PENELOPE AND ODYSSEUS AS ONE PERSON

Vladimir Kush, Metamorphosis

Watching, across the street, a grandchild being unpacked (extricated? downloaded?), I mused how my fantasies used to turn around a small, portable child, not a jumbo babe requiring a vanful of gear. Ah, the beauty of less . . . 

When you lose simplicity, you lose art. ~ Joseph Campbell

You also lose flow. In a poem, you lose the mysteriously perfect velocity that a particular poem requires.

But I don’t want to appear so infatuated with the elegant, luxurious less that I can’t see the need for more -- under some circumstances. There is a season for less, and there is a season for more. I hope the poem below, like the tai-chi sign, presents this balance.

PENELOPE AND ODYSSEUS AS ONE PERSON

One wants the world. The wing of dawn
beats in him: More! More!
The other never stirs from the loom.
An ancient rhythm repeats:
“Less – less – the real
traveling is inward.”

One loves storms and clouds,
says death is a skyless country.
The other prefers trees,
says death is a cloud of leaves
where at last we understand
the proverbs of the wind.

One asks why rest –
the horrible gallop of minutes
will trample us if we stay.
The other stops to caress
a single plume of grass,
leans to petals glistening with rain.

One craves ravishing words,
says to a lover, “Enchant me.”
the other unravels the yarn
to make beauty more naked;
weighs a shiver of sunlight,
water closing around the hand.

One lets the first smudge of dawn
erase all dreams,
now useless as daytime stars.
The other gathers the lost
feathers of dreams as they fly,
the sky a nest of horizons.

A shroud grows between them,
a weave of tales and waves.
They breathe one breath:
the tide and the shore,
a sea, a story of return –
the moon in a fisherman’s net.

~ Oriana © 2013

Vladimir Kush, The Sacred Bird of Yucatan. 
The lost feathers of dreams?

*

Penelope and Odysseus are a couple unlike any other in the Western canon. They are not doomed romantic lovers. In some ways they are the opposite of Romeo and Juliet or Catherine and Heathcliff. Nor are they like that psychopathic power couple, the Macbeths.

Yet they are a power couple not only because they are royalty, but because they cooperate. Unlike the unfortunate couples who conduct marriage as warfare (especially heart-rending to see when the warring couple is past eighty), Penelope and Odysseus clearly understand that cooperation is beautiful. This is BALANCE, a non-oppressive division of labor: tasks that are both self-affirming and building something larger, held in common. Coming home must be possible if we are to voyage. The voyage must be made, but with the hope of going back to the inmost self, back to Penelope’s arms:

For though the heart grow desolate, thought it roam
        forever in vain the ways of earth, in quest
of high and lovely things, yet it comes home
        in the end to the waiting arms, and finds its rest.

            ~ A.R.D. Fairburn, “Odysseus”

This is BEYOND ROMANCE: it’s love as loyalty (a deep marital loyalty can exist even without sexual fidelity) and mutual support. The symbol of the loyalty is the marriage bed of Penelope and Odysseus. The bed cannot be moved to another place because it is built from the trunk of an olive tree, with roots deep in the earth. The symbolism of the strong, “deep-rooted” commitment can’t be missed.

In fact Odysseus states that a good marriage is the best thing in life. In Book VI of the Odyssey, Odysseus says to the “white-armed Nausicaa”:

May the gods grant you
Your heart’s desire, a husband and a home,
And the blessings of a harmonious life.
For nothing is greater or finer than this,
When a man and woman live together
With one heart and mind

(~ tr. Stanley Lombardo)

The best thing in the world, Odysseus declares, is harmony between a husband and wife: one heart and mind. The driving theme of the Odyssey is the hero’s desire to return to his wife. But this is not Tristan sighing for Isolde. This is Odysseus, the supreme pragmatist, praising cooperative marriage. United, the power couple can accomplish much more than each alone.

*
My poem, however, is not about two different people who complement each other. It’s about the marriage of two selves within a person. Only two? Let’s not quibble along the lines of “one brain, many minds.” Art is allowed to simplify in order to make a point (“When you lose simplicity, you lose art.”)

Two selves, then: one who wants more (we sense that this is Odysseus, the spirit of exploring and engaging with the world) and the one who wants less: the solitary quiet of musing on experience, of choosing the best, the most vivid threads for the tapestry.

The season for “more” is youth. That’s the Odyssean voyage to many islands, many new kinds of joy and much suffering as well. Maturity is the season of “less” -- a paradoxical less, since it leads to more wealth. In my calculus, depth = wealth. Now I am mostly Penelope. I weave out of the wealth gathered when I was fascinated by being Odysseus. (But even Odysseus had his quiet, introverted side. And he wept. He wept a lot.) 

Vladimir Kush: Bound for Distant Shores

THE REAL TRAVELING IS INWARD

One of the outrageous ironies of my life is that my “American dream” was “seeing the world.” I would be free to travel. Now I don’t know if to laugh or cry, but when I was in my teens, I really didn’t know that travel was expensive -- a minor kind of ignorance, considering I also thought that most Americans lived in skyscrapers.)

Now that I finally can afford to travel, once a year, say (that’s about the most traveling I feel like -- I’m a typical home-loving introvert that way), other implacable limitations have arisen. Are we the sport of the gods? Sometimes it certainly feels that way.

But then Emily Dickinson didn’t travel, and her genius wasn’t hampered by it. It’s possible that her isolation made her creativity flourish.

Most of my life is inner life. In my Penelope season, life wouldn’t be worth living if I did not have my quiet solitude for reading and writing, and simply for digesting daily experience (no woman is an island, and I certainly have some “outer” life as well).

In honor of “less” and the inner experience, let me end with this poem, which gives primacy to Penelope. 

ARCHAIC PENELOPE

It’s my waiting that creates you.
The tapestry I weave,
unraveling you in dreams,
is your secret map.

How you try
to read over my shoulder!
You are too close,
thinking you are too far.

Here’s a seaweed-dripping cave
and a sea-nymph’s bribe:
immortality, but nothing else
will ever happen in your life –

and you pick mortality,
that beautiful blood flower –
scorn the sunny-smiled
forever, choose the storm.

Days slide off the loom of hours.
The moon sets, mottled with regrets
like a lamp with islands of dead moths.
Again you think of home.

Wreathed with horizons,
you want me
to stroke your neck,
stiff from looking ahead;

weary of women
opening like shores,
you want my body to lead
into the body of silence.

You beg to know
how the story ends –
and it is I
who tie you to the mast.

~ Oriana © 2013
 
Vladimir Cush, Candle

Hyacinth:

Outstanding. So many memorable lines.

Oriana:

Thank you. I hope these poems will find a wider audience, especially the first one. I’m trying to point out that it’s quite easy to have two selves, one fairly extraverted and one introverted. Every writer knows that, but I don’t think it’s been said in a poem.

Scott:

You know my friend, I have been reading your blog for a few years now and I enjoy them so much...this one is the best I can recall. While this posting is shorter than most, you pack in a lot of insight....and those poems! Incredible verse and imagery, especially like the second. The great Greek poet and writer Nikos Kazantsakis very much identified with Odysseus, he traveled all over the world. One of my favorite images is of him working on his epic sequel to the Odyssey on a train traveling across Russia. That work and his 'Report to Greco' is well worth the read, very moving. Thanks again for a great post and verse, this will be one to re-read later tonight with a cup of Starbucks.
 
Oriana:

For quite a few years, I identified with Odysseus a lot -- down to concealing his identity. Then Penelope came to prevail. I see the need for both, but without Penelope (i.e. the inward voyaging), the adventures would be chaotic, without a thread to pull them together.

I’ve read some of Nikos Kazantsakis’s Odyssey -- very beautiful language, rich nature imagery. I had no idea that he wrote this long epic sequel on a train across Russia. What an amazing interweave, the vastness of Russia and the vastness of his poem. 

Scott:

His 'Odyssey' was an odyssey itself; he wrote and rewrote it 7 times over 12 years, finally completing it on the Greek isle of Aegina. An amazing work, I need to reread it soon.

Charles:

The irony of this is that with all your travels and great poetry content you fully understand that real traveling is inward.

Peacock is my favorite image.

May the gods grant you
Your heart’s desire, a husband and a home,
And the blessings of a harmonious life.
For nothing is greater or finer than this,
When a man and woman live together
With one heart and mind

Homer is right: the best thing in the world is total cooperation and united power of accomplishment.
Oriana:

Now with so many images online, one can see the world on screen. Not quite the same, without the smells . . . But also without the madding crowd.

