WAS JESUS NAKED? POETRY AS CONSOLATION VERSUS REALISM

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

SHE DIED IN BEAUTY

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

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

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

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

~ Charles Doyne Sillery (1807-1837)

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

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

Rossetti: The Blessed Damozel, 1878

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

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

**

John Everett Millais: Ophelia, 1851

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

THE RISER

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

~ Sharon Olds, One Secret Thing, 2008

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

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

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

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

Piero della Francesca: Resurrection, 1463

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

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

 





















Rossetti: The Salutation of Beatrice, 1869

Charles:

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

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

John Guzlowski:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**

Oriana:

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

**

Frederick Leighton: Flaming June, 1879

Hyacinth:

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

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

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

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

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

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


CAN A BAD POEM PROVIDE CONSOLATION?
 
John:

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

Rainy Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Parenthetically, the lines

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

~ happen to describe depression with great economy. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John:

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

Have you heard Larkin reading the poem?

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

It's not what you expect.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CAN A GOOD POEM PROVIDE BOTH CONSOLATION AND REALISM?

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

ELEPHANT GRAVE
 
After an elephant dies,

the herd may carry its bones for miles.

Did you know that? Hefting them over

the flatland ebb and flow, as

years ago we trekked

the backwoods of late November,

New England burned out like candlewick.

White light parted maples then,

found me chasing your footsteps

as you led us home.

Last fall the hills blazed red— 

I wonder if you tasted smoke, oceans away

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

Did you think of the leaves

we used to bring home and tape up,

the way they all withered in the end?

Even the best, the brightest

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

even though you promised to come back.

I broke when I heard you were lying

alone in scrub grass,

no one to lift you up, knowing

you were precious.

Brother, I would have carried you

on my shoulders ’til the horizon bent for us

and our forest dawned along its edge.

Imagine, and the maples stoop to greet you,

saying welcome back,

welcome home.

~ Victoria White, The Kenyon Review

**

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

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

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

on my shoulders ’til the horizon bent for us

and our forest dawned along its edge.

Imagine, and the maples stoop to greet you,

saying welcome back,

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

Scott:

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

Oriana:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scott:

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

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

Oh Captain, Captain!
Where are we going now?

Oriana:

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

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

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

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

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

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

**


Scott:

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

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

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


Hyacinth:

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

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

PERSEPHONE’S KITCHEN

Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Persephone

EURYDICE IN MILWAUKEE

            At least I have the flowers of myself.

                                    ~ h.d.

“Your life would have been

so much happier,” a neighbor sighs,

“if you had been born

in this country.” Then I wouldn’t

have had Warsaw, trembles

my first thought. Memories rush in:

Eurydice at seventeen,

from a Milwaukee suburb
I take a bus downtown –

seeking that giant hum,

that multiple living heart.

I get off when I see the first

tall buildings at last.

But these stand empty, dead,

block after abandoned block.

I walk on and read the scars

of torn-off signs and names;

I’m fractured in cracked mirrors

of the gutted stores.

Sheets of old newspapers

fly at me like crumbling ghosts.

On the pavement, mildewed files,

frayed tangles of electric cords;

in the windows, crooked, stained,

half-shut yellowed shades.

Still disbelieving, I walk on

in tunnels of hissing wind.

Echoes crash in my wake:

alone alone alone –

as I walk toward the blue

window of Lake Michigan

glistening at the end. (Old friend,

are you still waiting for me there?)

*

Talent is how deep you go in,

walking against the wind

in empty labyrinths. Kind

neighbor, can you understand?
Some of us are driven
by a hunger more terrifying

than the pursuit of happiness.

Call me Eurydice –

I’ve lost a world, but gained

the dark flowers of myself –

not the brief blossoms we give

to brides and to the dead.

~ Oriana © 2011

This poem is not about my loss of Warsaw so much as about my loss of America. I mean the idealized, imaginary America in my mind after I arrived in real America. I was seventeen. That combination – loss of both Poland and America – was to be the first in the series of my “Persephone experiences.” (Eurydice can be seen as a version of Persephone.)

In my early teens, in Warsaw, I fell in love with Greek mythology. I thought it was possible to choose your own special goddess. A fierce young intellectual, I longed for Athena at my side – Athena the super-intelligent, with her brilliant strategies and unfailing guidance and protection of heroes. Now and then I also longed for Aphrodite to lend me her charms and help me in matters of love, but with the understanding that this was a secondary goddess. As my personal goddess, I chose Athena.

Soon enough I learned that you do not choose your god or goddess. Life (or call it fate, or circumstances), in combination with your deep self, chooses for you. Past the age of seventeen and a half, the only goddess I identified with was Persephone.

Persephone is a dual goddess, with two manifestations. The more familiar one is the traumatized maiden, Kore. Yet there is also Persephone the queen, the wise woman who understands the deepest mysteries. She “has been there.” But here is the most wonderful part: when the season is right, Persephone ascends from the Underworld to bring the gift of springtime to the world. Flowers spring up where she steps. She also has a fascinating companion. Hecate (who stands for wisdom and magic) is said to both precede and follow Persephone/Kore. 

