Frida Kahlo: Roots

This 1943 painting by Frida Kahlo is one of my favorites. She’s fused with nature. Note the capillaries that extend from her into the soil -- the artist nurtures the very land from which she arose. And that wonderful vine -- Frida feels already “recycled” and at one with the great leaves, which are a part of her. Mexico is a part of her, and she is a part of Mexico. 

I used to slightly sneer at people who undertook pilgrimages to “seek their roots.” Relative to them, I could never get away from my roots. I was always being asked, “Where are you from?” Sometimes I felt crucified on my roots, and sometimes experienced them as a place of return. In the poem “The Lost Name,” I imagine the time “when I sleep / in the cradle of roots” -- definitely both the roots of a tree, one of the great Northern trees -- a linden tree in June, buzzing with a million bees -- as well as the metaphorical “roots” of ancestral homeland.

Yet there was a time when I felt tired of the concept. Aren’t we all of mixed ancestry? And didn’t I leave Poland in part to get away from the Polish nationalism? Never mind the irony of having to get used to a much more megalomaniac nationalism. Didn’t I do it to get away from the spectacle of moronic politicians. Again, never mind the irony . . . No, that was not the surprise. The surprise lay in my own poems.

I don’t believe that we choose what we write about. We can’t avoid our central themes. And one of my central themes, perhaps the dominant central theme, turned out to be the loss of the beloved . . . in the form of loss of homeland, slowly but inevitably transformed into a holy land. It sounds ludicrous, I know; but that’s part of being an immigrant. At seventeen, I never signed up for being an immigrant. Who’d choose that? Sounds insane.

Nor did I sign up for becoming a poet. And I didn’t like what I saw emerge in my poetry, again and again, even after decades of living in California. Let me state right away: I love California. But in poem after poem, I kept writing about Poland in some way. The lilacs, the roosters, the chestnut blossoms. The wheat fields, the hollyhocks.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that all my poems are about Poland, no. My poem about Kafka really is about Kafka and writing, and my poem about Freud’s mother really is about a mother’s idolatry of her son, the genius. This list could go on and on, and yet . . . I can’t deny how often I start writing about something, anything, but pretty soon it’s the mist of lilacs, it’s Warsaw, it’s the Warsaw clouds like billowing archangels. It’s the woods and fields and roadside crosses. I simply can’t help it: the landscape within me is not the landscape around me. The roots have pierced me forever, and everything I do in some way originates in that very problematic garden from which I exiled myself, and which was hardly paradise.

Someone said that homeland is not necessarily where you live; homeland is where you want to go to die. This rings true to me.

CREDO

When God says, I could give you
the whole world, but would you take it?
he’s expecting No, since I am the alleged

immigrant at a feast, but I say Yes.
Go ahead, give me the world.
But that already happened at my birth.

Now I believe only in California,
dressed in flames each scarlet,
smoky year. A paradise cracked

with fault lines. Like my life, split
at seventeen. Like my soul,
a missing infinity sign. Not even

the body remains our native country.
Leaving me only the inaccurate
loss of homeland, a place where you go

to die. By nineteen I had a plan:
word by word I'd dissolve
into the thousand-year old 

town where I was born,
a Viking river port,
the river wide as history – 

wintry fortress-like cathedral,
underworld-cold 
even during summer heat --
 
and above the crown of thorns, 
me that shivering lost dove; 

me the bowing of the wind 

in the linden trees;
inside empty granaries,
the blinding dance of dust and light.

Meanwhile I’ll take the world.


~ Oriana © 2012

I realized I couldn't leave out the granaries, and the dance of the dust in beams of light, granaries being like churches that way, and almost the essence of my birth town -- like the width of the Vistula there, and the deaths of foolish young men who in spite of warning signs try to swim across to the other shore. That's in part why the “lethal gleam.” The other part of “lethal” is history, needing no explanation.

**


Speak softly, God! It could mean to someone
that the trumpets of your kingdom called;
for their sound no depth is deep enough:
then all times rise out of the stones,
and all the long-lost appear
in faded linen, brittle skeletons,
crooked from the weight of soil.
That will be a miraculous return
into a wondrous homeland.

~ Rilke, from “The Last Judgment”

That wondrous homeland is the whole earth. But we should also remember that most people used to get buried in the towns and villages where they were lived; the “wondrous homeland” was the familiar trees and grasses, the same river, the same meadows of clouds in the sky. 


In Wuthering Heights, Catherine didn't want to stay in heaven; she wanted to return to the moors. All readers understand this at the deepest level; the real heaven we want is the place we already love, or used to love in childhood and youth -- our first great love.
 
A miraculous return into a wondrous homeland . . . Even if I tried to ignore my poems, where was it that I found myself in my dreams? Never at my current home here in California, so dear to me in my waking life. 

Late night. I’m standing at the end of the pier with an infant in my arms (but there is no tactile or other sensation -- I don’t see the face or arms -- it’s a small bundle -- it could be a doll), and drop the infant/doll into the cold, black-gleaming ocean. Then right away I’m in the pine woods near Warsaw. I throw myself to the ground, hug the needles, the dirt, thinking, with immense love, Moje, moje -- mine, mine. I sense that the trees are saying, “We will not let them take you back.” 
 
Perhaps it was the false American self that I threw into the ocean, but at this point I’m a hybrid, and it would be difficult to separate out any “pure Polish” self versus the acquired hybrid Polish and American self. Perhaps it was an effigy of America, or “my success in America” (that incessant lie of almost all immigrants).

