MILOSZ: “HOW IT SHOULD BE IN HEAVEN”

Dali: Ascension

A HALL


The road led straight to the temple.
Notre Dame, though not gothic at all.
The huge doors of the portal were closed.
I chose the entrance on the side,
Not to the main building – to its left wing,
The one in green copper, worn into the gaps below.

I pushed. Then it was revealed:
An astonishingly large hall, in warm light.
Grand statues of sitting women – goddesses,
In draped robes, marked it with a rhythm.
Color embraced me like the interior
of a purple-brown flower of unheard-of size.

I walked, liberated
From worries, fears, pangs of conscience.
I knew I was there as one day I would be.
I woke up serene, thinking that this dream
Answered the question I so often asked:
What it’s like when one crosses the last threshold.

~ Czeslaw Milosz, Facing the River

**

Here is a rather surprising vision of the afterlife. Some might even call it feminist. I thought of the Goddesses as Goethe’s “Mothers,” the deities of elemental fertility and creativity, perhaps related to the “Eternal Feminine.” But the simplest and most encompassing label is the “Divine Feminine.”

The goddesses seem the archetype of woman as a mother and nurturer, a source of solace and compassion rather than judgment and punishment. The plural here is very interesting, since the dream image is Notre Dame (though not the gothic church). So there is a connection both with the Virgin Mary as a goddess of mercy, and with the older pagan goddesses. 

Note that “worries, pangs of conscience and fears” are all gone in the presence of these goddesses. Parenthetically, I am reminded that in his late long poem, “Orpheus and Eurydice,” Orpheus deals only with Persephone. 

It's startling that Milosz, certainly no feminist (Rilke could be called a feminist; he championed creative women, telling them to love not him, but themselves), has a dream about the afterlife that indicates a blissful afterlife among goddesses. The essence of that bliss is serenity: freedom from "worries, fears, pangs of conscience." This is not the way a young man would dream about goddesses! But the longer I live, the more I too appreciate peacefulness rather than excitement. I've accumulated such a hoard of writing, it would be enough just to harvest.

And the goddesses are in the left wing of Notre Dame. I'm pretty sure that Milosz means the cathedral in Paris, even though he insists that it's "not Gothic." He knew Paris well. In any case, what matters is that in the dream he enters the Goddess part of the grand building, just as the chapel of Mary is typically on the left hand side in most Catholic churches (this becomes the right-hand side if you are viewing the interior with your back to the altar, which was probably the medieval idea of giving Mary the place of honor).

In summary, this is the afterlife that the dream suggested: freedom from negative emotions, feminine presence, warmth, color, a suggestion of being inside a gigantic flower.

I chose Dali’s “Ascension” as the opening image because of its bold use of the Divine Feminine. It’s based on the traditional Trinity Cross, but in place of God the Father we get God the Mother (here the Divine Feminine has the face of Gala, Dali's wife). Note her tears as she welcomes her Son, knowing the torture he’s suffered. This is not the aloof Father receiving his “ransom,” but the compassionate Mother.

HEAVEN AS LITHUANIA

But for Milosz the main image of heaven remains the Lithuanian countryside of his childhood. The lush earth in late spring and summer consoles Orpheus, who lies down on the warm ground and falls asleep like a child. He who has touched the earth has already touched paradise, Milosz seems to be saying. This is a variation on the famous lines by Adam Mickiewicz (the great Polish Romantic poet who also grew up in Lithuania): He who never touched the earth cannot enter heaven. We need to “touch” the earth fully, both poets are saying; we need to know earthly life (Rilke: “let everything happen to you”) rather than escape into otherworldly spirituality.

Seamus Heaney observed that Milosz sought “Edenic moments.” One of those moments was granted to him when after fifty-two years of exile he returned to Lithuania to visit the countryside of his childhood. Below is one of my favorite poems by Milosz – maybe because I can imagine so well standing in a Carpathian meadow and feeling exactly the same. 

A MEADOW

It was a riverside meadow, lush, from before the hay harvest,

On an immaculate day in the sun of June.

I searched for it, found it, recognized it.

Grasses and flowers grew there familiar in my childhood.

With half-closed eyelids I absorbed luminescence.

And the scent gathered me, all knowing ceased.

Suddenly I felt I was disappearing and weeping with joy.

~ Facing the River

This is Milosz’s simplest image of heaven: this liebestod, this dissolution into a familiar meadow. 

It’s not surprising that Lithuania should be Milosz’s lost paradise and his image of heaven. But “How It Should Be in Heaven” is interesting for another reason: it’s one of the many poems that show the divide between Milosz as a skeptical intellectual, and that part of him that wants to be an ecstatic believer:

HOW IT SHOULD BE IN HEAVEN

How it should be in Heaven I know, for I was there.

By its river. Listening to its birds.

In its season: summer, shortly after sunrise.

I would get up and run to my thousand works

And the garden was superterrestrial, owned by imagination.

I spent my life composing rhythmic spells

Not quite aware of what was happening to me.

But striving, chasing without cease

A name and a form. I think the movement of blood

Should continue there to be a triumphant one,

Of a higher, I would say, degree. That the smell of gillyflower,

That of nasturtium and a bee and a ladybug

Or their very essence, stronger than here,

Must summon us just the same to a core, to a center

Beyond the labyrinth of things. For how could the mind

Stop its hunt, if from the Infinite

It takes enchantment, avidity, promise?

But where is our, dear to us, mortality?

Where is time that both destroys and saves us?

This is too difficult for me. Peace eternal

Could have no mornings and no evenings,

Such a deficiency speaks against it.

And that’s too hard a nut for a theologian to crack.


~ New and Collected, 465

**

It’s obvious here that Milosz is not willing to reject the earth as earthly paradise in favor of some vague celestial eternity, without morning and evenings. In fact Milosz states that he already was in heaven – it was on the bank of the river where he grew up. The difference between heaven and earth is not of kind, but only of degree: the scent of heavenly flowers is even sweeter. 

The most interesting part of this vision of heaven is not only that there should be mornings and evenings, contrary to “peace eternal” without time and change, but the continued quest for a “center beyond the labyrinth of things.” Thus, Milosz does not see heaven as passive bliss, basking in the eternal light: For how could the mind / Stop its hunt, if from the Infinite / It takes enchantment, avidity, promise?

“How It Should Be in Heaven” is an example of an essay-poem. It’s complex beyond the deceptively simple surface. It’s not just the praise of earthly beauty. We must note that this garden of earthly delights is “superterrestrial, owned by imagination.” The poet’s work does not cease in heaven (or at least in what “heaven should be”): Milosz wants to continue being a poet, always in pursuit of the perfect word and form.

