DANTE: ANOTHER MOON

It was near midnight. The late-risen moon,
like a brass bucket polished bright as fire,
thinned out the lesser stars, which seemed to drown.

~ Dante, Purgatorio, Canto 18; tr. John Ciardi

This is the most delightful tercet in a rather forgettable canto that deals with the “slothful” -- those who, while alive, have not shown sufficient zeal for their tasks. These are not the “sullen,” or the deeply depressed souls who end up in a muddy bog in hell. These are the slackers, the unmotivated, those at the portal of depression because they see no meaning and no reward in their work; sometimes they literally don’t know what to do and how to do it. When meaning arises, as during a flood or another emergency, the supposed slackers gain a sense of purpose as quickly as others.

In Purgatory, the purpose arises in the form of wanting to get to heaven. The former “slothful” now keep running to show their zeal.

“Faster! Faster! To be slow in love
is to lose time,” cried those who came behind;
“Strive on that grace may bloom again above.”

“To be slow in love is to lose time” -- nice and aphoristic, but not what we seek in poetry. And even the arrow-minded Abbot of San Zeno who, without stopping, barks back his reply to Virgil and Dante, can’t quite break away from the preachiness that mars the Purgatorio and especially Paradiso. Perhaps we need to be slow in love -- slow and silent and without the go-go-go spirit.

In Canto 18, the only  tercet that rises to true poetry is the one about the moon. That one obeys Wittgenstein’s commandment: “Don’t think. Look.” Or, as Larry Levis taught his students, “Gaze at the world.” A poet is a “gazer at the world.”

Here is the moon tercet again:

It was near midnight. The late-risen moon,
like a brass bucket polished bright as fire,
thinned out the lesser stars, which seemed to drown.

Lyricism starts already with “It was near midnight.” I am astonished that such a simple statement  touches us in a special way. It’s “gazing at the world.” Suddenly we are connected with the hushed beauty of a moonlit night. We can forget ourselves in it as those “lesser stars, which seemed to drown.” There is no sadness to this drowning, only dissolving into light.

And note the image of fire rather than water, which we’d expect to go with “bucket.” Yet the image water forces itself in, with the word “drown.” But the drowning is into light, a more unusual proposition. That’s of course how the stars “drown” -- they are invisible if one central light is too bright. As for the connotations of light, it would take many pages. It’s often associated with the divine. I don’t see why the soothing nature of darkness would be excluded as a manifestation of a benign deity, a soft-good night blanket -- but the cultural evolution of images has strongly privileged light.

Consider, for instance, the description of sunrise in the first canto of the Inferno, when Dante finds himself in una selva oscura, the dark woods of error:

I raised my head and saw the hilltop shawled
in morning rays of light sent from the planet
that leads men straight ahead on every road.

        ~ tr. Mark Musa

Planet? I checked Ciardi’s translation: it’s planet. In Ptolemaic astronomy the sun was regarded as a planet. Yet elsewhere Dante speaks of the sun as a star, as confirmed by the famous last line of the Commedia: “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.” It’s just the first smudge of dawn of the modern worldview here, but that smudge will eventually become a supernova destroying the scholastic certainties. Dante was already a heretic. His savior was Beatrice, and he knew that the sun is a star.

But back to Purgatory and Canto 18. Another taste of lyricism is not granted to us until the next canto, where we meet the Angel of Zeal, “with swanlike wings outspread.” But that’s straining at it. It’s not the same lyrical splendor, which needs to seem effortless like sleep. As Milosz says, “Even asleep we partake in the becoming of the world.” Cognitive processing is unconscious, and forcing a system on one’s imaginings deprives us of deeper thinking, which tends to be both unpredictable and metaphoric. Let the images come could be a poet’s sole prayer. 
Gustave Doré Geryon
 
Of course there are many imagistic passages in the Inferno, in my eyes the best part of the Comedy.  When Virgil and Dante climb onto the back of Geryon, Monster of Fraud, the winged creature that will fly them from Circle Seven to Circle Eight, we get this beauty in Canto 16 (“he” is Virgil):

Then he called out: “Now, Geryon, we are ready:

bear well in mind that his is living weight

and make your circles wide and your flight steady.”

As a small ship slides from a beaching or its pier,
backward, backward — so that monster slipped

back from the rim. And when he had drawn clear
 
he swung about, and stretching out his tail

he worked it like an eel, and with his paws

he gathered in the air, while I turned pale.

Dali’s Geryon is a must here:

But Geryon is my shameless digression in this post. Let’s consider more light. In Canto 28 of Paradiso, Dante reaches the Ninth Heaven, the Primum Mobile, “the first mover,” the outermost concentric sphere in Dante’s earth-centered model of the universe. This sphere imparts movement to all the inner spheres surrounding the motionless earth.

Here Allen Mandelbaum’s translation is the most inspired:

I saw a point that sent forth so acute
a light, that anyone who faced the force
with which it blazed would have to shut his eyes,

and any star that, seen from the earth, would seem
to be the smallest, set beside that point,
as star conjoined with star, would seem a moon.

Around that point a ring of fire wheeled,
a ring perhaps as far from that point as
a halo from the star that colors it

when mist that forms the halo is most thick.
It wheeled so quickly that it would outstrip
the motion that most swiftly girds the world.

But let’s also look at Ciardi’s rendition of that ring of fire:

so close around the Point, a ring of fire
spun faster than the fastest of the spheres
circles creation in its endless gyre.

Rhyme can be wonderful. But I also love the image of the earth “girded” by the multiple layers of motion. 

Dante the Pilgrim proceeds to the Empyrean, pure light (literally: “fire”) which is arranged like an immense white rose, often called Dante’s “mystic rose.” The souls of the saved are seated on the “petals,” immersed in bliss. 

 We know that our perception of bliss depends on change, and we’d soon grow bored doing nothing but staring at a point of light. Yet obviously boredom could not exist in heaven, since that would detract from bliss. One solution that has been suggested is that the souls gazing at god have no memory, and thus are immersed in the eternal Now.    

Dante, however, retains his memory. As the climax of his journey, he is granted the sight of the Trinity as three overlapping circles of colored light. Here Mark Musa’s translation is regarded by critics as the most sublime:

Within its depthless clarity of substance
I saw the Great Light shine into three circles
in three clear colors bound in one same space.
. . .

