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 . . .

DOSTOYEVSKI AND LOUISE HAY

photo: Qarrtsiluni

* * *

My grandson Woody 

fell in love with a pine cone once in Yosemite. 
By statute, you are not allowed to carry anything out of the park, 
but no one, not even the ranger, could separate that young man
from the single pine cone almost as big as his head 
he had chosen for his soul to feast upon. 

They open, you know, as roses do, pine cones, 
from being tightly wrapped in themselves 
to being how we all might become
this very moment, pointy, sinewy,
and ready for the fire of someone else’s presence.

~ an excerpt from Coleman Barks, “Lightning Bugs and the Pleiades”

It’s a wonderful observation, that pine cones open as roses do, from being “tightly wrapped in themselves” to being ready for the fire of someone else’s presence. But what is it that makes us ready to open to another human, rather than staying defensively wrapped up in ourselves? I’ll explore this using the unlikely duo of Dostoyevski’s experiences in the Siberian prison, that “House of the Dead,” and Louise Hay’s rise from victimhood and the central principle behind You Can Heal Your Life.

Do I hear someone say, Oriana, are you out of your mind? Dostoyevski and who? Outrageous? Yes. You won’t find a post like this anywhere else in the known universe.

*

But first I must say that I am stunned and delighted by the phrase “the fire of someone else’s presence.” I can’t imagine this poem being written before the twentieth century. Ascribing so much power to a “mere” human being would be seen as blasphemous (think how often we say, even now, with derision: “It’s only human”). The readiness to open to love, here metaphorically rendered as the pine cone opening up, would need to be translated into religious (“Someone Else” would be capitalized so as not to be mistaken for a “mere human”), or vaguely transcendental terms (think Wordsworth, Emerson – divinized Nature with a capital N).

It’s only now, in the recent decades, that we have become more and more humane – and with it, more able to see the beauty and power of being human. Yes, the road ahead is still long, but let’s admit how much has been accomplished. At last we are ready to celebrate how extraordinary it is to be human. No, we are not sinful, not inferior, not “fallen” and evil by nature (the toxic harvest of toxic religions). Only now we realize that it is high time to drop the emphasis on sin and punishment, and instead to acknowledge the transforming power of human love (affection might be a better term, I’d argue), the powerful impact that one individual can have on another.

Ah, the fire of someone else’s presence – that’s the power of the mystery of another human being. We experience that power when we fall in love. Passion and fire – is there an older metaphor? It’s the greatest feast life has to give. But it’s a dangerous feast – fire burns. A storm must end, the glory of a sunset fade. Erotic passion is not for daily life. It’s too close to mania; the brain cannot keep on producing its own stimulants (a brain in love lights up on a PET scan very much like a brain on cocaine). There is another fire to keep us warm, a healing green fire – that’s affection. The warmth of someone else’s presence.

When children are brought up harshly (“spare the rod and spoil the child”), with a lot of criticism and punishment, they interiorize the harshness and pass on the violations that they themselves experienced. But when a lot of affection is given to a child, the child interiorizes the affection. The popular self-help author Louise Hay, of all people, rather than any of the big names in academic psychology, opened my eyes to this simple but extremely powerful phenomenon. The triumph of the Nazis (bullies, etc) is to make you feel ashamed of yourself; to make you believe you really are an Untermensch, a subhuman. It’s more efficient when you punish yourself.

Stop punishing yourself, Louise Hay says. Immediately stop criticizing yourself. “But how can I improve unless I criticize myself?” you may ask. You’ll never improve until you stop verbally abusing yourself, Hay replies. You are scolding the three-year-old that you were. You are slapping your own hand for reaching toward some forbidden beauties. 

So the real first commandment is: “Stop criticizing yourself.” Could it be that simple? Yes. It’s stunning. It’s revolutionary. The more affection you give to yourself, Hay states, the more little gifts and endearments you shower on yourself, the healthier and stronger you will be, capable of accomplishing more than you dared dream of.

Nietzsche was wrong. It’s not suffering that makes you stronger. It’s loving yourself. And loving yourself is the only therapy that Louise Hay prescribes. “When people come to me with a problem, I don’t care what it is  . . . there is only one thing I ever work on, and that is LOVING THE SELF.” [emphasis in the text].

