Frida Kahlo: Roots

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CREDO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

me the bowing of the wind 

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

Meanwhile I’ll take the world.


~ Oriana © 2012

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

**


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

~ Rilke, from “The Last Judgment”

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

**

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

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

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

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

**

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FOR A MOMENT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~ Oriana © 2012

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

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


Oriana:

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



Ewa:

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



Oriana:

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

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

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

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

Ewa:

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

Oriana:

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

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

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

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

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

Oriana:

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

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

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

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



Darlene:

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

Oriana:

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

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

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

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


Hyacinth:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


WHAT WE WERE BORN FOR

DESERTS

I was born for love –
to give it and to receive it.
Yet my life has passed
almost without loving.
So I’ve learned forgiving:

even the deserts
I have crossed
I feel no scorn for.
I just ask them
with astonished eyes:

What gardens were you born for?

~ Blaga Dimitrova, Because the Sea is Black, tr. Niko Boris and Heather McHugh

**

Imagine the Sahara irrigated, producing enough food to feed all of Africa. Imagine parts of it covered with solar panels, providing electricity for the world. Instead, a deadly desert. South of it, warfare, famine, and disease.

But talking about the Sahara evades the pain of confronting “what the poem is really about.” In a capsule, it’s practically every woman’s woman’s lament: I was born for love, but my love life has been a desert. I too used to be filled with the same lamentation: I was born for love, and look at the desert that life has given me instead.

I’m not sure if I ever met a woman who’d not agree that this is a summary of her life. Women have an insatiable hunger for for emotional connectedness and deep friendship. It’s practically the definition of femininity.

There, I’ve said it, the word that changes the equation: no, not femininity, but friendship. I mean it in a more European sense: friendship as a special kind of love, a deep communion of the minds and mutual affection. Aristotle put friendship ahead of erotic love. My mother said, “Friends are more important than lovers.”

This is the wisdom of maturity. An eighteen-year-old would probably be shocked at the idea that friends are more important than lovers. An artist can grasp it more easily, since the enormous importance of peers is hard to overlook. But I don’t mean to dismiss Eros. In youth, that’s simply impossible. Later in life, if one is lucky enough to fall in love, it can be the greatest feast imaginable.

Nevertheless . . .

My perception began changing as soon as I shifted away from “love” and toward “affection.” 

Recently I came across this amazing little story by Marnia Robinson
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/cupids-poisoned-arrow/200909/the-lazy-way-stay-in-love

Waiting for a concert to begin at our local county fair, my husband and I checked out a reptile exhibit that included an animal trainer with a live alligator resting calmly on his lap. As we stroked the gator, I asked the trainer why it was so tame. "I pet it daily. If I didn't, it would quickly be wild again, and wouldn't allow this," he explained.

I was surprised. Only months earlier I had begun to grasp the power of bonding behaviors (skin-to-skin contact, gentle stroking and so forth) to evoke the desire to bond without our having to do anything more. I didn't realize reptiles ever responded similarly.

I didn’t realize it either. After all, reptiles allegedly don’t have the kind of brain that’s capable of bonding with others. But apparently even they can experience the pleasure of gentle touch, and apparently that’s enough. Strange as that sounds, pet an alligator daily and it becomes sweet-tempered. 

“I pet it daily.” I hope I never forget this story. It’s potentially life-changing for those women who happen to be married to alligators -- they know what I mean.

(Flash clarification: by “alligators” I don’t mean abusive men — run for your life; I mean merely somewhat gruff, undemonstrative men who are good underneath that rough skin.)

So we are not powerless over our relationships and the waning of both eros and affection? We may be largely powerless over Eros, in the sense of infatuation and romantic love. Eros is notoriously resistant to any struggle to keep it alive (which is probably for the best, if we ponder the finding that the brain in love looks in scans like the brain on cocaine). True, there are rare exceptions: Dostoyevski’s second marriage retained the glow of passion for fourteen years, to the end of Dostoyevski’s life. And that couple did it entirely without reading Reader’s Digest articles on “Ten Ways to Keep Romance in Your Marriage.”

