RILKE: THE UNICORN SONNET

This morning I was reading Rilke on how it’s not necessary for god to exist, since prayer creates him. And if such prayer-created deity doesn’t persist, that’s all the better, Rilke asserts: we’ll just pray again and again. I think it’s possible to understand this, and still get some benefit from the ritual of prayer.

Rilke’s famous unicorn sonnet shows how “belief can create,” at least at the subjective level:

O dieses ist das Tier das es nicht gibt

This is the animal that doesn’t exist. 
But they didn’t know it and dared nonetheless
to love its transformations, its bearing, its gait 
so much that in the tranquil gaze of light, it lived. 

Really it never was. Out of their love they made it, 
this pure creature. They always saved a space. 
And in that place, empty and set aside, 
it lightly raised its head and scarcely

needed to be. They fed it no corn, 
only the possibility that it might exist –

which gave the beast such strength, it bore 

a horn upon his forehead. Just one horn. 
It came to a virgin, all white, 
and was in the silver mirror and in her.

Sonnets to Orpheus II, 4

There appears to be some limit to the power of strictly mental existence. After the Middle Ages, lack of credible evidence eventually eroded the legend of the unicorn. (Or was it that there was no real emotional need for the unicorn to exist?) But we can still enjoy the unicorn as art. And the unicorn is still the heraldic animal of Scotland — perhaps presaging the doom of Scottish independence for now. Imagine having as your emblem an animal that doesn’t exist — though of course it DOES exist as a concept and as poetry. Platonists would argue that a symbol is more important than pedestrian reality.

But if I may be pardoned for being Aristotelian: I wonder how many of our current beliefs will ultimately go the way of the unicorn.

PRACTICE CREATES BELIEF

But, as Rilke says, it’s not necessary to believe in god in order to pray to him. In fact it’s the reverse: prayer creates god, at least in the psychological sense. The more often you pray (go to mass, make a pilgrimage, etc), the more real god will appear. Practice creates belief. Being exposed to religious art and sacred music deepens that effect.

 I’ve noted this effect also with New Age practices. People start going to psychics and Tarot readings “just for fun,” but within a year or so they may find themselves taking classes, joining a chanting group, and so forth. Contrary to the idea that belief comes first and action later, quite often action precedes belief. 

Hence the New Age doctrine of reversal: put the desired outcome  first. Be happy, and the beloved comes. Love yourself, and the excess weight will melt with no effort. Start writing, and the inspiration will come. There are studies that confirm this. 

START WORKING, AND THE INSPIRATION WILL COME

Artists still talk about the Muse – not always in the sense of the beloved who inspires creative work, but in the ancient sense of “Sing, heavenly goddess, the wrath of Achilles.” Yes, that beautiful divine being in a pleated tunic, holding a lyre.

I could create the Muse in my mind, give her a name, say prayers, even create a little altar with seashells, a geode, candles, crystals – there are writers who do! But if a writer actually sacrificed a lamb to the muse, we’d see this as insane. Taking the subjective world literally to some degree is, well, a socially accepted sort of schizophrenia . . . But exceeding that degree becomes clinical schizophrenia.

It's a very tricky terrain, and I can't exempt myself from "doing what comes naturally," i.e. harboring cognitive illusions. It's just how we evolved, and it's only when that tendency is pushed to extremes that we get pathology (typically paranoid schizophrenia) in place of poetry.

(By the way, in ancient Greek the first word of the Iliad is not sing, but rage.)

 

**

THE TELEOLOGICAL FALLACY

God in his wisdom made the fly,

And forgot to tell us why.

                 ~ Ogden Nash

Due to my recent computer NDE, I found myself with more time to read (no curse without a blessing, no blessing without a curse), and read Jesse Bering’s superb The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life. I read the chapters on destiny and “signs, signs everywhere” not once, but three times.

Bering writes:

Each of us, everyone one of the billions of individuals on this planet, feels as if we’re here to satisfy our own unique purpose, one crafted especially for us by intentional design. (p. 61)

This is an example of teleological (purpose-oriented) thinking (telos = end, goal). Young children, when asked a question such as “Why do mountains exist?” are likely to reply in terms of purpose: “So that animals have a higher place to climb.” Older children may shrug and say, “They just are.” Those who’ve had some science education can give a geological answer: volcanoes, and up-thrust mountains that result from the collision of tectonic plates.

Ah, those pesky geologists! Ruskin complained that he hears the clinking of a geologist’s hammer at the end of each biblical verse. After all, it’s not just biologists who asserted that everything evolved over an unimaginable expanse of time. Still, it’s Darwin who is credited with endowing us with the evolutionary perspective that omits “purpose” or “design.” Bering quotes from Darwin’s letter to the botanist Asa Gray:

I see a bird which I want for food, take my gun and kill it, I do this designedly. An innocent man stands under a tree and is killed by a flash of lightning. Do you believe that God designedly killed this man? Many or most persons do believe this; I can’t and don’t. If you believe so, do you believe that when a swallow snaps up a gnat that God designed that that particular swallow should snap up that particular gnat at that particular instant? I believe that the man and the gnat are in the same predicament. If the death of neither man nor gnat are designed, I see no reason to believe that their first birth or production should be necessarily designed. (p. 63)

Bering laments that parents and teachers unwittingly promote the idea of destiny, prophesying that Jimmy is going to be a pianist and Adele is already on her way to become a champion ice-skater. Few children live up to those glorious prophecies. They settle for an “ordinary” life. This is usually no tragedy, but in some cases this “failure” leads to a life-long resentment. I’ll say more on this topic in a future blog, “What gardens were you born for?”

My interest in the topic hints that it’s taken me quite a while – years and years of chronic depression – to overcome this kind of resentment. But my chief cognitive sin, I think, has been “navigating by omens.” It comes naturally to a poet trained to read “symbolic meaning” in poems that strikes the average reader as merely obscure. But no special education is required – we are wired to see pattern and meaning. Anything we see, anything that happens, can be interpreted as a sign, communicating to us who we are in our essence and what we are supposed to do. Consider this poem of mine:

  

AT THE WIND HARP

                       

   There are only miracles.

                                    ~ Franz Kafka

At the Marina, listening to the wind harp,

its rainbow of harmonics,

I felt a light touch

above my left wrist –

a little girl, maybe eight-years-old –
Down Syndrome –

pale skin, pale aqua eyes –

like a pretty ghost child.

She was just beginning to smile,

her finger pointing: “You.”
Then she ran off,

vanished like wind into wind.

*

In gilded medieval light, I stood

on a sand dune overlooking

the city of Prague –

zlata Praha,”golden Prague” –

its stony-ribbed cathedral,

royal castle of a thousand windows,

and the narrow crooked hope

in the crooked street below,

The Alchemists’ Lane –

And the legend of the Golem:

on the giant’s clay forehead

the word Emet, meaning Truth.

When the Golem grew dangerous,
Rabbi Liwa erased the first letter,

leaving Met, meaning Death.

And the Golem fell back to dust.

*

I started across the sand, but it bled

into flat suburban streets, the dream

fled. I lay thinking, will I ever

reach the golden city of Prague?

I thought of Kafka and the cold

cathedral, its moan of echoes,

prayers denied, denied, denied.

I thought of classes never taught,

of the ghost poems I wrote:

would they vanish like the night

into night? Then your image

returned – you returned,

child at the wind harp,

and with a touch as light as

one letter, changed the word

from death to truth. 

~ Oriana © 2012

**

Readers tend to like this poem, even if they don’t entirely “get it.” They like it because, as one person recently said, it gives a special (if unclear) meaning to a gesture made by a child. The mystical logic of the poem “animates the universe” that otherwise seems only “dead matter.”

Arguably it’s a flaw that the poem could use a bit of autobiographical explanation. The incident at the wind harp happened when I felt confused and defeated about my calling. If I was “meant” to be a poet, if this was what I was “born for,” the Great Dream of my life – shouldn’t there be, after so many years, a real audience, beyond a handful of friends? I was thrashing after any confirmation that I ought to continue on my frustrating path, to the point of wanting to believe that being touched by this little girl with Down’s syndrome singled me out for a difficult destiny. After all, a folk tradition has it that “holy fools” can see a deeper truth. And it all took place near a wind harp – harp and poetry, need I say more?