I love the opening:

How it should be in Heaven I know, for I was there.

By its river. Listening to its birds.

In its season: summer, shortly after sunrise.

But I love even more the ending of Milosz’s beautiful late poem, “Werki” (a village upriver from Vilnius). Whatever the afterlife may be, if there is an afterlife, it’s not about punishment and reward, but about being totally accepted – and allowed to enter one’s dream of heaven.

Maybe I only dream those rusty-gold forests,

The glitter of the river in which I swam in my youth,

The October from my poems with its air like wine.

The priests taught us about salvation and damnation.

Now I have not the slightest notion of these things.

I have felt on my shoulder the hand of my Guide,

Yet He didn’t mention punishment, didn’t promise a reward.

~ Second Space

LITERARY AFTERLIFE

But there is yet another immortality, or near-immortality, one desired by every writer: his or her afterlife in books.

AND YET THE BOOKS

And yet the books will be there on the shelves, separate being,

That appeared once, still wet

As shining chestnuts under a tree in autumn,

And, touched, coddled, began to live

In spite of fires on the horizon, castles blown up,

Tribes on the march, planets in motion.

“We are,” they said, even as their pages

Were being torn out, or a buzzing flame

Licked away their letters. So much more durable

Than we are, whose frail warmth

Cools down with memory, disperses, perishes.

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.


~ New and Collected, 468

**

We may smile at Milosz’s lack of awareness that the age of e-book was drawing near. But that is not of the essence: digitized or on paper, books lead their own existence, independent of their author’s.  The speaker here derives great pleasure from the thought that books will be us always. The delight I get from this poem is that it speaks of books in general – the country of the mind.

Again the opening is especially delightful:

And yet the books will be there on the shelves, separate being,

That appeared once, still wet

As shining chestnuts under a tree in autumn

What follows is a great statement of faith in the power of the intellect:

And, touched, coddled, [books] began to live

In spite of fires on the horizon, castles blown up,

Tribes on the march, planets in motion.

“We are,” they said, even as their pages

Were being torn out, or a buzzing flame

Licked away their letters. So much more durable

Than we are, whose frail warmth

Cools down with memory, disperses, perishes.


**

ACCEPTANCE OF ONE’S OWN LIFE

As Milosz grew very old and knew he would soon be departing, he seems to have achieved an inner peace, his Catholic and his pagan soul no longer in conflict. In the prose poem “Awakened,” he says

In advanced age, my health worsening, I woke up in the middle of the night, and experienced a feeling of happiness so intense and perfect that in all my life I had only felt its premonition. And there was no reason for it. It didn’t obliterate consciousness; the past which I carried was there, together with my grief. And it was suddenly included, was a necessary part of the whole. As if a voice were repeating: ‘You can stop worrying now; everything happened just as it had to. You did what was assigned to you, and you are not required anymore to think of what happened long ago.’ 

“Late Ripeness” confirms this peaceful clarity and expands on it. It is perhaps as close as Milosz ever came to having and describing a mystical experience, aside from an ecstatic communion with nature. He was not a mystic whose personal visions of the divine give him or her an unshakable faith in what lies beyond reason. Like one of his favorite philosophers, Leo Shestov, Milosz believed, or wanted to believe, there something (rather than nothing) lay beyond reason. There is no evidence that he ever got beyond wishing and found that something, and in “Late Ripeness” he seems to have reached the kind of peace and acceptance of his life that at least borders on the mystical.

Part of the transcendent experience is complete trust that the universe is giving you what you need, that your life is unfolding just as it should. Note that in the poem below, Milosz is almost ninety when he has this experience of release, connection to others, and also of clarity of purpose:

And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas 
assigned to my brush came closer, 
ready now to be described better than they were before. 

Note again, he is almost ninety when this beautiful sense of confidence emerges, without the alienation of feeling like someone who only watches the feast of life, but is always excluded from it, as in the last stanza of “A New Province”:

I would prefer to be able to say, “I am sated,

What is given to taste in this life, I have tasted.”

But I am like someone in a window who draws aside a curtain

To look at a feast he does not comprehend.
~ Provinces

That sense of not belonging is no longer present in Milosz’s last poems, of which “Late Ripeness” is probably the greatest.


Milosz desperately wanted to believe in the afterlife. Having witnessed so much perishing, he longed for a reassurance that what was lost will be restored somehow. “How to resist nothingness? What power / Preserves what once was, if memory does not last?” he lamented. He wanted not so much a “pie-in-the-sky,” as the idea of heaven is most commonly derided, but the restoration of losses and everlastingness. To Milosz, whatever existed was precious – not just the people and places he loved, but every ant, every blade of grass. In a universe ordered according to the principle of love, all must be preserved – if not right here on earth, then somewhere else in the cosmos. 


At the same time he knew that it’s no longer possible to believe that “real life” starts only after death (something that medieval Christians believed in earnest), and consequently this life is not important except as a way to earn the desired eternity. But in his great old age, Milosz seems to have achieved at least some serenity, as well as a sense of belonging to the human family (“grief and pity joined us”). For moments, at least, his sorrows departed, and the Kingdom was within him. 

LATE RIPENESS

Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year, 
I felt a door opening in me and I entered 
the clarity of early morning. 

One after another my former lives were departing, 
like ships, together with their sorrow. 

And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas 
assigned to my brush came closer, 
ready now to be described better than they were before. 

I was not separated from people, 
grief and pity joined us. 
We forget – I kept saying – that we are all children of the King. 

For where we come from there is no division 
into Yes and No, into is, was, and will be. 

We were miserable, we used no more than a hundredth part 
of the gift we received for our long journey. 

Moments from yesterday and from centuries ago –
a sword blow, the painting of eyelashes before a mirror 
of polished metal, a lethal musket shot, a caravel 
staving its hull against a reef – they dwell in us, 
waiting for a fulfillment. 

I knew, always, that I would be a worker in the vineyard, 
as are all men and women living at the same time, 
whether they are aware of it or not.

**

Van Gogh: The Red Vineyard

Lisa:

I am truly in tears over "Late Ripeness" as I have, of a sudden, become 90 and there is no is-was-will be, and we are all living at the same moment, working in the vineyard. I suppose I've really become my mother and my father in this moment of reading, as they truly have a vineyard in their late years (in the Appalachians of Georgia), and work in it daily, my father working the land on which he was born, truly delighted each morning by each bud break, taking my mother around each morning through the vineyards just to show her – this.