“Loving the self begins with never criticizing ourselves for anything. Criticism locks us into the very pattern we are trying to change. Understanding and being gentle with ourselves helps us to move out of it . . . It is as if little miracles are everywhere. Our health improves, we attract more money, our relationships become much more fulfilling, and we begin to express ourselves in creatively fulfilling ways. All this seems to happen without our even trying.”

“It’s not because you are fat that you don’t love yourself,” Hay says to an obese client. “You are fat because you don’t love yourself.” The diet she prescribes is the “mental diet” of nourishing yourself with loving thoughts, with tenderness. Praise yourself for taking even the tiniest steps, Hay advises. Do loving things for yourself. Be as tender to yourself as you’d be to a lover (for women in particular, this is a revolutionary proposition: that they could give to themselves what they give to a lover).

Knowing how frightening it can be for someone raised without sufficient affection to love herself, Hay suggests the affirmation: It is safe to love myself.  Repeat this a hundred times a day, for as long as it takes to embrace the idea.

Hay speaks with the authority of personal knowledge of hell. Raped by an alcoholic neighbor at the age of five, physically and sexually abused by her violent stepfather, she ran away from home at fifteen. She worked at menial jobs and had a series of abusive relationships. On her sixteenth birthday she gave up her newborn daughter for adoption; she never saw her child again. The husband she loved left her to marry another. She was diagnosed with cervical cancer – but, already on her way to building a different life, she managed to get well using alternative medicine. By learning to accept and love herself without judgment, she rose from victimhood to being a successful author and businesswoman. You Can Heal Your Life has sold over forty million copies all over the world.

She speaks in a calm, soothing, non-judgmental voice. “People who love themselves and their bodies neither abuse themselves nor others,” Hay says. They find it easy and natural to give affection to others. And in accordance with the saying that as we give, so we receive, affection flows to the affectionate.

It’s easy to ridicule the New Age aspect of Louise Hay’s philosophy and dismiss it all as wishful thinking. Physicians would be appalled by her theories of health and disease (which she insists on spelling “dis-ease,” to show the mind-body connection). But her intuitive psychology, her one healing principle put in the simplest of words, cuts a path of light through the murk of various psychotherapies. I sense that with her principle of unconditional affection for yourself she is getting at something monumentally important.

Do not dwell on your problems, she warns: “Whatever you give attention to, increases” (this is perfectly in line with the view that neurosis is paying attention to the wrong things). When she says, “Immediately stop terrorizing yourself,” this may sound exaggerated to those who have not experienced the phenomenon. I have. Likewise, I have seen the “little miracles” of giving affection to yourself – as well as receiving it from even one person. All it takes is just one person. Or even a dog.

In fact I once saw a tremendous personal transformation in a bitter, sarcastic woman when she got a dog. That was enough: love entered her life. She put a photo of her husky on her desk, and grew radiant when she looked at it. In a very short time, people began to like her, even to adore her. She went from bitter to sweet, and all because of a dog’s simple affection. I can’t really call it a “little miracle”; it’s one of the most amazing miracles I’ve ever witnessed.

And it reminds me of the time I briefly taught in prison, and had the inmates write about their pet. Smiles blossomed on their faces, miraculously softened and filled with affection. Several stated in their short essays, “My dog was the only friend I had.” They read those words without any bitterness, still grateful for the unconditional affection.

“MONSTERS IN THEIR MISERY”

On the other hand, there is Sartre’s famous l’enfer, c’est les autres: “Hell is other people.” Reading about Dostoyevski’s four years in a Siberian prison, his years in the “house of the dead,” “buried alive and closed in a coffin,” I am still astonished that he even survived this hell, much less gone on to become both a great writer and a loving person (“My husband worshipped me,” his second wife, Anna, writes in her memoirs).

