IS AMERICA HYPOMANIC? LOVE AND NEUROTRANSMITTERS; THE GREAT SECRET OF MORALS

Christian Schloe, digital art

*
THE OCEAN IS MY SPEECH THERAPIST
In memory of Linda Brown, 1941-2006
                 
The ocean is my speech therapist, Linda,
fluent spirit with no need to remove
pebbles from your throat.
I watched you climb my steep
Polish name on the first try,
licking off your cappuccino’s last foam.

We roamed in Yogananda’s Gardens,
the ocean lipping below,
lapping in flamenco billows.
You blew kisses to everything around:
a cypress twisted like a yogi;
the slow-motion koi. The plump gold one,

you said, was your guru, reincarnated now —
Swami turned Swimmie. In life
you crashed many times, and got up,
and got up, and smiled your wild smile,
until that final fall when you were beyond
anything as clumsy as mere getting up.

Overlaid with the great Amen
of surf, your voice speaks to me
again: So you’ve made a mistake.
You will make more mistakes.
Old grief and old salt,
what dancers they are! And the liquid

mockingbird sings forgiveness.
I still can’t pronounce
a single pebble correctly, not one blue
syllable of your death, Linda,
my friend, my friend,
you who had no right to die —

You laugh, an unstoppable child.
You are my speech therapist, Linda,
you and the Pacific Ocean,
that mouth full of broken glass —
wave after wave repeating,
Let’s shimmer, let’s shimmy, let’s shine.

~ Oriana © 2016

Not long ago, out of the blue, it seemed, I thought of Linda Brown, a well-known San Diego County poet whose premature death shocked the local poetry community. I checked, and that day happened to be the tenth anniversary of her death.

She and I would walk together in Yogananda's Gardens in Encinitas, always pausing to watch the koi. Then we’d sit on one of the stone meditation benches. She’d take out her notebook and effortlessly write a new poem — she was prolific. The world is a less vivid place with her gone.

Linda was bipolar. I’m not betraying any secrets here: she was completely open about all of her problems, and belonged to more 12-step groups than I can remember. Nor can I remember the number of times she ended up on the mental ward because at the height of her manic mode she became psychotic (again, she was quite open about this — she seemed to have no secrets). She also worked as a librarian, specializing in creating much-praised thematic displays.

In addition, for a number of years Linda taught a poetry workshop at a community college. She had a lot of friends and attended all manner of events. She traveled. How on earth did she find the time to do all those things, and to write poems besides — many ranging from good to excellent?

That, perhaps, was her one secret. Basically, she hardly ever revised. For her, poems simply welled up, the way that thoughts “arise.” If I hadn’t seen it, I’d have trouble believing it: once she opened her notebook and put her pen to paper, she didn’t stop until in her mind the poem had closure. Now, I can’t vouch that this is how she wrote every single poem she ever wrote, but it wouldn’t surprise me. A lot of poets have stop-and-go fits of inspiration; they revise and revise (Yeats was an example of a “serial revisionist”), and really sweat to find the right ending. Linda didn’t sweat — to put it mildly.

I knew one other person who wrote in this manner, but without achieving Linda’s quality. She also had some of the same mental-health problems and addictions, coupled with high energy and difficulty revising (since a poem was strictly “in the moment”). She produced poems by the hundreds.

I am not writing this to demonstrate, as if more demonstration were needed, that there is a link between creativity and the bipolar disorder — or maybe we should speak about the “bipolar spectrum.” Obviously, “there are so many madmen who are not artists.” And one doesn’t have to be bipolar to be creative. Yet being mildly — I emphasize ‘mildly’ — manic seems to help, at least when it comes to sheer productivity.

(But to complicate matters, many poets claim that for them being mildly depressed is inspiring. Some are downright afraid that happiness — a happy relationship, for instance — will ruin their creativity and deprive them of material.)

Like a lot of creative people who are also bipolar, Linda would go off her mood-stabilizing meds because he didn’t like normalcy. She felt the drugs “blunted” her, making it impossible to feel enthusiastic about anything — not even a sumptuous Pacific sunset. She didn’t care to be the efficient, mundane, down-to-earth person much like her very competent and practical mother. Not surprisingly, Linda enjoyed flying high and being artistic. She loved her “happy times.” And during those times, she had the happiest smile. She looked radiant.

But the “happy times” lasted only so long. Pleasant euphoria would shift into over-excitement leading to insomnia, overspending, and other out-of-control behavior. One of Linda’s sorrows was that she’d never known lasting love; her relationships were too turbulent to be lasting.