But let me not appear to evade the darkest interpretation: I take a newborn, presumably my own, go at night to the end of the pier, and let the child drop into the shiny darkness of the Pacific. I hand the newborn back to Mother Night. Would I be capable of such a thing?

The first answer I hear in my mind is Yes, absolutely. Give me liberty or give me death. A fraction of a second later I hear the rational response: the reminder that I am intelligent and resourceful, and would never allow the situation to become this desperate. Surely even my dreaming brain must know that . . .

All I can say for sure is that I’m getting rid of something unwanted that represents enslavement. The second part of the dream is much more clear: I return to a place I love, I hug the ground, and the very trees love me and protect me.

I’m reminded here of Cecilia Woloch’s poem about arriving in Carpathia, walking out into a meadow, and the ground calling out to her: Beloved, Beloved, Beloved. And Cecilia didn’t even grow up in Poland; her ancestors once lived in Carpathia, and she has traced back the village. The trees began speaking to her, I could tell.

**

If dreams are returns . . . It was about being loved, but it was self-love too. “Motherhood changes you,” said the women who knew, and I didn’t want to  lose who I was. I’d miss me. Like Emperor Hadrian mourning himself in advance, I’d miss my playful animula.

But becoming an immigrant changes you tremendously. Where is this young girl at the Warsaw airport, trying not to tremble, afraid to turn around and look back, as if the very sight of the poplars would draw me back to them, never to be separated? Within minutes of landing in Frankfurt-am-Mein, my first airport in the West, I felt I was already a different person. And somehow there was no going back. And that was only the beginning.

At first you are so bludgeoned by the new, you can’t reject anything. Then you gain some balance and -- huge surprise -- you are homesick. And you were determined to be the only immigrant in the history of the world who would not get homesick! You were not supposed to cry. Not night after night for two years, and then at unpredictable intervals.

My crying fits began with a strange thought that drifted through my mind a few weeks after the arrival: There is nothing real here. The plastic grass was only one icon, a minor symptom.

**

I had this dream in mid-August, after two computer crashes and a switch to a Mac. One friend commented, “It’s called going over to the Dark Side.” I had to learn a huge number of new things all at once. But it’s possible that it was already after I read the account of a near-death experience by a Polish woman who lived in the United States for a long time -- was it in Baltimore or Pittsburgh? She had the NDE while still living in an American city.

She did not go to heaven. She was back in the countryside near Warsaw, hovering above it. Every blade of grass, every tiniest leaf was lit by transcendent radiance. Birds were singing, and she found herself envious of the birds because they did not have to leave Poland. She envied the trees because they were rooted and would be staying in Poland, while she knew she’d soon have to go back.

If you think that maybe I am an extreme case of nostalgia, please remember  this woman’s NDE. By the way, the NDE was indeed changed her life. She moved back to Poland, and now lives in the countryside near Warsaw. 

(Here I simply have to tell you, startled reader, that the countryside near Warsaw is far from spectacular: it’s totally flat, mostly fields, some average woods and streams.)

Maybe it’s mainly the question of familiarity. Changing countries causes acute emotional distress because it’s what the psychologists call the “loss of the familiar.” And there is of course the loss of the sense of belonging to a particular place, and owning it. I used to own Warsaw. I owned the river and all the bridges; I owned the royal gardens and all the swans. I even half-owned even the American embassy, and, reluctantly, the Soviet embassy. It wasn’t even a question of beauty, but of ownership. It was all mine.

In the end, the most astonishing thing about the dream is my attachment to the land itself, after so many years. Any lost homeland becomes the “holy land.” It will always be with me, that cradle of roots.

But if you live somewhere else long enough, then the actual homeland (unlike the homeland you carry with you in memory) is no longer yours. Still, after my second trip to Poland, I wrote this poem: 

FOR A MOMENT

For a moment I had it again:
greenest fields and wildest clouds,
horse manes and cathedral domes.
I could live in Warsaw, I thought –
but only if on Sundays someone
took me to the fields and woods,
swampy streams with forget-me-nots.

I remember, when I was twelve,
an older cousin sermonizing
on the blessedness of giving.
Standing on the cliffs, still safe,
my joy just looking at the river,
I exclaimed, I don’t want to give.
I want to take and take and take.

There’s no memorial to the honey hue
of that lavish July
when I pronounced my heresy.
Nor to the desert
noon when I knew
I had to live on because
I had not given enough.

The European countryside
is a prayer you don’t profane
with regrets about your life.
Maybe it’s the millennia
of manure-fed humus
when people gave and gave,
and the nourished earth

gave back. For a moment,
looking at the fields,
so ancient yet each spring so new,
I had to live on because
I needed to be given to.

To be loved.
To be seated before
a big bowl of barley soup.
To be driven to concerts
and meadows, naive bridges,
sentimental willows.

To breathe in the scent
of moist woods. To squish
on the slippery muck of leaves
returning to the roots.
To hear no one ask,
“Where are you from?”
From this earth, underfoot.

~ Oriana © 2012

At the same time, if I were asked, “What’s your country?” -- assuming a context that does not involve a passport -- I’d reply, “I have two countries: Poland, where I was born and grew up, and the United States, where I’ve lived all my adult life and where I became a writer.” And it feels rich, to have two countries, two interesting cultures, two fluent languages. I am happy to have had the excitement of Warsaw and, in summer, the beauty of the Polish countryside; and I am happy to have the beauty of California when I look out the window. Ich grolle nicht -- I don’t complain (I have a bit of German too, thanks to Warsaw). No life is perfect, but it would be ungracious to complain. There are worse fates.

