SZYMBORSKA: REVENGE OF A MORTAL HAND?

BEFORE WISDOM


That last Polish August that glows
like a last ruddy pear in my mind,
my mother would point and say,

“Take a good look: you may never
see it again” – a river valley
kneeling in the greenest green,

or a birch grove touched by the wind,
so delicate it seemed
about to tremble away –

while in school we learned by heart
My fatherland, you are like health;
only he knows your worth

who has lost you -- but we hadn’t lost
health or fatherland, and the scent
of wild mushrooms was a prayer –

what if a prophet, a seer,
were to rise from the spilled moon,
a black boat on a Baltic bay,

were to point to everything
and say, “Take a good look:
it’s the happiest year of your life.

You will never see it again.”
And I was seventeen
on the stroke of fate.

*

Later, like a good-luck charm,
I carried these words in my mind:
The worst has already happened.

Then I chanced to read the reverse
of my amber amulet:
The best has already happened.
What, no more great love?
Only the bitter sage who taught,
Life is a cruel joke –

no greater lover and seer?
Where are my palaces of clouds?
Where is my will to believe?

*

Now I don’t even care to travel –
I say, too many stairs to climb.
I want to sleep in my own bed.

After the summer when I thought
I chose a larger destiny,
no sleep has seemed deep enough –

not the deepest granite cradle,
the High Tatras’ bluest lake,
the Eye of the Sea. Dear
wisdom, what I’ve paid for you –
My fatherland, you are like health.
But I sing that gilded August

before wisdom,
before the wasps flew in
to feast on wounded pears.

~ Oriana © 2012

**

The Happy Posthumous versus the Depressive Posthumous:

I hope this poem can be read “beyond nostalgia,” because I mean it to be mainly about "great expectations" and growing older: the shock of discovering that life has basically already happened. There were actually two years in my life that I see as the happiest: my last year in Poland, and my last year in Los Angeles. The irony of that “lastness” is not lost on me.

More to the point, the perception that much of my life is already behind me has awakened me to being posthumous. My best poems are behind me, my greatest love (wasted of course on the wrong man), my hiking in the mountains (when it was possible just to take Advil afterwards), the various jobs I’ve held, what little traveling I've done -- is it possible that once I was certain I’d get to see both the Himalayas and the Amazon jungle? As I say in one of my late poems, “Horizontal Rain,”

Mountains I haven’t climbed
I would no longer climb.
The arson of passion
lay smoldering behind me.

Can I know this with absolute certainty? No, but 90% probability is as good as certainty. Now if only I had “After Wisdom,” a happy-posthumous companion poem to “Before Wisdom.” The good part, which I managed to perceive only fairly recently, is that now that I've gotten over the shock of seeing that my life has already happened, I'm in the position of being happily posthumous. I don't have to wait for anything, strive for anything, hope for anything, achieve anything.

I remember when I was eighteen, and my mother said, “The difference between you and me is that you are still waiting for your life, and I am no longer waiting.” Now I’m not only “not waiting”; I regard my life as already posthumous. It feels great. Do not wake me from this dream of life after life.

**

Waiting was difficult enough, but the real torture used to be ambition. Striving -- I've done plenty of that. I didn’t think I could ever shed ambition, but look! a miracle. Now I can finally enjoy whatever happens, and bless my great good luck. I do wish I could write “After Wisdom,” a poem to celebrate the “marvelous posthumous,” but I'm pretty much past poems (and besides, the best poems are about loss, not about gain).

And I agree with Cecilia that we don’t choose IF we write, or WHAT we write about. Why so many poems about a lost love rather than happy love? We don’t get to choose. Hardly anything is as inspiring lost love. In the case of poets who become immigrants, their greatest love is the lost homeland. But as Milosz wisely warns, you run out of nostalgia (he never quite did, but then his real homeland was not Poland, where he spent his last years, but Lithuania; he chose Kraków because it reminded him of Vilnius).