Here is an excerpt of one of Linda’s poems that her audiences loved. It starts with her mother teaching her about vacuum cleaner attachments and how to vacuum properly. But the gist of it is the difference between mother and daughter:

“I’d rather be an efficient devil than an inefficient angel,” Mother proclaimed.
Yet she’d birthed a dreamer, a throwback to her mother who fled housework
to fish, napped two hours after lunch like an orchard of slowly fruiting trees.

We were seeking different kinds of order. She wanted perfection, nothing less —
immaculate mattresses sans “body ash,” dead skin flakes that sift through sheets;
everything in place — heavenly stasis — polished, put away, gleaming and clean.

I loved storms, fast-moving clouds, wind shaking its fist through leaves.”

*

To do justice to Linda’s mother, Margaret Brown did more than just clean the house. She loved gardening — that was her art. And Linda did have poems that were an homage to her mother, remembering the mother’s amazing resilience, her ability to remain undefeated no matter what life threw at her. One of her two sons committed suicide, and Linda was of course a difficult daughter, occasionally even becoming psychotic. Margaret, always supportive, soldiered on into her eighties.

*

Why is being mildly manic apparently good for creativity? Both energy and brain function are involved. There’s more to it than dopamine, but if you increase dopamine through drugs or falling in love, creative output tends to go up — including people who pick up the brush or pen for the first time ever. At the same time, we need the usual caveat: not everyone on dopaminergic drugs experiences a creative flowering. It’s not as easy as that.

Quality is another matter. Writers who use uppers often end up crashing — the opening of the novel may be brilliant, but the last chapters fizzle (P.K. Dick was a classic example). And the price can ultimately be horrendous, including an early death.

Ah, the brain, the brain. It may be too complex ever to understand its own function. Remember that we still can’t even define consciousness, much less explain it. Who knows, perhaps we are like those ancient people who tried very hard to figure out where the sun went for the night because they had no idea that the earth rotates on its axis.

http://nautil.us/issue/20/creativity/the-most-dangerous-muse
Christian Schloe

IS AMERICA A HYPOMANIC NATION?
 
“Energy, drive, cockeyed optimism, entrepreneurial and religious zeal, Yankee ingenuity, messianism, and arrogance—these traits have long been attributed to an “American character.” But given how closely they overlap with the hypomanic profile, they might be better understood as expressions of an American temperament, shaped in large part by our rich concentration of hypomanic genes.

If a scientist wanted to design a giant petri dish with all the right nutrients to make hypomanic genius flourish, he would be hard-pressed to imagine a better natural experiment than America. A “nation of immigrants” represents a highly skewed and unusual “self-selected” population. Do men and women who risk everything to leap into a new world differ temperamentally from those who stay home? It would be surprising if they didn’t. “Immigrants are unusual people,” wrote James Jaspers in Restless Nation. Only one out of a hundred people emigrate, and they tend to be imbued “with special drive, ambition and talent.”

A small empirical literature suggests that there are elevated rates of manic-depressive disorder among immigrants, regardless of what country they are moving from or to. America, a nation of immigrants, has higher rates of mania than every other country studied (with the possible exception of New Zealand, which topped the United States in one study). In fact, the top three countries with the most manics—America, New Zealand, and Canada—are all nations of immigrants. Asian countries such as Taiwan and South Korea, which have absorbed very few immigrants, have the lowest rates of bipolar disorder. Europe is in the middle, in both its rate of immigrant absorption and its rate of mania. As expected, the percentage of immigrants in a population correlates with the percentage of manics in their gene pool.

While we have no cross-cultural studies of hypomania, we can infer that we would find increased levels of hypomania among immigrant-rich nations like America, since mania and hypomania run together in the same families. Hypomanics are ideally suited by temperament to become immigrants. If you are an impulsive, optimistic, high-energy risk taker, you are more likely to undertake a project that requires a lot of energy, entails a lot of risk, and might seem daunting if you thought about it too much.

America has drawn hypomanics like a magnet. This wide-open land with seemingly infinite horizons has been a giant Rorschach on which they could project their oversized fantasies of success, an irresistible attraction for restless, ambitious people feeling hemmed in by native lands with comparatively fewer opportunities.”

http://www.hypomanicedge.com/excerpt/5.htm
 
Oriana:

Is there a dark side to the hypomanic exuberance? There is, of course, the danger that the risk-taking and reckless optimism will lead to a collision with reality. But people who are genetically inclined to be risk-takers also seem very resilient. A week later the disaster is forgotten and they are already pursuing a new project.

