MIND SEX

Los Cabos, Baja California

MALAGUEÑA

Jasmine like blossoming moonlight
has taken captive the blue dusk.
I am fourteen, fifteen, sixteen –
the radio sings Malagueña.

Years later at a wedding,
a middle-aged mariachio
sings Malagueña with such passion,
the guests fall silent as in a cathedral.

Few comprehend the lyrics,
but the meaning soars
in the arches of the vowels, held
so long they span constellations.

Maybe it never really ends –
life driven by desire
for a different life.  
You never stop waiting, 

never, a famous actress 
said in her old age –
she who we thought possessed
all we ever wanted to have.

The music cannot be undone. 
It casts the human voice beyond
blue, into pure indigo –
not star jasmine, sparse petals, 

but the full narcotic flower – 
as the lights on the bay
sink shimmering shafts
into the ocean’s dark love.

~ Oriana © 2013


“THAT’S NOT IMPORTANT”: A FLASH ESSAY ON MORTALITY

“That’s not important,” my mother would say countless times during her last years. She wanted “what wakefulness remains” reserved for the essence. That included the daily walks where she could look at trees, dogs, children, squirrels. A bird hopping on the pavement was important. The sale at Sears was not important. Neither was meeting the tax deadline, even if the IRS seemed to differ.

What, then, IS important? The answer depends on the person and on the stage of life. Right now, amid medical difficulties, holding on to the bliss of slow reading and slow writing has become primary. And beauty and tenderness, but much has been written about those -- so let me highlight slow reading and slow writing.

Primary? Yes. Because that way I hold on to the essence of what I am, of what makes my life worth living. Once I had my big awakening about mortality and how I don’t have unlimited time anymore, but must make the most of “what wakefulness remains,” I saw what I treasure most: “mind sex.”


 
MIND SEX

Once I got to know what I truly want, what works for me and what doesn’t, I began to buy fewer things, but the things I do buy are of better quality. Like Cinderella finally claiming her glass slipper, I want the best.

I have also finally understood what Marlene Dietrich and Katherine Hepburn meant when they said, “Wear black and white, and you’ll always be elegant and never have to wonder what to wear.” On the verge of buying a “royal blue” blouse I don’t need, I stopped -- I’d like to say “in mid-air,” but it was “mid-screen.” It’s not too bad, being in the same minimalist closet with Marlene Dietrich (though I have a certain fondness for burgundy that I’ll keep).

In reading and creative work, I know that when I limit variety, I gain depth. I build on what I’ve already acquired (and even that has too much variety --  oh my foolish insatiable mind when I was young and wanted everything, everything). Some people say they no longer read new books -- they give themselves to the pleasure of re-reading. Slow reading and re-reading: mind-sex. Voluptuous.

I’ve learned that reading (and re-reading) ten great poets in depth will yield more satisfaction than reading a hundred poets superficially.

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all. ~ Oscar Wilde

How do I choose those ten? I follow my bliss.

Ten is already borderline too many. When I was twenty-seven, I took one year just to read Rilke. I’d browse in the library’s poetry section, I’d glance at this or that poet -- but basically, my serious poetry reading was Rilke. And it was Rilke who taught me seriousness. 

Rilke at Muzot, 1923

INTELLIGENCE AND SELF-CONTROL

I still remember my shock when a boyfriend I had in my twenties calmly asked, “Why don’t you use your intelligence to improve your life?” I was startled. My intelligence was Platonic, not Aristotelian. I used it to get high grades in college; that was what intelligence was for. Intelligence = intellect = useless in “real life.”

And, mind you, I already knew and admired the director of UCLA Brain Research Institute. I marveled at what he once said, “I owe my career success to the decision I made in my youth never to raise my voice.” He was using his intelligence and self-control, two traits found by studies to be the most important predictors of “good outcomes in life.” Alas, I didn’t realize that the way I gained near-perfect reading knowledge of English by reading Gone with the Wind for one hour every day gave me a tool that combined intelligence with self-control, a tool I could continue using -- if not for career success, then as a source of reliable happiness.

