“MR. COGITO MEDITATES ON REDEMPTION”

[Madonna/Trinity Cross, 14th century, in Sejny (on the Polish-Lithuanian border; it may have been used by the Teutonic Knights as a field altar]

MR. COGITO MEDITATES ON REDEMPTION

He shouldn’t have sent his son

too many saw

the son’s pierced hands

his ordinary death

            we were doomed

            to be reconciled

            through the worst of reconciliations

too many nostrils

drew in with pleasure

the smell of his fear

            one mustn’t

            stoop

            fraternize with blood

he shouldn’t have sent his son

it was better to reign

in a palace of marble clouds

on the throne of terror

holding the scepter of death

          ~ Zbigniew Herbert,

translated from Polish by Oriana

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You can read more of my translations of Herbert's poems here:
http://www.thescreamonline.com/poetry/poetry7-2/herbert/oriana_ivy.html

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It is interesting that the medieval and Renaissance tradition of presenting the Trinity in the form of God the Father holding the horizontal beam of the cross as though to display his martyred son, with the Holy Spirit as a dove hovering around the cross or perched on top of it, vanished from large-scale religious art in later centuries. Possibly, as religion became milder, the image was seen as too gruesome.  And yet even now the image, and of course the concept of the deity requiring a blood sacrifice, has not been completely lost in popular religious art, as can be seen in the “trinity crucifix.”   

                                                                           

In Christ, A Crisis in the Life of God, Jack Miles writes,

"The crucifix is a violently obscene icon. To recover its visceral power, children of the twenty-first century must imagine a lynching, the body of the victim swollen and distorted, his head hanging askew above a broken neck, while the bystanders smile their twisted smiles. Then they must imagine that grisly spectacle reproduced at the holiest spot in whatever edifice they call holy. And yet to go even this far is still to miss the meaning of the image, for this victim is not just innocent: He is God Incarnate, the Lord himself in human form." 

To the believers, however, this is the image of supreme love, more so than the universal and non-controversial image of Madonna and Child. The pleas of those who would like the triumphant image of the Resurrection to take precedence have been ignored. And thus we are left with what may be called the "tragic vision." Tragedy is the dominant genre in great literature, perhaps because we sense its vision is more accurate.


And yet, having seen endless representations of the crucifixion, I would say that only a minority are gruesome. For all my admiration for Jack Miles, who won the well-deserved Pulitzer Prize, I don't think I'd classify most depictions of the crucifixion as pornography of violence. Some of them are striking for the serenity they convey, the calm acceptance. Simone Weil remarked that they are meant to be a healing image -- like the copper serpent that Moses showed to those bitten by "fiery serpents."


My favorite religious images, those that seem to have a healing power, are neither crucifixion nor resurrection, but those that present Christ as a radiantly serene figure.


One of the ironies and paradoxes is contained in the very name of Jesus, which is the Greek form of Yehoshua -- Joshua in English, the great warrior. But this new Joshua says, "Turn the other cheek" and "Love thy enemy." The radical nature of this message startles us even today.


It's been suggested that if Christianity is to survive, the archaic idea that "Jesus died for our sins" must be abandoned (e.g. Bishop John Shelby Spong). What remains of value is the message of non-revenge (cf  the Buddhist "hatred by hatred never can be ended") and compassion. In some areas, there has been progress toward compassion and forgiveness, but the problem of suffering remains. Perhaps the ideal should be not universal love, but universal respect. If humans ever learn to treat one another with respect, then indeed we can build paradise right here on earth.

As for Herbert's poem, I think it would be even more powerful without the set-off stanzas, i.e. no commentary. Well, poems can be somewhat flawed, yet still powerful. For me, the "shiver factor" remains.

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Ursula:

As a non-Catholic I always found the crucifix to be both horrifying and fascinating in a most unpleasant way.  Seems to me Jack Miles is making some good points.

Oriana:

He does make some good points. I probably became desensitized to the violence of the image through many years of daily exposure starting in early childhood.