It was a friend of mine who put her finger on what I see as the truly dark side of mania: “Manic people are shallow.” She said “manic” rather than “hypomanic,” but I think it applies especially to the non-stop go-go-go hypomanics.

Is Donald Trump hypomanic? One could argue that he is a classic example. One give-away: his self-reported low need for sleep. He is the go-go-go type.

Only a minority of people are truly hypomanic. However, it's a significant minority because those individuals are so active.

It's not really a disorder. Hypomania is not the same as “bipolar.” Hypomanics may have bipolar relatives, but they themselves are spared the ravages of the syndrome. If their elevated mood does crash, their depression tends to be mild and fleeting. But let’s remember the dark side: shallowness.

I realize that others would prefer to single out narcissism, arrogance, insufficient self-control, tendency to talk too much and insult others, never apologizing, never feeling sorry, and so on. These are indeed real problems, but for me they are secondary to that lack of depth of seems to go hand-in-hand with being “chronically happy” — especially if that chronic good cheer is achieved only through never slowing down.

Someone once told me, “Speed is the national drug.” Could this be related to excessive “pursuit of happiness”? Contentment seems to be a more desirable state, more conducive to depth.

Linda’s greatest wish was for serenity.
Half Moon Bay, Sabi Baral

*THE FICKLE CHEMICALS OF LOVE

“Love triggers dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin. That's why it's so motivating. But happy chemicals come in spurts. They do their job by turning off after they turn on. When your happy chemicals dip, you might interpret it as a loss of love. That turns a natural fluctuation into a crisis. You are better off knowing why love makes happy chemicals go up and down.

DOPAMINE brings about that great feeling you get when you find your missing keys. It's the neurochemical that evolved for seeking and finding. Animals sniff around for food and mating opportunities, and when they find something that meets their needs, dopamine surges. But the surge is brief. Dopamine does its job by dropping after it rises, so it'll ready to alert you to the next chance to meet your needs—and so you'll be sure to pay attention.

When you find your keys, you don't expect that great dopamine feeling to last. But when you find "the one," your body may produce so much dopamine that you assume you'll soar forever. When it finally subsides, you wonder what's wrong. You might even blame "the one" for having changed.

OXYTOCIN is the neurochemical that causes trust. It's released during orgasm, and in smaller amounts when you hold hands. In animals, it's released when mothers lick their babies. Oxytocin is the good feeling of a common cause, whether a political rally, a football huddle, or thieves with a plan.

Reptiles release oxytocin during sex, but mammals produce it all the time. That's why reptiles stay away from other reptiles except when mating, while mammals form long-term attachments to relatives and herds. The more oxytocin you release when you're with a person, the more attached you'll feel. More touch = more oxytocin = more trust.

Getting respect feels good because it stimulates SEROTONIN. In the animal world, social dominance brings more mating opportunity—and more surviving offspring.

Your brain always wants more respect to generate more serotonin. Your loved one may give you that feeling at first, by respecting you or helping you feel respected by others. But eventually your brain begins to take the respect you already have for granted. It wants more, so it can get more good feelings. That's why some people constantly make more demands on their loved ones, and why others constantly seek out higher-status partners.

Happy chemicals give us information that's hard to interpret. For example, if I watch a football game and burst with excitement when my team scores, I see thousands of others share my reaction. It feels like they understand me. Why doesn't my partner understand me when thousands of others do? The answer is simple. SPECTATOR SPORTS TRIGGER OXYTOCIN, AS DO OTHER GROUP ACTIVITIES SUCH AS POLITICS AND RELIGION. You get a good feeling of trust. Of course, trusting a large number of people in a limited way is not the same as trusting one person in a comprehensive way. But to your mammal brain, it's all the same oxytocin.

We want all the happy chemicals we can get. You expect some from romance, and some from other aspects of life. But no matter where you get them, happy chemicals sag after they spurt. When you know why, you can manage your behavior despite the confusing neurochemical signals.

There's good news here. Don't blame yourself or your partner if you're not high on a happy chemicals all the time. Maybe nothing is wrong. You are just living with the operating system that has kept mammals alive for millions of years.”

