MILOSZ: AN UNHAPPY LIFE?

The Milky Way gladdened them
like a birch-lined road.
       ~ Czeslaw Milosz

Asked on his 90th birthday if he'd had a happy life, Milosz replied, “No.”

(I confess I almost hate going on with this post; how could my many, too many words possibly match the eloquence of this reply?)

One Polish writer commented that Milosz had the luxury of admitting to having had an unhappy life because he’d attained the pinnacle of success: the Nobel Prize (1980). He could afford to say that because he’d never be seen as a failure. To be inundated with admiration and adulation, and then to say you have not had a happy life -- now that is a regal gesture, the defiance not of petty clerk, the Man from the Underground, but of a literary celebrity. Ungracious perhaps, but it takes being part of the elite. As Oscar Wilde remarked, “It’s always nice to be invited and not to come.”

Still, one doesn’t say, “I’ve had an unhappy life” just for the fun of it. It’s not anything to be proud of, once past the young and foolish stage when suffering can be romanticized. The young can be forgiven for being unhappy. But continuing past youth in the state of unhappiness is a kind of failure. A wise man, a mature man should master the art of contentment.

Yet Dickens was not happy in his personal life either. What of it, we may say -- maybe the unhappiness was part of the drive to write those great novels with comic scenes precariously poised over almost unbearable darkness and cruelty.

Was Lenin a happy person? Was Lincoln? Dante?


THE SENSE OF WORTHLESSNESS; WRITING AS REDEMPTION

Almost 20 years after winning the Nobel Prize, and consequently receiving an enormous amount of adulation both in the U.S. and in Poland, Milosz wrote this:

Meditating on my hereditary flaws, I have moments of relief any time I think of my grandfather; I had to have taken something from him, so I cannot be completely worthless.

His grandfather was a decent but rather ordinary man; Milosz writes about him in the brief prose piece, “My Grandfather Sigismund Kunat,” in THIS, his last volume, 2000.  And in an earlier (1986) volume, Unattainable Earth, he states:

From the beginning writing was for me a means of redeeming my true or imaginary worthlessness.

I have some empathy with this view that writing can redeem the badness, the worthlessness of a writer as a human being. We are raised in the ethos of altruism. We are supposed to serve others, live for others. Yet every committed artist realizes that he must be aloof at least some of the time in order to protect his creative solitude against the demands of the family, for instance. A writer has to put writing ahead of everything else in his or her life, including friends and family. If he does not, if he lacks the strength to shut the door and forbid anyone to enter his sacred space, he is not a real writer.

Bukowski put it best:

writers are indecent people
they live unfairly
saving the main part for the page

jesus christ would have been
a duller writer than Theodore Dreiser
jesus christ would have been a
very lousy writer

the beard and hair fit
but he was too good at
conversations and
miracles

a good human being may save the world
so the bastards can keep creating art
if you read this after I am long dead
it means I made it
and
it’s your turn now
to misuse your wife
abuse your children
love thyself
live off the funds of others

dislike all art created before and
during your time,
and dislike or even hate humanity
singly or en masse.

bastard, if you read this after I am long dead
shove me out of here. I
probably wasn’t that
good.

~ Charles Bukowski, from “Measurements from the Creation Coffin”

*

And here we are, reading this long after Bukowski is dead, and know that he’s telling the truth. No writer would want his daughter or sister to marry a writer. That much conscience is still left: the thought that someone dear to you might get involved with a writer turns you into Munch’s Scream.

But on the redemptive side, there is the hope that our work will be of use.
A friend of mine said that she always misreads the title of Adrienne Rich’s famous poem, “Diving into the Wreck,” as DYING INTO THE WORK. This is the death of the ego in the service of honesty. If you speak honestly enough, with no respect for things that don’t deserve respect, you may, with luck, say something worth saying.


DECADES OF LACK OF RECOGNITION

Until he won the Nobel, Milosz was practically unknown as a poet in the US, and little known in Poland. He wrote about this lack of recognition in the poem “Magic Mountain”:

So I won’t have power, won’t save the world?
Fame will pass me by, no tiara, no crown?
Did I then train myself, myself the Unique,
To compose stanzas for gulls and sea haze,
To listen to the foghorns blaring down below
Until it passed. What passed? Life.

Fame came to him when he was 69. Until then, as Robert Hass put it, “He was living in intolerable obscurity and loneliness. He had to invent the idea that there was still somebody to read his poems.”

(A shameless digression: once I realized that my idea of happiness was precisely being alone in a room, that amounted to the discovery that I’ve had a fabulous life! Solitude is a rare privilege for which I am infinitely grateful.)


AND AN UNHAPPY FAMILY LIFE

I love two things in life: gossip and metaphysics. ~ Anna Akhmatova

Milosz made no secret of his unhappy first marriage. He met Janina Dluska (Janka) in the late thirties; both of them worked for the Polish radio in Warsaw. Like Milosz at the time, she was leftist and anti-clerical (Milosz objected to the nationalist and anti-Semitic right-wing Catholicism in pre-war Poland. But he never lost his passionate interest in metaphysics, and was beginning to see hope in religion). They got married in 1944. Janina died in 1986 after suffering for ten years from a spinal tumor that led to almost total paralysis (she was bed-ridden), depression and paranoia (some sources refer to the dementia as Alzheimer’s disease).

Both Milosz and his wife were alcoholics. He famously said, “Heaven is the third vodka.” But excess of alcohol is worse for women, who detoxify it poorly, especially past the age of forty; women alcoholics tend to go downhill much faster than men.

One of the startling things Milosz said was, “For Janka, my winning the Nobel Prize was a tragedy.”

A few of his poems also make it plain that he had affairs, but those poems do not express love for his partners. Rather, he seems to feel sorry for the women.

In one source I learned that the main reason he left Vilnius, a city he loved, for Warsaw, where he already felt in exile, was that in Vilnius he got a woman pregnant; he didn’t want to marry her. He always felt guilty about this abandonment. Later, when he was teaching at Berkeley, he even suggested to a Polish-speaking graduate woman assistant who was about to make a trip to Poland that she introduce herself as his illegitimate daughter.

To make things worse, his younger son began to suffer from mental illness.

In 1992 Milosz married his second wife, Carol Thigpen, a former associate dean at Emory University, thirty years younger than Milosz. She unexpectedly died of leukemia in 2002.

I don’t know just how affectionate Milosz’s second marriage was. But I’m sure there was a huge gap between them, not through anyone’s fault. In a partner we seek someone who can know us and understand us. Marrying an American woman who was much younger meant facing unavoidable differences in background.

In a number of poems Milosz seems to hint that the right woman for him would come from one of the white manors in Lithuania, and be of the same generation. They would share the same native culture, language, landscape. She’d be a dryad almost, with milky skin and chestnut hair. And he also knew that real women who grew up in those white manors likely met with a tragic fate, deported to slave labor in Siberia or Kazakhstan.

Still, Milosz’s second marriage was probably vastly more happy than the first one. How uncanny that the second wife would also succumb to a terrible illness. But perhaps that’s not so unusual when you live in the shadow of a dominant partner. 

THE FAILURE OF CATHOLICISM TO PROVIDE COMFORT

Nor was the official Catholicism, which Milosz left in his teens and to which he later returned (for political reasons, I strongly suspect), a safe emotional harbor. In his essay, “On the Turmoil of Many Religions,” Milosz says:

Today the “turn to religion” probably is less social conformism than fear: let us react to the collapse of traditional norms as if everything religion, the guardian of mystery, teaches us were truth. You suspend your judgment and sing along with the others in church, precisely because you doubt your ability to unravel all those intricate questions. Only I have difficulties, only my mind remains empty no matter how many times I try to extract something from my imagination. The others here beside me have no such difficulties. Though I will not admit it to myself, each of them is thinking the same about me. And thus collective belief accumulates from the disbelief of individuals. (emphasis mine)
He also wrote:

The Catholic upbringing I received imposed a severely repressive morality. This is one reason why I tend to distrust my own judgments. I can say nothing good about repression, which crippled me in some ways and poisoned me with pangs of conscience.

How well I know this poisoning of everything with obsession over sin and the supposedly innate human wickedness that dooms us to hell, and the pangs of conscience over minor and at times entirely imaginary sins! Bishop Spong’s definition of religion as a “guilt-inducing control mechanism” applies here. Yes, guilt, shame and the threat of eternal punishment -- those tools were used incessantly to poison childhood’s natural inclination to enjoy life.