O Light Eternal fixed in Self alone,
known only to Yourself, and knowing Self,
You love and glow, knowing and being known!

That circling which, as I conceived it, shone
in You as Your own first reflected light
when I had looked deep into It a while,

seemed in Itself and Its own Self-color
to be depicted with man’s very image.
My eyes were totally absorbed in It.

Frustrated Reader of the Sublime, if you expected a clear description of the Trinity with fewer capital letters, you obviously had not been warned enough in childhood that the mystery of the Trinity is beyond human grasp.

But on the page I have a helpful note affixed in a stranger’s hand: “Perfect self-sufficient ecstasy.” This is powerful, since Christianity has presented us with a suffering god. Dante imagines a happy god.

Trinity is a Greek rather than a Hebrew concept. In fact in Judaism it amounts to the highest blasphemy. But let’s not worry about the jealous god of vengeance. Neither jealous nor vengeful nor suffering, god is three happy circles of light. Three happy circles of gaily colored light! How could those circles have memory, or anything to do with human suffering? 

But wait, the light emits love as it glows. There are those who claim to have experienced divine love.  Is there a hint here of Einstein’s “friendly universe”? Not that Einstein ever claimed the universe was friendly; he only suggested that it’s an important question facing humanity. But perhaps all that matters if whether humanity is progressing toward being more friendly. 

Still, I admire Dante having come up with this geometry rather than presenting the painters’ cliché: a double throne in the clouds, two bearded men, one of them older, the dove hovering above, added for the sake of the number three.

The dove was the best part. I miss the dove. But enough unreality. Since la luce etterna is beyond human grasp, let’s walk out into the night and look at the moon. 

NDE: THE VIEW FROM THE CARPAL TUNNEL

A ROSE FOR ELLEN


Traveler in the dark,
hitting broadside a pick-up truck,
your last thought a flash

like a shooting star:
Now at last I’m going to see
if there is anything beyond.

In the hospital, you felt a great light
bloom through you, white-blue
petal flames of stars:

There is no there.
There is only now.

*

They are modes of travel:
a rose, a star. You and I
liked to travel alone,

so a moment could blossom again
in thought’s afterlife.
Ellen, I can no longer tell

best moments from the worst,
bringing wisdom, a rose,
with its rapturous thorns.

You thought I was the adventurous one –
seventeen, asking a bus driver,
in a tongue that hurt,

broken glass in my mouth,
Excuse me, Sir, could you kindly
repeat the directions –

Alone in America –
not because I was brave;
because I didn’t know

what I was doing. You knew:
“My first marriage lasted
ten years; my second one,

two months – ” you smiled,
an artist defending her right
not to live in a hurry,

passing this way only once.
Traveler in the night,
I knew why you loved

the music of shadows,
sepia photographs.
In your there that is

here, Ellen, ride an echo.
Come by to remind me:
The afterlife is now.

~ Oriana © 2012

**

A lover of coolness and clouds, I know I sound like a freak to those who possess one or both of these luxuries most of the year. But for me summer is always my little apocalypse, sometimes getting more intensely apocalyptic as heat licks the house with tongues of hell.

Last summer it was the disastrous hyaluronic acids knee injections, meant to restore my ability to take long walks and even hike in the mountains. Alas, I developed a severe inflammation and was virtually house-bound and in pain for months. As often happens, a new insight emerged as I scoured the Internet for information (including the price of various wheel chairs). The insight was this: all arthritis (mine is post-traumatic, just in the left knee) is auto-immune. Of course! Inflammation involves the immune system. Armed with this awareness, I dare say I saved myself and no longer compare prices of wheelchairs, though my strolls are hardly the long walks I was hoping for.

This summer I had the near-death experience involving computers. Laugh if you will, but my life is centered on my computer, and two crashes in a row, the second one being Growlie’s death of old age, left me computer-less for stretches of time. Since the first crash happened when I was suffering from severe carpal tunnel, and constantly breaking my vow to stay away from the keyboard, the enforced rest seemed downright providential. As I said to a friend, “If I were a believer, I’d be on my knees giving thanks.”

Unable to type, I had to content myself with reading, which I agree expands one’s mind, even if it’s not as satisfying as writing. The most important book that I read, three times over, was Jesse Bering’s The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life. Bering brilliantly explains why we there is no soul, destiny, or a universal meaning of life -- and why we tend to believe in such things in spite of lack of evidence.

The chapter called “Curiously Immortal” deals with the belief in the afterlife as the “cognitive hiccup of gross irrationality” (p. 114), since it’s essentially impossible for us to imagine non-existence. We are practically forced to be in denial of death. It’s been wisely observed that we can’t stare into the abyss for too long (and Nietzsche warned that the abyss stares back at us). One say to live on without being paralyzed by the fear of death is the solution offered by most religions: if you believe in the correct deity and/or are a good person, you will be rewarded in paradise. Another solution is to treasure the now. I particularly love Rilke’s “To work is to live without dying.”

Those already familiar with my blog can predict where I am going. But for new readers who might be waiting for accounts of near-death experiences, let me first toss in Jung’s, which strikes me as quite interesting. It took place after Jung’s heart attack in the winter of 1944, before stories of the tunnel, the light, the greeting relatives, heavenly music, and perhaps a glimpse of Jesus became commonplace.

Jung said he found himself high above the earth -- later he found out he’d have to be 1000 miles above it to see the continents the way he saw them. Directly below him was Ceylon, and the view of India (Jung had visited both places, and the trip was one of the most important experiences in his life). His vision extended across the “reddish-yellow” desert of Arabia to the tip of the Mediterranean. Then he turned and saw a floating boulder:

I had seen similar stones on the coast of the Gulf of Bengal. They were blocks of tawny granite, and some of them had been hollowed out into temples. My stone was one such gigantic dark block. An entrance led into a small antechamber. To the right of the entrance, a black Hindu sat silently in lotus posture upon a stone bench. He wore a white gown, and I knew that he expected me. Two steps led up to this antechamber, and inside, on the left, was the gate to the temple. Innumerable tiny niches, each with a saucer-like concavity filled with coconut oil and small burning wicks, surrounded the door with a wreath of bright flames. I had once actually seen this when I visited the Temple of the Holy Tooth at Kandy in Ceylon; the gate had been framed by several rows of burning oil lamps of this sort.