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/your-neurochemical-self/201203/why-love-is-roller-coaster
Hong Kong in the rain

*
THE GREAT SECRET OF MORALS IS STRESS REDUCTION (my favorite baboon story)

“It’s one of my favorite Darwin quotes—"He who understands baboon would do more toward metaphysics than Locke"—scribbled furtively in a notebook between visits to the London Zoo in the summer of 1838. Twenty-one years would pass before On the Origin of Species would shock the world, but Darwin already knew: If man wanted to comprehend his mind, he’d need to train an unflustered gaze into the deep caverns of his animal past.” ~ Oren Harman

Oriana:

The man who probably understands baboons better than anyone is Robert Sapolsky, a primatologist who spent a lot of time studying one particular troop (from Wikipedia: After initial year-and-a-half field study in Africa, [Sapolsky] returned every summer for another twenty-five years to observe the same group of baboons, from the late 70s to the early 90s. He spent 8 to 10 hours a day for approximately four months each year recording the behaviors of these primates].

The story is that of a “tragedy”: the alpha males, the bullies of the troop, all died after eating TB-infected meat. What happened later is what makes me want to cheer: without the bullies, the health and well-being of the troop markedly improved. The levels of cortisol went down, and with them high blood pressure and other markers of stress and inflammation. Secure from aggression and harassment, the surviving animals were thriving. But the most striking result of this stress reduction was a “cultural” change toward cooperation and affection. Occasionally a male from another troop would join, and after a while adopt the non-aggressive ways.

Remove the bullies, and everyone benefits. In human cultures, this should start with zero tolerance for child abuse and abuse of women. Safe from abuse, a mother can provide more and better nurturing for her children. Stroking, grooming, speaking in a soft voice. It all starts there.

The title of this post was inspired by Shelley’s “The great secret of morals is love.” But for love to flourish — and by love I don’t mean the storms of romantic passion but mutual nurturing — there has to be enough freedom from stress. Under heavy stress, the goal is sheer survival. Love — or call it nurturing affection — grows and blossoms when stress is down to manageable levels.
 
Robert Sapolsky and friend

 ending on beauty

I beg you have no fear of silence
silence is eloquent
hatred yells roars barks and howls
love smiles and keeps silent
it’s waiting for you

~ Tadeusz Różewicz, tr Oriana

from the Polish website “You don’t read? Then I won’t go to bed with you”

Dali, Meditative Rose

RETURN TO KOLUSZKI

Return to Koluszki

If there is an afterlife, there will be no
angels. Winged desire will return
to Koluszki, Skierniewice,

towns I never knew
except as train stations —
yet it seems I stood forever

in the Market Square at noon
on brick pavement smooth as bones
turned into an alphabet.

Meanwhile scattered in space-time,
memory’s mass grave,
it’s my sweet abusive lover

speaking his last words:
To succeed, you must be willing
to wear uncomfortable clothes —

but before he pulls the trigger,
turns to me and says:
Remember only the beauty. 

We few, we happy few
who’ve danced on the floor of hell
in the arms of crematorium smoke.

Let us build Socialism,
he dead sing from cathedral clouds,
and Kafka has beautiful hands

when he gestures like rain.
Let us ring all the bells,
let us hold a grand ball

at the railway station.
But for now or eternity I stand
a few steps beyond the known,

feeding crumbs of my soul
to the insatiable angels.

~ Oriana © 2011

**

Recently I heard this on the radio: “It’s OK if there is no heaven. I can live with that. What I can’t endure is the thought that there is no hell – because then what about Hitler and the other bad guys? Where is the payback?”

I was completely amazed that anyone was so concerned with “payback.” Apparently the god of vengeance is not dead. To me the notion of never-ending "payback" has no appeal. Even if Hitler deserves eternal torture, punishing him in this manner would not restore a single life. It would not make a grieving mother glow with happiness again.

But let me address the opening statement: “It’s OK if there is no heaven. I can live with that.” Personally, I’ve lived with that since the age of fourteen. In any case, heaven has always been too high an aspiration. It astonishes me that so many people assume that they deserve eternal bliss (and in old-style Catholicism you really had to deserve it – Christ’s merit was not enough. If you didn’t deserve it, and the nun strongly implied that you didn’t, you would have to be purified by centuries -- centuries! -- of punishment in Purgatory).

There is also the problem of location. As Milosz observed in one of his late poems, “Second Space,” Western culture has essentially lost the idea of heaven in the clouds and hell blazing inside the earth. It is hot deep within, but the furnace is not stoked with sinners. What we have come to know, and it's no joke, is "hell on earth." And only half-joking, we’ve begun to speak of heaven as returning to a place we loved. When one of our San Diego poets suddenly died, eulogies and memorial poems mentioned that “Linda is now in Paris.” I imagined her in a different paradise, the Meditation Gardens at the edge of the world, on the cliffs over the Pacific.

