BREAKING UP: THE GHOST OF THE FIRST DAYS

O'Keefe: Narcissa's last orchid

THE LAST HOUR

Suddenly, the last hour
before he took me to the airport, he stood up,
bumping the table, and took a step
toward me, and like a figure in an early
science fiction movie he leaned
forward and down, and opened an arm,
knocking my breast, and he tried to take some
hold of me, I stood and we stumbled,
and then we stood, around our core, his
hoarse cry of awe, at the center,
at the end, of our life. Quickly, then,
the worst was over, I could comfort him,
holding his heart in place from the back
and smoothing it from the front, his own
life continuing, and what had
bound him, around his heart—and bound him
to me—now lying on and around us,
sea-water, rust, light, shards,
the little eternal curls of eros
beaten out straight.

~ Sharon Olds, Stag’s Leap

This poem from the latest collection by Sharon Olds has been haunting me. I keep seeing the husband bumping the table as he stands up. Such a small, trivial thing, it happens thousands of times and means nothing, is quickly forgotten -- and yet, in the context of the last hour together, suddenly unforgettable. The whole description of the stumbling is excellent, though I’d gladly skip the simile --“like a figure in an early / science fiction movie he leaned” -- in order to keep the narrative fast-paced. But it could be argued that the simile creates distance and lessens the pain through a bit of humor that, like the attempt at an embrace, doesn’t quite work.

The way these two people who have been married for thirty years now suddenly can’t hug with habitual ease, without awkwardness and bumping and stumbling, says everything. And yet the speaker manages to assume the woman’s archetypal role of the comforter, the ever-supportive angel “holding his heart in place”:

                                Quickly, then,
the worst was over, I could comfort him,
holding his heart in place from the back
and smoothing it from the front

The wife’s steadying him conveys her understanding and forgiveness. I almost want to exclaim: Are you sure you want to break up? You are still so loving toward each other; you are a good team . . .

For me the poem could end right here: “holding his heart in place from the back / and smoothing it from the front” is brilliant writing, a fusion of metaphor and physical detail; it would make a perfect closure. Until the point the poem is achingly physical.  And we are made aware that these two were closely bound by the sexual bond: all the love-making that had gone on for thirty years, what the speaker considers to have been the core of their togetherness:

and then we stood around our core, his
hoarse cry of awe, at the center,
at the end, of our life.

It’s his come-cry that enters here like a ghost, that must be parted with now. And the erotic bond dissolves:

the little eternal curls of eros
beaten out straight.

“Beaten out” is a great choice of words. The couple is no longer in the realm of the winged god.

Still, for all the good moments in this poem, I can’t seem to forget the husband’s bumping the table as he gets up. For some reason that has registered more strongly for me than his bumping her breast in what I assume is a sideways embrace, or in any case an awkward half-embrace. The ghost of his come-cry and the departure of Eros are interwoven here, but the hardness of the table and the slight jabbing pain have a physical reality that engraves itself on memory.

This is meant to be an amicable parting, so there is no mention of the fact that he is leaving for another woman. Besides, and here I speak on the basis of interviews, Olds understands that they had grown unsuited to each other, and this was indeed for the best -- the letting go as the last act of caring, of true love that leaves behind erotic possessiveness. Yet parting is never easy -- not for the one being left, who can’t help feeling hurt, nor for the one doing the leaving, who feels bad about causing the hurt.

*

“The Last Hour” is a near-perfect example of “taking a narrow slice,” focusing on one specific incident. What defines the moment of  parting is the husband’s bumping the table as he rises. I hardly need the rest to tell me about his nervousness and awkwardness -- precisely when he means to be gracious and magnanimously affectionate. This one detail establishes the truthfulness of the poem.

*

Something as mundane as bumping the table selected by the speaker to convey emotional tension reminded me of Akhmatova’s famous lines about the glove from “The Song of the Last Meeting”:

My breast was so cold, so helpless,
But light was my step.
I put the left glove
On my right hand.

Hardly anything is so eloquent as the right detail.

“The Last Hour” also brought back to me Akhmatova’s “Parting.” That poem too has a very memorable opening -- memorable in a different way, not through detail but through a broad, panoramic statement that distills insight about the entire relationship. The poem offers both a “narrow slice” -- the whole extraordinary second section -- and a broader perspective about the years it took these two history-crossed lovers to part (Nikolay Punin, an eminent art critic and curator of the Hermitage museum, died in a gulag).