[Masaccio, The Holy Trinity with the Virgin and St. John, 1427; Florence, the church of Santa Maria Novella]

Mary McCarthy writes, “The fresco, with its terrible logic, is like a proof in philosophy or mathematics, God the Father, with his unrelenting eyes, being the axiom from which everything else irrevocably flows.” (The New Yorker, 8/22/1959)

Angie:


Re: Madonna with the Trinity Cross. This is wonderful.  I, too, love that the Madonna is bigger than the Trinity.  And what an impish smile she has.  Fantastic.


Oriana:


It's as though the Mother Goddess, holding her child, asserted that what's below there, the barbarous sacrifice, is nonsense, since the eternal axis is the loving bond between mother and child. "Mother" is of course whoever is the primary care-giver. The most essential law is compassionate and nurturing love, and not the "ransom of blood" for some primordial offense. 

LIFE IS RICHER FOR ALL WE LOSE; WARSAW POPLARS

Warsaw Poplars

It’s not the country I miss.

I miss the poplars

lining the long avenue,

leafy perspective I loved to trace

from my fourth-story window,

past Cemetery of the Russian Soldiers

all the way to the airport.

The avenue was named

after the first aviators.

uncle Gienio, killed in air battle

over france, was an aviator,

smiling from his biplane,

fading in a sepia photograph.

To his little sister, my mother, he said,

“We’ll fly around the world.”

I stood in each window,

walked out every door  –

daydreamed on all bridges, dazed

with departure’s nets of light.

I too wanted to fly around the world.

At seventeen, you don’t ask

the price. In a sepia October,

I left. Behind me swayed

Warsaw poplars,

tree by tree bowing back.

Shadows laced my hands,

the passing leaves

rustled warnings I didn’t hear –

long perspective of poplars,

upward arms burned to gold –

behind me an endless

avenue of gold wind.

~ Oriana

**

A friend commented: Life is richer for all we lose.

This reminds me of Mickiewicz’s

My fatherland, you are like health;

only he knows your worth,

who has lost you.      

(~ my translation)

Joyce saw exile as essential to being a writer. It’s in exile that we find the esthetic distance that makes us remember, understand, and appreciate details we’d otherwise find pedestrian. Only in absence, distance, sepia. That’s why most love poems are about lost love.

The majority of immigrants see their lost homeland as paradise lost – no matter how imperfect that paradise was, how bitter-sweet the memories, should the person try to be accurate (which is hardly what we want; we prefer to dwell on blissful memories). Eva Hoffman’s excellent Lost in Translation starts with the section on her childhood in Kraków, called “Paradise.”  

Does it then follow that the new country is hell? The first months, sometimes years, may have a hellish aspect, due to the immigrant’s homesickness and sense of incompetence and humiliation. There have been times when I saw America as hell, when I cried myself to sleep thinking that I made a tragic mistake. Even now, I can easily imagine my tombstone in Poland, in the town where I was born, with these words on it: Do not leave your homeland.

But eventually a more balanced view emerged: there were things I liked and things I didn’t like, as would be true of any country. No, America was neither hell nor paradise; it was Purgatory, and in Purgatory there is hope. But that’s a separate post.


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Actually my nostalgia (I am tempted to say "nostalgias") came as a total surprise to me. I know this may sound as crazy as my delusions about America as a coast-to-coast Manhattan, but at the time of departure, I was in total denial that I'd feel any homesickness.

In fact I was determined to feel none, and I was quite a strong-willed adolescent, whether I commanded myself to read in English every day (eventually: to practice thinking in English) or do intense physical exercise. You can imagine the rest of this story, how hard the homesickness hit when it did . . .   

MY GRANDMOTHER'S LAUGHTER

My grandmother Veronika, 1945, 

first ID photo after Auschwitz

MY GRANDMOTHER'S LAUGHTER

1. Black Soup

My grandmother, a goose in her lap,

strokes the white bird,

strokes the long neck,

and when the goose is calm,

she calmly cuts its throat,

draining the blood

into a blue washbasin.

She makes the sweet, heavy

black soup. Apple slices

float, half-moons.

Her wide sleeves winnow

the feathered air.

Woopoo-tzoopoo,

woopoo-tzoopoo, she sings.