At that point Jung felt that he was being stripped of all desire and regret. All his wishes, “the whole phantasmagoria of earthly existence,” fell away. Only his essence remained: everything he’d experienced and accomplished. He was about to enter the temple and be with the people to whom he belonged (here I recognize the Swedenborgian notion that after death we join our “soul group”). But at that moment he saw his doctor float up to him. The doctor was in what Jung calls “his primal form,” surrounded by a golden chain or wreath. Telepathically, the doctor told Jung that he must go back to earth. Jung felt terribly disappointed, and at the same time worried about his doctor -- why was he able to appear in his primal form? Jung reports that the doctor did die shortly afterwards, of septicemia.

I find this NDE account fascinating in that Jung, the son and grandson of Protestant ministers, had a near-death experience that was completely non-Christian. It seems to have been strongly influenced by the Eastern tradition (note the temple patterned after the Temple of the Holy Tooth in Ceylon, and the Hindu seated in lotus posture) and by Swedenborg’s vision of the afterlife as being in the company of kindred minds (thieves with thieves, intellectuals with intellectuals; I’m not sure if I’d want to be with poets). 



There were neither Lutheran hymns nor something like a butterfly migration recently described by a neurosurgeon, Dr. Eben Alexander, featured in a recent issue of Newsweek (itself headed for digital afterlife). By the way, Dr. Alexander did not experience a tunnel nor greeting pre-deceased relatives. His guide was a beautiful young woman -- somewhat like Dante’s Beatrice once Dante is in heaven. Wish fulfillment at last. (To give him credit, however, he did not “go toward the light.” Instead, once above the fluffy clouds and the shimmering beings, he experienced “an immense void, completely dark, infinite in size, yet also infinitely comforting.”)

And I don’t suppose anyone is surprised that when Tibetan Buddhists have near-death experiences, they describe the bardo exactly the way they had learned it would be. Each culture and each age creates its own images of the wonders that await us “on the other side.”

However, we should remember that Buddha himself refused to speculate about the afterlife. He insisted that there is no permanent self, and made concentrating on the present moment the core of  his teaching. While the debate will no doubt continue, it is wise to remember Buddha’s wisdom: all we have is now.

In her poem “All Hallows,” Phoebe MacAdams writes:

Flowers and death 
hold hands 
in the season of souls; 

during Dias de los Muertos 

the arms of death are full of flowers, 

every skeleton offers a marigold and 

black, orange and yellow 
are the season's colors.

Mortality is a blessing 

in the darkness; 

nothing to do but 

treasure, 

and let go

**

 **

in line with Halloween: an opossum that lived in a baby grand piano in Virginia

Darlene:

OK, Ms Happy Atheist, if you were to have a near-death experience, what do you think yours might be like?
 
Oriana:

Heart attack is fairly common in my family, so who knows, I just might eventually really have an NDE. Of course I’d hope for a completely surprising one: no tunnel, no light, no deceased relatives. A merry-go-round ride through the universe -- why not . . .

But of course no one can predict. I’ve never wanted to be unconventional. It simply happened to me, starting with a fairly unusual childhood. My desperate teenage ambition was to be average, to be “like the others.” But since my life has been unconventional, I suspect that I might end up with a very conventional NDE: yes, tunnel, the white light, my grandmother waiting for me, perhaps with my favorite cousin who happened to die prematurely. Organ music, the way it was played at St. Jacob’s in Warsaw.

No, I can’t really imagine my own NDE. But I know what my heaven would be like: a beautiful college campus, with some wooded areas like the lush North European forests. The sound of the cuckoo, which is the sweetest, muffled, swallowed call, not the harsh mechanical cuckoo-clock annoyance.

But there’d also be a fantastic botanical garden, and of course a magnificent library. And the best lectures in a variety of fields: geology, history, philosophy, biology, and on and on -- no limit. Jesus might lecture on the history and sociology of religion. All the lecturers would be charismatic. And now and then I’d like to give a lecture.

No god -- what would be the use of him/it? Maybe he could organize an occasional group discussion on the nature of reality and the meaning of everything. At first I’d probably be an eager participant. But after a while I see myself preferring opera, or a good play. For art, you have to have conflict. Even a good poem has dramatic tension. In heaven? Only the great art of the past would still make one “feel alive.” (No wonder the very idea of heaven strikes many as insufferable.)

But there could still be plenty of intellectual stimulation. And I wouldn’t preclude romance, either. Or fine restaurants. Or being able to continue my blog for a new, responsive audience. My heaven needs to have love and work, aside from beauty.

Too bad that this is doomed to remain just a fantasy. As Leszek Kolakowski said, “Why should the universe be so constructed as to listen to our desires?” As Milosz observed, a modern person can’t possibly believe that real life starts only after death. How horrible earthly life has to be for such a belief to become real . . . Case in point: the Middle Ages. Many people prayed for an early death. 

And when they prayed, “Thy Kingdom come,” they really meant the end of the world. They dearly hoped to see all around them destroyed utterly: even the great castles and cathedrals, the trees, the animals. All, all had to go. Was it Nietzsche who said that the foundation of religion is contempt for life?
 
Mary:

it's not surprising to me that people have ndes that fit with their religious or spiritual backgrounds, or that diverge from their backgrounds. i really do feel people have the ndes that they need to have, to go wherever they need to go next, it's an invitation there. some people are being invited deeper into something they already have; others into something new. (how i have arrived at this, is a very long story.)

