Frieda’s missing the three children she lost by marrying him. Sex, even with a writer of genius, is not enough. Nothing is enough.

But maybe marriage – or any long-lasting relationship – is above all about stability, so we can turn our attention to matters other than mating? The British mystery writer Edgar Wallace said, “An intellectual is someone who has found something more interesting than sex.” True, but the levels of sex hormones also have to go down. And even then, there is an unstoppable part of the soul that keeps on singing, “One day my Prince will come.” For companionship, we explain, as if we knew. We don’t.

Sarah:

This is beautiful... Funnily enough, what I had to get out of the way first was a text about insect sex - ovipositing butterflies. In my proofreading I actually specialise in insect sex. The other scientist I work with studies ants who mate by the male leaving sperm on leaves and the female coming and picking it up. The males compete quite intensively to leave their sperm in the right places . . . doesn't sound like much fun to me . . .

Yes, we have a consciousness advantage, but still the insect 'level' lives on, doesn't it? I find the ending extraordinarily evocative. Not because I am thinking of the insects as insects – because I am thinking of myself. For all our consciousness and for all our smeary emotions and childhood longings, and all that we can do with them, there is this simple level, cruel, simple, and beautiful, on which we just cannot separate until it’s done. Cannot control when it will be done, cannot even know about it. And that 'probably'. Because we are still insects, too.

The other lines I find intensely evocative, moving, are:

The insect lovers seem to be transferring the cosmos into each other

by attaching at the tail, holding utterly still, and quivering intently.

What moves me is the way in which the cosmos gets transferred. Simple, mechanical, seems almost random and yet also utterly precise. How else would you do such a mystical thing? Attach at the tail.

Hmmm... you got me here!

Thank you also for your atheist prayers (the purest, in my opinion, not smeared by longing).

Oriana:

Sarah, this is simply brilliant. You refute Hass’s weak attempt to elevate us above dragonflies – as if we, a superior species, could disengage before nature is done with us. Yes, we are still insects too. Our mating goes much farther back than Rilke imagines: way beyond the ruined mountain-fathers and dried-up river-mothers, all the way back to what in our colossal human arrogance we call “primitive organisms.”

As for attaching at the tail: look up the Latin for “tail” (one of the two words), and the mechanics of mysticism become clear.

As for quivering: while browsing in a bookstore I picked up at random Heaven Is So Real by an Korean-American woman, Choo Thomas.

America

has been smeared with heaven and hell from the start. In a shameless digression, I simply must quote this little passage by Simic:

I’m squeezing her hand; she is squeezing

My hand. We are going down

To the cellar where they keep

Little dark chocolates

Filled with almonds of heaven and hell.

(from “Some Nights,” in Hotel Insomnia)

It used to be The Joy of Cooking. Then came The Joy of Sex. Then Pray and Grow Rich. Then The Secret, which smeared Pray and Grow Rich over matters such as health and the correct way to sing “One Day My Prince Will Come.” Now it’s the afterlife.

Bear with me. Here comes the dragonfly connection. Whenever Jesus came at night to visit Choo (whose husband had to relocate to the guest bedroom), Choo’s body would begin to quiver (her word choice) for twenty minutes or longer while the visions of heaven and hell and the “third place” (not Purgatory, but a desert in which “disobedient Christians” wander in circles forever) were being downloaded into her.

Interesting that there is no way of getting the body out of the way. We sing the body electric, the body primeval, insectal. We quiver – somewhere in the Duino Elegies, Rilke has his lovers quivering, maybe not exactly like dragonflies, but as Sarah reminds us, we can’t deny our ancient kinship, or the way we transfer the cosmos into one another.

Still, in my atheist eclecticism, I find something to my liking in Choo’s visions: heaven is a garden, and the who enter are those who are joyful and full of wonder; the dancers, not the penitents. Heaven is a state of mind, a mating with the divine, and it is within us.

Hyacinth:

I find Hass 's Dragonflies interesting, but my usual complaint about his work is that it’s not satisfying by my definition of what a poem should be.

In the poem with the word "Mädchen" why not just leave it. It's a charming word and nothing in English can replace it in my opinion. Loved your "smearing everything with longing."

Oriana:

I agree that there is no adequate English equivalent for Mädchen -- the word is affectionate, a diminutive. I think "maiden" used to approximate it, but now it’s archaic. So “dear girl” works, as long as we don’t find it condescending. Today a male poet probably would not dare to get close to this kind of rhetoric, afraid to be accused of preaching to young women from the heights. But the richness of Rilke’s mentality redeems the passage, I think.

Hyacinth also sent a poem by John O’Donohue. Let me quote the opening:

To Learn From Animal Being

Nearer to the earth's heart,

deeper within its silence:

animals know this world

in a way we never will.

We who are ever

distanced and distracted

by the parade of bright

windows thought opens:

their seamless presence

is not fractured thus.

Stranded between time

gone and time emerging,

we manage seldom

to be where we are:

whereas they are always

looking out from

the here and now.

It’s so frequent now: we are told to learn from animals and babies to be “in the here and now.” That is wonderful while watching a sunset, or dragonflies, or darting swallows. In fact, when I think of being happy, sitting on top of a mountain and watching the mountains get more and more blue as they step into clouds is the first thing that comes to my mind. But that’s in the past, all the various mountaintops where I sat on a boulder and gazed. It’s my remembering self that brings back that happiness.

Now, animals have some memory in the sense that they learn, they recognize. But I don’t think they ever “reminisce.” Their life is the outside. My life is 90% inner life, which may be excessive, I know, but I don’t crave a more “exciting” life. My first requirement is a lot of solitude and down time so I can process anything that’s happened and think about its meaning. I hate it when a lot of things happen all at once like a whirlwind; I don’t enjoy that. But I’ve never envied animals. Much as I love animals, I love the richness of inner life even more.

A DANGEROUS METHOD

2012-01-07T14:15:00.004-08:00

Psychoanalysis is a myth kept alive by the couch industry. ~ Woody Allen

EMMA JUNG REMEMBERS TONI WOLFF

AND MARTHA FREUD

It drove me wild, the way she lit a cigarette:

she’d place the burning match

across the ashtray and let the flame

consume itself like a sacrifice.

Her heavy rings, her rituals;

those Persephone eyes –

People whispered, “A black pearl.”

But a former patient of hers

recounted how in the middle of the session

the maid would bring in one cup of tea –

one cup – for Fräulein Wolff,

never for the patient.

Carl wrote an essay on marriage:

the complex partner, the “container,

a many-sided gem” contains

the other spouse, “a simple cube.”

Toni was not a cube.

She was “the thinking type,

which is unusual for a woman.”

About me people said, “She’s sweet”;

about her, “She walks like a queen.”

I in a gray woolen suit,

she in a hat with a rose and a veil.

My sister said, “Women like that

end up swallowing rat poison.”

She of the moon and I of the earth.

I was the foundation of his house;

she, its fragrance, he told everyone.

To practice his “honesty”

(if the container does not break down

in the face of what we are wont

to call “unfaithfulness”),

Carl insisted that Toni come

on Sundays to the family dinner.

The children made faces at her

when she couldn’t see.

One of Toni’s friends said about Carl:

“He was a big spoon. He drank her soul.”

She grew skeletal, with a concave chest;

turned more and more to alcohol.

One morning Carl’s shaving mirror

shattered into petals of sharp silver.

That day Toni died of heart disease.

In our garden at Küsnacht,

Carl made a stone memorial,

carved in Chinese characters:

Toni Wolff. Lotus. Nun. Mysterious.

People said, “Toni was all spirit”;

called her Carl’s “mystical sister,”

his “muse,” his “anima” —

anything but mistress.

Yet I understood

Carl’s wish to come again to love

in his prime, a bridegroom of the Mystery

(One should take great care not to interrupt

this necessary development

by acts of moral violence).

And Toni outlined her sacred task

in her book on female archetypes:

the Hetaira, brilliant, cultivated,

supports a man’s vision and his intellect.

Toni seemed to forget the fact

that the hetaira was a prostitute,

even if brilliant and cultivated.

