RILKE: LOVING THE DARK HOURS

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

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

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

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

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

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

the elusive Polish bison – a rare sighting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ich liebe meines Wesens Dunkelstunden

I love the dark hours of my being 

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

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

~ Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Robert Bly

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

I love the dark hours of my life

in which my senses deepen;

in them as in old letters I find

my daily life already outlived

and, as in legends,

distant and complete.

. . .

Sometimes I am like the ripe 

and rustling tree which rises 

above the dead boy’s grave

– gathering him in its warm roots –

and fulfills the dream he had lost

in sorrows and songs.

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

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

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

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

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

from Jung's Red Book

**

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TWO PICTURES

You will love again

the stranger who was yourself.

            ~ Derek Walcott

Photography traffics in time.

On my driver’s license, at thirty-nine

I look younger than at twenty-seven.

At thirty-nine, my eyes are lit

with an astonished smile.

My wayward hair seems to dance 

over my right brow.

At twenty-seven, I’m withered inside:

tight mouth, defeated eyes –

a face like the arrival

of familiar pain.

I’ve given up on my hair –

a wig crowns me with synthetic sheen.

I want to go back

to the woman in that faded polaroid –

get rid of the wig,

throw out the thriftshop blouse,

the platform sandals so worn down

she waddles lopsided.

I want to buy her a self-correcting

typewriter, so she doesn’t inhale

so much correction fluid.

I want her to stop wasting herself

on loveless men. They call her

a diamond, a pearl,

leave her like broken glass.

I want to crumple that list

she keeps near the phone,

of clever things to say.

I need to talk to her, it’s urgent:

she mustn’t spend evenings crying.

I want to buy her decent shoes.

She must be told she has talent.

Oh, she is bright and funny too –

watch her cook the “nothing soup,”

or read whole volumes, crouched

in a dim corner of the bookstore.

Secretly I admire her style –

waking at six to record

a flute concerto from the static-y radio;

drifting to sleep in the drowning

moonlight of Selected Shelley.

Dear child, I want to say,

forgetting it is she

who’s my unlikely mother –

this stranger who at night

will not pull down the blinds

so her houseplants can feed

on the morning’s first timid light.

If only I could show her

the other picture. But I can’t.

She must stumble into the future

blindly, carrying me into the now –

this woman slender as new moon,

too young and fragile for the task.

~ Oriana © 2012

Charles:

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Two Pictures” is also a great poem.

Oriana:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POETRY AS UNDERWORLD AND AS HIGHER JOURNALISM

ORPHEUS: EURYDICE’S REFUSAL

Mausoleum, Long Beach

Here you wander, in smooth

corridors of the dead,

the chiaroscuro of desire

wrapping you, crushable silk.

Even inside this armature,

it smells of the earth,

of moisture and roots.

The small-winged Eros is veiled.

You expected a lost world –

torches of black flame,

a black boat on a black river –

not these lamps hovering

as on a spider’s thread,

the gilded globe of the pendulum

like a captive planet.

Light comes in the color of stone:

amethyst, lapis lazuli.

Galleries of sheen

travel endlessly like mirrors.

You have no reflection.

You slide off, a horizon of absence.

The dead repeat themselves:

a name and two dates,

an echo that insists

that’s all that’s all.

The ceiling’s carved constellations

guard the mask of emperor and saint;

the nameless three hundred

who could leave the pass

only through the body

opening beyond return.

Are these your poppy fields

where you sway, a shadow

in a bouquet of shadows?
But there is no wind;
it’s the stone breath of stone.
Rust veins streak grayish marble.

It is not your myth you want.

Look how it hardens.

Only the unreal has such real edges.

Outside the spring rain
has blurred everything
into mud and flowers.
Follow me, my love.

But you do not move.
The serpent has made you
too wise. You stare at me,

silent, with your eyes

of stone, while I walk alone,

in love with the song.