The conviction that you are a morally bad person who deserves eternal damnation is hard to uproot. That’s why religions who instill it in children are emotionally abusive.

(Another shameless digression: I love the contrast between Protestantism and Catholicism in the chart below: “If I work harder shit won’t happen” versus “If shit happens, I deserve it.”)


SETTEMBRINI AND NAPHTA

Milosz refused to be an orthodox Catholic, espousing the positions of the church. Already in his youth he wrote, “In a Roman Catholic country intellectual freedom always goes hand in hand with atheism.” Even after his return to Catholicism he saw himself as a heretic, with tendencies toward Gnosticism. He always refused to call himself a Catholic writer.

The problem of evil bothered Milosz to the end. In one of his late poems, “An Alcoholic Enters the Gates of Heaven,” he says, addressing god, “It seems to me that people who cannot believe in you / deserve your praise.” He didn’t accept Dostoyevski’s idea that it’s better to give up the truth than Christ. He wanted to get through to the truth, no matter the pain.

Milosz was fascinated by the Gnostics (the world was created by an evil demiurge, not the real god) and by Simone Weil. He was leaning toward Weil, who thought that god did create the world, but turned it over to the rule of Satan (the “prince of this world”), and never interfered with the laws of nature. So much for prayers of petition. Milosz also believed -- or at least stated the view -- that the world was ruled by Satan.

This non-interfering god (who reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Church of God the Utterly Indifferent”) could, however, send grace. After she had a couple of mystical experiences, likely brought about by her fasting (Weil was an anorexic; she died of self-starvation), her faith seems to have become quite intense. She believed that god lived just beyond earth’s atmosphere, in interplanetary space. Thus she too seems hopelessly dated, in spite of her admirable common sense -- of course the laws of physics are not going to be broken just because of a prayer.

Milosz never mentions having had mystical experiences. He was left with the perennial lack of evidence for god’s existence. Milosz knew only one thing with certainty: that no sign would be given. No statue in church would ever nod its head or move its hand, no matter how ardently he prayed -- he too had the common sense to believe in the laws of physics. At most, we may find the presence of god in human affection. But why involve god in it? Affection could be appreciated on its own merit, with credit going to the affectionate humans.

It’s interesting that in his early youth, Milosz experienced a Settembrini and Naphta (referring to the characters in Mann’s Magic Mountain) sort of combat for his soul. He had two mentors: a humanist and Latin scholar, and a priest who hated the world and the flesh. Milosz eventually had a violent disagreement with the priest and renounced Catholicism. In the end, however, he decided that optimistic rationalism could not be trusted. He’d seen so much evil and destruction that he desperately wanted god to exist, since that was a promise of the resurrection -- not just of the individual, but of all things that perished.

But can we truly say that the Jesuit won? No, Milosz became both Naphta and Settembrini. Though a public Catholic, he reserved the right to think for himself rather than blindly accept the doctrine. And though he turned away from Marxist philosophy, he was far from being right-wing. He detested nationalism, and decried the ugliness of commercialism and uncontrolled capitalism. He didn’t glorify the church, only the beauty of the earth.

Thus, neither Settembrini nor Naphta won the battle for the poet’s soul. Rather, he incorporated both. He was both a sensualist and an ascetic, a liberal rationalist and a pessimist who believed that the world was ruled by Satan. God, apparently beyond good and evil, allowed mass destruction; there was no atrocity that he’d prevent.

This is similar to Aleksander Watt’s mystical vision in a Soviet prison during WWII, which led to Watt’s conversion to Catholicism. Watt saw the world totally given over to the rule of Satan; but above it stretched the realm of a perfectly serene god.

Now, Catholicism does not see god as happy; on the contrary, Catholicism is obsessed with suffering and presents images of a suffering god. But the promise of a healing harmony has to be there somewhere. It should be noted that Milosz never mentioned having had a mystical experience or seeing an actual sign that god existed. However, he stated that we can choose to believe; reason rejects religion, but religion is based on feelings. 


VICTORY OVER DEPRESSION BY “ESCAPING FORWARD” INTO WORK

Milosz called his depression “delectatio morosa” -- a morbid pleasure in brooding. He had much to brood about. What helped him, he says, is learning from his friend, the Polish-born Swiss philosopher Jeanne Hersch, about existentialism as a philosophy of freedom.

In Native Realm, Milosz writes: “I am not what I am. My essence escapes me. It is a durable achievement of existential philosophy to remind us that we should not think of our past as definitely settled, for we are not a stone or a tree. In other words, my past changes every minute according to  the meaning given to it now, in this moment.”

“The present changes the past” is not an empty formula. The present changes our memory of the past. Memory is a reconstruction, and it continues to evolve. What we do today can change the way we perceive the past. Thus, sooner or later a writer usually recognizes that all his disasters are terrific material. For a writer, “even the bad is good.”

“The snare of happiness will never entangle you,” Milosz prophesied about his own happiness in one of his youthful poems. But it’s depression that is the real snare. Mild depression -- maybe we should call it just a “melancholy mood” -- can fuel creativity. Deep depression is paralyzing.

For Milosz, the first part of liberating himself from depression came from his love of nature:

I would never have been cured of it had it not been for the beauty of the earth. The clear autumn mornings in an Alsatian village surrounded by vineyards, the paths on an Alpine slope over the Isère River, rustling with dry leaves from the chestnut trees, or the sharp light of early spring on the Lake of Four Cantons near Schiller’s Rock, or a small river near Périgueux on whose surface kingfishers traced colored shadows of flight in the July heat–all this reconciled me with the universe and with myself.

Second, he was able to overcome the self-centeredness of depression by connecting with European culture: 

But it was not the same as it had been in America; it was not only nature that cured me. Europe herself gathered me in her warm embrace, and her stones, chiseled by the hands of past generations, the swarm of her faces emerging from carved wood, from paintings, from the gilt of embroidered fabrics, soothed me, and my voice was added to her old challenges and oaths in spite of my refusal to accept her split and her sickliness. Europe, after all, was home to me. And in her I happened to find help. ~ Milosz, “Tiger 2,” Native Realm, 293

And third but perhaps the most important, he threw himself into work: writing and teaching. My guess is that ultimately it was his focus on work that kept depression at bay. He ceased to brood about the past and focused on what lay in front of him and in the future:

The philosophy of freedom, practiced by existentialists, took over the classical methods of confessors and spiritual guides, precisely in that it advises us to direct our sight always ahead, not backwards. Largely thanks to its counsels, I stopped meditating and set about my work, which has always been to me an escape forward.

~ Czeslaw Milosz, Unattainable Earth, 121-122. (emphasis mine)

Actually the advice about dedicated work goes back all the way to Ecclesiastes. After deciding that everything is vanity, the Preacher nevertheless says, “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.” (Eccl 9:10).  (other versions translate “device” as “planning.”

The Preacher also speaks about putting on clean garments and enjoying life. This is similar to what we find in a more ancient source, the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh. Siduri, priestess of the waters Gilgamesh, tells the following to the king of Uruk:

. . . fill your belly with good things; day and night, night and day, dance and be merry, feast and rejoice. Let your clothes be fresh, bathe yourself in water, cherish the little child who holds your hand, and make your wife happy in your embrace; for this too is the lot of man.

In Gilgamesh it’s the little child that charms me. But it's interesting that Ecclesiastes adds the missing element, the pleasure of working with all your heart, in spite of the ultimate vanity (cf Freud on what is most important in life: "love and work"). 

Love in the sense of romantic love may not be available. It’s frightening to ponder Milosz’s family situation: a bed-ridden wife, a mentally ill son. One answer may be to try to be as affectionate as possible in spite of stress; being affectionate reduces stress. But we are barely beginning to study this. The other remedy is to “escape forward” into dedicated work. Focus on something challenging preempts worry and is healing to the brain.

*

Sometimes a change in circumstances can end depression. But usually what is required is a profound change in perspective. When I decided not to be depressed, my external life remained the same, except that I came to love it. As long as I am able to write, I am content. Reading about Milosz’s “escape forward” confirmed what I discovered about the healing nature of work.