Was her pain greater than mine?

Must we give thanks for pain,

that midwife of the soul –

my nights ticking off

Greek and Latin verbs,

mildewed volumes on alchemy

dawning next to my pillow.

I, “a simple cube,”

having gone to a school for girls

where we were taught how to fold

a napkin correctly –

I, though not a thinking type (he said),

became an analyst and scholar.

As did Toni.

Believe me, every day

I thank God for Toni Wolff –

because I have been spared

the fate of poor Martha Freud.

Frau Professor was very quiet.

She hardly spoke at all. I was told,

before marriage she loved books –

now she’d hardly ever sit down.

She had a maid, but preferred

to do housework herself.

Meals were punctual to the minute.

Her linen closet was perfection.

All day she’d fuss about cigar ash.

At the table she scolded her family

for sneaking morsels to the dog.

Not even her children

paid attention to her.

The guests talked through her

as through glass.

Martha . . Frau Professor saved string.

She kept boxes in the kitchen

filled with string and scraps of ribbon.

Rumor had it she thought her husband’s work

was a form of pornography.

It was her younger sister, Minna,

who had opinions and ideas –

she and Freud discussing,

talking at the table, traveling

together to Italy and the Swiss Alps.

The day I first met the Professor,

he kissed my hand and gave me a bouquet –

Freud’s manners toward women

were immaculate – then said,

“I’m sorry I can’t offer

more hospitality. All I have at home

is an elderly wife.”

Frau Freud was then forty-six.

At least it was past their lean years,

when only Freud traveled first-class,

she and the children in third,

on the hard wooden benches.

He said he needed comfort

because his nerves were bad.

Of course it was Frau Professor

who went to arrange the tickets.

They say she even put

the toothpaste on his toothbrush.

And I – I thank God for Toni Wolff.

Emma Jung

The issue that the recent movie about Jung’s relationship with Sabina Spielrein raises is perhaps one of the central issues of our times: if a relationship is enriching, even transformational to the people involved, is it worth having in spite of its requiring secrecy, the potential of causing suffering to a third party, and any other related “badness”? Certainly neither Jung nor Sabina Spielrein regretted the relationship – for all the suffering it also brought.

“A Dangerous Method” could also be titled “More on Sex and Lies,” linking it to an undying tradition of how most men and women deal with the dilemma of having a “forbidden” relationship with someone who has a lot to give. A potential (some would say “inevitable”) damage to one’s established relationship needs to be weighed against the kind of mental expansion that rarely happens outside of a close interaction with an exceptional individual. To reject that stimulation and growth seems a crime against one’s soul that will eventually mean having less to give to one’s long-term partner as well.

Would I universalize this statement? No, we must go case by case and see if the suffering is minor in relation to the growth and overall pain. It’s never easy – even monogamy isn't easy, and a triangle is automatically difficult. Emma realized that her husband was the kind of man that intellectual women fell in love with; she was still thankful for being married to him rather than to someone less interesting and charismatic. She had the amazing wisdom of realizing that the gifts other women bestowed on Jung would eventually benefit her. She was also in the power position of knowing that her husband wouldn't leave her; if anything, he was afraid she might decide to leave him. But she was also “only human,” and could not have been thrilled with his affairs.

I forget now which biography of Jung gave me the material for the poem that opens this blog entry. What I do remember is the biographer’s admiration for Emma Jung and her transformation into a respected professional – in some measure as a response to the challenge of Toni’s ability to provide her husband with intellectual companionship.

It’s not a great movie, but one I don’t regret seeing. I recommend it as interesting, and food for thought. It made me look up Sabina Spielrein. I felt especially interested in her influential paper prefiguring Freud’s concept of Thanatos as the death drive, “Destruction as a Cause of Coming into Being.” And Otto Gross, the libertine and anarchist of psychiatry – the movie could have used more Otto, who steals every scene he’s in.

I expected a more erotic movie, but I didn’t feel any sexual chemistry between the actors playing Jung and Sabina. They were clearly competent actors. But the erotic tension you might expect somehow just wasn’t there. Maybe Omar Sharif was right when he said, “You have to be a little in love with your leading lady, or the love scene won’t work.” The love scenes didn’t work for me. The Jung-Freud interaction was more interesting – also with its lies and withholding – Jung apparently knew that Freud was having an affair with his sister-in-law, Minna; Minna herself confided in him about it; Freud didn’t know that Jung knew.

Still, I recommend the movie. It held my interest. And of course, because of my pre-existing poem, it was special for me when Jung says that Toni is the perfume of his house, while Emma is its foundation.

I don’t recommend it for Valentine’s, though. It’s not really a love story. The movie is more about ambition.

Viggo Mortensen as Freud and Michael Fassbender as Jung

*

Alas, the movie shows only the untransformed Emma – even while Jung is already having a relationship with Toni Wolff, Emma looks and sounds exactly as she did when she was a young wife. Her every look conveys the emotion of being troubled. But maybe it would add too many layers to the movie to go into Emma in more depth.

Toni Wolff

Jung is usually given credit for being less sexist than Freud, so we tend to forget that he thought that a "thinking type" is rare among women. As the quotation below shows, he was a man of his times after all . . .

A man’s chief interest should be his work. But [for] a woman, man is her work and her business. I know it sounds like a convenient philosophy of a selfish male when I say that. But marriage means a home. And a home is like a nest – not enough room for both birds. One sits inside, the other perches on the edge and looks about and attends to all outside business. ~ C.G. Jung Speaking, 1955

Jung’s inscription on Emma’s tomb was: “Vase, sign of devotion and obedience.”

I can’t help but chuckle over having found on google the naughty little factoid that women in Jung’s circle were known as “Jungfrauen.” In German, “Jungfrau” means virgin.

On the other hand, we should also remember that Jung was familiar with the Tao and its reverence for the Feminine.

What keeps haunting me is the scene of the passengers on the transatlantic ship standing on deck, mesmerized by the sight of the Statue of Liberty. Jung says, “This is the face of the future.” Freud replies, “Yes, and we are bringing them the plague.” That moment was more exciting for me than all the oddly un-erotic S&M scenes in the movie (one reviewer suggested that the spanking scene could be taken as punishing the lead actress for overacting).

Jung, Sabina Spielrein, Freud

“We are bringing them the plague.” The plague of self-absorption rather than a quest for a vocation and a productive life? Was it my knowledge that Freud, immensely workaholic, despised most of his patients as rich neurotics with nothing to do but cultivate their symptoms? For whatever reason, what Freud said finally set off t a bit of excitement in me as I watched this unexpectedly wooden movie, but it did. Overall, maybe because of the almost supernatural cool of Viggo Mortensen, who plays Freud, Freud comes across as a more powerful man than Jung, with a hint of being an evil genius.

I was also interested in Sabina’s statement that sex is not about pleasure. That hit home. If sex happened to be just a pleasure on the order of a bowl of ice-cream, it would not have much power. Sabina’s conclusion, that sex is about ego-death in a fusion, did not seem entirely convincing, though it might be part of it. But probably no one has THE answer; there is no simple statement that would explain the power of sex. Sex seems to mean something else to women than to men, and even then we have to ask which woman, which man, and at what age.

Both Jung and Sabina propose that a patient must develop a vision of the future rather than simply analyze the past. Freud suggests that the most a therapist can do is to make the patient accept reality. I am surprised that the movie did not use Freud’s famous statement about trading “neurotic suffering” for “ordinary unhappiness.” Jung seemed an awkward, stammering schoolboy next to Freud’s professorial self-assurance.

What produces such self-assurance? Speaking of another man who displayed a very high opinion of himself, a friend of mine said, “His mother spoiled him.” Sigmund was, of course, his mother’s favorite son, an experience he described as a “life-long feeling of triumph.” Jung’s mother was depressed and unpredictable. Freud’s mother had a powerful personality and loved her favorite son with an intensity bordering on idolatry – no sacrifice was too great to secure a successful profession for him. Too little has been said of “achievement enablers.” For Jung, that was primarily Emma, whose wealth made it possible for him to pursue his interests, but also intellectually stimulating women like Sabina and Toni, and the other adoring “Jungfrauen,” including the brilliant Marie-Louise von Franz.