But before I reached the Happy Posthumous, I did my time in the Depressive Posthumous. The dying of expectations is notoriously painful.

I confess: it wasn’t really the loss of Poland. It wasn’t the loss of a great love. It was the loss of the future. Like thousands of other poets, I was once full of hope that I’d become famous. Not for the sake of the ego; for the sake of having an audience. A poet wants to be read and read. My great dream was having a real audience.

And I had some reasons for hope. Instructors praised my work. Friends praised my work. Strangers would approach me after a reading and ask where they could buy my books. Told I didn’t have any, they’d try to reassure me that it was just a matter of time: “the cream rises to the top.” And of course I wanted to believe Szymborska’s famous lines:

The joy of writing.
The power to preserve.
Revenge of a mortal hand.

Those lines proved true enough for Szymborska, who has gained world fame. Will her work still be read a hundred years from now? We can’t be sure, since trends are bound to change. We live in an age of irony, but maybe a new romanticism is around the corner. Stranger things have happened. Regardless, Szymborska’s best poems deserve to be read for many generations to come. 

But many other excellent poems by less known poets are quickly forgotten, before they even truly find their audience. Poetry is a marginal art, and that’s simply how things are. The joy of writing? Yes, but only in the moment of writing. Later, moments of joy when someone who’s heard the poem during the reading still remembers it ten or more years later (twenty years has been the record so far -- perhaps the limit of my “immortality”).

Yet there is an even greater joy when someone tells me, after a reading, “Your poem really helped me.” I know the poem may not be remembered for long, but at least it reached someone, and had a positive impact. So, the joy of sharing in the moment. The joy of writing (forgetting the agonies; anyway, the best poems come quickly; they write themselves) and the joy of sharing. And the joy, when the poem is good, of knowing that it’s good, even if never gets published. Once I got introduced as “the best least-known poet in America” -- and that still was a true compliment.

THE QUICK AND THE DEAD

This past summer I read and re-read Christian Wiman’s Ambition and Survival, a book for which I was ripe, having come to an end of belief in poetry as a way of life for myself. One chapter in particular affected me profoundly: “In the Flux that Abolishes Me.”

Wiman, the current editor of Poetry magazine, becomes a veritable Ecclesiastes when he writes about the vanity of the hope for a literary afterlife:

Sometimes at Poetry we get manuscripts from dead people. I don’t mean the living dead, though we get those too. I mean the dead dead, who are by this point either singing with choirs of angels or sitting in the eternal workshop that is Hell, but in any event have no access to stamps. The manuscripts come to us by way of the poet’s friends or family, who are occasionally following some last directive of their loved one but more often acting on their own. They want to honor or understand all those hours that John or Mary or Sam or Jane insisted on solitude and silence. They want it to mean something.

 . . . We haven’t yet found anything to publish in these submissions . . . It is very difficult to predict what the readers of the future will choose to preserve, but one thing is certain: they won’t choose much, and they will think we chose badly.

That’s the downside of a life spent trying to write poems. The upside is that no one believes in the downside, not really, not wholly, and not at all in the moments that matter most, when one discovers a poem that seems to speak right through the centuries, or when a new poem of one’s own lights a fire in the mind. What is one believing in then?

Wiman goes on to quote Ruth Pitter (“an English poet who lay down in the dust in 1992, and whose work, it seems, survives in the minds of fewer and fewer people every year”). Pitter wrote:

The mind has suddenly become a great soundboard, echoing far beyond its accustomed range into its own vast borderlands, where lost paradise and hoped for heaven have betaken themselves;l and we are shaken by a cosmic wind, and know ourselves for creatures of a far greater range than we are commonly aware of.

The creative process, especially when the poem rolls out as if we were taking dictation from the unconscious (some poets actually believe they are channeling god), is indeed an exhilarating experience. Doubt as to the wisdom and beauty of the words freshly on the page sets in only later. But even if the new poem survives that stage of doubt, Wiman reminds us that it will not be for long: “If it’s eternity you’re after, verse isn’t going to get you there.”

