BODY HEAT: THE NON-PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY

Mary Dineen: Iris
 
“The question of the self: ‘who am I’ not in the sense of ‘who am I’ but rather ‘who is this ‘I’ that can say ‘who’? What is the ‘I,’ and what becomes of responsibility once the identity of the ‘I’ trembles in secret?” ~ Jacques Derrida
 
All I’m willing to divulge is that certain events made the identity of my ‘I” tremble in secret. As did the reading about a dream I had a long time ago.

BODY HEAT

I browse through the journal I kept 

in 1988. Boring, my witty remarks,
my vivid writerly details;

a student essay I quote,
“The Underclothes at Hawthorne
Disaster Wing Thriftstore, Inc.”


I flip the pages, find
my “Los Angeles airport dream”: 
We stand at the window and wait

for the plane from New York.
It crashes into the terminal!
Woozy from the impact, I get up.

Robert is gone – vaporized.
Only his duffel bag is left.
I grope it, hoping it’s still warm

from his body. Moments later
I think, “I’ll call Andrew.”
In the journal I write,

What a marvelous dream!

Except I’d never exchange 

Robert for Andrew. Never.

*

Now I shudder. No jets had yet
plunged into buildings. Ignorant
dream, how could it not know

that Andrew was to be
my Disaster Wing?
My long letters to him,

stormy knots of clouds,
signed: “Love always.”
I still can't believe it:

to Robert I said,
“Andrew is my prince –
you are my reality.”

*

Only the body knows.
Only the hands make love.
My songless Orpheus

committed suicide.
The same autumn Robert
got married, a Catholic

convert, a metal crucifix
over his marriage bed.
I put away the journal.

One image lingers: in the void
of the demolished airport,
I touch my lover’s duffel bag.

I stroke the bag’s whole length, 

seeking the last trace

of someone lost – a ghost even

of his body heat –
That’s the sole detail
I have saved –

it’s what remains for me
of that year, not of Our Lord,

but of our groping blindness.

~ Oriana © 2013

The poem describes my experience quite accurately. In my twenties and thirties, I kept a journal on and off, mostly off.  Like a lot of people who journal, I never read it. One time I did try reading it, and found it boring -- all those forgotten, meaningless details that had nothing to do with my new “older and wiser” priorities! And all those attempts to be clever and funny -- who did I think I was writing for? Posterity?

And then it happened: browsing, I landed on the page that recorded my dream about a plane flying into the building of the Los Angeles airport. I was the sole survivor, touching my vaporized partner’s duffel bag all over, seeking some trace his body heat still clinging to the bag. I was thunder-struck. The dream came back as if I’d just had it, never mind the many years in between. How could I have forgotten one of the most powerful dreams I ever had?

Worse, how could I have made this cruel remark to the man who wasn’t my Prince, not the one I fantasized about every night? I still can’t believe it . . . except that the memory, once resurrected, would not go away. I can only plead that it was the innocent “cruelty of youth” -- not meaning to hurt another, but not having lived long enough to have acquired more compassion and understanding of life and love.

I’m horrified by what came out of my mouth in the guise of “honesty” -- back then honesty was on everyone’s lips, the highest value, far ahead of kindness. I plead I “wasn’t yet me”; that was my immature self, not my more enlightened later self, chastened by having experienced not only more personal suffering, but also by understanding how much others suffer.

Wiliam Blake: Job

*
 
THAT EMBARRASSING YOUNGER SELF 

Ray Carver has a poem about this dilemma of having to own one’s younger self:

THE AUTHOR OF HER MISFORTUNE

I’m not the man she claims.  But
this much is true: the past is
distant, a receding coastline,
and we’re all in the same boat,
a scrim of rain over the sea-lanes.
Still, I wish she wouldn’t keep on
saying those things about me!
Over the long course
everything but hope lets you go, then
even that loosens its grip.
There isn’t enough of anything
as long as we live. But at intervals
a sweetness appears and, given a chance,
prevails. It’s true I’m happy now.
And it’d nice if she
could hold her tongue. Stop
hating me for being happy.
Blaming me for her life. I’m afraid
I’m mixed up in her mind
with someone else.  A young man
of no character, living on dreams,
who swore he’d love her forever.
One who gave her a ring, and a bracelet.
Who said, Come with me. You can trust me.
Things to that effect.  I’m not that man.
She has me confused, as I said,
with someone else.

 ~ Ray Carver

*
I discussed this poem with my students. Half of them said, No, he is no longer that man. The other half kept saying, Yes he is. What a cad.

We concluded that he both is and isn’t the same person. Legal cases regularly bring up this paradox: Your Honor, yes, twenty years ago my client did commit a crime, but he is now a “changed man,” a pillar of the community, president of an important charity, a loving husband, father of three fine boys. What good would it serve to put him in prison?

I still don’t have an answer to that question.

*

TO BELIEVE AS THE HANDS BELIEVE

As for my poem, written the same day I found the dream in my journal, it too provoked a debate. Or rather, not so much a debate as a round of condemnation from friends, with me as the sole defense attorney. Now, my friends were not saying, Your younger self is morally despicable. They were saying that this is a bad poem. It’s badly written: the two men create confusion. “Why don’t you remove the other man from the poem and make it a beautiful love poem?” my most romantic friend suggested. Others seconded that.

