SAVING JESUS: THE STONE BABY

Michelangelo: Last Judgment: angels waking up the dead

What is that unforgettable line?
~ Samuel Beckett

This brought to my mind a different sense of “line” -- one that continues, but is now never as long as it used to be. Here is an evocative photo of the line to see Lenin’s mummy, 1959. People were willing to wait for hours. (Also, talk about a “stone baby” that any ideology or religion is doomed to become.)

photo: Dmitry Balternants

A STONE BABY (LITHOPEDION)

“Lithopedions [calcified fetuses] are extremely rare; less than 300 cases have been recorded. The most recent case was that of a 92-year-old Chinese woman who was found to be carrying a 60-year-old stone baby in 2009.”

This may serve as a poem prompt: are you carrying a stone baby? An earlier self that’s still harboring a horrific grudge, or any other way you might want to imagine it?

http://www.buzzfeed.com/tasneemnashrulla/an-82-year-old-woman-is-carrying-a-40-year-old-fetus-inside

 

THE CRUCIFIX AS A STONE BABY

I remember a Jungian lecture on the meaning of the Catholic mass, which is based on the rite of animal sacrifice in the Jerusalem temple. Placating god with mere animal sacrifice was over; now the priest offered god “the perfect sacrifice,” his son, in the form of the host -- from Latin “hostia,” meaning VICTIM, and wine = the blood of that victim, blood being the synonym of life.

My revulsion as I heard let me know that my remnant nostalgia for childhood liturgy was over. I always hated the heavy smell of incense; now I realized it was originally used to cover up the stench of blood. “Without shed blood there is no freeing from sin” (Hebrews 9:22). This was the “bloody ransom” that we needed to enter paradise.

(In New International Version: “In fact the law requires that nearly everything be cleansed with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.” KJV uses the term “remission” -- “without shedding of blood there is no remission” -- the term for canceling a debt, bringing to mind a sort of economic exchange.)

I was also extremely disappointed to read the translation of the four eucharistic prayers the priest can choose from to perform the the miracle of transubstantiation. I’d expected something sublime, not these pedestrian words around the archaic concept of a sacrificial “victim.”

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE GOAT THAT TAKES AWAY SINS?

It’s interesting that the rite of the “scape goat” was omitted. No more transfer of the sins of the community onto a goat, the animal then driven out of the city. So convenient, and yet so entirely abandoned, that custom of simply loading the collective transgression onto an innocent animal, like cargo on a ship, and away! Imagine if Christians still sang hymns about “the goat that takes aways the sins of the world.”

But the Yom Kippur ritual of offering a perfect lamb remained, now elevated to a symbolic human sacrifice.

As for the objection that to kill an innocent man is a crime greater than the Original Sin, and that one crime doesn’t wipe out another, all we can say is that once we are trapped in a circular argument of unreality, we can’t possibly expect a rational solution. Why did Jesus die on the cross? To pay for our entrance ticket to paradise? Pay it to whom? This was a subject of many medieval theological debates. A popular answer was that the devil had to be paid; later this majority opinion was labeled a heresy. Imagining any kind of economic exchange only plunges are deeper into absurdity, so we must cease trying to understand. Who are we to question god’s master plan?

The whole thing has become a stone baby, and must go. No one can “save” us by being executed in our place. But -- and this is where the liberation by truth comes in -- we don’t need to be saved. We are not born in sin and wicked by nature. On the contrary, it’s high time to acknowledge that most people are good, and we are wired for empathy and even altruism.

Or, as George Eliot remarked about one of her characters in Middlemarch, “Celia didn’t need salvation anymore than a squirrel.”

No religious symbol is as revolting as the crucifix. This would be obvious if we “modernized” it to be an electric chair. Imagine an electric chair at the center of every altar.