I wouldn't dream of speaking seriously in such terms, implying that everything has a secret meaning and “there are no accidents.” In conversation I would never assert that the child at the wind harp confirmed what my “destiny” was – a single, special destiny being as much a myth as the one and only “soulmate.” We make up our “destiny” as we go along. Some believe in a “divine plan” designed especially for them, but there is no evidence for it, no matter how many people testify before a TV camera, “I know I was saved for a purpose.” What about the three hundred others who went down with the plane, while one lucky would-be passenger had a flat tire on the way to the airport, and thus missed the departure? What was the divine plan for those who didn’t survive? But it would depress us to ponder that chance plays a huge role, so we reject this frightening hypothesis. During a storm at sea, D.H. Lawrence soothed his wife by saying, “Of course the ship won’t sink; after all, I am on it.” He wasn’t joking. He had a destiny to fulfill.

THE COGNITIVE ILLUSION THAT EVERYTHING HAS A MEANING

Jesse Bering, a cognitive psychologist, makes a compelling case that it’s all cognitive illusion. But in poetry one can get away with all kinds of mysticism. A poet is pretty much compelled to be a mystic, at least for the duration of a poem, or s/he risks being called “pedestrian.” Ideally, there should be at least two layers of meaning in a poem, and three or four layers make it all the more wonderful. Signs, signs everywhere. As I say in a different poem, “Hel Peninsula,” already as a child I discovered layers of meaning:

      . . . Everything

is a language, has a secret message –

specks of insects glimmering in amber,

the bronze mermaid slippery as tears.

**

In retrospect, I see another, more plausible meaning of the “child at the wind harp.” Depressives tend to feel unloved and unlovable. Receiving even a slight token of affection from a child or an animal contradicts this assumption, and briefly lifts the heart. The poem need not be read in terms of the Death of the Great Dream, and its partial restoration when attention shifts to “truth,” the sacred task of a writer – a masked truth, hidden in symbolic images. Another “truth” contained in this poem is the power of affection to reverse the death of the heart. 

SYNCHRONICITY? 

                                                                                               

The human mind is nimble enough to read some kind of message or meaning in practically everything that comes to its attention. Fortunately, not everything comes to our attention, or we’d be overwhelmed. And that’s another factor we need to ponder in this strange game that the universe seems to play with us: SELECTIVE ATTENTION.

While composing the blog, having just copied the Wind Harp poem, I went to the mailbox to pick up my mail, these days sadly dwindled to bills and advertising. This time it was a travel supplies catalog, and on its cover, a lovely view of Prague in a gilded late-afternoon light. Jungians would love this. The human brain is wired to seek pattern and meaning: randomness can never satisfy it.

After all, it’s to this pattern seeking that we owe the arts and sciences – the entire human culture, in fact. Destiny and omens are cognitive illusions, and even “miracles” have a natural explanation, though we may not see it, just as we don’t perceive how a magician works his magic. Still, our highly developed ability to detect and create patterns has mostly served us well. As Howard Nemerov concludes in “The Blue Swallows”

 

O swallows, swallows, poems are not

the point. Finding again the world,

that is the point, where loveliness

adorns intelligible things

because the mind’s eye lit the sun.

Sunset, Hollywood hills. Photo: C. Sherman

##

Hyacinth:

Enjoyed it thoroughly. Your unicorn poem belongs on this blog.

Oriana:

Just for you, sweet Hyacinth:

UNICORN IN CAPTIVITY

15^th century French tapestry

Smooth as a leap and of the moonlight

even in plain day, it grazed so deep

in the woods of the inner eye,

it evaded mere seeing –

They wove it into a garden;

it would come to a virgin –

they wove the deceit – the delicate,

bell-like drops of blood –

They enclosed a profaning fence,

fixed a fine chain, a gem-set collar,

a pomegranate tree for a stake; violets

and columbines its embroidered domain.

Then they forgot about it.

Only the girl came to it in the still

morning-amazed world,

to touch it with a tender and imagined hand.

