WE HAVE ALREADY LIVED IN THE REAL PARADISE

Caspar Friedrich, The Chalk Cliffs on Ruegen, 1818

The past week started badly: Monday I woke from a nightmare in the wee hours, my heart pounding so loud and fast that scared me as much as the nightmare itself. The dream seemed a relapse to the years when I had recurrent dreams about being in a Nazi concentration camp. Then, in two dreams in a row, I was able to escape (in the last one, simply walk out) – and thought that this was the end of that nasty series. I even celebrated it with a little poem that wrote itself in my early minimalist, unpunctuated style (startling, those incursions of a younger inner poet):

THE ROAD TAKEN

Only a year ago I finally understood
the kingdom of hell
is within you
and chose to walk out of
that concentration camp

the gate’s wide wings stood open
the guards diligently did not look
the road led through sunlit woods
between bridal birches the road in heaven
I must have seen in childhood and forever

and only yesterday looking out the window
I thought this is my country now and not
a Nazi factory or a Siberian gulag
astonished that after all
I wasn’t sentenced to hard labor

only this morning I saw
my task is to keep on walking
reading sunlight and shadow
listening to birds in all their languages
announce the holy word home

~ Oriana © 2012

**

Re-reading the poem after my nightmare I remembered that in the camp lingo, “the road to heaven” – Himmelweg – meant to way to the gas chamber.

So there it was, an invasion of the awareness of evil into what otherwise seemed like a peaceful and happy period of my life. Another night’s good sleep normalized me, but I know I’ll remember this experience as another example of how the good and the bad, sickness and health, happiness and unhappiness, and side by side, woven (or maybe “tangled”) together. Just when you think everything is going great, life will send you a reminder that things are never so simple. And the other way: even while watching a harrowing Holocaust movie like “In Darkness” (one of the best ever, comparable to “The Pianist”), I couldn’t help thinking, “These are the cutest rats.” Pigeons never looked so good either as glimpsed from that sewer manhole.

Evil, evil everywhere. Evil and flowers and iridescent pigeons (isn’t it time to admit how beautiful pigeons are?) Thus, when Jack Gilbert says, “We have already lived in the real paradise,” I nod my head (a gross understatement: when I first came upon the line, it hit me with great power). I, with my nightmares and memories I’d rather not come near – though I don’t claim to have suffered more than most – I am strangely moved and shaken by this assertion: “We have already lived in the real paradise.” Not the imaginary one, but the real, imperfect paradise, to steal Linda Pastan’s phrase.

Yes, our very imperfect paradise, with one kind of hell or another periodically tossed in. I don’t know a single adult who’s been spared, who doesn’t know what pain is. But paradise nevertheless. And that is stunning, that we have had such abundance of beauty and affection. I think that has kept most of us alive – the secret knowledge that no matter how great the suffering of the moment, we know what paradise is because we have seen and experienced it. When people say, peacefully, that they are ready to depart, I sense that they feel they have already had their share of paradise.

We judge a poet by his or her best poems. And ultimately, I think, we also remember life by life’s best poems. I’m a softie. One great sunset, and I forgive everything.

Gilbert puts it best:

GETTING AWAY WITH IT

We have already lived in the real paradise.
Horses in the empty summer street.
Me eating the hot wurst I couldn’t afford,
in frozen Munich, tears dropping. We can
remember. A child in the outfield waiting
for the last fly ball of the year. So dark
already it was black against heaven.
The voices trailing away to dinner,
calling faintly in the immense distance.
Standing with my hands open, watching it
curve over and start down, turning white
at the last second. Hands down. Flourishing.

~ Jack Gilbert, Refusing Heaven

Gilbert deliberately chooses non-spectacular details: horses in the empty summer street, eating a hot sausage on a freezing day, “the voices trailing away to dinner, / calling faintly in the immense distance.” The ball “black against heaven,” then turning white when very close. I know nothing about baseball, and my examples would be different, but I know what Gilbert is trying to convey: the wonderful moments can’t be denied. And maybe the harder the life, the more the moments of grace seem paradise. During my hardest years, the years of perdition, I remember hearing Haydn’s trios for the first time. So yes, I have already lived in the real paradise.