I didn’t realize it because back in my late teens and twenties I assumed the power lay not in the doing, but in having a goal.


A GOAL IS NOT NEEDED

I used to think: I am happy whenever I'm working hard toward a goal. But having a goal wasn't always possible, or the old goal “ran out” or stopped making sense. I felt bereft without a goal. I remembered my last year in Warsaw and the happiness brought by my daily reading practice, whose goal couldn’t be more clear: I wanted to to master English. That’s why for many years I thought that for me the secret of happiness was working toward a clear goal. No goal = no practice = no happiness.

I nodded my head when I read Eliot’s “Little Gidding” (note the pig-sty near the church and the graveyard)

It would be the same at the end of the journey,
If you came at night like a broken king,
If you came by day not knowing what you came for,
It would be the same, when you leave the rough road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade
And the tombstone. And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfillment.

That’s the semi-bad news: it’s a rare life that can be called “purpose driven.” The splendid news is that we don't have to have a goal. I’ve learned that it's better if my goal is fuzzy at best, so achieving or not achieving it doesn't enter the equation. Then there is no “failure” -- none of that useless suffering. No goal, none, just the activity itself! The process, not the outcome. It’s the activity itself that’s fulfilling. In a sense, you are making love.

(and besides, piglets are delightful)

BLISSING OUT ON KARL MARX, OR NOTHING LEADS TO ANYTHING
 
I’m back from Coronado Library, an exquisite temple of the mind (oh the quiet old-money elegance, with busts of Aristotle). For two and a half hours I shamelessly indulged in mind sex, reading The New York Book Review. And I wasn’t making detailed notes, once a compulsive habit of mine -- intellectual hoarding. I was reading for the bliss of bathing in the intellectual grace of those semi-scholarly articles.

The first article (not counting a quick glance at Oprah’s “Change Your Hair, Change Your Life”) was a review of the best-selling book by Garry Wills, “Why Priests?” Wills argues that the Catholic church would be better off without its clergy. And no, he doesn’t mean the pedophile priests -- that pathology doesn’t require a book to indite it. Wills discusses the very institution of priesthood, and finds it obsolete. An ordained priest is needed to work the miracle of transubstantiation. But transubstantiation does not happen (Protestants reached that conclusion already centuries ago). Thus, in principle, anyone could lead a religious service.

(A shameless digression: this reminded me of my asking an ex-Jesuit, “But isn’t it time for women to be allowed to say the mass?” He replied, “Why should anyone say the mass? Perhaps we should stop it for three years, and see if anyone misses it.”)

“Transubstantiation does not happen.” The simplicity of the statement thrilled me. I had not thought of it in those few words because when I silently declared “It’s just another mythology,” the whole “mystery” disappeared. Besides, a Jewish rabbi, no matter how “reform,” could not possibly say, “This is my blood; drink it.” That was Dionysus. Divine cannibalism, the eating of the gods -- it was coming back to me, and it was delicious.

 

Raphael, Dispute over Transubstantiation
(I love the shelf clouds on which the Celestials are seated)

Next, the article on Marx. The Catholic Church and the Reds -- I’m addicted to these topics, and yes, that ease born of familiarity goes back to my childhood and teens, being caught up between two dictatorships, two totalitarian systems. The church, of course, was ahead, having had many centuries of practice at inducing guilt in us wretched sinners, and the carrot and stick of heaven and hell. The carrot wasn’t much (does anyone really want to live in a city with sidewalks of gold?), but the stick was overwhelming. Even after decades, hellfire is still burning in some of my neural circuits. The poison of being told that you will burn for eternity is so venomous that there is no 100% antidote.