A WORKER IN THE VINEYARD

What saved Milosz was longevity. He lived long enough not just to win the Nobel Prize, but to heal his wounds and conclude that there was some meaning to everything that happened: some lesson, some step in his development as a writer. He warns readers against the wishful tendency to believe that because something happened, it had to happen, and that it was somehow “for the best”; nevertheless, the older Milosz seems finally reconciled to his past. The suffering had its function, but there came a time to let go of the guilt, real and imaginary, and focus on the blessings. This is beautifully expressed in what is perhaps the best and most moving poem of Milosz’s old age:

LATE RIPENESS

Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year, 

I felt a door opening in me and I entered 
t
he 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.

*
 
As a humanist, I need to translate this poem into secular terms. We are more than ourselves: we are humanity. The vast majority of us are good at heart, and just by being ourselves we contribute to the advancement and welfare of many. If that sounds rather dry, then by all means let’s keep the image of the vineyard. 

 
THE PERSISTENCE OF CHILDHOOD

Between the ages of seven and ten I lived in perfect happiness on the farm of my grandparents in Lithuania . . . I lived without yesterday or tomorrow, in the eternal present . . . I was a little Adam, running all day in a garden under trees. ~ Milosz, “Happiness”

His happiness as “a little Adam” didn’t last, but his love of nature was to be life-long. It has been said that if we’ve been truly loved, we can never be completely unhappy. Perhaps once we’ve tasted paradise, we can’t be entirely unhappy either. In his essay "Happiness," written after visiting Lithuania at the age of 80, Milosz asserts that the experience of happiness in childhood retains a healing power throughout lifetime. Standing near the remains of his family estate, Milosz experienced that happiness in spite of everything:

"Much was going on inside me, and I was stunned by the strength of that current for which no name seemed adequate. It was like waking up from a long dream and becoming again the person whom I have never ceased to be. Long life, narrow escapes, my two marriages, children, my failures and triumphs, all flickered as if telescoped into a film running at a great speed. No, this is not a proper description, all all that existed in a big lump separated from me, placed in its own dimension of the past, while I was recovering my continuity from myself as a child to myself as an old man."
And he concludes:

"Then something happened -- and I must recognize that the myth of Ithaca stems from profound layers of human sensibility. I was looking at a meadow. Suddenly the realization came that during my years of wandering I had searched in vain for such a combination of leaves and flowers as was here, and that I have always been yearning to return. Or, to be precise, I understood this after a huge wave of emotion had overwhelmed me, and the only name I can give it now would be bliss."

He puts it more beautifully in this exquisite little lyric:

A MEADOW

It was a riverside meadow, lush, from before the day 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 eyes I absorbed luminescence.
And the scent garnered me, all knowing ceased.
Suddenly I felt I was disappearing and weeping with joy.

~ Czeslaw Milosz, Facing the River, 1995

IF MILOSZ WAS AN UNHAPPY ALCOHOLIC, HOW COME HE LIVED TO 93?

The answer is that Milosz was a writer first. His creativity came first -- his life of the mind. He lived long because he had something to live for. His "escape forward" into work was also an escape from early death.

Those who continue to be creative late in life show a longevity advantage. Their brain appears to reorganize to compensate for loss of speed. Creative work also generates positive emotions. This holds not just for the famous (Nobel Prize winners and Oscar winners tend to live longer), but also for those whose achievement is minor and fame local, if any. They write, paint, play music and so forth “for pleasure.” And pleasure -- deep, meaningful pleasure -- is vital for health.

Considering his immense creative output and his legendary vitality, I wonder if we should completely accept Milosz’s appraisal of his life as unhappy. After all, he spent most of his life doing the work he loved. And he also seems to have enjoyed teaching at Berkeley, even though he felt intellectual isolated among the leftist faculty. And I wasn’t surprised when a Polish poet told me, “Milosz really loved people.”

I think he became happier as he grew older, in his seventies and eighties. In Unattainable Earth, he writes from the perspective of being past seventy:

Love of life, passion for life. Perhaps one feels it also in one’s youth, but differently and with different words. One must liberate oneself, at least to some extent, from complexities, from taking one’s fate too much to heart, before being able to rejoice simply because one is alive among the living.

True, a disappointment in marriage is a sorrow, and alcoholism is certainly not a source of happiness. But in the end that’s not what will be remembered about Czeslaw Milosz. He will be known as someone who praised earthly life despite all the suffering he experienced and witnessed. And as someone who had an extraordinary, creative, and -- dare we say it? -- happy old age.

AN HOUR

Leaves glowing in the sun, zealous hum of bumblebees,
From afar, from somewhere beyond the river, echoes of lingering voices
And the unhurried sounds of a hammer gave joy not only to me.
Before the five senses were opened, and earlier than any beginning
They waited, ready, for all those who would call themselves mortals,
So that they might praise, as I do, life, that is, happiness.
**

John Guzlowski:

I wonder if he thought about happiness in his day to day life.

My experience is that only the truly unhappy, the clinically depressed, the lost children, think about happiness everyday.  The rest of us -- even those who are poor and hungry and lonely -- go on and on, not thinking much about what our feelings are, instead thinking about the jobs we have to do, the lives waiting for us at home after those jobs are done.

I suspect Milosz was like this. Even factoring in the dark moments of his life, he probably spent most of his time just doing what he enjoyed doing, what gave him satisfaction, if not happiness.

PS -- I love the picture of Milosz and the Pope. Milosz seems wonderfully aware of the ironies in his situation.

Oriana:

And the Pope too may have been aware of those ironies. He was regarded as pretty sophisticated. Let’s not forget that he changed the definition of heaven and hell, but he had to play a subtle game of daring to downgrade supernaturalism just so far but no further.

(By the way, I find it wonderful that the morally repugnant idea of hell as eternal torment is finally being discarded by progressive Christians.)

I agree with you about people’s going on without constantly questioning whether or not they are happy. Maybe happiness is never needing to ask yourself if you are happy. Maybe it's the elemental joy of existence -- “life, that is, happiness.”
”
The New Age slogan, “You deserve to be happy,” really gave me a pause. No way -- not according to what I was taught in catechism classes. In the eyes of the Catholic church, you most emphatically did NOT deserve to be happy, either here on earth or in heaven. You were a sinner and what you deserved (except for the pardon bought by the “bloody ransom” of the crucifixion) was eternal punishment.

By the way, I discuss this and more in my latest blog post:

http://oriana-poetry.blogspot.com/2013/08/are-humans-evil-by-nature.html

Milosz believed that humans were innately evil, and that man could do no good by his own powers. This is the foundation of the of doctrine of grace. You can find the refutation of this demeaning of human nature in my blog. (“Religion defames human nature; humanism praises the human potential.”)

A 90-YEAR-OLD FRIEND SAID SHE HAS "NOT ONE HAPPY MEMORY FROM LIFE"

Michael:

I don't hear Milosz's NO as eloquent.

I have a 90 year old friend who has said on many occasions that she has "not one happy memory from life."

Odd. She has achieved much by any standard and has (and had) many loving relationships.

I recognize her denial of happiness as the dialog of the depressive personality. Nothing more. No existential exploration is needed. The sadness here is that my friend and Milosz were never able to drown the deceptive, yet predictable voices of depression.
 --
 
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee. And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

~ Emily Dickinson

**
 
Oriana:

Milosz’s “No” was eloquent only because it came from a winner (I typed “sinner”) of the Nobel Prize. It’s as if he said, “Look, I won the greatest prize in the world, but if you think that winning the Nobel has anything to do with happiness, think again.”

On the other hand, photos of Milosz, and there are many, not to mention his poems and essays, and there are even more, seem to tell a different story: his life the usual mix of happiness and misery, with everything in between. And his old age was a time of great creative flowering; his diary, A Year of the Hunter, reveals an overwhelming richness. He had the proverbial energy of genius, and he needed it to deal with this richness.

His suffering and his joy (how many people get to win the Nobel Prize?) were perhaps more intense than those of a typical person -- but even here we can’t be sure. Our brain constructs happiness -- “contentment” might be a more accurate word. Studies found that a year after a very happy event (e.g. winning a lottery) or a very unhappy event (e.g. losing a limb), people tend to return to the level of contentment they had before the event. Dickinson was right: barring extremes, it’s more about our state of mind than the external circumstances.