As for "The Hall" and the last threshold, and the Goddesses of some sort beyond, I am brought back to the line from "Lat Ripeness": "We used no more than a hundredth part of the gift we received for the long journey," and I am somewhat relieved that there is a vineyard to work in regardless, and if no goddesses are sitting in wait for us beyond the last threshold, at least there are dreams of them. I had a waking dream (during la Dansa de La Luna 4 night ceremony with very poor Mexican women outside Teotihuacan, just beyond Mexico City) that the whole horizon, lit up, was demanding of me – in a huge voice – "WHAT DO YOU WANT! WHAT DO YOU WANT!" And as I went down the list of things I might want to manifest in this world, none of them stuck as I followed their effects to problematic or anticlimactic results . . . when, on the horizon, an enormous totem pole rose from the Earth, entirely uncarved, waiting for me to make my marks, carve my totem, make my signature . . . but because I couldn't decide or say what I wanted, the totem began to rumble and tremble and fell dramatically to the ground. This has been a haunting dream, of course, so it is of great comfort to remember that each spring there is budbreak, and that we are working in the vineyard . . . “whether we know it or not.”

Oriana;

Thank you, Lisa, for this generous sharing. “Late Ripeness” is a poem as amazing as the parable of the vineyard workers in Matthew 20. The parable does not fit the capitalist or any other model of how to pay the workers. It states that it does not matter how late in life you begin to be truly of service, doing the right work – you will be granted the full reward.

In youth, how many of us consciously know anything about what might be called our vocation? Only the lucky few. On the other hand, in another poem, “Capri,” Milosz says

Early we receive a call, yet it remains incomprehensible, and only later we discover how obedient we were.

So we needn’t worry, Milosz consoles us: we are workers in the vineyard whether we know it or not. It helps to know it since that way we experience life as more meaningful, and as less likely to be self-destructive. The thesis of the poem is valid also from a secular, humanist point of view: we can each contribute in some unique way. Whether we know it or not, we touch the lives of others: we can live from greatness and generosity, or we can live from our wounds and not utilize our abilities.

“Late Ripeness” is a marvelous “comfort poem.” We all have value, it says, we all contribute in some way: we are the workers in the vineyard.

As for “What do you want?” – that does not seem relevant any more. Few of us have full clarity, at any age. We don’t know what is best for us. It’s comforting to think that it’s actually not all that important if we do A rather than B (assuming both A and B are good things, or at least partly good). One way or another, we serve; we work in the vineyard of the collective human enterprise.

**

Photo: Charles Sherman


**
Una:

Lisa said it all, a beautiful response. Charles’s photo is exquisite. He has the artist’s eye. Best blog yet, but I say that every time.

I was caught up in “How it is when one passes the last threshold” because I recently wrote in a poem

I believe death is just another arm of life.

It’s possible when we step over the line

the world will become a color we've never seen before.

I was taken by “the garden was owned by imagination” – and yet the books will be there. Borghes said, “I believe that Paradise will be a kind of library.” E-books will never replace the beauty of holding a volume in the hand – the tactile feeling, giving off the odor of learning. 

Milosz is encouraging when he writes “we can stop worrying. Everything happened just as it had to.” We have accomplished what we were supposed to accomplish.

And yet we used up no more that a hundredth part of what we were given for the journey. It has long disturbed me to realize how none of us use a hundredth of the minds we were given. Mind-boggling.

Oriana:

I’m not sure if that saying about using only one percent of what we were given is neurologically accurate. On the other hand, very few of us have the kind of nurturing conditions that would allow a greater flowering. Simone de Beauvoir said, “One is not born a genius; one becomes a genius, and very few women have had the circumstances that would allow them to become a genius.” I agree that it’s especially difficult for women, but it’s not easy for men either. The whole universe has to be just right: the right parents, teachers, experiences . . .  

Still, as Milosz tells us, we shouldn't worry, and certainly we shouldn't live in regret.

Yes, heaven as the garden of paradise, but with books in it. But we must also remember that the kingdom of heaven of within us, and our mind has certainly room in it for whole panoramas, gardens (it’s the Huntington Gardens for me!), as well as favorite books. Lately I’ve discovered how much I love re-reading, what a caress it is to have the words re-enter my mind like old friends, bringing even more beauty and wisdom than before.

Mary:

Beautiful, as always, Oriana. I have the same feelings about heaven as present in this world and the next/parallel one. Ever since I was a little child.

Oriana:

Thank you, Mary. Coming to see the Kingdom as really "within" was a big moment for me. So in this world, certainly, both heaven and hell. I wish I could believe in the afterlife – not necessarily even as paradise, but simply as continuing to exist. There is a pleasure simply in existing, experiencing. 

Lilith:

The woman who receives the ascending Dali is his beautiful wife with tears of joy to see him in his ascended and perfected form, not a weakened Christ figure nailed to the cross, his side pierced and bleeding, but a powerful, flawless male in his prime. The wife, an amazingly beautiful human woman is also in her prime. I don't think she's a stand-in for god/goddess receiving him into heaven.  I think she's just his wife greeting him in her perfected human body as he crosses over in his perfected human body. 

It always amazes me, the Catholic doctrine that after last judgement our human bodies (restored in the perfected form of our prime) will populate heaven. Jesus, and later Mary, are already up there as human bodies, due to the miracle of the ascension, for that is the doctrine.

The Greeks, as we know, imagined their gods and goddesses as perfect human bodies in their primes. No wonder we, so influenced by the Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian traditions, are always dissatisfied with our imperfect human forms.

My 95-year old mother, a serious Catholic who longs for the next world, is convinced the first person she'll see on the other side will be my father waiting for her, in his perfected form as he was in his youth.  She has seen this moment in dreams and longs for it.

We intellectuals, who know there is no god and no heaven and nobody waiting to greet us on the other side, frighten the believers. They ask, if not god and the afterlife, then what do we live for? The answer is simple – we live for each other. Mainly there is our spouse, the person most likely to be at our deathbed, if not we at theirs. Our ordinary, flawed spouse.

Dali understood this much of it . . . passing over to the other side we are not greeted by god or goddess or St. Peter. We are greeted by our own dear spouse. What if Dali's wife was just an ordinary woman greeting his ordinary ascending body?  That might be an amazing painting also.

Oriana:

Wow, Lilith, you point out the obvious – that of course wasn’t obvious until you said it: there has been a tremendous cultural shift even among the Christian believers! Probably mainly due to the accounts of near-death experiences, millions of people now expect that the person to greet them “on the other side” will be someone they loved here on earth: their spouse, sister, another relative – perhaps more than one person. A pet is not out of the question.