Recently I had this exchange with an accomplished Polish poet, Ewa Parma, who lives in Katowice, Poland. 


Oriana:

I don’t know if I could write poems in Polish because the language is so intimate, and the secret of poetry, as Milosz said, is distance. English gave me that distance. 



Ewa:

I'm sure you could write poems in Polish, but as a totally different person, lovely schizophrenia, you know.



Oriana:

Yes, as a totally different person. I’ve tried to imagine that other self countless times, and know it’s fruitless. In terms of personal happiness, I might be happier. When my cousin wrote me that each summer she visits a different Greek Island, I thought, oh, maybe I’d have a similar project. And I’m sure I’d have more people in my life, and be more “communitarian.” I didn’t exactly choose my current reclusiveness. Like practically all the important things in life, it “just happened.”

If I’d stayed, I might have become a language poet. As a child I loved playing with words. Polish words can be morphed in wonderful ways -- I can imagine a kind of Finnegans Wake (not as long -- that would be boring), but not polyglot, strictly Slavic (of course we need to acknowledge German borrowings, like durszlak (the word for a colander)

But then, assuming writing in Polish -- if sufficient suffering hit me, who knows . . . I might swerve into meaning. But my poems would probably not be the lyrical narratives they typically are, influenced as I was by one of the main currents of contemporary American poetry. And, given that I write for the lost beloved, and my most important lost beloved was Poland, I’d have to acquire a different lost beloved -- or a different “motive for metaphor.” 

The schizophrenia of being Polish in Poland is nothing, I think, next to the immigrant schizophrenia, a true pathology in some immigrants who become terminally bitter to the point of delusional thinking.

Ewa:

I can imagine the immigrant schizophrenia, that's what I wanted to avoid and came back.

Oriana:

I was close to succumbing to the immigrant schizophrenia and entering the delusional terrain of totally rejecting the adoptive country. Then I managed to achieve a balanced view: there are things I like about America, and there are things I don’t like -- just as I could list things I don’t like about Poland, and the things I like. And that would be true of any country; no country is all good or all bad. All countries are holy places to those who were born there and grew up there -- this is what some would find out only by leaving their country of origin.

Every Polish child memorizes this simile, the most famous one in Polish literature: “my fatherland, you are like health. / Only he knows your worth, who has lost you.” I never thought I’d experience the truth of those lines.

At this point, I feel “sane” -- balanced in my feelings toward both Poland and America. What has remained unchanged is the sense of non-belonging and isolation. The people around me were molded by the American popular culture; I can’t begin to “relate” to the Howdy-Doody show.

There’s also the isolated feeling of being an atheist here, while in Warsaw after the break with the church (still, I repeat for the twentieth time, the most courageous act of my life), I felt finally at home, leaving the darkness and stench of the Middle Ages for the light of reason, poised to enter the ranks of the intellectual elite. That was my manifest destiny -- in either country, I thought. But life rarely works out the way we imagine in our teens. Actually, I have to admit that life is a lot more unpredictable and interesting than we could possibly imagine at fifteen or seventeen. As I also keep saying, I live in continual astonishment. 

**
Later Ewa remarked that it’s “easier to be an immigrant because you know what you miss.”

Oriana:

I never thought of it before: the specificity of missing something. I miss Aleje Ujazdowskie. I miss being on a train that's going through Koluszki. I miss pierogi. To people who haven't lost Koluszki there is nothing transcendent about that station; it's vaguely comic, that sweet name. But no, it's not easier, because you miss Koluszki on top of the universal problems with love and work. You miss what was familiar in the early years of your life in addition to having to deal with the universal human dilemmas.

I miss the little front yards with sweet-peas and peonies, and not the Warsaw Botanical Garden (though I can understand why some people adore the Botanical Garden). It’s not that I’m indifferent to the splendor of the Tatras, but I miss the gentle hills of Pomerania. It’s all about the familiar.

Do you know how I imagine heaven? As the ultimate country of immigrants. They say things like, “This is a wonderful place, the weather’s perfect. But what I’m thinking of is that bar in Pittsburgh . . . “ and “off they go again,” missing the familiar.

In a different vein: Poland has a warm culture, comparatively speaking, and people aren't as isolated. But things are changing, I noticed: traveling by car rather than by train, where you can have fascinating conversations with total strangers; streets seemed emptier to me, more people indoors watching TV rather than enjoying the city).



Darlene:

If you had stayed in Poland, do you think you’d write about Poland?

Oriana:

Thank you for assuming that I’d write at all. I have a vague feeling that one way or another I would indeed have become a writer. A poet? That’s a bigger maybe. I still see poetry as basically trauma-driven -- or, in less drastic terms, as written out of “wrongness,” as Christian Wiman puts it in Poetry and Ambition. 
 
But back to your question: no, I wouldn’t write about Poland, unless peripherally. I might mention a street, a river. Just mention them, without that holy hush. If I’d stayed, I suspect I’d write about Italy, Greece, France; I might in fact be a travel writer, as I sometimes imagined my future when I first even dared to think of becoming a writer. I’d also probably write about culture in general, about literature and theater. About history, and I mean world history, which always interested me more than Polish history per se.