It is also a poem of irony. “The Last Hour” contains some irony, if that’s the way we choose to look at the awkwardness. But “Parting” delivers painful irony over and over.

The last section is usually presented as a separate poem, and yet I feel it belongs to the sequence, as suggested by one of Akhmatova’s translators, A. S. Kline. In “The Last Toast” history asserts itself, the whole age, “cruel and coarse.” The thirties were a dreadful time in the Soviet Union. When we read Akhmatova, we cannot forget history. The speaker’s personal suffering is a small part of the great grief all around her. As Akhmatova wrote:

That was the time when only the dead
could smile, happy to be at rest.

*

PARTING

I

Not weeks, not months – years
We spent parting. Now at last
The chill of real freedom,
And the gray garland above the temples.

No more treasons, no more betrayals,
And you won’t be listening till dawn
As the stream of evidence
Of my perfect innocence flows on.

II

And as always happens in the last days,
The ghost of the first days knocked at our door,
And in burst the silver willow
In branching magnificence.

To us, frenzied, disdainful and bitter,
Not daring to raise our eyes from the ground,
A bird began to sing in a rapturous voice
About how we cherished each other.


III The Last Toast

I drink to our ruined house,
To all life’s evils too,
To the loneliness we shared,
And I, I drink to you –

To the eyes, dead and cold,
To the lips, lying and treacherous,
To the age, cruel and coarse,
To the fact that God has not saved us.

 ~ Anna Akhmatova, tr. Judith Hemschemyer and A.S. Kline (modified)

The opening instantly refers to a theme so vast it seems infinite: time. Akhmatova takes in a panorama of time. Though she is “in the moment” in Section II, the emotional power of that section comes from the hold of the past on the present: the return, during the last days, of the “ghost of first days.” But the genius of Section I lies in precisely in distilling the workings of time: “Not weeks, not months -- years / We spent parting.” Anyone who’s been through a reasonably long marriage and a divorce understands this.

But let’s turn to irony. The first instance of irony we encounter lies in the fact that the couple spent years in parting. This goes counter to any romantic notion of marriage. Yet it’s only some couples who keep growing closer over the years, forming a deeper attachment that we honor more than the waning excitement of romantic love. It’s lasting love, the commitment of married love: patiently letting the marriage go through its various stages until a beautiful cooperation prevails. As someone put it, the husband and wife need to realize that they are both on the same side. Sometimes it can’t be done; the two people are too ill-matched, or perhaps the circumstances have changed and are against the marriage. Many couples “keep parting.”

And then comes the overtly ironic statement about what freedom means: now the partner will not have to “listen till dawn / As the stream of evidence / Of my perfect innocence flows on.” The hyperbole of “perfect innocence” makes it plain that the speaker knows that both parties are “guilty” but self-justifying.

In the superb second section, Akhmatova beautifully observes what many others confirmed: that as break-up becomes inevitable, something from the first days of love comes back to remind the couple how intensely they fell for each other. It’s the irony of circumstances: it takes the ending to remember the beginning. The intensity is back, if only temporarily. Some divorcing couples, suddenly again attractive to each other, even being dating again.

Another irony here is very simple: it’s springtime, the season of love. Hence the silver catkins of the willow and the birdsong. There’s freshness and joy in the air -- but these two lovers are parting. (By the way, it’s worth noting that here Akhmatova lets nature come into the poem -- the wider world -- something that we don’t see in Olds’s poem.)

And then the last toast -- surely the most bitter toast in all of poetry. The bitterness is so deep that “sarcasm” would be a better word than mere irony. Normally we raise toast to all the good things in life: health, happiness, prosperity, success. Akhmatova uses the custom of toasting to turn in its head: she raises a toast to dreadful things. Some of it is straightforward irony: instead of drinking to companionship, she drinks to “the loneliness we shared.” But history forces itself in. The lying lips are not just the lover’s lips; they are the lips of spies and others who seek gain in denouncing their neighbors. The lover’s cruelty is overwhelmed by the massive cruelty of the era. And the last illusion is shattered: the speaker knows that “God has not saved us.” This is desolate knowledge: God, to whom millions have been praying for salvation, has not stirred to save anyone -- not the whole country.