For most of us, marriage is the opposite of romance, so let us leave it at that. But we are not powerless over affection. If we “pet [X] daily,” affection can grow and grow. Gentle touch, attentive listening, looking into each other’s eyes -- but I don’t mean to repeat the advice found in thousands of self-help books. Not that we need to read those books. We may not be as good at giving affection as dogs are, but generally we need no special training in how to give affection. The problem is not skill, but motivation.

That motivation may be born of in a moment of insight when suddenly we understand that marriage can be either heaven or hell . . . Well, not exactly heaven, but pleasant and supportive -- or it can be absolute hell, marriage as warfare. If your husband is an alligator, you have to figure out how to pet an alligator.

Here I am reminded of what I learned about Barack Obama that filled me with boundless admiration: in his youth, he made the decision not to be angry. That’s a terrific reminder: we are not powerless over anger. We are not powerless over affection. True heroes are neither men with guns nor self-sacrificing martyr-type mothers, but those who discover they are not powerless over something important. Realizing this is a lot more important than pondering “what we were born for” and lamenting that life has not lived up to our expectations.

“The owl of Minerva flies only at dusk,” Hegel observed. Wisdom often comes only late in life, after we have suffered enough and are finally motivated to make the best of what remains. I had to be cornered by mortality before I decided not to live in bitterness and regrets. I had to read Louise Hay, who showed me that we are not powerless even over having been an abused child and having internalized the abuse, perpetuating it by “beating up on yourself.” (I hasten to point out that by comparison with Louise’s childhood wounds, mine were mere woundettes.) Not powerless over the wounds of childhood? What else might we turn out not to powerless over?

Sartre asked, “What do you do with what was done to you?” More broadly, what do you do with what life and circumstances have done to you? Do you declare yourself a victim? Confession: that’s exactly what I used to do. Chronically. I’d rather not confess for how long.
For instance, I felt I was “born for” living in an exciting city with a vibrant cultural scene. I mention this in one of my poems, “If Dreams Are Returns”:

. . . boys with narrow glances
watching me. I march past them,
head high, knowing the train station

is not far, avenues lit with lilacs,
bridges with white towers, embassies –
what I was born for: the bright city.

**

“What I was born for: the bright city.” Really? Then how come I had such a tepid reaction to New York, once I finally got to see Manhattan and had what seemed strange perceptions, e.g. “so old and mildewed.” The skyscrapers I thought I’d adore struck me as ill-proportioned. The crowds that I missed so much (I thought) struck as as downright dangerous as they stampeded to the nearest subway entrance, disappearing underground in a vaguely sinister way, the business district empty and abandoned-looking after office hours.

After the dreamed-for trip to New York, I had to admit I loved California. I’ve even grown fond of the provincial place where I live, with its distinctly non-vibrant cultural scene (but there are worse places, worse fates).

You may ask, “What about returning to Warsaw?” Train stations, lilacs, a bridge with white towers, embassies -- need I say that many of my poems are in some ways about Warsaw? True, in my last year in Warsaw I totally fell in love with the city. But I don’t like the capitalist and increasingly Manhattanized version of it. You really can’t go home again. Some statements become clichés because they are profoundly true.

To assume that we were “born for” something special -- an elegant lifestyle, fame and/or fortune, the very best that life can offer (or, maybe, the worst that life can offer), or a particular vocation -- is to insert another layer of deluded belief between ourselves and reality. It’s hypermentalizing from the point of view of the teleological (goal-centered) illusion, a predestinarian view. I could say, “I was born to be a writer,” but it’s more modest and correct to say, “I have some literary talent, just like my three paternal aunts,” or even, “I love to write” -- let’s take the claim of “talent” out of it.

We were not “born for” anything particular. We were simply born. And here we are -- how are we going to use this one amazing life?

This may be particularly true of poets, who have to put up with poetry’s marginal position in the culture, but in my social set I sometimes meet people who feel that they are somehow “in the wrong life.” They were born for a different life, a much more pleasant one. The “born for” idea can easily lead to bitterness.

The logical solution seems simple: we should see whether or not we can change the conditions that make us feel “stuck as if by mistake in the wrong life.” If we can’t change the outside, then we need to change the inside, i.e. our attitude. “Bloom where you are planted.” Enroll in that acting class you’ve always dreamed of taking. Renounce the charms of being a victim. (I am, of course, preaching to myself. It still bothers me somewhat that being miserable takes no effort, while good things usually require work, and/or the stress of a long commute.)