   ~ Oriana

**

Let me quote James Hillman:

The hidden god (deus absconditus) who rules the underworld of death and shadows all living existence with the question of final consequences, comes also to mean the god of the hidden, the underworld meaning in things, their deeper obscurities. Underworld, secrecy, hiddenness, and death, whether in the chambers of plotters or the psychic interiority of scholars, reflect the invisible god Hades. 

             ~ James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology

And my short poem to illustrate journalism is this one (darker, in fact, since it's not "darkness" that defines the two categories).

THE PERSISTENCE OF REALITY

He shows me how to perform

hara-kiri, but can’t remember

if one starts at the navel,

zigzagging upward,

or at the chest,

zigzagging downward –

“The point is to hit

all the vital organs.”

Then he remarks how melodious

were the names of concentration camps:

Gross-Rosen, Bergen-Belsen,

Theresienstadt, Birkenau.

I tell him the Allies were bombing within

five miles of Auschwitz,

the inmates heard, they prayed,

but there was nothing

of military interest, no

plan to destroy at least

the crematoria or the railroad line.

But he has exhausted

the subject; begins to make love.

I interrupt, say we must

wait a while. For me some 
things are real, I apologize.

~ Oriana

**

Both poems were inspired by the same man (transgendered to Eurydice in the first poem) -- a lover, long ago, who committed suicide. (By the way, it was the Sunnyside Mortuary in Long Beach that provided the visual details -- the name like a bad joke). So even in an imaginary (inner, mythical, archetypal) situation, a real mausoleum provided specific visual details, including the eeriness of Foucault's slow pendulum showing the rotation of the earth, the dead rotating with the living, with "rocks and stones," as Wordsworth said about his imaginary dead beloved.  


Nevertheless, it was the poem’s own compelling music, not imposed by me but unfolding on its own, that carried it more so than the faint thread of a narrative. To me, this type of poem, lyrical and mysterious, is an example of what I call “underworld” poetry. The setting need not be any particular sort of underworld, but there is a strong element of the imaginary and an air of mystery.

The second poem is essentially verbatim reporting: these are exactly the things that were said and done, and my part as a poet was to recognize that there was a dark poem in this vignette. Call it a "found poem." It’s very compressed, minimalist reporting, and this is where conscious craft enters. The neat little quatrains also add to the tension; from the start, I wanted even stanzas, the perfect form jarring against the content.

I am certainly not against journalism – those can be very fine poems. They are better choices for a reading because they are easier for the audience to grasp. I am tempted to say that the more "real world," the better the poem will succeed at a reading, especially if it's a narrow slice of the real world, a memorable little story. And yet poetry is supposed to be the language of feelings, of the mental world, and that world has to enter, musically, invisibly, or else the poem will have no magic. 


Most poems are hybrids: they interweave the inner and the outer world. Journalistic poems can have fascinating content, while a lot of “subjective” poetry is boring beyond belief because of inadequate grounding in reality. But purely “objective” poetry runs the danger of being pedestrian. It’s not nourishing to that part of us that longs for something beyond the realistic “broken-up prose,” as modern poetry is frequently described. It doesn’t connect with our mental world and fails to move us. It’s better to turn to good non-fiction: at least there will be ideas as well as things, and we will learn something.

Ideally, I think, poetry should be grounded in realistic details, but not confined to them. Perhaps the key word is “confined.” In writing in general, I love the freedom to go beyond the here and now, the world strictly of the living. There should be room for communion with the dead and with entirely imaginary (yet strangely real) beings, such as mythical and literary characters. As Milosz says in “Ars Poetica?”

The purpose of poetry is to remind us

how difficult it is to remain just one person,

for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,

and invisible guests come in and out at will.

For me, those “invisible guests” include Penelope and Persephone and other mythical figures, as well as Anna Karenina, the Grand Inquisitor, Faust, and a number of other literary characters. Of course dead and absent lovers are frequent visitors, as are poets I have met only on the page.