But I don’t wish to leave the reader with the impression that “Freud wins.” Both Jung and Freud produced culture-transforming ideas. My favorite quotation by Jung is this one “The sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.” When it comes to Freud, “making the unconscious conscious” is perhaps the most famous quotation, but I am fond of an obscure one from The Future of an Illusion: “The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing.” This is surprising coming from a man who so illuminated the power of the irrational, who seemed to agree that we are slaves to our passions. And yet . . . once the voice of the intellect gains a hearing, we cannot go against a clear insight. I have experienced this more than once, and the power of that fraction-of-a-second experience is astonishing.

Scott:

Excellent poem and post! Jung is a favorite topic of mine as he influenced so many of my literary heroes and scholars. The New Zealand poet James K Baxter sought out a Jungian psychiatrist soon after he started attending university as a young man; the English classicist and literary critic Maud Bodkin wrote extensively on Jung, myth and literature, including another favorite writer, J R R Tolkien; and last but no means least the American psychoanalyst and Melville scholar Henry Murray was very much a Jungian.

I read a biography of Murray some time back. He had a bizarre extramarital affair with a colleague, akin to Jung's. All these writers mentioned above had issues in their marriages. Baxter left his wife and reportedly had several liaisons at the commune he founded. Melville had a strained relationship with his wife. Murray had the affair I have mentioned. Only Tolkien seemed to have had a long and happy marriage.

The relationship of men to their 'muses' and/or wives is of course nothing new, especially to men of talent and/or power. The most moral of men or those that espouse great and noble causes seem even more prone to not being able to stay with one relationship; books could be written of course of examples, so I won't belabor the point or try to excuse or defend. I spent a good part of my early life confined on a ship with nothing but hundreds of men for long stretches at sea and I have a fair recollection of many of our main topics of discussion and of course women ranked right up there! But while the conversations were base and crude at times, the vast majority of the men I knew were good and decent at heart and most sought what most men seek: a stable relationship with a woman who understands and cares for them.

Poets and philosophers concern themselves greatly with affairs of the heart...and flesh...and that to me is what makes life bearable – the art of trying to make sense of our relationships through feeling and emotion in a sometime cold, unfeeling world. When a woman and man make that special connection, and not just physical either, there’s no greater bond. I am also convinced however that no man can be a true deep friend with a woman without eventually the sexual component coming out. Now with discipline it can be suppressed but never totally eliminated. The older I get the less that theory of mine holds fast; maybe that's the natural order of things. If one can find that physical and soul connection in one person, that indeed is something to be envied and one that Jung obviously could not....but again, he's far from alone.

Oriana:

Dostoyevski’s second marriage was solid and happy; there must have been some other famous men with happy marriages, but for the moment only Dostoyevski comes to mind (and that was his second marriage; older age at getting married is a predictor of success).

It’s certainly true that when the partners are well matched and cooperative, especially if they work together on some common projects, they are an enviable “dream team.” Sadly, most people marry too young, before they have found their path in life. The ideal, I’ve read in some article, is be to find your path first and then see who else is walking that path. But we know that you can’t really say this to someone young and in love. The twenties are certainly not an age of wisdom, but hormones and fertility are at high levels. And a woman who wants to have children should not wait too long either. This is a terrible trap, especially for a motherly woman, who eventually gets told to “get a life” – but she may not have the slightest idea of what she wants to be once her children grow up.

But once some individuation is achieved (as Jung would put it), one of the partners is likely to meet someone with whom s/he can have an intellectual/soul connection. Whatever happens, suffering will be a part of it.

An additional. more contemporary problem is that some men definitely want a “service person” for a wife; they don’t want a woman who has a life of her own. Their secret or not-so-secret dream is a stable marriage to a conventional woman and an exciting extramarital love life with women who can be intellectual companions. They may discover the hard way that life can become very difficult if they pursue that dream. But in most cases, both parties start in good faith and things simply happen. Emerson made an interesting remark, to the effect that we shouldn’t blame ourselves for a bad marriage because “nature sets up powerful traps for us.”

Unfortunately the movie did not present Emma only as a long-suffering loyal wife and mother. She could have easily divorced Jung – the terms of the marriage contract were such that all the wealth she brought in would revert to her (in fact Freud thought that Jung had married for money, and that his marital problems were typical of such marriages). But Emma knew that no other man would be as interesting as Jung. So she made a heroic effort to become more interesting herself. As I describe in my poem, she educated herself and became an analyst in her own right. It was too late and too little for her to become a “muse” to her husband, but at least she got to a point where they had more in common. Aside from this, she had the satisfaction of having her own professional work.

After Toni Wolff, Marie-Louise von Franz became Jung’s close friend – a platonic one, due to Jung’s age. Aging can at least reduce the sexual element. Still, the emotional closeness could be reason enough for jealousy – but at that point Emma “had a life,” and if anything was glad that a capable woman was willing to dedicate herself to helping her husband with his work. Von Franz eventually finished the book on the legend of the grail that Emma Jung was working on until her death. It’s interesting that Emma was so fascinated with the subject of heroic quest.

Another eye-opening fact is that statistics show the lowest divorce rate in educated couples, again indicating that there is much to be said for having a similar educational level and similar interests. Atheists also have a low divorce rate, but the real factor there is probably more education; the highest divorce rate in the country is to be found in the so-called “Bible belt.” Thus, contrary to the conservative view, being religious in no way guarantees a happy marriage. Being educated, marrying at a later age, and having interests in common all correlate with stability and marital satisfaction.

Mary:

I was a social worker who practiced psychotherapy, and in my training learned about the work and the lives of Freud and Jung. On the one hand they were pioneers with healing methods that remain difficult and full of peril at every turn, without benefit of learning the wise ethical boundaries that therapists learn today. On the other hand – they were sexist male therapists who had affairs with female patients who did not conform to gender scripts. Maybe the movie isn't sexy or romantic because the subject matter is more about the assumption of power? Haven't seen the movie, but I'm wondering.

Oriana:

That’s a very perceptive observation: yes, absolutely, the sexist angle, and power and control. Jung seems a total cad. His one “romantic” moment, when he begs Sabina not to leave him to join Freud in Vienna, is completely unbelievable (maybe it’s also the angle of the shot, focusing on the soles of his feet). Yes, it could easily be said that the movie is about ambition, power, control, and sexism – and that’s the main reason that it’s simply not a love story.

To my knowledge, Freud did not have affairs with his female patients in the physical sense, but he did assume they’d fall in love with him. With the poet h.d., he desperately cried out, “Trouble is, I’m too old for you to love me!”

Both men had in their circle brilliant women like Lou Andreas-Salome (Freud) and Toni Wolff and Louise von Franz (Jung). This didn’t enlighten them as to the possibility that a woman could be as smart as a man. At least Jung didn’t disgrace himself (in our eyes) with something as ludicrous as “penis envy.” It’s not the penis (a rather ludicrous attachment) that women wanted to have, but male power and privilege.

The best acting in the movie happens when either Freud or Otto Gross are in the scene. It’s really about the men. The best scenes (e.g. Jung at Freud’s family dinner) don’t include women at all.

But it’s quite fascinating to see the old ways of dealing with mental patients, e.g. cold baths. How recent all this seems! And of course this was progress if seen against the inferno-like old asylums where patients were chained to the wall, and the public admitted to view the insane as a form of entertainment. But against that, there was (and is) also this village in Belgium with a tradition of taking in the mentally ill to do farm work, take care of the animals and be part of the family. I also know one schizophrenic who is an accomplished potter, and the fact that he has a valuable skill has made all the difference: he has a vocation/occupation other than just listening to his voices.

Lilith:

Thanks for sharing this quote from the 50's.

Jung's image is an inaccurate picture of gender relations among birds, which I'd think Jung, an educated man, would have known.