I was so identified with the traumatized maiden part of the Persephone myth that I rarely remembered the mature Queen – paradoxically the death goddess who is also the goddess of life. But even when I did remember her, did I ever want to become Persephone the Queen? Does anyone want to be Persephone? The youthful trauma marks the Persephone woman forever. The only good part seems to be having more empathy for the suffering of others. And traveling between worlds (in the sense of re-visiting trauma, though the underworld can be defined in many different ways) may be connected to creativity, but is it the only way?

Trauma may be the necessary ingredient for becoming an artist. But creative work later on can be motivated in other ways, can’t it? – or so I’d love to believe. (If there is a god who comes close to being the male equivalent of Persephone, it’s Hephaistos. Rejected by his mother, lame as a result of his forced fall from Olympus, he becomes a craftsman and an artist – the wonderful shield of Achilles goes beyond mere craft. As Lionel Trilling observed, it is not trauma that distinguishes the artist, but the ability to rise above it.)

Most men in my life seem to have related to my Aphrodite side, unaware of the traumatized girl. I think only one man saw me as a young Persephone, orphaned in an alien world, and that brought out his protective side.

Possibly my first great love also saw that vulnerable side, the nervousness, the low self-esteem – but his response was cruelty, which, along with other misfortunes, imprisoned me in trauma for the rest of my youth. In fact I’m not sure if it’s even possible for me to be happy in a carefree way because I was so deeply devastated in my young adulthood, my spirit broken, my faith in myself shattered. But carefree happiness is not the only kind.

It took many years, but I dare say I have recovered. I have developed skills and acquired resources. But the awareness I gained in my youth – that the worst can happen, and not just to someone else, but to me – that knowledge cannot be erased. The duality of Persephone is my duality as well. The darkness is always at the edge of my consciousness. It doesn’t mean that I can’t have plenty of happy, even ecstatic moments.

Still, I realize that while I have had a good share of “Persephone experiences” (which, Frightened Reader, I am wise enough not to enumerate), in the end I have been spared the worst fate which can and does befall some Persephone women: they never come out of chronic depression, their gifts ungiven, their lives wasted. I saw what was in store for me, and, practically in the last moment, I managed to rescue myself. In an instant that was years in the making, I realized that it was simply too late in life for depression.

It’s not that I decided to be happy – my revulsion against happiness was too long-standing for that. (I couldn’t understand why a brilliant man like Jefferson could even come up with that absurd phrase, “the pursuit of happiness.” Wasn’t his life about the pursuit of excellence instead?) I did not decide to be happy. But I did decide not to be depressed, and that changed everything. I have not had a single relapse, and after two years I am – surprise! – rather – dare I say it? – happy. I love my quiet life – outwardly the same life I had before my perception changed.

I have met three other people who also told me they made the decision not to be depressed, so I know I am not the only person to have followed the path of closing that familiar door and making a commitment. But I would never claim that this is a solution for others. Everyone is different, with a unique life history, and deep decisions ripen strangely, slowly, suddenly. The insight that changes everything may seem to come a fraction of a second, but in fact it was years in the making. I stood there, thrown out of depression, stunned by the slamming door of “too late,” knowing that there was no way back in. I stood there homeless, so to speak, barred from my old shelter and forced to cope and engage with the world – so I did.

[Persephone and Hades depicted on a vase, the British Museum. Note that Hades holds the cornucopia, a symbol of plenty. Scholars are unsure as to what it is that Persephone holds -- a pomegranate fruit? At first glance, I thought she was knitting.]

FROM VICTIM TO QUEEN: GAINING VALUABLE SKILLS AND SUPPORTIVE FRIENDS

The transformation from Persephone the Traumatized Maiden to Persephone the Queen does not mean that the woman becomes invulnerable to trauma. Alas, unlike in the myth, in life the rape of Persephone may happen more than once, in various forms – the shattering of dreams and hope can happen in various realms. But the inspiring part of the myth – the transformation from Maiden to Queen – does make the woman less vulnerable to being devastated/destroyed by trauma. I want to emphasize here that this is not the effect of the transformation, and not repeated trauma in the absence of transformation, which is disastrous.

Strength and maturity matter – if you’ve survive once, you know you can survive again and can build on that knowledge. Learning valuable skills matters. It matters tremendously. Knowing how to turn pain into art – or turning to dedicated work in any field – is a triumph of the spirit that makes us less afraid of suffering, since “even the bad is good” – it’s a goldmine of material and/or “learning experiences” (barring extreme circumstances).

Thus, the “pursuit of happiness” is the wrong motto at the early stage of the Maiden-into-Queen transformation. A misguided – or simply unlucky – pursuit of happiness may have brought on the initial trauma in the first place. A more appropriate motto might be the “pursuit of excellence.” Once Persephone gains excellence at doing something, in any field, she builds a foundation of strength and more secure self-esteem. Once a valuable skill is gained and excellence achieved, she may then discover, to her great surprise, that in fact she lives for pleasure – for delight of the deepest kind.

Another set of helpful skill is psychological and social savvy that come simply from life experience: being able to recognize red flags. This can work very well for trauma prevention. A recovering Persephone also learns the value of cultivating supportive friendships, including at least one with an Athena-type woman, with her practical intelligence and disdain for romantic follies. Add to this having not just “a room of your own” but an income of your own (for some reason, Virginia Woolf’s second requirement is rarely quoted) – and even Persephone has a chance of leaving bad memories behind and stepping into a productive and fulfilled life. From crying fits over the past to meaningful work, endurance and splendor – this is what Persephone teaches.