Soon after his release in February 1854 (“The fetters fell off. I picked them up, I wanted to hold them in my hand, to look at them for the last time. I seemed already to be wondering that they could have been on my feet a minute ago”) Dostoyevski’s wrote to his brother:

We lived in a heap, all together in one barrack [150 men] . . . In summer, intolerable closeness; in winter, unendurable cold. All the floors were rotten. The floor was covered with over an inch and a half of filth; one could slip and fall. The little windows were so covered with frost that it was almost impossible to read at any time of day. An inch of ice on the panes. Drips from the ceiling, draughts everywhere. We were packed like herrings in a barrel. The stove took six logs at once, but there was no warmth (the ice in the room barely thawed), only unbearable fumes . . . There was no room to turn around. From twilight until dawn no one is allowed outside to take care of his needs, for the barracks are locked, and a tub is set in the passage, and consequently the stench is unbearable. All convicts stink like pigs, and they say it is impossible not to act like pigs . . . We slept on bare boards and were allowed only a pillow. We spread our sheepskin coats over us, and our feet were always uncovered. We shivered all night. Fleas, lice, and cockroaches by the bushel . . .

But an even worse ordeal was being surrounded by constant hatred: “. . . the eternal hostility and quarrelling around one, the wrangling, shouting, uproar, din . . . the clanking of chains [the inmates wore shackles], shaved heads, branded faces, ragged clothes.” And this, somehow, is what I can imagine most vividly: the incessant cursing and quarrels, obscene songs, gambling, drunken brawls (illegal vodka was easily obtained), the thievery, the hatred of all for all.

And then there was the sadistic overseer, the purple-faced Major Krivtsov with his drunken rages, invading the barracks at night and waking the exhausted prisoners if they slept on their backs or the right side. Those caught sleeping on their right side were flogged, since, according to Krivtsov, Christ always slept on his left side and everyone was required to follow his example.

(Fortunately Krivtsov’s reign of terror ended after two years; he was arrested, tried for misconduct, and removed from government service.)

Dostoyevski's "mock execution"

It was after reading this harrowing account in Joseph Frank’s biography that I considered again Anna’s simple statement: “My husband worshipped me.” Dostoyevski was also a loving father: he stayed up nights when the children were sick. I’m embarrassed to admit that until recently I thought only dogs had that kind of capacity to forgive abuse and be all affection again when shown kindness – forgetting that my own grandmother Veronika was not emotionally destroyed by Auschwitz, as was true of most of the survivors, aside from some inevitable degree of post-traumatic disorder.

Dostoyevski’s physical health suffered, his epilepsy worsened – though luckily he had some respite during his frequent stays in the prison hospital, which Frank describes as a “fetid ward” where one risked catching an infection, but where he could rest from the “morally unbearable” prison life. Yet in spite of the “total stifling of the soul” during those prison years, his writer’s mind survived, as did his capacity for love.

At first being surrounded by hatred took its toll. In a letter, Dostoyevski confessed:

There were moments when I hated everyone I came across, innocent or guilty, and looked at them as thieves who were robbing me of my life with impunity. The most unbearable misfortune is when you yourself become unjust, malignant, vile; you realize it, you even reproach yourself – but you just can’t help it.

THE PEASANT MAREY

Luckily, something happened that made it possible for him to see the inmates with new eyes. It was an involuntary memory of the affectionate help he received once, when he was a terrified nine-year-old, from “the peasant Marey,” one of his father’s serfs. The boy was walking through the woods when he thought he heard someone shout, “Wolf!” He ran out of the woods toward the peasant he saw plowing nearby. Joseph Frank recounts:

The surprised Marey halted work to soothe the white-faced and trembling child, and assured him that no one had shouted and no wolf was near. Dostoyevski recalled Marey smiling at him gently “like a mother,” blessing him with the sign of the cross and crossing himself, and then sending him home with the reassurance that he would be kept in sight. [Dostoyevski writes: “Only God, perhaps, saw from above what deep and enlightened human feeling, what delicate, almost womanly tenderness, could fill the heart of a coarse, bestially ignorant Russian peasant serf . . . ”]

The memory of Marey’s kindness made Dostoyevski get up from his plank bed with a smile on his lips. “I gazed around, and suddenly felt I could look on these unfortunates with quite different eyes, and suddenly, as if by miracle, all hatred and rancor had vanished from my heart. I walked around, looking attentively at the faces that I met. That despised peasant with shaven head and brand marks on his face, reeling with drink, bawling out his hoarse, drunken song – why, he may be that very Marey; after all, I am not able to look into his heart.” (p. 209 -210)

Dostoyevski became interested in the inmates’ life stories. Except for a couple of clear psychopaths, he discovered a pattern of heart-rending abuse, of previous suffering worse than that experienced in prison. Thus he learned to separate the essential humanity of the inmates from the “alluvial barbarism” and to find “diamonds in this filth.”