Karl did look like a biblical prophet; he was, in fact, a descendant of eminent rabbis. But did I really need to be told that some of Marx’s ideas are by now completely obsolete, while other insights remain strikingly relevant? No, but it was an inexplicable pleasure to read about it. I can’t help it -- my heart leaps up when I read a sentence like “Late in his life, Marx replaced one utopian vision of total abolition of alienated labor with another, that of humanity devoted to artistic and scholarly pursuits.”

Oscar Wilde, of all people, beautifully summarized that other utopia, in a little-known essay, The Soul of Man Under Socialism. “It is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought . . . Charity creates a multitude of sins,” Wilde wrote with his famous flair. But I don’t insist on flair; a merely intelligent sentence will do.

Marx and his youngest daughter Jenny. Jenny is wearing the cross in solidarity with the 1863 Polish uprising against the Tzarist oppression. Actually the cross should be black; Polish noblewomen began to wear black jewelry to symbolize mourning for the lost independence.

The sentence about Marx’s two utopias constitutes the entire “notes” I took during my orgy at the patrician Coronado Library. My reading wasn’t meant to lead anywhere. When you are posthumous (that lovely state of non-striving), nothing is meant to lead to anything else. You don’t think in terms of “stepping stones” or a “ticket to the future.” You are not climbing up any ladder. You are walking down a soft level road through a wonderful forest; you are listening to the birds, watching the deer that are watching you. You are “following your bliss.”

Nevertheless, I admit that decades of being goal-oriented, and feeling bereft when I had no goal, sometimes still make it difficult to do something for its own sake -- just to enjoy it. In that case, here is my justification for going to the library: over two hours of brain healing. My personal kind of meditation. No goal is needed. It’s the activity that creates a feeling of happiness.

I’M RELIGIOUS! WHO KNEW?

Ronald Dworkin, that’s who. But before I get to his ideas about non-theist religion, let me reveal something from the time I was eighteen. True, back then youth was an excuse for all manner of ignorance, but this strikes me as  being particularly blind (and funny now, but not funny then).

As a freshman at UCLA, I took a lengthy test that was supposed to guide me toward the most suitable major (first of all, I was clueless about what the word meant, aside from the military rank). The counselor took a while pondering my results, reminding me of the Gypsy in Warsaw who studied the cards in a long, deep silence before saying, “You are going on a great journey.”

The counselor finally looked at me and said, “The score indicates that you are an artist.” “No, I’m not!” I exclaimed. I felt insulted; I defined myself as an intellectual. As the Tao warns, she who defines herself cannot know who she really is.

“Are you interested in the visual arts?” the counselor asked. “Not particularly,” I replied. She patiently combed field after field, while I was growing impatient. The test was actually a questionnaire about values; since my highest values were beauty and creative work, I happened to fit in with the artists. The counselor, exhausted, ended by pointing out that ballet and modern dance criticism was a new field in which I could become an expert and not have to face much competition. That, I thought, was the most ludicrous piece of advice since a Polish-American priest “playfully” (oh yeah?) slapped me across the bottom and said, “Just marry a nice Polish boy.”

Then I read an article which casually mentioned that creative people tend to  have unusual and colorful dreams. And talk about the deluge of unusual dreams I was having . . .

And now comes Dworkin with his idea that religion is not restricted to theism. One can be deeply religious without believing in an invisible man in the sky, the earth his mere footstool. Or believing in any kind of god or gods. (The gods wanted blood. Wasn’t it peculiar, sacrificing a lamb to Yahweh? And wasn’t it the priests who got to eat the lamb? A high-protein diet millennia before Atkins?)

“Many millions of people who count themselves atheists have convictions and experiences very like and just as profound as those that believers count as religious,” Dworkin argues. Albert Einstein, for instance, said that though an atheist he was a deeply religious man. He was in awe of the universe, its sublime mystery and mathematical order. It could be argued that he was overly Platonic in his outlook, but that was before the view favoring probability, and of course long before chaos theory. Still, his reverence and his enchantment with mystery can indeed qualify him as religious (most would argue that “spiritual” is a better label for the sense of the transcendent without a personal god).