As for history, Akhmatova experienced an excess of it. To get the flavor of just how horrible the times were, let’s consider this passage from her biography by Elaine Feinstein:

With Lev [Akhmatova’s son] in the Kresty prison, Akhmatova stood outside in the long queues in the hope of learning something about him, or to beg the guard to take in a food parcel for him. Lydia Chukovskaya [Akhmatova’s close friend] often waited with her in the same queue, hoping to have news of her husband. Unknown to Chukovskaya, Bronstein’s sentence of “ten years’ exile without benefit of correspondence” was in reality a euphemism for execution and he had already been shot.” (p. 169)

The reason that Chukovskaya’s husband was arrested and executed was that his last name happened to be the same as Trotsky’s real last name: Bronstein. It didn’t matter that the husband, like many other Bronsteins in Russia, wasn’t related to the exiled leader of the October Revolution and the organizer of the Red Army, at one time second only after Lenin.

(A shameless digression: A Moscow rabbi said like a prophet, “Lev Trotsky signs the check, but Leyba Davidovich Bronstein will pay the price.”)


Propaganda poster of Trotsky, 1918
 
Why was Akhmatova seen as a threat to the Soviet state? No one denounced her for having written a poem in which Stalin’s mustache is compared to cockroach’s whiskers (that was Mandelstam’s doom). She was known as a poet of love; romantic love and the loss of it are her number one subject. As for later poems such as the Requiem sequence, they were memorized by Akhmatova and Chukovskaya, and the text was burned; the state had no evidence against her. And yet she was a threat precisely as a poet who wrote mainly about love. Or, to put it more broadly, about human connections.

In 1946 Akhmatova was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers, her poetry denounced as “utterly individualistic.” A totalitarian regime or religion cannot tolerate individualism. Inner life is not even supposed to exist. Instead of giving oneself totally to the service of the state or the church, a true poet dares to write about such private matters as falling in love. It’s not propaganda. Romance is subversive. The family is subversive. Both insist that values other than those officially sanctioned come first. Akhmatova was accused of poisoning the minds of Soviet youth.

Nor is a poet ever going to agree that making a profit is the highest value, so poetry does not go well with unregulated capitalism either. The beloved -- can this word even be pronounced when blind obedience to the state, the church, or any system or institution is demanded?
 

Nikolay Gumilyov, Lev Gumilyov, Akhmatova, 1913

Lost Tram


It rushed like a dark, winged storm,

And was lost in the abyss of time . . . 

Tram-driver, stop,

Stop the tram now.  

~ Nikolay Gumilyov (executed in 1921)

(Shameless digression: in a dream I was riding a streetcar in Warsaw. I got off in front of the Polytechnic, where the tracks make a wide turn. A row of chestnut trees. But the street and the tracks suddenly break off into white blankness.)

*

I have long been interested in the question of what makes poem great as opposed to “minor.” I think it’s the largeness of vision that puts Akhmatova in a different rank and gives her work its emotional power. I think my own distinction works well of Olds vs Akhmatova: “poetry as higher journalism” (Olds) versus “poetry as underworld” (spare details presented with the knowledge of Time the Destroyer; death enters in some manner, or, if not death, then silence, sleep, absence).

One could also invoke the difference between information and knowledge.  Olds seems intent on exploring and saying everything she can. Akhmatova is careful to leave a lot unsaid, to create an atmosphere of mystery and hidden knowledge.

Finally, Akhmatova supremely musical; she uses the power of rhythm, which good translators try to imitate in English. Thus, even in translation, it becomes obvious why Akhmatova is praised for what’s been called the “epigrammatic beauty of her lines.” I immediately think of

Too sweet is the earthly drink,
Too tight the nets of love

~ but many other lines also easily nestle in memory -- which is not true of Olds’s lines. Even after many years, I remember the content of some of her poems, but not specific lines, with one exception: in “Rites of Passage,” about her little boy’s birthday party, she quotes her son as saying, “We could easily kill a two-year-old.”

When it comes to Akhmatova, I remember a number of her striking lines (all in translation, except for one poem where I simply had to make my slow way through the Russian version). Let me share some of them -- remembering that there is no separating the music and the beauty from the underlying insight.

Like most great poets, Akhmatova also has a simplicity that contains a largeness, a complexity. She juxtaposes nature imagery with emotional and even metaphysical drama like no one else -- unless perhaps Emily Dickinson. If Dickinson went more the way of “wild nights,” perhaps she might sound something like this.