And, as with re-reading books, I’ve grown strangely attached to the local streets. I recognize the yards, the trees.

And the same with people that one sees again and again, even if it’s a pharmacy clerk at Costco. I feel bereft if it’s not Stephanie, who has a way of giving signals that say, “You are a real person.” Just the fact that she recognizes my face out of thousands of customers means a lot to me. Maybe I should stop saying that I’m not a people person, since I like Stephanie -- I want to say, “She is so human.”

But when I was in my teens, I dreamed of seeing the Amazon jungle and the Himalayas. In fact I wanted to be an astronaut!

This is a very, very early poem, a piece of juvenilia that’s dear to me -- an early premonition that I was to be more Penelope than Odysseus (am I happy this way? Of course I’m happy! Especially since I have no choice!)

Ambition

When I was a young girl
I wanted to be an astronaut
out there in a space ship  
in the giant blackness
dazzled with stars

but when I grew up I noticed
I was strangely attached
to my room
to my lamp
to the blue coffee mug
where I keep my pencils and pens

the universe is spectacular
but simply too large
just the earth
is too much
I’m still looking for something
small enough to hold on to

 





 




 

ONE THING FOR ONE HOUR EVERY DAY

You cannot always be happy, but you can almost always be focused, which is the next best thing. ~ Winifred Gallagher

SHELLEY

Now that it’s over I can bear to think
about my sex-starved youth,
when I read Shelley late at night

in lieu of committing suicide.
I read Shelley in last minutes before sleep,
knowing I would never drown –

the water would carry me
in its cool silk arms. My ambition
was to be loved for my mind.

That was before I found out,
if a man says, “You have a lovely mind,”
it’s the end of hope.

Only Shelley did not fail me,
Shelley with his girlish face,
falling on the thorns of life.

Still I wanted to tell him you never
battle against a wave,
but lie on it as on a beloved body.

I had only Shelley left --
my eyes closing, the lamp shedding
tired shadows, I held back

the sea of sleep
for one lyrical moment of belief.
In the morning I waited for the bus
 
in front of a beauty parlor
called “The House of Joy,”
reading for the thousandth time:

RAISE HAIRLINE.
IMPROVE EYEBROWS.
I went to work

with unimproved eyebrows,
past Golden State Auto Wrecking
and Wilmington Scrap.

Critics despised Shelley.
How can one respect
a poet who died an incompetent death?

My parents were ashamed of me –
I wasn’t getting a Ph.D.
and lived an incompetent life.

Only Shelley did not blame me,
only Shelley would outlast
the stench of oil refineries,

the wheezing pumps, the infernal
night-and-day burn-off flame
over the lovers’ lane on Signal Hill.

From there one could see
ten million city lights, Los Angeles
blazing with desire and despair.

I had only Shelley left, returning at night
to the dreamer who sought A splendour
among shadows, a Spirit that strove

For truth, and like the Preacher found it not.
Meanwhile I sent out my brief resumé.
On the backs of rejection slips

I scribbled words like fevered leaves.
Mad brother in the margins of clouds,
yours is not yet a dead language.

That’s why I keep the waves
moonlit, sometimes swim out so far,
I forgive everything,

teach my ghost to sing.
Glorious phantom: whom did you
read before falling asleep?


~ Oriana © 2013

*

I owe my minor success in life to the practice of doing something for one hour a day, every day. It wasn’t always the right choice -- Shelley was not really the right poet in the sense of providing a matrix for modern poetry -- but drowning in the moonlight of Selected Shelley was deep and calming, as opposed to simply flitting through sound bytes in popular magazines.

Now, minor success may not sound like much, but it is, next to being an utter failure with unimproved eyebrows. Seriously, what could be more tragic than squandering one’s unique and only existence? And I know more than one person with a high IQ and splendid education who ended up doing nothing more splendid in life than writing email and cruising Facebook.

(A digression I can’t resist: one ruinous factor is having a trust fund -- even a small one that makes the person live in squalor. I’ve met one life-squanderer who slept in his car! During the day he sat in various cafés like Encinita's "Swami's," reading newspapers and free New Age magazines).

But the practice of “one hour every day” not about “success.” It’s about depth. Given my curiosity and the great pleasure I take in learning about a great variety of subjects, I could browse my way through life, or I could live deeply and learn to do a few things at the level of excellence.

GONE WITH THE WIND, OR HOW I DISCOVERED THE SECRET

Winifred Gallagher, the author of Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, recommends deliberately training yourself to be more focused. In this age of mania and short attention span, try this: “for one hour a day, do just one thing.” This “attention training exercise” really hit home, because that’s exactly how I mastered English (while still in Warsaw). For one hour each afternoon, I plodded through Gone with the Wind, a heavy Polish-English dictionary at my side.

I need to explain that I already had some foundation, some basic vocabulary, even if I was confused by the alien grammar, the odd excess of tenses. That foundation was hardly adequate for tackling a long novel (with stretches of black dialect besides!) But, guess what . . .  I didn’t know that I wasn’t “ready” for Gone with the Wind. No one told me it was too advanced for me.

No one told me -- because I told no one! I read the novel in secret for one hour every day after school, and Sunday at a similar time. Oh those golden Sunday afternoons when instead of enjoying whatever sunshine could be had under Warsaw’s turbulent skies, I communed with Scarlett O’Hara, who was no angel. For the first three months, my reading speed hovered around ten pages an hour, and afterwards I had a tension headache. Every time.

By the end of the semester, I was up to twenty-five pages an hour, the headache was replaced by pleasure, and my reading knowledge of English was near-perfect. But there was yet another effect. That year was the happiest year of my life.

I know that the slow, torturous-at-first reading of Gone with the Wind wasn’t the only factor. But it was a significant one. Without it I wouldn’t have had the safe harbor of that one hour of intense attention. That Scarlett was no angel was astonishing enough; that I could concentrate so totally on phrases such as “white trash” and “I’ll think about it tomorrow,” was also amazing. But the most amazing part was the sheer pleasure that I eventually began to experience when I reached the reading speed of 16-17 pages an hour.

Looking back, whenever I was happy in a reliable manner (I know that “reliable happiness” sounds like an oxymoron), it was always connected with intense mental work. Almost always that work involved very slow reading, as if I were trying to acquire a language (be it English or the terms used in endocrinology). I felt happy in libraries, especially college libraries where the reading was more difficult, forced more slowness.

So I had learned my secret, but the whirlwind of life took me far away, and I wasn’t in Warsaw anymore. I resumed my practice of slow reading only during what might be euphemistically called my “Shelley years.” It wasn’t quite an hour, but I did indeed have a bedtime ritual of reading poetry. For a while it was Shelley, but eventually Wordsworth suited me more, being that rarity among the great Romantics, a poet of tranquility. Later I discovered Dickinson, Eliot, and more. When I discovered Rilke, my life changed. Rilke taught me seriousness -- but that’s a separate topic.

Still, Shelley has remained especially dear to me -- my mad brother, a paradoxically soothing companion through the years of despair. The ungainly wreck of Ozymandias and the glacial pyramid of Mont Blanc loom forever in my mind.

Why this ghostly lingering? Just as a novelist creates unforgettable characters, a great poet creates unforgettable iconic images. Coleridge naturally gives us the Ancient Mariner with an albatross hung around his neck; it takes some intellectual heavy lifting to dispose of the giant bird and see instead the wind harp, and all of humanity as aeolian harps. From Keats I take the Grecian Urn. From Blake I take the Tiger, which makes god not an answer, but a question. 

Definitely NOT Blake’s tigers

Later there was an interlude in which my solitary therapy turned out to be reading a fairly mediocre and soon forgotten book of literary criticism on Hardy’s poetry. The content didn’t matter, only the fact that it was challenging enough to make me sink into slow reading as a nun sinks into contemplative prayer. After much turbulence, the healing sense of peace I experienced while reading that non-brilliant book, fortunately complex enough to provide a mental workout, is all I really remember of the experience.

Later yet I managed to survive a distressful year by reading Wallace Stevens every night. The woman who strolled along the beach singing “beyond the genius of the sea” strolled regularly through my mind, her small but persistent melody reassuring me that at least singing remained. Stevens demanded so much concentration that he saved my sanity when I felt within inches of running out into the street screaming before being dragged off to a locked ward.