Recognizing that what seems bad can be a hidden blessing is certainly valuable skill. One interesting New Age writer, Byron Katie, suggests that when something adverse happens, we should say, “This is happening for me” rather than “to me.” Persephone women who manage to transform into Queen may be late bloomers, even very late bloomers; but the flowering can be astonishing indeed.

Anna Kaminska, a Polish poet, made a statement that at first struck me as outrageous: “We always receive more than we desire. We receive what we ask for, but sometimes in a different currency, a currency that turns out to be of greater worth.” Since my life has been so rich in shattered dreams and outright travesties, my first impulse was to exclaim, "Hey, mystic poet, wake up! The essence of life is that we don’t get what we desire." (Well, once in a while we do, and the shattering of the dream happens with delay; as Teresa of Avila famously observed, “More tears are shed over answered prayers than over unanswered ones.”)

That larger consciousness goes hand in hand with “having a life” – and that matters most of all. If you love your work, you have a daily, reliable source of happiness. You have a practice, a creative routine to which you turn even during hurricane season. It now becomes difficult for a demonic-type man (for instance, a charismatic man who turns out to be a cruel narcissist) to destroy you; he will seek easier prey among the innocent and the weak, those who “don’t have a life” and are waiting for a male savior.

That the presumed male savior may turn out to be one of life’s cruel jokes – an alcoholic, for instance – is not as interesting as arriving at the transformed vision of the life you already have. The marriage that in youth may have been experienced as a prison may in middle age come be perceived as exactly the kind of stable foundation that you need. You married the right man after all! 

As for the Prince, how lucky that he didn’t come, with his demands that you become his “service person.” Perhaps the only way for a woman to become a Queen is not to marry a Prince, especially not in youth, when you haven’t yet found your own path.

One of the important events that led to my insight was a lecture on Aphrodite and the “Aphrodite woman.” To me, most of the lecture seemed to pertain to Persephone rather than Aphrodite. And then I saw the fusion of the two goddesses.

October, the month of Persephone’s descent, seemed to be a month of fate for me, along with my birth month, April, Aphrilis, Aphrodite’s month, sometimes equated with Persephone’s ascent. The pomegranate was sacred to both goddesses. If the golden Aphrodite is another phase/face of Persephone, the circle is completed, the suffering transmuted into art and/or of personality enlargement, similar to what happens when a person falls in love (often a combined Aphrodite/Persephone experience).

In neurological rather than mythic terms, the traumatized young Persephone is mainly the dysfunctional, hyperactive amygdala that causes so much suffering in the post-traumatic stress disorder. But there is another part of the brain that can calm down the screaming amygdala, and that’s the left pre-optic frontal cortex: the seat of (dare we say it?) reason, focus, insight, creativity. Here was Athena after all. But when it comes to the healing power of music and beauty and pleasure, we are back to Aphrodite.

Perhaps the worst part of trauma, of being identified with Persephone, is having a well-developed inner hell, with many mansions. An innocuous-seeming detail, a minor stressor, can drop a traumatized woman down into one of those inner infernal mansions, into the corridors of howling. Yet even in the darkest hell, what is that glimmer? It’s Aphrodite who glows and smiles, reminding a woman that she, too, is Aphrodite and has some of Aphrodite’s charisma, the magic that can transform anything into beauty. Let me repeat what Lionel Trilling said: it's not trauma that distinguishes the artist, but the ability to rise above it. 

The challenge of a Persephone-identified woman is to learn how to rescue herself from her inner hell. Athena provides insight, and that may be enough. But it also helps to focus on Aphrodite’s smile. Aphrodite imparts the glow of positive emotions, the memories of being loved. Persephone must learn to remember that she is also Aphrodite.

But this is not the only way in which Aphrodite can function as a savior. I have recently re-read the Aphrodite chapter in Jean Shinoda’s Goddesses in Older Women (Harper and Collins, 170-176). Already the subtitle struck a chord: “Lover, Creative Woman.” For Shinoda, Aphrodite is also the goddess of creativity. It’s not only that she is attracted to creative men, becomes their muse, believes in their talent and nurtures them before they gain recognition. What is even more important is that Aphrodite has her own artistic side. The Aphrodite woman can be intensely engaged in her own creative work.

As Jean Shinoda puts it, “Aphrodite is also the archetype of creativity. The same intensity and total absorption that happens when we fall in love is essential to the creative process” (p. 173). My own experience bears it out: the artist falls in love with the work in progress. Like Aphrodite the lover, s/he must be intensely in the moment, and both focused and receptive.

This is possibly the most original contribution of Shinoda’s presentation of the goddess archetypes. Aphrodite as the goddess of beauty and love has been with us for a millennia; Aphrodite as the goddess of creativity has not been paid much attention. Persephone is in part a goddess of creativity through her gift of travel between the worlds and imparting an aura of mystery (and poetry thrives on mystery). But Aphrodite can be a particularly empowering archetype for creative women – as well as for intellectual women such as scientists, or any other women whose work is intensely absorbing, and creates experiences similar to falling in love.