Crucifixion was more cruel than electrocution, causing a drawn-out agony, but that makes the crucifix all the more revolting. Interestingly, the crucifix does not appear until the Middle Ages. In early Christian iconography, the preferred image was that of a triumphant risen Christ. How did that radiant image of hope come to be eclipsed by the image of death by torture? Scholars have their answers: yes, history dictated a cult of suffering. How different the emotional tone of Christianity might have become without the compulsory crucifixes . . . 


SAVING JESUS FROM BEING A HUMAN SACRIFICE

I have come across an eye-opening book by Gary Wills, Why Priests? Wills quotes another author, René Girard, who argues against St. Anselm’s interpretation of the Passion as a substitute for animal sacrifice. 

St. Anselm based based his argument on the dubious Letter to the Hebrews, which scholars established to be the work of an anonymous author passing himself off as St. Paul. “There is nothing in the Gospels to suggest the death of Jesus is a sacrifice, whatever definition (expiation, substitution) we may give for that sacrifice.”

The Letter to the Hebrews, Wills and Gerard argue, gives undue centrality to animal sacrifice as the way of worship. But if Jesus is trying to present a new concept of god as a god of non-violence, then the Roman soldiers who carried out the execution, or the high priest, or anyone else, could not be interpreted as offering a blood sacrifice to a god who rejects blood sacrifice.

Wills comments:

Girard’s claim was all the more striking since he thought most other societies and religions were based on violence, on coalescence around a “founding murder,” and that “Christianity . . . is the only body of belief to escape the need for violence.”


As a lesser point, animal sacrifice had to be carried out in the Temple of Jerusalem, while the execution of Jesus was carried out outside the walls of Jerusalem, and obviously not in the  Temple. (Once we get involved in arguing about archaic rituals like animal sacrifice at the Jerusalem Temple, that’s the unfortunate literal and legalistic path we follow.)

As for medieval theologians like Anselm, “they read the Old Testament in the light of the New, in a regression to sacrificial concepts debunked by Jesus.”

THE TWELVE THRONES

So it’s possible to view the death of Jesus as simply the execution of a religious leader thought to be a danger to the Roman Empire, and not a “bloody ransom” for the Original Sin, or all sins. But is it possible to escape the view of Jesus as an apocalyptic preacher who thought the end of the world was imminent?

My heart sank when I saw the medieval image of the Twelve Thrones and the apocalyptic explanation of it:

I tell you solemnly in the New World, when the Son of Man is seated on his throne of splendor, you who have been with me will be seated on twelve thrones, to judge the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Mt (19:28)

(In KJV:

And Jesus said unto them, Verily I say unto you, That ye which have followed me, in the regeneration when the Son of man shall sit in the throne of his glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.)

In Luke 22:30, modern version:

so that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom and sit on thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.

But back to Matthew:

And everyone who has left houses or brother or sisters or father or mother or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life. Mt 19:29

Everyone who has left . . . children? (By the way, wives are curiously missing from this list. Why? Not important?)

What are we to do with such apocalyptic nonsense? It sends Jehovah's Witnesses door to door, and makes the lunatic fringe keep hoping for Rapture, no matter if constantly delayed for almost two thousand years. Sells books!

The apocalyptic perception of Jesus, which I have to admit has a high explanatory power, distresses me. Call me sentimental, but I was trying to cling to an admiration for Jesus. But the view of him as an apocalyptic preacher -- "let the dead bury the dead" finally makes sense, and a lot else besides -- and the view of the first Christians as end-of-the-world loonies -- one just can't argue with that.

Michelangelo: Last Judgment, St. Peter holding the key to heaven

SAVING JESUS FROM BECOMING A STONE BABY

BUT WAIT! There is a way that non-believers can translate “end of the world” so as to make it meaningful. It’s the “end of my life” perspective, a gift that those who believe in the afterlife are bereft of.  Given that my personal world will indeed come to an end, there is absolutely no point carrying any “stone baby” of regret and resentment. When I decided that it was too late in life to be depressed, it also became too late to waste time complaining or accumulating useless things or delaying something for a “special occasion.”