She pokes my arm

as if testing a cake:

This child is too skinny, she sighs.

I sit on top of her feet,

telling her to walk,

to take me somewhere.

skins of baked apples crack,

ooze tears of sugary sap.

Rosaries of mushrooms

dry over the stove,

shrink into pieces of dark wing.

2. Only the Horse


The Raba River spits up white,

drowning the cool green of spruce,

slow crescents of the Carpathians.

Poplars taper to silver. Wind,

then a stillness. The first drops.

The driver unrolls the roof.

The rain grows heavy, knocking,

trying to enter from all sides.

The driver heaves himself inside: 

The horse knows the way.

The river boulders knock,

the carriage rocks like an ark.

And all is found: the rain, the road,

the Raba hissing in stone bed;

the driver silent, the hooves a clock,

the horse a steady brown rhythm.

A village past the river willows;
the sunken bell of vespers.
The horse stops. Ribbons of steam

curl off his flanks.

Rain hushes to a prayer

along the dripping leaves.

The dorozhka disappears

into the wet-shining green.

Only the horse knows the way,
the horse in a halo of steam,

hooves ticking on the wooden bridge
for a hundred years.

3. Ghost Forest

Woolly threads of conifer breath

rise, tiny bent souls.

on the slopes, a ghost forest –

strangled spruce, green only at the top.

Underneath, gray sticks,

upturned bony hands.

No one enters –

you’ll get scratched,

slip on the needles and fall. No

blueberries or wild strawberries

here – a forest of nothing.

Still I press into that thicket,

squeeze between spindly trunks,

until like a starving tree

I stand in the inner dusk.

Beyond, bird calls of meadows.

Sunlight beads the bowed

tips of grass;

grandmother weaves for me

crowns of white clover.

What gray hunger draws me

past the smiling green

into the ghost forest –

As if there weren’t already

too many dead –

As if those with no faces said,

If you cannot win, endure.

4. My Grandmother's Laughter

One day in the street my grandmother

stops before another grandmother.

Both stammer: “It’s you – you – in Auschwitz – ”

Turning to me: “She and I shared

the same blanket. Every night she said,

‘You’ve got more than I’

and pulled, and I pulled back,

and so we’d tug across the bunk – ”

and the two grandmothers laugh.

In the middle of a crowded

sidewalk, in old women’s dusk,

widows’ browns and grays,

they are laughing like two schoolgirls –

tears rain down the cracked

winter of their cheeks.

On Piotrkovska Avenue,

on the busiest street,

they are tugging that thin blanket –

They are pulling back.

5. Praying to Saint Anthony

Pincushions and hairnets,

a mischievous spool of thread;

thimbles wobble in uneven hoops,

needles enter the secret veins of things. 

We rummage through drawers

reeking of decayed Soir de Paris

cologne and valerian drops;

the slipper-hedged dusk under the bed.

There remains the invisible world.

We kneel on the creaking floor

before the painting of a smiling monk,

a lily like a magic wand

tilting from his hand.

With a practiced zigzag,

we cross ourselves: Saint Anthony,

guide us to Grandmother’s thimble.

Again we scan

the summits of wardrobes,

horizons of floors;

the precipice behind the couch,

gritty crevasses of chairs.

Again she hides in laughter:

The devil must have covered it

with his tail.

6. Grandmother’s Theft

You’d think the pages would bleach,

she’d read them so many times –

lions run out of Christians

and Nero sicken from pearls

dissolved in purple wine.

She attends Caesar’s banquets.

descends with an oil lamp

into the catacombs’

damp dark. Quo vadis? –

“Where are you going?”

she repeats like a password.

And will not return the book.

*

For years her eldest brother, Józef,

puzzles over the gap

in his gilded-edged volume set.

He had received private teaching,

while she, to pay for his lessons,

was taken out of school in fourth grade,

put to work in a textile factory.

About the novel, she explains:

Because he never gave me anything.

7. Wolves

We set out late, ruddy pelt of the sun

tangled in the branches.

Then the dark begins to tick,

rustle and creak, the crowns of pines 

riddled with imagined owl flight. 