It would have been easy to transform this darkly realistic poem into an idealistic one: my one true love, even beyond death. I knew that from a purely esthetic point of view, a shorter poem would have worked: I browse through the journal, find the dream but omit any mention of the idolized “Andrew,” leave out further developments concerning Robert and Andrew, and quickly proceed to the ending. Everyone praised the ending.

But I wanted to retain the duality. For me the poem was about that duality, including the duality of past and present, and the older self’s new understanding of the dream in the light of a more mature understanding of love. No, I was no longer that ruthlessly “honest” young woman, and could now say with Tony Hoagland:

What we’ve learned is mostly
not to be so smart --

to believe
as the hands believe,
in only what they hold. 

**

The other matter that interests me is the strangeness of memory. If I hadn’t written down the dream, and then rediscovered the description years later, the dream, which I now see as one of the most powerful dreams I’ve ever had, would be forgotten with the rest of the details. The poem would not exist. The unexpected vehement condemnation that the poem drew further burned it into my memory. “This is the worst poem of yours that I’ve seen,” one person said.

On a dare, I decided to read the poem in public the next chance I got. But in the last minute I lost my nerve. In any case, “you have the right to remain silent.” But the emotional storm assured that I’d never forget the once-forgotten dream or the circumstances in which the “bad” poem was born.

**

I’ve often reflected that I wrote my “Polish poems” just in time, when my childhood memories were still relatively fresh, and those full-throated Carpathian roosters were crowing, casting splendid echoes. The negative side of communing with the past through poetry was that this selective recall perhaps became more important than it should be. Accused of having created an unreal and folkloric Poland, I could not deny the charge. The Polish countryside had become a holy land to me. Any lost homeland becomes that.

I had poems about Warsaw as well, presenting it as a magical city. When I was in my teens, it really was a magical city to me, but I also knew the other side that my older self fully remembered as well. My most perceptive readers picked up the darker undertones anyway (not to mention that the darkness was at times in full view, since my maternal grandmother was an Auschwitz survivor). They also assured me that the poems “go beyond the country”: those rooster-crowed villages, the wheat fields and the old farmer turning into an oracle, telling me I’d never go crazy, had an element of the eternal.

But there was yet another aspect to having written those poems: sometimes I felt I carried too much of the past with me. Because of the poems, I wasn’t able to forget, and forgetting may be memory’s wisest gift. We daily step into Lethe so we may be free of the old life and ready for the new. Or, as another dream told me, “Every three years I burn my diaries / to make room for new books.”

*





THE CLOUDS ARE NOT ALONE

Yet just recently I had an experience that confirmed that not even writing a poem is guaranteed to preserve an experience or insight: it’s perfectly common to forget having written a particular poem, even a good one. Some poets say that it’s best to put away a new poem until you no longer remember it, so a year later you can read it, astonished: This is good!  I wrote this? Me of little worth and no account? (the Book of Job has a way of coming to my mind when poetry and po-biz intrude on my field of being)

I’ve learned to look at the “used” side of my recycled paper: now and then I find a poem I entirely forgot I ever wrote, and decide to keep it. But the last time I did that, I knew the striking and beautiful poem was not my own. The author’s name wasn’t on the page. I instantly emailed the poem to my Salon, with the question, “Does anyone know who wrote this poem?”

The same night, the author was found. It was one of the members of the Salon. She emailed me: “OMG, this is my poem!” She was astonished, and admitted to having recognized the piece not right away, but only half-way through it. She had entirely forgotten having written it, just as I had forgotten having read it. Here it is:

THE CLOUDS ARE NOT ALONE

A Navaho man said the rain is our ancestors
Our bodies, with so much water when we die

evaporate generation after generation
into clouds made of ancestors raining down

all those evaporating beings farther and farther back
through the dinosaurs and more

Everyone who came before rains on me
The tides from the moon are in all of us

with our waters pulling each other closer and farther
while the stars smash away, create worlds

Poems travel at the speed of light
from the page to my eye

from scraps of language written down
Sappho’s love pulses across centuries

~ Janet Baker © 2013

**

How could she forget having written such a fine poem? How could I forget having read it?

It’s not that mysterious. Apparently neither of us took the time to properly encode the memory. Not reinforced through deep attention, strong emotion, and/or repetition, the memory became inaccessible.  Life rushes on, and both of us simply . . . forgot. The poem would be lost utterly if not for the lucky accident of the recycler rescue.

The chance nature of this incident creates a sense of both adventure and peril. Hooray, a poem that deserves to live is now resurrected. But how many excellent pieces have gotten lost? Legion.

Here was a poem that celebrated the idea that the ancestors are still linked to us, nourishing us. I remembered Rabbi Steve at the Interfaith Panel on the Afterlife (http://oriana-poetry.blogspot.com/2011/12/immortality-of-influence.html), saying that before life ends, a person needs to shed all the love s/he has received so it can be recycled. But the same could be claimed for knowledge and wisdom. All, all must be recycled. As Janet’s poem claims, “Everyone who came before rains on me.” 