But it’s OK if there is no heaven. I too can live with that. What I’d settle for is simply continued conscious existence, not in paradise, but in a much more modest place. That’s why I chose Koluszki, a small town in Poland that, because of its central location, had a huge train station – and still does, but now it’s been modernized. To return to something similar to the legendary railroad palace of my childhood, I’d need to get off at the station in nearby Skierniewice.

All the quotations I use in the poem are literal. You may well wonder about what kind of people I attract as friends and lovers. Certainly not what is glibly described as “normal” or “average,” even if no one has ever been able to define those terms as they apply to our complicated species. Still, I admit that a lover who says, “To succeed, you must be willing to wear uncomfortable clothes” (I think he did hit on something there, especially if we metaphorically extend “clothes”), or a friend who shouts at landing jets – I admit that I’ve been particularly blessed or cursed to be a magnet for the unusual.

I used to say, with Bukowski, “The insane have always loved me,” but that’s too strong, no matter how many of my friends and acquaintances have been on a psychiatric ward. Rather, I have been blessed to have known some colorful people. How did a couple of them (not counting Kafka) get into my Koluszki poem? “It’s all grace.”

It’s only after writing this poem that I realized that the task of my life as a writer and teacher and friend has been to feed the crumbs of my soul to hungry minds/souls out there. I haven’t fed meals to orphans or the homeless, but I have seen satisfied smiles on the faces of my students and audiences. That is reward enough. And it would be lovely to be able to continue this work in the afterlife . . . but I don’t insist. To have experienced it even once makes me happy.

But if I let my imagination roam free, then heaven would be a return to Warsaw, and especially to my favorite part of it: Aleje Ujazdowskie and Lazienki Park, with its statue of Chopin and the classical-style royal palace of the last Polish king – exquisite compared to the restored royal palace in Old Town. And of course the statue of Daphne changing into laurel, and the weeping willows and the swans. But I’d be happy just to walk under the huge shade trees, even in spring drizzle, when lilacs are in bloom, and later, the chestnut trees. Or in autumn, with maple leaves performing their ballet of falling.

Here is an excerpt from Cecilia Woloch’s marvelous piece set in Lazienki:

(For the Man Who Speaks with Trees)


Thin moon over Warsaw tonight. A haggardly golden half moon in a milky haze, slipping behind a cloud. “This tree saw the last Polish king,” he said of the giant oak in Lazienki Park. It was still early evening then, the deepening blue of summer dusk. The old palace shimmered over the lake and he walked right up to that tree, as if to kiss it, his nose to the bark. I stood next to him, face to the bark. “It doesn't speak Polish or English,” he said, “but the language of trees.” I heard it, too. His breath or my breath through the wood, or both; the breath of something else . . . When we kissed goodnight in the street, my lips were sticky, as if with sap.

~ Cecilia Woloch, © 2011

**

And let me quote the opening of a short story I once wrote, in the form of a letter from my double – that ghost woman, my Penelope, my divergent twin who’d stayed behind in Warsaw. 

LETTER IN OCTOBER

Leaving creates an undertow resplendent with abyss.

                                       ~ C. Eshleman

Dear Sister, My Dearest Twin,

Yesterday I walked down your favorite street, on the side opposite the American embassy, with the huge trees and the long wrought iron fence. I sat on a bench – perhaps the same bench where a man once sat down next to you, tall, silver-haired, neatly dressed and crazy, and sweetly asked you to help him write a letter to the Prime Minister to complain about a mistake he found in a newspaper: the name of a certain town in the Soviet Union was incorrect. “I know because I was born there,” he wanted to assure the Prime Minister. I didn’t yet exist, not in that simpler geography of time. You think only you attract the bizarre; I sit on the bench and watch the leaves fall. You and I like it best when a leaf falls slowly, rocked by the wind back and forth, back and forth. It's a long way to fall, across twenty-five years.

See, you forgot it’s autumn. I know your mouth has just twitched slightly, your teeth clicked with irritation – you are forbidding me to use that worn-out phrase, “the golden Polish autumn.” You loved the passion of red: old walls scarlet with ivy, the red burning along the veins of maple leaves. Yet I remember what you thought during the trip to West Virginia that astonishing October when you were seventeen: a fabulous blaze, but those were not real trees.

~ Oriana, © 2011

**

I don’t believe in any traditional afterlife, but I do believe in leaving behind us something of value to others. It’s not necessarily anything we leave intentionally. It can be something we said that lent itself to a soul-nourishing interpretation someone else needed at the time.