A bird's nest is not a home, but a nursery. It's built only for incubating the young and raising them till they fledge. The nest is built by the male and female working 50:50 together in total cooperation. Once the eggs are laid, the female does most of the incubating while the male brings her food, which is where Jung's image comes from, I am sure. (Among penguins, however, the male does all the incubating while the female goes off to take care of herself. I'm sure you saw that wonderful movie March of the Penguins.)

Once the youngsters leave the nest, they never return and the nest is abandoned. Both parents are involved with helping the youngsters get started outside the nest, teaching them to fly, etc.. Then the males and females are off. The female is out there in the world attending to all business "outside the nest." If she's a bird of prey, she's hunting. If she's a migratory bird, she migrates thousands of miles, etc.

Oriana:

You are so right. Well, when Jung made this bird analogy it was just beginning to be a little more difficult to be a sexist. There is an obvious strain here. And Jung himself says that he may sound like “just another selfish male.” Another analogy I’ve heard uses mountain-climbing: “someone has to take care of the base camp.” But aren’t most base camps simply left empty when the team is doing the climb?

I’ve never forgotten the film-maker’s Jalom’s observation: “Women are our last slaves.” A man I happened to meet at a Jungian lecture (where else?) said he started working at Whole Foods and at first he just couldn’t believe that practically all shoppers were women. “So women still do practically all grocery shopping?” he asked, as if not wanting this to be reality.

Speaking of mountain climbing, a hundred years ago becoming a professional woman must have been the equivalent of climbing Mt. Everest. I have absolutely no nostalgia for those “romantic” times.

Carl Jung and family, 1917

THE WILL TO BLISS REVISITED

2012-01-01T14:26:00.000-08:00

THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY

A pigeon flew in through a window

on the fourth floor and got trapped

in the sheen of the long corridors

in the large building where we lived.

My father caught him and handed

him to me. I held the bird tight

to my chest, then leaned over

the sill and handed him to the sky.

He dropped, a dead stone –

then wobbled, the wings

found again the art of the air –

and the pigeon wheeled

above the wide yard.

Flew away like the years.

But I still feel it beat,

that heart against my heart.

My earlier blog entry, http://oriana-poetry.blogspot.com/2011/06/will-to-bliss.html, I discussed happiness in terms of acting rather than thinking (“think less”). Recently, I have come across the work of Daniel Kahneman, succinctly summarized by the science writer Jim Halt: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/books/review/thinking-fast-and-slow-by-daniel-kahneman-book-review.html?_r=1 and a fascinating youtube video of Kahneman himself, explaining the experiencing self versus the remembering self: http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_experience_vs_memory.html

Daniel Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics. Surprisingly, he is a social psychologist. He “merely” showed that the model posited by classical economics, that of rational decision making by a supremely rational consumer and investor, simply does not hold up. (And I thought that everyone already knew that the stock market, for example, was totally “psychological” rather than rational; it was one of the first things I was told about capitalism: the euphoria, the crashes, the panic. I wasn’t told this by Marxists, but by patriotic Americans.)

If I were to summarize Kahneman’s findings as simply as possible, I’d say: we have two thinking systems and two selves.

TWO THINKING SYSTEMS:

System 1 is “fast thinking,” or intuition: effortless, largely unconscious, making snap judgments based on memory and emotion. It’s the equivalent of “parallel processing” in computers. System 2 is “slow thinking”: deliberate, conscious, analytical, laborious, rational (though not exempt from bias), step-by-step sequential (like “serial processing”), and painful. Your body is flooded with adrenaline – hence the dry mouth and dilated pupils. You can end up with a tension headache from using the slow System 2 thinking. It requires attention to boring detail, and who wants that? The IRS, that’s who. You can’t deal with an IRS audit on a purely intuitive basis: you have to document your income and expenses. It’s much more fun to trust intuition – to make snap judgments and jump to conclusions – even if intuition is right only half the time. Fortunately, when expertise enters the picture, e.g. medical training, the correctness of intuitive judgment improves.

One of the surprises of my life came in my teens. My father taught theoretical physics and advanced mathematics at the University of Lodz. One time, in my frustration over mathematics, which to me was the ultimate in slow, laborious System 2 thinking, and in particular with a monstrously complicated equation that was part of my high school homework, I asked him, “How come you know so quickly how to simplify an equation?” He replied: “Intuition.” A lot of training on top of a genetic gift for a certain field can shift slow thinking into fast thinking, the groaning and plodding into joyful intuitive leaps.

In a way, it’s like learning to ride a bicycle or drive a car. At first, we are in mind-body system 2: it takes a while to gain competence, and the learning process can be pretty uncomfortable. Once competence is achieved, we are – oh joy! – on automatic, unconscious of how we do it, freed to enjoy the sun and the wind, the trees and flowers.

Rather than engage my slow System 2 thinking, let me simply quote from Jim Halt’s review of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking: Fast and Slow in the New York Times, November 27, 2011:

System 1 (intuition) uses association and metaphor to produce a quick and dirty draft of reality, which System 2 draws on to arrive at explicit beliefs and reasoned choices. System 1 proposes, System 2 disposes. So System 2 would seem to be the boss, right? In principle, yes. But System 2, in addition to being more deliberate and rational, is also lazy. And it tires easily. (The vogue term for this is “ego depletion.”) Too often, instead of slowing things down and analyzing them, System 2 is content to accept the easy but unreliable story about the world that System 1 feeds to it. “Although System 2 believes itself to be where the action is,” Kahneman writes, “the automatic System 1 is the hero of this book.” System 2 is especially quiescent, it seems, when your mood is a happy one.

I love cooking. I do it intuitively. A recipe serves merely to inspire me and give me a general direction. But why not toss leaks into the soup? What about dried shiitake, chopped into small pieces? Or, in the last moment, add a dash of cayenne? My intuitive soups turn into epics. Baking, on the other hand, takes measuring and timing. Long, long ago, when I was young and foolish and ignorant of where my true talents lay, I tried baking. I’m not saying my cheesecakes weren’t delicious – it was just that they were not fun to make. After repeated experience of realizing how much I hated baking, I decided: “never again.” Life is too short to do what you dislike doing – if you don’t absolutely have to do it.

Thus, in a recap of my previous blog entry, I advocate following your bliss: the more you can run on intuition, the happier you will be. And the happier you feel, the more likely you are to trust your intuition. In writing, the more you surrender to the unconscious process, the greater the enjoyment. It’s really somewhat unnerving to say it (I still perceive myself as an intellectual) that the less you think (using the slow System 2, that is), the happier you are.

TWO SELVES

These days we are always nagged to “be in the moment.” The Power of Now has sold millions of copies. Being primarily a poet of memory, I resent that. For me, it’s the “power of back then” – which, through the magic of writing, becomes the “eternal moment.” I understood early on that “what really happened” doesn’t particularly matter, and in any case cannot be captured; what matters is what we remember.

In addition to positing two systems of thinking, Kahneman posits two selves: the moment-by-moment experiencing self and the unreliable narrator, the remembering self. Again, to quote Jim Holt:

It is the remembering self that calls the shots, not the experiencing self. The remembering self exercises a sort of “tyranny” over the voiceless experiencing self. “Odd as it may seem,” Kahneman writes, “I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.”

What Kahneman does not discuss is the importance of forgetting. Forgetting is one of life’s great blessings. And it’s our remembering self, the forgetful, inaccurate narrator, who lets details just drop away, so we remember what happened according to how meaningful it is to us in the present. Our present understanding changes the past. (Milosz discusses this in terms of the existentialist “philosophy of freedom” – again, see my past entry, http://oriana-poetry.blogspot.com/2011/06/will-to-bliss.html )

Some forgetting is of course unfortunate. The poem below makes me wish I’d written down the name of the village. But without my failure to remember, this poem would have not been born.

FORGETTING

Mazury region, former East Prussia

In the forest near the lake we found,

half buried in the sand,

a weather-scarred plaque

with the name of a German village.

We stared at the steep fence

of the Gothic alphabet.

Around, like a prayer for the dead,

the long shush of wind in the pines.