When such women are fulfilled by their work, I’ve often seen what I call the “smile of Aphrodite” on their faces. It’s like the radiance of a woman in love. I’ve seen on the face of a woman mycologist explaining to me why the study of fungi is the most fascinating field in the world; I’ve seen it on the faces of dancers and weavers. I remember the liberating moment when I realized that I can be totally intellectual and totally feminine; not only was there no contradiction, but it created a special charisma. After all, Aphrodite is the goddess of love; that love need not be focused exclusively on relationships with men.

I happen to know many creative women, and they strike me as Persephone-Aphrodite women – with enough of Athena and/or Artemis traits to enable them to cope with the world. Yet their mystery and creative powers seem to stem from that ability to take Persephone’s suffering and transmute it into Aphrodite’s gold.

If Aphrodite stands for the happy woman, and Persephone for the unhappy one, that division is of course an oversimplification and downright distortion. Aphrodite does experience love’s sorrows; it’s that she has learned that the gifts of love are worth it in spite of the pain that love also brings. And Persephone who matures into the Queen also comes to realize that it is blissful to withdraw from the world into the inner world (for me the underworld means primarily the inner world, which requires solitude). When the time is ripe, she finds it just as blissful to ascend into connection with others. Maybe because she has already suffered so much before maturity, Persephone is dazzled by all the happiness that is now hers. I dare put forth this radical thesis: mature Persephone is the happiest goddess.

Needless to say, Persephone’s empathy, depth, and rich inner life are indispensable creative assets as well. And besides, is Persephone the Queen perhaps none other than Aphrodite, dewy with reflected light?

PERSEPHONE’S KITCHEN

Deep summer. I eat gold squash

and black plums. Persephone says

she makes the soul at high heat,

out of darkness and desire,

that first fatal pomegranate seed.

Aphrodite makes her half of the soul

stirring in birds, the dolphin leap.

“Be happy like God,” Aphrodite

dares. Persephone regrets

nothing; Aphrodite sings

for her dead. I’ve feasted on grief

long enough. My youth is gone,

I’m ripe for life. Autumn fog,

Persephone’s wind-riven veil,

will sweep us away, but it’s August,

sun spills into the lucent grass,

and you say yes, tonight,

let’s consume

our bodies while they last,

the ground split with fallen figs,

golden apples, plums.

~ Oriana © 2011

Thomas Hart Benton: Persephone

Hyacinth:

Some favorite lines:

let’s consume

our bodies while they last,

the ground split with fallen figs,

golden apples, plums.

"I'm fractured in cracked mirrors"

"crumbling ghosts"

"the dark flowers of myself"

~ each one could make a whole poem

Oriana:

Yes, that's the power of imagery -- each image holds so much in it. When I research the pomegranate, in particular, the symbolism was all over the place, but what particularly struck me was that the pomegranate was sacred to both Persephone and Aphrodite. 

Mary (in Chicago):

Lovely poems and reflections, Oriana. And yes, your old friend Lake Michigan is still there, right where the last Ice Age created her. Just a few blocks from where I live, in fact.

Oriana:

I have a poem about Lake Michigan that’s more like a fragment:

LAKE MICHIGAN

Seventeen, alone and scared,

I thought, “I exchanged

Warsaw for this?”

looking at stunted suburban homes,

downtown’s abandoned streets.

You were my sole sublime:

a lake so huge I couldn’t see

the other shore.

A lake with respectable waves,

like a sea bay!

I watched you slap at the stone jetty.

Cold spray lashed out at the lamp posts.

During those months of weeping,

I knew you were there,

waves without end,

gray water underneath white fog.

In November’s stinging sleet,

I loved how you owned the horizon.

You were an image of my life:

I could see only gleaming distance.

Great Lake of memory,

you are still like life:

I cannot see the other shore.

When winter’s winds come like knives,

before I say “I know, I know,”

I will remember you,

that year my only friend,

the dancing way you had with light.

~ Oriana © 2011

**

I am still awed when I think about the Great Lakes – the largest fresh-water lakes in the world: amazing!

It was an extremely difficult time in my life, but for a writer, “even the bad is good,” as a poet-friend observed. Not that I knew it at the time. It’s only now that I am grateful for at least some of my Persephone experiences. 

Ursula:

Perhaps you can put these poems in a collection: "Immigrant," "The Girl from Warsaw," "The Myths of the Immigrant." Each one of them captures the experience in a different way. I read so many stories when they arrive, they work hard, success! Your poems are real. Like adoption, immigration is based on loss and the loss never diminishes.

Oriana:

Thank you for that interesting analogy with adoption. Yes, immigration is adoption after all, but without kind new parents to nurture and instruct you, and any immigrant could use such parents . . . And the loss is double, because after a while (sometimes even a short while) you don't fit in the country of origin; you have unalterably changed by having stepped out of your circle and experienced what may be a radically different world. You’ve eaten the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. So the original "I could always go back" escape clause disappears.

What I read decades too late is that immigration is something you do for your children. This strikes me as a wise statement. Now if that bit of wisdom had gotten through to me at the age of, say, sixteen, I dare say it would have hit me between the eyes!! It seems incredible now, but I had zero awareness of immigrant realities. Sure, I'd heard about homesickness, but -- I know this will sound crazy, but remember the teen brain is not very developed -- I thought it wouldn't happen to ME!!! What propelled was definitely not any idea of sacrifice for the sake of my future children. I expected no homesickness, no hardship, no tears -- just each day being an exciting adventure of a sort I couldn't quite imagine . . . 