HELD BY THE LIGHT

When I first read these lines in “Broom,” a poem by Deborah Digges, I couldn’t get them out of my mind:

I asked myself, when was I happy?
When did the light hold me and I didn't struggle?

The question hit deep. And the answer came in two parts, related in a surprising (at first glance) way. Dear old Sigi [Freud], here we go again: “love and work.” Like most women, I have some romantic memories I treasure, but that realm seems terribly uncontrollable, and ultimately full of frustration. Still, I can say, "Whenever I fell in love, I felt happy.” Ecstatic even, if we omit the agony part.

But not only. I had periods of happiness in my life when I wasn't seeing anyone -- nor did I wish to. Reliable happiness has come from the quieting and centering power of deliberate attention. For me, most serene happiness has come from work, not love.

And that's perhaps where I differ from most women, and I suspect that you fall in the same general category. Romantic love cannot sustain us for long, and anyway, romantic love must die to make room for long-term attachment. And motherhood, I've been told, "is like marriage; it’s not like romance."

Or, as one man described his lover who also happened to be my only and unreliable woman friend: “Sweet, but trouble.”

ONE THING FOR ONE HOUR EVERY DAY

Poetry forces slowness due to its density of images and ideas. If you let your mind drift for even one minute, you have to start all over again. Reading Deborah Digges is slow work since her poems are complex web of interlacing images (in less successful poems such density becomes a clutter). It’s not a transparent narrative that reads as easily as good fiction. “Why would I want to read anything written in such a contrived way?” someone once asked me. The best answer might be: because it’s attention training.

The image I take from Digges? The “greeter of souls.”

Perhaps every poet worth reading is a greeter of souls: a portal to entering depth through slowness.

*

I don't know how to classify writing poetry, as opposed to reading it. I think it's more like being in love -- the uncontrollable aspect is exciting, inspiration is a high -- but the process is also fraught with anguish and frustration. For one thing, writing poetry involves a lot of decisions about word choice -- and choice is stress.

Also, inspiration is often partial. Imagine ten or even twenty years of knowing that a certain ending is weak. Now I'm finally learning to let go, knowing that something better will come later -- and if it won't, that's not so terrible. A friend’s “It’s only a poem" -- rejected by me at first -- is a pearl of rare price. When Megan first said it, I wanted to kill her: what desecration! A few years later, knowing that “it’s only a poem” saved my life again and again.

Contrary to the idea of “poetry as therapy,” writing poetry is NOT therapy. READING great poetry can be very effective therapy; my blog is devoted to this idea. If you need emotional healing, I don’t recommend writing poetry, especially I you are an advanced poet who understands the enormous demands of the art: it’s too devouring. But slowly reading great poetry will create a beautiful calm.

So we are back to the “reliable happiness” that results from intense, deliberate attention related to slow reading. Better than chanting or repeating mantras, it was always slow reading that calmed me down and centered me. Every day I had this refuge, whether Gone with the Wind, Chomsky's essays on linguistics (quiet ecstasy in the library!), The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, or -- I am not making this up -- articles in The Journal of Experimental and Clinical Endocrinology. The subject didn't matter, only the slowness of the reading, and doing it again and again.
 

Whenever I had this center, the rest of my life was easier to take. If I happened to have a relationship, I could ride the ups and downs better than if I didn't have that intense quiet focus (which made everything else less important). In my recent reading of both Deborah Digges and my friends’ work, I saw this meticulous accretion of images, and had to pay intense attention. And I recognized that familiar feeling of peaceful happiness.

CAN YOU DO TWO THINGS INSTEAD OF JUST ONE?

In theory, it sounds easy. Why not even three things? Wouldn’t  it be three times as good?

In practice, just doing one thing for one hour every day is challenging enough. “We manage best when we manage small”~ Linda Gregg.

Listen: it’s hard enough to do one thing every day for just ten minutes. I remember what a lapsed Catholic friend told me: “I decided I’d say this one particular prayer every day for nine days. I thought it would be very easy. In fact it turned out to be very, very hard.”

Yes, doing just one attention-demanding thing every day is difficult enough. Most lives are so cluttered and scattered that nothing is ever done slowly and well, much less at the level of excellence.

Cultivate one garden. Focus on one poet. Choose just one exercise.

Just one. Focus, focus, focus.

Everyone knows the saying, “Less is more.” It goes farther than that: more -- abundance, mastery, peace, happiness -- begins with less. I’m stealing this motto -- 
MORE BEGINS WITH LESS  -- from the life coach Janet Luhrs. 

Let me steal one more thing: 

THE STRAWBERRY JAM RULE: THE THINNER YOU SPREAD YOURSELF, THE LESS GOOD YOU CAN DO.

From Rapt:

Far more than you realize, your experience, your world, and even your self are the creations of what you focus on . . . Targets of your attention are the building blocks of your life.

I still say that in great matters -- who we fall in love with, for instance  -- we have no conscious control unless to run away, but some temptations are so great the only thing to do is to yield to them, as Oscar Wilde said. Factors such as the person's physical resemblance to someone we loved in childhood may be primary. But when it comes to daily activities, the practice of voluntary attention -- doing just one thing for one hour every day -- gives us a certain realm of control.

It was a sheer good luck that Gone with the Wind in English happened to be available to me in Warsaw, and not, say, How to Be a Successful Teenager -- the latter didn’t fall into my hands until I arrived in Milwaukee. Fate spared me blithe simplicity. Let me reiterate: anything that I achieved in life I achieved by doing it every day.

When was I happy? Unreliably and with anguish, whenever I fell in love. Reliably and without anguish, whenever I engaged in mental work requiring intense attention. That's WHEN THE LIGHT HELD ME AND I DIDN'T STRUGGLE.

ADDENDUM, SEPTEMBER 1, 2013

THIS KEEPS COMING BACK: PRACTICE RATHER THAN “TALENT” -- BUT PASSION AND INTRINSIC INTEREST MUST BE THERE

I’m not sure if we can dismiss genetics: my cousin Ewa showed a talent for mathematics already in grade school: she went for beyond assignments and solved math problems for fun. I, on the other hand, read voraciously, played with words, created new ones, dove into the archaic, and learned languages with ease (this became obvious to my first English teacher after only a single lesson). Ewa became a professor of mathematics at the University of Lodz. I can boast of only moderate success as a poet and writer, but given that I’m an introvert who never went after “connections,” I didn’t entirely fail either.

In terms of talent running in the family, my father (Ewa’s uncle) was a mathematician, while three of his sisters had literary talent and did publish; one was more into mathematics.

But patience and persistence have to be there too. I showed some mathematical ability (I loved algebra), but did not have the patience for complicated problems. But I did have infinite patience (and passion) when it came to learning a language. I discovered the miracle of daily practice in my teens (a tad late, but I didn’t have a mentor). 



Below is a quotation from an article that tries to debunk the concept of talent. Practice is all, it says. Again, I don't completely agree with this, but I do know the power of practice. And I agree that you have to do the boring part of practice, not just the fun part. The capacity to sustain boring practice is probably largely genetic.

“People who rise to greatness tend to have three things in common: 1) They both practice and rest deliberately over time; 2) Their practice is fueled by passion and intrinsic interest; and 3) They wrestle adversity into success.

The elite performer’s willingness to engage in hard or, quite often, very boring, practice distinguishes people who are good at their chosen activity from those who are the very best at it.

K. Anders Ericsson, a psychologist and author of several landmark studies on this topic, has shown that even most physical advantages (like athletes who have larger hearts or more fast-twitch muscle fibers or more flexible joints—the things that seem the most undeniably genetic) are, in fact, the result of certain types of effort (which I describe below). Even super-skills, like “perfect pitch” in eminent musicians, have been shown to stem from training more than inborn talent.

Elite performers also practice consistently over a pretty long period of time. Ericsson says that “elite performers in many diverse domains have been found to practice, on the average, roughly the same amount EVERY DAY INCLUDING WEEKENDS.” Spending a half hour jogging over the weekend isn’t going to make you a great runner, but training every day might. Dabbling with your paints every once in awhile isn’t going to make you a great artist, but practicing your drawing every day for a decade might.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/raising-happiness/201308/new-theory-elite-performance-0?tr=MostViewed

Charles:

Favorite lines in "Shelley":

From there one could see
ten million city lights, Los Angeles
blazing with desire and despair.