~ Oriana © 2012

**

SIGNS, SIGNS EVERYWHERE

Mary:

Maybe it's not just that our brains are wired to perceive signs. My own feeling: in some sense they really are "out there" as well as "in here." After all, evolution is adaptation.

Oriana:

Jesse Bering is good at explaining the adaptive value of seeing signs in things, and how natural selection worked to heighten this human capacity. Out of everything “out there,” we tend to single out certain things and occurrences as signs and omens because once that was crucial for survival. For instance, we are hard-wired to see "faces" in things -- this was useful for recognizing predators, with their frontal eyes. And even now -- or perhaps especially now -- it’s important that we recognize the emotions and intentions of people we meet.

Can this become borderline irrational? It happens all the time. As Steve commented in another post, after making a decision, a friend of his “watches the universe for signs” and concludes on that basis whether or not the universe favors his decision (note the theory of mind here – this man animates the universe; the universe either likes or doesn’t like his decision, and will communicate its attitude).

Our minds are very good at finding meaning in just about anything. But we should remember that it’s all interpretation. As the old rabbis said, a dream isn’t complete without an interpretation. That holds for just about anything we pay attention to.

(P.S. Alas, we've lost Mary in December 2012. She was a beautiful human being, an activist who tried to make contraceptive rights more widely available to women -- among her other causes.)

JAMES HILLMAN'S VIEW OF DESTINY

Darlene:

What is your view of Hillman “acorn” theory of destiny?

Oriana:

You are referring to The Soul’s Code, in which Hillman proposes a kind of “DNA of the soul.” How I wish Hillman were still alive and could read Bering’s deconstruction of the soul, destiny, omens, and especially of the mind/body duality in general . . . All this Platonism really has to go. It's more than two thousand years out of date.

Still, you know how much I love Hillman’s idea that extraordinary people are extraordinary because they are so dedicated to their calling. And I am grateful to Hillman for trying to dismantle the psychoanalytic idea that parental influences and early childhood experiences make us who we are. Una, a mother of five, often says, “What you do as a parent doesn’t matter that much. They always turn out different than you expected, and each one is different from the day they were born.”

At the same time, we should beware of falling into genetic determinism (I don’t think we need to reach for some imaginary and non-material “DNA of the soul” when the actual DNA encodes so much: intelligence, persistence, ability to delay pleasure, risk-taking versus caution. But even genes don’t have absolute power to determine who we are, how we “turn out.” That would be like claiming “god’s master plan.” Caroline Myss says somewhere that even which tomato you pick at the supermarket has been determined in advance as part of your destiny – “it’s that specific.” That’s absurd. The interactions with the environment are very complex. We shape ourselves as we go along. We invent ourselves – within limits. Contrary to blithe New Age pronouncements, no, we can’t be anything we’d like to be (Hillman would agree with that).

THE SELF-MADE MAN AND THE VICTIM

I also like this perceptive statement by Hillman: “The current American identity as a victim is the flip side of the coin whose head brightly displays the opposite identity: the heroic self-made man, carving out destiny alone and with unflagging will.” But when we take a closer look at the “heroic self-made man,” he (self-sufficiency is a masculine ideal) is never 100% “self-made”; we discover a multitude of people and factors that helped shape the person. Usually the truth resides not at either extreme, but somewhere in between. 

If we are lucky, the dominant talent encoded in our genes will be allowed to develop and find an outlet. But a lot of people are not lucky, and besides, we tend to be gifted in several areas and may not have a single dominant talent that shows already at an early age. It’s more realistic to think in terms of several potential paths in life rather than a single “destiny.” But once we commit to a path, at the beginning it may be helpful to think of it in somewhat absolute terms. Remember, choice is stressful; eliminating choice and focusing on one path makes sense in terms of maximizing accomplishment and happiness (“why quitters win” – they concentrate on one thing).

I’d call this a pragmatic view of destiny. Calling a particular path our “destiny” may help us focus and put enough work into developing the required skills that we achieve excellence, perhaps even become “extraordinary.” I suspect, though, that the concept of destiny will eventually fall into disuse as a leftover from archaic modes of thought. It’s not as bad as believing in karma from past lives, but if you get too literal about your “acorn” (or daimon or genius or guiding image or any other metaphorical-mythical representation of “destiny”), you get simplistic. There are many forces at work and in constant interaction; our knowledge of what shapes us and how and why we consciously try to shape ourselves is likely to remain partial. There are worse, ahem, fates.