In a short poem, every word matters. It’s interesting that Gilbert chooses the word “heaven” (“already it was black against heaven”) rather than “sky.” “Heaven” amplifies “paradise” – the paradise in this life, as the poem makes clear. Gilbert’s heaven is in line with Jack Lennon’s “above us, only sky” (“Imagine”), but having that sky is marvelous. Later we have “voices . . . calling faintly in the immense distance.” These are human voices, the voices of mothers calling their boys home, and the distance is not literally immense. It’s immense in memory, and immense when we think of all the mothers calling their children home for dinner.

It’s not that Gilbert doesn’t realize that there is much evil in the world. But in his view, “we must risk delight.” Even if another, gentler world awaits, we must drink in the glory of the earth. In one of his best-known poems, “A Brief for the Defense,” Gilbert insists,

To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end has magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.

           

“Music despite everything.” While seeing earth as paradise, at least some of the time, is a modern attitude, music has often been recognized as a portion of divinity that we can know while alive. In Paradise Lost, Milton’s praise of music could hardly be higher:

Music, the greatest good that mortals know,

And all of heaven we have below.

For all my love of music, I must object. Music is all of heaven we know? My heaven includes the shrill cry of a seagull, the ocean waves, the mountain meadows, the great mossy woods of northern climates – the list could go on and on, and include also the beautiful silences when love is being born, the lovers’ happy laughter, the affectionate talk of heart-to-heart friends. With more domestic comfort now and less premature dying, we can relax and look around: there is indeed plenty to celebrate, and this is not the Vale of Tears even if it occasionally seems just that.

Keats put it much better by calling the world “the Vale of Soul-Making.” Jung spoke of “individuation.” Maslow came up with “self-actualization.” Then there is the worn phrase, “fulfilling our potential.” It’s a modern ideal; we know that in traditional societies there was much less freedom to explore and pursue one’s interests. I shudder when I think of the past. I find history fascinating, but there is no century in which I’d rather live, especially as a woman.

Joseph Campbell disposed of questions about paradise by saying, Sacred space and sacred time and something joyous to do is all you need. He defined “sacred space” as a “place that lets you experience your own will, your own intention, your own wish.” (A room of her own! Did Virginia Woolf know how revolutionary her suggestion was?) This sacred space can be your study and/or your kitchen (women will understand what I mean), or, in the absence a whole room to yourself, a favorite armchair where it’s quiet enough to hear your thoughts – where you can read, and from where you can watch the birds. But Campbell also speaks about the “sacred space within yourself” – “the further you can get into that, the more at peace you will be with yourself.” For me that going into that inner sacred space occurs when I’m deeply engaged in reading or writing. For someone else it might be gardening. We are unique, and our sacred space, within and without, is also unique. Let’s cherish it. Let’s get a geode or a cluster of crystals to “mark our territory.”

“Sacred space and sacred time and something joyous to do” – that’s certainly one quite plausible definition of paradise. But simply experiencing the beauty of nature is paradise. Yet before the cognitive evolution that has allowed us to see the earth as paradise, even a poet who was a great lover, even a worshipper, of nature’s beauty, Wordsworth assumed that the real paradise is elsewhere – this is where the soul comes from. In his most famous ode, he says,

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;

The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,

   Hath had elsewhere its setting,

       And cometh from afar.

This sentiment is still repeated by the likes of David Whyte and many other New Age writers. They assume that our essence is not terrestrial but astral, formed on a different, “higher” plane – in the true paradise whose memory we lose as we grow beyond infancy. I’m amazed that the medieval attitude of rejecting the world is still with us, though the ideas of the “fall of man” and exile from the original paradise, or humanity’s decline from the “Golden Age” to the “Silver Age” to the “Iron Age” and so on, a constant diminishment from the original perfection – such notions are finally on their way to becoming intellectual relics. The denigration of this world has long been recognized as essential to organized religion’s attempt to sell to us the next one, with or without the seventy-two virgins. I have to exempt Judaism here, with its solid earthiness and this-life orientation. And I hurry to say that both Wordsworth and Whyte celebrate the beauty of the earth.

Wordsworth was a pioneer. We owe it to the Romantics that the beauty of the nature became celebrated. In the Western culture, for many centuries nature used to be seen as merely savage and dangerous. Forests and mountains were the meeting places of witches. Before 1750 or so, the idea of hiking in the wilderness for pleasure would strike most people as insane.

Contrast this with Byron’s famous lines in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV:

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

There is society, where none intrudes,

By the deep sea, and music in its roar:

I love not Man the less, but Nature more.