An hour a day of slow reading is great practice in growth and developing depth.

"No one told me it was too advanced for me" was a very touching line.

Your workouts of concentrating on complex books reminds me of my wind sprint workouts at night. Almost nobody can do that either.

Lot of wisdom here:

"Contrary to the idea of “poetry as therapy,” writing poetry is NOT therapy. READING great poetry can be very effective therapy; my blog is devoted to this idea. If you need emotional healing, I don’t recommend writing poetry, especially if you are an advanced poet who understands the enormous demands of the art: it’s too devouring. But slowly reading great poetry will create a beautiful calm."

Great blog.

Oriana:

Several people singled out the lines about Los Angeles. I know I was projecting my own emotional state on the city, but the city itself seemed to contain the extremes of hope and despair. The “factory of dreams”: great expectations, and then, much of the time, the shattering of those expectations. It rings true of all great cities, as contrasted with little towns (though little towns can be outposts of despair).

But the lights, the lights! There’s something magnificent about a huge field of city lights. Magnificent and frightening, the definition of the sublime.

As for reading complex material, to this day I remember the high I felt after reading Chomsky’s ideas on linguistics. Wading through all the complexity made me almost eerily happy. It’s amazing what intense focus can do. I wouldn’t risk my life the way people who engage in extreme sports do, but I think I understand why they love it.

At the same time I realize that I may be creating some confusion here. There is a high that results from the so-called “hyperfocus,” but ideally “calm focus” is the best and most beneficial mental state. It’s more like meditation, without the obsessiveness and burnout that can be the dark side of prolonged hyperfocus. What I love best is not excitement, but a very deep calm.

CHOCOLATE JESUS

Honey, I talk to god all the time. Doesn't mean I actually believe there's anyone up there.  ~ a woman on Facebook

**
CHOCOLATE JESUS

Well I don't go to church on Sunday
Don't get on my knees to pray
Don't memorize the books of the Bible
I got my own special way
I know Jesus loves me
Maybe just a little bit more
I fall down on my knees every Sunday
At Zerelda Lee's candy store

Well it's got to be a chocolate Jesus
Make me feel good inside
Got to be a chocolate Jesus
Keep me satisfied

Well I don't want no Abba Zaba
Don't want no Almond Joy
There ain't nothing better
Suitable for this boy
Well it's the only thing
That can pick me up
Better than a cup of gold
See only a chocolate Jesus
Can satisfy my soul

When the weather gets rough
And it's whiskey in the shade
It's best to wrap your savior
Up in cellophane
He flows like the big muddy
But that's ok
Pour him over ice cream
For a nice parfait

Well it's got to be a chocolate Jesus
Good enough for me
Got to be a chocolate Jesus
Good enough for me

Well it's got to be a chocolate Jesus
Make me feel so good inside
Got to be a chocolate Jesus
Keep me satisfied

~ Tom Waits  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5kHx1itU8c
 

*
I especially like

When the weather gets rough
And it's whiskey in the shade
It's best to wrap your savior
Up in cellophane

Sweet Jesus, yes, but chocolate Jesus? If there happened to be a song called “Chocolate Muhammad,” there’d be Islamic riots. And who knows, Putin might send the singer of Chocolate Jesus to Siberia for “offending the religious feelings of others.” 


Abandoned church of the Transfiguration, built 1878, Arkhangelsk Region

But let’s stay with our more tolerant Western world. When you ponder the fact that in the past singing a song of this sort would lead to being burned at the stake, you immediately see the “softening” in attitudes toward  blasphemy. Let’s face it, this song would have been unimaginable just a century ago -- maybe even as relatively recently as the nineteen fifties, when “In God we trust” was put on the banknotes (I still fail to understand what this motto has to do with money -- maybe “in God we trust; everyone else has to pass a credit check”?)

*

Now that the Pope shocked the world by announcing that even atheists go to heaven as long as they’ve been good persons, how can I not be elated? What a journey I’ve witnessed! ~ from “only Catholics go to heaven” to “non-Catholic Christians also go to heaven” to “even good atheists go to heaven.” From the cruelty of the Middle Ages, a leap into the tender-hearted modern times. Well, almost. We are still talking about what doesn’t even exist -- unless here and now, both heaven and hell, and each human being gets to travel in both.

(Imagine a greater shock, the mother of all shock: what if the Grand Mufti announced that non-Moslems can also enter paradise? Paradise! That word is so redolent with pleasure, promising ecstasies we can understand; “heaven” is for monks, who’d just continue their monotonous chanting.)

MOVING AWAY FROM THE GOD OF PUNISHMENT TOWARD A LOVING “CHOCOLATE JESUS”

It didn’t use to be that sweet: be good and you’ll go to heaven. No need to believe in Virgin Birth or walking on water, no need to develop arthritis from kneeling. The old-time religion was much more grim. As Andrew Butterfield writes, “The prospect of death held a special fear, since according to Catholic doctrine death was not the end but merely a new beginning of one’s suffering. The damned burned forever in hell, and even the good had to undergo an extremely long time in purgatory, enduring torments far worse than anything experienced in life.”

(How long is meant by “extremely long time in purgatory”? My grandmother expected many centuries, perhaps ten. This actually gave her hope; she did not see herself as doomed to hell, the conclusion I reached about myself.)

 

Albrecht Dürer, The Penitent, 1510.

True, after shocking the world on Wednesday, on Thursday the Vatican took a giant step back. A spokesman for the Holy See said that those aware of the Catholic Church need to “enter Her or remain within Her.” (Her? Yes, the church is feminine -- a transvestite.) But already quite a few years back it was announced, infallibly I presume, that Protestants need not become Catholic to enter heaven; some time after that, we learned that Jews don’t even have to convert to Christianity. So I don’t think any going back is possible any more -- just as there is no banning pets from heaven. Just try telling a Catholic family that their dog has no soul! We are already in the twenty-first century, and it’s too late for that.

Besides, Jesus told us to feed the hungry and visit the sick, but he never mentioned becoming a Catholic. He himself was definitely not a Catholic. In fact, the historical Jesus was probably closer to a Jehova’s Witness. 

From an Amazon review of Bart Ehrman’s Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth:

Erhman believes, quite convincingly, that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet in the Jewish tradition of his time. Jesus believed and preached that God would soon intervene and destroy the forces of evil, bring in his good kingdom on earth, and install him on his throne. There is just one problem. Jesus was wrong. In fact, he was mistaken about a lot things. People don't want to hear that, Ehrman points out.

The difficulty, Ehrman believes, is that this historical Jesus is obviously far too historical for modern tastes. Ehrman is right. Out of the context of his time, the overriding message of Jesus is preposterous, leaving anyone grasping for a meaningful faith nowhere to go, no inspiring message to believe in. Jesus the wisdom sage or Jesus the social revolutionary, for example, might offer solace, guidance, and hope but a Jesus predicting the end times leaves us only a corpse.

*

This is precisely the problem: the “historical Jesus is obviously far too historical for modern tastes.” In fact, a question arises as to the sanity of Jesus: today he’d be discussed as a case of paranoid schizophrenia with the “Messiah complex,” fairly common in schizophrenic delusions.

So no, the historical Jesus is not the chocolate Jesus who’d fraternize with kindly atheists. And here we are already visualizing a surprised atheist entering heaven together with her atheist dog.

OR MAYBE TOO MYTHOLOGICAL?

Here is a scene showing orphaned little Jane Eyre at Lowood School for Girls:

“No sight so sad as that of a naughty child," he began, "especially a naughty little girl. Do you know where the wicked go after death?"

"They go to hell," was my ready and orthodox answer.

"And what is hell? Can you tell me that?"

"A pit full of fire."

"And should you like to fall into that pit, and to be burning there for ever?"

"No, sir."

"What must you do to avoid it?"

I deliberated a moment: my answer, when it did come was objectionable: "I must keep in good health and not die.”

~ Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

If already Charlotte Brontë could pen this little chuckle in 1847, no wonder we can more than chuckle. We can discard hell altogether as cruel and unusual punishment. 

If we discard hell, then everyone goes to heaven (serial killers may have to undergo compulsory therapy). But assuming the existence of heaven, what exactly would the souls do there? What would there be to talk about? -- for eternity, mind you. And no change in the weather. Or rather, what weather?

And besides, a New Age friend I once had told me about her near-death experience. I asked if there were trees in heaven. She said, “No, nothing like trees.” And for felicity, I require trees.