People who’ve had NDE’s report a disembodied voice telling them to go back, but otherwise there is no indication of a traditional “god image” (to use an evasive Jungian term). Somehow god and the angels have receded from the picture. What matters is meeting again people we once knew and treasured. It’s their company we crave, not that of the angels. In the collective psyche, earthly love has clearly taken precedence.

Dali’s painting, certainly not orthodox, could be interpreted both ways: it’s the ascending Christ being greeted by the Divine Mother (the dove of the Holy Spirit clearly draws on the tradition of the Trinity Cross), and/or it’s Dali being greeted by Gala, both of them in perfected beautiful bodies.

I am sure my mother, though officially a non-believer, also longed to be united with my father. There is a part of the human brain (the right hemisphere, perhaps?) that cannot accept non-being. I have a short poem about this:

In the Heaven of Indra

  

hangs a curtain of pearls
threaded with intricate skill:
suspended in moon gleam,
in each pearl can be seen
all the other infinite pearls.

We too are interlaced
more than we dare believe.
We dream of heaven
because we have known hell.
My mother, already unconscious,

lifted her arm and reached out
as if to lace her hand with the hand
of someone waiting for her
on the other side.
Then she went into that love.


~ Oriana

**

I am also with you on the question of the meaning of life. It shocked me to read that Sartre asserted that if god doesn’t exist, then life has no meaning. Later he said something to the effect that there is no inherent meaning, but we can create our own meaning. We can indeed create an extra layer of meaning, but the essential meaning of our life lies in how we touch the lives of others. “No man is an island” – we constantly interact with others. As you put it, and there is no better way to state it, we live for each other. 

Even Milosz, for all his desperate longing to believe the Catholic doctrine, knew that it’s impossible to return to return to the medieval idea that our real life begins only after death. In one of his late poems he confessed that he prayed many times for a sign, a nod from a statue in a church – but eventually resigned himself to the fact that the statue would never stir, and the only “sign” of the divine (if we must use the term) is the kindness of others – a smile, a hug, a helping gesture.

Now if only humanity could fully accept this here-and-now philosophy! The absurdity and barbarism of war would become too glaring to be tolerated any more. We’d all try to maximize the joy of life. Kindness would be imperative, simply from the point of view of enlightened self-interest. Jobs could be restructured so as to be more rewarding. Child-rearing does not have to be as stressful as it is now – more help should be available to the parents. I could go on and on, but there is no need to belabor the point: if all there is the life we have now, then our priority should be to make it as satisfying as possible.

As for mysticism, I expect that it will always be with us because our meaning-seeking brain is wired that way – to a lesser or greater degree, depending on the individual. Mystics, however, follow their contemplative bliss rather than wage religious wars. Even when focused on an otherworldly lover, they tend to be gentle and kind to others. We’ve been witnessing a shift from organized religion to private spirituality: a quiet revolution that may yet prove to be the most profound modern phenomenon. A truly secular view of life would be the greatest revolution in the history of humanity, I think. And much good would follow, once we understand that the best response to the “god is dead” news is not despair, but trying to make the most of life here and now.

Scott:

As always, your recent post brings much reflection. I must thank you for bringing Milosz into my reading circle, a poet who I had never heard of until your blog . . . as well as Tony Hoagland whom you featured  some months back. A lifetime reader, only in recent years have I turned to poetry and what I once regarded as an art on the fringe of literature I now see as the capstone. As you know, I am Ahab-like  obsessed with Moby Dick and Melville and it's ironic that Melville too turned to poetry the last 30 years of his life after his novels just did not sell, the world was not ready for them yet. Your reflections on Milosz and heaven bring to mind C S Lewis and his visions of Narnia and England. In the concluding book of the series, 'The Last Battle', the Pevensies all reach Aslan's country and find it much like England with its rolling hills. I pray it's like that . . . and like Borges' view: “I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.”

I stumbled upon a dissertation on Zen Buddhism and Moby Dick from a philosophy student in New Zealand last week. In his acknowledgements, he dedicated his thesis to the benefit of all who read it with the wish they would find a life of happiness and free of misery. At first read that might come across as so much fluff but when you reflect on that sentiment . . . isn't that what life truly SHOULD be?! Thanks again for a great post. Milosz's imagery is amazing, the line “a caravel staving its hull against a reef” hits home with this old sailor. I say old; am not yet 50 but feel old in that I have seen a lot in this near half century but hope to see much more and in my old age be surrounded by friends, family and, as a line from a  favorite poem states, “a warm river of books and black coffee.”

Oriana:

I love “a warm river of books and black coffee.” Or latte or cappuccino. And books – how could there be a paradise without books? The most exquisite fact of existence is that we who love books can experience this paradise right here. Then there is the beauty of nature, and the affection of friendship – all here and now. Maybe something wonderful awaits us after we “cross the threshold,” but just in case, let’s enjoy what paradise is available to us while we are alive.

Hafiz, and he’s not the only one, says that if we haven’t tasted paradise in this life, we won’t taste it afterwards either. Now, with the belief in heaven and hell on the wane, the challenge for humanity is to try to create “earthly paradise” – or at least something approaching it.  A life of happiness rather than misery – as you say, “isn’t that what life truly SHOULD be?!” Absolutely. We can’t eliminate all human suffering, but we can eliminate a lot of it – if only it became a priority.

When I think of the past, I’m simply horrified by how hard life was for the great majority of people. The “vale of tears” wasn’t just a poetic phrase – it was a realistic description. I think it’s a sign of great progress that now we don’t hear that phrase very often.  And yet even life is still miserable for so many. It’s mainly misery that creates the longing for heaven, and that’s why there is practically no atheism in sub-Saharan Africa.

Milosz, however, longed not so much for happiness as for the restoration of all that gets lost. He was the opposite of a Buddhist that way: emotionally, he could not accept the fact that everything passes. It was only after he witnessed the orgy of destruction during WWII that he returned to Catholicism – but not without continuing doubt, and desperately seeking some image of heaven that would make sense. He even imagined a cosmic super-computer in which the matrix of everything that exists on earth is preserved, so that it can be re-created. Not just people, but houses and furniture. Even ants and earthworms. Having witnessed annihilation, Milosz was insatiably hungry for existence.

He also suffered from guilt and anxiety, self-medicating with alcohol. Thus another feature of the kind of heaven that he tries to describe in his poems is freedom from self-torment. But his most successful work describes earthly paradise. This short poem is hugely popular:

Gift

A day so happy.
Fog lifted early. I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over the honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw blue sea and sails.