There’s a man who stole a hefty sum from me by not delivering the goods. People advised me to sue him in small-claims court, but why should I go through that stress? I’d win, but collecting is another matter. It’s not worth it for me. Life is too precious for that, so I just let it go -- as close to “loving my enemy” as I can come. I know his life is a serious mess, and hope some resolution comes, some clarity so he can be an honest person again. It’s the same when I think of others who’ve hurt me -- what does it matter now? I feel mainly compassion for them. It’s too late in life for resentment.

So even if the wildly radical teachings of Jesus make sense only in the context of his expectation that the current world would soon be destroyed (“Take no thought for the morrow”) and New Jerusalem would follow, at least some of those teachings can still be applied in the context of our mortality.

*

FORMER GREAT LOVE AS A STONE BABY

Since this is officially a poetry blog, let me offer a poem related to the theme of a stone baby.

YEARS LATER

At first glance, there on the bench
where he’d agreed to meet, it didn’t seem to be
him -- but then the face of grim
friendliness was my former husband’s,
like the face of a creature looking out
from inside its Knox. No fault, no knock,
clever nut of the hearing aid
hidden in the ear I do not feel I
love anymore, small bandage on the cheek
peopled with tiny lichen from a land I don’t
know. We walk. I had not remembered
how deep he held himself inside
himself -- for fun, for thirty-two years,
to lure him out. I still kind of want to,
as if I see him as a being with a baby-paw
caught. His voice is the same -- low,
still pushed around the level-bubble
in his throat. We talk of the kids, and it’s
as if that will never be taken from us.
But it feels as if he’s not here --
though he’s here, it feels as if, for me
there’s no one there -- as when he was with me
it seemed there was no one there for any other
woman. For the first thirty years. Now I see
I’ve been hoping, each time we meet, that he would praise me
for how well I took it, but it’s not to be.
Are you as happy as you thought you’d be,
I ask. Yes. And his smile is touchingly
pleased. I thought you’d look happier,
I say, but after all, when I am
looking at you, you’re with me! We smile.
His eyes warm, a moment, with the accustomed
shift, as if he’s turning into
the species he was for those thirty years.
And turning back. I glance toward his torso
once, his legs -- he’s like a stick figure ,
now, the way, when I was with him, other
men seemed like Ken dolls, all clothes. Even
the gleam of his fresh wedding ring is no
blade to my rib -- this is Married Ken. As I
walk him toward the street I joke, and for an instant
he’s alive toward me, a gem of sea of
pond in his eye. Then the retreat into himself,
which always moved me, as if there were
a sideways gravity, in him, toward some
vanishing point. And no, he does not
want to meet me again, in a year -- when we
part, it’s with a dry bow
and Good-bye. And then there is the spring park,
damp as if freshly peeled, sweet
greenhouse, green cemetery with no
dead in it -- except in some shaded
woods, under some years of leaves and
rotted cones, the body of a warbler
like a whole note fallen from the sky -- my old
love for him, like a songbird’s rib cage picked clean.

~ Sharon Olds, Stag’s Leap, 2012

How many times have we seen this: a woman degrading herself, pursuing a man who no longer cares about her. Begging -- I can imagine her asking the husband who left her for another woman to meet again only as begging -- and no, he’s not interested, though courteous enough to go through it with a “grim friendliness.” We sense he didn’t really want to see her -- that he doesn’t want to see her ever again, and why should he? He’s married to someone else, and that’s his real life, not memories of how it was with the ex-wife. He feels awkward sitting on the bench next to the woman with whom he no longer feels any live connection.

I think here we also get a bit of a glimpse of the speaker as someone who’s been through a lot of therapy (this is revealed in other poems) and assumes that it’s good for everyone to psychobabble about every detail of their inner and outer lives, and that which you manage to verbalize is the true story rather than one of the many fictions and perspectives. In my observation, most men are utterly uninterested in that kind of analysis. Strange to say, I find myself joining the minority of women who likewise simply have other interests. Music! Literature! New developments in science! There is an exciting world out there, and a larger family. Waiting for the ex-husband to change his mind (or open up) is like waiting for Prince Charming, or -- for the Rapture.