But who operates by logic? The change in attitude happens or doesn’t happen. Once I said goodbye to depression, I discovered that I actually love my quiet life, and don’t crave an “exciting life,” as I once thought. This discovery and “attitude adjustment” wasn’t due to conscious cogitation. My brain did it without bothering me about the details. All I know is that a shift happened.

**

And yet, and yet  . . .  there is a certain power in the beautiful, doomed question, “What gardens were you born for?” No human beings should have to live in crushing poverty, without clean water, enough food, an access to education. Who knows what genius perishes when basic needs are not provided for.

And I dare say we were born to get and give affection. “Love” is a contaminated word, concealing a huge demand. But we can manage affection. I’m all for declaring affection a basic human right.

Yes, in an ideal world we’d all get plenty of nurturing and affection. And now and then, we get lucky. No matter how long we’ve lived an alligator existence, someone comes along and -- begins to pet us. Or, to mix metaphors, unexpected rain makes the desert bloom.

ANZA-BORREGO DESERT, SPRINGTIME
       

Every stick bursts into blossom.
Flame-beaked ocotillos
wave in the warm wind.
In the scar of an arroyo
silvers a live stream.

This is the most precious garden:
not hothouse orchids
but the desert lavish with gold
brittlebush, our-lady’s-slippers,
bells ringing indigo and mauve.

Just one season of unstinting rain,
and this place of thirst
blooms the richest Eden.
Prickly pear opens its purple veils.
Lilac-plumed grass tames to my hand.

So after years without love,
tenderness makes us flower.
So our face
becomes the face of all,
unfolding petal by petal.

~ Oriana © 2012

Hyacinth:

Great blog. My favorite line: "cornered by mortality." Brilliant.

Recently a young woman I know has fallen in love after a disastrous marriage. She said her new love is very romantic. I asked, But is he affectionate? Yes she replied. And does he show it? Yes. Good, I said.

In a relationship of my own what I found I liked was that my lover allowed me to love him, odd as that may sound. I recall a line from the movie "As Good As It Gets": Nicholson asks in a fury, "Did you have sex with him?" and she answers, "Better than that. We held each other."

Oriana:

The longer I live, the more I treasure affection. As Adrienne Rich said, “Without tenderness, we are in hell.” 

Lucrezia:

Re:  What you say reminds me in part of the Roman saying, “To live is not necessary; to sail is necessary.”

Well, what if you were a Roman slave?  And what defines living?  The luxury of sailing?  There is an entire psychology of the "haves" that is irrelevant to the majority of the world.

If it came right down to bread or roses (or circuses) we'd all choose bread.

Perhaps the above was somewhat molded by my Berkeley experience but my personal philosophy is far from Marxist!

Love the photos and the alligator story.  There is a similar story called The Lady and the Tiger. A woman came to a wise man and asked for help with her troubled marriage. The wise man told her he would help her but first she had to bring back a whisker from a tiger. After many months of getting closer and closer to a tiger that lived nearby, she finally got close enough to clip a whisker, for which she thanked him. When she brought the whisker to the wise man, he tossed it on the fire. He explained to the bewildered woman that a man is no more fierce than a tiger, and that if she had enough patience to tame the tiger, she could do the same with her husband.

What is annoying about this story and similar ones is it's never the man who seeks advice regarding how to help their marriage/wife/GF. Men never buy or read books or attend seminars on how to maintain their relationships. The entire industry is supported by women. One relationship counselor said that the quality of the relationship is usually 100 percent women's responsibility, because if one is looking for one's partner to contribute in that area, it just won't happen. But then, men take on certain responsibilities like maintaining the family's cars or finances . . . so there may be a balance of responsibilities in many cases.

I don't think anyone's life is a desert who gives love, even if the quality/quantity of that which is received seems not enough.  If one can give love, then one has love in one's life.  As for being in love, am reminded of a relative who left his wife and two children for a younger woman who was in the same field.  His wife had put him through years of university study and he had a PhD.  My dad used to say "Maybe they're in love," and roll his eyes.  What is the higher deed:  keeping one's commitments or indulging in emotions that as you mentioned, often quickly fade?