**

Lucrezia:

Had not seen that Dali painting but it was immediately recognizable as his. The Dali museum is here in St Petersburg, Florida. If one lowers one's eyelids to gaze at this image, one sees the horned beast/god or bull skull that appears in another painting.  So one might see Christ as the sacrificial bull or devil but one can also see the image as a womb with its outstretched fallopian tubes and fimbriae grasping at the ovary behind it. It is indeed a channel of the divine XX feminine and the temple of the womb is where she meets her lover, is pierced with the arrows of love and is transformed. The egg is the Virgin. Also note the conjoined moon and sun in the background:  another fertilization symbol, modifying the sphere to the shape of an egg (or earth and heaven).

We are all the sons and daughters of G*D.

Look at the vagina between his feet. The road led straight to the temple.

**

Oriana;

I think you are amazingly right on about the similarity of the hands to the fimbriae of the fallopian tubes. And you are of course totally right about Christ being the sacrifice – that’s the official view (the raising of the host –hostia means “victim”). Saturated with the image of the crucifixion, we may forget the continuity with the archaic tradition of sacrificing an animal to a particular deity (in the Jerusalem temple, the altars flowed with the blood of sacrificial lambs; the Catholic mass is based on the Hebrew animal sacrifice ritual).

I don't think this kind of response was possible in 1960, say, except in small circles of mythology scholars. When I arrived, America struck me as giving lip-service, at least, to religion as it was a century ago, I imagine. Europeans get freaked out by American religiosity. But I saw right away that the real god was money (this was my first exposure to commercials! I immediately saw them as similar to Communist propaganda, but more pernicious in the sense of their hidden power to mold the psyche), and the religious talk was the required smokescreen. The more worship of the golden calf (note the statue of the golden bull on Wall Street), the more "God Bless America" invocations.

I suspect that Joseph Campbell's popularization of world mythology, along with the goddess movement, affected the more educated people, making them see the religion they were brought up in a wider global perspective – an important step toward detachment. The rediscovery of the divine feminine was of course another very important development.

Eastern religions go beyond seeing seeing you as the children of God. The Eastern view has always been that, like Christ, we are both human and divine. The closest the West has been able to come to this is by speaking of the “divine spark” within each human being. Only recently Father Keating, a Benedictine monk who has studied Buddhism, began saying that “our deepest self is Christ.” Milosz might agree with that; the difference is that Milosz wants the human self totally preserved, and not only the divine self. I am afraid we have to see this as wishful thinking, and simply try to make the best of life while it lasts, including enjoying the little eccentricities that make each person unique and precious. Hoping for a paradise (or even simply preservation) elsewhere only takes our energy away from trying to maximize  what blessings we do have. 

Dali: Christ of Saint John of the Cross; note the somewhat fimbriae-like fingers

MILOSZ AT THE GATES OF HEAVEN

     Czeslaw Milosz, Krakow 2002. Photo: Judyta Papp


AN ALCOHOLIC ENTERS THE GATES OF HEAVEN

What kind of man I was to be you’ve known since the beginning,

since the beginning of every creature.

It must be horrible to be aware, simultaneously,

of what is, what was,

and what will be.

I began my life confident and happy,

certain that the Sun rose every day for me

and that flowers opened for me every morning.

I ran all day in an enchanted garden.

Not suspecting that you had picked me from the Book of Genes

for another experiment altogether.

As if there were not proof enough

that free will is useless against destiny.

Under your amused glance I suffered

like a caterpillar impaled on the spike of a blackthorn.

The terror of the world opened itself to me.

Could I have avoided escape into illusion?

Into a liquor which stopped the chattering of teeth

and melted the burning ball in my breast

and made me think I could live like others?

I realized I was wandering from hope to hope

and I asked you, All Knowing, why you torture me.

Is it a trial like Job’s, so that I call faith a phantom

and say: You are not, nor do your verdicts exist,

and the earth is ruled by accident?

Who can contemplate

simultaneous, a-billion-times-multiplied pain?

It seems to me that people who cannot believe in you

deserve our praise.

But perhaps because you were overwhelmed by pity,

you descended to the earth

to experience the condition of mortal creatures.

Bore the pain of crucifixion for a sin, but committed by whom?

I pray to you, for I do not know how not to pray.

Because my heart desires you,

though I do not believe you would cure me.

And so it must be, that those who suffer will continue to suffer,

praising your name.

~ Czeslaw Milosz, This, 2000

**

Sober Reader, you yawn: yet another famous poet turns out to have been an alcoholic. “Heaven is the third vodka” – should we even bother discussing what for non-alcoholics is sheer nonsense? And is it really true that great writers need a “charismatic flaw,” as the literary critic Leslie Fiedler claimed, that flaw generally being dependence on alcohol?

Milosz writes: “My real drinking began in earnest in occupied Warsaw with my future wife Janka and Jerzy Andrzejewski (author of Ashes and Diamond) . . .  I drank a lot, but always took care to separate time for work from time for letting go . . .  Alas, too many generations of my ancestors drank for me to have been free from the urge for the bottle.” (Milosz’s ABC, p. 18)

The fact that Milosz had the self-discipline to separate work and drinking possibly accounts for his amazing creativity in old age. Or maybe it was the positive emotions generated by the Nobel Prize when he was almost seventy, receiving recognition and adulation at last. I prefer not to delve into this puzzle, except for acknowledging how inspiring it always is to find a writer who in his or her old age experiences a creative blossoming rather than a decline. Instead, I am interested in the acutely bitter tone of this unique poem. Is this Job speaking, subtly accusing the Old One (as Einstein liked to refer to God)? Let’s not forget that Milosz is a metaphysical poet, and can provide us with a certain metaphysical shiver when we consider the kind of cruel deterministic theology that is still very powerful, while progressive Christian theologies remain anemic.

“An Alcoholic Enters the Gates of Heaven” is especially interesting in the light of the recent prediction by a fundamentalist preacher, Harold Camping (a happy camper, since he regards himself as one of those predestined to taste paradise) that the Last Judgment would take place Saturday May 21st at 6 PM (Eastern Standard Time, I think). I have also just read an interesting summary of crucifixion-centered theologies versus progressive theologies. The preacher who was predicting the end of the world belongs to the first tradition, of Christ seen both as a sacrificial victim, a "sin sacrifice," and – this seems an egregiously un-Christian concept – as the ultimate judge who will accept the chosen few and hurl billions of souls into eternal torment.