DRIVING FROM THE AIRPORT

           

past the blind mirrors of downtown,

I see you again: you and I

by the side of your car, our last goodbye –

the bellies of incoming jets

swooping over us,

your head in a halo of drizzle,

tilted as you shout,

Keep your nose up!

You show me how a plane

descends, its nose pointing

up – it mustn’t nosedive.

Your arm goes down and

down, precise, horizontal,

landing in the most dangerous

airport in the country.

No one foresaw, everyone was blind

about the coming wreckage, 

your body found

alone in your condo.

But I always see you

as you stood back then,

mantled in fine rain,

shouting, Keep your nose up!

The jets' shark shadows cross

the mirror drizzle of time.

It’s to me you gesture,
it's to me you shout –

showing me how to land,

how softly to arrive.

~ Oriana © 2011

in memory of Linda Brown, a San Diego poet, December 14,1941- February 14, 2006

Linda Brown, her high school graduation photo, 1959

Ewa Parma (in Poland):

Fantastic. So, you miss even Koluszki, Oriana. And Lazienki Park is your personal heaven. Immigration must be Inferno then. I couldn't stop smiling when I read: "The insane have always loved me." True. And about feeding the angels with crumbs of your soul. That's what poets are for. Thank you.

Oriana:

I miss the old Koluszki train station. It was part of every summer. Lazienki and Aleje Ujazdowskie are indeed my heaven, starting at the Square of Three Crosses. I could walk there for eternity, especially when lilacs are in bloom . . .

Immigration was definitely Inferno at first. The Untermensch feeling is unavoidable, I think.  And if the milieu you grew up in was radically different from where you end up – and I went from an intensely intellectual milieu to an anti-intellectual one, or at least one where it was difficult to find intellectual peers – alienation is unavoidable. Even without that, I’ve met so many bitter, unhappy immigrants, it seems an endemic condition. As Danusha Goska said, Don’t ever be an immigrant. I second that. Not unless your life is in danger.

Having said all this, I’ve been inclining to the view that, past the Inferno stage, immigration is a Purgatory. It would take another blog post to explain.

I’m thrilled that you understand the part about the poet feeding the world with crumbs of her soul.

Steve:

Thank you for "Return to Koluszki." I was very moved by it – on a number of levels. And, as in all really excellent poems, I was moved more deeply each time I re-read it. The opening lines involve me at once: 

If there is an afterlife,

there will be no angels.

Winged desire will return

to Koluszki, Skierniewice,

towns I never knew

except as train stations –

I love the image of a "winged desire" rather than angels in the afterlife--although I'm intrigued that at the end of the poem you are feeding crumbs of your soul to "insatiable angels"--an ending image, by the way, that is stunning in its accuracy. Don't we all do that as we create art? The angels are insatiable, just as our own inner vaults are endless. There are beauty and terror in those lines, as is true of all spiritual encounters, I believe.

And the music of standing in the market place in the "sway of the Angelus" is gorgeous, especially followed, as it is, with the haunting reminder of what humans can do to humans in "pavement smooth as bones" and the evocative "memory's mass grave." Given the location of the poem, these lines carry some precious and powerful freight.

And then the appearance of your "abusive lover" and Linda add a drama and presence in the poem that work very well. "Remember only the beauty" is truly a haunting line, especially from someone about to pull the trigger (in a suicide, it seems?). Such amazing combinations of beauty and terror!

I really can't tell you how moved I was by this poem. It is so beautiful. What a wonderful statement of the artist's condition:

But for now or eternity I stand

a few steps beyond the known,

feeding crumbs of my soul

to the insatiable angels. 

**

Oriana:

All I can say is thank you, from the bottom of my heart. It’s wonderful to see that a reader understands a poem of mine so well, finding a layer of meaning that actually escaped me. Coming from Poland, I can easily think of mass graves (I even have a poem about seeing them as a child in a Pomeranian forest) – but as so often happens during the creative process, the line with “mass grave” came on automatic. Thanks for pointing out that the location of the poem adds a historical dimension to that. 

Lucrezia:

[Oriana wrote: One obvious Q is where you'd like to go/return for your "heaven." Would it be Berkeley? Oregon? Egypt? Or maybe more than one place.]

Definitely not Egypt, but the others are appealing.  But everything one imagines about heaven is something one knows from this life.

"Good-by, good-by, world. Good-by, Grover's Corners. Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths. And sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you."