THE LADY AND THE UNICORN TAPESTRY

Charles:

I love this image but don't know what the symbolism of the flag is.

Also love the human face on the lion and the background of all the animals.

THE LION AND THE UNICORN

Oriana:

Yes, both the lion and the unicorn are quite endearing. In fact all the animals here are. 

Note the wonderful flourish of the tails.

The banner is the pennant of the French nobleman Jean de Laviste, who at the end of the fifteenth century commissioned the six unicorn tapestries They are now at the Cluny Museum in Paris.

The background of the tapestry is known as the mille-fleurs design.

Charles:

Interesting if an artist made a sacrifice of a lamb to a Muse 2000 years ago she would have been considered a pagan.

Same is true today except it isn't politically correct to smite a lamb for any purpose unless a butcher does it.

Love the story of the Down syndrome child, literally touching and the afterthoughts about it.

Oriana:

Sacrificing either humans or animals to a deity used to be customary, a pious practice. To most of us, blood sacrifice is a repulsive idea. Only Jesus as a human “sin sacrifice” is still the official dogma. At long last at least some more liberal Protestant theologians (e.g. Bishop Shelby Spong) are protesting that we need to drop this archaic and barbarous concept of an innocent being killed for anyone’s sins. The religious right, on the other hand, constantly invokes the “blood of the Lamb.”

Then there is the doctrine of trans-substantiation. As a child I was force-fed the belief that the communion wafer and wine literally became flesh and blood. Talk about organized schizophrenia . . .

It’s interesting that the crucifix wasn’t part of early Christian art. Early Christians preferred to depict paradise. The crucifix became dominant during the Middle Ages (I still can’t understand how humanity survived the Middle Ages).

The girl with Down Syndrome was amazingly lovely and endearing. If I happened to be a mystic, I’d probably see her as an angel. But then the mind is awfully good at creating meaning. When the meaning stays private, it’s usually harmless. But if I took being touched by this “special” little girl as a sign that I am a prophet and should start preaching (some might argue that being a writer is similar), that could be a symptom of a psychotic breakdown. Sometimes the line between normal cognitive function, including seeing meaning in something we see or experience, and psychotic delusions, seems rather faint . . .

THE CHARM OF THE ILLUSION OF DESTINY

Lilith:

Oh no! Can’t you leave me the illusion of destiny just to tinker with. You are so right, and I’ve never seen it written before, that I have been all my adult life an atheist-poet-intellectual-literature professor navigating through written language omen by omen, synchronicity by synchronicity, searching for connections.

As though humans are like ants in a colony, all connected on one wave length, and that wave length just might be poetry. And one day I understood that we, and all of the earth and its creatures, are made from the same star and are thus the same stuff. I had to look that far for connection, which might be the only truth that’s not an illusion, in the Hindu sense of peeling away the illusions so we can reach enlightenment. 

Oriana:

Actually, even the atoms in your right hand most likely come from a different stars than the atoms in your left hand. The reason is that it took the death of many stars to produce the atoms that now constitute our bodies. Every atom inside us was once inside a star! Now of course any of those atoms is in a very different configuration than billions of years ago. Who knows where it's been. 

Of course we are connected in all kinds of ways. We are of the earth, we are the children of the Universe. And there really are patterns out there -- just not necessarily the kind that correspond to our desires. But much is yet to be understood. I’ll leave it at that.

I think Daoism is compatible with no personal deity, no destiny, and no afterlife. "Soul" in the sense of psyche dies when the brain dies. But we remain right here on earth in the memories of others, and through the ripple effect -- "the immortality of influence." I do have a blog on that: the accidentally hilarious interfaith panel on the afterlife. You'll love it. 

http://oriana-poetry.blogspot.com/2011/12/immortality-of-influence.html

ARE LOVERS PRE-DESTINED TO MEET?