I might write about motherhood. Or about forests and animals. Who knows? Anything is possible, but the one thing that seems impossible is that I’d have written about Poland the way it happened when I started writing in Los Angeles. I became a poet in Los Angeles. And I was quite fond of many places in Los Angeles, but I found myself writing about Carpathia and the Baltic. It was not a choice; all of a sudden, it seems, I was writing about the chestnut trees in bloom and the wooden bridges over the Raba, or the Prince Poniatowski Bridge in Warsaw. I was writing about the streetcars. If I continued to live in Warsaw, I doubt it would ever enter my head to write a poem about streetcars.

But then, as Ewa pointed out, I would now be a completely different person, and there would be no oriana-poetry blog. Would there be a different blog? Maybe. About what? I don’t know and I can never know.

That’s one of the strange things about being an immigrant: you try to imagine the person you’d have become if you’d stayed, you desperately try to imagine her daily life, her apartment, her mornings, her nights -- and you can’t. You want to call to this invisible twin sister, talk to her, cry and laugh with her. And you can’t. In spite of what the poems want, she doesn’t exist. 


Hyacinth:

I don’t remember seeing this painting by Frida and it's by far the best in my opinion. The way she is entwined with the earth in a prone position looks as if she is putting down roots. Speaking of details: those roots and vines!

The concept of: if god gave you the whole world would you take it? -- that would be  overwhelming and too mind-boggling  to get your thinking around.

Liked the soul wearing an infinity sign. Considering all the "souls"  in poetry I've been writing about--hardly a poem that doesn't contain"soul."

Favorite lines: the river wide as history and about barley soup. Details.

I think your youth saved you coming to a strange country. You eventually adapted but all the older immigrants I've know including my great grandparents found it almost impossible to assimilate to get over mourning the old country. Some I remember never learned English and the women never left the house.

About reclusiveness -- I read recently that Emily was not always a recluse but fell into the well of poetry deeper and deeper until the outside world  didn't exist except in what she made of it in her poems. I find the older I get the less I want to be anywhere but writing or reading poetry -- an occupational hazard?
 
Oriana:

This painting is certainly one of Frida’s masterpieces. I’m surprised that it’s not more famous. I can’t think of any other painter who paints so metaphorically. Dali’s surrealism seems pretty shallow next to this.

By “I could give you the whole world” I meant “anything you might want is yours.”

Age is definitely a factor, and I’d likewise not advise anyone, well, “older,” to even try to change countries, especially if acquiring a new language is a must. The first years can be extremely stressful. And America is extremely complex: the many kinds of insurance you have to have, the weird tax system, having to have a car, with all the complexities and responsibilities that involves . . .  If you didn’t grow up with these complexities, they are truly overwhelming.

At the same time, the “happy immigrant” myth also makes it more difficult to make a realistic adjustment and not feel like a failure. You go to America in order to be a success . . . “started by cleaning restrooms and ended up a millionaire.” That’s true of maybe one person in the history of the world. Maybe. Usually it’s rather “you can’t get there from here.”

In Europe at least the fate of the Russian aristocrats after the October Revolution set a prince-to-pauper pattern that seems unknown in America. But here too you encounter the prince-to-pauper stories. And becoming declassé is a special kind of emotional disaster: the sorrow when you know you can’t give your children what you yourself had.

Poets and writers have to have the gift for staying alone in one room for hours and hours. Without that solitude, no great work can be done. But there is a need for experience as well, so it’s always a difficult balance. Poets need to do a lot of “gazing at the world,” as Larry Levis called it. They are naturally reclusive and introspective, so they need to remind themselves to “gaze at the world.” That leads to prose more so than poetry, I know. There is no perfect solution. 


MOTHER NATURE REVISITED

The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Diego, Myself and Señor Xólotl

When you came back to me –

I painted a green day-hand and a brown night-hand
holding up Mexico, her canyons and deserts,
    her candelabra cacti.

And we were there, embraced by our land.
You were my naked baby
who is reborn every minute with your third eye open. 

Even our dog Señor Xólotl was curled
on the wrist of evening,
ready to bear our souls to the underworld if he had to.

Together, we stared out beyond the picture, saw
in the dark window a small woman in a wheelchair
cast out in a workshop far beyond the moon,

desperately mixing the colours of love
    until they vibrated –
watermelon greens, chilli reds, pumpkin orange.

She hurriedly drew the shattered arms
of the universe –
                             holding us all up

as if we were a mountain dripping roots and stones.

From What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo (Seren, 2010)

© 2011 Pascale Petit

**

The modern idea of nature is chiefly benevolent. We speak of the nurturing “Mother Nature.” We don’t hear much about “Nature red in tooth and claw.” But let us take a look at that interesting passage in Tennyson’s In Memoriam:

55.

The wish, that of the living whole

No life may fail beyond the grave,

Derives it not from what we have

The likest God within the soul?

Are God and Nature then at strife,

That Nature lends such evil dreams?

So careful of the type she seems,

So careless of the single life;

That I, considering everywhere

Her secret meaning in her deeds,

And finding that of fifty seeds

She often brings but one to bear,

I falter where I firmly trod,

And falling with my weight of cares

Upon the great world’s altar-stairs

That slope thro’ darkness up to God,

I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,

And gather dust and chaff, and call

To what I feel is Lord of all,

And faintly trust the larger hope.

  

 56.

‘So careful of the type?’ but no.

From scarped cliff and quarried stone

She cries, ‘A thousand types are gone:

I care for nothing, all shall go.