Oriana:

I agree: Everything one imagines about heaven is something one knows from this life. Even science fiction can’t seem to get that far away from earthly reality. When it comes to heaven in particular, the Christian variety has been dreadfully colorless and unappealing because what we really want is a wonderful cup of coffee, great food, and, why not, finally finding that soulmate or missing half. And pets, absolutely. And friends – some of whom may have wound up in the other place, which wouldn't make us happy. 

Actually I startled myself with both my Warsaw as heaven and Koluszki as “modest afterlife” fantasies, since in both places I remain solitary. In Warsaw, just the city was fascinating enough and I can imagine myself blissed out on my favorite avenue. In Koluszki I’d miss friends, I suspect.

And yes, we already live in paradise. Without denying suffering, this is still paradise, nor have we been exiled from it. It also strikes me that the synonym of heaven is “life everlasting,” while hell is occasionally called “death eternal.” As I say in one of my poems, “We don’t want heaven, we want life.”

Scott:

I can't recall a single blog posting when I have not found something of interest; from religion, Greek myth or philosophy your musings and reflections are great to ponder over a good cup of coffee. What a great question. I could easily spend my afterlife in a small house by the beach in Hawaii, specifically the North Shore of Oahu. It would be nice to have an eternity to explore the other islands or all of Polynesia for that matter, much like Robert Louis Stevenson, Melville and Jack London did. Of all the places I have travelled to, Hawaii meets all my expectations and then some: mountains, beaches, warm weather with plenty of interesting plant and animal life.

As for Melville, pondering the next world was a lifelong obsession as Hawthorne noted in a famous journal entry. I would bet he too would have chosen somewhere in Polynesia to spend eternity, or if not there his home in the Berkshire Mountains where he penned his classic Moby Dick; I hope to visit it one day.

I was going through some of your older blog entries and as I mentioned earlier it's just amazing how your postings are full of some of the deepest thoughts yet I never feel it's over my head or too lofty; it hits just the right mix of scholarly and 'neighborly'. I was looking over your post on the Odyssey and it brought to mind Kazantzakis' epic; he and Melville were kindred spirits indeed. If ever you get a chance, Melville's novel 'Mardi' is time well spent, a grand sweeping journey through the mind; a dress rehearsal for 'Moby Dick.' Thanks again for posing such a thoughtful question and rest assured, your thoughts and poems have indeed brought many a smile and appreciation to me and all who follow your blog; if a poet’s mission is to bring enjoyment and thoughtful reflection you have met that and more.

Oriana:

Your comments certainly bring me a smile every time. I was just reading, on another blog, of a restaurant menu listing “harpoon-caught swordfish,” and immediately thought of Melville, Moby Dick, and you. And when I opened my email, there you were, with Melville not far behind.

Do you by any chance have a link to that journal entry you mentioned, Hawthorne’s commenting on Melville’s obsession with the afterlife?

Thanks for recommending Mardi. I now remember that an English professor highly recommended it. Needless to say, I love the sermon on Jonah in Moby Dick and Melville’s courage to philosophize rather than be a shallow entertainer.

Scott:

This can be found at www.melville.org/hawthrn, from a journal entry Hawthorne made after a visit from Melville;

"Herman Melville came to see me at the Consulate, looking much as he used to do (a little paler, and perhaps a little sadder), in a rough outside coat, and with his characteristic gravity and reserve of manner.... [W]e soon found ourselves on pretty much our former terms of sociability and confidence. Melville has not been well, of late; ... and no doubt has suffered from too constant literary occupation, pursued without much success, latterly; and his writings, for a long while past, have indicated a morbid state of mind.... Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had "pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated"; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is strange how he persists – and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before – in wondering to-and-fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us."

Oriana:

Oh, thank you, this is wonderful! This is so much like Milosz's struggle to believe. Milosz was an atheist in his youth: I guess he too “pretty much made up [his] mind to be annihilated.” And later he was too intellectually honest to accept the Catholic doctrine without questioning, which he knew would lead to heresy. But then each person’s belief or unbelief is personal. I agree with what Michael said once, that one’s religion is autobiographical.

Hawthorne's prose here sounds somewhat like Melville's – I guess it's the period, the interesting roll of those long sentences, before the era of sound bytes.

“Better worth immortality than most of us” – and this he achieved, in the sense of a literary afterlife.  

Scott:

Hawthorne was right on the mark as Melville truly never got free of the struggle he had regarding these matters. He read widely on Buddhism late in life and while he found much to admire in its lack of an uncompromising creed, he did not adhere to its total resignation of self and quest for Nirvana.