I repeated the name of the vanished

village like a spell.
I thought we’d always find
that greenest of all the lakes,

that path crowned with tall pine

where we sheltered under branches

in the rain. He put his jacket around me.
The needles shone with drops,

a forest of crystal. But I forgot

the spell – the lake nameless
among a thousand lakes,
the evenings hyphenated

with gold dashes of the fireflies.

The village weathered into silence –
the memory of a forgetting
I would remember all my life.

The name started with an A,
as in always, and ended

with an N, as in never.

In between, forest and wind –

the dead keening for the dead

in the amber forgetting of pines.

Ultimately everything will be forgotten. We too will be forgotten. But, as the souls of trees told me in another poem, it’s not important to be remembered, only to be beautiful.

Sarah (from Pietrusza Wola, Carpathia)

Interesting, yes. Of course it is also the remembering self that produces the phantom limbs – and the experiencing self which enjoys the real limbs, right now...and maybe this enjoyment doesn't involve awareness of 'the self', or need to.

I don't think Buddha neglected the remembering self – I think it was precisely this that he was saying did not exist in any permanent, reliable way. Which of course is no impediment to enjoying it. He certainly saw the power of it, the reality of it. Confusing it with a stable truth or permanent foundation is the problem.

I am not sure about the narrative aspect of musing on experience – that it has to be like that – I'm a total introvert too, but I like to muse on it not in terms of story, or film, but in moments, maybe moments of selflessness too – they do get recorded somehow... when associated not with, say, films, but with objects...

Oriana:

I agree with everything you say – the experiencing and the remembering selves are entangled in a complex way. It’s a dance – a complicated tango, incessantly changing.

I too sometimes do my remembering simply by reviewing moments and images. But even if it’s just images, it’s never like looking at a photograph. I’m aware that remembering the images – or just having it drift by the mind’s eye, for some unknown reason – means creating that image according to what the meaning is now. Some details are automatically enhanced, others omitted.

I’m not saying that this is a conscious process, because we want to remember X but not Y, though that wish may play a role. And that creative aspect of memory fits my broad definition of narration. The type of therapy that interests me most is narrative therapy – how you tell a particular story, and how merely doing it in the third person leads to a gentler, compassionate treatment of the protagonist.

And yes, Buddha probably did acknowledge the remembering self – perhaps the only self that exists, but is constantly in flux as our memories change. No permanence to anything, no. And Proust too comes to mind – how a bit of cake can evoke a train of (some say much too detailed and thus unreadable) memories.

The art of writing, as I know you know, is to a great extent the art of omission. Simplify, simplify, simplify! What threatens to engulf us is the too-muchness of everything. How delicious to be still and close one’s eyes for a moment, and let something drift into the inner sight. It's Proust, but it's also Wordsworth, with his "emotion recollected in tranquility." May we always have the tranquility it takes for a rich inner life.

On a somewhat different note: I find that the remembering self functions defectively during depression. It functions in the service of depression. Thus, positive memories are blocked (at one point I was challenged to write down ten good things that happened to me; after being literally unable to recall a single good thing, I finally managed to come up with three, a tremendous victory!), while negative memories come up in enhanced color. After committing myself to not being depressed, I could track my recovery by counting the number of positive experiences I could recall. I wasn’t suddenly flooded with remembered happiness. It took time.

Now, thank goodness, I can even ponder a disastrous experience like my summer nightmare caused by hyaluronic acid injections that were supposed to help my knee pain (my left knee was first wrecked in an accident, and then seriously harmed by a knee surgery that’s soon stopped being performed). Even though this came on top of all my other medical disasters, and could lead to a serious “Why me?” session, I can now reflect on the experience, seeking a blessing in the curse (“In every blessing a curse, in every curse a blessing” – those little mottos come handy). Without the distortion of depression, I find my remembering self to be downright wise, or at least capable of learning.

But I also have no doubt that the interplay between the experiencing and the remembering self is quite complex, and it is only at times that we can tell “the dancer from the dance.”

Charles:

You summed it up in the last paragraph better than Daniel Kahneman
and Jim Halt combined. A beautiful blog.

Oriana:

Thank you. Yes, for me the ultimate value is beauty.

That doesn’t mean a dismissal of the remembering self in favor of the experiencing self. In fact I love to re-experience beauty by calling up the images and experiences (e.g. suddenly seeing a coyote pack run along a hillside, or, while hiking on Hurricane Ridge, seeing an eagle fly at eye-level with me just feet away). When I consider the remembering self, it’s not just about selective narration; the experiencing self comes into play as well.

THE IMMORTALITY OF INFLUENCE

2011-12-16T15:38:00.000-08:00

Charles Sherman, "Cascading Continua"

Often I Am Permitted

to Return to a Meadow

in blue-green Carpathia, just to hear

a rooster crow –

then the echo – and reply – and far away,

as if hung in high blue air,

another pure return –

an echo for each meadow,

in a widening ring.

The echo of all

the roosters I heard

in those Carpathian summers still

travels from hill to hill –

by now it has reached Krakow,

bending around the blue-green

copper domes and tombs of kings,

where the Vistula embraces

the city like shining laughter,

like a gleaming wheel.

And the echo travels

as starlight can travel

for a thousand years –

and we wish on a dead star

that still guides us here.

So the echoes of us roll

in a widening ring –

of the song we sang,

and thought

that we were not heard.

I am back from Los Angeles, where I attended an interfaith panel discussion on the afterlife. The most important thing I carried away from it was the concept of the "immortality of influence," a term used by Rabbi Steve. There was also Rabbi Amy, who moderated the discussion. Father Kidney and Reverend Betsy represented the progressive Christian outlook (these are not made-up names; this is how the panelists were addressed).

Father Kidney said, “We derive our belief in the afterlife from the fact [sic] that Jesus rose from the dead. Because of his resurrection, we know that there is no death.” Reverend Betsy seconded that. I thought the rabbis would roll their eyes, but they had perfect self-control. (A friend later remarked, “We have equally powerful evidence that frogs, when kissed, turn into princes.”)

The two rabbis made modern liberal Judaism sound much like secular humanism. Talk of the supernatural is avoided. The dying are not told that they are going to heaven. What counts is the earthly life, up to the last conscious moment. “We don’t know what happens later,” both rabbis agreed. Instead, the dying are told of the heritage of family love they are leaving in this world and any other gifts that they are bestowing – and of the "immortality of influence," i.e. we can’t even know all the ways in which we touched others. It might be a casual remark, a smile, a small action that, unknown to us, we performed just at the right time to have a deep impact on someone’s life.

The interfaith panel on the afterlife was fun in all kinds of ways. After Father Kidney said, “I can’t prove it to you scientifically or mathematically – that’s why we BELIEVE,” Rabbi Amy, in her high heels, back-split skirt and a stylish yarmulke, said, “When I was in training, my rabbi told me not to believe anything, only go by my personal experience. So if you ask me if God exists, I have to say I don’t know.” Honest, yes, but did she have to shock Father Kidney and Reverend Betsy this way? Rabbi Steve said he was certain there was something beyond the body, but wouldn’t commit himself any further.

Somehow not surprisingly, the debate ended with a member of the audience who stood up and said, “I am a physician and I don’t believe we’re going anywhere.”

The discussion took place in the pretty spectacular Corpus Christi church in Pacific Palisades, round like a UFO and gleaming with modernity(never mind the idea that a church is supposed to be built on the plan of the cross – after Vatican II, everything goes). The sign over a faucet that said “Holy water for home use” was discreetly hidden across the women’s restroom. Father Kidney complained that ten of the original stations of the cross (wooden carvings – this is rare) got stolen, or in any case “disappeared.” Also, this was actually the first time I learned that a candle is equivalent to prayer, and the candle you light is doing the praying (how did I miss that? It would have spared me all kinds of time in my childhood and early teens – I left the church at 14).