That day when I set out to “see Milwaukee,” I found myself walking in a nightmarish, deathly landscape of abandoned streets, the Dead City, one of the several underworlds I was to experience. Many years later I managed to capture the experience.

A friend told me she once found herself in an abandoned section of New York, and it was profoundly unsettling.

Even normal, "live" parts of any American city can unnerve an outsider because of the absence of people on the sidewalks (typically). A European thinks (or used to think) that a city is supposed to be "humming with life."  When I was in my teens, crowded sidewalks also meant safety and a kind of anonymous community. In addition, streets were a part of history. To abandon any part of the city, to just let it decay, would have been a sacrilege, a heartless abandonment. But then I myself could have easily been accused of heartlessness back then, having just abandoned the familiar streets for an imaginary “promised land.” 

Charles:

It’s wonderful that in Persephone women have this role model of transformation from victim to queen, but what about men? Men also suffer from trauma and depression. Is there a myth that addresses that?

Oriana:

Thank you, Charles, for asking a very important question. Even though men on the whole rate themselves as more happy as women (the notorious “happiness gap”), and even though testosterone is the “happy hormone” that produces an orientation toward action rather than brooding, there is no denying that trauma and depression affect men as well, often with tragic consequences (men are more likely to succeed at suicide).

In Re-Visioning Psychology, James Hillman tries to make the “Persephone experience” relevant for men as well:

“Each of us enacts Persephone in soul, a maiden in a field of narcissi or poppies, lulled drowsy with innocence and pretty comforts until we are dragged off and pulled down by Hades, our intact natural consciousness violated and opened to the perspective of death. Once this has happened – through a suicidal despair, through a sudden fall from a smooth-rising career, through an invisible depression in whose grip we struggle vainly – then Persephone reigns in the soul and we see life through her darker eye.” (p. 208)

This universalizing is impressive, but emotionally there remains a gap: a man is simply not going to see himself as Persephone, while for me the identification was both unwelcome and unavoidable. Eventually I managed to perceive and welcome Persephone the Queen, the form of the goddess to which I was blind in my youth. And thus the myth became not frightening (the way the Dead City was frightening in “Eurydice in Milwaukee”), but healing. If a man hopes to be empowered by a mythological story, I think the story practically requires a male protagonist. 

The myth that can empower at least some men is that of Hephaestus, whom I see as the “wounded artist.” Hephaestus experienced parental rejection (to put it mildly); afterwards, he suffered because of Aphrodite’s betrayal. Nevertheless, we don’t think of Hephaestus as a victim. That’s because he became a wonderful craftsman and visual artist. No, we never think of him as a victim; we think of his excellence and his marvelous creations. His salvation and his joy lay in giving himself to creative work.

A more problematic myth is that of Dionysus, the god of ecstasy. Dionysus is often called “twice born.” He is dismembered, then resurrected. He stirs women to both ecstasy and madness. As a male savior, he rescues his mother from Hades and marries the abandoned Ariadne; on the other hand, as the leader of frenzied Maenads (think of today’s celebrity groupies), he is hardly a role model. There is a bipolar pattern here, not the security of the daily smithy of Hephaestus. But as the god of ecstasy, Dionysus cannot be ignored. He may serve as a reminder to “let yourself go.” Jean Cocteau said, “Genius, in art, consists in knowing how far we may go too far.”

Remembering Dionysus may also be helpful in recovery from trauma. What does Dionysus learn from being torn apart, then resurrected? He learns that he can survive. And this may be inspiration enough. Dionysus, the god of the life force, cannot be destroyed. This is a message that turns against despair. Something in you is inviolable; it will survive and heal you.

Dionysus reminds me of another myth that helped me: the story of Ariadne abandoned on the island of Naxos. Dionysus comes to her in her despair, and she becomes the god’s bride. For me the equation was simple: marry your art. I’ll develop this in the next post.

Michael:

So it is a shared experience for those who have been in Persephone's kitchen, male or female, to learn to walk with Persephone's face – the cover, the mask, and only by looking closely can an observer see the knowing that lives in the eyes or in the subtle folds of the face (the sad knowing). If divined, it would reveal the truth about that place in which we grew, as Rilke knew, and lamented: "If I had grown in some generous place, if my hours had opened in ease, I'd make a lavish banquet for you, my hands wouldn't clutch at you like this, so needy and tight."

Recently I spent two weeks with my mother.  It was the first time I saw clearly the world in which I'd grown. I was compelled to verbalize that place, which meant wrapping my mother and father in words, and the words were reluctantly called up, they were harsh and unpleasant, and haltingly whispered. And still, I can only say them to myself. At first I thought I'd lost the idealized dream of what I thought I'd been, what my family was, and how I'd grown. I welcomed yet another painful departure, yet another good-bye wave I've learned so well at mid-age. And this got me thinking about loss, which I'm now thinking is more about finding than losing. And isn't this the essence of your thought here?


I’ve lost a world, but gained

the dark flowers of myself –

not the brief blossoms we give

to brides and to the dead.