Underworld is the realm of the Psyche, Soul. Journalism is mainly about the outer world. In most poems, the inner and outer, the soul and the world, are intertwined: a mix of the outer and inner world, of reality and the imagination. Even a journalistic/realistic poem needs to be "well-imagined." But when a predominantly Underworld poem starts rolling out, with its own music carrying it, and I don’t know where it’s going, it’s a very special joy. It happens rarely, so it’s only moments when I feel like a “real poet.” By the way, this being a “real poet” is no ego trip: rather, I experience an overwhelmed, somewhat scary feeling of taking dictation. Not long after the visit to that mausoleum (a friend and I jokingly called ourselves “graveyard poets”), I remember hearing in my mind, “Here you wander, in smooth / corridors of the dead” – already with line breaks! – and knowing that I had to write it down.

One could see all this in terms of introversion and extraversion, subjective/objective, dream/daytime, inner world versus outer. An excess of either is unbalanced, but an occasional poem can be extremely introverted or extraverted, and still produce the kind of delight that only great poetry can. 

ARIES AND SCORPIO, THE WORLD AND THE UNDERWORLD

Being an Aries/Scorpio Rising who identifies more with my Scorpio self, I also see this Underworld/Journalism division as a Scorpio/Aries divide. Scorpio seeks mystery and the depths; Aries wants to “see the world.” Scorpio is fascinated by the trance-like state induced by an “underworld” inspiration; Aries finds nothing so fascinating as accurate details and active verbs.

The Scorpio-lyrical self wants a poem to have hypnotic music and be all enchantment, while the Aries self pulls toward “I don't want this story to be lost” (even if those who don’t see the need for the narrative element in poetry don’t think that a poem based on a great story is “real poetry.”)

Most poets I know I basically realistic “higher journalists” with lyrical moments. These are hard times for lyricism, it seems. There are few judges and editors who go mainly for the lyrical, or, as I’ve been told, my trouble is that editors are not into beauty. “This is too beautiful,” I’ve been told more than once, even if it happened to be a dark and surprising beauty. Not the beauty of roses, but of the purple thistle flower. You still have to use the word “petal,” however. Not allowed.

One poet who dares to write mainly in the underworld mode is Eric Pankey. This is one of my favorite poems of his:

SHADES BEFORE AN OFFERING

They stand before me as the stirred air

Outside a swarm, a ghost of salt

In suspension, shadow wrapped in shadow.

My habit of flame gives them shape:

A mass that tosses and settles, tosses

Like drafts in the air, loose pages,

Scribbles amid the fog and ether,

Scribbles and scratches upon vellum.

No words can tempt them to step forward.

No barley or wine, blood or honey.

No opiate incense. No dram of sleep.

No words can tempt them to step forward

Again. They recognize my hands,

Folded in prayer, for what they are:

A rude shambles, the locus of slaughter.

~ Eric Pankey, Oracle Figures

**

It is amazing how the strictly imaginary leads to a powerful insight about the “real world”: our collective human hands, even when folded in prayer, are not to be trusted: they are the hands of killers. Pankey's best underworld poems teach us something about the world and the paradoxes of being human. In this poem, we learn -- unforgettably -- that our hands are the hands of a butcher. Yet  I sense that Pankey has had all kinds of rich experiences that he doesn't write about. I agree that we don't choose what we write about; still, we the readers are the poorer if the poet stays strictly on one side or the other. 

I also love the wonderfully imagined first stanza of “Mary Magdalene Preaches at Marseille” by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin:

Now at the end of her life she is all hair –
A cataract flowing and freezing – and a voice
Breaking loose from the loose red hair,
The secret shroud of her skin:
A voice glittering in the wilderness.
She preaches in the city, she wanders
Late in the evening through shaded squares.
 
**


This is neither realistic/journalistic Mary Magdalene nor real ancient Marseille. And yet our sense of delight gives this poem its own reality.

For contrast, here is a journalistic poem:

One September Afternoon

Home from town

the two of them sit

looking over what they have bought

spread out on the kitchen table

like gifts to themselves.

She holds a card of buttons

against the new dress material

and asks if they match.

The hay is dry enough to rake,

but he watches her

empty the grocery bag.

He reads the label

on a grape jelly glass

and tries on

the new straw hat again.