Jaded reader, you may shrug and say that this has no doubt been said before in some other way; aren’t there too many poems out there already? The sites that offer a “poem of the day” choke with unending material; the Internet overflows with hundreds of thousands of poems. True, but how many of those poems are worth reading? Let’s be generous: maybe ten percent. At the same time, for various reasons, many truly excellent poems never find an audience. They slide into oblivion without a sigh, sometimes forgotten even by their author.

This is sad because poetry can be more powerful than any other kind of writing. I wouldn’t  have this belief if not for the repeated experience of someone from the audience approaching me after a reading, deeply moved, thanking me for having made him or her see something in their life in a new light. All good poets seem to have those tales of being thanked by tearful strangers; it’s what keeps poets from feeling useless.

Whenever I do a reading, I imagine that in the audience there is one person for whom a certain poem is meant. I can’t predict which poem and which listener, but experience has tended to confirm my belief that at least one person will be touched in a special way. And that’s also what makes the fickleness of memory and the loss of good poems so sad: the gift is not given, and the person who’d be ready to receive it remains untouched.

Not long ago I happened to be that person in need of a gift. Browsing at random through a book I received from a stranger, I came across these famous lines:

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.

This was not trendy in Whitman’s time, and he had to self-publish. Imagine if it had been lost.     

FIRE BIRD: POETRY OF THE BODY

A few days ago the clouds looked so wonderful, so 3-D -- ordinary tumbled white clouds with grayish underbellies -- that I thought, “I don’t need to ask for anything more of life.”

The next instant, however, I thought that I’d ask not to be parted from this beauty. But scientists still seem a long way from defeating the built-in aging clock of the body, if they ever get there at all (the first “death switch” is puberty; theoretically, we could be immortal if we gave up reproduction).

Many people say that it’s not dying that bothers them; it’s watching and experiencing the process of aging. “Don’t you just hate aging!” is what I hear from women, and no one even remembers the consolation of “inner beauty.” Old is not beautiful, but the only thing we can do is “age gracefully” (or perhaps disgracefully, why not), with acceptance.

The huge popularity of plastic surgery testifies to our growing rejection of “looking our age.” So a poem about welcoming and even celebrating the changes that aging brings to the woman’s body is a true surprise. Sharon Olds, arguably the most famous American woman poet and the most recent recipient of the T.S. Eliot Prize, has written such a poem.

The Older

The older I get, the more I feel
almost beautiful -- not my face, plain

puritan face, but my body. And I will be
fifty, soon, my body getting

withery and scrawny, and I like its silvery

witheriness, the skin thinning,

surface of a lake crumped by wind, ruched 

wraith, a wrinkle of smoke. Yet when
I look down, I can see, sometimes,
things that if a young woman saw she would
scream, as if at a horror movie
 turned to crone in an instant -- if I lean

far enough forward, I can see the fine
birth skin of my stomach pucker
and hang, in tiny peaks, like wet stucco.
And yet I can imagine being eighty, made
entirely, on the outside, of that,  
and making love with the same animal
dignity, the tunnel remaining
the inside of a raspberry 
bract. Suddenly I look young to myself
next to that eighty-year-old, I look
like her child, my flesh in its loosening drape
showing the long angles of these strange
bones like cooking-utensil handles in heaven.
When I was younger, I looked, to myself,
sometimes, like a crude drawing of a female --
the breasts, the 1940s flare of the hips --
but this greyish, dented being is cozy as 
a favorite piece of clothing, she is almost
lovable, now, to me. Of course, it is 
his love I am seeing, the working of his thumb
over this lucky nickel -- five times
five years in his pocket. Maybe
even if I died, I would not look ugly
to him. Sometimes, now, I dance
like shirred smoke above a chimney.
Sometimes, now, I think I live
in the place where the solemn, wild drinking
of coming is done, I am not all day coming
but living in that place where it is done.

~ Sharon Olds, The Unswept Room, 2003 


“Sometimes, now, I dance / like shirred smoke above a chimney.” What an amazing ending from that point on! At first reading, I understood “coming” as “arriving,” in terms of the metaphoric “journey of life”; only after a while I recalled the sexual meaning. Of course it’s richer with both meanings present. And I am not surprised at the “posthumous” feeling; there is something posthumous about the very act of writing, which seems the opposite of living. 

As someone said, you can’t write about making love while making love. 

This is an extraordinary poem, with an astonishing counter-culture beginning, coming from a woman:

The older I get, the more I feel
almost beautiful -- not my face, plain
puritan face, but my body.

We take it for granted that the older a woman gets, the worse she looks, and consequently feels less beautiful. “The older I get, the more I feel/ I look like a fright” -- would be something that a woman reader would nod her head to. Then, another surprise: Olds is not talking about her face -- and to a typical woman, but especially the kind of woman who was praised for her beauty when she was young, her face is what his penis is to a man: a secret foundation of her self-esteem. Not the entire foundation, no: but a more significant part than most women would like to admit.

Olds dismisses the importance of the face. She’s interested in the body. But for all her bravado about the beauty of an older body, she does admit to moments of dread:

       . . . Yet when
I look down, I can see, sometimes,
things that if a young woman saw she would
scream, as if at a horror movie,
turned crone in an instant -- if I lean 
far enough forwad, I can see the fine
birth skin of my stomach pucker 
and hang, in tiny peaks, like wet stucco.