Past a certain age, we know that no one ever gets everything they want -- and there is no special reason why we lose out on certain things. When it comes to the Big Three: love, fulfilling work, and health, an old saying claims you can have at most two of those, but never all three. “Deserve has nothing to do with it.”

But you are absolutely right about your 90-year-old friend’s depression-distorted perspective. Depression feeds on itself: we seek to enhance the sadness, often by thinking of yet another bad thing that happened to us in our late teens or early twenties (a period of life that is most vividly remembered). And once depression becomes a habit, the access to positive memories is blocked. I learned about this blockage when I experienced it; only later I discovered that it’s a typical depressive phenomenon. Nor can one receive love and affection -- it’s at odds with the depressive self-image as someone unloved and unappreciated, and this negative self-image is furiously defended -- how dare you say that my life is rich in friendship? I don’t have any friends; never had a single REAL friend in my WHOLE life.  And this is often said to a friend who’s trying to offer affection and consolation.

At the same time, not to be too hard on Milosz, I need to confess that if someone asked me, “Have you had a happy life?” -- my instant impulse would also be to say No. The memory of catastrophes and suffering is powerful. Luckily, I have regained access to memories of happy moments. It was the slowest part of the recovery, nothing like the instant effect of the paradigm shift. But at this point I am aware of my blessings, and even call myself lucky. And I’m lucky at long last to have realized just how lucky I am.
 

Hyacinth:

So sadly true, his comments on religions and life.

It broke my heart to hear him speak of his drinking.  I thought he was too sensitive and soulful to say that “Heaven is the third vodka.” So many poets suffer from doubt and taking all too seriously, and the resulting depression and addictions.

Oriana:

"Heaven is the third vodka" ~ it makes me shudder, that definition heaven. But to alcoholics, being drunk feels magical. A friend once told me, the glow of the first-time euphoria still lighting her face: “All anxieties are gone, all worries, all self-consciousness. You feel witty and brilliant, popular, a star. Life is wonderful and you are happy.”

I suspect that’s the meaning of “heaven is the third vodka” -- but only for an alcoholic. If you are genetically prone to anxiety and alcohol removes that anxiety more quickly and efficiently than anything else, I can see how being drunk seems “magical.”

You and I can't understand it -- it's not a normal experience. Of course we’ve had moments of happiness and even euphoria -- but not as a result of drinking. One reason I loved hiking was that care-free feeling -- at least partly a result of less oxygen, meaning less brain function, not enough for mulling over pedestrian worries. That constant chatter inside the head becomes less, and is blended with the chirping of birds and other sounds of nature -- the most exquisite music there is, at least while hiking. And later, no hangover -- just excellent sleep (exercise really is the best sleep inducer), so you feel great the next morning. That’s rather the opposite of the experience of getting drunk.

In order for addiction to develop, especially perhaps in the case of alcoholism (I think smoking is more socially influenced, and then nicotine is as addictive as heroin), there has to be a genetic susceptibility -- it always runs in the family. Milosz's mother drank, and other relatives (I don't quite remember, but he certainly stated alcoholism was in the family). And then on top of genes, there has to be enough stress, but then life always supplies that sooner or later. Alcohol is a fast-acting sedative -- all anxiety can be gone within minutes. It’s like Valium. And it raises serotonin.

But as alcoholism progresses, the reward is less and less, while the punishment now is “getting the shakes.” Brain damage, liver damage, heart-muscle damage . . . It’s amazing that Milosz lived as long as he did. But then Nobel Prize winners often do. Among actors, Oscar winners also live longer. It’s usually explained as an effect of increased social status. Apparently it’s not the increase in wealth. More likely it’s the sudden adulation. Milosz got plenty of that.

Hyacinth:

Perhaps I’m wrong, but don’t you find it crazy that a man of his intellect would accept predestination?

Oriana:

No, you're not wrong. It IS crazy that he fell for the most absurd deterministic metaphysics. Once you assume that everything that happens is god’s will, predestination (already in the instant of creation of the world) follows. Milosz must have been desperate at some point, wanting god to exist so much that all kinds of cruelties had to be accepted, including god's "experiment" in alcoholism. I think he wanted the afterlife so idiotically much (as if there would be something to do there for us) that a cruel god was better than none.

I can understand that his having witnessed massive destruction made him want to protect people and things from disappearing. Great art, including great literature, is a form of preservation, however imperfect. But that kind of preservation wasn’t enough for Milosz. He wanted everything restored: not just the birds he saw in childhood, but even the insects that sustained such a large population of birds. But everything changes. Somehow Milosz rebelled against this with all his being. He wasn’t interested in the immortality of the soul; to him the Christian promise was that the whole person would be restored, all the details and personality quirks.

What is crazy is that someone of his intelligence would not realize that of course any religion can make all kinds of attractive promises precisely to recruit followers. These promises are completely empty, but the priests can always say, “Not yet.”

I think the second reason Milosz fell into the trap of predestination was his poor knowledge of physics. At this point we accept probability rather than certainty. The future is not determined, at least not at the micro level of an individual. Also, evolution has progressed toward animals that have more and more freedom, rather than be “predestined.” So Milosz’s ignorance of modern science has done him in on that point. It’s sad that he was able to grasp the idea that the present changes the past, but wasn’t able to apply it more broadly, to rejoice in this “philosophy of freedom.” 

Scott:

Happiness is what all humans hope to attain. And those that constantly worry, obsess or strive for it usually don't find it. I can see where some would be attracted to the Buddhist philosophy of non striving and simple acceptance. As I've said before, it would be interesting to see what would result from a meeting of leading Quaker, Sufi and Zen leaders. They could start in Damascus!

Oriana:

I think the best guidance for happiness -- though I’d prefer the term CONTENTMENT -- is contained in Ecclesiastes. That wisdom goes back thousands of years. It says that nothing lasts, everything passes away, all is vanity, don’t count on an external reward -- there is no justice, the wicked prosper, etc. Sounds pretty bleak, but then we suddenly get to the advice to enjoy life to the fullest -- and to work in a dedicated manner. “Whatever thy hand finds to do, do it with all thy might” -- this is my #1 favorite sentence in the entire bible. Dedicated work has been my salvation.

And yes, there is wisdom in other traditions as well. I instantly liked Daoism and that part of Buddhism that warns against “striving.” This may seem like contradiction of Ecclesiastes, but I have it figured out in terms of both the creative process and other kinds of work. 

ARE HUMANS EVIL BY NATURE?

In February, 2012, I attended a lecture by the man honored by Time magazine as America’s “best theologian.” When asked to explain his thoughts about humanity the theologian said simply, “We’re shit.” ~ Roger Olson

The conservative evangelicalism in which I grew up requires that in order for people to be saved, they must admit that they are in and of themselves utterly lost and sinful and deserving of eternal torture. ~ Libby Anne

Augustine’s doctrine of Original Sin proclaimed that all people were born broken and selfish, saved only through the power of divine intervention.  Hobbes, too, argued that humans were savagely self-centered; however, he held that salvation came not through the divine, but through the social contract of civil law. On the other hand, philosophers such as Rousseau argued that people were born good, instinctively concerned with the welfare of others. ~ Adrian F. Ward, “Scientists Probe Human Nature -- and Discover We Are Good After All,” Scientific American, November 20, 2012.

In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. ~ Anne Frank

DAUGHTER OF THE CHURCH

The nun rustles, black robe,
the starched December of her headdress,
teaching a row of seven-year-olds
to kneel on the stone church floor
and beat our chests: my fault, my fault,

my most grievous fault.
She shows us colored slides
of the Crucifixion:
Each time you sin, you drive a nail
into the flesh of Jesus.

At eleven I confess to impurity.
With boys, with girls, or by yourself?
The question intrigues me.
The confessional gapes, a mildewed ear. 
With a sinner’s bravado I whisper,
With boys, with girls, and by myself.

After communion I cross my arms
to keep the miracle inside me.
I collect pocket pictures of the saints.
I pray to the Madonna of the Seven
Sorrows, seven swords thrust in her
delicately bleeding heart.

Holding a lit candle, repeating the novena,
I stand last in the row of girls.
Slow petitions of smoke uncurl
from the quivering flame tips.
Wax sweats opaque tears.
The priest looks so unhappy,

I fall in love with him.
God sees every thought
in my impure head.
The priest dips his fingers
in a gilded bowl,
and draws a cross of ash on my forehead.