  ~ Leo Dangel (posted on Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry)

**

William Carlos Williams at least tortures us with the puzzle of “so much depends on” before he goes on to the red wheelbarrow. In Dangel’s poem we have a bit of mentality showing in the line “like gifts to themselves” – a line that lifts the poem a bit, but does not make it soar.

But look at what a bit of “underworld” can do for a basically journalistic poem. This is an example of “higher journalism” that moves me. It touches on death and communion with the dead (in this case, dead dogs), and uses the imagination to transform flowers into beloved animals.

Old Woman With Protea Flowers, Kahalui Airport

She wears the run-down slippers of a local   

and in her arms, five rare protea   

wrapped in newsprint, big as digger pine cones.   

Our hands can’t help it and she lets us touch.   

Her brother grows them for her, upcountry.   

She’s spending the day on Oahu   

with her flowers and her dogs. Protea   

for four dogs’ graves, two for her favorite.   

She’ll sit with him into the afternoon   

and watch the ocean from Koolau.   

An old woman’s paradise, she tells us,   

and pets the flowers’ soft, pink ears.

~ Kathleen Flennicken (posted on Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry)

**

Between the two extremes, my guess is that more readers prefer poems like “One September Afternoon” to Pankey’s underworld drama, or to the Irish poet’s imaginary Mary Magdalene (since more and more children grow up in secular households, some young readers may not even know who Mary Magdalene was).  As the wise saying goes, there is no arguing with tastes, or any need to. True, the trend is heavily toward journalism, but those who love the lyrical and mystical will discover that kind of writing on their own, and experience rapture again and again, in private, unseen by their creative writing instructors, many of whom would gladly delete all poems based on myth and dreams. Fortunately, most poems are hybrids, like “Old Woman with Protea Flowers” – so we don’t have to choose between the inner and the outer world.

An addendum:

Roland Barthes, in Writing Degree Zero, writes:

Prose is narrative, relational, human, ordered. Poetry is “inhuman,” connecting the poet not with the world, other people, or history, but to heaven, hell, holiness, childhood, madness, pure matter. With all the splendor and freshness of a dream language, poetry is terrible and inhuman, full of gaps and full of lights, without foresight or stability of intentions, and thereby opposed to the social function of language.

I think this is too extreme. Poetry, like prose, can be relational and deeply ordered. However, Barthes does hit on something when he says that poetry connects  us with “heaven, hell, holiness, childhood, madness” (I am not sure what he means by “pure matter” – the inhuman nature of the universe?).  

It has been often noted that we live in the Age of Journalism. The mass media, now including the Internet, present practically all events as if they were of the same importance; all become equally evanescent. The Underworld element relates to what is timeless. There is mystery at the heart of poetry – note that poetry has never even been successfully defined. Likewise, the best writing comes from the unconscious -- hence its original, unpredictable nature. Maybe the word "Underworld" is not exactly right; I simply haven't been able to find a better label. I invite the reader to help me.

Brenda Hammock:

My favorite lines from the Eurydice selection:

Only the unreal has such real edges.

Outside the spring rain
has blurred everything 
into mud and flowers.
Follow me, my love.

But you do not move. 
The serpent has made you 
too wise. You stare at me,

silent, with your eyes

of stone, while I walk alone,

in love with the song.

My favorite lines from the Reality poem:

all of it!!!

Although you suggest that Eurydice is inspired by a male suicide, your narrators often betray a chthonian attraction of their own. That conflict reminds me of Rilke's Eurydice.  She doesn't really want to return to the world of light. She no longer feels at home there.  The fascination with hara-kiri (and other methods of undoing) seems to contradict that beauty you've been accused of indulging.  Yes, I can see the allure in "the chiaroscuro of desire /wrapping you, crushable silk," in"torches of black flame," in "lapis lazuli. /Galleries of sheen."  I've been thinking about the lull of beauty as I read Joanna Klink's They Are Sleeping.  Here's a passage from her "Monde, Demimonde" (University of Georgia Press):

Le Pendu is delighted, prepared.
Under the attraction of earth
he rises into the cool interior.
Le Pendu a portion of everything they know
about the sea and its marble sheets.
Chronic Pendu charting the wayward
skipping air, Pendu with his papier-maché lungs,
Omen-Pendu, shuddering sleepyhead in
clear light, force thrown off his neck, his heels
springing back from the smooth fresco sky.
Pendu cool under the makeshift gallows,
Pendu in the storm and static rainlight,
white legs flashing, Pendu
spinning in his pivot, precious Pendu
weeping into air, turning work into play, work into sea.
 