But what follows another amazing passage, when she places herself next to the eighty-year-old she imagines becoming: 

Suddenly, I look young to myself
next to that eighty-year-old, I look
like her child, my flesh in its loosening drape
showing the long angles of these strange
bones like cooking-utensil handles in heaven.

The bones as "cooking-utensil handles in heaven" is just wonderful. And, needless to say if you know all the poems Olds wrote about sex, she imagines herself as “sexually active” at eighty -- how unpuritan can you get, how opposite of “prim and proper.” And even in that PR photo of hers at seventy, note the long hair and the somewhat daring (by East Coast standards) hair clips, and that defiant posture of a sex diva. I guess her PR photos are closer to her poems than her everyday persona. At eighty, she’ll be photographed in the nude, so we can compare that with the poem :)

Toward the end, the “shirred smoke above a chimney” (in another poem Olds states that she wants to be cremated) brings us back to the first mention of smoke at the beginning: 

The older I get, the more I feel
almost beautiful -- not my face, plain

puritan face, but my body. And I will be
fifty, soon, my body getting

withery and scrawny, and I like its silvery

witheriness, the skin thinning,

surface of a lake crumped by wind, ruched 

wraith, a wrinkle of smoke.

Smoke is an image of something airy, insubstantial. The skin keeps on thinning, getting closer and closer to becoming crematorium smoke. (“ruched / wraith, a wrinkle of smoke” -- this is brilliant writing). Olds does not treat the body as a metaphor for the mind or personality. The body is literally thinning out, as if preparing to be smoke. 



Sharon Olds at 70

But the greatness of this poem lies partly in the fact that Olds does not end simply on dying. As is typical of her, she finds an affirmation. Note that she is dancing like smoke, celebrating the richness of life. She can imagine her life as already over, and still feel joy at having been alive. 


*

Gloria Steinem wrote that when she was diagnosed with cancer, her first thought was, “I’ve had a fabulous life.” I think Sharon Olds, when she thinks of dying, would say the same. But we don’t need to famous to feel that way. Simply existing is transcendent.

It’s stunning that Olds can using even aging and dying to celebrate life. She finds beauty even in the aging body, and that dancing “wrinkle of smoke” above the crematorium chimney becomes a smile.

MOTHER, NAKED AND HAPPY

If I remember correctly, when someone brought up the “poet of the body” label, Olds replied, “I am surprised that every poet isn’t.” And she has a point: the body is so physical, so much a part of nature, a fascinating animal. Yet offhand I can’t think of any other famous poet who describes the human body as much and in as great a detail as Olds.

But great poems don’t come only from the famous poets. I’ve read marvelous pieces from poets whose reputation is local at best. The poem below is an example. In a way, I like it even better than “The Older” -- it has a gorgeous music, for one thing, making it irresistibly lyrical. 

Elderly Mother at the Hot Springs

The old woman, standing in the shower,
hums her tunes below falling water.
She recites all night in her sleep,

her lips whisper now and at the hour
of our death, amen, forgive us our sins,
fill drowsy rooms with flecks of spirit.

She stumbles, grasps the rails of her walking,
legs blue over dead toes. The agéd mermaid
slides into warm water

and in weightless breaststroke
begins her old ballet
leading dancers through pools of earth.

As long as her watery stories pour forth
I hold my mother in fluid we share,
lime green swim suit and blue desert day,

swimmer in her high eighties, me
in my mid fifties, my smooth roundness
near the flaps of her skin

like ruffles of ashen petticoat,
layers of her cascade to ground
netted in dark veins.

She ripples in sulfur moments, returns
to the pools of prayer, and I see for the first time,
mother, naked and happy.

~ Janet Baker © 2013

While this poem does not celebrate aging per se, it does celebrate a woman in her high eighties, not quite healthy (note the “dead toes”), who manages a weightless ballet as she swims. So what if her skin is flabby and she has broken veins --

near the flaps of her skin

like ruffles of ashen petticoat,
layers of her cascade to ground
netted in dark veins.

~ she still enjoys the “sulfur moments” in the hot springs.

Of course it wouldn’t do not to mention the importance of prayer for this elderly mother. Though I regard myself as a happy atheist, I can understand the comfort that the devout get from praying. I’ve discovered that I am happy when I concentrate on something outside of myself. A person busy praying is not brooding over past mistakes. That alone is part of the benefit. Another part is expecting paradise in the “great beyond.”

(Reading about the happy elderly mother, I almost wish I could pray. But emotional comfort is simply not the same as perceived truth.)

But this poem is not about prayer per se, or even about swimming. It’s about an elderly mother, “naked and happy.” Startling? Yes. Encouraging? Yes, since we do have a dread of aging, thinking we will be less happy as the body becomes increasingly dysfunctional. This doesn’t have to be. The brain constructs happiness, just as it constructs memory. If we relax and welcome whatever life brings, the brain will have us live in an “easy world.” And if an elderly woman is lucky enough to have a daughter who can take her to hot springs, all the more reason for joy.