YOU HAVE TO LET A CAT BE A CAT

When I can a cat, Georgia Dziordziusińska-Dziordziuśkiewicz, I learned that you need to let a cat be a cat. This widened to the view that you need to let each person be themselves, and you actually grow to enjoy them when they are relaxed and natural (who knew so many people were naturally charming when they don’t feel judged?), without feeling any demands put on them. Most people are good human beings, and like to be treated as such. They don’t care to be “lured out” to talk about the relationship with their father or whatever is assumed to be their “core issue.” Is that really so important? Can’t we respect the fact that perhaps they’d rather read the newspaper or go to the movies? Personally I enjoy the “strong silent” type. I have enough heavy stuff of my own and don’t want the burden of someone else’s complicated psyche piled on me. Not for free, in any case.

(By the way, I’m still not sure about cats versus dogs, now that pets have become an option. I love watching a cat be a cat and a dog a dog, sniffing around in ecstasy of exploration. I identify with that. And I know that neither species will ask me about some childhood trauma or some other “stone baby” I might be carrying, but without feeling burdened; no need to reactivate those old neural circuits; the most important and beautiful part of memory is forgetting.)

*

The clouds were so beautiful on the way to Coronado Library, again I thought that if I could no longer read or write, or contribute in any way, just looking at the clouds would make life worthwhile. But that’s assuming a brain functional enough to experience beauty, in which case it would probably be functional enough to read and write. Best not to fly in the no-think zones of potential dementia. But if someone asked me, when I'm past 80, what I loved most in life, it’s possible that I’d reply “clouds.” 


photo: Jeffrey Levine

I can’t image Sharon Olds replying in this manner, and I don’t blame her: she’s herself, fixated on the body and family relationships, and I am myself, a lover of clouds (and more, but the list would be too long). She had to meditate on and on about the end of her marriage, even if to some of us that implies a sad waste of time. Her ex-husband certainly seems to want to move on without revisiting the old marriage, and who sees no more reason to see the ex-wife a year from now, or (I think this is implied) ever again.

At this moment I remembered one of my favorite scenes in the movie “A Serious Man.” The protagonist tells his “temptress” type of neighbor that he’s separated from his wife. She asks, “And have you been taking advantage of your new freedom?”

This is a wonderful point of view. Are you taking advantage of the opportunities of the moment, or are you incubating your stone baby? I speak as one who was guilty of that in my younger years, when I had spent way too much time talking in my head to my great love who married another woman. Luckily, I also developed as a writer, and creative work took over, along with teaching and journalism. And in my mental cemetery I found not the picked-clean skeleton of my once-great love, but the lilacs of gratitude: how wonderful that the cruel narcissist didn’t marry me! How magnificent that there were limits to his desire to destroy me . . .

Even so, I found the poem an interesting study of this unequal meeting of ex-spouses in which the ex-wife is still showing signs of clinging, even though she ends by implying through an image that it’s over, it really is over. But first she had to torture both of them by going through this unnecessary meeting, in the course of which she realizes that if he doesn’t look radiantly happy, that’s likely because of her presence. Her very presence is oppressive to him, is a form of silent nagging, some implied criticism of him as not open enough, or no longer husbandly.

Well, it happens: sometimes our very presence is oppressive to someone. If we recognize it, the only decent thing is to move on.

THE SHOOTING STAR

Mind you, sometimes the angels smoke, hiding it with their sleeves, and when the archangel comes, they throw the cigarettes away: that’s when you get shooting stars.
~ Vladimir Nabokov

This is clever as everything that Nabokov ever wrote, but I saw a shooting star last night, after a long period of not seeing any, and it was a lovely recognition. As usual, by the time I thought of making a wish, it was too late.