Beech trees and bluebells, England

GOD AS SANTA CLAUS

A woman who belonged to a 12-Step program told me that the idea is to find a “higher power” or “god as you understand him.” She rejected the god of her childhood: “He spied on me and was writing down my sins so later he could throw me into hell.” Her sponsor asked, “So what would you like god to be like?” And the woman replied, “Santa Claus.”

I am not making this up, nor is it meant to be a joke. The woman was lively and intelligent. She said she wanted a caring god who did good things for her. No hell, no punishment -- just help and affection. She shrugged and smiled: “So my god is a kind of Santa Claus.”

The "softie" god within would have been much more pleasant. Just take punishment out of the teachings, and you get a supportive religion, totally unlike the nasty stuff it was in my childhood, and that was the only religion available. No buddhist centers yet, not even in Warsaw.

No judgment, no punishment, no vengeance -- wasn’t that the most radical message of Jesus? An extreme, for the times, respect for every human being? (I’m “cleaning up” Jesus, I know: he wasn’t quite so universal.)

But back to God-as-Santa, or the “God Within.” What about the Satan Within and the internal battle between Zoroaster’s Ahura Mazda and Ahriman? But that’s the battle of youth. The God Within is for the middle-aged women.


Ahura Mazda

FEMINISM AND THE “GOD WITHIN”

Why women? Rabbi Finley pointed out that he started hearing about the “God Within” in parallel with the rise of feminism. “Women would come up to me and say that they believe in the god within,” the rabbi  stated. The god within was a softie: totally supportive, compassionate and loving, she (I think the change of pronouns is appropriate) provided guidance and nourished persons with positive thoughts and beautiful images. The god without was the patriarchal god, a dangerous lunatic: judgmental, jealous, angry, raging, always threatening punishment and dealing out “justice” (“Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord, and I shall pay back”)

(I realize that the term “lunatic” is politically incorrect, reminding us of the 19th century and the Lunacy Act: you had to register your insane relatives rather than just hide them in the attic. Now there is some dispute if the god of the Old Testament is best diagnosed as manic-depressive or a malignant narcissist. I vote for malignant narcissist.)

One scriptural support for the god within is of course my favorite saying of Jesus, “The kingdom of heaven is within you.” If god is a loving, blissful state of mind, I have no quarrel with this definition.

It wasn't the idea of the god within that displeased Rabbi Finley, but the feminist rejection of the the god without. “I need that eye in the sky,” he declared. “It challenges me: am I really as good as I think? Am I good enough? Could I be an even better person?” Shifting from the personal to the universal perspective, and tossing in the Nazis and the Stalinists, in his lecture on “The Otherness of God” Rabbi Finley declared that humanity needs god because without god, without the eye in the sky, humanity is evil. The eye in the sky keeps us in line.


(My experience with the eye in the sky god-without was that I was never good enough. I could never stay in the state of grace for more than two weeks after confession. I watched with melancholy envy as the beefy Insensitives proceeded to communion, while I held back, feeling unworthy -- thus depriving a certain altar boy of the pleasure of pressing the gilded tray against my budding bosom so hard it hurt. If only someone told me that not being careful enough and spilling a liquid of some sort -- there weren’t too many sorts, due to the communist economy -- was insufficient to disqualify me from grace.)

By contrast, the god within reassures women (well, primarily women) that they really are “good enough.” It’s the small still voice that tells them the world will not end if they lie down and rest for a while.

THE SAVING GRACE OF ATHEISM

Do we need this cumbersome metaphysical framework just to give ourselves the permission to lie down and rest? Could we manage just on “common sense”? The bible certainly contains much wisdom, and not just accounts of atrocities. Feminist scholars have even identified passages where god appears to be more God-the-Mother. But I can’t remember anything from the bible that changed my life. The statement that struck like a lightning and changed my life was “You can practice being strong, or you can practice falling apart.”

So, there was no choice except to be strong. Just one word -- “strong” -- did some incredibly heavy lifting. Sorry: it really was that simple. The message reached me at a time when I was whole-heartedly practicing falling apart. It put an end to that, then and forever. It happened to be in a book that my friends classified as “beach reading” and beneath me. But it delivered that one common-sense sentence whose price was “far above rubies.”

To be honest, I needed one more thing for the paradigm shift that ended my chronic depression. I needed to grow old enough to realize that there wasn’t that much life left, and that I did not want to waste that shockingly brief span of years brooding about past mistakes and disasters (I saw my life only as a series of tragic mistakes; my positive memories were blocked, so I couldn’t remember a single good thing ever happening to me). But I’ve spoken of this elsewhere. The way all this relates to the saving grace of atheism is by defining life as NOW, not as the hereafter. If you lose the now, you lose it all. 

Albrecht Dürer: Melancholia, 1514

ARE WE ALL AEOLIAN HARPS?
When we look at the cultural revolution that makes the fifties look like another country, it wasn’t just feminism that happened. New Age also happened, and it deserves to be taken more seriously. It’s an attempt to create an alternative to Christianity, though “Christ consciousness” is part of the emotionally supportive life philosophy it provides. On the West Coast  the New Age movement has been wildly successful.

An alternative to Christianity is no small accomplishment. Jung tried it too.  His thinking changed constantly, but not his absolute rejection of the Judeo-Christian tradition of a judging, punitive god who is the Absolute Other while humans are just worms -- as Job says, “I am of little worth,” also translated as “I am of no account.”

Jung came up with a vision of a spiritual Übermensch, or the Self with a capital S (creating a hair puller equivalent of trying to comprehend the difference between being and Being). The divine lies within us; it is the “innermost infinity.”

At the same time, the psyche within is connected with the psyche without. Jungians and New Age mystics believe that the nature of reality is ultimately spiritual, and our thoughts influence matter. Quantum physics is often invoked: the observer influences the outcome.

Critics never tire of pointing out that there is nothing new about the New Age. Its various principles have been expressed since tribal religions, with new notions being added. Thus, one school of ancient Greek philosophy held that each person’s mind is part of the great collective Logos. Coleridge put it more beautifully than most in his “Aeolian Harp”:

And what if all of animated nature
Be but organic Harps diversely framed,
That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the Soul of each, and God of all?


It is an attractive notion, a god without that is not “absolutely other.” Here, the god within is a harmonious part of the the god without. I have no quarrel with that. It is simply Nature with a capital N. In my view there is no distinction between Nature and nature: it’s simply all there is. We are part of nature; or, to put it even more simply, we ARE nature.

WE HAVE ALREADY LIVED IN THE REAL PARADISE
 
If we are nature, then there is no judgment and punishment, even if bad things still happen to good people. Even a school shooting is not an occasion for declaring that the perpetrator is now paying for it in hell. It’s simply too late in history for that kind of primitive revenge consciousness. Rather, we debate on how to improve mental health services.

Isn’t this compatible with the “judge not” message of Christianity? Only if we revise Christianity to be fully compatible with its message of radical compassion. “Love thy enemy” is still the most daring ethics ever proposed. “Hatred by hatred never can be ended” is the Eastern equivalent, but the phrasing is mild -- far from the emotional shock of “Love thy enemy.”

Alas, if we go by “gospel truth,” Jesus did not always love his enemies. In fact he threatened blasphemers with hell. Yes, even Jesus needs some softening of the heart chakra to meet the modern standards. Since in every period of history the bible was read selectively, why not continue to be selective and go for Chocolate Jesus -- or, to be even more inclusive, god as an all-good and unconditionally generous Santa Claus?

(A shameless digression: I never believed in Santa Claus. My parents spared no effort to prevent me from believing in Santa, witches, or ghosts. Is it any wonder that eventually I rejected Catholic supernaturalism? Mark my words: atheism starts with not believing in Santa Claus.)

But, first of all, did you see the gorgeous full moon in Gemini (May 24)? I went for my evening walk soon after moonrise, and got to see earth’s twin like a huge amber lantern low on the horizon. I also remembered another lunar encounter, the time I saw a full moon from a plane at 30,000 feet, beautiful and serene between two silver-edged clouds. What a gift, I thought. What other paradise can one want?

But nature wasn’t seen as beautiful until Romanticism. “Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low” -- Isaiah voices a longing for a completely flat paradise.

And if we are to trust Dante and the Book of Revelation, in heaven there is no night. And then what would we do, dreamers, poets, lunatics and romantics? 

But not to worry. Every atom inside us was once a star. We don’t go to heaven; we ARE heaven. We are the universe.

