SAINT JOAN SPEAKS TO ME

May 30 marks the anniversary of the death of Jeanne d'Arc, my patron saint (it used to frighten me when I thought about the challenge of following the example of her courage). This anniversary reminded me of an extraordinary dream I had some years ago.

Saint Joan Speaks to Me 

I am walking down the cobbled

streets of Rouen. Cabbage leaves

blacken in the gutter.
In the square they are burning

Joan of Arc. Her eyes are

transparent with light.

She says, Truth is a torch,

but it makes a beautiful blaze.

The crowd is weeping.

Her lips are charred

doors of light. She says,

A dead body is only a dead body.

How can we tell ash from soul

unless we too rise,

a blue heron of smoke

slanting into flight –

that pulse of a wing so slow,

so soaring when she says,

We are all burning.

Be a greater fire.

~ Oriana

(published in Qarrtsiluni; image credit: Qarrtsiluni)

**

While there is certainly a universal meaning here, at the time I had the dream, I was most affected by the message "A dead body is only a dead body." It seemed a stern warning against suicide, even in the face of shattered dreams, of what seemed like complete defeat. 


For a long time I was hoping for a religious conversion. I was afraid that without religion, the terror of dying would become more pronounced as I grew older, more and more unbearable. It's only recently that I noticed all the cherubic, blissed out old people I've been meeting all my life, without paying attention to how they could be so happy with "God so far and death so near." 


Cheerful octogenarians! It's most likely the changed neurochemistry that comes with aging, the weakened function of the left hemisphere as the right hemisphere still holds out, the dominance of serotonin over the more quickly ebbing dopamine, but study after study keeps confirming that "older is happier." The burden of worry and anxiety about the future seems gone -- what future? No worries, no regrets. With less thinking, "living in the now" is finally easy. 


But before then? It seems to me that it's not a question of the "power of now" -- not when you are forced to plan for the future and make difficult decisions. Not when your life can be turned upside down by some unexpected event. For me, it's a question of having my "life support": creative work, music, my love of nature and beauty in general -- and friendship. I am still stunned by the realization that that is enough. 


No need to enter Carmel -- though I feel I have entered my own inner Carmel. The steady light, and not the storms and shipwrecks of youth. Reading slowly and re-reading ten times, rather than "reading by lightning." It's the steady light of work and contentment that is that brighter fire. It's the immense patience that an artist finally masters, learning to create as if time didn't exist, and that ride with Death and Immortality (see Dickinson) would never end. 


As Zbigniew Herbert puts it in his poem "A Sign":


you have to dream patiently
in the hope that the text will complete itself
missing words will find their way
into crippled sentences
the certainty we are waiting for
will cast anchor


(~ translated by Oriana)

So it's by taking your time, rather than by rushing from task to task, keeping madly busy, that you can become a brighter fire. It's in the slowness of days that we can burn at white heat. 


***

A DREAM ABOUT "GREEN MOUNTAIN"

I dreamed that Cecilia and a friend of hers were up on a high tower, waving to me from the top window. Cecilia shouted, with happy excitement, "I found a place in Poland with no trace of the war! Here, in Zielona Gora!"

Somehow I was in California, and yet I could see Cecilia up in the highest window and hear her call to me across those thousands of miles. How happy she was to have made this astonishing discovery: a place in Poland unstained by WWII.

Zielona Gora is a town in Silesia; the name means "Green Mountain." I knew the name well, but had never been there. I woke up and googled the town, the dream beating within me like a little green heart of hope. Yes, there was the tower! Alas, soon enough I found what looked like a war memorial, similar to countless others, though rather humble. In terms of quantity, this town was apparently relatively unstained by war. 

Pondering the dream, I thought that maybe the name of the town, dormant in me for decades, turned up because not long ago I saw the movie "Greenberg" (i.e. green mountain). In it, the protagonist says, "It's not just that youth is wasted on the young. It's worse than that: life is wasted on people." It does indeed seem wasted if we consider that here we are in the twenty-first century, enjoying the marvels of technology, and yet war is still a barbarous daily fact. Nor is anyone optimistic enough to predict that a hundred years from now (two hundred? three hundred?) humanity will finally be morally advanced enough to desist from waging war.

Still, I can't imagine that camps like Auschwitz would ever come into existence again. Sometimes I think in despair that no, we have not progressed an inch; Homer could write about us. Then I think that in Europe at least there won't be another Auschwitz. Bosnia almost defeated that hope. But it didn't have that scale, no, and the world did, ultimately, react to stop the genocide. Genocide somewhere in Africa remains another story. But let us rejoice in the thought: No more Auschwitz. Never again. Not in Europe, and eventually -- maybe as soon as a century or two from now -- nowhere.  


Moral progress is slow, but it happens. 


Below is one of my poems based on a family story.

THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD

Auschwitz, 1944

November drizzle and the dread of winter –

through the secret mail,

a post from my grandfather

to my grandmother, on the women’s side

of the electric wire:

I am in a special barracks.

They give us almost no food.

It was an experiment in starvation:

ten men, seventy and over, were chosen,

bathed, dressed in clean white nightgowns,

then led, a small squad of elderly ghosts,

to a separate barracks: they were to lie in bed,

getting only a little soup.

Their kapo weighed them in the morning

and at night. The doctor came by once a day

to check the progress and update his graph,

the downward curve that would stop;

the scientific question was when.

The idea was benign euthanasia

for the old, no longer useful to the Reich:

they were to die

hygienically, in clean nightgowns.

Now all would depend on luck.

Shivering in the dark of dawn,

my grandmother waited

in front of the electric wire.

Nearby, spasmodically twisted, hung

the body of someone who during the night

chose the final route of escape.

At last my grandfather’s muffled voice:

Veronka, I’m here –

She took the rag-tied bundle

hidden in her clothes –

one serving of the dry gray bread –

her own untouched ration –

and a few biscuits from a Red-Cross parcel –

and with all her will,

more than her famished strength,

threw it over the fence.

He caught it. She turned around

and found herself eye to eye

with a German woman kapo.

The kapo hit her across the face:

I could have you hanged!

In the pause between life and death,

the kapo stared at the starving

woman who’d just thrown food

to someone else –

suddenly turned

and quickly walked away.

That evening one man’s weight

failed to go down. The doctor found

this subject’s curve did not fit,

had flattened out, instead of smoothly

going downward.

Three more times my grandmother managed

to throw some food over the wire.

More and more the subject’s weight

deviated from the curve.

Science tells me what to do,

the doctor declared, and crossed

the abnormal subject off the record.

My grandfather was discharged,

still in his nightgown.

Soon he drilled with the other

inmates in his block: a hundred men

were to lift their striped caps,

all exactly at the same time:

in winter, a general was to visit the camp.

Mütze-e-en ab! the guard chanted out,

then raged, “One moron in the second row

was late!” They’d try again: Mütze-e-en –

someone was early. It was a ritual

performance: the drawn-out

syllable of suspense, the terminal bark,

the inevitable failure. They trained

every day, sometimes for two hours,

wooden camp shoes sinking

into the greasy Auschwitz mud:

Mütze-e-en ab!

The Russians entered at the end of January.

The general never arrived.

~ Oriana

**