Wiman cites the magazine’s standard reply to the “manuscripts from the dead”: “We have been very glad to read these poems. These poems have moved us. But we’re not going to be able to use these poems at this time.” I can almost see someone sweeping away autumn leaves, tossing them into trash no matter how beautiful they are. And there is no arguing with Wiman that writing poetry [or any kind of writing] has to be its own reward.

And there is still something else: some of what we said or wrote will live on in an anonymous fashion, since we are really a collective mind, and even something as seemingly personal as a poem is to a significant extent a collective creation.

That’s why I don’t revoke this “pre-posthumous” poem of mine:

THIS IS HOW I WANT TO SURVIVE

On the Baltic, where my life began,
white beaches banked
by dunes and pine,

at the margin of foam I found
a crumb of amber –
a reliquary of an unknown life.

*

Wet shadows ripple the sand.
Seagulls spiral like greedy angels.
Tamed by the grass, the hills

have forgotten granite.
Between the blond grass
and late sun,

at the margin of a dream
I found,
I am suspended in amber.

This is how I want to survive:
lace of a leaf,
shadow of wing –

begun on a Baltic beach,
a dark alphabet
pressed into syllables of light.

~ Oriana © 2012

**

Anonymous, yes. The ripple effect, the immortality of influence. Even if I won’t have any consciousness of it, there is some solace in thinking about continuing to touch the lives of others in a helpful way, however slight – “lace of a leaf, shadow of wing.” 

This larger vision of being anonymous and collective extends far beyond writing. If you don’t like the word “collective,” substitute “connected.” What we do and say does matter because it's not just our own small story, but part of the great story of humanity -- how we manage to sing even under the most difficult circumstances. How we don’t give up. 


Wait, you may say, but haven’t you given up poetry? Yes (or rather: poetry gave me up). But I haven’t given up writing. I shifted to what for me is a larger music.

Issa's most famous haiku is regarded as a great metaphor for human life:

On a branch
floating downriver
a cricket, singing.

~ Issa (1763-1827)

**

I wish to acknowledge Danusha Goska for having said, “It’s not just our own small story, but part of the story of humanity.”

                                                                                                                                                                  Hyacinth:

I like the"greenest green" gives me permission to describe a color as what it is rather than dredge up an image every time. Especially love the ruddy pear image so perfectly fitting to the subject. And the"crumb of amber" -- that is so visual, and the word amber has so many associations.

I think poetry or any writing has to be its own reward. Anne Sexton said that she wrote poetry instead of committing suicide. I'm working on a poem about where and why I write, and I picture the finger of god (Michelangelo) and think I would like to touch someone (just one) with my poetry (much more humbly of course).

Oriana:

When I was in my late twenties and early thirties, I also wrote poetry instead of committing suicide. And even now I can’t imagine life without writing. I considered becoming a hospice volunteer or maybe a wildlife center, taking care of animals. That might be emotionally satisfying. Like every woman, I have a nurturing side. Nature made us to be mothers. But I also know that I need an intellectual outlet, a life of the mind, of ideas. Poetry did not quite satisfy my intellectual side. Now that I mingle the two, and feel I am incredibly lucky. 

John:

When I first started reading seriously, I felt that the kind of concentration I was doing was like nothing else.  I would read a poem or a paragraph in a novel with so much intensity, trying to get to the heart of it and all its wisdom and complexity, that it felt like time was slowing down, that somehow I was creating with my mind a machine that would let me stretch time so that I could pack more and more feeling/thinking into it.  There was reading time and there was real time and real time (with it's everyday, "passing" concentration) was never where I wanted to be.  It's like your experience with Chomsky, I guess.  Your mind working over and through and into a puzzle until every word is linked with every other word and all of it is simultaneously present to you.