Overall, however, I am very glad to have attended this “interfaith panel.” One member of the audience objected that these were not three different religions but only different forms of one religion. Historically, that is essentially correct. In my view, however, the two humanistic rabbis stood apart from the Catholic priest and the Protestant minister. Rather than speak about heaven, the rabbis agreed that the important thing is the legacy we leave to the living. The meaning of life lies primarily in how touch the lives of others. Our influence will live on in ways we can’t even imagine. We can try to make sure that this influence –even if mostly anonymous – is positive.

This fits in well with my notion of contributing to the collective psyche. Since I am not a famous writer, I can’t expect my contribution to be more than a droplet in an ocean. But I do want my droplet to shine.

II. PARADISE NOW

Artist: John Shakur Radzikowski

I deeply believe that we choose eternity while in this world,
that is, it is here and now that we build and create eternity.
And that which we will find later is that which
we were capable of finding here and now.
If we have not found it here, then we will not be able to find it later.

~ Sophia Andresen, Portuguese poet and writer

Rilke did not believe in “belief.”

Belief! – there is no such thing, I almost said. There is only – love. The forcing of the heart to hold this and that for true, which we commonly call belief, makes no sense. First one has to find God somewhere, experience him as so infinitely, so utterly, so enormously present . . . But for belief, that compulsion to God, there is no room where one has begun with the discovery of God, in which there is then no stopping any more . . .

~ Selected Letters, 275-6

Thus, Rilke’s argument is basically the same as that of Rabbi Amy: don’t force yourself to believe anything; go by your own experience. Rilke’s wording, however, helped me realize that I am an atheist only in regard to the Judeo-Christian god – as creator and judge dealing out punishments and rewards, especially in the afterlife; as a “king of the world,” violating the laws of nature, subject to temper tantrums and malevolent moods, the “Old Blood Bath,” as a friend calls him, mostly cruel and archaic.

Alas, for all its message of forgiveness, Christianity stinks of blood sacrifice, and just can’t break away from the original cruelty (though I admire the attempt). In practice, the cruel, angry, punitive god-the-father prevails over Christ’s mercy even in Christianity, though lately the liberal denominations have been making a frantic effort to dissociate themselves from the archaic, by emphasizing the “holy spirit.” Christ is supposed to return as the Judge who’ll divide the saved from those damned to eternal fire, but the third person of the Trinity is entirely devoid of any punitive streak. It is indeed “as harmless as a dove.”

(I need to acknowledge here the observation that the hell of unending torment is a Christian rather than a Judaic concept. Judaism always laid emphasis on earthly life.)

On the other hand, if god is defined as “that which you love most,” then I have no problem. Of course then there is the question if this term, corrupted and defiled by history and politics, is needed at all. Whether the term is used or not, “that which you love most” presents no problem at all in terms of leading a joyful, fulfilling life. So what if it must end. We can act out of love, or out of fear. I’m not going to drop what I love doing and start praying the rosary, which always ended in a bored stupor.

And of course then god becomes “it.” If anyone prefers the capital letter to indicate reverence, that’s fine with me too: let it be the great It.

Let me quote again Rilke, on how death (especially when viewed without expectations of going to a “better place”) forces us to take life seriously, to take the risks worth taking.

Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love . . . Life always says Yes and No simultaneously. Death . . . is the true Yea-sayer. It stands before eternity and says only: Yes.

III. AND NOW THOUSANDS OF NEW YORK INTELLECTUALS HAVE NOTHING TO BELIEVE IN.

The title of this section comes from something said to me at Yaddo (an art colony) in the early nineties. The fall of the Berlin Wall was still a relatively recent event, and I mentioned it at the table. A woman poet from New York became distressed and lamented, “Yes, and now thousands of New York intellectuals have nothing to believe in.”

I no longer remember what I replied – probably something at least a tad sarcastic. But deep down, for all the shallowness and ignorance of the New York Marxist intellectuals, I felt some empathy with the lament. I remember my own youthful desire to give myself to something UTTERLY. The death of god was a loss. It was sad to feel, at fourteen, that the church was the tomb of a dead god with nothing to give me anymore. (I specifically remember Confirmation as the beginning of the end: the grumpy old bishop conveyed no sense of the sacred; administering the supposed sacrament was just another irritating chore).

The emotional flatness came before my intellect supplied reasons. It was as if the emotional brain matured first, before the intellect had a chance to whisper, “Look at the similarity of mythological motifs – isn’t this like believing in Zeus?”). (As for the evolution of religion, I recommend, over and over, Robert Wright’s brilliant The Evolution of God.)

Recently, reading a biography of Lenin, much to my surprise I found myself completely envious of pre-revolutionary Lenin, of his absolute dedication. I could feel his ecstasies, even if the only member of the sparse revolutionary group whose attendance at meetings could be counted on was the police informer. There is a superhuman energy that comes from such focus, an astonishing courage. His absolute faith in his mission was completely misguided, but his courage was breath-taking. I know I will be completely envious of young Trotsky (I’ve just ordered a biography that I know is hostile to him; it won’t matter one bit; Trotsky’s heroic dedication will shine through).

Of course I realize that these men became prisoners of the Idea and turned into monsters who assumed that the end justifies the means. I know they have blood on their hands – in fact past the elbows. I condemn their embrace of mass murder as allowable in the name of a noble future. But I also know that the hunger for ideals, for being able to believe in something, having something to live for, is a great human hunger, sometimes the greatest. In some of us, that hunger for being dedicated to something comes ahead of even the need to be loved or to love and nurture others (I point that out as a woman who is speaking from experience, since it’s been suggested that nothing is as important to a woman as erotic and maternal love; isn’t love “a woman’s whole existence”?).

But here lies a tragedy: every ideal, once an attempt is made to put it into practice, becomes corrupt and/or wrecked on the rocks of reality. Ideals are oversimplifications; reality is extremely complex. Even being a dedicated artist has those rocks of reality in it, the unintentional hurting of others simply because you love your art more. And what about being an intellectual? Is there anyone I loved more than I love books? (OK, my father, BEFORE I myself could read; he read to me at bedtime.)

Books, that virtual paradise … But maybe we shouldn’t be so “hung-up” on reality, life’s elusive shadow stumbling over itself. Indeed, what is truth? Once I had a humbling experience of going to a Jungian lecture on “Encountering the Ultimate Other” (the title was irresistible and drew a crowd of educated agnostics). Well, it turned out to be New Age fantasies of the astral world and how beautiful and wonderful it is (“the flowers here are nothing compared with the astral flowers”).

No evidence was presented for the existence of this paradise – the whole lecture was simply pure assertion. In spite of my embarrassment about even being present at the event, that night I slept wonderfully. My theory is that having heard so many positive statements had an effect on my neurochemistry, regardless of the fact that intellectually it was all a pile of doo-doo taller than any Gothic cathedral (even the Notre Dame of Amiens). And the audience, mostly PhD’s, walked out with blissful light in their faces, again showing that “truth value” has nothing to do with it . . .

If I were to write a self-help book, it would be loaded with feel-good words. Content is basically irrelevant; you want to bliss out the reader (which reminds me: haven’t I once paid a ridiculous fee for a poetry conference during which I was told to “let go of the idea of content”?). I’m not planning to write any such meaningless but benevolent book, but once in a while a feel-good effect results from some words I use in a poem. It’s gratifying to see smiles blossom on the listeners’ faces, even if I never promise them astral flowers, only mountain meadows.

Hyacinth:

Provocative. My first thought was that all the stories we learned and the sense of a higher being probably didn’t do us harm. We have a solid grounding in the literature and stories of the bible. And there is much wisdom there. My grandchildren were, many of them, raised with no concept of anything bigger than parents and themselves and I’m not sure that is all good. I doubted early on as well but never put it into words. As I said, I quit Sunday School at three! but attended services for years as my mother played the organ and we loved the music.

Oriana:

I too loved the organ music, the priests’ splendidly embroidered vestments, and the Latin liturgy. Still, to some extent I was harmed by the Catholic church. The fixation on sin and hell were the harmful part, and, after puberty and the experience of my first timid erotic fantasies and first love, the church’s obsession with sex as the main sin. That certainly didn’t help my mental health, especially since I was already an anxious, over-responsible child who felt “not OK” practically all the time. The church added to that torment and further lowered my already low self-esteem. Now there were also “impure thoughts” to worry about and bring up in confession.