‘Thou makest thine appeal to me:

I bring to life, I bring to death:

The spirit does but mean the breath:

I know no more.’ And he, shall he,

Man, her last work, who seem’d so fair,

Such splendid purpose in his eyes,

Who roll’d the psalm to wintry skies,

Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,

Who trusted God was love indeed

And love Creation’s final law–

Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw

With ravine, shriek’d against his creed–

Who loved, who suffer’d countless ills,

Who battled for the True, the Just,

Be blown about the desert dust,

Or seal’d within the iron hills?

No more? A monster then, a dream,

A discord. Dragons of the prime,

That tare each other in their slime,

Were mellow music match’d with him.

O life as futile, then, as frail!

O for thy voice to soothe and bless!

What hope of answer, or redress?

Behind the veil, behind the veil.

~ here Nature’s indifference to human needs is duly lamented.  “I care for nothing; all shall go” is her reply to man’s desperate plea for immortality – and if not immortality, then at least of some show of caring.

Man’s helplessness was presented earlier in Canto 54:

So runs my dream, but what am I?

An infant crying in the night,

An infant crying for the light

And with no language but a cry.

~ together with the “lame hands of faith,” Tennyson, though in the end defending religion, seems mainly to have eloquently stated the case for nature’s alleged “cruelty.” Cruelty, however, implies that nature is deliberate evil; in fact, nature is merely amoral, as innocent as that “infant crying in the night.”

It’s interesting that Czeslaw Milosz, known for poems praising the beauty of nature, was not in fact all that far from from Tennyson’s position. He writes,

Amost every day, Public Television airs nature programs, mainly for young people. About spiders, fish, lizards, coyotes, animals of the desert or of alpine meadow, and so on. The technical excellence of the photography doesn’t prevent me from considering these programs obscene. Because what they show offends our human, moral understanding – not only offends it, but subverts it, for the thesis of these programs is: You see, that’s how it is in Nature; therefore, it is natural; and we, too, are a part of Nature, we belong to the evolutionary chain, we have to accept the world as it is.

If I turn off the television, horrified, disgusted by the images of mutual indifferent devouring, and also by the mind of the man who filmed it, is it because I am capable of picturing what this looks like when translated into the life of human society?

. . . The makers of those films have a scientific outlook and show the truth, nothing but the truth; furthermore, they appreciate the splendid photogeneity of nature.

. . . Is hunting and devouring each other the very essence of Nature? It is, that is why I dislike Nature.

~ A Year of the Hunter, pp 48-50 (1994; emphasis mine)

But, as usual, Milosz shows that he has two souls. The prose quoted above was written by his more elevated, Catholic soul. But his cat-loving pagan soul wrote this charming defense of nature:

To Mrs. Professor in Defense Of My Cat's Honor And Not Only

My valiant helper, a small-sized tiger 
Sleeps sweetly on my desk, by the computer, 
Unaware that you insult his tribe. 

Cats play with a mouse or with a half-dead mole. 
You are wrong, though: it's not out of cruelty. 
They simply like a thing that moves. 

For, after all, we know that only consciousness 
Can for a moment move into the Other, 
Empathize with the pain and panic of a mouse. 

And such as cats are, all of Nature is. 
Indifferent, alas, to the good and the evil. 
Quite a problem for us, I am afraid. 

Natural history has its museums, 
But why should our children learn about monsters, 
An earth of snakes and reptiles for millions of years? 

Nature devouring, nature devoured, 
Butchery day and night smoking with blood. 
And who created it? Was it the good Lord? 

Yes, undoubtedly, they are innocent, 
Spiders, mantises, sharks, pythons. 
We are the only ones who say: cruelty. 

Our consciousness and our conscience 
Alone in the pale anthill of galaxies 
Put their hope in a humane God. 

Who cannot but feel and think, 
Who is kindred to us by his warmth and movement, 
For we are, as he told us, similar to Him. 

Yet if it is so, the He takes pity 
On every mauled mouse, every wounded bird. 
Then the universe for him is like a Crucifixion. 

Such is the outcome of your attack on the cat: 
A theological, Augustinian grimace, 
Which makes difficult our walking on this earth.


~ Czeslaw Milosz, Facing the River (1995)

**

Here Milosz acknowledges the innocence of nature. Only humans mistakenly say: cruelty, and imagine the kind of deity who cares for every mouse and bird. Yet if this is so, “then the universe for him is like a Crucifixion,” Milosz brilliantly observes. This position – that nature is “cruel” – only makes our life more difficult. Much as he would like to believe in a totally caring god, Milosz will not condemn his beloved cat. The cat is as innocent as Frida Kahlo's dog, Señor Xólotl "curled . . . on the wrist of evening." 

But wait! The human psyche and human values cannot be so easily dismissed. We are the ones capable of pity for all suffering – and of remembering the beings, human and animal and vegetal, who are no more. Lois P. Jones sent me this beautiful French poem by Rilke:

WHAT SURVIVES 

Who says that all must vanish?
Who knows, perhaps the flight
of the bird you wound remains,
and perhaps flowers survive
caresses in us, in their ground.

It isn’t the gesture that lasts,
but it dresses you again in gold
armor – from breast to knees –
and the battle was so pure
an Angel wears it after you.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke, tr. A. Poulin 

***


Michael (at Mile 410 of the Pacific Crest Trail)

I enjoyed wrestling with the thoughts in your most recent post.

A great injustice, an unfortunate thoughtlessness, is the inappropriate use – the gross use – of and in humans and nature – there is no and, humans are nature. We are as much nature as any other creature (and gasp! we haven't even begun talking about the so-called inanimate...). The AND in Human and nature has lead to a world of fear and division and disregard and power-over.