Oriana:

I'd love to hear your story. I'm not in the least surprised that people have NDEs that fit with their religious backgrounds or spiritual beliefs, but I'd be surprised to hear that anyone's NDE differs from what they already know, at some level.  The closest I've come is certain dreams, and on analysis, if I had no clue in waking life, no info would come. I realize this doesn't constitute a proof, one way or the other, but I do wonder -- if others are having all sorts of mystical experiences, why am I, a poet after all, deprived of anything of the sort? I mean, inspiration, sure, but the best writing comes from the unconscious, and that's not regarded as anything mystical, not even by Jung. Jung's theory of creativity was "cryptomnesia" -- http://oriana-poetry.blogspot.com/2012/10/jung-in-land-of-dead.html


Mary:

Oriana, I will tell you my story sometime, I am not always in a frame of mind/heart where I can talk about it. I personally feel everything is a "mystical experience" of some sort if the mind/heart is open. I definitely feel that while reading your poems! Doesn't have to be really a grand or dramatic experience like Jung's aerial view of Europe. [Oriana: it was actually Asia, with just the southern tip of Italy showing, but I understand what Mary means]

[PS: Sadly, Mary died not long after Thanksgiving 2011. She was suffering from adrenal insufficiency. Alas, we will never get to know about the experiences that made her believe in the afterlife. I am glad that her brain created for her a soothing story. Most people die peacefully, surrendered to the process of the gradual shutting down.]

Denise:

http://www.care2.com/greenliving/from-near-death-to-cancer-free-an-amazing-true-story.html?page=1
 
Oriana:

To me everything is a natural experience. For instance, I once did actually come close to dying. I felt my body shutting down system by system, and I was experiencing great peace, thinking oh, so this is what it feels like to die. The peacefulness was lovely. After recovery, i remembered that large amounts of endorphins are released in traumatic situations -- I wish we had those endorphins more often, under less life-threatening circumstances. // Believe me, I'd love to see the universe as totally benign, and all cancer miraculously (or otherwise) healed (thank you Denise -- I know we lump all such recoveries under "spontaneous remission," since we don't really know; but maybe one day we will) -- I'd love to experience something absolutely mysterious, the Jungian mysterium tremendum -- and mind you, my background in science isn't all that deep, though more than average -- but, darn it, everywhere I look, everything I remember, points to natural processes with no need for any divine or angelic assistance. 

It's like waves in the ocean -- we no longer need an ocean god to explain the waves and storms. As John Lennon sings in "Imagine": above all, only sky. Once I fully accepted that, enjoying the moment became very important to me. And it was while watching my mother die (I had "hospice at home" -- I can't praise hospice workers highly enough) that I had, with great intensity, the insight: "We are of the moment." And that moment should not be wasted on quarreling, feeling disgruntled about little stuff, and so on.

By the way , it strikes me as almost funny that I seem to derive much strength from my atheism,  quite like people who derive strength from their faith. That wasn't always the case. I had to come to the feeling of certainty and stop wavering. I think it's the power of clarity. 

Scott:

As usual, love the pictures; the beauty of the butterflies and the ugliness of the opossum is a great contrast! If you substitute Nantucket for Ithaca in Cavafy's great poem you get the gist of my feelings; who knows why that little windswept isle has captured my imagination so. You know Melville is a great favorite of mine but as much as I enjoy his writing I am I think more enamored with the whaling aspect more than anything. I'm one of those few....those ' happy few '....who loves the whaling digressions. I'm sure a Jungian analyst would have quite an entertaining session or two trying to ascertain why a child of the agrarian South would be so caught up in the activities of a small Christian sect of a little New England island. I can only imagine their NDE's chasing the world' largest carnivore!

Oriana:

Scott, you are a treasure! Also, if you ever have an NDE, Melville will probably be waiting at the end of the tunnel. He'll point out the place in the ocean where you'll glimpse the whiteness of Moby Dick.

Scott:

I'm hoping it will be Starbuck or some other 'Weighty Friend'! To be at the helm of a whaler in the South Pacific on a moonless night while the 'starry archipelagoes' pass overhead would be a nice NDE as well.

Oriana:

I should have thought of it! Fictional characters should be given at least as much weight as famous authors. We speak of great writers as being “immortal,” but it’s actually the characters those writers created who are immortal. And yes, I’m almost sure that an NDE could be very pleasant in the company of a favorite fictional character.



 

WAS JESUS NAKED? POETRY AS CONSOLATION VERSUS REALISM

Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Lilith, 1868
 
POETRY NEEDS THE TENSION OF OPPOSITES

SHE DIED IN BEAUTY

She died in beauty, -- like a rose
  Blown from its parent stem;
She died in beauty, -- like a pearl
  Dropped from some diadem.

She died in beauty, -- like a lay
  Along a moonlit lake;
She died in beauty,-- like the song
  On birds amid the brake.

She died in beauty, -- like the snow
  On flowers dissolved away;
She died in beauty; -- like a star
  Lost on the brow of day.

She lives in glory, -- like night’s gems
  Set round the silver moon;
She lives in glory,-- like the sun
  Amid the blue of June.

~ Charles Doyne Sillery (1807-1837)

The moon/June rhyme came as if to say: here is the essence of 19th century poetry. Poets like Sillery (I wonder about that last name: too good to be true?) wanted to sound oh so pretty, no matter how fake the result.

The problem here is not only clichés. The main problem is the non-stop sweetness. A poem needs the tension of opposites (or, to use the standard term of literary criticism, “dramatic tension”). It shouldn’t be all sweet or all despairing. In that sense, poetry is not all that different from fiction: we don't want a story where all is sweetness and light, and the hero is never challenged, simply going from success to success. Into each life some rain must fall -- we'll return to this later. 

Rossetti: The Blessed Damozel, 1878

How did this poem ever survive to reach me in a century that treasures non-fiction, “what really happened”? We want to know specific details, however unpretty. Imagine, after the sometimes brutal realism of modern poetry, coming across “She Died in Beauty.” Enough anthology editors must have thought it a treasure, so here it was, in another anthology. We moderns seem to have a hunger for reality that is startling after so many centuries where the main function of poetry was the same as that of religion: consolation, never mind the truth.

And the odd thing is, all those "blessed damozels" were dead. I think Poe was right when he said that the best subject for poetry is the death of a beautiful woman. Or at least it's the best subject for the kind of poetry favored in the 19th century.

**

John Everett Millais: Ophelia, 1851

Sillery also wrote “Eldred of Erin” and “The Rose of Cashmere, an Oriental Opera.” For a quick contrast, let us move on to a poem by Sharon Olds:

THE RISER

When I heard that my mother had stood up after her near
death of toxic shock, at first
I could not get that supine figure in my
mind’s eye to rise, she had been so
flat,  her face shiny as the ironing board’s
gray asbestos cover. Once my
father had gone horizontal, he did
not lift up, again, until he was
fire. But my mother put her fine legs
over the side, got her soles
on the floor, slowly poured her body from the
mattress into the vertical, she
stood between nurse and husband, and they let
go, for a second -- alive, upright,
my primate! When I’d last seen her, she was silver
and semi-liquid, like something ladled
onto the sheet, early form
of shimmering life, amoeba or dazzle of
jism, and she’d tried to speak, like matter
trying to speak. Now she stands by the bed,
gaunt, slightly luminous, the
hospital gown hanging in blue
folds, like the picture of Jesus-come-back
in my choir books. She seemed to feel close to Jesus,
she loved the way he did not give up,
nothing could stop his love, he stood there
teetering beside the stone bed and he
folded his grave-clothes.

~ Sharon Olds, One Secret Thing, 2008

The ending makes me wonder: if Jesus folded his grave clothes (a parallel to swaddling clothes), did he then stand naked? This is a modern inquiry; I don’t expect it to raise any eyebrows (much less start riots in the streets; only now I realize what a blessing it is to live in a country where religious fanatics are too few to inflict serious damage). 

This is not one of Olds’s masterpieces. I chose it because it’s typical of her recent work, and fairly typical as contemporary poems go: the main requirement is specific, realistic details. For an interweave with the transcendent we get the mother’s spirit of a survivor against the background of evolution. She stands up: “My primate!” And, in a surprising turn, we get the Resurrection, but in a new light: Jesus “teetering beside the stone bed” and then folding his shroud (how would he even disentangle himself from it?) The mother’s recovery from near-death is compared to the Resurrection, not in order to elevate and enlarge the subject of mother’s recovery, but in order to makes us think of the risen Jesus in a new, realistic light.

And who doesn’t love that ending? Talk about a fresh perspective:

Now she stands by the bed,
gaunt, slightly luminous, the
hospital gown hanging in blue
folds, like the picture of Jesus-come-back
in my choir books. She seemed to feel close to Jesus,
she loved the way he did not give up,
nothing could stop his love, he stood there
teetering beside the stone bed and he
folded his grave-clothes.

Piero della Francesca: Resurrection, 1463

It’s startling that we get realism in painting as early as the Renaissance, but have to wait so long for realism in poetry -- practically until the twentieth century. 

And even in painting, we get a sudden swerve into the decorative: I’m thinking of the Pre-Raphaelites, who can be thought of as a visual parallel to 19th century poetry -- though they are more interesting by far than most of that poetry. There is a boldness to them, in all that retro. Nobody reads Tennyson’s Arthurian tales any more; but a museum show of Pre-Raphaelite art will draw a crowd and be enjoyable, no matter the damsels, the bosoms, the robes slipping off, the relentless prettiness. 

 





















Rossetti: The Salutation of Beatrice, 1869

Charles:

Her neck is about three inches too long. It was just too difficult to fix. The colors are great. 
 
Oriana:

There is eroticism in Pre-Raphaelite painting, a sensuality of flesh and color that will indeed always draw a crowd. A typical 19th century poem is not erotic, in spite of the frequent use of the word “bosom.” Sure, Whitman, yes; but I mean typical.

John Guzlowski:

Ian Watt wrote a great book called The Rise of the Novel in which he talks about realism and how it couldn't have existed before 1700--much of what he says about the fiction can also be applied to poetry.  If I'm remembering correctly, his main argument was that there really wasn't a sense of the deep self in individuals before that--mankind needed to get beyond a survival level of existence (more free time to think and brood) before we could turn inward and before literature could follow us there.
 
Oriana:

And enough people had to become literate before a novel-reading public could exist. From the start most readers of novels were women (today it’s 80%). In fact the majority of novel writers in the 18th century were women. I think that must have been an influence: women are interested not only in romance, but also, and perhaps primarily, in the psychology of the characters, in their inner lives.

But poetry remained archaic both in terms of language and subject, heavily relying on myth and tales of people of “noble birth.” Wordsworth tried to revolutionize poetry by making the language more simple and writing about  characters such as the leech gatherer. But even his language remained archaic, and later even he shifted to a more “exalted” subject matter. What makes poetry so obstinately old-fashioned until fairly recently is its ELEVATED TONE.

But there are surprises. One of them awaited me in an article on late Victorian poetry
http://www.bostonreview.net/BR37.5/colin_fleming_late_victorian_decadent_poetry.php

Those poems were often Gothic, full of ghosts. This is my favorite passage in the article:

Sometimes, one must disengage with reality in order to better understand its workings, upon return. To wit: Stephen Phillips’s “The Apparition” (1896), which begins with a flatly expressed statement, as though nothing were amiss. And yet, natural order has been upended:

My dead Love came to me, and said:
     “God gives me one hour’s rest,
To spend upon the earth with thee:
     How shall we spend it best?”

If you’re able to look past the ghoulish conceit, this is very humdrum; she might as well be asking him what he’d like for tea. And then we get a well-turned joke of domestic discord, further emphasized by an off rhyme:

“Why as of old,” I said, and so
     We quarreled as of old.

**

Oriana:

A sudden touch of realism creeps in, making all the difference. Now I’m amused (in a sad way) and interested.

**

Frederick Leighton: Flaming June, 1879

Hyacinth:

The one thing or actually there are many but the one thing I didn’t like about the Victorian age is the flowery poetry. Some of the literature was great, but poetry?
 
Oriana:

There is a fake feeling about much of Romantic and Victorian poetry, that exalted and archaic language so in contrast with the often-shocking realism of Dickens and Hardy. Maybe the realist prose writers had to prepare the ground for modern poetry. They had to shock the public first; then truth became acceptable in poetry as well.

The best of Browning escapes the fakiness (my spell-checker changed it to "famines"). Browning found a way to deal with the non-consoling aspects of reality, and was criticized--Oscar Wilde: "Mr. Browning uses poetry as a medium for writing prose." His wife's poems were more popular by far during Browning's lifetime.

The poet's clinging to archaic diction and"poetic" imagery has something of the "dying religion" about it. As people could find less and less comfort in religion (Ruskin complained that he heard the clink of a geologist's hammer at the end of each bible verse), as the human animal became perceived as  truly an animal, some people turned to fake ghost-filled poetry for escape.

True, a handful of Victorian poems are justly considered masterpieces, but even those, for all their wisdom, seem to lack freshness. It's mainly the old-fashioned language, I think.

The ghostliness may be related to the fact that even not so long ago people used to be a lot more familiar with death and dying than they are now, and poetry reflected that. Sure, poetry is about mortality regardless of period, but . . . the burials used to be more frequent and burial customs were much more elaborate than these days, when we scatter the ashes (“cremains,” in the lingo of the funeral industry). 


CAN A BAD POEM PROVIDE CONSOLATION?
 
John:

Oriana, I like what you say about the dying religion--a lot of the poetry does sound like that.  But it's not limited to the Brits.  There's so little American poetry from the 19th century that remains.  Whitman, Dickinson?  And who else?  Thoreau, Emerson, Longfellow?  I don't think so.  When I teach 20th century poetry, I use Longfellow's “Rainy Day” to talk about everything that's wrong with the typical 19th century American poem, clichéd language, thought, prosody.

Rainy Day

The day is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains, and the wind is never weary;
The vine still clings to the mouldering wall,
But at every gust the dead leaves fall,
And the day is dark and dreary.

My life is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains, and the wind is never weary;
My thoughts still cling to the mouldering Past,
But the hopes of youth fall thick in the blast,
And the days are dark and dreary.

Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.

Longfellow is the priest of a dying religion--telling us the truths are still the truths, even though he knows they're not.
 
Oriana:

“Into each life some rain must fall” -- I had no idea that this comes from Longfellow! I suspect very few people do, though the expression lives on as a kind of proverb or “folk wisdom.” If any of our words survive, even anonymously, that’s amazing. So before I go on to agree with John, let me say a little thank you to poor Longfellow, now indeed an example of how not to write.

Note that this is the poetry of consolation, especially in that closing stanza.

Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
 
~ apparently this is what the poetry audience wanted: uplift, soothing thoughts, the calm that comes with certain soothing, familiar words and familiar verbal music. Old songs used to deliver it too. Today, greeting cards still deliver it. We need certain words to reconcile us with the way life is. In the past, life was more difficult -- a lot of disease, a lot of dying at a young age--the need for consolation was greater. 

Now, those two lines are pretty bad. But "into each life some rain must fall" works for me as consolation. It works for me better than Buddha's "Life is suffering" or Scott Peck's "Life is difficult." That's the power of imagery, the power of metaphor. 

Parenthetically, the lines

My thoughts still cling to the mouldering Past,
But the hopes of youth fall thick in the blast,
And the days are dark and dreary.

~ happen to describe depression with great economy. 

Bad art can console. It can save lives! And I think poets are also trying to console themselves too -- or maybe even primarily. Christian Wiman, the current editor of Poetry magazine and the author of Poetry and Ambition, said something interesting: that poets write out of a sense of wrongness. Here are Wiman’s words:

Poetry arises out of absence, a deep internal sense of wrongness, out of a mind that feels itself to be in some way cracked. An original poem is a descent into and expression of this insufficiency. 
 
I’m reminded of Baudelaire’s “The Cracked Bell,” in which he states “My soul is cracked.” It seems true that poets write out of “wrongness,” and seek to console themselves for this wrongness. (I used to call it “the gap, the size of Grand Canyon, between the life I wish for and my actual life”). It’s just that modern poets write a different kind of comfort poem than old-time poets, whose typically wrote like this (I quote Wiman again):

   O leaves, O leaves that find no voice
   In the white silence of the snows,
   To bid the crimson woods rejoice,
   Or wake the wonder of the rose!

That kind of emoting is now taboo, but not consolation in a new, less effusive mode. Jack Gilbert comes to mind, consoling himself all the time. But at his best, he tells us “we must risk delight” and that a moment of beauty -- hearing the splash of an oar in the dark -- is worth all the sorrow that is yet to come. Is it? Some find this “consolation” rather bleak and unconvincing, but that’s all we have left now -- the beauty of nature and the affection of others, if we are fortunate enough to have those “affectionate others.” Sharon Olds also writes a lot of poems in which she is consoling herself in her own way. Louise Glück in fact complained that women are always expected to be "in the service of the life force."

Interesting, the evolution of poetry. I do remember a poem by Longfellow that I liked--something about a Jewish cemetery that had some degree of genuine observation in it, an unexpected word here and there . . .  but I know what you mean in general. The two 19th century poets whose work survives are not just  untypical; they are EXTREMELY untypical. Their work survives because they dared to be different, to go against their century’s hunger for consolation. Dickinson’s “I heard a fly buzz when I died” is the true shocking contrast with Sillery’s “She Died in Beauty.”

The modern breakthrough to more genuine writing, away from consolation  and toward truthfulness, is pretty astonishing. The heroic, rhetorical mode has disappeared; in both fiction and poetry, we write about the ordinary. The didactic mode? It has to be more subtle, couched in clever humor, the way Tony Hoagland does it, for example. It’s not that we lost our need to be consoled; still, we insist on “real life.” And today’s poems deliver a lot of realistic vignettes. How ironic that there used to be a large general audience for the kind of poetry that today we regard as terrible, and now, in this country at least, only poets read contemporary poetry, some of it excellent but doomed to oblivion for lack of sufficient audience.

As for my use of pre-Raphaelite paintings for this post, Pre-Raphaelites strike me as wonderfully escapist. And it’s legitimate, I think, to have some escapist art, some respite from reality. Who wants paintings of the Satanic mills? (of Manchester, I suppose, with Engels in charge of one, and supporting Karl Marx)

John:

I really like your image of alternative Victorian poetry (anti-pre-raphaelist) about the Satanic mills with marxist overtones. Imagine! Oscar Wilde or George Elliot doing for poetry what Dickens did for the novel! But I guess it was impossible. Even Hardy, the guy you'd think would have been a natural, a British sort of Philip Levine, wasn't capable of it. It had to wait for Philip Larkin. And where did he come from? I look around and wonder where a poem like This Be the Verse came from.  With Levine you know, but Larkin's a mystery as great as why 19th century poetry in England is so much posing and masks.

Have you heard Larkin reading the poem?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rjRYSfCJvM&feature=related

It's not what you expect.