The best explanation I ever read of what I felt when I was reading came from Henri Bergson, his sense of Duration, all time interpenetrating all time, time as a rich soup rather than a straight line.  

Oriana:

Yes, the sense of time spent in deep concentration is totally different from the time that's scattered on now answering the phone, now sending a quick email, browsing Facebook -- whatever it is that simply doesn't have depth. It feels like having an attention deficit disorder. Whenever my attention span becomes short, it's like the clutter of life being dumped on my head. Concentration is healing; distraction is destructive.

I suppose meditators and mystics achieve that depth in their way, while intellectuals just reach for a "difficult" book. Up to a point, the more difficult it is, the more satisfying it is. For me: Nietzsche yes, Heidegger no. The meaning must be graspable.

But some of it is simply slowing down, reading very slowly and with total absorption. I'm sure brain imaging would show a different average frequency, and different brain regions involved. Deep concentration is healing. It's very difficult for me to get there by the usual methods described on meditation websites, but sitting down (sometimes lying down -- lotus posture is out of the question, bad for the knees and circulation in general) to demanding reading and being totally with the text, in tremendous quiet, without distraction or interruption -- that's my paradise.

When Joseph Campbell was asked about his spiritual practice, his reply was that he underlines sentences in a book.
 

LARRY LEVIS: A FINE TREMBLING

TO MY GHOST REFLECTED IN THE AUXVASSE RIVER

I’m tired of praising the dead

Tired of ghosts.

I am just sitting in my yard, watching

Thin clouds move above me,

And the grasses are bending in one direction.

This wind has no friend but me;

It is Spring,

And I am addressing you, Spirit,

Because the wheat ripens for no one,

Not for the sky,

Not even for you.

And you, who do not believe in words,

Care less for my life than for a broken comb you’ve left

In a movie theater, or in a bar.

Each day at noon

I used to close my eyes,

And lie alone in the dark, listening.

And you never spoke,

Never uttered the thin prayer that was me.

Or on the long bridges when I drove to work,

You would stare into the river

Until you made yourself think of nothing.

And when you found you could do it,

You were thrilled,

You were like a spider

Moving laboriously, and without thoughts, over a bead

Of water shining in its web.

You stayed out later, and later.

You loved knives, bars, drugs, music.

When you would turn on the radio

And dance alone, in the kitchen

Of the diner,

I kept sweeping.

You have become pure, finally.

You have become that silence just under the water

Where the river turns brown, and slows,

And a stillness rides alone

Over that place –

And I just drive past it, now.

If only I could reach in and pull you out,

Or if only you were a fish,

And then, if you did not speak to me,

As a fish did once, in a dream,

I would slice you up to the stomach and slap

Your head against stone.

And make you flesh,

Even while these flies dance on the rocks.

But I am a stranger, I will pass,

And always, when I bend to drink

From this place, I come up with nothing, with

Broken water, a fine

Trembling in my hands,

Which must be you.

~ Larry Levis, from The Dollmaker’s Ghost

**

For me, the poem starts here (pardon this workshop habit of saying: “The poem starts here”):

It is Spring,

And I am addressing you, Spirit,

Because the wheat ripens for no one . . .

And you, who do not believe in words,

Care less for my life than for a broken comb you’ve left

In a movie theater, or in a bar.

Each day at noon

I used to close my eyes,

And lie alone in the dark, listening.

And you never spoke,

Never uttered the thin prayer that was me.

~ This is a complaint. The transcendent part of the young man, maybe that “larger self” that Adam Zagajewski mentions in his poems, does not seem interested in its container, so to speak – the daily self of the poet. Eventually that part of him becomes “a silence just under the water,” and, later “a fine trembling” in the speaker’s hands. And yet this is not a negative poem, when you consider the beauty of it, especially the beauty of the last lines. The poem illustrates one of the paradoxes of poetry: the content may seem despairing, and yet the reader is left in a state of hushed awe, and nourished with beauty.