Oriana:

Thank you, Lucrezia, for excellent comments. You bring up many valid points. Just to defend the Roman saying a bit, the admiral/commander did not mean sailing for enjoyment, but in service to the country. In addition, sailing was then rather dangerous, so it was also an act of courage, an expression of the human spirit of daring and accomplishing (with luck). Nevertheless, your point about the slaves is well-taken. The perspective of the privileged classes -- what you perceptively call the “psychology of the haves” -- has indeed tended to prevail, and only in the recent decades has there been a correction (now and then excessive, but that’s normal when a new balance is being sought).

I am outraged that a counselor (male, I suppose) said that the woman is 100% responsible for the relationship. The male partner has to be motivated to have a good relationship. That’s where some men's eyes are opened only when they retire. Now they realize that life can be either sheer  hell, marriage as warfare (you’ve probably met couples like that) -- or it can be happier than ever.

When the man understands the importance of his marriage or “marriage equivalent” -- the importance of the woman in his life -- he’ll get nicer, start bringing her flowers and little gifts. And she in turn will reward him ten times over, which no woman resents, as long as she gets her strokes and is not being put down and mistreated. I’ve seen some very good relationships where the woman could still be said to be giving more, but then the man is also giving in other ways. A wise couple establishes a division of labor: as you pointed out, and as is frequently the case, he is responsible for maintaining both their cars, for instance. But it need not be along traditional lines. Maybe she makes more money and he’s a great cook.

If a woman puts her husband through school, these days she can sue for breach of contract if he then leaves her -- which used to be a common story until one of those deserted wives sued and won. He (an M.D.) had to pay her back, just as if he’d taken out a loan. So there’s been progress.

I agree that giving affection -- and we can decide to be affectionate; we are not “swept away” by affection -- makes life infinitely better. You are absolutely right: if there is affection in your life, then your life is not a desert: it is a garden. Articles on Ten Ways to Keep Romance in Your Marriage drive me nuts; let’s concentrate on the doable, which is affection, a treasure vastly beyond the storms of passion.

Charles:

This you your best blog yet.

Love the image of the dark and cold city. Opposite of your dreams.

So much wisdom here.

My favorite line is, "shift happens."

Oriana:

“Shift happens” has become one of my mantras. The phenomenon of perception shift is my deepest source of optimism. It can’t be forced, but it can be facilitated, I think, through a bit of conscious cogitation, reading, and experimentation. I tend to agree that we don’t solve problems so much as we transcend them. We outgrow them. Suddenly the whole matter isn’t even relevant as we move to a different stage of life. 

Scott:

I enjoyed this post very much, timely as usual. There's a great movie, 'A Knight's Tale'; a B movie perhaps but there is a fantastic line I just remembered this week. The lead was told by his father 'Change your stars and live a better life than I.'  Is it not funny how stars are used so metaphorically in our lives from astrology to poetry? I really like Louis MacNiece's 'Thallassa' which ends;

'By a high star our course is set.
Our end is life. Put out to sea.'

My three great passions in life have been the sea, history and reading. Poetry has come to me rather late in life (I love the 'Minerva's owl' line) and I think I shall pursue the writing, reading and collection of verse the rest of my life. A harmless and 'impractical' pursuit, Auden called poetry 'small beer' but I think he in his heart knew different.

Love, affection, friendship, a good book, great coffee, birds at the feeder...simple pleasures all but as I near the half century mark I am truly embracing my age, I like this time in my life very much. No longer bound by the follies of youth and not yet hobbled by old age and it's frailties, I'm free to embark on my voyages of discovery, no matter how Quioxtic they seem. One goal is to have at least one volume of poetry in my collection by poets who are on record as being an admirer of 'Moby Dick' ( and many poets love that book!) The more impractical a thing is, the more I like it at this stage of my life. Worry, fear, guilt and regret I try to put in my wake; as W R Rodges said in 'Life's Circumnavigators'

'Oh, when shall we, all spent,
Row into some far strand
And find, to our content,
The original land,
From which our boat once went,
Though not the one we planned.