Naming the stark place of intellectual, emotional, and spiritual poverty in which I grew has strangely buoyed me along. No wonder, I say, I've struggled so. I've had a long journey just to catch up, much less to excel. And I remain at the threshold of that world, foot in, foot out, circling, not quite able to look away finally, or forever.

So yes,

My youth is gone,

I’m ripe for life. Autumn fog,

Persephone’s wind-riven veil,

will sweep us away, but it’s August,

sun spills into the lucent grass,

and you say yes, tonight,

let’s consume

our bodies while they last,

the ground split with fallen figs,

golden apples, plums.

Beyond enjoying the profound beauty of these verses (and they are profoundly beautiful), I read them as wistful, and as a surrendering to the only meaning that's left.

"I’m not sure if it’s even possible for me to be happy in a carefree way because I was so deeply devastated in my young adulthood, my spirit broken, my faith in myself shattered. But carefree happiness is not the only kind."

I can only sigh. This is out of my soul.

Related: I’ve been thinking about time and the psyche. No questions, per se, just thinking. I’m awed that I can be child again, or infant, or young man, that I can smell in those places, feel and touch, and memories are alive in my body, pulsing with a joy, a pain, and in an instant, I return to the present. And I've puzzled over time on the trail – the usual markers for distance and time are not functional, like being outside of time – I see the hiker pause when asked which day it is, the word day being unfamiliar, and then the blank expression while searching for a hold, a marker, to remind which day it is, whatever that means, and the concept of day, of time, remains foreign and very unwelcome.

Stirred by your blog. Thank you.    

Oriana:

Thank you, Michael, for this rich poetic response.

Time is indeed partly foreign to us, since in the inner life we can call up an image from childhood, or imagine ourselves in ancient old age. Also, we think according to our personal landmarks, and not in terms of, say, July 2, 1996, 2:15 pm. So the external time doesn’t feel quiet real. (An Alaska joke: What were you doing on the night from October to April?)

The pomegranate, sacred to both Persephone and Aphrodite, was a symbol of the womb, and thus of fertility. This fits Aphrodite, but it is particularly striking when we consider Persephone. Of course we must not forget that each spring Persephone becomes the goddess of life. Still, it is because she ate those “fertility seeds” that Persephone must return to the Underworld. Is there a hint here that fertility requires some degree of withdrawal from the busy upper world, some quiet time? This would hold true for artistic creativity. But pregnant women also often seem withdrawn, as Rilke beautifully observed in his masterpiece, “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes.”

A friend of mine calls her meditation “doing my gratitudes.” This is coming easier and easier to me as well. What you say about the way you grew up made me feel grateful for my very rich childhood. I don’t mean material wealth, especially not in the American sense – what a laugh that would be, our cramped make-shift apartment in Warsaw (I will never forget how a visiting American scientist exclaimed: “You are so poor! Yet everywhere I go, there is art on the walls, there are flowers on the table.” I was astonished at his astonishment.)

Yes, there were flowers on the table. There was money for vacations and ballet lessons, private English lessons and German lessons, and certainly for what books were to be found in the rather bizarre bookstores behind the Iron Curtain (I wonder how many people still remember that phrase). As a daughter of two Ph.D.’s, I grew up with what might be called “intellectual privilege.” This had both benefits and drawbacks, since as soon as I left Warsaw, my life went downhill in some important ways, and I could never regain the intellectual richness of my original milieu. That was my first “Persephone experience.” Some losses are just losses, impossible to translate into a gain – though on the whole I agree with the idea that a loss can be a hidden gain. 


Or maybe the human brain is so creative that it will find a gain in almost anything, given the innate drive to do so. Once I said, "I came to America in order to be traumatized enough to become a poet." Only when I noticed the expression of shock on the faces of my friends did I realize how extreme that sounds. Of course there is no real answer here in terms of purpose; it's just an instance of how the mind will latch onto anything rather than admit the suffering was useless.

Or else the loss and gain are in different realms. Not long ago I was “doing my gratitudes” and pondered that just being able to watch the sunset on the Pacific is paradise. On the other hand, I also felt mournful thinking of two of my friends reading at The Tender Barbarian (named after the title of a Czech novel), a café/bookstore near the University of Warsaw. I also thought of a local poetry workshop I once attended, in a place with a glorious view of the Pacific. I presented a poem with Orpheus in the title. The two male participants were both indignant. One (a former lawyer) said with passion, “I don’t know who Orpheus is, and I DON’T WANT TO KNOW.” So I too can only sigh . . .  and then resume “doing my gratitudes.”

Nevertheless, carefree happiness may be possible yet – moments of it, but that is enough. One of the surprises in recent years has been the much-replicated finding that people grow happier as they grow older. True, it took me a very long time to disassociate myself from Persephone as the traumatized young girl, but the privilege of growing older (and we must remember that not everyone has had that privilege) finally exerted its transformative power. Yes, I am aware that everything could be taken away in an instant, but I don’t focus on that thought. I’ve learned to do more and think less. I’ve learned to “gaze at the world” rather than constantly introspect. The practice of contentment is becoming easier. That feeling of not belonging becomes irrelevant; we belong to the universe; we belong to ourselves. How rich we are after all! Persephone, let us not forget, married the richest of the gods. AND she wasn’t confined to one world or the other.

Besides, as I write in one of my poems, “Asphodel,”

The ancients understood

the soul feeds on flowers. Even

in hell, a life filled with flowers.