Lisa:

I can't help replying again, in reference to the self becoming bigger than one's self. Obviously not even Levis' ghost grew bigger than himself, and he ardently stays shut up (and down) in his own pity. Then, there is "Salmon Boy," who becomes caught up in his separate ego-self until his father spears him and his mother filets him- so that he is left out, exposed to the sun, to become the food for his people - to become one with them, or to become integrated, or to become larger than himself. This is the ancient act of initiation; this is the ancient act of the father, who must give the blow, in order for his son to become "bigger than himself" and his own self- infatuation or self-pity. Oh, I am a bit tired of the one who chooses to remain a stranger and not dip down into the river, not see his own "ghost spirit," not make of it a fish.

Salmon Boy, by David Wagoner

That boy was hungry. His mother gave him Dog Salmon,

Only the head. It was not enough,

And he carried it hungry to the river's mouth

And fell down hungry. Salt water came from his eyes,

And he turned over and over. He turned into it.

And that boy was swimming under the water

With his round eyes open. He could not close them.

He was breathing the river through his mouth.

The river's mouth was in his mouth. He saw stones

Shimmering under him. Now he was Salmon Boy.

He saw the Salmon People waiting. They said, "This water

Is our wind. We are tired of swimming against the wind.

Come to the deep, calm valley of the sea.

We are hungry too. We must find the Herring People."

And they turned their green tails. Salmon Boy followed.

He saw Shell-Walking-Backwards, Woman-Who-Is-Half-Stone.

He heard the long, high howling of Wolf Whale,

Seal Woman's laughter, the whistling of Sea Snake,

Saw Loon Mother flying through branches of seaweed,

Felt Changer turn over far down in his sleep.

He followed to the edge of the sky where it opens

And closes, where Moon opens and closes forever,

And the Herring People brought feasts of eggs,

As many as stars, and Salmon Boy ate the stars

As if he flew among them, saying Hungry, Hungry.

But the Post of Heaven shook, and the rain fell

Like pieces of Moon, and the Salmon People swam,

Tasting sweet, saltless wind under the water,

Opening their mouths again to the river's mouth,

And Salmon Boy followed, full-bellied, not afraid.

He swam fastest of all. He leaped in the air

And smacked his blue-green silvery side, crying, Eyo!

I jump! again and again. Oh, he was Salmon Boy!

He could breathe everything! He could see everything!

He could eat everything! And then his father speared him.

He lay on the riverbank with his eyes open,

Saying nothing while his father emptied his belly.

He said nothing when his mother opened him wide

To dry in the sun. He was full of the sun.

All day he dried on sticks, staring upriver.

**

Oriana:

Well, I am glad there is the "feeding the people" communal meaning that we can give to the Salmon Boy's final condition.

Larry Levis’s poem delights me with its marvelous lines, and frustrates me at the same time – and then delights me again when we get to the "fine trembling."

If not for the title, I could see this as an address to God – Kurt Vonnegut's God the Utterly Indifferent. It's possible that this kind of god loves humanity, but not on an individual basis. And perhaps the poem can be perceived as being addressed simultaneously to the speaker's spirit, a detached internal Witness and fearless dancer, and to God the Utterly Indifferent. It's not Teresa of Avila exclaiming, "If only we took care to remember what a Guest we have within  . . . "

But let us remember that the image knows more than the poet, and while the speaker seems dejected not to receive more ego satisfaction, to be only a temporary container, if that much, the images of water, shining, stillness, the "silence just under the water" and finally the "fine trembling" add up to beauty and mystery. Anyone who has had the experience of filling his hands with water from a stream and seeing the fine trembling knows how wonderful that looks and feels, that little bit of water dancing in your hands, shining and alive. I am in awe that Larry Levis identifies this beautiful trembling with his spirit. Even though before that he says, "I come up with nothing," that is eclipsed by the luminosity of the final image and the discovery. And the lyricism seduces me too.