Us on that happy day
This fierce sea will release.
On our rough face of clay
The final glaze of peace
Our oars we will all lay
Down, and desire will cease.'

**

Oriana:

What you say reminds me in part of the Roman saying, “To live is not necessary; to sail is necessary.” I take it to mean that humans need to have a meaningful goal, meaningful work. That’s why the ideas of heaven, whether Christian or Muslim, just don’t appeal to me -- what meaningful task would there be to accomplish?

At the same time, I’m against anything that smacks of predestination. Sure, we don’t just decide what to do, how to act, out of nowhere, but are influenced by our genes and circumstances in ways too complex to completely understand. Nevertheless, we as individuals do make some choices and decisions -- e.g. Obama’s decision not to be angry. That’s almost like “changing your stars”!! Someone could object that if there is plenty to be angry about, how can you not be angry? As human beings, we can in fact decide not to be angry. We have that freedom. We don’t have to be on automatic, reacting to whatever happens in a predictable way.

As for collecting books by poets who admire Moby Dick, you know of course that my book is now available on Amazon . . .

DELINQUENT PALACES

Browsing through Christian Wiman’s Ambition and Survival, I came upon an epigraph to the chapter “A Mile from Hell”:

Elder, Today, a session wiser
And fainter, too, as Wiseness is—
I find myself still softly searching
For my Delinquent Palaces—

Ravished by the phrase “Delinquent Palaces,” I looked up the rest. Because the poem spoke so powerfully to me in the context of my life, I ended up misreading it – a fact I discovered only when John Guzlowski (a professor of American literature) pointed out the standard interpretation. I am still tempted to think that the religious interpretation, though most plausible, is perhaps not the only one after all – the loss might be multiple, and maybe even different from what Emily herself tried to narrow it down to.

A loss of something ever felt I—
The first that I could recollect
Bereft I was—of what I knew not
Too young that any should suspect

A Mourner walked among the children
I notwithstanding went about
As one bemoaning a Dominion
Itself the only Prince cast out—

Elder, Today, a session wiser
And fainter, too, as Wiseness is—
I find myself still softly searching
For my Delinquent Palaces—

And a Suspicion, like a Finger
Touches my Forehead now and then
That I am looking oppositely
For the site of the Kingdom of Heaven—

~ Emily Dickinson, 959, c. 1864

But let me briefly be an eccentric misguided reader just for the pleasure of it. The intoxicating phrase, “Delinquent Palaces,” made me remember something delicious:

We stand over the black

gleam of the canal,

weeping willows on both sides;

a statue with a raised saber behind us,

poised to lead a charge.

The royal park is dark,

except one row of windows

in a palace where secret talks

are being held between

America and China.

~ Oriana (the opening stanzas of “Secret Talks” © 2012)

This memory goes back to the years of the Cold War when the U.S. and China had no official diplomatic relations. The two powers were talking in secret, however. The talks took place in the smaller of the two royal palaces in Warsaw’s Lazienki Park, then and even now one of the places I’d equate with heaven. 

On this beautiful overcast morning, the sky blank (I’ve come to accept blank sky as almost fog – how have I been able to live with so little fog?) – with this sky like a blank page, I could almost ask, “Where does heaven start?” – coming from a language in which “sky” and “heaven” are the same word, as in most languages. And the answer comes instantly: “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” It’s not a place. It’s a state of mind.

“IT’S PRETTY TO THINK SO”

But something in us craves a tangible, breathable place as well, with paths to walk on. Heaven used to be defined as an actual place, up in the clouds. I think that in Dickinson’s times, no one questioned the idea of heaven as a place. That’s why she says,” the site of the Kingdom of Heaven.” The “within you” state-of-mind definition had to wait two millennia for a modern psychological worldview, and is still far from being embraced by those who are thrilled with the idea that “in my end is my beginning” (although, as Milosz observed, it’s pretty impossible to convince a modern person that real life begins after death).  

Even now, in the twenty-first century, millions of people yearn for an actual place to go to once the body is dead. Of course nobody wants a place of suffering, but an enchanting domain, a fabulous kingdom with a thousand mansions, a city with streets of gold, or a garden with fruit trees similar to the Garden of Eden. If not that, the dead might settle for going to Paris, or returning to whatever town or village they loved most. There is no guarantee, but, as Jake says in The Sun Also Rises, “It’s pretty to think so.”

