KAFKA AND FELICE BAUER

(the first poem is an imaginary letter from Kafka to Felice, and also to someone like myself)

Letter from Kafka

Dear Fräulein K, I can’t believe you ask,

Does God love us? You must joke.

We are the suicidal thoughts of God.

I always have a headache ready,

can easily arrange insomnia.

Do I complain too much?

My motto: If we cannot use arms,

let us embrace with complaints.

If only I could be not the nobody I am,

but the nobody I’m paid to be.

For a minute in my mind I leaned

to peony petals rimmed with rain,

when my superior, that good sober man,

asked if we carried insurance for convicts —

I wanted to slap him with both hands.

You see what an impossible

person I am. What strength it takes

to read this letter.

How you must hate me.

But I am unworthy of hate.

My father meanwhile grows

and grows, one colossal leg

already in America,

he’s sprawling across the continents.

We have nothing in common, but then

what do I have in common with myself?

Today a neighbor coughed twice;

I know tomorrow

he’ll cough even more.

I must move away from home:

the sight of my parents’ nightshirts

makes me sick to the stomach.

I think of marriage

even more often than of death.

But isn’t marriage too high a price

for the crystal-and-snow bride?

If only I could spend my life

in a cellar with nothing but paper 
and pen, and a ribbon of light

seeping in at the edge of the door – 

But I won’t torment you by mail;

I’ll save it up until we meet.

If writing is prayer, who am I praying to?

not the one who hangs

around our neck our daily stone.

Perhaps we shouldn’t meet.

I resent having to talk

when I could be writing you a letter.

You ask: What is art?

Dear Fräulein: there is no art.

There is only the delight of failure.

Kindest Regards, K

    ~ Oriana 

**

From the Lost Letters of Felice Bauer

to Kafka

Felice Bauer was Kafka’s fiancée by correspondence.

She kept all of his letters; he kept none of hers.

Dear Franz: On my birthday I dreamed I walked

around a cemetery, looking for my grave.

Each man’s tomb was marked with a dresser,

filled till-death-do-us-part with white shirts.

Lifetimes of shirts! Some with pleats, Franz,

with stiff collars. Birches like leafless brides

wept at the gate. How easy for you to say,

I do not really exist. Yet you claim

a right to your despair. What about

my despair? Who were the ghosts

ironed and folded into those shirts?

When we met, you mistook me

for a servant. In our one picture together,

you smile above my head,

the smile of a man who knows

he’s handsome. You don’t fool me, Franz.

Even the shadow under your chin

lies in its place, demanding Ordnung –

though when I ask what time it is,

you sigh, Eternity, or, Too late.

You write: I am not interested in literature.

I am literature. And I am what literature

is about. Nobody, meaning everyone.

Thank you for your two thousand

letters about your nerves, bad stomach,

sponge baths and Swiss exercises.

Dear Franz, you will always be

my son. Forever yours, Felice

    ~ Oriana

**

From Kafka’s letters to Felice:

11 November 1911 (Excerpt)
 
Fräulein Felice!
 
I am now going to ask you a favor which sounds quite crazy, and which I should regard as such, were I the one to receive the letter. It is also the very greatest test that even the kindest person could be put to. Well, this is it:

Write to me only once a week, so that your letter arrives on Sunday—for I cannot endure your daily letters, I am incapable of enduring them. For instance, I answer one of your letters, then lie in bed in apparent calm, but my heart beats through my entire body and is conscious only of you. I belong to you; there is really no other way of expressing it, and that is not strong enough. But for this very reason I don’t want to know what you are wearing; it confuses me so much that I cannot deal with life; and that’s why I don’t want to know that you are fond of me. If I did, how could I, fool that I am, go on sitting in my office, or here at home, instead of leaping onto a train with my eyes shut and opening them only when I am with you?...

**

20 November 1912

Dearest, what have I done that makes you torment me so?  No letter again today, neither by the first mail nor the second.

You do make me suffer! While one written word from you could make me happy! You’ve had enough of me; there is no other explanation, it’s not surprising after all; what is incomprehensible, though, is that you don’t write and tell me so.

If I am to go on living at all, I cannot go on vainly waiting for news of you, as I have done these last few interminable days. But I no longer have any hope of hearing from you.