WORK AND HOPE

He also noted that when they were allowed to work on their own projects, producing articles they could sell to the local population to earn a little money, for the duration of the task the prisoners were transformed into quiet, dedicated workers. Dostoyevski writes: “If it were not for his private work to which he was devoted with his whole mind, his whole interest, a man could not live in prison.” It wasn’t the money, which they typically wasted on drink, that motivated them; it was the self-chosen skilled work that humanized these men and, unlike forced labor, gave them obvious pleasure.

Dostoyevski also saw the immense importance of hope. A man can endure anything if he intensely concentrates on hope. One of the writer’s most nightmarish recollections is that of prisoners chained to a wall in the Tobolsk prison (Tobolsk, in Western Siberia, was a transit point for most convicts). Not able to move more than seven feet from the wall, and kept like that for five or even ten years, they were surprisingly quiet and well-behaved. “I will tell you why,” Dostoyevski writes in The House of the Dead. The man on a chain can endure it because he has hope; he knows his sentence will end. “He will get out of the stifling dark room with its low vaulted roof of brick, and will walk in the prison yard . . .  and that is all. He will never be allowed out of the prison . . . He knows that and yet he is desperately eager for the end of his time on the chain. But for that longing how could he remain five or six years on the chain without dying or going out of his mind?”

Dostoyevski's monument in Omsk

A WORLD WHERE EVERYONE IS KIND

Doing the work you love and the importance of affection: two of my central themes. So far I have written mainly about the healing power of dedicated work. But I also strongly believe in the healing power of affection. I’m insatiable for affection: kindness, respect, non-violent communication, gentleness, tenderness.

Cruelty versus kindness, the emotional damage caused by abuse versus the healing power of affection – that’s the eternal story of humanity. Steven Pinker, in his The Better Angels of Our Nature, amply supports the claim that violence has remarkably diminished. Robert Wright, in The Evolution of God, points out that as hardship decreases and life becomes more secure, religion becomes less cruel, with more and more emphasis on kindness and compassion. Personally I suspect that the greatest factor in the decrease of violence (at least in the developed world) has been less abusive child rearing, with widespread knowledge that children thrive on affection.

Hay may not explicitly say it, but her book makes it clear that not loving yourself  stems from being ashamed of yourself. When you don’t love yourself, it’s not just that you are not particularly fond of yourself. It’s always worse than that: you are ashamed of yourself, you feel inferior, a failure. And this is where Hay and Dostoyevski meet. When Fyodor Karamazov, the father, comes to visit the monastery and plays the buffoon, Father Zosima tells him, Don’t be so ashamed of yourself, for this alone is the cause of everything.

Astonished Reader, do you see Louise Hay nodding her head? Do you find a sequel of Dostoyevski’s insight in Hay’s insistence that you must be “willing to release the need to be unworthy” and “immediately stop criticizing yourself”? Do not belittle yourself, Hay says, and then you will not belittle others. Be kind to yourself, and then you will be kind of others “Be loving, and you will be lovable.” Don’t be so ashamed of yourself; love yourself, and you will be loved.

Someone said that maybe heaven is our dream of a world where everyone is kind. Imagine! This is what we must imagine, a community of kindness and not some city in the clouds, of jasper and gold. If we must make gods in our own image, as humanity as done for tens of thousands of years, then let god be affection. I could run into the arms of affection.

But before I do, let me end with a poem of mine that I know is minor, but revives a memory that is close to my heart:

BAD DOG

“When will you lose the dog again?”

I was sure my cousin Stash would tease,

greeting me after twenty-seven years.

Medor was Uncle Dobroslav’s piesek,

a handsome German shepherd.

I took him for walks along the river,

to chestnut tree-shaded parks.