But what’s wish-making next to the great spectacle we are offered every night . . .  One-tenth would have been enough to make me rejoice (typed “rejoyce”) in being here to see. Did I really, REALLY,  go through three years of thinking about suicide every single day? I who say that one sunset can hold me, that I’ll never get tired of clouds . . .  We change; life changes; and I am infinitely grateful to have experienced the moment -- later many moments -- when I understood that just to be alive is sublime.

But back then I was carrying a stone baby -- my rejected great love for a man whose greatest gift to me was marrying someone else.

Then I discovered that dropping idealization -- this took years -- dissolved the stone baby. I was finally free of that false pregnancy.

And I can still enjoy Michelangelo’s muscular (look at that biceps!) Jesus in the Last Judgment scene. For me this is actually a Mr. Universe contest, and Jesus wins the trophy. 

WHAT FICTION SHALL BE MY TRUTH

 

LAST WORDS

Don't kneel to the enemy!

my mother called after me, loud,

slipping away to join the generations

of that motto in our family,

going back to the days of the Tzar.

My mother looked like Anne Frank,

except that she survived –

named me for the heroine

of a Polish author who wrote,

“Not that soon he’ll be free,

but that he goes with an angel.”

But who was my enemy, my angel?

Those who had tried to destroy

all that was different in me, wild –

they seemed pathetic now,

stunted souls who wanted to keep

everyone the color of shadow.

Was there an enemy inside,

one whom I knew and loved,

“the spirit that denies”?

Or was that an angel who goes

with me because I am blind

and need a guide who says No

to the glitter and dross of the world –

an angel of silence in Mary’s blue,

veiled with dark hair and a tranquil smile.

Rilke wrote: Life always says

both Yes and No. My beloved

Adversary or the angel that goes with me

says Yes only to my mother’s words:

Do not kneel to anyone –

that harsh blessing, or is it a warning,

is it duty, or is it love – in the name of

the Mother, the Daughter,

and the Holy Ghost of not giving up.

~ Oriana

**

In Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” there is this interesting passage:

"Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of you?"

~ Critics explain that this is the mirage of a “benign companion” witnessed by Arctic explorers when they are near death. My angel is in “Mary’s blue,” and though she has something to do with the deadline of death, the immediate concern is how to make the best use of what time remains.

The point of a useful fiction is to help us live to the fullest. Most of us know better than to insist that this fiction is a literal fact. If I invoke the figure of an angel who goes with me, it’s not an angel from so many paintings, with huge magnificent wings and a beautiful boy-girl face – though I am sure that having seen scores of such painted angels did have its effect. No, the angel is a metaphor, but imagining an actual figure or maybe voice or a distant light helps to constellate the idea that my work has some impact, some meaning. If we always insist on rational proof, we may end up like Don Quixote, who died because he regained his reason, and, alas, lost his reason for living.

One of my favorite Polish poets is the magician and metaphysician and weeping clown, Konstanty Ildefons Galczynski, who liked to call himself an “angelologist.” For him the life of the imagination was sacred. On his tombstone, he said, he wants these words:

Liryka, liryka, tkliwa dynamika,

angelologia i dal.

With the warning that all music is lost in the literal translation, here is my attempt:

Lyricism, lyricism,

tender dynamicism,

angelology and distance.

(Or, rather than "lyricisim" -- lyrical poetry. Let me try a less literal translation:

Lyrical poetry, ah, the tenderness,
angelology and the distant fields.

A little better, but the rhyme is still lost, the music is still lost. As Milosz remarked, "One must be translatable.")

Galczynski's wishes were disregarded. But “angelology and distance” stayed with me. “Distance” is a pathetic choice, I admit, for rending the short but soulful syllable of dal, the emotionally rich Polish word for the mystery and allure of all that is faraway. That little word with the dissolving final “l” contains in it riding off into the sunset, and also the horizon, and fog too, with roadside willows marching off into the grayish whiteness and disappearing.