As for Wordsworth's descriptions of nature, there are too many to choose from. I don't mean just his joy in the daffodils and rainbows and cuckoo calls, but more so his feelings of awe as he watches a sunset, the sea, forests and lakes, a mountain waterfall. Nature is his greatest inspiration, even though he goes only halfway toward the modern acknowledgment of the earth and this life as a difficult paradise of the sort that Jack Gilbert presents, along with many other modern poets. 

"We have already lived in the real paradise." For me, this line is revolutionary. Don't forget: I started in the Vale of Tears. An unbaptized infant was already a depraved sinner. All non-Catholics were doomed to burn in hell fire forever. Using the microphone, priests continued to preach the Dark Ages. It's been quite a journey before I could embrace this life and this glorious blue-green planet. 

. . . paradise was when
Dante
regathered from height and depth
   came out onto the soft, green level earth
into the natural light

~ A. R. Ammons

Let me close with this passage from David Wagoner’s “Getting There”:

What have you learned so far? You’ll find out later,
Telling it haltingly
Like a dream, that lost traveler’s dream
Under the last hill
Where through the night you'll take your time out of mind
To unburden yourself
Of elements along elementary paths
By the break of morning.

You’ve earned this worn-down, hard, incredible sight
Called Here and Now.
Now, what you make of it means everything,
Means starting over:
The life in your hands is neither here nor there
But getting there,
So you're standing again and breathing, beginning another
Journey without regret
Forever, being your own unpeaceable kingdom

~ David Wagoner In Broken Country

Hyacinth:

It seems to me that each blog gets better and explores or maybe sets up the exploring of things I am writing about. It inspires me to not give up when I think I'm so far off the meaning of what I want to say. David Whyte has been an influence on my writing. I like especially the way when he gives a reading he repeats a line maybe several times or reads the whole poem over. We get more out of it at every reread, and he knows this.

Oriana:

Thank you. I feel that I’m deepening my own exploration of various central themes that engaged me over the years. What I seek in poetry is wisdom – an unfashionable attitude, so I’m thankful to all the readers of this blog for their loyalty and interest.

David Whyte has done a service to poetry lovers. I hope I didn’t come across as condemning him. His New Age incursions are few; on the whole he is in awe of the mystery of life right here. He wants us to listen to our deeper knowing. Insofar as I’ve done it, it has moved me toward my “happy atheist” stance and away from any delusions of a better life in some New Age neverland. We should call ourselves earthlings or something similar that would announce our being part of nature. It’s the constant setting ourselves as apart from nature that has brought about much evil. We evolved right here, in this glorious place; let’s fully embrace our home. 

**

(I sent John an old Jewish saying: Life is so terrible that it would have been better not to have been born. Who is so lucky? Not one in a hundred thousand.”)

John:

Good quote – it gets to the complexity at the heart of so many things.  I think people like to see the world and life and themselves simply (I'm blessed) but it's not just that.  We're also doomed and damned and happy and confused and clear

– all at the same time.  My mother was in a convalescent home recovering from cancer surgery and she heard some nurses down the hall laughing about something and she turned to me and said, "Half of us are dying and the other half are going to a party."  

I think what she was said was true about the self too.

Oriana:

Yes, I remember it – another wonderful quote from your mother. It does apply to life, to self. Everyone’s life is part happiness, part suffering. Yet we see life as a blessing, as having a great value. I’ve grown to love this quotation: “There will be music in spite of everything” ~ Jack Gilbert. And his life was rough in so many ways (I speak in the past tense, since now he has dementia).

Yes, we have to acknowledge both the paradise and the suffering. It’s still a real paradise, but when hell opens up, it’s real too. Again, it helps to remember that there will be music in spite of everything. There will be beauty, and couples who have just fallen in love, and laughter, and joy.

BILL MOHR'S ARS POETICA

ARS POETICA

I wasn’t on a path or near a creek or lake.
In the gray light of a smoldering storm,
I heard the rotted wood of toppled trees
wait for my noise to loosen incandescent spores.

Once, hurrying through the thicket of a mountain,
I saw a glowing tube of threads like a mashed globe
suspended, taut, creased with undulant shadows.
A tent caterpillar, a man explained as sparks

from a fire pit decanted. But that name
did not suffice: those syllables only blurred
the motionless reverence of the tiny span
the chrysalis allowed itself as galactic cusp.

The next day a monk talked of cycles
of evasive desire. As he spoke, I rubbed
the small tear in a padded finger
of the left hand of my motorcycle gloves.

I’d hit the pavement hard, but jutted
back up. No broken bones, no lacerations.
I’m easily distracted: not much chance
to escape the sticky wheel of suffering.