~ Oriana © 2013

If you think that this early indoctrination that taught me I was innately a bad person was something I shrugged off instantly when I left the church at 14, consider this. In my, ahem, advanced youth I was asked by a friend if I regarded myself as a good person. My response was silence. I could not bring myself to say “Yes” -- having been taught in my vulnerable years that it was wrong to think of myself as good rather than bad, a hopeless sinner, a crucifier whose sins were nails in the flesh of Jesus.


 
The assumption that humans were innately evil created a strange problem for the church: what about people who were conspicuously good? What about the parents’ daily acts of kindness toward their children? What about the young man giving up his bus seat to an older person? What about the child bending to pick up something dropped by someone (I was often that child)?

It’s not by our own merit that we perform “good deeds”, the nun instructed. The soul in its natural state is a “dirty soul.” We are naturally wicked and morally weak, but god may send us grace which gives us the strength to do something good. Without the supernatural influence of grace, we’d sin instead. 

But maybe it’s not fair to quote a poorly educated nun who doesn’t dare to think for herself. Let me then quote Czeslaw Milosz, certainly an eminent intellectual and world-famous poet:

If I believed that man can do good with his own powers, I would have no interest in Christianity. But he cannot, because he is enslaved to his own predatory, domineering instincts, which we may call proprium, or self-love.

Here is the doctrine of grace by any other name: man cannot do good with his own powers. Odd, this certainty, unless we ponder the fact that Milosz was heavily indoctrinated with the misanthropic old-time Catholicism. At the same time, there is no denying that men, more so than women, do show a lot of striving for dominance. This appears to be related to testosterone. Sports have long been praised as a safe outlet for testosterone-driven aggression.

But something else also cannot be denied. Let’s skip for a moment the countless examples of nurturing, altruistic behavior among women. Any cemetery will show “Beloved Mother” to be vastly more frequent than “Beloved Father.” Never mind. We also have overwhelmingly numerous examples of nurturing, altruistic behavior among men. Let’s not permit the bad apples like school shooters (often mentally ill) make us forget the heroic, altruistic actions by first responders, or simply an ordinary passer-by risking his life to save a stranger. If a video exists, it shows that such a man appears to be acting without thinking, “by instinct.”

Religions don’t want to recognize that instinct. Any evidence that we are born with brains wired for empathy is most unwelcome. No, we have to make children believe that humans are evil by nature. Ever since St. Augustine invented the doctrine of the Original Sin, Christianity had no problem writing off all humans as innately evil.

In the first year of religion classes, it was difficult for us to understand why all of us were considered guilty of the Original Sin. One boy actually dared to protest: “If it happened to be me in the Garden of Eden, I wouldn’t have eaten the forbidden fruit.” The rest of us nodded our heads: not us; we would not have touched the apple. The nun smiled with triumph. “There is no doubt you would have sinned. It’s human nature to sin.” Reluctantly, at eight years old, we came to accept ourselves as weak and depraved.

Our bodies were obscene and our souls were dirty. Or, as “America’s best theologian” put it, “We’re shit.”


THE CENTURIES-OLD DEBATE ABOUT HUMAN NATURE

On the whole, Christianity has regarded human nature as evil. We are conceived and born in sin. An occasional heretic like Pelagius,who held that someone else’s sin could not be inherited, was quickly silenced. St. Augustine's thinking prevailed: humans are born evil. The Original Sin is transmitted by the semen (egg cells were still unknown, or no doubt they -- and thus WOMAN -- would be blamed instead).

We find this defaming of human nature already in the Old Testament, for instance in the Book of Job:

What is man that he should be clean? and he which is born of a woman, that he should be righteous?

Behold, he putteth not trust in his saints; yea, the heavens are not clean in his sight:

How much more abominable and filthy is man, which drinketh inquinity like water? ~ Job 14: 14-16

“Abominable and filthy” -- that was the politically correct, pious view of human nature.
But a bit of dissent began already with Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466- 1536).

The emphasis of Christian humanism was on the image of God as the source and basis of human beings’ unique dignity and worth above nature. And this life began to be viewed not merely as a prelude or probation but as a gift to be enjoyed.

Erasmus stands out as the premier Christian humanist of the Renaissance and Reformation and it irked Martin Luther to no end. Luther opposed humanism; to him human beings are a disease on the skin of the earth—unless and until God’s “proper righteousness” begins to transform them through faith. Even then, however, he held out no hope of real progress either in individual holiness or civil righteousness. He expected the return of Christ at any moment and saw cultural engagement and creativity as a waste of time. Luther denied the image of God in sinners, saying it is but a broken relic of little or no use. To him the rebelling peasants were but mad dogs to be hunted down and slaughtered. ~ Roger Olson

(I’m struck here not only by the idea that “human beings are a disease on the face of the earth,” but much more so by Luther’s dismissal of cultural creativity as a waste of time -- after all, the Second Coming was at hand. The belief in paradise can be disastrous for one’s engagement with the present. A former Jehovah’s Witness explained that education was discouraged: “You won’t need to know any of those things in paradise.”)

If humans are innately evil, then are they really the image of god? Luther said that sinners were not an image of god, but this seems to be a minority view. The majority of Christians would say yes -- every human being was an image of god. But if the answer is yes, what does that say about the nature of god? I’m surprised that this point has never been raised. Or perhaps it was quickly dispatched by claiming that Adam and Eve were good, but then they disobeyed, and this Original Sin got transmitted to the subsequent generations, making humans innately bad ever after. But if Adam and Eve were totally good, why did they disobey? Religious mythology leads to unsolvable problems -- and centuries of scholars trying to explicate the same archaic text.

The first letter of TULIP, an anagram summarizing the Calvinist doctrine, is T for TOTAL DEPRAVITY. Are humans by nature “totally depraved,” as Calvinism holds? Are infants little psychopaths who outgrow their instinct to become serial killers only after years of religious training? After centuries of debate (and for millennia the assumption was that we are by nature wretched sinners, nasty and brutish, in need of “correction” by punishment, even after death), we now have scientific evidence that the innate tendency goes mostly the other way.

What? Rousseau was right? It appears that indeed we are innately good, wired for empathy and altruism. Whether Rousseau was right about “civilization” turning the naturally compassionate infant into a cruel soldier or prison guard is still under discussion, but studies agree that our automatic default is empathy. How can we explain these findings, suddenly favoring humanists rather than fundamentalist Protestants? It’s “mirror, mirror in the brain.” We have mirror neurons and can feel another person’s pain or pleasure; our brain is wired for empathy (yes, even psychopaths can experience empathy -- but it’s not their default setting). Sensitivity to the emotional states of others emerges at a young age -- not only in humans, but in other primates, and social animals in general. A small child will try to comfort another distressed child. And yes, social animals are capable of altruistic behavior. It’s an innate capacity.

I will discuss mirror neurons in more detail later in this post. Aside from mirror neurons, humans and primates, as well as elephants and whales, also have von Economo neurons (VEN), sometimes called SPINDLE NEURONS. These special neurons may also be involved in social behavior. And there is also evidence that empathy relies on the release of the hormone oxytocin.

Cooperation and social emotions are strongest in animals that hunt in packs. Vegetarian animals don’t have as much need for cooperation.

And insofar as empathy can lead to altruistic behavior, Ayn Rand was clearly wrong: we are wired for altruism (or call it caring and compassion) more so than for the “virtue of selfishness.”

EVIL IN A NUTSHELL

Great, you may say, but why wars? Why greed, and other anti-social behaviors? That’s a very complex topic, and all we have is theories. It’s probably a combination of factors, but we know we can be taught to hate the dehumanized “other.” We also know that being under stress may decrease empathy. And, alas, the baby studies also discovered that we have an innate bias for those whom we recognize as similar to ourselves: the “in-group.”

All this merits a separate post. For now let us note that most human behavior is LEARNED rather than innate, and that imitation plays a very important role in learning. But note also that aside from ethnic and religious conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, war seems to have become obsolete in Europe. As globalization progresses, the meaning of the “in-group” expands.

The reverse of blaming all evil on man is blaming all evil on god. After all, everything that happens is god’s will, his grand Master Plan. 

ARE BABIES NATURALLY GOOD, OR NATURALLY EVIL?