And we are lucky to have these beautiful rhythms and slant rhymes, with a direct rhyme also present -- who’d think that “standing in the shower” could be paired with “now and at the hour” from Hail Mary? The dictum that poetry “must give pleasure” is amply fulfilled here -- even in the description of aging. 

This is not to say that it wouldn’t be wonderful to stay young and healthy forever -- or at least for a very long time. I’d want centuries. I don’t think I’d ever get bored of trees and clouds, or ever cease to be “in continual astonishment” at what life brings. But aside from “polite helplessness,” as Wallace Stevens puts it, I also want joy, regardless of age. Poems that present the possibility of happiness even in “advanced youth,” as an old friend used to call it, help us live on, swimming and dancing, or at least remembering swimming and dancing. Why did I choose “Fire Bird” as the title of this post? No, we don’t rise again from a literal nest of flames. There is no return from the fire of the crematory. But before then, at any age, life throws challenges at us. And the point is to get through somehow -- “on a wing and a prayer,” as another friend has recently said -- and keep on dancing. There is no “fire bird” out there. The real fire bird is a human being who keeps on dancing.
 
##

Darlene:

I know you don’t believe in the soul, but I don’t care for all this body talk. Too much about the body.

Oriana:

I believe in brain function, possibly the most complex thing in the universe. We don’t yet know enough, don’t have the right way to talk about it. So we talk about the skin instead. About feet and hips and shoulders like some funny utensils. But can you imagine a hundred years from now? I can’t either.

Darlene:

But deep in your non-existent soul, don’t you think the body isn’t THAT important?

Oriana:

Just try to live without a body. The awful truth is that the brain doesn’t really care about the truth; its task is to make sure the body lives on. And if it takes a soothing hallucination to accomplish that purpose, the brain will produce just that.

This January has been particularly rich in fantasies about what my life might be if I had an undamaged left knee.  Never mind Prince Charming: these days my fantasies are all about the left knee.

Hyacinth:

Janet's aging mermaid is so touching, such a tender way of talking about her mother's aging and not at all sentimental. So many fine lines, and I relate not just as a daughter but as the mother going through this. I especially like "flaps of  her  skin like ruffles of ashen petticoats." 

To have lived at all is the miracle. Quoting Rilke:
"...to have been here this once, even if only once, to have been on this earth seems irrevocable..."

And speaking of age, it's good to see Sharon Olds winning a big prize. Her long grey hair and “plain Puritan face." She makes no excuses for aging. Another description of skin,"surface of a lake crumpled by wind...a wrinkle of smoke" was so accurate, too. Mine looks like very thin parchnent and is as thin.

Oriana:

Once I was in Whole Foods in La Jolla -- you can imagine how rich the customers are -- and I saw a woman who was in her late seventies, maybe, or already past eighty. She was badly stooped -- osteoporotic spinal compression and deformation. But she obviously just had her face laser-peeled, so she didn’t have a single wrinkle. Her skin looked shiny-white and very thin, almost ghostly. That kind of laser causes a third-degree burn, I was told -- imagine, at that age, to go through a procedure like that! With most women, vanity never ends; nor is Sharon Olds entirely free of it, with her “old and beautiful” stance. At least that’s empowering. Olds gives us the courage not to lament what we see in the mirror.

Of course I agree with you and Rilke: yes, to have lived at all is a miracle, and it is irrevocable, the order of things changed a tiny bit, but forever, just because we have been here. 

Charles:

Incredible images and perfect for the blog.

When I read Sharon's poem I liked the line, “Sometimes, now, I dance / like shirred smoke above a chimney” as my favorite in the poem.

Sharon is beautiful in this picture. Something of a diva. Very well preserved. If she happened to be fat and ugly, I bet she wouldn’t have written this poem.

My favorite line in the entire blog is of course: “The real fire bird is a human being who keeps on dancing.” So beautiful.
 
Oriana:

That’s my favorite passage in Sharon’s poem, too. That’s greatness: not just the use of “shirred,” but the underlying concept of already being that posthumous smoke.

There are times, once we’ve lived long enough, when we are all ages at once, including no longer any age.

Sarah:

“The real fire bird is a human being who keeps on dancing” - the last line always matters the most and I like it!

Oriana:

Glad to hear you too like it. It’s usually only quite a bit of suffering that we learn to dance on. And it’s so inspiring to know someone like Hyacinth, 86, who in spite of poor health keeps on dancing, and finds life transcendent.

THE GOLDEN YEARS: MYTH OR REALITY?

Scott:

Your latest blog is as timely as ever, enjoyed it very much. I turn 50 this year and could not be happier. Am a bit slower perhaps in body but all in all this is a great time. Gone are the silliness of youth and it's vanities, I so appreciate my time to read and reflect. 4 years ago I was working 60 hour weeks with big paychecks, but the long hours and stress were not worth it. I hope to make another decade or so at work and then my wife and I can perhaps travel more and 'stress less.' Birds, books and coffee; simple (some may call dull) pleasures but I'm being as honest as I can, wouldn't trade them for a fancy car or mansion. My house has heat, the pantry is full and family are healthy. Sounds trite and cliché I know but these are good times. And now I have Robert Lax to discover!
Oriana:

It’s thrilled to find in you the confirmation of all the studies on happiness and aging: older is happier, as long as health holds out -- and for many, that’s into their eighties.