*

That doesn’t mean that mythologies are dead. They still speak to us. As long as we don’t literalize them, I am all for keeping the best of the ancient stories.

I don’t have a moonrise poem, only a moonset poem.

MOONSET, MONTANA DE ORO



Mottled like a lamp with moths, 

the heavy globe

sinks into the obsidian

silence of the bay.



The bellied curve

rests on shiny black water,

an entrance to the world

where the past becomes eternal.


We stand on the shore
as if waiting
for the ferry,
arriving dark on dark –



The wedge of amber

eases down.
The tip glows, 

a coin of pure white light.



Now the passage is paid.

The perfection of darkness.
You ask, “Where is Gold Mountain?”
In silence I take your hand.

One day as soft and tranquil 
as the ocean of a distant night,
we’ll pay with the priceless
coin of a spent life

and journey to Gold Mountain.
But not yet, my love.
Across the dark, again
we start toward dawn.

~ Oriana © 2013


###

REDEEMED FROM WHAT?
Lilith:

Loved your new blog. So the new pope says I can be redeemed -- redeemed from what, I ask?
 
Oriana:

Obviously, from hell, where you deserve to go because of your sins and the Original Sin (transmitted through your father's semen, St. Augustine says; at least the ovum is sinless, but only because St. Augustine didn’t know that such a thing as the ovum existed), except for being rinsed in the blood of the Lamb. The blood is the payment that needs to be made if justice is to be done.

And here the ugliness starts all over again. So you don't think you've done anything so evil that you deserve to be fed to the pit of fire? Let's take a more extreme case: an unbaptized child dies, so her soul is thrown into a pit of fire (the limbo was just for babies; but imagine an “unredeemed” 9-year-old girl). The cruelty of the Christian god is unspeakable. (Judaism wasn't as focused on hell, or afterlife in general). But we have just witnessed a huge leap forward for the Catholic church, since the new pope would allow an unbaptized child to enter heaven.

Now, if you’ve been properly indoctrinated/intimidated, of course you suffer from guilt and low self-esteem. I know I did, and life was difficult enough without that extra burden. Doomed for eternity! The ideal of perfect morality, which includes never experiencing “lust” or envy or anger or wanting a second helping not to mention dessert, is impossible to achieve, so naturally everyone is a sinner in need of “redemption.” It’s something like ransom, except in this case it involves a cruel and unusual execution of someone innocent instead of the sinner. Never mind that you wouldn’t have agreed to that. I assumed you too were told again and again: Jesus died for your sins. 

And if your own sins are truly minor, there is always “In Adam’s fall, we sinned all.” We have St. Augustine to thank for the doctrine of Original Sin: collective guilt. My nuns and priests were used to the objection that a child would make: “If it were me in the Garden, I wouldn’t have touched the apple.” The nun would smile indulgently and kindly point out that of course you too, little boy or girl, would have been disobedient, since it’s human nature to be curious, disobedient, and ambitious for self-improvement (“ye shall be as the gods”).

And if the creator created humans in his own image, then surely he himself must share all the human flaws.

Furthermore, what's to be done with the failed prophecies of the "last days"?

It really makes sense to see the historical Jesus as an apocalyptic preacher. (by the way, how would Jung try to resolve JC's "father complex"?)  

Michelangelo, Last Judgment
 
Charles:

This blog starts out great and continues that way. It is associational writing that is enjoyable and makes sense.

A good question to ask a believer is, "Exactly what happens in hell?" Going into this thought process in a serious way will should have even the most ardent believers wonder if all the suffering in hell is realistic in the face of "Love your enemy."

I love the reference to the Catholic Church being a transvestite. How else can you describe this male-dominated religion where the hierarchy dresses like drag queens?

To see Jesus' predictions that went awry: https://www.google.com/search?q=jesus+wrong+predictions&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a.

And yes, Hell is a cruel and unusual punishment. God as Santa Claus makes so much sense.

Of course we are nature. Love MOONSET, MONTANA DE ORO. It captures the beauty of nature.
 
Oriana:

Thank you for pointing out the profound contradiction between “Love thy enemy” and the existence of hell. I haven’t thought of that. Christians don’t normally think of it; they got indoctrinated and intimidated as children, and some fear of hellfire lurks in the brain forever. 


And yes, a merciful deity would love his/her/its enemies and through love produce a change in the state of mind. Call it "love therapy."

Dante has a more sophisticated description of hell, where the psychological set of mind of vices such as gluttony or hoarding is colorfully depicted. But that’s Dante’s sophistication. Nothing even approaching subtlety is indicated in the gospels -- just fire for all. In a country with a hot climate, heat as a torture is easy to understand.

There was a time when I yearned for some metaphoric understanding that could validate Christianity -- since in some ways Jesus is a cool guy with more advanced sense of ethics. But then again, not. There is no saving Christianity without a huge revision. Bishop Spong’s Christianity Must Change or Die is a good start for anyone who yearns for truly compassionate, non-apocalyptic Christianity.

The beauty of nature is what finally remains for me. I never tire of sunsets and the beauty of moonrise and moonset. If there is any room in my mind for what the Jungians would evasively call the transcendent function, it’s the extravagant beauty of nature. In terms of sheer functionality, the earth doesn’t have to be beautiful, or the ordinary domestic cat be such an exquisite athlete. This beauty is a gift of nature so great that “Today you shall be with me in paradise” is the one true prophecy: we live in paradise.

GOD OF PUNISHMENT

Lynda:

Loved your "Chocolate Jesus" blog. Such a wealth of thought! I'll read it again when I have more time. It made me think of my Catholic girlhood, how my God was the God of Punishment. I gave him up at eleven when I was preparing for confirmation. The kids talked about how the bishop would slap you in the face at the ceremony. I decided no one, not even God's minion, would slap me. 

Oriana:

“God of Punishment” (GOP) is the perfect phrase. Yes!!

I envy you for having left the the GOP early, unlike me who actually went through with the confirmation. The bishop was a typical “grumpy old man,” devoid of any aura of holiness. He acted as if the ceremony were completely empty, which made me aware that it really was empty. 

Darlene:

Don’t be so sure of going to heaven. As you point out, the Vatican issued a disclaimer: If you are aware of the Catholic church, then “you must enter her or remain within her.”

Oriana:

Fortunately, the fourth century gave us Bishop Athanasius, later St. Athanasius of Alexandria. He taught that a heretic is doomed only if he is aware that he’s rejecting the true church.

I am not aware of rejecting “the true church.” In my eyes, the Catholic church is far from being the true church.

Not that such a church exists or can exist. Ultimately every person has his or her special beliefs. Many people have a sense of the sacred without needing to worship at man-made altars. The “temple of nature” surpasses anything constructed by humanity. I enjoy beautiful churches (except that they often smell bad), but nothing raises my spirits so much as being in the woods or a mountain meadow in bloom.  


Steve:

I really enjoyed your latest blog on The Chocolate Jesus. I immediately thought of "Well, I don't care if it rains or freezes, / Long as I have my plastic Jesus / Riding on the dashboard of my car."

As you know, I consider myself a spiritual though not religious person--but I also adore irreverence, I suppose because we all get so serious when the idea of God or the Creator or Higher Power or whatever we call it comes up. So I love the idea of a chocolate Jesus. Makes me think of an oven hot pad I once bought for my sister. It had a picture of a cat on it with the words

Love them little mousies,
mousies what I love to eat
Bite they little heads off
Nibble on they tiny feet.

What does that have to do with a chocolate Jesus? Well, a chocolate Jesus wouldn't last too long it MY hands, that's all!

Thank you for your fascinating philosophical/spiritual wanderings in your blog. They are always a treat!
 
Oriana:

Well, you’ve done it. I finally googled “Plastic Jesus” and got this famous rendition:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dG9tuuznL1Y

~ so it’s both a trinket Jesus and a “Sweet Madonna” -- both completely supportive and non-punitive.

Chocolate Jesus wouldn’t last too long in my hands either, though I stipulate dark chocolate, preferably “non-Dutched” (processed without alkali, thus providing more polyphenols). And thus my chocolate Jesus would become “the god within” quite literally.

For me the amazing and very “American” question was: “If you could have any god you like, what kind of god would it be?” It’s a profoundly American question because it at least implies freedom of choice, and asserts that the individual matters, and is not like Job saying, “I know I am of little worth” (in another translation, “I am of no account”).