Progressive theologies, on the other hand, are fascinated by early Christianity that emphasized agape (loving kindness; a community of affection) and paradise rather than hell. The basic tenet of progressive theologies is that the Second Coming is the birth of Christ Consciousness within us and among us, in the global community. We are here to build the kingdom of God on earth. God intends all souls to be saved. Paradise is here and now.

Alas, progressive theologians do not seem to have the PR resources commanded by the “blood of the Lamb/Armageddon” theologies. The only time there seemed to be true hope for progressive theologies was when Rabbi Kushner’s famous book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, became a best-seller. Kushner posited a deity with limited powers, one who neither causes nor prevents cancer, heart attacks, tsunamis, and other disasters. God does not decide which child will get leukemia, or who will grow up to be an alcoholic. Some evil is the work of natural laws (these days, an earthquake is rarely called an “act of God”); other kinds of evil are the work of man. Afterwards, everything depends on our response: do we curse and despair and can’t move on, or do we summon the strength to transcend the tragedy? Faith is one of the resources that can increase people’s strength to endure and recover. (Twelve-step programs also come to mind.)

Alas, Milosz was brought up in old-time Catholicism. Even though he forayed into such unorthodox theologians as Swedenborg and Simone Weil, he could not accept the notion that God’s power is limited and it wasn’t God who planted alcoholic genes in a particular individual: it just happened. The first lines of the poem tell us that God knew who’d be an alcoholic “since the beginning of every creature,” i.e. since the moment of creation. Predestination? Yes. A Calvinist doctrine, is has wormed its way into any theology which agrees with the statement, “Everything that happens is the will of God.” And if the belief in omniscience, including the knowledge of everything that will happen, is the required trait of divine perfection, then logic grimly leads to the conclusion that only predestination can account for omniscience. Everything was decided for eternity at the moment of creation. And countless millions were predestined to become alcoholics.

What kind of man I was to be you’ve known since the beginning,

since the beginning of every creature.

I remember my father’s saying that the only way out of these theological conundrums is those religions where the gods have limited knowledge and limited power. This idea has been around for a long time, certainly long enough for Milosz to have heard of it. But when the doctrines of omnipotence and omniscience are drummed into a child’s mind, reinforced with the fear of eternal damnation is you dare question dogma, it is difficult to shake off toxic beliefs. It seems to me that Milosz caused himself untold anguish by not being able to liberate himself from the toxic theology of “old-time religion.”

True, the Catholic Church emphasizes free will. I don’t remember the word “predestination” being ever used in my catechism classes. In fact the existence of evil was explained in a simple and powerful way: “Because God has granted man free will.” Thus God will allow genocide rather than interfere with man’s free will. Case closed. It’s only the more intellectual Catholics who ponder omniscience, connect the dots, and arrive at the moral monstrosity of predestination.

It is interesting that in this poem Milosz does not use the capital “You.” Maybe the god who predestines so much suffering doesn’t deserve to be capitalized. In fact, already in the second stanza, the poet winces at the idea of what it must be like to be an omniscient god who knows what will happen since he planned it down to the smallest detail. Milosz startles the reader by announcing that it must be horrible to be God:

It must be horrible to be aware, simultaneously,

of what is, what was,

and what will be.

~ and later

Who can contemplate

simultaneous, a billion-times-multiplied pain?

and then the stanza that is bound to shock the pious:

It seems to me that people who cannot believe in you

deserve your praise.

But the pathos of the poem lies in the personal part:

I began my life confident and happy . . .

I ran all day in an enchanted garden.

Not suspecting that you had picked me from the Book of Genes

for another experiment altogether.

As if there were not proof enough

that free will is useless against destiny.

Note also:

Under your amused glance I suffered

like a caterpillar impaled on the spike of a blackthorn. [emphasis mine]

The experiment of making someone an alcoholic somehow amuses this kind of God, even though the results are known in advance. Maybe God would be bored if the world were filled with goodness. He wants to be entertained with some people’s drunken antics, their remorse, their broken promises. If the alcoholic’s wife and children suffer, that’s “collateral damage.”

The speaker wonders if perhaps he is like Job, being tested to see not so much if he’ll curse God (cursing God would imply that God exists), but, in the modern context, if he’ll become an atheist and decide that the world is ruled by accident.

I asked you, All Knowing, why you torture me.

It is a trial like Job’s, so that I call faith a phantom

and say: You are not, nor do your verdicts exist,

and the earth is ruled by accident?

The God who performs such experiments, having already predestined their outcome, the God who can contemplate pain multiplied billions of times, does not appear to be synonymous with love. Let me quote the startling lines again:

It seems to me that people who cannot believe in you

deserve your praise.

The poet then ponders the possibility that God is not an amused sadist, but is overwhelmed by pity instead. The proof of it is crucifixion

for a sin, but committed by whom?

By Adam and Eve? Is it the old “ransom” theology here, demanding that someone must pay with blood for the first humans’ having dared to reach for knowledge? Or is it the sum of the collective sin, all the sins committed in the past and present, and the sins about to be committed in the future? The whole obsession with sin seems a monstrosity.

Nevertheless, Milosz decides that atheism would be impossible for him

Because my heart desires you,

though I do not believe you would cure me.

Here Milosz falls into his own trap, since if God happened to predestine his cure, then the cure would certainly happen. So “I do not believe you would cure me” stems from some bitter intuition that cannot be rationally explained.

Milosz knows that faith rests on emotional need, not on reason. And thus, like Job, he decides that the solution is to praise the author of the suffering. Thus he joins the community of those who “continue to suffer, / praising your name.”

Czeslaw, I want to scream, even the gospels provide a less deterministic and sin-obsessed scenario. For instance, in Matthew 25: 31 and onward, we see that the Last Judgment separates not the sinless from the sinful, but those who did good works such as feeding and clothing the poor and visiting the sick from those who did not perform such kind deeds. Thus, at least according to St. Matthew, doing good is the criterion for admission to heaven. Long live orthopraxy (right conduct) as opposed to the Protestant doctrine of “by faith alone” (sola fide). I have always praised the Catholic church for maintaining that faith without works is dead: “For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also” (James 2:26).

Nevertheless, we are still stuck with the existence of eternal punishment, even if the non-doers of good somehow deserve it. The hellfire that is the foundation of traditional Christianity remains a problem. The current Pope, a former Grand Inquisitor in charge of maintaining the purity of the doctrine, has changed the definition of hell to a state of mind in which a human being is separated from God. Thus, hell can be experienced here on earth (no one would argue with that), and it need not be eternal. It seems that almost everyone experiences both hell and heaven right here on earth, and several times at that. Swedenborg’s idea that a soul can decide to leave hell for heaven makes intuitive sense.