How many demands the beloved can make!
The woman discarded, none.
I am glad that the water today
Stands still under colorless ice.

And I stand -- Christ help me! --
On this shroud that is brittle and bright

*

Neither a rose nor a blade of grass
Will I be in my Father’s garden

*

My night nurse insomnia is visiting elsewhere,
I’m not brooding by a cold hearth.
The crooked hand of the tower clock
Doesn’t look like the arrow of death.

How the past loses power over the heart!
Freedom’s at hand. I forgive everything.
I’m watching a sunbeam run up and down
The first moist ivy of spring.

*

My twin in the mirror will stay up.
I’ll sleep soundly. Good night, night.

*

And this is youth, that glorious time

*

Like happy love,
Calculating and malicious.

*

Don’t kiss me, I am weary.
Death will kiss me.

*

And I knew I’d pay a hundred times
In madhouse, prison, tomb:
Wherever such as I would wake.
But torture by happiness continued.

*

Not for anything would we exchange
This granite city of calamity and fame

*

Do I not talk to you
With the screech of birds of prey?

*

The sky sows a fine rain
On the lilacs in bloom.
At the window beating its wings
Is the white Day of the Holy Ghost.

*

The evening light is yellow and wide,
April is tender and cool.
You have come many years too late . . .
Forgive me for so often
Mistaking other people for you.

*

And the burdocks stand shoulder high,
And the forest of dense nettles sings

*

Why are my fingers covered in blood?
This wine burns like poison.

*

We were fated to learn . . .
What it means to find out in the morning
About those who have died in the night.

##

It remains a luminous fact that in spite of her great suffering Akhmatova did not commit suicide. Yesenin did, then Mayakovski, then Tzvetayeva. Life had become more painful than they could bear. What gave Akhmatova the strength to endure? I think it was her dedication to poetry as the sacred task of her life and the miracle of creativity. Secondly, she identified with Russia, with the greater story of the suffering of her country. In one unforgettable poem, “Belated Reply,” she speaks to Marina Tzvetayeva:

We are together today, Marina,
Walking through the midnight capital,
And behind us there are millions like us.
And never was a procession more hushed,
And around us funeral bells
And the wild Moscow moans
Of a snowstorm erasing our traces.

**

Addendum: Nikolai Kondratiev, the brilliant economist who described the long-term cycles in capitalism, was also executed under the guise of “10 years without the benefit of correspondence.”


John:

Love the ghost of the last days and the ghost of the first days.
Oriana:

I love that too, that ghost of the first days knocking at the door. Wow!

Una:
A fine piece of prose with a depth of meaning many women will relate to.

Now that is the classic Olds that I like very much. Details are one of her specialties, and she has really captured the parting after a long marriage (30 years). I remember saying as I left, “You will always be the father of my children” -- I felt the need to soften the blow.

Akhmatova is amazing. How I’d love to read Russian so I could hear her voice and not the translation. I love the willow’s “branching magnificence"

It is a wonder to know great poetry from the very good. Akhmatova for sure is a great and Sharon is very good.

Oriana:

Now I realize what bothered me about the poem by Olds: too much telling after this:

Quickly, then,
the worst was over, I could comfort him,
holding his heart in place from the back
and smoothing it from the front

For me the poem could end right here: “holding his heart in place from the back / and smoothing it from the front” is wonderful writing, a fusion of metaphor and physical detail; it would make a perfect closure. Until the point the poem is achingly physical.

Olds is precisely the poet who makes some people object that what she writes is “prose with line breaks.” Early Olds seemed more poetic, though even way-back I noticed that after reading those little narratives I didn't feel like re-reading them. The older Olds has more to say, but has gotten too wordy, too prosy. She just doesn't compress enough to make it poetry. It's more like journal writing, though a high-caliber journal writing. And the images sometimes keep me from wanting to re-read, e.g. the image of her ex and his new wife flying together like storks with medical bags in their beaks. Very striking at first, but you don't really want to encounter it again. It's not delightful enough, at least not for me. Too crude or whatever it is.

**

Akhmatova aimed at perfection. I will never forget how a young woman who  knew Russian closed her eyes in ecstasy and chanted (rather than merely said), “Akhmatova’s poems in Russian are soooo beautiful . . .  soooo beautiful.”

Akhmatova kept her poems short, but they are as if graven in marble. Her conciseness reminds me of Dickinson. Imagine Dickinson as a poet of love, venturing further into wild nights . . . a heady thought.

Kathleen: (reconstructed from memory -- Macbeth, my computer, seems to have concealed Kathleen’s message)

I really like the comments you made about parting, especially the feelings of the one who is being left and of the one who is doing the leaving. Quite perceptive. 
 
Oriana:

If we live long enough, we become well-traveled in heaven and hell -- various circles of hell, so when it’s our turn to do the leaving, we know what it feels like to be left . . .

I think Akhmatova is marvelously perceptive when she says:

Not weeks, not months -- years
We spent parting.

In long-term relationships, the growing apart does take years. But then, beware: in the last days, the ghost of the first days will knock at the door, and the old intensity and mutual attraction may return for a while, the way someone dying often has that last rally of strength: s/he sits up in bed and starts talking with animation, perhaps even planning life after recovery -- the face suddenly much younger . . . 

Charles:

When I first looked at the orchid I thought it was a photo.

Love the ad at the top of the page. You are truly a poetreneur.

If you didn't explain Stag's Leap I wouldn't have understood it in such depth. Thank you.

Actually you explained both poems beautifully.

So interesting that Akhmatova was persecuted because she wrote about the individual -- about personal matters such as love.

"The Beloved" can become the state. I see this happening in America now.

Oriana:

That painting by O’Keefe is perhaps the least known among her flower paintings. I love the title even more than the actual painting, though those lacy fringes of petals are irresistible -- like emerging fractals.

It’s not so much the state that become the Beloved as the dictator. We saw this with Hitler, Stalin, Mao, the North Korean dictators. When humans worship someone, it can be romantic infatuation or it can almost as easily be a deity or a dictator. 

EARTHLY PARADISE

FELINE PLEASURE

It happened on Valentine’s Day, or rather night. I “laid me down to sleep” and experienced a wave of total bodily delight just stretching out and feeling the coziness of being cocooned in my comforter. (Comforter! I love the word. Not the Holy Ghost, but something light and fluffy that keeps you warm.)

It was perhaps as close as I can ever come to mystical ecstasy. The revelation, alas, was modest: my favorite place in the world is my own bed. Not original, I know. Not even new to me, though for the first time confirmed by the feline pleasure of the body. But every bit of clarity counts. Old grudges against life have been falling into oblivion, the way one kind, supportive lover can heal the wounds caused by a number of previous narcissists.

GOD IS AFFECTION

A more original insight was that “God is affection” is something I could buy, were I to redefine God as well. I never cared for “God is love” – not only because it’s a cliché, but because love carries so much darkness. Even parental love is not free from narcissism and possessiveness, or from the desire to punish when expectations are not met and the child’s values and interests turn out to be “wrong.” Even when a parent tries to be tolerant, the disappointment in a mother’s or father’s face still shows and weighs on the child (regardless of the child’s age). Affection, on the contrary, seems entirely positive. Only affection can forgive and forget (love may forgive, but does it ever forget?) Only affection is not “ego-invested.” Tell me that God is affection. I could run into the arms of affection.

*

I’m going over Tranströmer again, in Bly’s marvelous volume, The Half-Finished Heaven. Just the title should alert us that a lively poetic sensibility has presided over this selection. Here is a passage from “Below Freezing”:

One can’t say it out loud, but there is a lot of repressed violence here. That’s why the furniture seems so heavy. And why it is so difficult to see the other thing present: a spot of sunlight that moves over the house walls and slips over the unaware forest of flickering faces, a biblical saying never set down: “Come unto me, for I am as full of contradictions as you.”

If only we had such an honest biblical saying. If only we stopped yearning for blind submission to a “great cause” and noticed the wonderful small beauties of a spot of sunlight slipping over the flickering faces. Now that is an image of affection.

THE JOY OF THE FOCUSED LIFE

One of the things I’ve learned by living and making mistakes (like posting on Facebook) is that I don’t want to spread myself too thin. I enjoy doing just a few things, but doing them well. I’ve just re-read the marvelous New York Times article on the benefits of concentration: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/05/science/05tier.html  Let me just toss some quotations your way:

William James: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” You can lead a miserable life by obsessing on problems. Or you can recognize your brain’s finite capacity for processing information, accentuate the positive and achieve the satisfaction of . . . THE FOCUSED LIFE.

People don’t understand that attention is a finite resource, like money. Do you want to invest your cognitive cash on endlessly Twittering, [posting on Facebook], or Net surfing or couch potato-ing? You are constantly making choices, and your choices determine your experience."

Why is the focused life so conducive to happiness? Because it’s much more likely to include periods when we are in FLOW. Flow is also known as being “in the zone”; I prefer flow, a beautiful, liquid word that suits this state of being so immersed in what we are doing that we cease to be aware of time, self, and other such childish things.

It is a truth universally accepted that you can achieve flow even if you never learn how to pronounce Mihaly Tsikszentmihalyi.

Flow, like heaven and hell, is a state of mind. Milton: “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”

TROTSKY, PARADISE, HAPPY CHILDHOOD

On and off I’ve been reading a biography of Leon (or Lev, the Russian variant) Trotsky (real name: Leiba Davidovich Bronstein; a Moscow rabbi remarked, prophetically as rabbis seem to, “It’s Lev Trotsky who signs the mortgage, but it’s Leiba Davidovich Bronstein who will have to pay the price.”). No prophet of the ironies of history, it was Trotsky who said, “We want to create on this earth a real paradise for people.” The author of the biography, Robert Service, is hostile to Trotsky. Yet in the Introduction he also says, “More than any other leading Bolshevik he conserved in his head a vision of a future world where each man and woman would have the opportunity for self-fulfillment in service of the collective good. He proclaimed this with passion to the day he died” [assassinated in 1940 by a Stalinist agent].

The idea of that paradise on earth included free or nearly free access to education (including university education) and cultural life (by “nearly free” I mean that anyone could afford to go see an opera, for instance, and not just in terms of having to be content with the worst “student seats”). Now, I’d be the last to praise the Soviet system just because in Warsaw I could afford to go to the opera – or even because of free higher education and free medical care and other well-known features of socialism (which in its moderate form is not totalitarian, but can, and does, co-exist with democracy). Yes, that spoils you, but for the whole Eastern bloc the word became tainted with dictatorship.

It gives me a melancholy pause, the fact that the dream of the kind of paradise of earth that isn’t just the elimination of hunger and poverty, but also “the opportunity for self-fulfillment in service of the collective good,” is no longer spoken of. Oddly enough, the last time I read about it was in a class on Victorian literature, where I did a paper on Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891).

In it, he says, “Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” Wilde imagined a system that would make it possible for everyone to realize their talents. Who, then, would do menial work? Wilde assumes that in the future, machines would: “The fact is that civilization requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.” (To this a woman writer replied that there will never be a machine that can change a baby’s diapers.)

Let me swerve even more and give you this little-known Wilde quotation: “Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.”

A quotation from Trotsky’s Autobiography that I can’t resist – its opening paragraphs:

Childhood is looked upon as the happiest time of life. Is that always true? No, only a few have a happy childhood. The idealization of childhood originated in the old literature of the privileged. A secure, affluent, and unclouded childhood, spent in a home of inherited wealth and culture, a childhood of affection and play, brings back to one memories of a sunny meadow at the beginning of the road of life. The grandees of literature, or the plebeians who glorify the grandees, have canonized this purely aristocratic view of childhood. But the majority of the people, if they look back at all, see, on the contrary, a childhood of darkness, hunger, and dependence. Life strikes the weak – and who is weaker than a child?

My childhood was not one of hunger and cold. My family had already achieved a competence at the time of my birth. But it was the stern competence of people still rising from poverty and having no desire to stop half-way. Every muscle was strained, every thought set on work and savings. Such a domestic routine leaves but a modest place for the children. We knew no need, but neither did we know the generosities of life – its caresses.

(I’m thrilled by the phrase “life’s caresses.” I feel infinitely grateful to my mother for flowers on the table. And for taking me to the High Tatra mountains during the Easter break, once, just to show me the wild crocus blooming in the snow.)

The passage by Trotsky is a translation from Russian, and an imperfect one, to put it mildly (I assume “competence” means “financial security”) – and yet Trotsky’s intelligence shines through. He was a born writer – later pages show a gift for vivid detail as well. He was a stylist; he could not bear writing an ugly sentence. If only he’d confined himself to writing, becoming a harmless novelist and/or essayist. I’m coming to the strange conclusion that an education in the arts might serve to keep the gifted from going into politics, where they could do real harm. But get a young man seriously interested in poetry, and he’ll be harmless. Poetry will keep him off the street, including Wall Street.