These days not even fundamentalists insists that babies are born “in sin.” True, that’s still the rationale for infant baptism: baptism allegedly washes away the stain of the Original Sin. But most people don’t normally speak in those archaic terms any more. What interests us is “innate tendencies.” Can we demonstrate that even preverbal infants show empathy and altruism? Or, on the contrary, are babies predisposed to be mean and aggressive?

Using puppets, researchers determined that pre-verbal infants (as young as 3 months) preferred the cooperative puppet, the one who helped the teddy bear open the toy box, to the hostile puppet who slammed the box shut. Other studies were a variation on the theme. The infants also seemed to want to see the hostile puppet punished -- perhaps a seed of the concept of justice (at least retributive justice).

A reader commented on the article in The Scientific American:

A better example of an early argument for instinctive human goodness than that of Rousseau's is given in Adam Smith's "The Theory of Moral Sentiments".

This is from a summary at the Adam Smith Institute website:

The Theory Of Moral Sentiments was a real scientific breakthrough. It shows that our moral ideas and actions are a product of our very nature as social creatures. It argues that this social psychology is a better guide to moral action than is reason. It identifies the basic rules of prudence and justice that are needed for society to survive, and explains the additional, beneficent, actions that enable it to flourish.

Self-interest and sympathy. As individuals, we have a natural tendency to look after ourselves. That is merely prudence. And yet as social creatures, explains Smith, we are also endowed with a natural sympathy – today we would say empathy – towards others. When we see others distressed or happy, we feel for them – albeit less strongly. Likewise, others seek our empathy and feel for us. When their feelings are particularly strong, empathy prompts them to restrain their emotions so as to bring them into line with our, less intense reactions. Gradually, as we grow from childhood to adulthood, we each learn what is and is not acceptable to other people. Morality stems from our social nature.
 
http://www.adamsmith.org/moral-sentiments

And here is another summary which makes Adam Smith even more in line with recent findings:

The moral philosopher Adam Smith (also the "father" of economics) argued in his 1759 book The Theory of Moral Sentiments that virtue derives from our innately social nature in which we cannot help but share in the joy and pain of those around us. Smith argued that when we do things that cause others pain, we also feel pain. Because our biology causes us to avoid pain, we typically avoid such actions. Similarly, we enjoy pleasure and vicariously experience pleasure when we do something that brings happiness to others. This "fellow-feeling," or what we would now call empathy is what maintains us in the community of humans. This is a critical requirement for a social creature. Smith was the first to clearly make the case that it is our social nature that motivates human virtue and is the reason why we vilify vice.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-moral-molecule/201102/are-humans-good-or-evil

The “moral molecule” is oxytocin, the hormone associated with trust and empathy. Women have higher levels of oxytocin.

I realize that the reader expects baby pictures, but aren’t we inundated with those? It’s time for something else. A tiny lemur can certainly evoke empathy.

 

Do lemurs feel empathy? Yes. They are highly social animals, and will comfort another lemur in distress. This “compassionate” behavior is seen in all primates, as well as in dogs, whales and elephants. In his The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism among the Primates, Frans de Waal gives examples of “ethical behavior” among the primates, concluding that it’s our social emotions that give rise to morality, and not religion.

Religion defames human nature; humanism praises the human potential. De Waal hopes that the ideals of humanism will prevail.

THE NEUROSCIENCE OF EMPATHY

Mirrors: no one has as yet described
what you really are –
you that fill the interstices of time
as though with the holes of a sieve.

You, squanderers of the empty hall –
when twilight falls, wide as the woods . . .
and the glow, like a sixteen-point chandelier,
goes through your impenetrability.

Sometimes you are full of paintings.
A few seem to have gone into you.
Others you sent shyly by.

But the loveliest will remain, until
into her withheld cheeks
enters the dissolved Narcissus.

~ Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, II, 3

I dare say that the “dissolved Narcissus” enters into everyone when we discover our reflection and understands it’s “us.” We can’t resist looking at ourselves in the mirror, even though, over time, it means watching our aging (“Mirrors are the doors through which death comes” ~ Cocteau) Yes, mirrors are tremendously important in our lives. But in terms of evolution and survival, hardly anything approaches the importance of watching OTHERS. We need to know what others are doing and, based on facial expression and other clues, we can guess what they are feeling.

MIRROR, MIRROR IN THE BRAIN

This special sensitivity to others is highly developed in social animals. It seems to have a lot to do with “mirror neurons.” Mirror neurons are the latest buzz in neuroscience. They are also called the “mirror system,” a part of our “social brain.”

The odd thing is, when you watch someone play tennis, for instance, some of your motor neurons are firing as if you yourself were playing tennis. And if the player happens to -- ouch! -- fall, some of your sensory neuron fire as if the fall happened to you.

Do you wince and hiss as if in pain when you see someone burn his hand with scalding water? It happened to me once -- I was literally hissing in reaction to someone else’s getting burned, even though my own hand was physically unhurt. And I’ve witnessed the same reaction in others. But those vicarious “social” experiences need not be negative. I hope that everyone is familiar with the rush of joy we can experience when watching the joy of another.

What makes it possible for us to be so intimately intermingled with others? And those others need not be real. For many years I thought I was the only one who fell in love with fictional characters (and the part-fictional protagonists of biographies) and mourned as the book drew to its end -- it was hard to bear parting with someone I loved. I thought that was just part of my overall craziness. Then I discovered that this is a relatively common phenomenon. But why?

To reiterate, humans and other primates have mirror neurons that can create virtual reality and likely underlie empathy. Mirror neurons fire both when we experience a sensation (such as pain) and when we merely WATCH someone else experience that sensation. “I feel your pain” is not an empty cliché: we becomes distressed when we watch another person in distress, and happy when we watch a happy person.

The reaction is stronger when we know that particular person. But again, that person can be a fictional character (we often “know” fictional characters better than we know actual people because the author tells us what the character is thinking). I can be in mournful mood for hours when bad things happen to someone in a book or a movie -- and happy when when good things happen to them. I feel frightened when they are frightened, and relax   when they are safe. Never mind that none of it is “real”!
Here is a quotation from a recent article (sorry to have lost the link) Because of mirror neurons we can experience vicarious life events as if they really happened to us. As far as your brain is concerned, the people you “meet” in stories really are your friends and loved ones. And the adventures you enjoy through fiction and stories really do teach you important lessons as if you were the one who defeated the zombies, aliens, or serial killer. The strong emotions you feel during a well-told story further cement memories and help you to retrieve information in the future, all without leaving the safety and comfort of a chair.Mirror neurons were first discovered in the early 1990s by a team of neuroscientists at the University of Parma. Using neuro-imaging, the researchers found certain groups of neurons in the brains of macaque monkeys that fired not only when a monkey performed an action – say, reaching for a banana – but also when the monkey WATCHED another monkey or human perform that action. If there were sounds associated with that action, then even hearing those sounds in another room also activated the mirror neurons.

According to a current estimate, about 10-20% of motor and sensory neurons are "mirror neurons" that fire when we simply watch someone do something, or watch that person experience a sensation such as pain. Or when we read about an action or sensation. Or merely imagine it (I suspect many of my memories are false; children often appropriate a sibling’s story and believe it happened to them). Mirror neurons create a kind of virtual reality -- we really do feel someone else's pain, at least to some degree.

It's the firing of the mirror neurons that may underlie empathy.  And it's possible that a deficiency or dysfunction of mirror neurons accounts for autism.

Empathy, in turn, has a lot to do with moral development and caring about others, even strangers. Our own feelings are the primary guardians of moral values. This is where “good without god” comes from: if we hurt someone and the person starts crying, we feel awful. If we make someone else happy, we too feel happy. One of the most reliable ways to make ourselves happy is to make someone else happy.

Charles:

The title and the opening image says it all.

I was so hoping that "Daughter of the Church" would have a happy ending.

Love the way you point out the hypocrisy of the image of god in christianity.

Incredible news about oxytoxin!

Animal examples of empathy show the error of the view that religion is needed for morality.

I experience the activity of mirror neurons when I see another person get hurt even on television, especially if the accident actually happened (and I don't have to know the person).

I think this may be my favorite blog so far.