I  shall have to repeat specifically the farewell you bid me in silence.

I should like to throw myself bodily on this letter, so that it cannot be mailed, but it must be mailed.

I shall expect no further letters.

Franz

**

Hyacinth:

Kafka was a fascinating man, a romantic it seems. He has the same intensity in his gaze that Rilke has. I especially liked the "lifetime of shirts." Women used to spend hours ironing. Put me in mind of Eliot's "I measured out my life with coffee spoons," measuring life with the little things. And "birches like leafless brides" – an odd way to say that. "Writing is deeper than death, (we don't know that) just as one wouldn't pull a corpse from the grave, I couldn't be dragged from my desk at night" -- ah but we are victims of this world.  

Oriana:

Yes, I’m sure that Kafka and Rilke had about the same level of intensity. Someone said that what ultimately matters in literature is emotional intensity (I agree, though I think many times it also has to do with the finding and use of "magical metaphor"). Intensity, complexity, and drive – these are supposed to be the three main traits of gifted people. I wonder if the genetic component prevails over the environmental one, or if the intensity has to do largely with “sufficient trauma” (both these extraordinary men experienced a lot of suffering; think of Rilke as a young boy in a military academy, of all places! His father wanted to “toughen him up.”)

We are all victims of the world and the biology of aging, but the great achievers have given the rest of us so much joy over the centuries. And to be even a small light is already something.

Kafka with friends in Vienna's amusement park

TU ES PETRUS: EXTREME CONCENTRATION

Tu Es Petrus

About that workshop in the south of France

I didn’t go to: I only wanted to steal away

to the church of St. Pierre, its fortress walls

the remains of a Benedictine abbey

on an ancient pilgrimage route.

In the cracks of the eternal,

swallow nests and tufts of grass,

stubborn and scraggly

as Saint Peter was. But the instructor,

so beyond lapsed that she advertised

the conference chiefly in terms of food –

eight local varieties of olives, four of wine! –

would find me fluttering away, a dove,

homing in the broken arches

of my childhood faith –

though beauty never left me,

swiftest pilgrim, the most holy part.

Instead of wine-tasting, I’d be genuflecting,

crossing myself, fingertips barely

moistened, anointed rather

with the water from the sweaty font,

its dusty, sacramental scent,

blossom of stone after the first drops

of summer rain. In brightest June

could she comprehend

how a gesture, when repeated

for a thousand years,

becomes its own source of light,

a zigzag glimmer in the dark,

blessing we no longer know whom –

urbi et orbi, the town and the world.

And the sign of the cross,

gliding in the nave’s narrow dusk,

rides a shiver of joy that the words,

Tu es Petrus, and upon that rock

I shall build –

were not spoken merely

to a single man. 

   ~ Oriana

**

This poem was born both from not having gone to a workshop in France, in Auvillar, with its ancient church of St. Pierre (I had hoped for a merit scholarship, but it was given to a woman who had “matching funds,” as the instructor informed me, with amazing candor) – and from suddenly seeing the words Tu es Petrus, and taking them personally. In that moment I felt I was Petrus/Petra. Later, while writing, not yet knowing what the ending would be, I experienced the insight that those words were meant for everyone.

It’s not a question of building a church. I realize how heretical I am, but that’s a deep pleasure of a being lapsed. The doctrines mean nothing next to personal understanding and experience. For everyone, the task is different. Tu es Petrus – you are the rock. The simple sentence suddenly came to life. It was as simple as the pronoun "you" finally breaking through to me in the personal sense. 


You are that rock upon which something great can be built. I am that rock. Each person is potentially that rock, that foundation. We are not sand; we are the rock. Our strength is enormous, if only the right builder (the best part of ourselves) comes, identifies, and sets out to work. 

What edifice? And how is this building to be done? Thanks to Lilith’s comments, I realize that instead of “extreme effort,” I should have said “extreme concentration.” I am more likely to produce something of quality on days when I managed to start with my “soul hour” of slow reading. That’s my personal meditation practice. Before I can create anything beautiful and nourishing, I need to nourish my own soul.