Dworkin refers to Rudolf Otto’s influential work, The Idea of the Holy:

When scientists confront the unimaginable vastness of space and the astounding complexity of atomic particles they have an emotional reaction that matches Otto’s description surprisingly well. Indeed many of them use the very term “numinous” to describe what they feel. They find the universe awe-inspiring and deserving of a kind of emotional response that at least borders on trembling.

I can become ecstatic just looking at the clouds. It doesn’t have to be sunset in full peacock display. The late afternoon clouds, those silver-gray harmonicas and schools of fish and angel wings -- and I’m thinking of fractals, Mandelbrot -- the clouds on their great journey.

*

Shelley, expelled from Oxford for his atheism, wrote these mystical lines in his “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”:

The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats through unseen among us -- visiting
This various world with as inconstant wing
As summer winds that creep from flower to flower --
Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower,
It visits with inconstant glance
Each human heart and countenance;
Like hues and harmonies of evening --
Like clouds in starlight widely spread --
Like memory of music fled --
Like aught that for its grace may be
Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.

Mont Blanc

**

Dickinson, too, is an ecstatic without always being a theist (sometimes she is, sometimes not).

Come slowly, Eden!
Lips unused to thee,
Bashful, sip thy jessamines,
As the fainting bee,

Reaching late his flower,
Round her chamber hums,
Counts his nectars -- enters,
And is lost in balms!

~ Emily Dickinson, 211

We too can count those nectars; we too can enter and be “lost in balms.” We are the children of the universe, interconnected in more ways than we can even conceive of, part of a thrilling mystery. If being religious means being in awe of nature’s mystery and beauty, as well as a strong commitment to moral values (which derive from our capacity for empathy), then yes, all my adult life I’ve been religious without knowing it.

(for Dworkin’s article, go to http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/apr/04/religion-without-god/?pagination=false

Hello fractal animula!

JOSEPH CAMPBELL AND MIND SEX, ALSO KNOWN AS “SPIRITUAL PRACTICE”
 
For me mind sex means chiefly (though not exclusively) slow reading. Slow reading could also be called “deep reading,” or “studying.” Slow reading  is the practice that can sustain me day after day, rain or shine (and in this climate zone it's that merciless "shine" that’s an ordeal). All I need is a book and a pencil. By the way, asked what his spiritual practice was, Joseph Campbell answered, “I sit with a book and a pencil and underline words.”

And that was his main source of reliable happiness.

Along with performing the Apollonian task of organizing your world, attention enables you to have the kind of Dionysian experience beautifully described by the old-fashioned term rapt—completely absorbed, engrossed, fascinated, perhaps even “carried away”—that underlies life’s deepest pleasures, from the scholar’s study to the carpenter’s craft to the lover’s obsession. ~ Winifred Gallagher, Rapt

The best advice I ever got? ATTEMPT BUT LITTLE AT A TIME. Then you can do it slowly, at the level of excellence (or at least you will be able to reach the level of excellence) -- and reap the most pleasure. LESS = NO STRESS. When you do anything for the joy of it, without stress, the brain heals from the ravages of stress. Joy is a wonderful therapy. 

EARTHLY PARADISE

FELINE PLEASURE

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

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

GOD IS AFFECTION

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

*

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

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

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

THE JOY OF THE FOCUSED LIFE

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

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

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

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

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

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

TROTSKY, PARADISE, HAPPY CHILDHOOD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OLDER = HAPPIER

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

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

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

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



**

Charles:

Another beautiful blog, effortlessly written.

Oriana:

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

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

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

Hyacinth:

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

About childhood:

Childhood is so brief a thing

a time of crayons and comics and fireflies against

a blurred background of war, polio, breadlines; against

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

snores. Some childhood memories should be burned,

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

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

is sudden. No longer scuffing through

the fragile architecture, now we are  responsible

for keeping things upright like building blocks.