One such consequence is the world as an animal Auschwitz – 58 billion land animals senselessly killed each year for food, worldwide. The creatures taken from the sea are many, many more. I saw a butcher buying goats in NW China. He lead them to his cart, grabbed them by the skin on the back, and hurled each over the 6' side of the cart and let each drop on its back, on the floor. For him, the goat was apart from him. He believed in the AND. Nature is to be controlled. Disregarded. Killed. Not worthy of respect, nor is there reason to be concerned for its suffering.

Last week I was a hiking a few miles south of The Devil's Punchbowl on the PCT and rounded a corner and nearly bumped into two young men. From their clothing I guessed they were on their first day-hike, venturing into the wilds with only Hollywood as a guide. The meeting was sudden, neither of us had heard the other coming. One of them said, "Damn, I thought you were a bear." A bear. Right. But he was serious and to support his concern, he held a handgun, a version of the famed 1911 pistol, hammer back. I wanted to laugh and at the same time slap him silly for being so naive and stupid and for endangering my life and those of others hikers. He believed in the AND.

In a general way it might be said there are two kinds of Pacific Crest Trail hikers: First, those who believe nature is a force to reckon with, to be wary of, and they plan for her volatile ways – these folks carry gear for every contingency – one, two, or even three first aid kits, a satellite phone or tracking device, GPS, maps for several miles in every possible direction, food for an extra day or two, a back-up water filter, too much clothing, snow shoes (in spring and summer?), a shovel, etc. They believe in the AND. The second kind believes nature is benevolent and they pack lightly. These are the ultra-light backpackers. They may carry an extra pair of socks. That's it. Enough food for the miles, no back-up gear. These hikers are nature.

It's the view. Of nature. That allows for these different approaches.

Not far from where I live in San Diego someone has scratched into the concrete sidewalk: WE ARE ONE WITH EVERYTHING! Yes, we are. And the walk we must learn to walk is the one without the AND.

I hear the reasoning of the deep ecologists in your discussion--deep ecologists acknowledge the interconnected of systems, but have little concern for the individual. So the earth didn't pause its ponderous revolution when I was born, nor will it pause when I die. But what would happen if humans ceased to exist? If the oceans died? Or the polar ice caps melt? 

Oriana:

The ice caps are already melting, of course. Humans who run the world (presidents, generals, CEO's) seem like a bunch of young male teenagers. The gang mentality. The adolescent belief that we are “separate, different, and superior.” Why are we superior? Because we have morality, while nature, we were taught, is “red in tooth and claw.”

And anyway, by the time the polar caps are totally melted, that will posterity’s problem, and who really cares for posterity? It’s been observed that some people never use the future tense. 

Even having children and grandchildren does not necessarily make them care. I remember having chatted with a real-estate developer. He said he was working on “developing” the hills around San Luis Obispo. “Not those hills!” I moaned. “That’s such a beautiful area.” “I know,” he replied. I used to hike there when I was in college.” “And where will your children hike?” I asked. At first he pretended not to hear. Then he said, “People need housing,” and became busy working on his laptop.

After all, most agree that profit is more important than nature.

You are correct in your argument that people don’t seem to realize that they ARE nature. Hence either the romanticized, deified version of Nature, or the degraded rape-her-while-you-can nature. But Milosz has gotten himself into a different conundrum. He is disgusted by the food chain: all this devouring. He wants a divine order where maybe we can just feed on light. This reminds me of Linda Pastan’s wonderful poem:

The Imperfect Paradise 

If God had stopped work after the fifth day

With Eden full of vegetables and fruits,

If oak and lilac held exclusive sway

Over a kingdom made of stems and roots,

If landscape were the genius of creation

And neither man nor serpent played a role

And God must look to wind for lamentation

And not to picture postcards of the soul,

Would he have rested on his bank of cloud,

With nothing in the universe to lose,

Or would he hunger for a human crowd?

Which would a wise and just creator choose:

The green hosannas of a budding leaf

Or the strict contract between love and grief?

~ Linda Pastan

Nevertheless, Milosz is sane enough not to call nature “cruel.” After having witnessed a huge amount of human cruelty, he knows very well that it’s not his cat that is cruel. And he realizes that not even the God of Love (as opposed to Blakean “Nobodaddy”) could open up to all suffering, because then the universe would be a constant crucifixion. And even God wants to be happy! So, in midst of sorrow, we must choose to live in joy. Only a basically joyful person, I suspect, can be emotionally strong enough to try to actively minimize suffering and environmental destruction. 


But what I particularly fear is people who don’t seem to have any sense of the sacred or, what may be equivalent, a sense of beauty. 

Scott:


Where DO you find those pictures?! The clarity of the images for your posts are really striking. I really liked the Chinese fisherman with his cormorants, saw one of those birds just this weekend on the coast of Georgia. The Chinese fisherman image on your post brought to mind, oddly enough, the thought of the Quakers and their being known as
Children of the Light; Lowell's 'Quaker Graveyard on Nantucket' comes to mind as well. 

Which that leads to Melville(Lowell as you probably know makes many allusions to 'Moby Dick'). Melville was haunted by Calvinism most of his life. Like Milosz he never fully escaped his upbringing though at the end of his life he seemed to have acquired some peace.

Oriana:


For images, I scour the Internet. The best images are often not attributed, to my astonishment. But maybe it’s better that way, in line with Internet generosity.