I am also tempted to say that “three things are needed for mastering the art of concentration: turn off, turn off, turn off.” Since we live in the Age of Distraction, the Age of Attention Deficit, the Age of Mania, it takes a special effort to enter one’s private Carmel. The first requirement is to turn off (or, if it’s morning, not to turn on) the computer, the cell phone, the little ding that announces email. Sometimes noise-canceling headphones (I mean those with white-noise murmur) are the only rescue from the noisy, manic environment. One way or another, we have to plunge into quiet and slowness, because “speed kills.” It’s thanks to slowness that we can go in depth and start building that which has a chance of lasting. 

Hyacinth:

I like "sweaty font" and  a gesture" zigzaging in the dark" – visual even to those of us who are not Catholic.

As for " extreme concentration," it comes about during alone-time. I think one of the main reasons there were fewer women writers and poets was because, as Virginia Woolf pointed out, women needed a room of their own, minus the inevitable chaos of many other voices, especially little voices, the chorus of which drowns out thought.

Personally I have had to learn to write with distractions: TV, phone conversations, clients needing help with their computers, etc. But the quiet times are by far the most productive.

Oriana:

Thank you, Hyacinth, for pointing out the most critical condition for creative work. For me the alone-time is supremely important, and I have arranged my whole life around securing that necessity. I especially appreciate your remark about “the inevitable chaos of many other voices, especially little voices, the chorus of which drowns out thought.”

On the conscious level, at least (and I agree that it's 90% not a conscious decision; it's not the neocortex that decides, but the limbic system, craving affection and touch), I made the decision against having a child when I read an article that pointed out conditions for having or not having children. If I recall correctly, the #1 reason for not having children was genetic disease. #2 was: "Your work requires a lot of solitude."

But I know that I can use that quiet time for construction or self-destruction. By the latter I mean depression.

If I work, then there is never enough of the alone-time. If I start brooding, my inner temple becomes a vipers' nest of isolation, loneliness, and pointless reiteration of the idea that, coming from another culture and having my kind of erudition, I might as well be from another planet because where I am now only two things are valued: 1) money 2) family. And family is not extended family, a ton of colorful relatives who are already there, enriching your life with their own fantastic life stories, but children you have to give birth to if you don't want to be alone (in the lonely, abandoned sense of "alone").  

There might be something to these depression-bred observations, but they don't lead anywhere constructive, only to further isolation and alienation. Likewise, it's just the kind of black-and-white thinking characteristic of depression, and not the rich mosaic of more accurate thinking. So I collect crumbs of beauty and insight for the part-mysterious edifice that I, but more than I, build upon the rock of my strength. 

Jack Gilbert says somewhere that if you are alone, that's usually by sheer luck. I think at this point he is very lucky that enough people appreciate him enough to have provided decent care for him, and he hasn't ended up on the dung hill like Job or Argos, the once-splendid dog of Odysseus. But it's in his previous solitude that he produced those unique poems that made people care.

It's the old solidaire-solitaire paradox: there has to be both solitude and connection. It's not a question of balance; solitude is more important by far. A little connection goes a long way, but not a little solitude. Just as I say extreme effort and extreme concentration, I should probably add "extreme solitude." Extreme by other people's standards, that is. For you and me, there is never enough of that magical quiet time when the surprise of inspiration can unfold.

Hyacinth:

In a workshop years ago, the leader said something I remembered: the ones who rob you of time to write are the ones who give you something to write about.

Oriana:

Yes, there is something to that. I'm thinking of P, who was a crazy maker, who created chaos and destabilized my creative routine (which I belatedly was only beginning to create) -- and of course so many of my poems are about him. And I also think of the women we know who are mothers of bipolar children -- maybe they wd not have even become writers except for the trauma.

But I can also say: because the intensity is there. If there is mostly drudgery, the effect is destructive. Here I remember that article about male post-partum depression that startled me completely. It was first-person confession of a man who became depressed when sharing in child care deprived him of his quiet time. He wrote that he went into mourning and literally wept for his former life when he could read and write and just enjoy being with his thoughts. His marriage ended in divorce, no surprise, but how sad.

I think that if any country has the right motto, this is the one: "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." These are the "unanlienable rights." What if these rights were truly granted -- and in a sense, they are all one? What if we took "pursuit of happiness" seriously, as a human right? Would not lack of time for the nourishment of one's soul then be a violation of human rights?