And the rest of our lives we suffer a vague

homesickness for a time when we could believe

we left our missing sock in a dream.

**

Oriana:

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

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

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

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

. . .    Some childhood memories should be burned,

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

then we’d carry around the ashes.

~ how is that for an unexpected simile?

I wish Hyacinth could be declared a national treasure.

Ursula:

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

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

Oriana:

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


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

Scott:

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

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

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

Oriana:

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

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

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

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

BEING LAPSED II: THE LASTING IMPRINT, PERSONAL SPIRITUALITY

I’m fascinated by those who convert to Catholicism in adulthood. I am not surprised by the stories of addicts seeking recovery. Contrary to Anne Sexton’s Need is not belief, I suspect that when the need becomes extreme enough, it can lead to belief. Even Karl Marx, famous for his description of religion as “opium” for the people, had a much more complex and sympathetic perception of it:

“Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. . . . Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.” [Karl Marx,Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.]

But this does not address the poetics of religion, its seductive beauty. I am especially fascinated by Aleksander Watt's account of his conversion to Catholicism, in his hair-raising memoir, My Century. He said that, more than anything else, it was the beauty of Christ's face in the paintings that drew him. This made me realize that it's actually the "popular" religious art that has an enormous impact, with its idealized presentation of that beautiful, soulful, loving face. All those cheap, conventional paintings and figurines, all that art condemned as conventional and sentimental. This bad, conventional, sentimental religious art dares to be totally positive, and that can have a very deep impact.

I have a poem that speaks about the power of religious images:

WALKING ON WATER

After the storm, the clouds like blown

milkweed lie in the widening sky.

I still don’t know how we survive

our youth, how in a matchstick boat

we cross the wind-clawed sea.

When I look back, I see no boat.

I must have walked on water,

holding fast to false beliefs:

that I was strong; that the worst

had already happened;

that to commit suicide would disgrace

the memory of my grandparents,

who had survived Auschwitz,

so what excuse might I give

for not surviving America?

It is not the truth that saves us,

not the truth that makes us free,

but a half-remembered image:

dimly seeing in the dark

a luminous, familiar

figure walking on the sea.

And like Peter, you step

out of nothing as out of a boat,

and start walking across the storm –

not on water, not on air,

barely even on faith –

toward nothing you dare call love.

~ Oriana

**

At this point I cobble my own spirituality: a bit of Taoism, a bit of Teresa of Avila, nothing "organized." I've attended both the post-Vatican II mass and the Latin mass (the first time when it was officially forbidden, which appealed to my sense of underground resistance: archaic beauty against the hierarchy). Alas, old or new, the mass doesn't nourish me anymore.

How senile they are getting, how slowly they lean and maneuver on their walkers, the priests who can still say the Latin mass. It is depressing to witness this decline (though I was touched, once, by the expression of bliss on the age-ravaged face of a priest who just finished celebrating the Latin mass, once it became officially permitted again). Alas, I know I can't go home again, and must piece together whatever means of spiritual sustenance I can find.

My parents chose my name, Joasia, after the endearing heroine of Żeromski's The Homeless (Ludzie Bezdomni.) Żeromski’s title refers not to the homeless in the streets, and certainly not to that homeless feeling that’s part of the immigrant experience, but to spiritual and emotional homelessness. 

Naturally, soon enough I got to experience the church's secret: give us a child early enough, and s/he is ours forever. There is no deleting that giant imprint -- a lapsed Catholic is still a Catholic. And I've come to see it mostly as part of my mental wealth. For poetics, Catholicism is incomparable. The music, the art, the ritual as it used to exist before Vatican II -- what beauty, what splendor! Just the flowers at the altar, how gorgeous, luxurious, in unstinting abundance. Even in winter, flowers.