I think I am like a lot of people who’d answer that I’d like a totally loving and supportive god. Remember that woman’s “My god is Santa Claus”? In our age it’s understood that Santa would never be so cruel as to bring ashes instead of gifts. Santa or Chocolate Jesus, but definitely not the terrifying “eye in the sky” spying on people’s thoughts and everything they do from the perspective of sin and punishment. If we stumble and fall, we’d like to be lifted up, not threatened with hell.

I think Christianity is actually mellowing toward the loving god within. The great part is that no one would kill in the name of the god within. The god within is basically one’s highest (some would say “deepest”) self. And it’s of course possible to talk to the god within and not be disturbed by silence. That silence can even feel soothing.

Or else a loving thought (including love toward the self, already a “soft” idea) can be perceived as an answer from the god within.

The part that clergy of all denominations do not like about the god within is that it makes them superfluous. New religious communities can be imagined, but they’d be more democratic and egalitarian. The dictatorship model will sooner or later be abandoned in the West. And irreverence is part of the great transition.

THE INNER INFANT

MOON

The moon is full tonight
an illustration for sheet music,
an image in Matthew Arnold
glimmering on the English Channel,
or a ghost over a smoldering battlefield
in one of the history plays.

It's as full as it was
in that poem by Coleridge
where he carries his year-old son
into the orchard behind the cottage
and turns the baby's face to the sky
to see for the first time
the earth's bright companion,
something amazing to make his crying seem small.

And if you wanted to follow this example,
tonight would be the night
to carry some tiny creature outside
and introduce him to the moon.

And if your house has no child,
you can always gather into your arms
the sleeping infant of yourself,
as I have done tonight,
and carry him outdoors,
all limp in his tattered blanket,
making sure to steady his lolling head
with the palm of your hand.

And while the wind ruffles the pear trees
in the corner of the orchard
and dark roses wave against a stone wall,
you can turn him on your shoulder
and walk in circles on the lawn
drunk with the light.
You can lift him up into the sky,
your eyes nearly as wide as his,
as the moon climbs high into the night.

~ Billy Collins, Picnic, Lightning

The humor of the poem relies on a rhetorical device that Collins uses quite often: he literalizes a metaphor, here going beyond the “inner child” to the inner infant: “the sleeping infant of yourself” that you can carry out in a tattered blanket in order to introduce him to the moon.

Nevertheless, even though Collins repeats this little joke of his again and again in his poems, we must admit that this particular poem is  quite memorable. First I thought this may be due to the fact that “inner infant” has a certain freshness, while the “inner child” has become a cliché to the point that some people don’t seem to realize it’s only a metaphor and not a real child hiding in some closet of the psyche. But just to make sure, I googled “inner infant.” Alas, there are entries for it; a cyber-nursery of inner infant psychobabble has already set up its dysfunctional playpens. (Of course some New Age people believe that memories of life in the womb can be retrieved as well. Oh happy embryo! Oh ecstatic zygote!)

Still, unlike the inner child, “the sleeping infant of yourself” is a lot more unexpected. The catalogue of the first stanza is forgettable and should have been omitted so we can quickly get to Coleridge, the moon, and the infant, without stumbling over sheet music, the English Channel, or a smoldering battlefield. Imagine this:

The moon is full tonight,
as full as it was
in that poem by Coleridge
where he carries his year-old son
into the orchard behind the cottage
and turns the baby's face to the sky
to see for the first time
the earth's bright companion,
something amazing to make his crying seem small.
 
That’s where the poem finds itself and becomes less a list and more a vignette, organized by this central image:
 
you can always gather into your arms
the sleeping infant of yourself,
as I have done tonight,
and carry him outdoors,
all limp in his tattered blanket,
making sure to steady his lolling head
with the palm of your hand.

Details create reality: this is the most important thing that a writer needs to learn. Don’t moralize, don’t philosophize, don’t psychobabble -- we are going to forget all that as soon as we lift our eyes off the page, if not sooner. But good details make the made-up incident real and they don’t let go.

At first I wasn’t sure about the “tattered blanket” -- why would the blanket be tattered? And an inner voice replied, because it’s been so many years since you were an infant. The lolling head on that fragile neck is almost painful to imagine. But that was us, no denying. “Tattered” goes well with “lolling.” Yes, once we were so pathetically dependent on adults. Do we ever get over that initial insecurity? Or, as some New Age fans worry, Do we ever get over the “trauma of birth,” or are we stuck with post-traumatic stress disorder for a lifetime? (A shameless digression: a Jehovah’s Witness told me that humanity is still in post-traumatic shock after the Fall in Eden 6,000 years ago.)

You can tell that I live in Southern California, the capital of “rebirthing.” I think getting born once is enough, and one infancy is fine too. Blessedly the brain was too undeveloped then to be capable of encoding long-term memory of what it was like to be in diapers. True, we missed some wonderful moments too!

The final stanza returns us to the adult:

And while the wind ruffles the pear trees
in the corner of the orchard
and dark roses wave against a stone wall,
you can turn him on your shoulder
and walk in circles on the lawn
drunk with the light.
You can lift him up into the sky,
your eyes nearly as wide as his,
as the moon climbs high into the night.

Again, details create reality, and you see the scene so distinctly that you forget you never had an orchard with pear trees (though I had a fig tree once), nor a stone wall, and perhaps not even a lawn. There you are, the manipulated reader, walking in circles on an imaginary lawn under a full moon, lifting your inner infant to introduce the babe to the moon. The poem works: it’s the magic of a well-developed central image, even if that image is stolen from another poet.

*

I wondered in which famous poem Coleridge speaks of his infant son and the moon. “Midnight Frost” wasn’t it -- the babe stays asleep in the cradle the full length of the poem (“My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.”) And then -- eureka! -- “The Nightingale.” Astonishingly, it’s not in the Norton anthology, though it’s of about the same quality as the other conversation poems. Perchance a hidden hostility toward nightingales?

(A shameless digression: Let’s admit it once and for all: nightingales are shrill, annoying midnight screamers using their cheap trills to establish territory against other competing males. To know nightingales -- as opposed to poems about nightingales -- is to hate them. By the way, there are no true nightingales in North America; however, we have the mockingbird, and at his mating-mania worst the mockingbird can sing all night. The last time I heard a mockingbird, he was imitating a car alarm. Fortunately that was not late at night. In fact I adore mockingbirds during reasonable hours.)

Here is Coleridge on the babe and the moon -- “he” is the poet’s infant son, Hartley:

He knows well
The evening-star! and once, when he awoke
In most distressful mood (some inward pain
Had made up that strange thing, an infant’s dream—)
I hurried with him to our orchard-plot,
And he beheld the moon, and, hushed at once,
Suspends his sobs, and laughs most silently,
While his fair eyes, that swam with undropped tears,
Did glitter in the yellow moon-beam! Well!—
It is a father’s tale: But if that Heaven
Should give me life, his childhood shall grow up
Familiar with these songs, that with the night
He may associate joy.—Once more, farewell,
Sweet Nightingale! Once more, my friends! farewell.

**

He “hushed at once.” I wonder at what point a young child first truly notices the moon, and whether the word for moon, meaning the concept of the moon, needs to be heard, grasped, and remembered for such noticing to develop. But lack of precise knowledge need not prevent us from enjoying this “father’s tale.” We nod our non-lolling heads.

Hartley Coleridge (1796-1849) became a minor poet and an alcoholic. We know that these conditions are genetic and are not to be blamed on early exposure to the moon and/or nightingales.

the screamer

*

Amazingly enough, a wonderful poet I know happens to have written a poem in response to the poem by Billy Collins:

HOLDING MY DADDY UP TO THE MOON

Yesterday I fell apart when I read
Billy Collins’ poem about Coleridge
holding his infant son up
for a first look at the moon.

Billy says if there is not a child
in the house, “take the sleeping infant
of yourself . . . ” and I took my father,
the forgotten little boy. No one
would have done this for him.

In the only picture I have (two inches
square, glued to a piece of wood)
he is sturdy as a Percheron pony,
dressed in knickers and tweed coat,
fingers barely close on the book
he holds like a teacup.
He never learned to read.

When the lawn is creamy with moonlight,
air drenched in jasmine
and mockingbird song,
it it this child I hold up.