One time I lost him; Stash, the hero,

found him the evening of the same day.

But Stash never mentioned Medor.

Head tilted in concentration,

he studied me for a moment:

“What did I use to call you?

Ah, yes, królevna.” A royal princess.

I cringed, just as I did then.

“Do you remember that bad dog?”

he suddenly asked; reminded me,

across the Vistula we had visited someone

who kept a “bad dog” on a chain.

The dog had once bitten Stash

and two of his friends.

In the end, Stash said, the dog broke loose

and charged a group of passing soldiers,

who shot him dead.

But the day we visited when I was a girl,

I did not see a vicious dog.

I saw a dog on a chain,

and felt sorry for him.

The grown-ups were busy talking.

I went out into the yard.

When he came out to look for me,

Stash froze with terror.

The dog had both paws on my shoulders.

“Oh God, what if he bites her

on the cheek,” Stash thought.

But the bad dog was licking my face.

What a gift, that my cousin remembered.

I was no longer the bumbling girl

who’d lost the family dog,

but a royal princess, a magical child

who’d tamed a dangerous animal.

Now I remembered: Piesek, pieseczek,

I spoke to the dog, slowly coming closer.

Piesuniu, I spoke caressingly.

The dog squealed faintly, stretching his neck

to smell me, greet me. And I let him.

“That was such a bad dog,”

Stash said, still wincing after years.

~ Oriana © 2012

**

Scott:

Your opening poem reminded me very much of a favorite haiku of mine by Paul Muldoon:

I, too, nailed a coin

to the mast of the Pequod.

A tiny pinecone.

Dostoevsky's prison experiences were akin to Melville's time aboard 3 whalers as well as his service aboard a Navy frigate. Like the Russian writer, he was confined for months at a time with men from all walks of life – but now forced, for better or worse, to survive their experiences together as best they could. Melville recounts in his semi-autobiographical 'White-Jacket' how, like Dostoevsky, he was spared at the last minute from receiving a flogging for some minor infraction. This was thanks to an act of kindness in which a shipmate interceded for him in his defense.

You are so right on the mark in your emphasis on kindness. I can think of few character traits as important as the simple act of showing a fellow 'shipmate' of the world (as again, Melville pointed out in the aforementioned novel, how the world we inhabit is truly a 'celestial frigate' and we all share its voyage) the simple act of a kind word or action.

Oriana:

When I think who in American literature is most like Dostoyevski, Melville’s name comes up immediately. Of course no one in the whole world literature is quite like Dostoyevski, with his fearless intensity and characters who stand for ideas, but nevertheless seize our imagination in an unforgettable way. But when I think of the demonic character of Captain Ahab, he could (aside from the whaling context) be a character out of Dostoyevski.  He also seems to be in hell in a way that Father Zosima defines hell: not as a place, but as a state of mind: specifically, no longer being able to love. (Zosima’s views are not really those of the Russian Orthodox church; Anna Akhmatova called Dostoyevski a “heresiarch.”)

Jack London’s Sea Wolf also comes to my mind as Dostoyevskian in a minor way, trying to present a demonic character who is like Nietzschean Overman, setting himself  beyond good and evil, the opposite of “slave morality.” But in all of American literature, it seems to me, only Moby Dick deals with the great questions of psychology and philosophy the way Dostoyevski does.

Scott, you mention barely escaping flogging. This happened to Dostoyevski as well. The sadistic Krivtsov gave the order and preparations were being made, when, alerted by a messenger sent by a cadet friendly toward political prisoners, the general in charge of the prison arrived in the last minute to countermand the order. So in the inferno of the prison, Dostoyevski also experienced instances of kindness that must have seemed miraculous. And Zosima's ideas of universal brotherhood and how we are all responsible for all seem at least somewhat similar to the kind of brotherhood that develops among Melville's crewmen. 

Hyacinth:

I don’t see you as "late in life." You are just beginning. I am so happy you have reached the conclusions you have, and are able to think well of yourself and all you've come through and accomplished. I agree with Louise Hay that we must say only good things to ourselves and praise ourselves. I tend to yell at myself for mistakes – not good.