Teresa:

“An invisible red thread connects those destined to meet, despite the time, the place, and despite the circumstances. The thread can be tightened or tangle, but will never be broken.” ~ Chinese proverb

Oriana:

This is lovely as poetry, but it's based on our tendency to think that because something happened, it HAD TO happen. Funny, it was Milosz, a public Catholic (though full of Gnostic doubt), who taught me this principle of cognitive bias.

No, lovers are not predestined to meet. We could be wonderful "soulmates" with a thousand other people. But lovers always see each other as inevitable -- at least as long as they are in love. "Destiny" is an illusion. There are infinite other plots, perspectives, narratives -- as many as there are people, each with his/her own "contract with life."

It’s not just that lovers aren’t predestined to meet. Nothing is predestined in this probabilistic universe. But the redeeming feature here is that we can learn lessons from whatever happens. Response is everything. Learning and growth are everything. 

THE SEA UNICORN

Scott:

Love the 'sea unicorn', the Narwhal. The poet Louis MacNiece has a great line from one of my favorite poems, 'Thalassa'

'The Narwhal dares us to be free'

Lawrence was a great early proponent of Melville, as was the Catholic poetess Viola Meynell, a friend of his in the 20's post WWI literary circle.

Oriana:

Scott, you are amazing. And you’ve taught me something – I used to think the narwhal was just a “northern whale,” an arctic species – and didn’t know this was indeed the unicorn – the sea unicorn! The “horn” is a greatly elongated left canine. Below is an image of narwhals “tusking.” 

RENOIR AND ROSES

I will refrain from tales of my recent computer apocalypse, especially since it’s not yet over, with Best Buy as the Whore of Babylon, while New Jerusalem, friends tell me, is getting an Apple. Instead let me say that I like to get up early, the morning still ghostlike, sip my coffee with Ganoderma lucidum, and read something beautifully useless.

(Unfair, you say. What’s Ganoderma lucidum? It’s a tree mushroom, “shining-skin shining” in Western nomenclature, “spirit mushroom” in Chinese. Bitter, yes, but how could I resist a name like that?)

When it comes to “beautifully useless,” however, a lot of poetry has been a disappointment. Useless, yes, beautiful, no. So imagine my near-ecstasy when I came across Margaret Szumowski’s Night of the Lunar Eclipse. Even her lesser poems seem to be in that sweet key of a minor. Her best ones, ah! – multiple orgasms and arpeggios.

The poem about women as Aurora borealis is my great favorite. Now I have found my second most favorite poem in that gorgeous volume (with its slightly coy lower-case titles titles, as if to say, “This is just a poem”):

the old man in the midst of renoir’s women

The old man loves the naked women in the museum,

calls to his old wife not to leave him behind

in the room with all the Renoir women,

ripe as apples in his country boyhood.

He calls to her, desperate she will disappear.

She gave him seven children, but one is gone,

and what does it matter now

if nymphs pull the satyr into the pond,

or if outside, the gardener cultivates

every kind of rose you could imagine.

They are old, their son is gone, but wait,

the old man still loves the old woman.

She is all he has as a woman, rushing away

on bunioned feet. She has spotted the gardener.

What to do about the rosebush

that won’t bloom no matter how carefully

she waters, and fertilizes, and waits for it.

She wants this gardener

to be God. “If you had been there,

my rosebush would be blooming.

My young son would not be dead.

Will you revive him?”

“Yes,” says the gardener. “He is here.

I woke him yesterday in the palest roses.”

~ Margaret Szumowski, The Night of the Lunar Eclipse

It’s so rare to find a new poem that delights me. 99% of poems I come across are instantly forgettable; some are not even readable. Maybe I’ve become too fussy: I want a poem to transport me to that “otherworld” of metaphoric vision. Too many poets use something that looks like a poem as a medium for writing prose, except it’s easier to write something that looks like a poem: a snapshot, a snippet – you can count the words – without the bother of giving us a fuller story.

Now, I’m not saying that it’s the task of a poem to give us a “full story.” No, just a wisp of a story will do, as long as there is mystery and more than one layer of meaning. A lyrical moment is always welcome, as are surprises. Here the gardener could indeed be God: note that the resurrection takes place in a garden (and echo of the Garden of Eden), and the resurrected Christ is mistaken by Mary Magdalene for the gardener.