As he walked past, he smiled delightfully,
though not at me as such. He had no other blessing
to dispense. Yet he’d grown up poor, I thought,
those teeth needed work when he was young.
 
~ Bill Mohr  
                                   

[This poem was in a recent issue of POOL magazine. The monk is Thich Nhat Hahn.]

For more of Bill Mohr's work, please visit BillMohrpoet.com

**

Bill comments:

The image of the tent caterpillar in "Ars Poetica" came out of a camping trip in Colorado in 1976. The encounter with the monk was 15 years ago. Two incidents, almost twenty years apart, somehow flowed together.

Oriana:

At first I wanted to keep Bill’s explanation of how the poem came to be a secret, but now I see it needs to be presented as part of the whole wonder of it. It’s one of the perennial surprises of poetry, how things “somehow flow together,” even if separated in time and space. And after all, the poem’s title is Ars Poetica. 

For a poet, there is no escape from the sticky wheel of experience, since it’s the richness of unexpected details that gives a poem its life. I love all those unexpected details: the caterpillars’ tent as a universe, or at least a “galactic cusp” (a magnificent phrase); the tear in the glove; the monk smiling in an impersonal manner, detached from specifics, while the poet notices even the bad teeth that tell us the monk grew up in poverty. Talk about an unexpected detail – the holy man's bad teeth! It's not a disparaging comment; it's a line that again directs us to the real. I agree with Wallace Stevens that poetry is the "necessary angel of reality." 

In the image of a tent created by the tent caterpillars (not as spectacular as the one that Bill saw on his camping trip), note what seems like the tree's eye staring through the silky veil. 

Here is another image of the tent these caterpillars make -- again, it reminds me of a "galactic cusp." 

Hyacinth:

Delightful images and lines. I especially like "the sticky wheel of suffering" It will stay with me. 


Oriana:

"The sticky wheel of suffering" will stay with me too. The whole poem is delightful, but these lines definitely hit home:

I’m easily distracted: not much chance
to escape the sticky wheel of suffering.

And I especially like these stanzas where the narrative is interwoven with cosmic imagery:

Once, hurrying through the thicket of a mountain,
I saw a glowing tube of threads like a mashed globe
suspended, taut, creased with undulant shadows.
A tent caterpillar, a man explained as sparks

from a fire pit decanted. But that name
did not suffice: those syllables only blurred
the motionless reverence of the tiny span
the chrysalis allowed itself as galactic cusp.

~ Note also the wonderful rhythm, the fluent music of the poem.
 
*

Kate Harding:

I love your blog and I love this poem by Bill. Did you know him when you were in LA?

Besides being a wonderful poet he has written a very interesting manuscript about the poetry scene in Venice.

Your blog is a rich rich feast and it fills me up when I'm hungry and makes my cup run over when I'm full.

Oriana:

Thank you, Kate. I had the great good luck to know Bill Mohr when I attended workshops at Beyond Baroque. He was always stern yet supportive, so I can also add that he is a marvelous teacher. 

One thing I love about Bill’s poem is that it never mentions poetry. It’s up to the reader to figure out how the observations on tent caterpillar and the Buddhist monk add up to ars poetica. Una Hynum does the same thing in her own ars poetica poem.

ARS POETICA

            We must risk delight.

                  ~ Jack Gilbert

Churning butter, I turn the handle

of the Mason jar until my arm

gets tired. I rest and crank again.

The unexpectedness

of what happens is like coming

upon an acre of wild daisies.

Out of thick, white cream,

clusters of yellow cling to beaters.

I pour off the whey, place

nuggets of butter on a plate,

pat and smooth, working out

the gray droplets. Finished,

I lower the dazzling mound

into the artesian coolness

of a well, careful not to break

the plate against the stone.

      ~ Una Hynum

            (published in A Year in INK)

**

Oriana:

Note these lines:

The unexpectedness

of what happens is like coming

upon an acre of wild daisies.

 
This is a wonderful statement about the creative process: the surprise. We discover more than we ever thought we knew. Often we make the cognitive leap, the connection, only when writing. Different areas of the brain are activated; something new emerges. It feels very rewarding (and extremely frustrating when the poem seems "more of the same," too expected; my nostalgia poems got to the point where I wasn't discovering anything anymore).

Sometimes the discover is more about the esthetics of the poem we are writing. We find the right form for it, or the right metaphor from which the rest follows. 