**

John Guzlowski:

The blue window of Lake Michigan is a perfect image. I grew up in Chicago, in the ruins of so many dreams, the broken factories around various corners, the workingman's taverns, the long blocks of small shops that sold nothing, but there was always Lake Michigan and the streets and parks along its length.  In Chicago, the lake and the city came together for 38 miles and when I was a kid I spent so much time on that edge. The blue lake and the green parks in front of me and the city at my back. I didn't want to turn around.  When I finally left home, moved out of my parents' house, I rented a room in an apartment near the lake, and I tried to go there every day for a walk or a bike ride or just to sit.  

I hadn't thought about how much the lake meant to me, but of course it did.  It was the perfect place to dream. I remember riding my bike down there – the paths and sidewalks along the lake where great and you could go for hours and hours and never cross a street – amazing. 

I've written so many poems about the lake: its dreaming center.

But it's also the place where I went crazy.  When I did acid or smoked too much dope or got really drunk, I'd go to the lake -- like I was trying to get it all out of me in those cold waters, but most of the time I just ended up getting crazier or running into other people who were as lost as I was.  

And one winter after graduating from college I worked on the lake as a long shoreman.  There's a pier that sticks out into the lake about 1/2 mile, and boats used to line up along it and take on and drop off cargo. It was the only pier in the middle of the city and sitting at the end of the pier during lunch time and looking back into the city with all the sky above was always something.

Oriana:

Thank you, John for this dreamy post and poem. I especially love “I grew up in Chicago, in the ruins of so many dreams, the broken factories around various corners, the workingman's taverns, the long blocks of small shops that sold nothing, but there was always Lake Michigan.”

Even my first glimpse of the lake was amazing – another reality opening at the end of that long abandoned street: something  huge and primeval against the heartless capitalism that I felt back then in my first encounter with urban decay. Something beautiful in an eternal way.

That feeling of being lost may be part of being human, but it’s especially acute, I think, when we are leaving adolescence and experiencing the first shattering of dreams. Sometimes the city-scape mirrors that. The experience I describe was uncanny and unforgettable. It would have been an experience of despair – except for the jewel-like lake that suddenly came into view. It was a moment of grace. I was too exhausted to continue all the way to the strand, but I knew the lake was there. 

Scott:

Enjoyed your posting very much. It hit home in many ways. I like how you stated you made the decision to not be depressed. Too many times I will find myself focusing on negative things or things that COULD happen and letting it rob me of the here and now. Your blog should be required reading for many people. The insights and openness of yourself and the people who comment are refreshing in a world of blogs where so many are meaningless drivel. Your writing on loss of Poland and the idealized America you had would make a great book, very poignant. Thanks as always for your engaging blog. I recommend it to everyone.

Oriana:

Thank you, Scott, for praising the openness – not just mine, and that of the people who comment in this blog. For me the whole point of prose is not to produce forgettable upbeat chatter, but to share from the depths. If the story we tell is true – insofar as we are able to tell the truth – then complexity and subtlety, and even mystery and beauty will follow.

What startles me now is that for many years I realized I could indeed make the decision not to be depressed, but I had no motivation to do so. I don’t mean I could have made this decision in my youth, when most of the bad stuff was happening. That was an overwhelming situation, and I had neither wisdom nor other resources. I am grateful just to have survived. That I did not manage to stay sunny and keep smiling, that many times I sank into despair – I don’t blame myself for that. I don’t blame myself for not having been a Buddhist sage who could laugh at how every dream turned into a travesty.

But later I did have the skills and resources, and I still wasn’t motivated not to be depressed, preferring to brood over the misfortunes of the past (even that is understandable from the point of view of what neuroscientists call the “negativity bias”). It took the pressure of aging. What finally motivated me was the desire not to waste the rest of my life – once I truly understood that simple phrase, “the rest of my life.”

Lilith:

I remember when the Jean Shinoda Bolen book was so popular (was that the late 80's or early 90's?) and everybody was talking about what goddess they most identified with.  In fact, that book was one of the many that I ditched in my move this year, threw it in the dumpster.  Coming from the "pop psychology" point of view, her books were accessible to the new agers, and sold very well, as I recall. 

Grounded in the mythopoetical, as you are, as well as being an artist who has gone through the depths (and a genuine intellectual to boot), your writing about myths within us is powerful and true beyond anything a pop psychologizer could come up with.  I can see an entire book of yours, both prose and poems, about overcoming depression through living Greek mythology.  And it would be a far better book than Bolen's. But are we beyond the era of the book?  If so, the world has your wonderful blog to read.

Oriana:

Thank you, Lilith. I blush. And I think you are too hard on Shinoda, who was a pioneer after all, back in the mid-eighties. “Which goddess are you?” was an unfortunate sales gimmick, and Shinoda quickly points out that few women fit just one pattern – although now and then I do meet an overflowing Demeter, a tight-lipped, efficient Athena, or an athletic Artemis running with her dogs.  

The bigger question is whether the knowledge of mythology is helpful to us. There are those who claim that it’s time to drop those archaic stories. Who cares? they ask. Some of us do care because something in the story speaks to us deeply. And stories have a power to heal. In fact, certain myth could be perceived as stories about healing: Persephone’s transformation, Psyche’s tasks and journey through the underworld, the abandoned Ariadne’s marriage to Dionysus. In all of these, the young woman is traumatized, and then manages to unite with the divine.