Aside from the ending, the part about the spirit dancing in the diner kitchen while the young man keeps sweeping is also unforgettable. So we have this man doing a menial job, but his spirit – or the Spirit – celebrates himself. Later we get the flies dancing on the rocks – dancing, not just swarming. Come to think of it, the fine trembling could also be seen as a kind of dancing. It's an image combining fragility and a great, invincible vitality.

Alas, there is no human community here, and the greater wisdom that would come from relatedness. This could be read as a portrait of an isolated individual sulking that Something Greater does not deign to speak to him. Inside our mind is a cosmic mind, the Upanishads say. Presumably the cosmic mind is connected with everything, but we have to know how to tune in to it – maybe by losing the preoccupation of the self. Some believe there is an angel inside us, or walking near us – an immigrant who makes us long for another place. Or maybe, on the contrary, it’s an angel of this life, this world, not one of inaccessible angels in Rilke but the Stevensian Angel of Reality, one who says Look! Look now while there is a chance.

Because Levis does this looking at the world – he does not merely contemplate himself – there is a poem behind the poem here, a poem of images wiser than the poet. For me those images align along the lines of an amazing New York Times article called "Happy like God." Let me offer just one sentence of it:

To be like God is to be without time, or rather in time with no concern for time, free of the passions and troubles of the soul, experiencing something like calm in the face of things and of oneself.

And here is Levis:

You have become that silence just under the water

Where the river turns brown, and slows,

And a stillness rides alone

Over that place –

Levis says it better, because he uses the power of images, so he speaks beyond himself, in a larger fashion – even if he doesn't quite know it. He uses archetypal nature images such as water. As Jung said, "He who speaks through archetypes speaks with a thousand voices."

Lisa:

Oriana, an apology for what sounded a bit reactionary. I was very wrapped up with a student of mine – one who I adore, one who is really suffering, and this poem you sent really brought it up for me! This "being a stranger" – lost in the world even to oneself, was just too painful to face this last week. However, I am revisiting this poem, which I do love, and which is so very beautiful. 

This "you have become pure...where the river turns brown," and this ghost of oneself that is irretrievable and was, perhaps, never within grasp anyway, 

this "nothingness" which is the water of life itself –that which makes our body say to itself, 
"Yes, I am here in all of this brilliant wonder."

**

Oriana:

Your post is lovely, showing your sensitivity both on the human level – the suffering student – and on the cosmic level of union with nature. 

I was indeed somewhat confused by your initial reaction, but no problem. You did make it all the more clear for me that in many poems Larry Levis is indeed this perpetual isolated adolescent, though in his mature work he can write some magical lines, and the self-pity universalizes, transfers onto all of us.

Nevertheless, I think human life has a meaning chiefly within a social network, and very few can sustain communing with nature as a source of meaning. And Levis does have some excellent poems that center on others, be it his father or the Mexican grape pickers. He makes those people enter our psyche. I think one of the central tasks of a poet is to expand our empathy.

Going back to the poem, just the fact that Levis addresses his spirit/Spirit is already amazing. True, there is a poetic tradition of the poet speaking to his soul, but Larry's poem feels quite different.

I would like you to read Szymborska's poem on the soul because I think that it says some of the same things, though it says it very differently. Levis uses the power of the image, risking obscurity; Szymborska is plain and clear, and we admire her mainly because what she says is so unexpected. Both poets appear to say that the soul/spirit has its own agenda.

A Few Words on the Soul

We have a soul at times.
No one’s got it non-stop,
for keeps.

Day after day,
year after year
may pass without it.

Sometimes
it will settle for awhile
only in childhood’s fears and raptures.
Sometimes only in astonishment
that we are old.

It rarely lends a hand
in uphill tasks,
like moving furniture,
or lifting luggage,
or going miles in shoes that pinch.

It usually steps out
whenever meat needs chopping
or forms have to be filled.

For every thousand conversations
it participates in one,
if even that,
since it prefers silence.