It's not this reading--with it's working class voice:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qahT62n8tcA 
 
Oriana:

Blake not only mentions the “dark Satanic mills,” but also laments the fate of children exploited as chimney sweeps and the prostitutes spreading venereal disease (“the youthful harlot’s curse / . . . blight with plague the marriage hearse”). But the need for the poetry of consolation prevailed, and Blake remained without successors until the modern era. In America, only Whitman showed an even greater fearlessness. The nineteenth century was simply too early, I suspect: readers wanted consolation and uplift from poetry, even if it meant sacrificing truth to beauty.

(I don’t know how to classify the late Yeats: he certainly moved from Victorian melancholy and Celtic Twilight to the more honest modern vision in poems such as “Among School Children.”)

Consolation is not entirely the business of the poetry of past centuries. Among my contemporaries, especially women, I see a lot of striving for a positive ending, be it at the price of losing authenticity. Even Sharon Olds, for all her scrupulous realism, tries to draw a life-affirming moral from her stories and vignettes. 

This is truly not meant as a negative comment on Olds’s work, who’s uneven but manages to come across as truthful and interesting as long as she stays close to reality without far-fetched similes. The hunger for consolation is real, and is more likely to be satisfied by bad art, which goes straight for affirmation, without dwelling in darkness. But dwell in darkness we must, the better to appreciate a glimpse of light later.

I’ll never forget the personal essay workshop when an older woman protested a portrayal of an abusive mother by saying, “Your mother didn’t really mean what she said. She wouldn’t want to hurt you that way.” The rest of the class and the instructor were upset by the woman’s denial of reality and her attempt to invalidate a young student’s story. But thanks to the media, most of the population is not in denial about abusive mothers. We are not innocent about the “dark side” of anything that used to be idealized: romantic love, marriage, motherhood, patriotism, religion, warfare. We have awakened to the betrayal that sooner or later awaits us. That we can proceed in spite of that foreknowledge sometimes astonishes me.

In fact, the media may have gone too far in presenting evil. I have noticed how famished young college students are for positive portrayals of love and work -- life in general.

Thanks for the videos. I especially loved hearing Larkin do the reading himself. His being single and “child-free” probably helped him honestly say what he thought. (On the good side, I’ve noticed (and studies confirm) that child rearing is not as abusive as it used to be. It may be the “dignitarian revolution.” Human rights are finally being applied to children.

In poetry, it was a huge leap from King Arthur to ordinary people living ordinary lives. In novelistic prose it happened much sooner, but poetry kept clinging to the elevated tone and subject matter for a long, long time. It took WWI, for one thing, to make people more honest about admitting the dark side. Less religiosity probably helped too.

And here is a little treat -- thanks to John's bringing up that poem by Longfellow:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayGkA-vxrMc

CAN A GOOD POEM PROVIDE BOTH CONSOLATION AND REALISM?

Yes. In fact I want to end with a poem that seems to work precisely in that way: Victoria White’s “Elephant Grave”:

ELEPHANT GRAVE
 
After an elephant dies,

the herd may carry its bones for miles.

Did you know that? Hefting them over

the flatland ebb and flow, as

years ago we trekked

the backwoods of late November,

New England burned out like candlewick.

White light parted maples then,

found me chasing your footsteps

as you led us home.

Last fall the hills blazed red— 

I wonder if you tasted smoke, oceans away

as the first shells hit and
you couldn’t run.

Did you think of the leaves

we used to bring home and tape up,

the way they all withered in the end?

Even the best, the brightest

come to nothing, I learned,
 
because there wasn’t a body

even though you promised to come back.

I broke when I heard you were lying

alone in scrub grass,

no one to lift you up, knowing

you were precious.

Brother, I would have carried you

on my shoulders ’til the horizon bent for us

and our forest dawned along its edge.

Imagine, and the maples stoop to greet you,

saying welcome back,

welcome home.

~ Victoria White, The Kenyon Review

**

Here we have death in a war (I can’t help it if what immediately comes to my mind is “When will they ever learn?”). The soldier’s sister mourns his death. What hurts is its anonymity:

I broke when I heard you were lying
 
alone in scrub grass,
 
no one to lift you up, knowing

you were precious.
 
And she imagines undoing the damage:
 
Brother, I would have carried you

on my shoulders ’til the horizon bent for us

and our forest dawned along its edge.

Imagine, and the maples stoop to greet you,

saying welcome back,

welcome home.
 
**
 
This is lovely without sacrificing truth to beauty. We know it’s only a compensating fantasy, this grieving sister carrying her dead brother all the way home, where he dreamed to be. And the knowledge that this is only a fantasy makes it all the more poignant. There is no glorious afterlife mentioned here, but the glory of human love illumines the lines. 

Scott:

Melville indeed would have found much to discuss in your last two postings as faith and poetry were two of his great passions. It's been often remarked by scholars of 'Moby Dick' how the novel was steeped in Melville's grappling with belief; between Ishmael's soliloquies on philosophy to mate Starbuck's simple Quaker faith, the whole work is full of Biblical and moral ponderings. For us here in the 21st century it is no less a issue; how I wish some Quaker, Sufi and Zen leaders could meet in Jerusalem and hash all this current Middle East turmoil out! I am sure I have mentioned this before but it's struck me how many British, Australian, New Zealand and American poets were Catholic converts and how their faith changed their lives and verse and how many found great comfort in it. I'm sure as one brought up in Catholicism it must be hard to fathom how such men with no background in the faith could come to embrace it so wholeheartedly. I'm struck too by Tolkien( a writer who, like Melville, was a good poet but could have been a great one had he devoted more energy to it; his 'Voyage of Earendel' is incredibly good) and how his Catholic faith colored all he did; he truly had a happier home than Tolstoy or Melville, both who suffered with coming to a sure belief. I know most all thinking people must struggle at one time or another with matters of faith, belief and a deity; poets perhaps more than most.

Oriana:

Thank you, Scott, for bringing up this important point: great literature is indeed full of what one might call the “struggle with god.” But a writer typically develops his own version of whatever religion they might profess in public. Tolstoy, Dostoyevski, Milosz -- they were all “heretics” who grappled with doubt. Milosz explicitly stated that a thinking man must indeed be a heretic. Blind faith, without questioning, without an individual emphasis, is not possible for a real writer (who is per se a “real thinker,” never mind the church’s anti-rational stance).