It’s been said that we live in an age when we know too little to insist on strict atheism, and too much to believe in any particular religion. In practice, we are eclectic, choosing bits and pieces from all sources. Greek mythology has long been one of my sources of sustaining metaphors, or useful “fictions that are my truth.” There are no angels in Greek mythology, but each soul comes into the world with its daimon, or “destiny” – a semi-divine being, or sometimes simply a voice, that guides the soul toward its larger mission or fulfillment. “Eudaimonia,” which came to mean “happiness,” was having a “good daimon.” Thus, I asked myself if my notion of the angel who goes with me is close to that of a daimon Hmm . . .  it would be marvelous to think of my angel as a daimon, a guide toward destiny. But I didn’t grow up knowing that word. I grew up with the beauty of the traditional angels.

Yet I see that angel as walking on my left side. It’s impossible for me to see it otherwise. Why the left side, usually considered less noble, sinister even? I think it’s because I know that the left side of the body is controlled by the right hemisphere. That’s my mystical self, the seat of metaphorical thinking, intuition. My left hemisphere sneers at all this, of course, but has to admit that my life has been shaped largely by what appears to come from the right hemisphere. Or, to go with my fictive truth, by my angel in blue.

The angel’s voice is somewhat higher-pitched than my own, a pleasant mezzo, while I tend to the dusky alto. But typically my angel does not speak. She is more likely to lead me to a passage in a book. One morning I found “Take care not to waste yourself.” On the following morning: “It is important to give up on irrelevant questioning.” So my angel is an arranger of synchronicities.

I have also wondered if this angel is perhaps the figure of Sophia, sometimes identified as intuitive wisdom, the Holy Spirit, the divine feminine or Shekhina. I felt extremely moved when I read somewhere (alas, I forgot the source) words to the effect that when humanity was exiled from Eden, “the Mother went with them” – that loving mother being identified as Shekhina.

Yet when it comes to the image of Sophia, an older woman comes to mind. And I do not see an older woman in blue; I see a figure that is eternally youthful and beautiful, androgynous rather than womanly. In short, an angel, always with a beautiful smile, though not necessarily with wings.

Another unfortunate image of Sophia is Michelangelo’s – at best a slip of a girl shockingly paired with an aging Creator.  

Looking at that almost teenage, unconvincing image, I say no to Sophia, and return to “angel.” This angel who goes on my left side is no softie, in spite of her silkiness. She (if I must choose a pronoun) has prevented me from taking several lucrative job offers, repeating and repeating that time is the greatest wealth – the time to think and write. I suspect it was this angel who didn’t stir to pull me out of depression as long as depression served writing. When depression ceased to be functional and I saw it as an obstacle and not a friend, it was shockingly easy to let go of it.

A possible autobiographical origin of my angel could be the long walks in Warsaw with my first boyfriend. It was then I noticed how the city, which could be overwhelming, a roaring metropolis, became wonderfully “easy,” enchanting even. He diffused the stress. In his company I could take in a lot more stimulation without getting overwhelmed.

His eyes? They are deep marine blue, like my father’s. 

What is her name? She claims all names, equally at ease with Sophia as with its Polish endearment form that was current in my family, the name of a dedicated woman physician, the great-hearted Zula or Zuleńka.  But could my angel’s name not be – Raphael? He (since I must choose a pronoun) nods his beautiful head. Not that he’ll tell me where we are going. But at least I go with an angel.

*

“On Angels” is one of the most popular of Milosz’s poems – simple and affirmative. Milosz seems a poet who contained both extremes: he gave us poems presenting the tragic vision of the human condition (“This”), and poems of great serenity (e.g. “Late Ripeness”)

These days even devout believers find it hard to imagine God as a man with a white beard floating in the sky, or seated on a throne amid clouds. New definitions have been attempted. There has also been a tremendous resurgence in the popularity of angels, but again people are beginning to see them differently – not necessarily with wings. “Angel” means “messenger” – and a messenger can take many forms. A bird beginning to sing while you are in despair might be understood as a messenger (and not only because a bird is a symbol of the Spirit).