And simply dropping the idea of predestination, even if it implies no omniscience, would cleanse God of the charge of cruelty. No need to posit an “amused glance.” Karl Barth, regarded as one of the greatest theologians who ever lived, rejected immutable predestination at the moment of creation because it would negate grace and Christ’s power of redemption. (It puzzles me that Milosz would not be of the same persuasion. Is not believing that God would cure him equivalent to the sin of despair?)


Likewise, if we assume the atheist position, the universe may be indifferent, but at least it does not watch our suffering with an amused glance.

Besides, both chaos theory and quantum theory cast doubt on the deterministic universe. It can seriously be doubted if Milosz’s genes were determined in the first nanosecond of the Big Bang. As for the so-called genetic lottery, neither malice nor kindness was involved, no Job-like experiment and no amusement – and we are learning that DNA is not destiny.

Furthermore, Milosz did admire and accept Sartre’s “philosophy of freedom.” One of its main tenets is that the present changes the past. We know that human memory is meaning-based, and that meaning is subject to evolution and insight. This is what allowed Milosz his escape from depression by “escaping forward.” There may be no consolation, but there is work to be done. It’s pointless to be stuck in the Middle Ages, wasting time on theological conundrums. And besides, as the title indicates, even an alcoholic can enter heaven. For me, this means heaven right here, right now – right this moment as I am typing these words, knowing they might be helpful to someone – or at least interesting. And even apart from that, and in spite of aches and pains and dissatisfactions, there is an elementary pleasure in existing.


Actually, this poem interests me not because of its presentation of old-time theology, but because I see a wider meaning that has nothing to do with religion. I see it as somewhat related to Jack Gilbert’s “A Brief for the Defense,” which also deals with the existence of enormous suffering in the world. Great poets and writers frequently grapple with the problem of evil, of innocent suffering, and that is one reason we regard them as great.

The question need not be whether to praise God, but whether to continue to affirm life in spite of suffering. One thing that a writer can do is fully acknowledge and lament suffering, but also juxtapose it with something good. Even if the world ends on some fine Saturday, we can still take delight in the blossoming jacarandas and whatever other fragments of paradise are within our sight. “We must risk delight,” as Gilbert puts it. That, perhaps, is the greatest piety.

Milosz did know how to risk delight. Poems of his that people tend to love most are not Augustinian torments, but an acknowledgment that we do the best we can and that life is a gift, and our cup runneth over:

GIFT

A day so happy.
Fog lifted early. I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over the honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw blue sea and sails.

Berkeley, 1971

“Gift” is one of Milosz’s Blakean songs of innocence, at least borderline transcendent: a day in which the ordinary earthly life is a paradise – if only we forget the evil we have suffered, do not feel guilty or embarrassed by our past, and envy no one. To see the birds, the flowers, the ocean with no thought of the self – “if the doors of perceptions were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite” – that, sages agree, is paradise. And if we experience enough paradise here on earth, perhaps the longing for some vague heaven will lose at least some of its appeal. If not, then we have to seriously reconsider the concepts of God and the kind of afterlife that would be something else than floating in the clouds, “doing nothing and nothing forever.” That can never be a poet’s dream. A poet takes the gift of his/her life and transforms it into a gift for others. That would be heaven enough for me. 

                                        Milosz, Krakow 2001. Photo: Judyta Papp

**

You may be wondering how Milosz managed to live to be ninety-three, sharp and productive to the end. It’s possible that alcohol actually helped him. Recent studies on drinking have come up with politically incorrect results. It turns out that even heavy drinkers outlive tee-totalers. The effect of alcohol in preventing heart disease and stroke is greater than the effect of measures such as exercise, diet, and statins.

Benefits of moderate drinking (1-2 glasses a day; daily alcohol consumption is more beneficial than less frequent drinking) includes decreased incidence of heart attack and stroke, diabetes, arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, dementia, several major cancers, osteoporosis, gallstones, kidney stones, thrombosis, and enlarged prostate.

Large recent studies have established that people who drink 1-2 glasses a day have the lowest death rate from all causes.

It doesn't have to be red wine since the benefits are due to alcohol per se. Alcohol is anti-oxidant and anti-inflammatory, and dilates blood vessels better than anything else. It also raises the levels of serotonin.

Why even heavy drinkers tend to live longer than tee-totalers is unclear. Stress reduction may be the main factor.

                                                 Photo: Judyta Papp

But there is heavy habitual drinking, and then there is the tragedy of progressive, out-of-control alcoholism. Binge drinking, and/or drinking the first thing is the morning, are signs of advanced alcoholism, with its shortened life expectancy. Given that Milosz lived to be ninety-three, and continued to be productive, my guess is that his alcoholism, while undeniable (“Heaven is the third vodka” – take that, all you theologians who would define heaven!), was not of the worst kind. The pious may take it as a sign of grace. I am simply grateful that Milosz had a wonderfully productive old age, creating fascinating poems.


(My thanks to Jon Wesick for enlightening me on chaos theory and quantum mechanics in regard to the concept of the deterministic universe) 

Michael (from Walker Pass, waiting for the snow to melt so he can resume hiking on Pacific Crest Trail):

If one must order life by shuffling pieces around on the game board called god, predestination is a worthy fiction, as are a 7-day creation, sin, heaven, and hell. If. Feats of creativity at playing this game are written on every dusty page of Christianity. If. But my impatience is large. I cannot sit quietly by watching men and women earnestly working out the next move when the game board itself should be scrapped. We need to begin again. 

Oriana:

I completely agree with you. In Wisdom of the Psyche, (thanks for recommending the book), Ginette Paris says more than once that it’s still very soon after the death of God, and it will take a few more generations before we (at least the Western civilization) are done mourning and fully concentrate on living this life well, doing our best to create at last an approximate paradise of beauty and affection and meaningful work right here on earth. 

Doing away with both predestination and divine punishment was announced also by Rabbi Kushner in his When Bad Things Happen to Good People. It is possible to develop a spirituality without a cruel, monstrous being who in the moment of creation decided which child to make leukemic, which deformed, which doomed to struggle with alcoholic genes, and so on. Nor is everything that happens to be seen as either punishment or reward. The same goes for the equally monstrous law of karma that exacts retribution for something done during a lifetime four hundred years ago. I love the way both Kushner’s and Paris’s books praise the healing power of human affection.