It may be a different element of the story that speaks to us at different stages of life. At first, I identified with Persephone strictly from the point of view of trauma, of finding myself in the Dead City. Eventually I was able to connect with Persephone the Queen, a powerful image of transformation from trauma to royalty. 

But another woman might respond most to the notion that Demeter, with enormous love, went searching for her daughter. And yet another person might see a girl coming out of the earth, and it’s springtime.

After writing most of this post, I had a dream about a flood. The waters kept rising. And what was I trying to save? Books. Not any special books, just the first stack that was at hand. Because books stand for culture. The flood of illiteracy is rising, but there are always those who try to be the bearers of light. In the words of Hoelderlin, “Where danger grows, that which saves us grows also.” 

Scott:

I was re-reading your latest entry and fully agree with Lilith: your story of leaving Poland, coming to America and your life here would make a great book.

I think too that not only is myth not dead, we need  it more than ever and it continues in film and books in many different  forms. In your home of San Diego this week the Comic Con event is  going on, so much of the goings on there are taken straight from myth  or a close cousin. My teenage daughter is a big fan of the Greek and  Egyptian myths, I have been thinking of re-reading Kazantzakis'  fantastic epic on Odysseus this summer. A monster of an epic poem, it would keep me occupied until October when two Moby Dick related books  are due out!

Just last week I visited an old friend and was introduced to his girlfriend. After talking some I discover she is a big reader and is of Polish/Jewish heritage, her father came here in the 20's. My  friend is a devout atheist and big reader too. His favorite writer is Tolkien( which I find oddly ironic in that he was a lifelong devout  Catholic); I told them both to check your blog out. Please consider a book, it would make great reading.

Oriana:

First, a minor comment: a lot of atheists, especially if they could be described as “devout atheists,” have a basically religious temperament. They are bright, educated, and hungry for meaning. Organized religion has failed to nourish that hunger, but intelligent religious writers, those who don’t mechanically mouth the dogma, can be satisfying. At least they are concerned with the large issues and are themselves spiritual seekers and questioners who dare to think on their own. My favorite C.S. Lewis piece is the one with a rather Swedenborgian flavor: a bus to heaven makes its stop at the gates of hell. Any soul in hell that would prefer heaven is free to get on the bus. The bus leaves empty.


I think that like poetry, mythology (in all forms) has its relatively small but dedicated audience, and will not vanish from the culture. Those stories are an eternal comment on the human condition, and can be surprising (Odysseus rejecting immortality, returning to his palace in beggar’s rags), and inspiring (Psyche in her journey through the Underworld learning to “stay on task” and refusing to “feed the hungry ghosts”). Like a good preacher who makes the Gospel stories come to life by using modern-day examples, we keep re-interpreting the myths so they continue to have meaning for us.

The book that you and many others have been suggesting I write would go against the “happy immigrant” stereotype. It wouldn’t be exactly like I.B. Singer’s Lost in America, but that title immediately rings true for me, brings me back to that shattering first year. Native-born Americans would not care to hear about it. They want to hear about immigrant success, happiness, and gratitude for finding yourself in paradise. They don’t want to know about what I call the “immigrant trauma.”

After all, isn’t a person supposed to be happy just to be here? The last thing the readers would want is my starting with the sentence, “The greatest mistake I made in my life was leaving Poland.” I have given a lot of thought to this matter, and this continues to be my conclusion. I hasten to clarify that this was my greatest mistake from the point of view of personal happiness, but not necessarily from the perspective of becoming a writer, if that is given a superior value over the “pursuit of happiness.”

Interwoven with the immigrant trauma is, to use Milosz’s phrase, “the history of my stupidity.” And I have to concur with the ending of his poem (“Account”):

The history of my stupidity will not be written.

For one thing, it’s late. And the truth is laborious.

So I don’t foresee a book, but a continuation of what I have been bringing forth: poems and prose entries that reveal this or that aspect of a very complex story that's by no means finished. Vignettes. See, for instance, in this blog, The City of Tomorrow or the poem My America. 

Hyacinth:

I have always realized a room of one's own is only part of it. We also need an income of some sort.

The room must be quiet and have a door for privacy.  A writer needs a time without interruptions.

One line stood out for me: "the flood of illiteracy" – and a flood it has become. Most households have so many electronic devices, the way we used to have books everywhere. Children are "entertained" all the time and are not using their own creative minds, and they are not outdoors playing. This contributes to obesity. Play is a child's work of growing up and learning.

I loved "the blue window of Lake Michigan.” I’ve never been there but all waters for me are blue windows to nourishing the creativity of a poet.

Oriana:

Yes, ultimately there is no evading it, and Woolf was explicit: a woman writer needs sufficient income so that she doesn’t need to work for money. She needs to have enough money to buy her the time for writing, a time without interruptions. The destructive aspect of email is that it’s a constant interruption.

It seems that everyone loves that “blue window” of Lake Michigan. It was a glimpse of beauty at the end of the frightening street lined with abandoned buildings. I didn’t need to walk that far; it was enough to see that blue window to regain my connection with something real and lasting, something I could love.