Our brain is wired to seek meaning, so anything perceived as meaningful, as conveying a relevant message, can serve as an angel/messenger. In Milosz’s poem, note “in the smell of apples.” It could be argued that anything that makes life seem worth living falls into the angelic category. Milosz ultimately settles on a voice – without arguing that it’s simply an “inner voice.” On the contrary, he invokes a voice speaking  “in an unearthly tongue” that can, nevertheless, be intuitively understood. 

ON ANGELS

All was taken away from you: white dresses,
wings, even existence.
Yet I believe in you,
messengers.

There, where the world is turned inside out,
a heavy fabric embroidered with stars and animals,
you stroll, inspecting the trustworthy seams.

Short is your stay here:
now and then at a matinal hour, if the sky is clear,
in a melody repeated by a bird,
or in the smell of apples at close of day
when the light makes the orchards magical.

They say someone has invented you
but to me this does not sound convincing
for the humans invented themselves as well.

The voice — no doubt it is a valid proof,
as it can belong only to radiant creatures,
weightless and winged (and why not?),
girdled with lightning.

I have heard that voice many a time when asleep
and, what is strange, I understood more or less
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue:

day draws near
another day
do what you can.

Note that ultimately the voice/the angel says “do what you can” – do your work, do your duty, be a bearer of light. We must remember that Milosz struggled against depression, and no wonder, considering all he lost, the enormous evil he’d witnessed. He won against depression by “escaping forward” (i.e. away from the past) into his work.

I think the underlying argument here is that there is grace in life, and that some people and things are “angels” – the bearers of light, of hope. A lover’s tender words, birdsong, a dog’s affection – we need those angels to keep on going. The language spoken by the “angels” may be human or non-human (birdsong). The man pulling radishes points the way with a radish. The point is that somehow we “get the message.” And that message only seems modest. “Do what you can” is the challenge to use all your capacities.

**

  
(I am indebted to James Hollis for the title of this post.)

Una:

I loved "the world turned inside out." His comments about the "smell of apples at close of day and "when light makes the orchard magical" brought back a year on a farm in Greene, RI that had an apple orchard, abandoned and nearly dead, apples not worth picking if there were any. But a few blossoms is all it takes to be make spring happen. . . And I liked to climb the apple trees. At the time I was reading The Devil and Daniel Webster and pictured him up in one of these trees.

I like the simplicity and complexity of this poem, the best I've read of Milosz’s so far. He called angels "messengers" and I see them more as witnesses.

Oriana:

This is one of his most endearing poems, simple on the surface, and complex underneath. It’s affirmatory, though in terms of our longing for guidance and protection, some readers may be disappointed that the message comes down to “do what you can.”

I especially like the way he sees angels not as the traditional figures, but as messages in the smell of apples or birdsong. There are so many things around us that say Live. And yes, the simplicity. We are not to worry about how enormous the task is, or any external reward. We are to do what we can.

Both the voices within us and the messages we perceive as coming to us from the outside may be contradictory. Recently I’ve been fascinated by Rilke’s statement that life always says both Yes and No. We are to “listen to our better angels," as Dickens supposedly said. I love the plural. All my life I’ve been dealing with many messages, so I understand this need to choose even between angels.

SELLING YOUR SOUL TO THE ANGEL

One of the traditional themes in literature is selling one’s soul to the devil. I wonder, though, if we could as well speak of “selling your soul to an angel.” One way or another, there is an imagined contract, and the price you pay. A writer is always told, “Believe in yourself.” But if you do, your angel will dictate how you spend your time, and it won’t be playing with your children. And even away from your desk, you may still be in your mental writing space, so that you resent the intrusion of the so-called loved ones. Is it any wonder that artists in all fields were more often thought to have sold their soul to the devil?

And what about the saints? If you spend a lot of time in prayer and meditation, you also distance yourself from those near you. I want to know how the saints got away with it, while artists can’t.