Oriana:

I’ve had my awakening – “It’s too late in life to be depressed” – just in the nick of time. Lateness is a relative term – once we are adults, it’s “too late” for wasting time being miserable when we could be happy and productive. Or, to use an alternate phrase, “Life is too short to be chronically depressed.” My apologies for always coming back to that special moment when I finally understood this.

I was very lucky to have had that “moment of truth” at a time when energy and health were still sufficient for accomplishing something. Ten years from now I know there will be special challenges. So I want to acquire all the wisdom I can, and do as much as I can while it’s still possible.  

Louise Hay, no intellectual, made a discovery that may not seem like much, and it didn’t originate with her – she just put it in the perfect sound-bytes. You yell at yourself because you got yelled at. We interiorize whatever abuse we’ve received, and abuse ourselves even more severely . . .  To use an extreme example, children in concentration camps played at being Nazis. When we are young and powerless, we imitate whoever has power. Afterwards, we’re on automatic – unless we experience an awakening.

When it comes to verbal self-abuse, I could certainly outdo any mere childhood bully. Oddly, though, in adulthood I always did it in English. Since I am bilingual, you’d think I’d call myself “stupid” in Polish for a greater emotional effect, but that simply didn’t happen. Taking Louise’s advice, I tried to use endearments in my self-talk, and those are strictly in Polish. The English endearments, few as they are, have almost zero effect. Polish has rococo endearments, hundreds of them, thousands (since every name can be transformed into several affectionate forms). Fortunately, these have blissful emotional power to make me feel loved. I never dreamed that something in my native language would be my best therapy. There are certain Polish words that never fail to relax me and make me smile. It’s like Dostoyevski’s memory of the kind peasant Marey, except that a single word is enough.

Charles:

I love the opening poem. It sounds like one of your poems.

And the first few paragraphs – the green fire of affection – the prose sounds like a poem.

Oriana:

Oh, how I wish I had a pine-cone poem. I love pine cones and have seen plenty of those huge ones, and yes, have been tempted to steal at least one. I vaguely remember that I did, long ago, though from a national forest rather than a park. The cone got lost somehow in the chaos of moving, one of life’s lessons showing me it’s not the thing but its image that survives, becoming magical in memory and especially in art.

My blogs are uneven in terms of artistic level. I like to be literary when it happens without much effort (oh, what a confession). But the blog is my “communications playfield” and much of the time I want to communicate clearly, directly, without metaphor. After decades of writing mostly poetry, where you are so constrained, so terrorized into “show, don’t tell,” I want to tell and tell and tell!

The price is being inartistic. But once I understood that my poems, no matter how artistic, will not live on – and better poems than mine won’t live on either – that’s the current reality if you are not super-famous – once I stopped deluding myself and understood that 99.99% of poems, too, are only of the moment, I realized that I might as well have fun writing. The blog has been an avalanche of pleasure. 

Darlene:

I agree that this post is unique, but . . . there is a reason. We don’t write posts like “French cuisine and MacDonald’s.”

Oriana:

Darlene, you’re breaking my heart :) I was already planning a sequel of posts: Tolstoy and Deepak Chopra; Henry James and Madame Blavatsky; Kafka and Richard Carlson (Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff ); Proust and Oprah.

Seriously, there is a strong theme of feeling guilty and ashamed of yourself versus unconditional self-love and self-acceptance. There is also the theme of not judging others. When Louise says, “We are the victims of victims,” that’s a magnificent call to understand rather than take revenge (either by becoming victimizers, or by internalizing the abuser and punishing ourselves). Break the chain, she says. What Dostoyevski says is more complex, but I think it’s close to “You are a beloved child, and so are others. Be loving toward everyone.

I admit I’m pushing the envelope here, but both Dostoyevski and Louise managed to survive horrible stuff, and emerged not as victims but victors. Both ended up with insights that provide resilience.

I don’t fully share the belief system of either author. The point is to “take the best and leave the rest.” One of the many wonderful things about the modern times as contrasted with the past is that you can be selective. You don’t have to swallow anything whole. For whatever reason, in any religion and philosophy, wisdom is mixed with garbage, or maybe just archaic stuff that no longer applies. Let’s be selective. Let’s be VERY selective.