On the positive side, it would be more difficult to understand some of literature without the background of Christianity. Dante would probably be of no interest.

My parents would have brought me up as an atheist except for my grandmother, who would have made their life impossible if they did. So it was her intimidation power that prevailed. I wonder what kind of person I would have turned out without the Catholic background (the concept and images of hellfire cannot be deleted; the priests know that and chortle with joy, thinking “Once a Catholic, always a Catholic”).

I think I would have still visited churches out of curiosity, and enjoyed them as architecture and meditative space. The time spent in church and on prayers at home – that would have been used differently. I think I would have grown up as a healthier and more self-confident child without Catholicism. My self-image would not have been that of a hopeless sinner who can’t go for much more than a week without committing a sin and thus falling out of the state of grace – which meant the likelihood of ending up in hell should I die a sudden death (the nun told us not to count on the availability of confession – after all a child could get run over by a truck, “and guess where your soul would go?”)

Now the church has gone very soft and tells children, "Remember that Jesus loves you." That was NEVER said to us. Not once. Children were not coddled by nuns and priests back then; they were emotionally terrorized. We were not treated as innocents, but as sinners. God was an invisible something/someone to fear and appease with confessions and masses and prayers, chest-beating and acts of contrition.

Virgin Mary (in Polish most often called Matka Boska, meaning Mother of God or Divine Mother; the emphasis was on “mother”) was more connected with affection, and I felt affection for her. I never assumed she cared for me, but I had a naive expectation that if I prayed to her, she might hear the prayer, since she was said to be pure mercy and unconditional love; words like judgment and punishment were never used about Mary. “Even if you are the worst of sinners, you can always pray to Mary.” She got the most prayers and candles. All the "miraculous icons" I remember were Mary’s icons.

I’ve met people who were brought up without religion, and they all struck me as decent, normal persons. They seemed neither more self-involved nor less happy than a typical church-goer, and acknowledged “something bigger,” be it nature or humanity or both. It’s hard to look at the ocean or the stars and not see something bigger than oneself, entirely without the benefit of religious education. In fact, in my Catholic years I was so busy adding up my sins that the beauty of the world did not register as intensely as it did later, without the burden of worrying about sin and hell.

Below is a poem of mine that touches on the hellfire part of old-style Catholicism, and on my sense of the sacred that is now more nature-related.

DYNGUS: EASTER MONDAY

Father always managed to splash me,

shouting, Shmingus-dyngus!

laughing as I’d run, shaking off

a trail of drops. The Church frowned

on the puddles of this springtime

baptism, taught me I was a sinner.

in the town where I was born,

a baroque naked angel

held golden scales to weigh

good deeds against sin.

Heaven was up, hell was down.

the soul huddled like a chilled bird.

My mother said, “There is no hell.

God wouldn’t be so cruel.”

At ten I was aghast at her heresy:

hell was where my mother was going.

At fourteen I said, “If God exists,

let him strike me with lightning.”

Waited, shaking in terror.

For five minutes I could hardly

breathe. Pigeons cooed, fragile sunlight

redeemed the rain-streaked masonry.

I began to walk fast, away

from that first-communion girl,

lilacs in her arms, moist and heavy,

veins crossing the silk of leaves.

Beyond an ocean of baroque clouds,

that country still exists. Other children

pick up yellow pebbles

on a Baltic beach, believing it’s amber.

Another girl walks down the black

soot-eaten factory streets in Łódź;

the giant rhythm of the looms

closes around the shuttle of her body.

Another child wakes on Easter Monday,

her father hidden in the kitchen,

the water in the basin

dancing with impatient sheen.

My cat wakes me up at dawn

to the liturgy of clouds

rimmed with narrow gold.

I wade in the gathering

light of resurrection.

In the yard, spires of lilacs.

I agree with a chittering bird:

it is only practical to be happy.

Again I will climb

the same mountain,

follow the bleached star

of dry yucca where the trail

sharply turns. I agree once more

to the mortal price of love.

At dusk I return to Mozart,

my one-candle vespers.

The notes shape a brief heaven.

Fog erases the pine-dark hills.

Last year in Vermont, I told Adam Zagajewski the story of how I waited to be struck with lightning for my blasphemy, and he replied, in his expressionless way that worked very well in this situation, “Sometimes there is a delay.”

Nevertheless, back in that moment, at fourteen, I was willing to die and suffer in hell for eternity for daring to think on my own. I was willing to be sent into eternal torment rather than worship a cruel god who created hell. I still had lingering belief, and for the first minute or so I fully expected to be struck by lightning. I stood there, shaking, awaiting electrocution. I see this as the moment of the greatest courage in my life -- ironically, being literally willing to die for my beliefs, and furthermore, to be tortured forever for my beliefs. Shaking but unbowed, because this god more cruel than Hitler was not worthy of worship.

But after five minutes or so, the remnant belief was gone. I stopped shaking and walked on, a fierce little independent thinker and not a sinner. The world looked radiant around me: the trees in gold-green first leaf, the grass full of tiny daisies, the city I loved.

Hyacinth:

The church I was raised in was not fire and brimstone, but when I married we changed to Southern Baptist, and they are the worst. When my children were grown, I apologized to them for having brought them up with the idea of a cruel God. Also, the idea of blood sacrifice always bothered me.

Oriana:

The more liberal wing of Christianity has already pretty much ceased to mention hell; practically everyone goes to heaven (including Jews and Buddhists). But eventually, I predict, even heaven will no longer be mentioned, and the whole notion of the afterlife will be retired into polite silence. As in liberal Judaism, which does not strike as different from secular humanism except for the ethnic element, the emphasis will shift to how best to live our life on earth.

In Polish, as in many other languages, the word for heaven is the same as the word for sky, so it’s pretty impossible to imagine heaven as something other than the sky, always with picturesque clouds. Ultimately, this image becomes just too infantile to take seriously. Yet no other image has been proposed, except the New Age concept of the astral world where we need only think about something, and, as promised in The Secret, our desire is fulfilled. Thus, in the astral world, if we think of a favorite opera, soon we are singing its arias better than any earthly singer. (God is usually not mentioned, only the instant fulfillment of desires.) This is extremely attractive, but no proof of the astral world is ever offered, unless the “visions of certain highly evolved mystics” (whose names are not disclosed).

But even as hell falls into disuse, Christianity has another obstacle to overcome, and that’s the founding dogma that Jesus died for our sins. This “blood ransom” is the price of our entrance to heaven (otherwise we’d all go to hell, where we belong because of our sinful human nature, also known as “total depravity”). The idea is archaic and morally repugnant. It has to go, or Christianity will look more and more archaic and irrelevant.

The Catholic mass evolved from the ancient Hebrew ritual animal sacrifice in the Jerusalem Temple. Few Catholics know about this, and those who know may say, yes, but isn’t it wonderful that now we don’t kill any animals at the altar, but have substituted a wafer and wine? Yes, but the doctrine of trans-substantiation requires Catholics to believe that the wafer and wine are LITERALLY transformed into flesh and blood. Wars were once waged over this, and thousands were slaughtered because they believed that the wafer and wine became actual flesh and blood, or else they believed that the transformation was only symbolic. Not counting the Crusades, those wars and massacres (and the earlier mass slaughter of the Gnostics) took place in Europe; that’s why the Europeans are more likely than Americans to say that religion has caused more harm than good.

True, the wars are in the past; no one is publically encouraged anymore to kill in the name of Christ. It could be argued that nowadays most people go to church or temple for social or sentimental reasons (weddings and funerals, and also childcare), and no longer pay attention to the beliefs are supposed to go with their official religion. Or they may mouth the doctrine that “Jesus died for our sins” without thinking. That is probably true of the “silent majority” of church members. But there is an annoying noisy minority who loudly insist on hellfire and the necessity of being rinsed in the “blood of the lamb.” Nothing short of a blood sacrifice of the highest order (his own son) could possibly appease their angry, vengeful deity. And no, being a good person doesn’t mean anything; unless you accept the doctrine that Jesus died for your sins, you become fodder for hellfire.