~ Una Huynum, The Magee Anthology, 2001

*

Now this is a poem in a different league from the clever joke by Billy Collins . . . This is the “human” poetry that touches the heart and yes, it can make us cry, so people who are afraid of feelings (yes, feelings can hurt) don't want to come near it. Better to chuckle with Billy.

Some humor is fine in poetry, but with humor you can go only so far. We don’t read poetry for comedy. From poetry we want poetry.

A poem like Una’s is of great value precisely because it has emotional power; it expands our empathy. We see the little boy who didn’t get either the love or the education that every child  should get. And if we truly understand, we stop judging and blaming: to blame is to ascribe total “free will” to a person, as if we could choose our genes, the income and education of our parents, and all kinds of other circumstances entirely beyond personal control.

“I wrote this poem when I was beginning to remember positive things about my father,” Una commented. If we had a difficult relationship with a parent, it can be decades before we begin to feel compassion for him. Yet as soon as there is even a grain of compassion, everything changes: instead of a dangerous big man with big fists we see a helpless little boy who didn’t get enough caring. He was “forgotten” in the chaos of a large family, and had to survive somehow, keeping his fear and pain to himself. Sensing that no one would have lifted this child up toward the moon, his adult daughter, the poet, now symbolically performs the missing act of affection.

This lifting up of the child toward the sky is something many parents do. It’s beyond affection; something only half-understood compels them to do it. They hold up the child like an offering to the universe. At the same time it could be said that it’s the other way: they are offering the universe to the child. The universe belongs to the child, and the child belongs to the universe. It’s the start of a beautiful friendship, if I may be permitted to steal a line. It’s part of a non-fear-based relationship with reality.

Cesare Pavese observed, “We don’t remember days; we remember moments.” I remember the moment when I first saw a broadsheet with Desiderata in the window of a bookstore in Washington, D.C. I was seventeen and a half, and this was the second or third week after my arrival in the United States. One of the statements felt like an antidote to all the instances when I felt I wasn’t valued and welcome, the world already too crowded, with room only for important people. I kept reading it over and over: “You are a child of the Universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.” That was the moment when a total stranger, the writer of Desiderata, picked me up and lifted me to the moon and the stars.

(That writer was Max Ehrmann, who penned the text in 1927. The work remained little-known until the sixties and seventies.)

The statue of Max Ehrmann in Terre Haute, Indiana

(A shameless digression: when we look at those marvelous sepia photographs showing the huge families of the past, when having ten or more children was not uncommon, let us remember that the more children, the less parental attention and affection each child received. The younger children were basically raised by their older siblings, and sometimes felt as if they had no parents.)
 
 Queen Victoria with children and grandchildren. At least there were nannies.

*
 
Pavese is right: in the end we remember not years, not days, but moments. Watching my mother slowly decline and die was very painful to me, but I preserved some moments I cherish. My favorite one lives on in this poem:

MOTHER MOON

I tuck a baby blanket
around her shrunken body,
wheel her past the patients parked
in wheelchairs against the wall –

the fractured elders sent to this
“Rehab Center” to be trained
to walk again, though they don’t
see what there is to walk to.

In the patio, sharp breath of February wind,
the dry rasp of banana leaves.
“Cold,” she complains. I tuck her tight
in her cocoon of hearts and balloons

when she looks up at the sky
and smiles. “Moon,” she says,
her face in that moment
again her own,

not a stiffening mask.
In the pale heaven over Los Angeles,
a frail daytime moon
hangs like an unfinished watercolor.

Earlier that week a baby girl I know
pointed her finger and said
“moon” for the first time.
Her eyes gathering the light,

my mother smiles, pulls one
finger from under the blanket
and points up. “Moon,”
she says for the last time.


~Oriana © 2013

**

There is an unavoidable sadness here, a lump in the throat when we realize that eventually we will notice the moon for the last time. Yet I see it as a celebration of my mother’s ability to blossom into total joy.

And though now this seems very long ago, I can’t forget the news report that Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma bomber, on his way to the site of the execution, saw the moon again after several months on death row, “and his face lit up with obvious pleasure.”

Let’s step away for a few seconds to see a little boy consciously enjoying looking at the moon for the first time. And then for the last time.

This was a human being, and humans enjoy looking at the moon. It’s part of being a child of the universe.

And maybe what underlies the “funny” poem by Billy Collins is not a joke after all, but a great truth of the heart: that we are not tragic strangers in this world, our lives “nasty, brutish and short.” Even if we didn’t get enough tender care in childhood, we can give tenderness to ourselves. When this tenderness toward the self is joined to a connection with nature, the rich feast of life is its own reward. As Rilke says, "just to be here is magnificent.”

And if your house has no child,
you can always gather into your arms
the sleeping infant of yourself . . .
You can lift him up into the sky,
your eyes nearly as wide as his,
as the moon climbs high into the night.



Hyacinth:

WS Merwin wrote an unforgettable poem entitled Still Morning

" I am a child before there are words
arms are holding me up in a shadow
voices murmuring in a shadow
and I watch one patch of sunlight moving
across the green carpet..."

He goes on to  say all the voices are long gone now and he keeps seeing sunlight on the green carpet.

As for the tattered blanket, take it from the mother of a child whose blanket was so necessary to him that he would stand under the clothesline and cry while it dried. He dragged it everywhere.

Those of us who have never heard or seen a nightingale see it as romantic.

So much of what you write about your mother I have experienced. Thank you for writing about it.

Love this blog. Wish there was more  of Arnold's Dover Beach: the image of the moonlight on the cliffs of Dover and the Channel.

Oriana:

You’ve just inspired me to include at least some of Arnold’s Dover Beach in the upcoming blog, Chocolate Jesus. Interesting that Arnold saw the “sea of faith” receding in the nineteenth century. To be sure, there was a good deal of receding, with geologists and paleontologists making inroads perhaps more so than the theory of evolution at that point. Still, the scientific basis of modern atheism wasn’t then what it is now, along with scholarship in mythology and history of the bible making more people aware that all religions are human invention.

But I know you mean the beauty of the imagery. Without it, I would completely lose my interest in poetry and read nothing but non-fiction. It’s the imagery that still holds me. Imagery is eternal.

I have one preverbal memory, and I don’t think it’s “false memory.” It’s a flash of my grandfather’s face and his laughter as he’s trying to tempt me with a ladle of milk (I was allergic to cow’s milk). It’s an indistinct memory, but it’s his laughing face, and that’s not in any photograph. He died -- in front of my eyes, of stroke -- when I was two and a half.

I don’t remember when I first saw the moon -- REALLY saw it, and watched it with delight. I suspect I already had the word for it at the time. I remember the first time I saw the moon through a telescope: I was eight. It was startling to see the roughness of the surface. But I still loved it. I particularly loved seeing the moon from a plane once: so beautiful and serene.

And I love these lines from Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence:

Late, late yestreen I saw the new Moon,
With the old Moon in her arms;
And I fear, I fear, my master dear!
We shall have a deadly storm.

Did you see that just yesterday we had the new moon, a wonderful crescent with the faint outline of the full moon? I watched it close to moonset, when it’s huge near the horizon.

I always walk out at night just to look at the night sky.

You don’t get to see the nightingales: you hear them. It’s a mystery how such a small bird can produce such very loud sound. It’s the poets who romanticized the nightingale, the readers being embarrassed to admit that they prefer good sleep to that racket (or so I suspect, but I’ve already confessed to my hatred of noisy birds -- including those that make a terrific din at dawn).

Scott:

Love the idea of poetry and astronomy. I am currently reading a novel based on the life of Maria Mitchell, the famed astronomer of Nantucket (Melville met her and wrote a poem of her late in life). If it's clear, rarely does a night go by where I don't go out and look at the constellations (I have to take the dog out anyway!)

Ah Pavese; I wish I knew Italian, he and Levi are favorites of mine....and I love the Godfather movies!

Oriana:

Moon and poetry are practically inseparable. Hyacinth told me a story about a workshop she once took. The instructor made a big point about not wanting to see any moon poems, since everything that could be written about the moon has already been written. The participants quickly conspired together, and all brought moon poems to the session that followed. As you can imagine, these were fairly seasoned poets who realized that you can always write something that hasn’t been said before if you simply write honest, interesting details about what you really see, without trying to be poetic. The moon between the clouds is not the same as the moon tangled in tree branches.

As you probably already know, Pavese did a “masterly” translation of Moby Dick into Italian. For some reason it’s easy to imagine Moby Dick in Italian, all those vowels rising and falling like waves.