Oriana:

“Daughter of the Church” DOES have a happy ending, but it lies beyond the poem, in the fact that this was written by an ex-Catholic who left the sin-and-hell-obsessed church. I am especially glad I left before I started dating, with its potential for a huge guilt-trip. I had enough anguish as is, and over what? An imaginary punishment by an imaginary being for an imaginary offense (mostly “just being human”).

Oxytocin is available in the form of nasal spray (apparently the only way to get it to the brain; forget sublingual). Some users report mild euphoria. We need a few more years of research. I fear this research won’t be done because if it can be sold without Rx, then Big Pharma can’t make money off it. Oxytocin could indeed be wonderful, but someone needs to get very rich off it or it won’t be properly researched and developed for wider use.

My mirror neurons do a lot of firing too. What I can’t endure is images of any cruelty to animals. Or just make it cruelty, period. Even hearing aggressive speech hurts me. TV news, a lot of movies -- hideous moments that take a while to wash out from memory. 

APHRODITE DRYWALLED; PERSEPHONE STEPS OFF THE ELEVATOR

Frederic Leighton, Persephone

PERSEPHONE STEPS OFF THE ELEVATOR AT THE 4TH FLOOR

and emerges again onto the adobe walled landing,
the Southern California horizon wide as an avalanche
exposing parrot-wing cerulean, and cobalt
streaking into the molten crown of evening’s still golden
approach.

Returning to light,
even twilight makes her shadow gasp with
recognition. Here on the 4th floor she seems still
long-haired and trusting, the speckled-blue egg of her
gaze is open to any invitation, as it was before
she became the Queen of Night,
pomegranate-smeared
and cruel.

If only she had not returned,
ascended to this balcony that obscures the long
corridor, on the walls of which hang photos
showing a girl
holding a blue flower; if
only she didn’t have to look
at the radiant sky, its
beauty reminding her of everything she’s either
lost or never had.

In the moment of stepping into light
    she does not know,
    for the first time,
if beauty is,
or ever can be
enough.

~ Diane Wakoski, San Diego Poetry Annual 2012-13

**

In spite of the supposed death of myth, I keep seeing new Penelope and Persephone poems. I don’t mean just a handful -- a friend of mine said that she keeps track of Penelope poems, and has read hundreds of those. Of course there are poems about other myths as well, and maybe it’s my selective attention that makes me see so many Penelope and Persephone poems. The stories of these two wives seem to speak to us in a powerful way.

It’s almost strange to say “wives” -- separation from the husband is an essential part of the story. Each is really “a woman alone,” as Wakoski refers to her mother; each has found a way to cope. Elsewhere in this blog I speak of Penelope’s weaving (“It’s my waiting that creates you”). I’ve also examined Persephone as another aspect of Aphrodite who was known as Aphrodite of the Graves. The pomegranate was sacred to both goddesses. But unlike Aphrodite, Persephone is a dual goddess: she withdraws from the world and then returns, bringing the gift of springtime. The Queen of the Dead is also the goddess of life, of spring.

Persephone ascends -- it’s that moment of entry that we see brought up to date in Wakoski’s poem. This is one of her most exquisite and well-crafted pieces. It’s built around unexpected imagery, starting with the elevator. The myth does speaks of Persephone’s “ascent,” usually making us think of climbing a steep, dim path in the Underworld. Having Persephone take the elevator instead is brilliant.

Of course it helps to live in Southern California where there are so many of those adobe walled landings. I was reminded of various clinics where you leave the Hades of medical offices and take the elevator to the parking on the roof. You enter the light and for a moment you are a young girl again. You are Persephone revisiting your girlhood. Even your shadow “gasps with recognition.” You’ve left sickness behind and are returning to your real self and the real world. How radiant everything is!

And yet . . . Here is “the Southern California horizon wide as an avalanche.” I’ve watched an avalanche from a distance once. The noise was very similar to thunder, or a lethal cavalry charge, the horses of death white, not black. There is no escaping mortality; each year brings some unavoidable losses. No, you are not a girl anymore. Here on the fourth floor, the roof parking, your white Toyota is waiting like a patient animal. You drive off not just into the beauty of the world, but also into the noise, the demands.

*
And I love this recurrence of girlhood, situated so precisely at the 4th floor:

Returning to light,
even twilight makes her shadow gasp with
recognition. Here on the 4th floor she seems still
long-haired and trusting, the speckled-blue egg of her
gaze is open to any invitation

~ Here on the 4th floor she is still a girl who trusts, who believes everyone is kind and will like her. No matter what the trauma, a part of us is inviolable and returns to that trust again and again. It's one of life's mysteries, and I suspect that without it, we couldn't live on. 

*

I am not sure if Wakoski is aware that “to enter the light” has become a New Age metaphor for dying. Even if she isn’t, we are still entitled to see any meaning that occurs to us. The poem belongs to the reader, and its meaning changes for each psyche, as well as over time.

But we need not invert the meaning of the myth quite so radically as to see the time in the Underworld as life (at least inner life and creative solitude), and dying as return to the earth-worldliness-dailiness. It’s rather that the inner life that is the realm of memory, a gallery of the past. In relation to memory, we are posthumous. 

This poem shows why it pays for poets to know mythology. Through the power of myth, an ordinary, pedestrian event such as stepping out of the elevator is transformed into a larger vision. Jung: “He who invokes archetypes speaks with a thousand mouths.”

Another thing I admire about is how the poem presents that precise moment of entering the light, and never leaves that moment. It’s a vignette, a still shot, not a narrative. It does not retell the myth, which the reader is assumed to know.

So we have here a very powerful combination:

1) the power of myth, an immortal story with multiple meanings

2) the power of a single moment -- a “narrow slice,” “tight focus,” “the eternal moment”

3) the power of setting the myth in the modern world -- Persephone steps out of the elevator

4) the power of specificity -- she exits at the fourth floor; the adobe-walled landing and many other highly specific yet relevant images, such as the photograph of a girl holding a blue flower

*

In classical mythology, Persephone is NOT the Queen of the Night, and she is not cruel (she is very gracious to the aged Oedipus, for instance). Wakoski conflates her Persephone with the wicked Queen of the Night in Mozart’s The Magic Flute. Here is the splendid Queen of the Night aria:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2ODfuMMyss

But Wakoski is right in reminding us that cruelty arises from wounds, from abuse. Can beauty fully heal us? All the “comfort poems” I know say that life is full of suffering -- but look at the beauty. Beauty makes life worth living, in spite of the unavoidable losses and grief. But there are times when we may wonder if beauty is enough.

Like many women, in my youth I identified with Persephone, especially in her victimized condition. Beauty was barely enough. Now I am willing to say yes, beauty is enough. I never tire of the late afternoon’s gold deepening into sunset.

**

The “eternal moment” is Milosz’s phrase. “Life’s counted not by breaths, but by breathless moments” I say in one of my poems. Sometimes those are moments of entry.

Milosz wrote only one myth poem that I’m aware of, and he wrote it late in life, after the loss of his second wife. Not surprisingly, he becomes Orpheus and she Eurydice. Milosz too brings Orpheus to live among us. This is his entrance to the modern Underworld. Note that the season here autumn, and the location is a city, possibly New York. Here is the opening of “Orpheus and Eurydice”:

Standing on flagstones of the sidewalk at the entrance to Hades
Orpheus hunched in a gust of wind
That tore at his coat, rolled past in waves of fog,
Tossed the leaves of the trees. The headlights of cars
Flared and dimmed in each succeeding wave.

He stopped at the glass-paneled door, uncertain
Whether he was strong enough for the ultimate trial.

He remembered her words: “You are a good man.”
He did not quite believe it. Lyric poets
Usually have – he knew it – cold hearts.
It is like a medical condition. Perfection in art
Is given in exchange for such an affliction.

Only her love warmed him, humanized him.
When he was with her, he thought differently about himself.
He could not fail her now, when she was dead.

He pushed open the door and found himself walking in a labyrinth,
Corridors, elevators. The livid light was not light but the dark of the earth.
Electronic dogs passed him noiselessly.
He descended many floors, a hundred, three hundred.

He was cold, aware that he was Nowhere.
Under thousands of frozen centuries,
On a trace of ash where generations had moldered,
In a kingdom that seemed to have no bottom and no end.

**

The entrance to Hades is through the glass-paneled doors of one of the huge office buildings downtown. Inside, a labyrinth of corridors and “electronic dogs” -- certainly we can’t expect a real dog, or even a mythological three-headed Cerberus, to stand guard. Cerberus, you may recall, was so soothed by the music of Orpheus that he fell asleep, letting the intruder enter the forbidden kingdom. The electronic dogs never sleep.

And then, though Milosz doesn’t specify it, Orpheus pushes the down button of a gleaming elevator and begins to descend. We are both in time -- our time -- and outside of time, in mythology.

Poets rarely simply retell the myth: they revise it and modernize it. Thus Dante’s impudent-seeming change in the ending of The Odyssey: he sends Odysseus to explore the forbidden seas of the Western hemisphere (in Dante’s imagination, that hemisphere is all ocean, with enormous Mount of Purgatory rising directly opposite Jerusalem). Like Dante, Milton too interweaves classical mythology into the Judeo-Christian one. Poets update according to what makes sense in their lifetimes.

To Milosz, born in 1911, what mattered most was the startling changes he witnessed in the twentieth century. It wouldn’t do to have a pastoral Orpheus. At the cusp of the new millennium, Orpheus becomes urban. Like Persephone, he enters the Underworld in autumn -- late autumn, with gusts of cold wind and fog. The headlights of cars also come in waves, in gusts. Orpheus stands on the sidewalk at the glass doors that are the entrance to Hades. He stands hunched, huddled against the cold; the wind tears at his coat.

Then he enters what I assume to be a skyscraper. It’s a modern office building, with labyrinths of corridors and elevators. To me, the “livid light” suggests fluorescent tubes. Hospitals are also mazes of corridors, filled with disembodied voices. But this skyscraper, which may be Mount Purgatory if one takes the elevator going up, has many underground floors. Orpheus takes the elevator going down, and finds himself “nowhere.” Only the twentieth century dared present this bleakness: an afterlife of nowhere.

Orpheus is not just physically cold; he also perceives himself as cold-hearted. That, too, is a modern perception. Poets used to be regarded as the embodiment of passion. It took modernity to acknowledge that any artist has a certain aloofness. S/he does not live for others the way most people do. An artist’s lover will never be as important as art itself. The time reserved for creative work is sacred; it must be defended against the devouring others. (Rilke found even a dog to be too emotionally demanding.)

The poem continues; Orpheus sees throngs of other shades who no longer remember him, and finally encounters Persephone. I have already discussed it in another blog post: 

http://oriana-poetry.blogspot.com/2010/11/milosz-as-orpheus.html

**

Another way to use myth in a poem is to interweave it with a personal narrative. In this one Aphrodite steps out of the shower. Yes, one has to be modern.

(A special note on Jehovah’s Witnesses in relation to “Jim the Drywall Man” -- I’ve known (though not closely) a few Jehovah’s Witnesses besides Jim: all of them struck me as decent and well-meaning, just extremely out of touch with the modern world. They really believe that the Universe is only 6,000 years old. One JW wrote on Facebook that humanity is still in post-traumatic shock after the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. She didn’t mean it metaphorically, e.g. we never quite get over the loss of childhood. She meant it literally. The Garden of Eden is the sect’s foundational myth -- except that they don’t see it as a myth.)

DRYWALLED

I’m stepping out of the shower
like Aphrodite rising from the sea –
all dewy syllables of her, but if
you touch her, jolts of diamond –

And me in misty rivulets,
hurrying and streaming
because the drywall man
will arrive any minute.

He’s late. His eighty-year-old aunt
just had a nervous breakdown,
burned out by taking care of
her one-hundred-year-old mother. 

“Breakdown runs in our family,”
he explains. The aunt says her veins
are on fire. “What should she
be taking? B vitamins?

B vitamins and lots of exercise?”
The eighty-year-old aunt
collapses after merely
walking across the room –

the room perhaps just dry-walled,
fuming with fresh paint.
She drops onto the armchair,
too weak to get up. Her veins

are on fire. Many still believe
the smoke goes to heaven.
James the drywall man
does not traffic in heaven.

A Jehovah’s Witness,
he’s waiting for eternal life
in the Peaceful Kingdom –
first wholesale slaughter,

the long-promised Armageddon,
then the lion and the lamb,
and a little child. And death,
what’s death but sleep

before the Resurrection for the few
true believers who take
B vitamins and get lots of exercise.
Poets are no better. I myself

have translated these shameless
Aphroditic lines: There is no
old age. Only flower and fruit.
Each year I feel closer to fruit.

Aphrodite is always in blossom,
satin spill of petals without 
bruise or the wind’s brutal tug.
She knows nothing about love.


~ Oriana © 2013

**

Aphrodite is not really the goddess of love. She is the goddess of romance. That kind of love is cheap. Real love takes time. It takes a ruthless knowledge of the partner’s flaws, and learning to love him or her nevertheless. I hesitate to say “in spite of the flaws” since in the end we love even those flaws.

“There is no old age. Only flower and fruit” -- this is a quotation from Milosz, though I no longer remember which poem or essay it comes from. In life there IS old age, and for some it can be terrible. But in myth, the cycle of flower and fruit continues. “We kissed briefly in everlasting spring.” And memory has no past tense.


**

(A shameless, artistically incorrect digression: aging could be summarized as an energy shortage. The cells’ mitochondria don’t produce enough energy; all ills flow from that. We can slow down mitochondrial damage by taking 400 mg of CoQ10 and N-acetyl-cysteine [NAC] to increase the levels of an important antioxidant enzyme. We can avoid toxic, inflammation-causing, mitochondria-damaging excessive exercise. We can eat Greek yogurt . . . Will stem cells prove to be the golden apples of immortality? Not if money continues to be poured into useless bombers and warships.)

*

Charles:

Mozart's aria is amazing the way her voice is the exact same tone as the flutes.

The last three paragraphs were my favorites: Aphrodite as the goddess of romance rather than love. 
 
Oriana:

I think Mozart had terrific fun while composing this aria. Let me give the link again:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2ODfuMMyss

What saddens me is being always aware that he died at the peak of his creativity. Imagine what treasures one more year of life would bring.

I’m planning a blog post on romance versus love. 

Una sends us a poem:

PERSEPHONE RETURNS

So she came back needing to make things whole.
Pumpkins dried on the back porch rail
and wind wrapped around her with cold.

The house was numb
and spent, her world too splintered to be
picked up where she left off. Nothing

had changed. Yet everything had changed,
the marriage rent like cobwebs.
An apron hung on a rusty nail, the old life

shattered like a pomegranate hurled
from an upstairs window, bleeding
seeds into the dust.

~ Una Hynum © 2013

*

Bobbie Jean:

Thanks for the Wakoski poem, Persephone theme. I find her second stanza the only section that touches me.The first stanza feels forced and avalanche doesn't work for me nor what feels to me like filler description. Overall perhaps the poem is bringing a myth to its knees and lacks the mystery that would possibly move me more. I like the idea of the goddess stepping out of the elevator, the introit into that goddess as she lives in women today,
as you comment, going through their daily rounds in the midst of mortality. I’m glad Wakoski is writing and expressing poetry as she knows it. And most of all thanks for your time and caring to interact with the poem. I value that.
Oriana:

I was thrilled with the very idea of Persephone taking the elevator up to the 4th floor, which I strongly associate with roof parking for medical buildings. Perhaps I was too swayed by that personal association, and my former strong identification with Persephone the victimized maiden. The second stanza touches me the most, but the whole poem does. For me the mystery lies in that return -- no matter how violated we were at some point, a part of us is inviolable, the maiden who merely watched and did not lose a sense of her value as a person. She intuitively understood that bad people act out of their wounds, and maybe even came to feel pity for the man (for me that was the moment of liberation).

I took “avalanche” to mean “overwhelming.” Emerging into the California light often has that quality for me. The West Coast in general: the space and the brightness.

At the same time, I would not call this poem a major piece. The title is brilliant; there is some falling off after that.

Where I most connect with what you say is this:

I like the idea of the goddess stepping out of the elevator, the introit into that goddess as she lives in women today, as you comment, going through their daily rounds in the midst of
mortality.

That's why I gave the poem this kind of attention. It diverges from the myth just enough to interest me, the myth rising from death into life, from darkness into light, still inherent.

The myth changes depending on the artist. The photographer Anne Berry entitled the photo below "Persephone" ~ note the eerie faces of the other macaques.