I remember when I didn’t know about these studies, and the thought of the later decades was simply terrifying. True, there is less future, but you gain the present. I used to live in the future so much that when I suddenly realized that “the future was stolen from me” (that’s how I thought about it), I was devastated. And then being pressed against the wall by mortality cured me of depression. It was one of the most amazing events in my life.

Thanks to you I’ve looked up Robert Lax, and he’s certainly one of the most eccentric poets ever. But note the vagaries of fame: Lax’s “Circus of the Sun,” once praised as “perhaps the greatest poem of the [twentieth] century,” is now utterly forgotten. And, who knows, maybe Ezra Pound will be the next one to go. And maybe we’ll rediscover Lax. It’s completely unpredictable.

But then who’d want it to be predictable. Like the "golden years" -- I used to think it was a myth. And look. And live.

Scott:

Can’t put a price tag on mental clarity and the ability to enjoy simple things, 'rivers of books and black coffee.' I'm never happier than when I see my office in my rearview; I wish I could recall the exact quote but Melville wrote to his brother once the folly of people who were caught up in their work. Now to someone whose work is their passion that's totally different, it's not work at all. The work I'm referring to is the mind numbing drudgery of petty work with petty people, no glory or honor in that. Now whaling, that was a life! I might feel different had I actually had to kill and boil one down for it's oil but for those few minutes of excitement and terror those Quaker tars of yore probably never felt more alive. As a famed poem of theirs stated;

'Death to the living
Long life to the killers
And greasy luck to whalers'

A nasty, bloody business no doubt but again, the ports one would see, the islands, marine life and wonders of the stars at night must have been unreal.

Oriana:

Scott, you have managed to bring Melville into this! 

FRIDA KAHLO THE LOVE EMBRACE OF THE UNIVERSE

“People have been trying to rationalize God’s lies for thousands of years. These stories are very powerful and are at the root of our culture. But you have to realize that the God of Genesis is a human creation, and not the God at the center of the universe,” says the celebrated translator Stephen Mitchell in an interview with Psychology Today, November/December 1996. Later he speaks of “the ultimate intelligence of the universe, which some call God or Tao.” 

Mitchell states that he believes that there is absolute justice in the universe, but not in the sense of punishment and reward -- more in the sense of surrender to whatever happens and bearing it with grace, without resentment, trusting that all is as it should be (I dare say: here is someone who didn’t grow up under a dictatorship, raised by an Auschwitz survivor . . .  who, by the way, was not broken by her camp experience, in a way bearing out what Mitchell says)

Mitchell’s wife, Byron Katie, said about him, “Stephen is brave enough to be married to the impersonal.” Maybe more and more people are becoming brave enough to regard the divine in impersonal terms, but there is still a craving for a someone or something “out there” that cares. We can't help it: we want the universe to be friendly. 

Rilke, even though he agreed with Lou Andreas-Salomé, the great love of his life, that all religions are a human invention, wrote poems that seem downright religious, and not necessarily in the non-orthodox mode of The Book of Hours. This one, from a later book, is many readers’ favorite:

AUTUMN

The leaves are falling, falling from afar,

as if distant gardens withered in the sky;

the leaves fall with gestures saying no.

And in the nights the heavy earth falls

away from the stars into aloneness.

We are all falling. This hand falls.

And look at others: it is in all.

Yet there is One who all this falling

with infinite gentleness holds in his hands.

~ Rilke, The Book of Images (a fused translation)

I wonder what Rilke would do with the knowledge that the universe is expanding, everything rushing away from everything else -- the line about the earth falling into aloneness seems prescient. While the notion of a “friendly universe” is consoling, deep down we yearn for more than “friendly.” We want the gentleness, the tenderness that with luck we’ve received from parents and lovers. We are less likely than in the past to see ourselves as wretched sinners in need of redemption; what we’d like is a loving god infused in the universe, a cosmic Santa Claus.  

That’s not the benign impression of the divine that I get from Kahlo’s 1949 masterpiece, The Love Embrace of the Universe, Earth (Mexico), Diego, Me, and Señor Xolotl. Oddly perhaps, I suddenly thought of Arab women praying at the Tomb of Rachel. The distinctions between Judaism and Islam were irrelevant to those women; what mattered was that Rachel was a mother. A mother is someone who cares.

Here we have Mother Earth, embracing though not particularly tender; it’s the reality of earth, its no-nonsense power. What attracts me most is the cosmic face, androgynous, though closer to feminine. The hue is greenish-lunar, but it’s not the moon; this face is larger than that of Mother Earth. Stephen Mitchell might see it as the imagined face of the god “at the center of the universe.”

Much has been said about this painting in terms of mythology, both Aztec, Christian (Madonna and Child), and Hindu. Frida’s dog is named Xolotl, the guardian of the Underworld. But the dog is endearingly small and curled into himself, as if about to fall asleep on the brown forearm of the Great Mother. Diego looks rather comic as an oversized naked infant in Frida’s lap, but he also has the third eye of cosmic vision, maybe to signify that an artist is a visionary, a seer. Nevertheless, Diego is a “big baby,” regardless of his fame, and Frida needs the embrace of the Great Mother to help hold him. 