Just this morning I was wondering how my life would be different if I were to return to Catholicism. My first thought was that it would be a “living death.” For me Catholicism meant being hobbled with fear of hell, especially with my despair over my sinful thoughts. And fear of hell is already hell.

But I also know that intuition can deceive us, and I may be overly given to the dramatic. But then a lukewarm belief is not possible for me; I’m afraid I’d tilt from atheism into religious fanaticism with no middle ground. There is a pejorative word in Polish, devotka, to denote a woman who spends a lot of time in church, on her knees, praying the rosary rather than engaging with others, with life. Not even acts of charity have an attraction for her; she wants to commune with her imaginary beloved.

Now we say’d about such a woman: “She has no life.” Her various “devotions” (let’s not forget favorite saints) become an outlet for the love that is otherwise lacking. Rilke’s mother was a devotka, who forced her little boy to kiss Christ’s wounds on the crucifix.

Writers do have a life, and that makes all the difference. Any faith can provide a useful system of life philosophy and metaphors. Catholicism in particular has a beautiful liturgical vocabulary. Being brought up in a religion and then leaving it is also useful to a writer, especially if one grapples with the tradition and forges one’s own non-toxic, life-affirming philosophy -- something I am trying to accomplish.

This morning I wondered if I’d be a kinder person with the encouragement of faith, so to speak. I remember performing “good deeds” as a child, earning my entries on the right side of the great ledger of sins and good deeds, the balance of which would decide eternal bliss versus eternal suffering. I truly believed this at an age where the brain isn’t developed enough to forge one’s own version of religion (I think every adult has his own version, his own god, toxic or supportive). I was counting my “good deeds” and didn’t yet know the pleasure of generosity, of giving. There is no need of religion for anyone to perform acts of kindness. It’s more pure to help someone without counting on a reward in heaven.

On the other hand, if someone gets guidance from pondering “what would Jesus do?” and does something kind as a result, that’s great! Whatever works. What I am against is toxic religion, the kind of destroys self-esteem and peace of mind. I’ve come to see the banal truth that what counts is conduct. How I wish the church taught me that, instead of all the talk about “sinning in thought” and eternal punishment.

To make matters worse, the sin of despair was the “sin against the Holy Ghost,” and that was the one sin which would not be forgiven. You could commit murder, then go to confession and be absolved; but if you despaired, seeing yourself as a wretched sinner doomed to hellfire, that was the sin that would not be forgiven. This was a trap from which I saw no escape. As someone said, all religions are about guilt, just with different holidays. 

Scott:

I think that Moby Dick is in many ways a novel of consolation. Ishmael's befriending of Queequeg, a stranger from another culture, speaks volumes of his compassion and acceptance. The numerous outright funny episodes, the stalwartness of Starbuck, whom Primo Levi (and I concur) thought the true hero of the novel, and the deep philosophical probings all point to 'a mind awake'. Even Ahab, we are told, 'has his humanities.'

And the ending is not “the end”; do we not all one day end this voyage? Ishmael survives and returns home a better person for the voyage; look at all he's learned. The novel shows us the fate of those who are obsessed with revenge; the kindness of cannibals; and again, the purity and frankness of Starbuck. I am one who is not all dismayed by the book's ending. I am much like Sylvia Plath: “my one wish (coward that I am): to see a monster turned to heat and light.” Of course, I don't consider whales monsters nor would I wish to see them hunted and killed today -- but as Hoagland's poem “Reading Moby Dick at 30,000 feet” ends:

Oh Captain, Captain!
Where are we going now?

Oriana:

Yes, fiction too can be a source of consolation. I think masterpieces tend to be affirmative in the end, though in a complex way, with much darkness woven in.

I love that poem by Toni Hoagland. It laments a passionless, rushed, distracted life that modern culture often thrusts on people. Let me quote the ending of the poem at greater length:

Better to be on board the Pequod,
with a mad one-legged captain
living for revenge.

Better to feel the salt wind
spitting in your face,
to hold your sharpened weapon high,

to see the glisten
of the beast beneath the waves.
What a relief it would be

to hear someone in the crew
cry out like a gull,
Oh Captain, Captain!
Where are we going now?

**


Scott:

Cannot wait to get this book by that obscure Dutch poet, Slauerhoff, and his book on Camoes, The Forbidden Kingdom. The first chapter mentions Camoes reading a copy of the Odyssey, a gift from his father. He is told by him to stay at home and work on his poetry as “voyages only show that the world is the same everywhere.” That brings to mind a passage from Moby Dick where Ishmael says to the Quaker owners that he wants to see the world. “Can't ye see the world where you stand?” one replies. And another passage from Moby Dick is akin to it: “It's a wicked world in all meridians.” Slauerhoff appears to have been your classic poète maudit. He stated My poems are my only home.
 
Oriana:

This hits close to home, since the dream underlying my coming to America was “I want to see the world.” And I became so exhausted from seeing America, and so spoiled by the beauty of California, that the dream ceased to be -- also because of health problems. If I couldn’t roam through the streets of an unknown city, getting delightfully lost, then finding my church tower like a compass again -- if I couldn’t roam but only sit in the tour bus, then the mystery was lost.

Once I said to Hyacinth: "Poetry is my homeland." But eventually poetry ceased to provide that sense of home. After a period of great "lostness," I have found a new and more vast homeland in literature in general, in any good writing. That’s the country of the mind. Ideas need to be embodied in everyday details, which become mysterious when slowed down to the speed of writing.


Hyacinth:

I agree with the philosophy in Scott's comment about the world is right where we are standing. Isn't that Zen like? My philosophy prof said the only part of the world you can change is your own, and I think that's true of everything-- this is all we really have and so much is tucked into every moment if we are aware. I loved traveling to other places and seeing other cultures but as Lucille Clifton said we are more alike than we are different.
Oriana:

To anyone who wonders about traveling: If you have the health and money to travel, by all means do! It’s always an adventure, especially if you go abroad. There is a price in stress, and young people do a lot better. If only I had had money in my youth, when I still had my health . . .  Well, we don’t get everything we want, it gets to be too late, and I live with that. I’ve been lucky in other ways. And I console myself thinking of Emily Dickinson and her non-traveling -- except in books and her wonderful mind.