HOTEL AMERICA

In the lobby of a luxury hotel,

someone passes through a false room –

a pretend fireplace, slippery love sofa,

the faux-marble mausoleum-like floor

strewn with wilted blooms –

someone says, “America is finished.”

I begin to pick up the dead flowers,

the hotel as empty as the streets outside –

only me, a stray housewife, limp petals

in my insufficient hands. “Your dream

of America is finished,” says Linda,

native-born, who calls herself Lucrezia.

And Daisy, formerly my musical Danuta,

Daisy says, “America is a good place

to make money, but – real life is over there.”

How do we know what we love?

Do we have to lose it first? Saint Yakub’s

church in winter, the snow-crusted coats,

a fugue of steam like breath –

the acrid smell of wet wool,

the borrowed animal human smell.

Some part of us ascended,

not the soul perhaps, but more real

than synthetic perfume sprayed

on the massive stiff bouquets, though by now

Warsaw’s Hotel Europa may have

adopted these scents and ways,

incense against the backward years,

that animal press of people,

no airy scallops of angels.

But at altars candles and blossoms

prayed in tongues, the petals’ wings

trembled, the tall glow of flame mirrored

in chalices’ silver and gold. Pipe organ

shook the stone pillars. Roses, lilies,

peonies – what it must have cost,

in winter. Back then in communal breath,

the church gave us splendor.

Now it’s finished, hellfire and flowers.

~ Oriana © 2010

**

But now I am beginning to see that I can build my own spiritual home, and it has nothing to do with whether or not native-born Americans accept me or reject me, or whether the mass is in English or in Latin (an ex-Jesuit priest said to me, “Maybe we should stop saying the mass for three years or so, to see if anyone will miss it”).

To my surprise, creating a personal spirituality (actually I prefer the term "life philosophy") has not been all that difficult. It’s been evolving within me all along. This morning I was thinking about a project I'll probably embark on in the Fall. It's likely to bring its share of suffering, whatever uncertain joy it may also bring. It's still time to call it off. But instead, on a beautiful automatic, I remembered "Thy will be done." And I realized that one doesn't have to believe in God to say that! It's obedience to something large and strong within, something that makes most suffering trivial, really.

Is it the "spark of the divine" within us, the invincible human spirit? The Inner Christ, the Buddha Spirit, the Higher Self? What we call it doesn't matter any more than a person’s religious denomination matters, as long as there is that connection to something that rises above the petty stress, the thousand little humiliations. What do these matter? In the end our grudges and grumbles will be forgotten, utterly forgotten. Only the "eternal moments" (as Milosz calls them) will survive – and ultimately only those translated into art.

**

Janet Baker's luminous poem, "Shine," shows how "lapsing" from an outgrown religious orthodoxy can make us see the divine in other ways as we evolve our personal spirituality.

Shine

To shine is to be god is to be clear blue sky is to be enough.
And night is the time the shine is held by stars in the blackness. 

And I can allow that god is the same as shine
since the beginning of my tribe, and I can imagine shine

as the god I dance for, and I might imagine during night
with no blue sky the moon glow shines softer.

I am dancing my words around the church, quivering at Christ,
I am dancing sex and shimmers, dancing sweat and glisten,

and since Christ is a man, he shines at the dancer,
slips money in her belt, dances his hips into hers round the room.

No need to harden shine into solid gold of Buddha, no need to climb
skyward to be closer, carry prayers to the highest mountains,

so the Hindus have blue-skinned gods to remind
how blue disappears each night returns each day.

If blue enters my heart, this dance will be enough,
blue sky shining with no need for my words, blue

beyond the need to word, beyond the need to poetry. Shine
this god of the beginning of my tribe when god and shine were one.

  ~ Janet Baker © 2010

**

Hyacinth:


Janet's poem is magical.


Oriana:


Absolutely. There are so many wonderful poems out there that deserve to be more widely known. In a small way, I hope to introduce some of them to the readers of this blog.