Trotsky before he became Trotsky. If only he’d become a poet instead.

OLDER = HAPPIER

As for what Trotsky says about childhood, I don’t remember ever believing that it was the happiest time of life. Indeed, to quote Trotsky, “who is weaker than a child?” Has any child ever completely escaped bullying or being otherwise hurt by those bigger and stronger? There are wonderful moments in childhood, but the nightmarish part stays with us. People may want to be young again, but never to be a child again.

Incidentally, Lenin seems to have had the kind of affluent “happy childhood” that Trotsky mentions as the privilege of the few — including summers at his [Lenin’s] grandparents’ country estate.  

I grew up with the myth that youth is the happiest time of life. My parents and others gladly reminisced about their youth (until its sudden end with the outbreak of WWII). In novels and most movies, the protagonists were usually young, beautiful, and in love. Love songs were almost all about young love, before marriage (no song ever advised, “All you need is marriage”). Since I had a miserable youth, I thought I was a pathological exception. The confidences of women friends eventually made me see that a lot of us were “exceptions.” 

By now scores of studies have established that older adults are happier than younger adults. The older = happier relationship holds until the “elderly” stage sets in, with its accelerated aging and sickness. Thus, new research indicates that, on average, the years past fifty are the happiest time of life — and the seventies tend to be happier than the fifties. When time starts running out, people begin to revel in life. Seeing that the future is not what it used to be, they begin to live for the moment. This, maybe, is the happy second childhood, without the derogatory overtone. Or a kind of second adolescence, the way it should have been. Happiness! Not for pigs after all, but a sacred calling. Let’s enjoy it while we can.



**

Charles:

Another beautiful blog, effortlessly written.

Oriana:

Thank you. I’m glad it seems effortless. This one essentially was. I scribbled down “thoughts from all over,” and realized that they were all related to happiness in some way. One of those mysteries of how writing comes together. The less conscious effort, the better it is.

Another reason for the effortless feeling is that my mind has grown richer, I feel. I’ve gained clarity about my values, my real interests.  For me the danger is that I have such an abundance, I have to restrain myself from writing on and on.

Here is what Rilke says in his letters (My thanks to Lois Petit for posting this): For the more we are, the richer everything we experience is. And those who want to have a deep love in their lives must collect and save for it, and gather honey. 

Hyacinth:

You've said about what I would have said. I did find among my notes this: well-being equals happiness for me. An out of body experience I get from music or nature and art, as if I'm looking down on myself from an elevated place.

About childhood:

Childhood is so brief a thing

a time of crayons and comics and fireflies against

a blurred background of war, polio, breadlines; against

the undertow of fear, nightly shouting, thuds, the final

snores. Some childhood memories should be burned,

with respect, like a flag, full of stains and tears. And even

then we’d carry around the ashes. The end of childhood

is sudden. No longer scuffing through

the fragile architecture, now we are  responsible

for keeping things upright like building blocks.

And the rest of our lives we suffer a vague

homesickness for a time when we could believe

we left our missing sock in a dream.

**

Oriana:

It’s only in the recent decades that Western society started owning up to the fact that a lot of children have an unhappy childhood – some seriously so. Interestingly, this happened at the same time as child rearing became more affectionate and less oppressive. 

I wonder about the future generations: will they interact with electronic devices more so than with parents and peers?

Isn’t it time to admit that our Hyacinth is a better poet than Ruth Stone, for instance? Now, I’m glad that Ruth Stone got to be famous, but Hyacinth has more striking lines and more lyricism (not this particular poem, but those with nature imagery).

That the ending is fabulous goes without saying. I also especially like

. . .    Some childhood memories should be burned,

with respect, like a flag, full of stains and tears. And even

then we’d carry around the ashes.

~ how is that for an unexpected simile?

I wish Hyacinth could be declared a national treasure.

Ursula:

I just read your blog on happiness and childhood and was staggered by your declaration (in question form), that it was time that we (the greater WE), recognize Hyacinth as a better poet than Ruth Stone. I like Ruth Stone's work but Hyacinth’s strikes me in the heart far more often.