The painting could be described as being about love, and the embrace certainly seems to confirm it. Still, I see it more in the sense of “this is how things are” -- our task is to make the best of this impersonal embrace and live without resentment. It’s a letting go.

One of the most imaginative poems about “letting go” is Janet Baker’s “Men.”

Here is what the author writes about this poem:

I wrote the poem from a spontaneous waking dream that I had a few years ago when I was doing a lot of shamanic journey work. I had done a guided meditation in which I released my brother from my heart, and later this vision came, a whole crowd of men leaving single file, marching out like a small army.  My body was like a submarine with a small hatch, and they twisted and wiggled to get out of it.  

The poem is pretty much a direct transcription of my vision. The vision astounded me.  I had never realized that every man I had ever formed an attachment to was still imprinted in my heart, one man over the other. And at the bottom of it all was my father, dead at least 20 years at the time of the vision, but not yet ready to leave.  I had to work so hard to push him out, and then he was too heavy to go to the light and fell back into me.

It was a wonderfully liberating feeling to have the men leave, yet I have noticed that they have a way of coming back. I've seen all of them recently living in my house, my rooms transformed to army-type barracks where they are sleeping, some in suspended animation, partially awake.

MEN

I feel pressure build inside my heart like pressure to give birth,

pushing against the cage of my chest, and the first man comes out,

Adam born from under my ribs, then the second, then the third.

  

There are men I recognize, men I can name, and men I can’t.

They leave one by one toward a far horizon,

squirming out, slipping through, walking off.

I see Gene and Patrick and Joe and Jack, one behind the other.

They ride off on their totem vehicles: motorcycles, sailboats, bicycles, trucks,

and some stay behind and take their time.

There’s a hole in my heart, a tunnel through which these grown men leave,

let themselves out, move away. And some I'm glad to see again.

I see who matters, and who doesn’t, and who really was The One.

I had thought that once I bonded to a man,

he’d stay in my heart until he was replaced, essentially erased.

Now I see them layered like over-leaves,

layer upon layer of men in my heart, so full, so cluttered, so taken up.

My ex rides off on his motorcycle in a cloud of dust,

comes back to the perimeter, hangs around saying nothing.

I see Patrick sail off in his boat. The white sail on the ocean recedes.

He comes back with a gift from the sea,

a necklace of coral and pearls and shells,

a gift of the waters for me. And he says, thank you dear,

it was nice being in your heart all these years, it was nice in your love.

I see him sail off in his boat again, see the white sail of him far far off.

I feel a really big one trying to get out. I push with my chest,

like trying with all my strength to expel a child.

Out comes my father, and I say,

“Dad, you have got to go to the light. It’s time.”

My father, so heavy and so clumsy,

keeps falling back into my heart.                   

    ~ Janet A. Baker © 2012

**

Oriana:

I love the imagistic way in which this poem presents the complex psychological situation of emotional release – here compared to giving birth. If giving birth is, in a sense, what our lives are about, then the creation – including a lover whose life has been changed by us – must be released by the creator into the larger world. And it must be released with gratitude and a blessing. 

In the poem, the men's departure from the speaker's heart is no tragedy. The tone  is one of celebration. Release implies forgiveness. There is no bitterness here, only gratitude. I particularly like these stanzas:

I see Patrick sail off in his boat. The white sail on the ocean recedes.

He comes back with a gift from the sea,

a necklace of coral and pearls and shells,

a gift of the waters for me. And he says, thank you dear,

it was nice being in your heart all these years, it was nice in your love.

I see him sail off in his boat again, see the white sail of him far far off.

*

This poem is an excellent example of the power of what I call the "magical underlying metaphor": in this case, men leaving the woman's heart. The underlying metaphor sets up the narrative and the structure that allows the images to add up to a satisfying whole. 

But just when we think this is it: the ex-husband and the lovers leaving one after another, there is a surprise. There is a man who will not leave the speaker's heart. It's her father, destined to live on in her consciousness. 

Note how the poem does not try to explain away why the father keeps falling back into her heart. He's heavy, yes, but that has a larger meaning which the reader can develop according to his/her experience and understanding. We are left with the image and the mystery. And it's wonderful to end a poem on an image rather than an explanation. This is such a visual poem.

And I love the reversal of the biblical story: here the woman is giving birth to Adam ("from under my ribs"), "and the second, and the third." True to nature, the woman-Eve gives birth to a multiple Adams.

I also love the painting that Janet Baker chose to accompany this poem. Frida Kahlo holds her husband Diego Rivera in her lap like an overgrown, overweight, clumsy baby. And yet, aided by the cosmic embrace, she can hold him effortlessly, as part of the universal process. Funny, I’ve had fantasies of carrying a lover as a woman might carry a baby; a part of feeling the tenderness, I suppose. 