*

Brad McMurrey has also sent a comment in the form of a poem. Here is an excerpt:

POETRY

As though touching her might

make him known to himself . . .

                          ~ Li-Young Li, “Dwelling”

                                          

I was unfocused rain, twisted thunder, lost lightning

randomly stretching my hand to find a target.

I was unknown to myself when she arrived.

She seduced me with the promise of knowledge,

like the serpent in the first Garden, as though

touching her might make me known to myself.

She has seduced me into Eden.

Now I am known to myself.

**

Oriana:

In my case, the creative process seduces me with the promise of beauty rather than knowledge; but the knowledge (discovery) happens nevertheless, and is as important to me as beauty. Beautiful lines that don't say anything worth saying will be quickly forgotten: it's the marriage of beauty and insight that I crave, both as a reader and writer.

CARPATHIAN BLUEBERRIES; UNA HYNUM'S "YOU HEAR ME STILL"

I loved the city, but summer vacations opened another world to me: the countryside. When my babcia was still alive, that meant Carpathia. Here is a poem about one aspect of that experience.

CARPATHIAN BLUEBERRIES

They were the most tender

mercy of the summer,

the long solstice days when we stayed

in the mountains and I picked them

myself, early morning, beaded

with cold dew – or in ripe

afternoon, scented with the sun.

On the edge of a spruce forest,

crouching, half-kneeling,

I picked and ate and ate –

or grandmother bought them

from a country woman,

her thin young daughter

like a shy twig, bent,

carrying twin metal buckets

heavy with sweet darkness,

blue so deep it glowed into black.

Lead me into temptation,

give us days that are endless,

berries to the brim –

though the mountains stepped

farther and farther

into bluish haze,

before being swept

into the golden, chill

corridors of September.

~ Oriana


**
One of our San Diego poets has an exquisite poem about picking blueberries with a friend. 

You Hear Me Still

We pick up midstream,

as if years were just the pause

between the first blueberries

dropped in a cold pail.

In letters we’ve been able

to go beyond the stilted words,

fathom the pain, the joy,

as if we are children still

picking berries, up before dawn

in the wet woods full of wings

and fur and rustlings,

parallel, out of sight

listening for the crunch of twigs

underfoot, aware of each other

calling softly not to be lost,

not to ruffle the silence.

~ Una Hynum

***

Marjorie:

I love Una's "Blueberries" for its understatement.  The images of the blueberry picking are lovely, while the last stanza gives us something ugly that underplays the earlier beauty.  The poem never really tells us what that ugliness is, and so we finish this poem with a sense of mystery and menace.  Well done, Una!  

IMAGES OF RESURRECTION: LOUISE GLÜCK’S "THE WILD IRIS," GEORGE HERBERT’S "THE FLOWER”

WILD IRIS

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:

from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue 
 shadows on azure seawater.

~ Louise Glück

**

The closest I have come to experienciong resurrection has been a return from despair, or a liberation from oppressive circumstances, such as a bad relationship with a domineering partner who becomes more and more a vampire. And then -- a burst of creativity that can follow.

Louise Glück's famous poem is among my great favorites on the subject of resurrection.  

I was reminded of this poem last year when I read Eat, Love, Pray. (How I'd love that book to be not chatty, but exquisite, the way Brodsky wrote about Venice.). On p. 39, I came on this:

Del centro della mia vita venne una grande fontana

which, translated into Italian, is the unforgettable line by Louise Gluck:

From the center of my life came a great fountain

~ the title poem in Wild Iris. In Italian it sounds to me like something out of Dante, that kind of dignity and gravitas. And of course the music, the music . . .

But aside from how gorgeous the line sounds in Italian, the longing for this came over me – how much I'd love a great fountain to come from the center of my life. I wouldn't insist that this fountain should be poems, though I have experienced the birth of a poetic sequence more than once.

George Herbert (1593-1633) has a long poem, “The Flower,” whose last two stanzas have always spoken to me deeply.

Who would have thought my shriveled heart

Could have recovered greenness? It was gone

Quite underground; as flowers depart

To see their mother-root, when they have blown,

Where they together

All the hard weather,

Dead to the world, keep house unknown.

And now in age I bud again,

After so many deaths I live and write;

I once more smell the dew and rain,

And relish versing: O, my only Light,

It cannot be

That I am he

On whom thy tempests fell all night.

~ George Herbert, from “The Flower”

**

My apologies for the problems with spacing. I did what little repair was possible. More could not be fixed.