Oriana:

Milosz too could not really embrace Buddhism. He knew he wasn’t really able or willing to renounce desire, especially the desire that things wouldn't perish totally. He kept hoping that everything, absolutely everything is preserved somewhere in another realm.

Re: finding some peace in the face of all this vanishing. It took me a long while to “rest in that anticipation [of annihilation],” i.e. to feel how the world becomes enlivened once we look around and say, “This is it. Let’s make the best of it while it lasts.” Heaven, according to the new Catholic definition, is not a place but a state of mind, and hell likewise, and both can be experienced on earth. Am I ever completely separated from beauty, from great books, great music, human affection, and all the other things I love? If not, then I am in heaven. Thank you, John-Paul II, for pointing out that I am already in heaven! Sometimes to a greater degree, of course, but I find variety desirable, even in heaven. Even an occasional dose of hell is refreshing in its own way, to make us love the heavenly state all the more.

John Guzlowski:

“Koluszki” is a great poem, Oriana.

Oriana:

Thank you. I was worried if the reader needed to have grown up with the meaning of Koluszki, simultaneously “nowhere” and a legendary train station. In Poland, all trains go to Koluszki.

John G:

I didn't know that but sensed something of it in the poem--the impossibleness of the place mixed with its reality – a sort of magical realistic moment in the poem.

Oriana:

This is probably the most "magical realistic" poem of mine -- thanks for pointing it out. Koluszki figures in popular songs and in the legend (it's probably a legend) of a grand New Year's Eve ball at the station when a blizzard stopped a train headed for Warsaw. Thus everyone knows the name of the town because it's such an important railway station, but nobody I knew had ever been to the town itself. The station could as well have been a portal to nowhere. Ewa Parma inspired my post with her poem "The Last Station," which warns against getting stuck in Koluszki.

Marjorie:

This latest blog is particularly good. I like the poetry — yours and Cecilia’s both. Re: the attraction of bizarre people, paranoiacs are attracted to me, and I to them. That was a worry until I found out that on a Rorschach Test they will see in the blots not only the many disparate objects intelligent people see but will put all of these together in a coherent story. It’s obviously that quality of imagination in paranoiacs that make them appealing. Poets and paranoiacs both find resemblances in basically unlike things. The difference is that poets (provided they’re not mad) know that they’re making metaphors, while paranoiacs mistake their metaphors for reality.

Oriana:

Joseph Campbell said that “essential schizophrenics” (but not paranoiacs) were on a hero’s journey – note, he said, the elements of withdrawal from society, initiation, and return as a more aware, self-confident person with a gift for the community (the question of return is not entirely clear, though perhaps near-death experiences are a new model). As the saying goes, the typical distinction between “artists and madmen” is that both dive into the waters of the unconscious, but the artists “know how to swim.”

Sink or swim, humans with their immensely complex, pattern and meaning-seeking brain, risk reading too much into everything that happens. Schizophrenics, creative people, and Jungians can easily find meaning in practically everything. Also, people in these three categories are drawn to more cosmic meanings rather than the mundane. I suppose we need to add religious mystics and New Age “psychics” to the category of people who can read a larger meaning in what others would see as quite ordinary. 

Lilith:

What a surprise to see Linda Brown on your blog!  But that does fit with your talk of immortality, she who put her book together just in time before her death.

Oriana:

Yes, if not literary immortality, then some measure of a literary afterlife – even just a decade or so – even that is an amazing thing to contemplate. And just the endurance of books as books, not necessarily one’s own, brings us certain emotional comfort. This is also in line with Milosz’s poem about books having their own life, “And Yet the Books.” Let me quote the ending:

I imagine the earth when I am no more:

Nothing happens, no loss, it’s still a strange pageant,

Women’s dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.

Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,

Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.

**

I think this is also a chance to give the reader a tiny taste of Linda’s own poetry. Beset with many problems, a spiritual seeker drawn to Eastern traditions, Linda saw meaning and comfort in what others might find ordinary. Here is the first stanza of “One Leaf”

A leaf from a liquidambar tree fell

out of a blue November sky

toward the ground below. It caught

in a series of oak leaves, did not

make it to the canyon floor. The sound

of one leaf falling, like a circus acrobat

into a safety net, is what I came here for.

~ Linda Brown, Journey with Beast


**


Finally, Gloria Hajduk, a visual artist who resides in New Mexico, sends us this gem: