DOORWAYS CAUSE FORGETTING; PLATH'S MAD GIRL'S LOVE SONG

Existence is plagiarism. ~ Emile Cioran

~~~

BORROWER

A hesitant knock on the door.

I look out, then down.

The neighbors’ little boy,

I think his name is

Christian, stands staring at his

tennis shoes, faded T-shirt ripped

at the neck. He holds a cup tilted

at a forlorn angle, stammers,

I don’t remember

what my mother sent me for.

Standing at the blue door

of a long life,

my cup only half full,

I can’t remember either.

What did I come for?

What was it I wanted?

~ Una Hynum © 2012

           

I’ve used this wonderful poem before, in the post THE BURDEN OF CHOICE; I’m pleased to use it again. A masterpiece does not get “used up”: a great poem has the power to leave us in hushed awe time after time. (This may not be true of Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium”; in my view, that’s because, after the first three gorgeous stanzas and the perfect closure of “gather me / into the artifice of eternity,” the last stanza is relatively weak and the last two lines are flat.)

Una’s poem has a very effective, hush-producing ending. But readers also love the line that says “standing at the blue door.” Yes, that’s the final door. In life we pass through so many doors, literal and metaphoric. As we are about to pass through the last one, it is our final chance to ask ourselves what we came for and what we wanted. I think Ray Carver was among the lucky few: he managed to answer at least the second question. Dying of lung cancer at only fifty, he wrote this:

LATE FRAGMENT

And did you get what

you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on the earth.

           ~ Ray Carver (1938-1988)

If we suddenly had to “leave this plane” (as we say in California), most of us, I am afraid, would not say that we got what we wanted. But then we’d have to confess that we didn’t really know what we wanted. Or perhaps we knew it at an early age, had no courage to reach for it, and remembered that summons from destiny only when the clock of life said: Too late.

And how interesting that Carver, a successful writer (I also enjoy his poems), chose not fame, but being able to "call myself beloved, to feel myself / beloved on the earth." My chief desire has been to be on the right path in terms of work. It's when I feel I am on the right path that I feel myself beloved. And no, it has nothing to do with fame. Interesting, I keep saying to myself, interesting. Just to be doing what feels I should be doing. 

I did not have this clarity even a few years ago, so I am all in favor of saying: let us not be so hard on ourselves. To know what we want in life is perhaps the most difficult thing of all. A trivial foreshadowing of this “not knowing” is the near-universal phenomenon of walking into a room wanting something, except we can’t remember what it was.

Why can’t we remember? One reason is too many doors. The most fascinating article I found last week was “Doorways Cause Forgetting”: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mental-mishaps/201205/doorways-cause-forgetting

It happens to all of us. It’s not the beginning of dementia. It turns out that “doorway-caused forgetting” is part of normal brain function. That’s why it’s so common for people to walk into a room and there blank, with no idea of what they came for.

 “Walking through doorways empties your mind,” the author explains.  This was shown in experiments where people had to walk through doorways as opposed to continuing in space with no doorways. “When we enter a new environment, we construct a new situational model, which erases the old model.” And the old model included the information about the momentary previous self that needed to get something.

This confirms the fragmentary nature of our perception: the brain does not have a complete picture of “reality.” It has just dots to get by: the brain improvises by connecting the dots and filling in the gaps. A new environment, such as a different room, can easily erase our vague memory of what it was we needed in the other room.

One remedy, I’ve discovered, is to name the object you need, and then repeat that name as you keep walking (e.g. “masking tape, masking tape”). This little triumph of language as memory can spare you many useless trips, especially if you need to climb the stairs. I suspect it’s not only doorways that cause forgetting; step by step, stairways are even worse. The self at the top of the stairs is not the same as the clueless self at the bottom. Regardless, repetition is the mother of memory. Carrying a word is like carrying a holy icon: it can work miracles.

###

After all this self-help, let’s have more poetry – and what is poetry, real poetry, if not a kind of holy icon that keeps us in touch with our innermost reality?

Mad Girl's Love Song

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

~ Sylvia Plath, 1951; published in Mademoiselle, August 1953.

**

The first two lines are actually quite right on, and remind me of Bishop Berkeley’s precept that “to be is to be perceived” (esse est percipi). This poem could also serve to illustrate the meaning of solipsism (solus – alone; ipse – self): one can’t be sure of the existence of anything outside one’s own mind. Are other people “really real”?

I love the rhyme – I’ve always been crazy about rhyme, though now it’s forbidden and even slant rhyme mustn’t be too obvious. And of course I love the heaven and hell references: “God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade.” The fall of god extinguishes the fires of hell: the screaming and moaning cease at last, after so many centuries (though only decades in an individual’s life – still a horror). (Although it’s possible that the only way to reach paradise, in this life, includes a willingness to enter hell.)

Note that here the speaker controls the life and death of the world. She is above nature – she can make the world live, or die, simply by opening and closing her eyes. Call it solipsism or call it a keen insight: the world lives in us. We make it up in our head. 

“I should have loved a thunderbird instead” adds a touch of humor for me.

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.

The mythological thunderbird becomes more real than the lover (who may indeed be imaginary – or so rarely seen in flesh that he becomes more fantasy than a real man).

But ultimately any lover is, to a shocking degree, someone that we make up inside our head. We can experience another person only so far and no further. We can’t get inside their mind and see the world through their eyes. That’s where we come up against the “otherness of the other.”

Something that Yeats said applies here: The tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul.

“Mad Girl’s Love Song” is a villanelle; while in college Plath wrote a lot of villanelles and other poems in form. (I first said “young Plath” — but she never got past being “young”; she was only thirty when she died; yet we can say “early Plath” versus “mature Plath”.) I love the music of this one. It shows that Plath had an astonishing mastery of craft even before The Colossus. This poem reminds me how extraordinary Plath can be — even the early Plath.

It’s possible that the only way to reach paradise, in this life, includes a willingness to enter hell, a willingness to make sacrifices for one’s vocation and take risks, such as a love relationship with an exceptional person, that may lead to a disaster.

Yet Plath held poetry close to her heart, like one of Dostoyevski’s heroines who jumps out the window hugging a holy icon to her chest. Poetry can be that icon, connecting us to the inner life —almost always, of course, in the service of life, not death — of enduring.

**

Extraordinary – I don’t use the word lightly. And again I want to quote that crucial passage from James Hillman’s The Soul’s Code:

Extraordinary people display calling most evidently. Perhaps that’s why they fascinate. Perhaps, too, they are extraordinary because their calling comes through so clearly and they are so loyal to it . . .  They seem to have no other choice . . . Extraordinary people are not a different category; the workings of this engine in them are simply more transparent. (p. 28-29)

“Extraordinary people are not a different category”; it’s just that they have clarity about their vocation and a great loyalty to it. And this brings me to another article:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/strategic-thinking/201206/why-quitters-win

The title is misleading. By “quitters,” the author, Nick Tasler, means people who can commit oneself to one option and eliminate the rest. To use an extreme example (mine, not his), Frank Lloyd Wright also loved music. But he didn’t try to be both an architect and a piano virtuoso. He chose his path early and persisted. Architecture is a kind of frozen music – but we don’t need to go that far. He made his choice, and became extraordinary.

Here we come back to the finding that less choice is better, and no choice may be best (depending on the matter at hand). REDUCE OR ELIMINATE CHOICE. Keeping options open is not only stressful, but virtually guarantees failure.

But how can we know if option 1 is the best if option 2 looks yummy also, and option 3 has its seductive angles as well? If the pull of a single option is not that distinct, we have to make a leap of faith. I hate to confess how many times I simply tossed a coin . . .  but even that is better than sitting half-dressed at the edge of a bed, like a woman in a painting by Edward Hopper. Should she put on the red dress or the blue one? (Do I hear someone say, “But Oriana, she is trying to decide if life is worth living!” – Listen, I know what it means to be a woman. She can’t make up her mind about what to wear. The problem is that it all looks good. It’s the cumulative microtrauma of trivial choices that makes women so exhausted.)

Decisiveness: the ability to choose one thing, one course of action, while “quitting” others. Eliminating the stress of choice. To quote from the article:

The inability to make what Harvard ethics professor, Joseph Badaracco, calls “right vs. right” decisions can be a fatal strategic flaw. An otherwise talented manager who can’t bring himself to focus on one customer segment at the expense of others (but what if they want to buy, too!?!) winds up taking his team in circles, and his career into a rut.  

At the heart of strategic thinking is the ability to focus on one strategy while consciously quitting the pursuit of others. Choosing what we want to do is easy. It's choosing what else we want to do that we are nonetheless going to quit doing that is the hard part—to build the school by stripping funding from the hospital; to develop this product while shutting down production of that one. As David Packard (of Hewlett-Packard fame) once said “more companies die from overeating than starvation.” The same truth applies to our careers and personal lives.

**

I’m not sure if I agree with the statement “choosing what we want to do is easy.” For some people it is, for others it isn’t. Perhaps the author should have said: “choosing what we most want to do.” But even then . . . Try asking someone, “What’s the most important thing in your life?” People I know would sooner discuss their sex lives (or lack of them).

I do agree, though, that paying the price of focusing – sacrificing other attractive things and activities – may be even harder. Not particularly for me – once I have clarity, it’s relatively easy for me to be single-minded. But I’ve known people so immersed in a dozen attractive activities that they are always in a rush, frantic, unable to do anything at the level of excellence.

We live in a manic, multi-tasking, short-attention span culture. My most important motto is DO LESS. The less you do (but the more thoroughly you do it, and the more you enjoy doing it), the more you will accomplish.

Why? For one thing, you’ll be eliminating a lot of choice-making, possibly the primary source of stress in modern life. The future belongs to the decisive – the “quitters,” those who quit doing too many things.

Plath had the advantage of one huge blessing: she found her calling early in life. Call me Scorpio Rising: I love “Mad Girl’s Love Song.” With a wisdom uncanny for someone so young, Plath exposes the solipsism of being in love. It seems to us that that’s exactly when we are the least self-centered, being so connected to the Beloved. But is the Beloved mostly someone we made up, a holy icon we carry in our heads, driving with that image in our mind all the way to Canada? Even so, it’s a state of grace.

A state of grace as long as it inspires rather than interferes with our accomplishing something in the world. Remember Longfellow (I harbor a secret fondness for Longfellow):

Life is earnest, life is real,

and the grave is not its goal.

Not the grave, but accomplishing something – which could be writing poems that connect us with that mysterious Otherworld which is in this world. Or it could be having loving relationships and “gracious living.” It could be volunteering for a charity. There is enough potential “meaning in life” to fit anyone’s talents and personality. The only problem is that we “can’t have it all.” Once we accept that, the rest is . . . well, not exactly easy, but doable. As one visual artist told me, “When you concentrate on one small thing, something huge begins to unfold.”    

**

Hyacinth:

A neat blog.  Reading it, I realized the key word here is "KNOW." Do we ever know what we want enough to make a conscious choice? It seems more fate or luck. And everyday we wake to pass through the door of a new day and forget, if we ever knew, what we came for.

Oriana:

I love your prose poem about passing “through the door of a new day and forgetting, if we ever knew, what we came for.” Yes, each day brings such an avalanche of new challenges, sometimes I wonder how anything gets done as planned. No wonder there is a small book for “Women Who Do Too Much,” and the main idea is: “Today I’ve done (fill in the blank), AND THAT IS ENOUGH.” It’s an attempt to gain control by doing LESS. Another key word in this blog is LESS – the need for less, so we can give more attention to what is MEANINGFUL, what brings us closer to our perceived purpose.

I want to sidestep the eternal and non-resolvable debate over free will versus determinism by saying that yes, all cognitive processing is unconscious, and yet, and yet . . .  The very fact that some of it does get communicated to those brain regions that generate consciousness must have some significance. Maybe this conscious knowing, or the illusion that we know, helps us to “hold the course,” the way repeating a word virtually guarantees that we will remember what it was we wanted from another room – unless we encounter something startling on the way, and that of course has the power to erase our small and temporary “holy icon.”

And if we remember an idea – for instance, that by doing less we will accomplish more – if we keep repeating that, and offer conscious resistance against the onslaught of competing demands – then there is some hope for not being merely a straw carried by a flood.

There is also this: making a leap of faith, closing other options, and working in a full-hearted way – but also being very sensitive to feedback from all directions. A friend of a friend said he “listens to what the universe says in response to his decision.” Usually there are pretty clear signals if we are on the right or wrong track. An athlete’s training schedule may seem pretty grueling to the rest of us, but to the athlete it’s ecstasy because it has a MEANING. An athlete KNOWS what he wants: to get faster and/or stronger, to win the race, the game.

There is a power to knowing, because it’s a power of having a meaning, a purpose. Alas, self-help books tend to ask: write down ten things you want in your life. No: write down ONE thing, the one you want most. But wait: is the word WANT the right one? Should we perhaps say: the one you LOVE most?

When I look at what I loved most at the age of 12, 22, 32, 42 and on, I get an instant answer: reading interesting books. Learning. Writing is secondary to my being a learner; it grows out of it. But that’s getting into another infinity.

                                                                                                                                

Scott:

Your blog raised, as always, thought provoking issues, and with coffee by my side I will attempt to add to your excellent musings. I would be very reluctant to leave all my choices; I have, we all really do, so many. Birds, whaling, poetry, history, college football, coffee, travel and just so many others too numerous to list have been my joy and passion for so long I just don't see how I could possibly choose.

Poetry is a relative latecomer, only in the last few years has it risen to a true passion. I loved your thought on poetry as a “holy icon”– the best poetry is very akin to that. I think of how poorer my life would be today had I not discovered poetry after 40...and your blog I might add. I have written over the years so many scraps of outlines for stories, poems and other writing projects, they fill a drawer – and even a large coffee mug my daughter brought back from London: my cup truly 'overfloweth'! And the vast, vast majority have never seen completion and I sometimes take myself to task for that. But then I recall....you guessed it....a favorite quote:

  

 For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!” ~ Herman Melville, Moby Dick. 

Plath is such a tragedy: what talent and promise! It's a common refrain, I know, but why are so many poets victims of this melancholia. I ache for these “Odysseuses of the arts” who sacrifice so much for our enjoyment of their gifts. 

I have been reading a lot of Tennyson of late. He too was often distressed and anxious over his life and was renowned and lauded in his lifetime, unlike Melville. I prefer the Tolkien life, full of family, friends and a grand project that consumed him all his life. And even though his Lord of the Rings masterpiece did indeed consume him, he also found time to be a poet, artist, translator, wrote several children's book and taught at Oxford for decades. Throw in his happy home life of a wife and children who went on to have successful careers of their own.

Contrast that with Tolstoy who had fame, money and title, and for years was absolutely miserable...I'll take the Hobbit life in the Shire with food and drink with loved ones. Plath's intellect, upbringing and talent are a prime example that having good looks and brains and talent does not guarantee happiness. Plath was a fan of Moby Dick, and I came across this great quote:

I am rereading Moby Dick in preparation for the exam deluge tomorrow—am whelmed and wondrous at the swimming Biblical & craggy Shakespearean cadences, the rich & lustrous & fragrant recreation of spermaceti, ambergris—miracle, marvel, the ton-thunderous leviathan. One of my few wishes: to be (safe, coward that I am) aboard a whale ship through the process of turning a monster to light and heat. ~ Sylvia Plath, Journals, pg. 370

I wish that last line too!