Before Joseph Campbell formulated his famous motto “Follow your bliss,” he used to say, “Follow your passion.” One meaning of “passion” is suffering. No matter what path in life a person chooses, there will be sacrifice and suffering – even if you are listening to an angel! Who says angels don’t demand sacrifice . . .  But the worst sacrifice is to disregard our messages, our inner voices, and blindly obey someone else’s will – the way a traditional wife often sacrificed her own development for the sake of her husband’s career. I agree with Campbell that the point is to have your own adventure, your own unique path, rather than be merely a “service person,” a woman with no life of her own. Once we “have a life,” the messages – call them angels – start coming in profusion. 

A post-script on “selling your soul to the angel.” Believers might say, “Why not make a covenant with God?” Once I rejected the deity of my childhood as a monster unworthy of worship, there was no going back on that perception. Christ seemed more like Prometheus, leading men to a different god than the one who told Moses that the man caught gathering firewood on the Sabbath had to be stoned to death (while Christ said that Sabbath was created for man, not man for the Sabbath). I understand how women saints fall in love with Christ. But Christ is an exalted savior-hero figure. An angel is more homey, an imaginary friend who can impishly pop up among trivia, saying, “See that?” It’s possible to laugh together.  

I read that Islamic mysticism calls God a Friend, a Guest, the Beloved; Christian mysticism has that aspect too, but the blood stain of the Old Testament can’t be laundered out. 

Mary:

wow again. your poem, and milosz's. and the "liryka, liryka" poem- beautiful. i am not at all concerned with heresy. heresy versus orthodoxy just constrains the Infinite. who's to say your angel is not real? i too have had many experiences of mysterious presences accompanying me, bearing me along. how much stuff must be going on in/around us that we have little to no clue about?

Oriana:

I love your “heresy versus orthodoxy just constrains the Infinite.” This is so magnificent, I will for once restrain myself from further comment!

(later)

On further thought, I would like to quote a bit more from Milosz’s heresy. This is from Bells in Winter:

For me, therefore, everything has a double existence.

Both in time and when time shall be no more.

And so, one morning. In biting frost,

All is cold and gray. And in that sleepy haze

A span of air suffused with carmine light.

Banks of snow, roadways made slippery by sleighs

Grow rosy. As do wisps of smoke, puffs of vapor.

Bells jingle nearby, then farther away, shaggy horses

Covered with hoarfrost, every hair distinct.

And then the pealing of bells. At Saint John’s

And the Bernardines’, at Saint Casimir’s

And the Cathedral, at the Missionaries’

and Saint George’s, at the Dominicans’

And Saint Nicholas’s, at Saint Jacob’s.

Many many bells. As if the hands pulling the ropes

were building a huge edifice over the city.

. . .

And if the city, there below, was consumed by fire

Together with the cities of all the continents,

I would not say with my mouth of ashes that it was unjust.

For we lived under the Judgment, unaware.

Which Judgment began in the year one thousand seven hundred

     fifty seven.

Though not for certain, perhaps in some other year.

It shall come to completion in the sixth millennium, or next Tuesday.

The demiurge’s workshop will suddenly be stilled. Unimaginable silence.

And the form of every single grain will be restored in glory.

I was judged for my despair because I was unable to understand this.

~ Berkeley, 1973-1974

translated by the author and Lillian Vallee

True, my ellipsis took away the transition from Vilnius to San Francisco (“and the towers of San Francisco seen through rusty fog”), but the bigger point is that in this poem, Milosz appears to be a gnostic: the true God is not the jealous  “demiurge” described in Genesis. Not that I am a fan of Gnosticism; the Gnostic rejection of the body and the world is not to my sensual taste. On the other hand, I too could say that everything has a double existence – the second one being in our psyche. Memory, that inner reality, is always shaped by the present according to what meaning we currently see in what happened. In that sense, the inner existence of things is profoundly ours.

           Vilnius: Interior of St. Peter's and Paul's --note what I call the "soul-fishing boat."