What keeps the poem from turning into mere fresco?  Well, the knowledge that the man is hanging.  I think your poems often pull a similar trick.  Yes, the language is lovely and the reader could miss the subject matter if s/he listens as some do to music, appreciating only sounds without concentrating on the jaggedness belied by glinting words.  One may be hypnotized by light flashing off a waved knife--and that, surely, makes the blade all the more dangerous.

**

Oriana:

Thank you, Brenda, for this exquisite comment. You are right, the language of a poem may be beautiful, but on a closer look something terrible is happening. In the first poem Eurydice refuses to follow because she knows that Orpheus is “married to art”; he loves his music more than his bride. The second poem is more explicit about the lover/hara-kiri demonstrator’s fascination with death as though it were merely an esthetic phenomenon.

Once I had a dream that uncannily corresponded to the “Le Pendu” passage that you quote. I dreamed it after learning that my favorite cousin died of cancer. It was as though my mind tried to defend itself from grieving by presenting a Tarot image that dissolves in waves of symbolism, a cosmic play that has nothing to do with loss. I think that’s why we can bear to read so much poetry that deals with death: in an accomplished poem, there is enough beauty to make dying an esthetic experience. 

In our Salon, we just studied Linda Pastan, whose poem about her mother’s dying, “The Descent,” is an extended metaphor of going down on an escalator. We get so caught up in the imagery, there is no room for any fear of death, that kind angel. And in my “Lilacs from Persephone,” I say,

In this unending granary of minutes,
what is death unless
a new tenderness? Smoky lilacs
I give you in memory
of rain-beaded blossoms --

lilacs in your arms,
the moist hearts of leaves. 

We badly need to believe in the inherent goodness of things. Poetry can be more potent that way than religion. We can dismiss religion as archaic nonsense, but the beauty of poetry works on our “emotional brain” in a more subtle way. 

Tarantella:

I'm pleased to have the time to read your blog tonight. Wow! These lines are more graphic than any horror file and so chilling.  I will never forget them.

"He shows me how to perform
hara-kiri, but can't remember
if one starts at the navel,
zigzagging upward,

or at the chest,
zigzagging downward -
"The point is to hit
all the vital organs."

*

The photo is wonderful and mysterious. It almost looks as if the face is starting to put a deformed hand on one cheek.

Oriana:

At that point I was so used to that young man's speaking of suicide as a craft (an "artistic suicide" was his goal), that this didn't particularly chill me (let me explain a bit more: I was ridiculously sure that he wouldn't do it as long as his mother was alive; he told me as much, and I took it on face value). What undid me was the little interlude on the beautiful names of concentration camps (which my grandparents survived, but three other relatives weren't so lucky).  

Hyacinth:

I understand what you're saying and agree that there are two sides to you as a writer, but isn't that true of many? I am also an Aries and some of my poetry sounds like it's written by different people. I like the stories but love the lyrical and think, Just be who we are and write what comes.

  

Oriana:

Sure, I write what comes, and more often it’s journalism, with lyrical lines here and there, lines where music and imagery are primary, and can’t be fully explained, because they “know” more than the poet knows. Without the lyrical lines, there wouldn’t be enough pleasure to make me stay with poetry. I know how to write competent informational prose, and in the past I got paid for precisely that. Nevertheless, eventually I got to miss poetry, and it certainly wasn’t a matter of content (for satisfying content, I still go to good non-fiction). It was a nostalgia for the music and the beauty; it was a longing for longing. I sense in myself a kinship with the underworld that I can’t rationally explain (or maybe I just don’t want to analyze it, given the pleasure of mystery).