Oriana:

Thank you for that magnificent quotation from Plath’s journals. Spermaceti, ambergris – I can imagine how much she loved those words. (“Ambergris” is one of my favorite poems by Jorie Graham: “We must be unforgettable or not at all.”)

I hope I didn’t create the impression that a writer should have no particular interests, and indeed even wide interests. The whole beauty of being a writer, and especially an essay writer, is that you can use practically anything that comes your way.  You learn alchemy: how to transform even the whale of the mundane into light and heat.

My point was rather that once you are aware of what is most important to you, and dedicate yourself to it, the other interests are made to serve the calling; they are subjugated. Those that seriously compete for your time will drop away. So the sacrifice is of that of other potential callings, not of activities that feed what you sense is your true calling.

But I speak as a “born writer,” or however we may want to call it. Some people might want to put a derogatory label on it, such as “workaholic.” They think great achievement is due strictly to “talent,” something one is born with; then they read the famous person’s biography, and discover a “workaholic” – which should be a source of inspiration rather than dejection – but it’s a rare person who wants true achievement.

I do, even if my accomplishment is bound to be modest. It’s not about fame; for me it’s about enjoying my life, being able to shape and release my thoughts. In the morning I can’t wait to read something good, and then to get to the keyboard.

Now I can hardly believe that I went through periods – years – and not long ago, but even quite recently – when I felt I had no venue for my gifts and intelligence; no one wanted what I had to offer. It took enormous labor to get a handful of people to attend a poetry workshop – no matter how much praise I received for my innovative workshops. Poetry was so marginal for others, while it was central to my life. As a poet in a family-centered community – after having developed within the Los Angeles poetry scene, not so permeated by the idolatry of the family – I felt I was truly “from another planet.” From that kind of isolation it’s only a step to suicidal depression. You can imagine how blessed I feel now.

I’ve discovered that a sense of calling is a great source of strength. Now, whatever life throws at me, I can transmute into writing. (Ideally, that holds true for poetry also, but poetry is a hundred times more difficult than prose.) What a difference from being constantly devastated (and over time it took less and less adversity and rejection to feel more and more devastated). All this fortunate change because now I can say, “I am a writer.” I confess I am astonished.

Note also that prose writers don’t have the startling suicide rate that poets do. A poet is at the mercy of inspiration; a non-fiction prose writer can find inspiration in anything – what joy! 

Plath is a tragedy, but also a triumph. Look, we are reading her words . . . her brain children live . . . her stars continue to waltz out in red and blue.            

Sarah:

The early Plath poem is extraordinary – glorious! and so is your post, particularly the bit actually about doorways causing forgetting. I am not sure I agree about the stairs, but the passing through doorways – it's a small felt shift, a flash of satori, every time, and one I never noticed. We forget what we wanted and who we are and it feels – well to me it feels good. So while knowing what you want and getting it before the final doorway is of vital importance in life, at the same time the second we are through that doorway it is not going to matter at all.

This brings me into a discussion I was having with a colleague yesterday about choice and self and how intertwined they are, and how the illusions of and attachments to both can be dropped, leaving us with actually a more solid existence.

Oriana:

Plath’s villanelle is indeed glorious, and deserves to be better known. It’s very odd, given its importance in Plath’s life (the Mademoiselle award that led to Plath’s experiences in New York, and later to The Bell Jar), that Ted Hughes somehow “forgot” to include it in The Collected Poems.  

When I think of the dreadful waste of my chronic depression, I see that one of my central problems was getting stuck on both self and choice. I thought that I, a definable self, made a terrible choice, the fount of all the disasters that followed. Eventually I realized that, given the circumstances, my inexperienced and quite forgivable early self really had no choice. It wasn’t even about forgiving myself so much as understanding that there was no need to forgive. The choice had been illusory. The solution was to embrace my circumstances and make the best of “fate.” When I found myself making the best of it, I came to see the obvious: I love my quiet life. What a privilege! How crazy that just several years ago I was having crying fits because my life was what it was, quiet rather than exciting.

To the Buddhist saying, “No self, no problem,” I’d like to add: “No choice, no problem.” That’s what the second article, “Why Quitters Win,” keeps affirming. Commit yourself and close the other options. “When standing, stand; when sitting, sit. Above all, don’t wobble.” 

I also need to correct myself about stairs and forgetting. In my experience, as I go downstairs, I often forget what it was that my upstairs self wanted from the kitchen or the dinette; but as I ascend, I begin to remember what it was downstairs that I forgot to bring with me (and yes, to get to the stairs I pass through a doorway; the piece of paper on which I scribbled some morning insight remains a part of the “dinette context,” instead of being envisioned near the computer). I admire the wisdom of grandmothers: never go upstairs empty-handed.

Charles:

Love the first image.

Love Cioran’s quote, “Existence is plagiarism.”

Thank you for explaining why I forget so often when walking into a room.

Love it that you are still on the topic of God.

Speaking of forgetting going from room to room, in a Jewish home the Mezuzah is put on the doorpost of every room to remind people of Divine energy and the oneness of the universe. Not exactly what you are talking about but an interesting aside.

Oriana:

Yes, the Mezuzah is an interesting example of a “reminder.” As you walk into the house, the transient outdoors self is discarded, and now you are reminded of religion. It was interesting to read that the parchment in the Mezuzah often contains the name Shaddai, or the letter shin meant to stand for El Shaddai. There are various names of god used in the Hebrew scriptures that are essentially lost in translation. The serene, generous Elohim in the first chapter of Genesis does not seem the same deity as the lying, vengeful Yahweh. “Shaddai” is probably “god of the mountain,” but it’s interesting that a female biblical scholar suggested an association with Shadayim, “breasts,” implying nurturing. In the future there will no doubt be other interpretation, according to the spirit of the times. With more female scholars, will there be a renewed interest in Asherah, the Hebrew equivalent of Ishtar? It’s impossible to predict.

Jack Miles, in his award-winning “God: A Biography,” writes: "The God whom ancient Israel worshiped arose as a fusion of a number of the gods whom a nomadic nation had met in its wanderings” (p. 20).

                                                                            

RILKE: LOVING THE DARK HOURS

“I believe in god, but I don’t believe in immortality,” a woman told me in a restroom at Macy’s (not the first time that I’ve conversed on a grand subject in a public restroom). Since ancient Judaism didn't "feature" an afterlife, I asked, "Are you Jewish?" She said, "No. I'm a mystic." Before I managed to reply, another woman emerged from a stall and asked, “Are you a psychic or just a mystic?” “I am a MYSTIC,” the first woman reiterated.

It wasn’t the time and place to demand definitions, but it was yet another confirmation that people crave something that they can call mysticism or spirituality. And there is certainly mystery enough to make room for this yearning for the benevolent unseen – for a responsive, friendly universe, itself one great collective psyche. The vocabulary changes, but not the nature of the yearning.

The Judeo-Christian god does not seem particularly suited to be the object of that yearning, since he is mainly the god of the dead – a sky god, to be sure, but less Zeus than Hades: the hidden god, the invisible one. Only the dead – and then only a blindly submissive portion of them, those who sacrificed their intellect, as Ignatius Loyola insisted we must – have communion with him. They, and maybe the mystics – who are quick to protest that their visions cannot be expressed in “mere words.”  

If heaven and hell are states of mind – and that’s the current Catholic dogma outlined by the former Grand Inquisitor, later Pope Benedict – then god too is a state of mind, a loving and blissful one (for the moment, let's not invoke the cruel archaic Yahweh, but the kind of benevolent deity that non-fundamentalist believers desire). With this new definition – god is a loving state of mind – the problem of trying to prove god's existence is solved. 

And since we have access to a blissful and loving state of mind in this life, immortality seems excessive; we can do without it. But, wait a moment: we don’t pray to a state of mind. We don’t worship a state of mind. We ENTER it – but not forever. The human brain requires variety, everything is in flux, and soon enough we exit bliss and enter a different state of mind, one of a hundred emotional flavors between heaven and hell.

If we enjoy infinite variety, if we love traveling, then immortality is still the most wonderful promise any religion could make. I don’t really want heaven (what a bore! in hell at least I could be of use, bringing comfort to fellow sufferers), but I’d love it if consciousness could continue having fascinating adventures even after we shed our bodily container. There is, however, the nasty problem of truth – of evidence or lack of it – that intrudes here. And because of that unpleasant intrusion, I can’t call myself a mystic (I know: I’ve tried calling myself a mystic atheist because, after all, there is so much MYSTERY out there). I don’t even call myself “spiritual.”

the elusive Polish bison – a rare sighting

Some might point to things I love, such as books, music, nature, writing, deep and affectionate conversation, animals, etc, and argue that, combined with my lack of interest in luxury cars, fine clothes, gadgets, kitchen remodeling and the like, I qualify as “spiritual.” “I think you are a deeply spiritual person,” I’ve been told more than once. “Some people think they are atheists, but they really aren’t,” a man recently remarked in my direction. I felt insulted at first, but quickly realized that he was completely confused about the meaning of atheism, and assumed it meant nihilism.

But for me atheism felt like the opposite of nihilism. Taking that plunge into clarity was so refreshing, and what relief! – a hundred pounds of “seeking” and respectfully “not knowing” off my back. Not as bad as tons of religious nonsense crushing me before I left the church at fourteen, all the susurrations of mindlessly repeated Our Fathers – but even the so-called “spiritual quest” was still a hindrance, a drag. Now my energy was free to be directed toward living and thinking, without religious phantoms choking me. I’ve never before felt so affirmative, so capable of enjoying the feast of life.

It’s possible that some people regard “spiritual” as synonymous with “inward.” I think I strike some people as spiritual because I am deeply introverted, and thus have a rich inner life. Among poets, I favor those who likewise seem to have a rich inner life and dare speak with great seriousness. They take that risk, rather than escape into clever irony and humor. And the moment I think of seriousness in poetry, I remember that it was Rilke who taught me seriousness. Oddly enough, as a beginner I enjoyed writing short funny poems. Then came the encounter with Rilke. When I came to the line, “You must change your life” (in response to powerful art), that was already after the fact; his poems had already changed my life.

In some ways, it was an instant change; I was thunder-struck by suddenly grasping what poetry was. But it took many years before I was able to formulate a mental answer to those who tried to force me into the “spiritual” slot: I am not spiritual; I am a writer. (This actually came as a startling personal discovery: I am not a mystic; I am a WRITER. The thought filled me with happiness.)

I’d rather have inspiration than mystic visions; and what joy, the keyboard rather than the rosary! When I gaze at the clouds, I’m not thinking of heaven; I’m simply enjoying the clouds. But I may also be thinking about how to describe them, since I’ve used up “baroque,” my favorite adjective for describing the celestial spectacle.

The churches of my childhood had the most fabulous echoes, especially when nearly empty: then the slightest creak of the pew was multiplied into a huge long groan.

As a writer, I am grateful to Catholicism for all its imagery and craziness, the purple hoods on statues and paintings during the Great Week of Lent, the orgies of candles and naïve processions to bless — what? The fields, the animals, or just the small walk right around the church? It didn’t matter. The little girls sprinkling flower petals in the path of Mary’s icon definitely had fun, and had to be restrained from tossing up great geysers of petals all at once.

So there was in me the child who suffered from the anguish of being doomed to hellfire (since I took seriously the constant mea culpa confessions of being by nature a wretched sinner, helpless against Satan) and the future writer who took in the cavernous interiors, the stench of incense, the thunderous rage of the organist. This was long before I learned that the incense was originally used to cover up the smell of blood in the temple, and the mass was designed around the ancient Israeli ritual of animal sacrifice (host = hostia = “victim”).

Ah, the echoes of the past. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud likens the psyche to the city of Rome, with layers and layers of history — so I see within me earlier selves with their now outgrown desires and despair. Living is a continual dying into oneself, over oneself, so to speak, building new layers of consciousness on top of the old.

Recently I came across this poem by the young Rilke. I’d read it many times before, but now it spoke to me more clearly than ever:

Ich liebe meines Wesens Dunkelstunden

I love the dark hours of my being 

I love the dark hours of my being
in which my senses drop into the deep.
I have found in them, as in old letters,
my daily life that is already lived through,
and become wide and powerful, like legends.
Then I know that there is room in me
for a second large and timeless life.

But sometimes I am like the tree that stands
over a grave, a leafy tree, fully grown,
who has lived out that particular dream, that the dead boy
(around whom its warm roots are pressing)
lost in his sad moods and his poems.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Robert Bly

I like parts of another, more literal translation by Mark Burrows as quoted by Dowrick (p. 154)

I love the dark hours of my life

in which my senses deepen;

in them as in old letters I find

my daily life already outlived

and, as in legends,

distant and complete.

. . .

Sometimes I am like the ripe 

and rustling tree which rises 

above the dead boy’s grave

– gathering him in its warm roots –

and fulfills the dream he had lost

in sorrows and songs.

(When it comes to great poets, literal translations seem both more powerful and interesting, and sometimes even more poetic. In literal translation, the last line of Rilke’s poem reads: “lost in sorrows and songs.”)

This is one of my favorite poems from The Book of Hours – the collection in which Rilke’s artistic genius first showed itself. Those of you with a even bit of German will probably remark that Dunkelstunden is more musical and somber (the heavy doon/shtoon internal rhyme, with apologies for the phonetic transliteration) than the weightless “dark hours” rising like glib balloons, but there is no helping the loss of this funeral-march music. Miraculously, “reif und rauschend” preserves its alliteration in Burrows’ “ripe and rustling.” The original has rhythm and rhyme, and that is lost. But I’m thrilled that both Bly and Burrows at least give us a good translation of Rilke’s imagery and meaning (sometimes lost in Macy’s perversely inaccurate translation).

The poem makes me think of the saying that happiness lies mainly in remembering. While something is happening, we are too busy experiencing it. It’s afterwards, remembering, that we can savor the pleasure without the tension, and can see a particular event as part of the evolving story of our life. At least that’s true for introverts, who need a lot of quiet, solitude, and “down time” (including dim light; introverts don’t like bright light or too much sunshine) so that they can process their experiences and reflect on the meaning of it all. Was Rilke an introvert? He’s the patron saint of introverts. Auden called him “the Santa Claus of solitude.”

I identify so much with everything Rilke is saying in this poem that it’s practically my personal anthem. I imagine that’s true for almost anyone in the Salon: extraverts don’t become poets. This is a good time to be an introvert: we are no longer branded as shy and/or antisocial. Several recent books praise us as thoughtful and sensitive. Quiet is a minor best-seller.

Rilke doesn’t waste time being defensive about what he loves: the quiet solitary hours. He tells us something wonderful: that there is room in us for a second large and timeless life. This life is discovered only through reflection, or by reading old letters and journals. That’s when you see both what has ceased to matter, and what has remained. In another poem, Rilke says that the part that lasts is what “consecrates us.” Whatever is large and timeless will emerge; we can’t really escape our central themes.

from Jung's Red Book

**

It’s wonderful to explore those central themes, to see that “there is no failure; there is only learning.” And we begin to make out the outlines of our own legend, “wide and powerful.” Yet the second stanza moves away from this celebration to note “sometimes I am like the tree that stands / over a grave.” Whose grave? The grave of the young self, the adolescent with all his dreams and innocence and huge ignorance. The adult is not just an older version of the adolescent, but in some ways a different person. The adult has ceased to be just a dreamer and drifter; ideally, she has “found her path in life” and is fulfilling a major dream, instead of setting off into five or six different directions at once. 

I remember the first time someone spoke of his younger self and said, “I wasn’t yet me.” Even though I myself wasn’t quite me yet at the time I heard it that statement, I grasped it instantly. I sensed it was about finding one’s essence, one’s unique self-expression. It’s what happens when a painter stops painting like most of his peers and becomes, say,                    Jackson Pollock.

I’ve always had an intense life of the mind. My real life is my inner life. Nothing much shows on the outside, but in my mind, what blizzards, storms, ecstasies! 

When I think of the great divide between adolescence and adulthood, I can’t of course dismiss changing countries and languages as the first great event that made almost all other change look minor by comparison. But in my life there was an event of comparable, or arguably even greater importance: the discovery of my vocation as a writer. Or maybe instead of “discovery,” I should say “gradual development,” since it wasn’t a matter of a light going off in my head, but rather a “long and winding road” with many backslides; in the end, I did accept the rather strange idea that I was, indeed, a writer. Not a poet – that “vocation” broke down more than once – but, more broadly, a writer, in the Rilkean sense of having to write, because you know that if you couldn’t, you’d die.

There are of course many other kinds of vocation. Almost anything can be a vocation if you feel it’s the right path for you, and you work at it with “wild patience.” Mistakes become stepping stones; the most beautiful trees grow in cemeteries. For me, there is also a beautiful feeling of calm that lets me know I am indeed doing the right thing.

James Hillman was a contrarian Jungian psychologist. Spurning the idea that parents, and especially the mother, determine the child’s destiny, Hillman came up with an “acorn theory” of development: each of us is born with a potential destiny (“daimon”) that can be discovered and fulfilled – just as the acorn contains the potential to grow into an oak. In The Soul’s Code, Hillman recognizes that only some people will go on to realize their potential. In fact such people strike us as extraordinary:

Extraordinary people display calling most evidently. Perhaps that’s why they fascinate. Perhaps, too, they are extraordinary because their calling comes through so clearly and they are so loyal to it . . .  They seem to have no other choice . . . Extraordinary people are not a different category; the workings of this engine in them are simply more transparent. (p. 28-29)

Rilke became aware of his poetic vocation fairly early in his life; once he found his path, he struck people as being totally dedicated to it. The best-known and most startling anecdote about Rilke’s life is that he refused to come to his daughter’s wedding because he happened to be in a fertile, productive phase and didn’t want to lose his creative momentum. Years ago I knew a woman who was so appalled at Rilke’s not coming to his daughter’s wedding that she could not bring herself to read his work. I understood Rilke perfectly, even if I suspected I wouldn't have had his courage to protect his creative solitude as fiercely as that. But Rilke did have that courage and that dedication and that “first things first” loyalty to his calling, and that’s why Rilke was Rilke.

But this poem was written long before the wedding incident. Rilke was already an “oak,” so to speak, but he remembered the acorn – the acorn and the seedling. In The Book of Hours he announced, “I feel my own power.” But in “The dark hours of my being” we also sense great affection in him for the young boy that he once was. For one thing, the boy already had the dream that the man was fulfilling – the dream that the boy “lost in sorrows and songs.” The songs were a beginner’s poems (Rilke started writing verses at the age of nine); the sorrows – read any biography (for one thing, imagine a sensitive boy being sent to a military academy).

Here I’d like to come up with a wonderful coda about all of us being great rustling trees, and quite a grove we are! But “grove” reminds me of “grave.” With every gain, there is some loss, so here is thinking of the young girls and boys whom we outgrew, who are no more except in our memory, but who need to be remembered with tenderness.

This is the tenderness I finally managed to achieve toward my younger self. I wrote the poem before major unhappiness hit again. I could use a third picture, and a fourth one. Such is life. With luck (and let’s face it, it takes a lot of luck), we pursue not happiness, but a calling – which we recognize in the dark, solitary hours of our being.

TWO PICTURES

You will love again

the stranger who was yourself.

            ~ Derek Walcott

Photography traffics in time.

On my driver’s license, at thirty-nine

I look younger than at twenty-seven.

At thirty-nine, my eyes are lit

with an astonished smile.

My wayward hair seems to dance 

over my right brow.

At twenty-seven, I’m withered inside:

tight mouth, defeated eyes –

a face like the arrival

of familiar pain.

I’ve given up on my hair –

a wig crowns me with synthetic sheen.

I want to go back

to the woman in that faded polaroid –

get rid of the wig,

throw out the thriftshop blouse,

the platform sandals so worn down

she waddles lopsided.

I want to buy her a self-correcting

typewriter, so she doesn’t inhale

so much correction fluid.

I want her to stop wasting herself

on loveless men. They call her

a diamond, a pearl,

leave her like broken glass.

I want to crumple that list

she keeps near the phone,

of clever things to say.

I need to talk to her, it’s urgent:

she mustn’t spend evenings crying.

I want to buy her decent shoes.

She must be told she has talent.

Oh, she is bright and funny too –

watch her cook the “nothing soup,”

or read whole volumes, crouched

in a dim corner of the bookstore.

Secretly I admire her style –

waking at six to record

a flute concerto from the static-y radio;

drifting to sleep in the drowning

moonlight of Selected Shelley.

Dear child, I want to say,

forgetting it is she

who’s my unlikely mother –

this stranger who at night

will not pull down the blinds

so her houseplants can feed

on the morning’s first timid light.

If only I could show her

the other picture. But I can’t.

She must stumble into the future

blindly, carrying me into the now –

this woman slender as new moon,

too young and fragile for the task.

~ Oriana © 2012

Charles:

Love the continuation of your wrestling with God thoughts. So many brilliant viewpoints in just the first few paragraphs.

Did you know that the word, "Israel" means, he who wrestles with God? You would have made a great Talmudic scholar.

Then that pleasant surprise image of 1/2 a Polish bison.

You are a committed atheist and you back it up with profound thoughts. I don't believe you could have gotten to where you were if you didn't go through Catholic boot camp.

People often accuse me of being spiritual but all I want to do is become a better human being. I could care less about being spiritual.

"I’d rather have inspiration than mystic visions; and what joy, the keyboard rather than the rosary! When I gaze at the clouds, I’m not thinking of heaven; I’m simply enjoying the clouds" is my favorite few sentences.

“Two Pictures” is also a great poem.

Oriana:

I'm still not sure if it was just a coincidence that my commitment to atheism – finally deciding "this is it" – and the quantum leap in happiness that I experienced. I think we need to close doors – keeping too many doors/options open (in this case leaving the door ajar to the possibility that "maybe god exists" – not a being floating in the clouds, that’s just too silly, but some kind of cosmic force) drains energy. Once a choice is made, there is less stress. It’s similar to committing oneself to a vocation – you stop imagining yourself doing other things, and focus on one path. There is power in simply having a focus.

Catholic boot camp – I love the phrase. Yes, the exposure was both toxic and challenging . . . It was pretty dramatic to be plunged into Catholicism after Winnie the Pooh . . . and to this day, nothing compares to Catholicism in terms of aggressive indoctrination and my ultimate rejection of that indoctrination (even assuming that total recovery is not possible). People who think that Communist propaganda was a ruling factor in my childhood obviously didn’t experience old-time Catholicism, which outdid the government not just tenfold, but worked at a much more powerful life-and-death level, and had fabulous images and music and stories. The splendor of the churches compared to the dull, boxy “House of the Party” – well, there simply can be no comparison. 

(But now I also realize that I was deprived of what existed for the Jesuits, for instance: the deep meditation on the Gospels, a more interesting and experiential approach. The church wasn't going to see a mere girl as anything but superficial, not worth initiating into "spiritual exercises" -- those were for the church elite, especially the Jesuits.)

So my leaving the church, once I came back full circle to the perception I had already during my first religion lesson – that this is all fairy tales, and there is no invisible bearded man sitting on a throne in the clouds, whose will determines all that happens – my breaking away was the greatest act of courage in my whole life, since back then a part of me still believed that I was dooming myself to eternal torment in hell. In fact even now I am not totally free of that old terror – except that, should I turn out to be wrong, I am prepared to say, with Bertrand Russell, “Sir, you didn’t give us sufficient evidence.” And should hell as a place of eternal torment turn out to exist, then a deity who created it is worse than Hitler and is not worthy of worship.

In any case, I reject the criterion of faith and accept only conduct as having any validity for judging a person. I know this is a more Judaic than Christian thinking, as is the concentration on this life rather than the afterlife.

In many cases belief is irrelevant; it’s the behavior that matters. When I was doing depression, if someone asked me, “Do you really believe all this nonsense? Do you believe you are worthless, of no use to anyone, your whole life a failure, and so on?” it would probably have depressed me even more, since now I’d be exposed as a moron who worshipped at the altar of such falsehoods. In any case, it would have plunged me into more thinking, this time about my own thinking. I needed to stop thinking and start working. In a similar vein, people who torment themselves pondering religious questions that can have no verifiable answer are mostly wasting their time – unless they have Dostoyevski’s genius and the result is The Grand Inquisitor. Otherwise just giving a dollar to a homeless person is worth more than all the metaphysics.

Speaking of Dostoyevski, I realize that I can understand literature better because I am familiar with both the Old Testament and the Gospels. I also understand why someone like Dostoyevski could have a deep attachment to the person of Christ, and thus be unable to make a clean break (though he could never be conventional; he constructed his own heresy). Literature is the richer for his conflict between reason and faith.

Many people still confuse atheism with nihilism. The latter means a lack of values. All atheists I know have strong moral values, love beauty, love their friends and families. As Milosz observed, believers and non-believers are not all that different. Where Milosz was probably wrong was in his assertion that believers made the choice to believe. I think that’s decided on the level of the unconscious. I can’t believe if there is lack of evidence, even if I’d like to believe. In others (e.g. recovering addicts), the need to believe may prevail. I say: whatever works. How we live right here on earth matters because it touches the lives of others. We are responsible for that. It’s social contract all the way. Even suicide is a social act. So ultimately it all comes down to being a good person, and I think everyone can say Amen to that.