Lilacs in bloom in Lazienki Park

For me, the heavenly city was my favorite part of Warsaw, the wide avenue that goes past the Lazienki Garden. The loss of Warsaw came to symbolize all loss – of rich human connections, intellectual stimulation, the energy of a great city and my “owning” those parks and avenues, owning even its church bells and baroque clouds – and those rows of small curly clouds we called baranki, little lambs. All the losses and disappointments that followed were added to the huge compound loss of losing Warsaw and all it offered. When I contemplated that loss and the rest that followed, I wasn’t a mere mile from hell; I was fully in hell, brooding on everything that went wrong in my life. And that brooding was the opposite of heaven understood as a state of mind. That’s why I read “oppositely” as “the opposite of”; being a mourner and a dispossessed princess who’s continually “still softly searching” for those “delinquent palaces” closes the rainbow gate to a joyful state of mind.

“Oh, it’s about her loss of the Kingdom of Heaven,” was all that John needed to say to bring me around to the standard interpretation, shattering my seeing the remembered palaces as the landscapes and cityscapes of the lost childhood and early youth. In terms of Emily’s life, a case could be made that the speaker was thinking of the death of her childhood friend, Sophia Holland (it’s an interesting coincidence that “Sophia” means “wisdom”), or perhaps the lack of love from her depressed mother and distant father; still, the most plausible interpretation is indeed the religious one, reminiscent of Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode. The fifth stanza ("Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting") sets forth the idea that the human soul comes from heaven, and can at first remember heaven's glories. Then gradually “shades of the prison-house begin to close,” and the vision of splendor fades “into the light of common day” – the ordinary life of quiet desperation, as Thoreau would later say. 

Does adult life have to be so constrained with hardship? Shouldn't there be more time for joy? 

Wiman comments: “ ‘A loss of something ever felt I,’ Emily Dickinson wrote, who could never quite bring herself to call that ‘something’ God, though she sensed the source of that loss was as early as her earliest memories: ‘Too young that any should suspect / A Mourner walked among the children.’ If I could trace my own losses back, could read my life by blood and bone, would there be a single source? Do I want that charge again, or the time that it enlivened? Is God merely a synonym for gone?”

The word “charge” seems to refer to Wiman’s experience in church one time, an experience he can’t really recall, but still refers to as “my conversion, when I was so filled and frightened by God that I fled the service deep into the bowels of that Baptist church.” He also says, “Even in my most pious days I detested church.” During the services, he’d become “a hive of nerves, wanting it only to be over.” What riveted him, however, were the stories of radical conversion, usually preceded by a great affliction. The most I can make of it is a yearning for transcendence.

THE SUBLIME: BEAUTY’S BUT THE BEGINNING OF TERROR

Though now and then I wondered what a religious mystical experience might be like, the closest I could come to feeling an intensity of delight so intense that it might be called transcendent was through encounters with the beauty of nature, especially the great energies of nature (what Kant calls the sublime; something that is both beautiful and terrifying; Rilke: “for beauty is but the beginning of terror / we are still barely able to endure, / and we adore it so / because it serenely / disdains to destroy us.”)

Falling in love had some similarity to that – a trance-like feeling of hushed amazement, being startled and mastered by something I didn’t expect. But sooner or later anguish would replace the eerie calm, as if to say that life must go on with all its difficulties. So I’ve settled for moments of beauty as my sufficient nourishment – the critical words here being “moments” and “sufficient.” The sense of loss that was my daily companion is a half-remembered phantom now. But this is already my current self speaking. My earlier self was a mourner – a Mourner with a capital M, in fact. And that was how I kept away from the kingdom that is both within us and around us.

CARRYING BAGS FULL OF SAND

Can a constant feeling of loss be a burden preventing us from enjoying the feast of life? Jane Hirshfield’s “Burlap Sack” gives an answer that speaks to me.