The same writer can produce works that tend toward either pole. Brodsky, for instance, wrote some of the best “higher journalism” I ever read in his essays on St. Petersburg, as well Watermark, his wonderful and more "underworld" essays on Venice, a city that he claims is perfect for divorces: everything seems to be dissolving).

Lilith:

Yes, much contemporary poetry is just too prose-like for me . . . no magic, no juice.  Now I see the juice is indeed in the Scorpio. Thanks for the thought.

Oriana:

By “juice” I suppose you mean that which makes poetry live, even millennia later. Here, again, we have Gregory Orr’s “limitless factors,” chiefly music and imagery, but also that which I have called the underworld: feelings, mystery, communion with the dead, communion with the past – with anything that exists only in the mind. The moment you say, “I remember,” you the underworld. Why is the underworld so fascinating? Aren’t we urged to stay in the Now?

However, all theorizing about poetry can be only a partial truth. Poetry evades theory (Goethe: “gray is all theory; gold shines the Tree of Life”). A poem either has magic, or it doesn’t. I hope the poems on this blog have magic. 

Bill Mohr:

The last two stanzas of "ORPHEUS: EURYDICE’S REFUSAL Mausoleum, Long Beach" are astonishing. If others don't hear how staggeringly vivid these lines are, then one can only feel sorry for their limitations.

Oriana:

Thank you.  A few people advised me to drop the last stanza, but of course it’s the climax of the poem – Eurydice refuses to follow Orpheus, now that she understands the fact that’s usually rendered as “an artist is married to his art.”

In one of his late poems, Milosz speaks of the “hell of artists” – those who put their art ahead of their human affections. In another poem, he mentions a certain Polish woman poet who was a very good person, dedicated to others – that’s why, Milosz says, she wasn’t a good poet. I don’t think it’s necessarily a conscious choice; those fated (I’m tempted to say “doomed”) to be artists are compulsive. 

Hyacinth:

Isn't narrative about the same as journalism and how prose poems evolved? Not sure I understand the difference except in poetry there's the lyricism.

My favorite lines:

""you have no reflection"

"it's the stone breath of stone"

"hands folded in prayer"

and still not to be trusted ( in my experience that is when they are most not to be trusted, hiding behind religion to excuse all kinds of behavior)

As for Kooser I'm disappointed in his choices as too sentimental and beyond ordinary to the point of dull. They may be true slices of life but I long for the "puzzle" of WCW.

I call myself the poet of the ordinary but hope for more meaning and puzzles than Ted offers, at least lately. His own poetry is so astonishing but his choice of others is not.

I don't understand why you're using the term "underworld." "Inner world" is closer but not quite what term you're seeking.

As you can see I have more questions than answers.

Oriana:

Journalism includes description as well. What I mean by the term is emphasis on the external world. But those “external” details can certainly be used to illuminate feelings. For instance, the rural couple going over the things they bought in town is definitely happy. I like those details, but wish for “something more,” a touch of mystery, a going beyond the visible. 

But I don't mean the term "journalism" to be pejorative. Good journalistic poems have depth. In my experience, they also tend to be very compressed, minimalist, bracing. Underworld poems go more for atmosphere and lyricism. It's not unusual for me to go a bit into a trance while reading a good underworld poem, and certainly while writing one. I am "under the spell." 

I know I was going for a seductive title rather than a logically tight distinction. That, too, is what I'd call "underworld." I was also struck by the frequent communion with the dead in those poems.

I know my theorizing is loose at best. When it comes to poetry, we are always left with questions rather than answers.

Robert Champ:

I enjoyed the blog. Agree about Kooser's selection of poetry. Every now and then a really nice poem, but often prosaic to the point of yawning. And yet all the people who appear in his "columns" have published books.

I prefer poets who are both underground and journalistic. On the one hand, I don't want the poem shambling too long down a dusty road; on the other, I don't want it drifting out of reach.

Oriana:

Yes, the interweave (or call it balance) of underworld and journalism usually yields the best  kind of writing. I love your metaphor of "the poem shambling too long down a dusty road."