Tent revival meetings are still being held in the South. When I was a visiting poet in Arkansas, I read a leaflet advertising one such tent revival. Every sentence dripped with hate and threats of hell, all in the name of sweet Jesus. It may be several decades before this kind of toxic Christianity is finally gone from the face of the earth. I realize this statement is optimistic; the belief in a punitive deity is propagated by intimidation, starting in early childhood. This intimidation, often combined with religiously condoned physical abuse (“don’t spare the rod”), is hard (but not impossible) to overcome.

Nevertheless, there has been immense progress. Catholics and Protestants no longer massacre one another – not even in Northern Ireland. I can’t speak about Islam, but progressive Christianity has become more and more inclusive, even showing a desire for fusion with at least some elements of the Eastern tradition. Since every religion I’m familiar with has progressed by borrowing from other sources, I think the world may eventually become part secular and part religious – but I think the religions of the future are more likely to be benign. I agree with Robert Wright (The Evolution of God) that the overall progress has been in the right direction: less and less religious violence and more emphasis on kindness rather than blind faith.

Scott:

As always, your posts are great reading to ponder over. Your mention of interfaith brings to mind that I would love to hear a panel discussion between a Sufi, Quaker and Zen adherent and see where things shake out! That is one of the huge attractions( one of so many) of Moby Dick in that you had so many diverse beliefs melded on the Pequod; from the Quaker Starbuck to Quequeg’s pagan South Sea religion and all in between, Melville probed them all in one fashion or another. Your experience with the Catholic church had obviously a profound impact on your life and I am curious if in your poetic circles you have come across Catholic poets who are quite happy and devout in their beliefs.

I came to poetry rather late in life and it has struck me many times how many prominent poets, who were not brought up in it, came to Catholicism and embraced it, like the New Zealand poet James K Baxter (educated in Quaker schools), G K Chesterton, the prolific English poet and apologist, as well as Roy Campbell, the South African born man of letters. Here in the U.S. Allen Tate and Robert Lowell too came to it late in life (I believe both abandoned it as well); of course there are many others but those five come to mind as poets whose work I particularly enjoy.

The Portuguese poet you mentioned, Andresen, also was said to have remained a devout Catholic her whole life (would love to read her biography; her love of the sea and Greek myth mirror mine) and the French poet, Charles Peguy, has long fascinated me. A devout agnostic and socialist, he turned to a mystical Catholicism, though he never took the sacraments, oddly enough, and was shot in the head in battle during the first days of WWI; a great quote by him is the following

Homer is new and fresh this morning, and nothing, perhaps, so old and tired as this morning's newspaper.

Funny too that Peguy, Baxter and Andresen were all great admirers of Greek myth; it brings to mind Camoes fantastic blending of Christian symbolism and Greek myth in his epic, 'The Lusiads.' (have always wondered how that book got past the Catholic censors in the 16th century!) And back to 'Moby Dick' (as you know, for me all roads lead back to the Pequod), the Cuban literary critic Jose Feo maintained that a Catholic could not have created a mad character like Ahab, rooted as he was in American Calvinism. Allen Tate asserted as well that the South could have won its independence had the region had one dominant faith like Catholicism instead of the diverse Protestant denominations that were the fabric of the old South( the “Christ-haunted South” as the Catholic writer Flannery O'Conner called it). I would be interested to read a study of Catholicism and poetry where the faith is discussed in detail on how it affected the poets craft and those cases too, like Lowell, who abandoned it and the impact it had.

Oriana:

One member of the audience said, “What we have here is not three religions, but one – each borrowing from the others.” In my written comments, I put down, “Next time, bring in a Buddhist and an atheist” (wouldn’t it have been fantastic to have had Hitchens present – he was too near death, of course, but imagine his kind of brilliance interacting with the considerable intelligence of the two rabbis; on further thought, those rabbis were not really theists in the conventional sense; I don’t think conventional religion attracts the best minds anymore; we’ll never have another Augustine or Thomas Aquinas; it’s a safe guess that if Hitchens happened to have been born during the Middle Ages, he’d have likely become a “doctor of the church”).

In my circle there are some Buddhists and eclectic New-Age believers (e.g. they believe in past lives and a “friendly universe” that’s responsive to their personal thoughts and desires; as one said, “If you are friendly toward the universe, it will be friendly to you”; another said, “I believe only those things that make me happy.”). I’ve come across only one Catholic poet. She converted in adulthood and seems to be getting some emotional nourishment from the church, though even she sees it as a dilapidated shell around the radiance. We are distant friends at best. I can’t feel close to anyone who feels s/he has THE answer; s/he is not helping me carry the burden of the questions. But that’s a theoretical statement, since such people generally don’t even come close to me, so there is no heart-to-heart conversation (in which perhaps their doubts and seeking rather than finding would come to the surface).

By the way, that poet (I’m not sure if she’d care to be labeled a “Catholic poet”) made the interesting observation that the badness of most religious poetry comes from the “poverty of the language of religion” (her phrasing). Good poems of those poets who are publically religious tend to praise the beauty of the earth. They love rivers and meadows, the birds and even the insects. Often it’s a lost childhood paradise. Milosz is a perfect example of that. Rilke shifted from his youthful mysticism of “we are building God” to love for the earth.

Most poets I know were raised in a religion that they left in adolescence or young adulthood. Catholicism definitely had an impact on me, and leaving the church meant losing some things I loved – the poetics of it, including the pillar-shaking organ music (I loved aggressive organists who really let go). As I say elsewhere in this post, that breaking away was my moment of greatest courage. Afterwards, when I stopped shaking with terror, I experienced a beautiful sense of freedom, like tossing off heavy and constraining winter clothes – springtime! A slight nostalgia came later, but it was never the intense, painful nostalgia that I felt for

Poland

. I cried over the loss of my homeland (the first two years are the hardest; I call them the “wet pillowcase years”); I never shed a tear over the loss of Catholicism. The gain of freedom outweighed any sense of loss.

An interesting observation about Captain Ahab being rooted in American Calvinism; that’s probably true. Would a Catholic South had won the Civil War? I doubt it. The South was united enough – not by religion, but by the supremely un-Christian belief that slavery was morally justified. (By the way, Nazi soldiers had Gott mit uns – “God is with us” on their belt buckles – maybe the saddest example of how religion can be perverted)

As for the blending of Christian elements with classical mythology in poets such as Dante and Milton, it seems that to them classical mythology was profoundly real. As an example of this, I strongly recommend Ciardi’s translation of the 26^th Canto of the Inferno, the Ulysses canto. Milton is another example of a poet who fuses Greek mythology with Christianity. Characters such as Hercules were seen as real people who lived long ago. Our modern concept of a myth was born only in the nineteenth century, when mythology became a field of scholarly study. That’s also when scholars started the quest for the “historical Jesus,” trying to separate myth from the probable reality (e.g. most likely Jesus was born in Nazareth and not in Bethlehem).

Charles:

“Immortality of influence” – this is especially true of rich art collectors. They leave their legacy as great collectors of fine art.

Oriana:

And it’s great art that is given a degree of immortality thanks to those rich collectors. It always takes at least one other person – and usually many others – for great work to be accomplished and, later, preserved.

Non omnis moriar – “not all of me will die.” Not to die wholly, to leave behind something of great value, has always been the dream of creative people. But any life that is well lived is bound to leave a legacy that is rich beyond our knowing.

I was most terrified of death when I was young. Later, though I did not yet have the phrase “immortality of influence,” I came to realize that we are collective beings; we influence one another, and the echoes go on and on. We contribute to the collective psyche. It is our moral duty to contribute joy, goodness, enlightenment. Not that we need to be particularly conscious of this contribution. As long as we are not timid and reach for the best in life, the echoes start traveling.

The City of Gold, Revelation 21:18

Would anyone actually want to live in the City of Gold (with the wall of jasper, and pearly gates)?