That's a wonderful comparison of Melville's Calvinism to Milosz's old-time Catholicism. Either way, it's not a lovable deity. I think Milosz had at least some moments of peace – several late poems indicate that. He felt that at least in his old age he’d be accepted “as is” – but certainly without any apologies for the huge amount of suffering he had to witness or experience, for the silence when he prayed that the suffering of others be relieved. I think Milosz arrived at moments of blissful acceptance and moments of agonized acceptance.

FRIDA KAHLO: THE SUICIDE OF DOROTHY HALE

SURPRISED BY MY OWN BREASTS

       

Suicide fantasies – that night I had them

like a meteor shower. Too late, I thought:

I should have done it

the time I stood with a Polish artist

on the roof of an abandoned factory.

I saw the leap, I saw

my body falling, falling

onto the grimy street below,

a wino sleeping under cardboard,

the desolation of America

pulling me down like gravity.

The painter called me by my

childhood name, its three clear

vowels a Baltic seagull

against the polluted sky. Why

couldn’t I respond? Was that the year

I threw myself at an alcoholic

Vietnam veteran? I already was

a fallen woman, might as well

sleep with artists. Eros has

a twin brother, the one lover

who will never leave you –

one who kisses like the wind,

one who whispers: Die. Leap

into the night and shatter

in a million stars.

*

But in the morning when I woke up

I was surprised by my own breasts –

as if I saw them for the first time,

soft and female and defenseless,

the nipples like wild strawberries –

Why have we been of little use,

they seemed to ask, aren't we sweet?
Warm from sleep, in tendrils

of morning light, my body 

waited – as if my life
had not been a mistake.

I’ll keep you, I nodded to my breasts.

~ Oriana

**

The thought that “It’s too late for suicide” was one of the crucial steps that led to my decision not to be depressed (since obviously it was also too late to be depressed).  My poems were actually ahead of me. The one below is several years old, but the awareness expressed in it did not translate into a true change right away.

ALDEBARAN

The only philosophical

question left,

a French writer said,

is whether to kill yourself.

But that is the question of youth.

In my twenties, I could never look

from a high window or a roof 

and not feel a gathering leap.

Middle age asks two questions:

How much time left? and

How to spend what wakefulness

remains? Now I look 

out the window, and the deep

magnolia gives two answers:

the morning light

glistening in the crown,

and the wreath of shadows.

And the layered wind

does not rustle To be or not to be –

Each leaf silvers Hamlet’s

forgotten reply: Let be.

It’s too late to renounce

the privilege of surprise;

centuries, it seems,

since my father told me

not to worry about the universe.

“That’s Aldebaran,”

he pointed to an amber star.

When the universe shall ask

the final question, I too

will point: Aldebaran.

Great light seen only in the dark.

~ Oriana © 2011

**
Something struck me as I thought about “Aldebaran,” and of my past suicidal imagery in general, mostly jumping from high places. I knew I’d fall, but actually I wanted to fly. That was the frustrated wish underlying the despair.

Not to fall, but to fly – to live out of my greatness rather than out my wounds. And, unwillingly at first, I realized that it is a choice: regardless of circumstances, we can still make that choice and it will make a huge difference. It took the pressure of mortality to give up on escaping life, escaping backward into past trauma. Instead, I decided to open myself to that choice outlined already in Ecclesiastes: “whatever thy hand finds to do, do it with all thy might.”

Or, to put it less grandly, working hard was the only thing I knew how to do. I didn’t know how to be happy, but I knew how to write. At first I had to do it blindly: blind work like “blind faith.” I couldn’t afford to ponder why I was writing, or for whom (my depressive vision was zero audience, now and forever ). I couldn’t afford to think about purpose and meaning – that way lay brooding and crying fits. And those would be no more. It was too late in life to be wasting life.

How did I break my addiction to depression? First, I had to realize that it was a behavior: call it brooding, overthinking, or delectatio morosa (the term used by Milosz). And a behavior can be changed. Like Milosz (see below), I decided to throw myself into work. Greater connection with the beauty of nature also helped.

ESCAPING FORWARD

Here is Milosz, first on his regaining the connection with “the beauty of the earth,” and then on throwing himself into his work as an “escape forward”:

The classic result of all sudden ruptures and reversals is the rumination on one’s own worthlessness and the desire to punish oneself, known as delectatio morosa. I would never have been cured of it had it not been for the beauty of the earth. The clear autumn mornings in an Alsatian village surrounded by vineyards, the paths on an Alpine slope over the Isère River, rustling with dry leaves from the chestnut trees, or the sharp light of early spring on the Lake of Four Cantons near Schiller’s rock, or a small river near Périgueux on whose surface kingfishers traced colored shadows of flight in the July heat–all this reconciled me with the universe and with myself.

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

- Czeslaw Milosz, “Tiger 2,” Native Realm, 293

~ Do you know what the gravest sins in your life are? – I have made too many mistakes to trust my ability not to err now when thinking of my past.

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

Jeanne [Hersch], a disciple of Karl Jaspers, taught me the philosophy of freedom, which consists in being aware that a choice made now, today, projects itself backward and changes our past actions. That was the period of my harsh struggle against delectatio morosa to which I have always been prone. Monks suffering from delectatio morosa would plunge into meditation on their sins and found it a good way to shirk their daily tasks. The philosophy of freedom, practiced by existentialists, took over the classical methods of confessors and spiritual guides, precisely in that it advises us to direct our sight always ahead, not backwards. Largely thanks to its counsels, I stopped meditating and set about my work, which has always been to me an escape forward.

~ Czeslaw Milosz, Unattainable Earth, 121-122.