“Woman, why are you weeping?” – you know the rest. I know from personal experience that after the death of the beloved we are prone to see him – someone in the crowd looks just like him. The brain produces these visions, these benign hallucinations, as part of the grieving process. The brain does a lot of things behind the back of our consciousness, so to speak. But I don’t mean to translate a poetic story into “neurotheology.” In poetry, we have to suspend disbelief and walk with the grieving woman into the garden, accepting the miracle.

But we don’t have to go into religious symbolism of the garden, be it the garden of Eden or the garden of the resurrection -- or, from a secular point of view, of becoming one with nature, returning in the beauty of blossoms. It’s enough to know the mother’s wish for the gardener who can restore her son, and the ending becomes heartbreaking in that wonderful way that only poetry can ascend to:

“Yes,” says the gardener. “He is here.

I woke him yesterday in the palest roses.”

*

But the first delight that the poem delivers is that roomful of Renoir’s apple-ripe women, also a kind of garden of Eden, an orchard with the Tree of Life (a woman is a tree of life). Only after presenting to us the miracle of art – making its subject “live” again whenever a painting is gazed on – we get the treat of another kind of coming back to life, the delicate and tender “I woke him yesterday in the palest roses.”

So what if it’s poeticized wishful thinking, and the ashes of the beloved have sunk into the ocean. The otherworld of poetry allows this kind of wish fulfillment – as long as there is beauty. And here beauty seems to reside in the image not just of roses, but of the “palest roses.” Paleness signals frailty, sometimes death itself.

But the rose is also the flower of Eros (oddly enough, Eros is the anagram of “rose”). Thus we have here the lovely fusion of Eros and Thanatos. The lost son is awakened by the gardener. And this miracle happens again and again every time the poem finds a reader.

DOSTOYEVSKI AND LOUISE HAY

photo: Qarrtsiluni

* * *

My grandson Woody 

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“MONSTERS IN THEIR MISERY”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dostoyevski's "mock execution"

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

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

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

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

THE PEASANT MAREY

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

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

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

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

WORK AND HOPE

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

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

Dostoyevski's monument in Omsk

A WORLD WHERE EVERYONE IS KIND

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

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

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

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

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

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

BAD DOG

“When will you lose the dog again?”

I was sure my cousin Stash would tease,

greeting me after twenty-seven years.

Medor was Uncle Dobroslav’s piesek,

a handsome German shepherd.

I took him for walks along the river,

to chestnut tree-shaded parks.

One time I lost him; Stash, the hero,

found him the evening of the same day.

But Stash never mentioned Medor.

Head tilted in concentration,

he studied me for a moment:

“What did I use to call you?

Ah, yes, królevna.” A royal princess.

I cringed, just as I did then.

“Do you remember that bad dog?”

he suddenly asked; reminded me,

across the Vistula we had visited someone

who kept a “bad dog” on a chain.

The dog had once bitten Stash

and two of his friends.

In the end, Stash said, the dog broke loose

and charged a group of passing soldiers,

who shot him dead.

But the day we visited when I was a girl,

I did not see a vicious dog.

I saw a dog on a chain,

and felt sorry for him.

The grown-ups were busy talking.

I went out into the yard.

When he came out to look for me,

Stash froze with terror.

The dog had both paws on my shoulders.

“Oh God, what if he bites her

on the cheek,” Stash thought.

But the bad dog was licking my face.

What a gift, that my cousin remembered.

I was no longer the bumbling girl

who’d lost the family dog,

but a royal princess, a magical child

who’d tamed a dangerous animal.

Now I remembered: Piesek, pieseczek,

I spoke to the dog, slowly coming closer.

Piesuniu, I spoke caressingly.

The dog squealed faintly, stretching his neck

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

“That was such a bad dog,”

Stash said, still wincing after years.

~ Oriana © 2012

**

Scott:

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

I, too, nailed a coin

to the mast of the Pequod.

A tiny pinecone.

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

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

Oriana:

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

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

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

Hyacinth:

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

Oriana:

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

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

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

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

Charles:

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

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

Oriana:

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

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

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

Darlene:

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

Oriana:

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

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

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

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