BURLAP SACK

A person is full of sorrow
The way a burlap sack is full of stones or sand.
We say, “Hand me the sack,”
But we get the weight.
Heavier if left out in the rain.
To think that the stones or sand are the self is an error.
To think that grief is the self is an error.
Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags,
Being careful between the trees to leave extra room.
The self is not the load of ropes and nails and axes.
The self is not the miner nor builder nor driver.
What would it be to take the bride
And leave behind the heavy dowry?
To let the thin-ribbed mule browse in tall grasses,
Its long ears waggling like the tails of two happy dogs?
  

~ Jane Hirshfield, After  (my thanks to Panhala for both text and image)

**

This is a poem of wisdom rather than a poem that’s delightful as poetry. The message is too explicit, we could argue. As Henry James said, “To be direct is to be inartistic.” But the wisdom is delightful. And perhaps wisdom is a kind of poetry (to steal from Wallace Stevens, who said that money is a kind of poetry). There is imagery here, but no music, and not much surprise once we absorb the initial lesson: to think that grief is the self is an error. Overall the poem doesn’t, ahem, enthrall me. It’s too didactic and general for that (Jack Gilbert often fails in this manner). Still, what the poem says is a gift the way that a compact little essay can be gift, or an aphorism, a mantra that helps us be resilient in adversity.

A person is full of sorrow

The way a burlap sack is full of stones or sand. . . .

To think that the stones or sand are the self is an error.
To think that grief is the self is an error.

I can’t begin to say how wonderful this observation is. If you happen to be in a place of sorrow, it might be good to write or type these lines in large bold font and tape them to the mirror, to remind yourself that you are not the heavy sack you are carrying. This includes physical afflictions, such as suffering from a chronic illness – you have to keep reminding yourself that you are not the disease; that you are still you, a bright and loving person, funny and generous, passionately interested in poetry and music and astronomy (or whatever it happens to be).

I admit that when you are in the heavy clutches of medicine, it’s difficult to remember that you are not the disease. Difficult but possible, between visits to see the various doctors. And during such times it’s more important than ever, this love for whatever it is that you love, for what carries your essence apart from your affliction.

Just my use of the word “carries” reminded me of the saying that language is fossil poetry, metaphors we no longer even notice. A poet can remind us of what is precious by using images, making us notice the metaphors. Any poet who puts on the page the statement of what is important is writing wisdom poetry. Harold Bloom said, “The ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy can never end, and wisdom writing is more poetic than philosophical.”  

True, Jane Hirshfield does use poetic metaphor and imagery to convey her message, and tells us,

Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags,
Being careful between the trees to leave extra room.

~ a reminder that the self carries the grief, but the self is not the grief. The self is not the sack, the side bags, the sand and stones in them (or did we expect the load to be gold and precious stones? In traditions that exalt suffering [Nietzsche: All religions are at bottom a system of cruelties], that would not be far-fetched). As for being careful to give extra room to the side bags when you pass between the trees, that reifies the self-as-mule, and also points out the difficulty of carrying such a load of losses and disappointed expectations.

It’s a full-time job, carrying those bags, jealously preserving the grief, making sure we don’t come too close to anything that might dislodge it – an encounter with the freshness of the present rather than the half-real past. But that’s going beyond the poem, into the marshy terrain of questions such as “Is depression self-limiting, or self-perpetuating and self-enhancing?” It depends on the individual case, and on how the present changes the past – the present that, minute by minute, we still have the power to create.

The ending seems to return to the first statement that the self is not the burdens it carries. In the end, the self is compared to both a bride and a mule (I find this a marvelous conjunction):

What would it be to take the bride
And leave behind the heavy dowry?
To let the thin-ribbed mule browse in tall grasses,
Its long ears waggling like the tails of two happy dogs?

BAGS OF SAND VERSUS THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

As if to provide an uncanny illustration for Hirshfield’s poem, a friend of mine had a dream in which he was carrying a burlap bag of sand. He knew it was sand because the bag had SAND printed on it, and a hole in the middle from which sand was seeping out. He had to carry it in his arms, cradled like a baby, to prevent the loss of sand. And the bag was growing heavier by the second.

Fortunately he found the man to whom the bag belonged – a Hassid in full garb – and handed the bag over to him. He felt great relief, but also some loss. Loss? Interesting. Well, we get attached to our burdens. It could be argued that, for all the torture, people may be deriving some sense of meaning from this. In Waiting for Godot, the slave Lucky carried a suitcase full of sand to show that he was a good carrier, and thus shouldn't be sold at an auction. How many of us carry burdens to show that we are such nice good people, so excellent at suffering, and thus we don’t deserve to die?

Even the bride’s dowry – perhaps the weight of expectations – is seen as not much more valuable than sand and stones. It’s wonderful that Jane Hirshfield doesn’t use the modern colloquial term for the stuff we drag along from the past: baggage. By going back to earlier times when a person or a mule carried the bags, she makes the pointlessness of that behavior more vivid and pathetic (and the bags get heavier and heavier the longer we carry them). It’s up to us to interpret what the heavy bags stand for: our possessions? memories of negative events to look over like photo albums? too much responsibility that shouldn’t be ours? Resentment that the richer, larger life that seemed to be our birthright lies somewhere else, and we can’t get there from here?

But what about those palaces in Warsaw? Are they just sand and stones, worthless rubble of memory? No, I want to save those. For some reason, happy memories don’t weigh as much. But even they can become dysfunctional if too much time is spent in the country that now exists only in my mind. There are limits even to nostalgia.

Everyone knows that Hirshfield has a Buddhist orientation, and we can recognize the image of dropping the burden, the sack full of stones and sand, as the moment of enlightenment. But I also see something marvelously American here. The individual is seen as having a great value, even stooped under the burden s/he’s carrying. The soul is a bride, happiest when unencumbered. In the ending of the poem there is, I dare say, the pursuit of happiness.


**
 
My special thanks to John Guzlowski 

Lilith:

The new blog is stunning....I love most the park of blooming lilacs.  That is enough heaven for me, and I have missed lilacs so much since moving to Southern California.

Oriana:

They are heaven. As you can imagine, I spent much time with my face pressed to the Lazienki lilacs! I used to kiss them -- literally. After rain, there'd be tiny rainbows on the blossoms, and I'd lick them off. Lilacs appear in my poems -- whenever I say lilacs, I mean THOSE fabulous Warsaw lilacs, that incredible moist abundance . . . 

After the lilacs are done, chestnut trees begin to bloom, and Warsaw is heaven again, a somewhat different variety. Then the linden trees. The fragrance of the northern plants is glorious.

John sends us this quote:

People living deeply have no fear of death.   ~ Anaïs Nin

Oriana:

There is simply no mental space for that fear – people who live deeply have so much to do and think about. And they feel grateful (to the universe? to life? to their friends? it doesn’t matter to whom or what) for the richness. They feel they’ve had their share – when it’s time to go, they’ll say “I’ve had a great life. In my memory, dance and sing and be happy.” When one of Jung’s daughters died, the mourners waltzed out of the church – according to her wishes.

Charles:

Why shouldn't your interpretation of “delinquent palaces” be just as valid?

My favorite photograph is the woman walking into the sunset. Love the colors.

Oriana:

A literary critic would point out that Dickinson lived in an era when Christians believed that heaven was a place (vaguely depicted , but with palaces a strong possibility); what’s more, they believed that the soul descended from heaven to enter the body as if the soul were given a prison sentence. Life was a Vale of Tears.  In terms of the historical context, the religious interpretation is the most plausible.

But a poem belongs to the reader, and sometimes the reader gets more out of a “strong misreading.” I have an unusually specific vision of my delinquent palaces – I know their exact location. But they have a broader symbolic meaning of something wonderful that we had in childhood and early youth, and then lost. Post-war Poland was full of people who lost something valuable they had before the war – sometimes a city they loved, such as Lvov or Vilnius. That was their very specific Paradise Lost. Immigrants are notorious for idealizing their country of origin, of secretly visiting in their dreams and daydreams those parks and fountains and old churches . Some mourning for lost paradise is only human. It’s only when it interferes with making the best of the present that it becomes dysfunctional. In my misreading, I read the poem as a warning against becoming a perpetual mourner (actually I love Emily’s capitalization here: a Mourner). To be a Mourner is to lose the kingdom of heaven which is in the present.

Yes, the colors in that photograph of a women carrying a sack on her back have a subtlety. The photo is the opposite of hype. The path is dusty; it’s already slipping into the past.