Just when our body goes from ache to pain,
it slips off-duty.

It’s picky:
it doesn’t like seeing us in crowds,
our hustling for a dubious advantage
and creaky machinations make it sick.

Joy and sorrow
aren’t two different feelings for it.
It attends us
only when the two are joined.

We can count on it
when we’re sure of nothing
and curious about everything.

Among the material objects
it favors clocks with pendulums
and mirrors, which keep on working
even when no one is looking.

It won’t say where it comes from
or when it’s taking off again,
though it’s clearly expecting such questions.

We need it
but apparently
it needs us
for some reason too.

~ Wisława Szymborska, translated by Stanislaw Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh

**

After Levis's lush images, we may feel disappointed by this kind of witty, cerebral poem. Tough . . . It takes all kinds. I want to point out the similarities, though. Here too the soul is very elusive, and mostly absent from tasks that bore it. Note:

For every thousand conversations
it participates in one,
if even that,
since it prefers silence.

and note also this stanza:

Joy and sorrow
aren’t two different feelings for it.
It attends us
only when the two are joined.

*

I also love it that the soul settles

Sometimes only in astonishment
that we are old.

~ or growing older. It's definitely astonishing. Don't we always feel younger -- much younger -- than we are? In dreams, don't we even look younger by far, not to mention that the dead are both dead and alive -- though in a dream, when we look in the mirror, we may see our hair suddenly gone white. Let us sit a while with this astonishment, let's offer it food and drink.

Actually the line that haunts me is the one about the soul's preferring clocks with pendulums. You don't see those very often anymore, and what a loss! There is a meditative quality about the pendulum's going back and forth, back and forth . . .

Even just the round dial and the march of the three hands, each at a different speed, those are evocative as well. Again, the power of the image. What is happening to our world as we go digital? What about that ad for a CD that will preserve your photos for 300 years?

Lisa:

On a more spiritual note . . . or are we always playing one spiritual note 
after another, even as we brush our damn teeth one more time and head 
off to work (smile - hopefully fresh and white), here is a response
to Salmon Boy from one of my music making, Kirtan playing, dear, dear 
friends:

Somehow, I think this is all of our fate . . . like the crucifixion... or
the death of the personal self. At some point, life is going to turn
us all back into itself... into God... into love. The Sufis believe
that the true idol to be destroyed is the self; and love, passionate
love, is the Divine's method of awakening us to that which is beyond
our self. Thus the lover may dissolve into love . . .

Kahlil Gibran says about love:

Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself.
He threshes you to make you naked.
He sifts you to free you from your husks.
He grinds you to whiteness.
He kneads you until you are pliant;
And then he assigns you to his sacred fire, that you may become sacred
bread for God's sacred feast.

**

Oriana:

My metaphor is giving blood rather than crucifixion. I'm still very uncomfortable with the last image in the Salmon Boy poem. But I do like Gibran's poem, and yes, life does that to us, to women in particular  . . . it teaches us that it's not about our little isolated self. Meaning lies in how we touch the lives of others.

Emily Dickinson put it well:

If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,

Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

(919)

Note that kindness to animals certainly counts for Dickinson. Our connection is not limited only to human beings.

I do not remember the source, but somewhere I read the beautiful statement that if you plant a tree, that already means you have not lived in vain.

I love this fusion of mystical insight from all traditions. Anna Kamienska says

I don't believe in the other world
But I don't believe in this one either
unless it's pierced by light

My ideal is to live from greatness, from generosity. For many years, I lived – at least in private – from my wounds. People kept saying, "You have so much to give," but I felt there was no right outlet, no takers. What I had to give was not wanted, I thought. The riches of my psyche were of no interest to others, my poems too difficult, too full of ideas, and my ideas too complex. But about two years ago – better late than never – I saw that the notion that life isn't long enough to recover from one's wounds need not be true. It's not about healing or not healing one’s wounds. It's about transcending them through the daily practice of generosity.