It seems that in life we alternate between accumulation and release. In later life in particular, we see that some of the past lovers are now irrelevant; we don’t have anything in common with them anymore; we’d never choose them again. The gifts they brought have been assimilated; the pain they caused may seem nothing now, a trifle, a laugh. It’s because we have changed, gone on a different path. But part of the reason we have changed is that we have received the gifts that each lover brought. With time, we come to see the gift as greater than the suffering that love also brings. 

Margaret Mead said that a woman needs three husbands: the first one in early youth to be a passionate lover; the second to be a good father; and the third to be a joyful companion for the older years. Rather than complain about growing older, may we always give thanks for all our joyful companions. And thinking about past loves, may we remember the gifts each brought. After all, that's what we kept, adding to our wealth. 

A personal note: I have also had a dream about my past lovers (though they weren’t exactly the actual men; they could also pass as “men in general”) gathered in front of me, looking somewhat sheepish, as if wanting reassurance that I don’t hold a grudge against them. I don’t remember what I said, but I do remember that I felt nothing but affection for all of them. 

**

Hyacinth:

One of your best. Your “cosmic Santa Claus” made me laugh and Janet's poem is a masterpiece!!!

I admire Frida Kahlo and read her life story and it is so  heart breaking to think anyone spent their life in that much pain. I do not always understand her paintings but find modern Spanish art  something I just don't get. It's like the literature of magical realism -- I'm not fond of that either.

Stephen Mitchell I admire immensely and have almost committed his Rilke translations to memory. I think in many it's Mitchell's voice we hear as much as Rilke’s. Interested in his "the ultimate intelligence of the universe" as god. His concept of surrender to whatever happens and bearing it with grace makes me think of your poem about forgiving that I like so much. 

Oriana:

Reading that interview made me more interested in Tao -- again. And this reminds me of my visit to a Taoist temple in Los Angeles. In popular practice Taoism is not exactly non-theistic. What struck me was the statue of Quan-Yin, the goddess of mercy. She got the most offerings of fruit and flowers. Frida would understand. 

Charles:

Starts out with a great picture. Did you notice the Escheresque birds in the sky that are also clouds?

I interpret the image like this: Frida is holding an androgynous Diego Rivera, then Frida, then Frida's spirit, then the God of Nature with His/ Her hands embracing animal and plant kingdom.

To me, the concept of God is pretty much irrelevant. I love watching the religious and atheists argue about who is right and who is wrong. What's  more important to me than whether or not God exists are values and the concept of good and evil. Where do values come from and what is good and what is bad for me and humankind.
Oriana:

You are so right about the Escheresque birds, especially on the left side of the painting! First I saw the dark birds, and then the light space also revealed itself as birds. Yes, Escher’s Night and Day. A brilliant observation.

Religious beliefs in the sense of dogma seem so ludicrous now, so irrelevant in terms of the real challenges of life. And to think that people used to wage wars over whether the communion wafer and the wine became the flesh and blood of Christ in the literal sense, or only symbolically. Thousands were massacred over such absurdities.

A person’s conduct, especially in terms of kindness, is a lot more important to me than arguments over the Virgin Birth, the Trinity, Purgatory, and so forth. It’s been pointed out that the Catholic Church gained its dominance by exterminating the opposition, especially the Gnostics of Provence. Martin Luther, however, had a powerful German nobleman protecting him, and attempts to assassinate Luther did not succeed. That, in a sense, was the beginning of the end. If you were allowed to think on your own, religion was doomed, no matter how slow the decline. The arguments between theists and atheists are a distant echo of an earlier argument.

Literal or metaphoric? Or should we perhaps scrap the whole archaic foundation? After all, what matters in the end is not theology, but conduct. As for the origin of ethics, Rousseau’s idea of “social contract” appeals to me. We realize that life would be insufferable if everyone tried to steal other people’s goods, if cheating and lying and violence would be the norm, and so on. That’s why parents typically use the social-contract reasoning when they say to their trespassing little one, “How would you like it if Jimmy took your toy? Now, go to Jimmy, return the toy, and say you are sorry.” I don’t mean to trivialize the seriousness of ethics by giving this toddler-derived example; that’s the beginning of learning the Golden Rule that continues over one’s whole lifetime.

Explanations of ethics in terms of empathy also make sense to me; it doesn’t have to be explicit “rational self-interest.” No one claims that humans are immaculately rational. We can identify with both the joy and the suffering of another, and laugh and weep with them.

Now, evil . . . there is not enough space here to go into the problem of evil. But when I think of the Middle Ages, and how cruelty was the norm, I bless our imperfect but so much better modern reality.

To return to Kahlo’s painting, regarded by critics as her last masterpiece: for me it’s ultimately about the importance of nurturing. Even the toy-snatching toddler is being nurtured rather than threatened with punishment, not to mention everlasting torment in hell. And Diego too is being nurtured by Frida. In turn, both of them are nurtured by the Earth and the Universe.
 

Seretta:

Your blog is the best one I've seen. It is rich with art and your wonderful selections and commentary. Thank you!

Yes, Janet's poem is "layered," memorable and so well crafted. 

Kate:

Thank you for this wonderful feast of beauty and thought. I agree with Seretta. Your blog is so rich.

Oriana:

Thank you for your generous comments. They keep me going. 

Ursula:

Janet Baker's poem "Men" is quite marvelous. What a great experience. 

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