I think we also have to deal with the human, all too human yearning for the absolute. It took me a while to realize that aside from facts such as “the earth is round,” we simply can’t speak of absolute truth. We speak of points of view, perspectives, interpretations. I used to yearn for a divine voice (or any voice of superior wisdom) to explain the meaning of my life to me. Then with the suddenness that tends to accompany insight, I realized that there is no such thing as THE meaning of my life. We have a meaning-seeking brain, however, and mine set to work in no time to provide possible meanings, depending on the point of view.

Oddly enough, that turned out to be more satisfying than hearing some variation of that “divine voice” I used to yearn for. If I were to hear that voice now, I’d immediately reply, “From whose point of view?” Anything absolute now strikes me as constricting and authoritarian. But it takes a lot of life experience to stop waiting for THE answer, THE book, THE man, THE job. The list varies somewhat from person to person, but the notion of the absolute and of magical, all-satisfying person or condition underlies it all. Not all people manage to outgrow the yearning for the absolute; there are octogenarians still waiting for their Prince or Princess instead of loving the imperfect partner they are lucky to have. But as ideas such as multiple perspectives, more than one vocation per lifetime, partial truth and partial satisfaction make their way into the collective psyche, there is at least hope for more maturity and tolerance. 

Hyacinth:

My favorite poem by Milosz is “The Gift”. Milosz touches me in some of his lines and these are the most lyrical and touching. I read a quote from Thoreau this morning: "My truest, serenest moments are too still for emotion; they have woolen feet." That I understand: these moments of silence of the "soul." There are certain meadows and moments that have "woolen feet" for me too.

Oriana:

Let me shamelessly digress with this precious quotation about Thoreau:

Alcott and George William Curtis were both visiting Mr. Ricketson, and interesting discourse had gone on at the dinner, Thoreau talking very well. After dinner, Alcott and Curtis went with Mr. Ricketson to his “Shanty” for serious talk, but the others went into the parlor to consult some bird book. Mrs. Ricketson, playing at her piano, struck into “The Campbells are Coming.” Thoreau put down his book and began to dance—a sylvan dance, as of a faun among rocks and bushes in a sort of labyrinthine fashion, now leaping over obstacles, then advancing with stately strides, returning in curves, then coming back in leaps. Alcott, coming in, stood thunderstruck to see “Thoreau acting his feelings in motion” as he called it. Alcott did not have that kind of feelings. 

Edward Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau as Remembered by a Young Friend, 1917 (the youngest son of the famous Emerson)

“The Gift” is a timeless, wonderful poem. I hope Milosz had many more of those moments, and didn’t really lose sleep over predestination – though we can’t be sure. A nasty theology can do so much damage. I mean chiefly the classic Calvinism with its “total depravity” and “limited election.” It horrifies me that people went for it.

Mary:

It's not surprising that Milosz lived with alcoholism. So many poets have mood disorders and self-medicate. I recognized something bipolar in Milosz when I discovered his work in my teens, though I didn't yet know that word or description. There is something about alcoholic thinking that meshes with the theology of this poem – the fear, guilt, shame. At the same time, I wonder, why did humans evolve to have genes for alcoholism?

Biologists have found adaptive purposes for other disease genes. Two copies of the sickle cell gene create sickle cell anemia, but one copy, like my half African American grandson has, confers resistance to malaria. And even when people end up with genetic diseases – not all but a part of the suffering is due to disability not as some predetermined biological damnation to an irredeemably horrible life, but as the construction of an excluding, unaccommodating culture. I have a number of genetically based disorders – a big reason for my fatigue – and have thought about this issue a lot. Maybe there are dimensions to it that go beyond the individual's suffering, intense as that can be.

Oriana:

Alcoholism among creative people is certainly no surprise. Neither is the bipolar disorder. I can understand the temptation, even among some professionals, to associate mood disorders and alcoholism with creativity. But I’ve come across too many alcoholics who were NOT creative (reminding me of “Artists are such fools.” – “There are so many fools who are not artists) to make me swallow the supposed connection between alcohol and the “inner fire” of creativity.

True, creative and high-achieving people very often have something at least partly abnormal about them, something that makes them outsiders who deeply understand the tragic dimension of human existence. But alcoholism is a particularly destructive way of being abnormal, most often leading to premature creative decline.  Milosz’s alcoholism was of the fascinating “disciplined” sort. The capacity for self-restraint and persistent, disciplined effort are also supposed to be genetic. Perhaps Milosz should have been mainly thankful for his genes. I feel the poem presents an unfortunate, mistaken perspective. Imagine if we had here a poem of thanksgiving instead! Milosz’s poems of gratitude also happen to be more lyrical.

I’ve come across the theory that there is less alcoholism among Mediterranean peoples because they have lived with alcohol for thousands of years, and the worst alcoholics – those who start drinking heavily already in their teens – just didn’t get to live long enough to reproduce in a significant way, so those genes got “weeded out” over many centuries (hence the myth that there are no Jewish alcoholics). In Northern Europe – so the theory goes – not enough time has elapsed, and now alcoholics get to live longer, etc. These theorists also point out to the Native American population: look what happened when whisky was introduced. 

I don’t know if I buy that, but the persistence of alcoholism has certainly been one of the genetic puzzles. My guess is that it is not purely genetic. As you say, culture has something to do with it. A repressive, stress-causing culture, one that uses “fear, guilt, shame” to manipulate people, creates the conditions when “release” is of tremendous value. There are certainly alcoholics in every social class, but it seems to me that the association with poverty and the “social bottom” is real. I’ve been to places in rural America where it’s just scary to see those hollow faces and burned-out eyes, especially in women.

In terms of “side benefits,” it’s been pointed out that early on in the disease, thanks to having reliable stress release, an alcoholic has an advantage over the “normie,” and can do better in a stressful job. Drinking is easier than meditation or physical exercise. I am terrifically grateful for having been spared the alcoholic genes, so I was forced to find other means of escape – or I’d probably be dead by now. Fortunately, my love of books and ideas created a sufficiently rewarding alternate reality for me. Once I had a marvelous dream about having decided to commit suicide and walking around a (generic) college campus and saying goodbye to strangers. Then, in the dream, I stood in front of the library, glassy, all lit up. And I woke up in awe, repeating, “So many books! So many books!” And of course I have writing too. I am so blessed.

Stress reduction, art education, enjoyable physical exercise, affordable mental health services – wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had more of these? There’d still be alcoholism and other substance abuse, but to a lesser degree, I think, since the amount of stress is a well-established factor. I think lives might be saved. And no toxic theology please.