**

Mary:

Wow. Beautiful poems. How often the complexity and beauty of living beings has kept me going too. In her poem "Having It Out With Melancholy" Jane Kenyon talks about the beloved physical presence of her dog saving her life.

Oriana:

Thank you, Mary. Yes, I know that Jane Kenyon poem. Cats and dogs are great therapists. True, dogs are more reliable for unconditional love, but when I need an image to soothe myself, I think and holding and petting a cat – the silky fur, the purring.

Here is my translation of Milosz’s poem on “doghood” – in the second stanza, with us as “dogs” to the “powers above us”:

The warmth of dogs and the unknown essence of doghood.

And still we feel it. In the hanging out of the wet tongue,

the melancholy velvet of the eyes,

the smell of the coat, different than our smell, yet kindred.

Our humanity becomes more distinctive then,

common, pulsating, licking, hairy,

even though to dogs we are as gods

disappearing into the crystal palaces of reason,

busy with incomprehensible actions.

I want to believe the powers above us,

while engaged in tasks we cannot comprehend,

sometimes touch our cheeks and hair

and feel within themselves this poor flesh and blood.

~ Czeslaw Milosz, translated by Oriana Ivy

I don’t think the analogy works all that well – since we humans are not as loving and lovable as dogs. But I know that Milosz’s point is rather this: just as the dogs can’t understand what it is that we do in our “crystal palaces of reason” (he takes that from Dostoyevski’s Notes from the Underground), so we cannot understand divine actions.

But going back to the subject of depression, long before I quit “cold turkey,” I had an episode of very deep depression, the stuporous kind. But an internship in a school was given to me (I was in college), and affectionate first-graders were my healers. 

Why are pets and small children such effective “anti-depressants”? It’s their affection and physicality, I think. They make us “get out of ourselves” and give back the affection. Nor do animals and children lie awake worrying about the future, or the mistakes they made in the past. They certainly don’t suffer from overthinking.

Michael:

I am moved by your poem “Surprised by My Own Breasts.” So smooth and rhythmic and beautiful and filled with wisdom.

Your poem is familiar so I looked back at our correspondence. On June 10, 2009 you sent the poem to me. And I wrote:

6/11/09

“Surprised by My Own Breasts” is a masterpiece, Oriana. A masterpiece. Rilke wrote:

To me it seems as if I were at once

infant, boy, man and more;

only as it circles am I complete.

Ah, the cacophony of our souls and when all is rumbling and senseless to be drawn back to the body by the body, so simple, so warm, so mine, so right, so grounded.

I think Rilke once called making love 'that most difficult act' (in Letters to a Young Poet?). I get that. What is more complex than the intersection of body, sexuality, mind, soul – shoot, throw in all the psyche's labels – and yet a touch, a kiss, an hour making love, a look at one's breast, a touch to the penis, brings chaos to a halt. For a moment. What mystery. I'm greatly impacted by your poem. Blushing, yes. But only because you let me see into the very private place of your soul. I wish I could respond with the same beauty with which you gave. So who feeds the poet?

I was moved then, I'm moved now. Very nice...

And then you wrote:

My intuition is long-term depression is an addiction, but outside of the dopaminergic reward system. Maybe the reward is not struggling. Non-action. The abatement of the testosterone-driven will to action, will to power (so exhausting, and then of course one might fail). It could vary with the individual what the reward is.

Claw or vampire? That love affair . . . The defenses against any threat to depression are strong. We want to sink deeper in, into stupor. The fury when some incident causes a jolt of adrenaline, and then we want to sink back in, and we can't.

But that's perhaps valid just for me, and I think now I have it right: for me depressive thinking is what drinking is to an alcoholic.

But it's too late even to write about depression.

**

And I think you were prescient – your journey worked out that way.

Oriana:

That wonderful June of 2009 was precisely the time of my commitment to not being depressed. It was too late in life to keep wasting time in that manner, and the opportunities for joy – and if not joy, at least contentment. Now it seems to me that until that June, I was still an adolescent. And then, “in a twinkling of an eye,” a true adult, finally taking responsibility for my state of mind and my ability to contribute to others.

As with all paradigm shifts, there was a long period of incubation – including the “prescient” poems. On the neural level, a new master circuit forms and takes over in microseconds, so the change seems extremely sudden. Only when you reflect, you see the gradual preparation.  And the wonderful thing about a paradigm shift is that once your perception changes, you can’t go back to the old behavior, even if you acted a certain way for decades. That behavior no longer makes sense, and you really have no choice except act in a new mode.

For me, it was not a change from depression to happiness. As I must have said several times, it was from overthinking to action, from depression to throwing myself into work. I have not had any slidebacks, but I had moments of slight resentment: all that work! It’s exhausting! But that resolved itself too. I noticed that I enjoyed writing prose a lot when I did it slowly, in small chunks, taking breaks. In fact, I am happiest and most serene when writing prose.

Poetry is not as controllable, but fortunately I don’t feel any tormenting need to write new poems. Also, a friend gave me a motto that also became a minor paradigm shift: “It’s only a poem” (thank you, Megan!) When I get stuck in a poem, I know I need to take a walk. Or take a shower. Or start cleaning the house. The cognitive-creative unconscious (a mouthful, but I don’t want it confused with the Freudian concept), all those automatic “back-burner” neural pathways, work best when we let go of conscious effort. Kafka and Rilke both knew that “ripeness is all.” Sign over Kafka’s desk: Warten (“wait”).