I concur, not that I would have ever thought of grading poets but I do think, setting aside publishers and width of reputation, that Hyacinth is greatly unvalued, perhaps somewhat by herself. What a warm fire you are.

Oriana:

Yes again on Hyacinth. Her craft is better too, tighter, more musical. Hyacinth has more lyricism by far. About Ruth Stone’s work some people would say, “This is not poetry” – but nobody would say this about Hyacinth’s work. We immediately know that it IS poetry.


The trouble is that it takes so much energy, even if we e-submit, to keep on submitting in a system that’s not efficient at recognizing quality. The whole marketing aspect is simply too much for someone who’d rather give it all to poetry itself.  But at least Hyacinth has gained local fame. This is supposed to be a growing new phenomenon: many poets are very good, but remain unknown at the national level. They enjoy a strong regional reputation, though. And after all, a region is like a small country. Think Lithuania. A poet this wonderful would not be ignored in Lithuania. Or rather, let’s not think about po-biz at all. Let’s simply love the poems and poets that we love. Let’s bless our luck in having her and her poems.

Scott:

Your statement about your bed being your favorite place reminded me of  mine: my chair in the living room beside a lamp stand where sit  several books that I am reading and a coaster for my coffee cup (a close second is looking out my French doors observing my bird feeder).  It brings to mind too that line about being surrounded by a 'warm  river of books and black coffee' in Robert Morgan's poem 'White  Autumn'.

Trotsky was an interesting fellow, a biography about him and the rest of the early Russian revolutionaries would make great reading; too bad they were not poets and chess players!

I can't help but concur with the 'oldest = happiest' conclusion. As I am almost 50, it is so much better being 50 than 15; to be secure in one’s own skin is a worthy goal I think.

Oriana:

OMG, what a nightmare: to be 15 again! On the other hand, I’d love to stop aging. In fact some rejuvenation would be wonderful, but we all know the irony of the human condition . . . it seems that life gets richer in various ways just as the body starts declining. Only today I had yet another profound insight that led to even more self-acceptance – but it was about something in the past, and I can only smile a melancholy smile at wisdom coming late, as usual (Hegel: “The owl of Minerva flies only at dusk”).

Alas, the revolutionaries were poets and chess-players only on the side; their true dedication was, naturally, to the revolution. I grew up with the portraits of Marx, Lenin, and Engels arranged like a new holy trinity in every classroom (Marx’s facial hair outclassed everyone else’s) – that’s why I say they feel like a family to me. Of course we studied the Communist Manifesto in high school, and knew the biography of Lenin in some detail (not about his mistress, to be sure).  We knew all kinds of details about the October Revolution – the warship “Aurora,” the Winter Palace, the fact that the Smolny Institute (the first revolutionary headquarters) used to be a boarding school for aristocratic girls – BUT! Trotsky was never mentioned, and we had no idea that the revolution would have never succeeded without him. Long after Stalin’s death, history books still never mentioned him. To do so would have been a thought crime, to use Orwell’s magnificent coinage.

As for the revolutionaries in general, it’s only now that I stop and think, stunned – these men, and some extraordinary women like Rosa Luxemburg (lots of streets in Poland were named after Rosa, since she grew up in Poland, and Polish remained the language of the heart for her) – these incredibly bold men and women decided that capitalism had to be overthrown, and eventually, thanks to superhuman-seeming will power (some would say: fanaticism) and courage and self-sacrifice (and, to be fair, their willingness to sacrifice others as well; Rosa was perhaps the least inclined that way, being pro-liberty and pro-democracy) – in the end, in some countries they succeeded. The results proved disastrous, but I’m stunned that the experiment was even tried! Maybe it had to be tried, so that we could see how a balanced approach is needed, with creative capitalism encouraged, but predatory capitalism restrained, and some mechanism in place to moderate the boom-bust cycle (already described by Marx).

Just a quick note on Trotsky. Trotsky started out as an anti-Bolshevist, correctly predicting that the “dictatorship of the proletariat” would soon turn into a dictatorship OVER the proletariat. Alas, Lenin had legendary powers of persuasion, and managed to convince Trotsky to join him. Not that Trotsky is to be excused for having been persuaded; once he starts defending, advocating, and in fact exercising “revolutionary terror,” he loses my sympathy. As one of his biographers put it, he was a brilliant man who became a “prisoner of an idea.”