A stir in the ferns, a snap.

I’m waiting for one

high note, clean blade of a knife.

And the dark is pierced –

panting, barking, an animal tumult.

Hungry bodies of the night,

they are closing in.

Yezus Marya! grandmother shouts.

Then, calmly: Stand still.

There are lights and cries,

the villagers banging gates,

calling back the dogs

they loosed from the chain.

We borrow lanterns and walk on,

wolf shadows swaying

among the shadows of pines.

8. All Souls

On All Souls’, grandmother and I

buy chrysanthemums at a bazaar.

Petals smell of the earth.

The sun grows small, a white pebble.

Hundreds of candles gentle with their glow

the sites of executions. 

On white-pebbled paths,

we walk among the graves.

She thrusts a coin into the hand

of a beggar woman wrapped

in seven black shawls:

Pray for the soul of Yakub.

Adds his last name, so God

won’t confuse him with anyone else.

9. Winter comes from the East

Winter comes from the East,

winter comes at Christmas

crows from the frozen

heart of Russia,

a black wind off the Urals.

A ruddy ring around the moon

means frost.

Moon in a fox-fur hat

brings cold, great cold.

I paint ghost roses

with my breath, lick icicles,

wade wind-tilted snowdrifts.

One night across the bright darkness,

I see a falling star.

I am young, and do not make a wish.

10. Bread and Salt

In late amber

afternoons, the streets ascended

on the scent of warm bread.

She brings home a sun-round loaf.

Under the saw-toothed knife

the crust crackles, resists;

I beg for the “heel,” I eat

the steaming, almost breathing

bread, like the flesh of the earth.

*

At the spa with the salt towers,

the fountain of Hansel and Gretel,

huddled under a dripping

stone umbrella. The salt towers

are five-storied pyramids, dripping brine

through a scaffolding of birch twigs.

We stroll around, breathing the salt breeze.

It’s meant to cure everything.

“Inhale!” grandmother reminds.

*

We watch a bride and groom

greeted at the door

with bread and salt.

Bread so you never go hungry.

Salt so you dance with

shadows, in the lucky light.

11. Stations of the Cross


“Why are there no women priests?”

She shrugs: Because men rule the world.

Like we have to listen to the Bolshevik.

We are doing Stations of the Cross.

She lingers before the Sixth Station:

Pale wisp of a girl, Veronica

presses through the jeering crowd,

the whips of snarling executioners.

She holds out her white veil to wipe

the condemned man’s face,

streaked with blood and sweat.

My grandmother Veronika

greets her patron saint.

She has seen the executioners.

Only the uniforms are different.

She does not bow her head.

In the kitchen, making beet soup

with botvinka, not wasting

the tiniest leaf, she laments:

As soon as I close my eyes,

you will never go to church.

12. God's Hearing

One evening in Auschwitz

the women in her barracks began to pray.

Their prayer grows and grows,

a chant, a hymn, a howl –

it carries far

into the searchlight-blinded,

electric wire-razored night.
The Kapo rushes in, shouting,

Not so loud!

God is not hard of hearing!

And my grandmother laughs.

Then she begins to sing:

Many have fallen

in the sleep of death,

but we have still awakened

to praise Thee,

she sings to the God of Auschwitz.

Her voice does not quiver.

         ~ Oriana


*****

Ursula:

These are  marvelous, so full of love and memory and life -- the horse pulling you all through the forest in the rain, and your grandmother and her bunkmate laughing over what must have been a threadbare, vermin eaten blanket, what resilience.

Are you making books of these? Have they all been published somewhere? They are so strong, and full  of good spirit. I found them deeply refreshing.

Oriana:

Thank you, Ursula. Yes, the resilience -- my grandmother's strength of spirit was magnificent.

Some of the sequence has been published, but not the entire sequence. I've seen sending out my manuscript (including this sequence) to various contests, but with no success. Maybe this is not surprising, since the trend is away from the narrative, even if it's a lyrical narrative.

And I want to share these stories, these strange and magical details. If a few people can find them through this blog, it's better than nothing.

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