I also think of Sharon Doubiago, who said that after she had her first child, her mother came and said, "Today I take the baby. Every Tuesday I take the baby, and you can do whatever you want with that time." And Sharon started reading, and then took a class. Whatever it was, she started creating herself on that "day off."

But how many women have this kind of wise and generous mother? Should affordable daycare (or nightcare, if applicable) be a substitute? I don't know what the practical solution is, but I have seen women weep, literally weep, saying, where is that bright girl I used to be? Where is that free spirit who'd get up and start dancing? She is dead . . . 

The Winged One wasn't there with them -- I mean Eros, or whatever we call that angel. That level of animation, of being alive. But we make the best of whatever we have, and I am continually astonished by the quiet, unobserved heroism of so many people -- including that housewife in Tony Hoagland's poem who does not, after all, break out of a check-out line at Vons, screaming that she can't take it anymore.

Hyacinth:

When my oldest daughter got into her teens, she gave me a day off in the summer once a week . She kept the younger children and cooked dinner. She was 12 years older than her baby sister and the boys were in between. I'd go to the beach with a book and a blanket and sometimes just nap or take a long walk. and sometimes I'd take one child and they got to do whatever they wanted. Once my son and I did beach combing, once we body surfed, and once with one of the children gathered shells. It was delightful and such a gift. The kids tell me now their big sister ruled them with an iron hand and they minded her.

Oriana:

What a gift – what sensitivity and generosity in a teenage girl! I remember now that Sharon Doubiago’s mother said, “If I don't take the baby so you can have a whole day to yourself,  you will lose yourself.” 


Going back to that chorus of small voices drowning out thought, even angelic choirs are unwelcome when I want to be alone with my thoughts. I love classical music more than anything else, more than poetry, but having it “in the background” while I’m writing, which means thinking, is out of the question. I’m not a multi-tasker. When I listen to music, I want bliss. When I write, I want the silence that is like a womb of slow, deep thinking.

My favorite scene in the movie “The Serious Man” is the exchange between Rabbi Marshak’s secretary and the hapless anti-hero who seeks advice from the holy sage. “The rabbi is busy,” the secretary replies, denying access. “He doesn’t look busy!” the protagonist protests. “He is thinking,” the secretary explains, and that’s the end of it. I find this scene inspiring because for me it goes to the heart of the matter: our culture doesn’t see thinking as “being busy,” and doesn’t respect the silence that thinking requires. 

Tu es Petrus – and upon that rock something great can be built. It may take an immense amount of work done with a lot of concentration, and a strange trust that we are, indeed, building even when we don’t see it. 

READING KAFKA IN WARSAW

Franz Kafka was born on July 3, 1883, in Prague, which happens to be also the city where Rilke was born (in 1875). Thus, one the greatest prose writers and one of the greatest poets of the modern era shared a common mother city. Kafka happens to be one of my favorite masters -- I especially love "The Metamorphosis" and "The Hunger Artist." But I also admire "The Penal Colony." I was introduced to it in an unforgettable way.

READING KAFKA IN WARSAW

                        in honor of Andrzej Paszkiewicz, a great teacher

On the last class day of my last year of high school, our literature and philosophy teacher pulled out a worn paperback from the abyss of his cracked, ancient leather briefcase, and read aloud to us “The Penal Colony.”  Kafka’s books were forbidden at the time. For some years after the war they could be bought in bookstores, and then suddenly disappeared. The government realized that Kafka was not a friend of the regime . . .  

And our marvelous teacher read to us, unruly smart-ass teens, Warsaw’s “hereditary intelligencja” – because he realized that unless we knew some Kafka, our education in literature was going to be a travesty. Kafka was not only one of the greatest modern masters; he was also the most prophetic writer of the 20^th century. Here was a story about a place amazingly like a concentration camp, an orderly place like Auschwitz, where sadistic brutality masquerades as supreme justice, as Law and Order, even Hygiene. We listened without stirring. No passing notes, or suppressed giggles. The silence was startling.

I remember how solemn (but without any theatricality) the reading was. He made no comment afterwards, just slowly put the book back into his worn briefcase. We sat in stunned silence until the bell rang. Our last literature class.

Our teacher could have chosen a different story, but he chose "The Penal Colony," maybe to show us that a writer could indeed be a prophet and a deep psychologist who showed us that the seeds of the horror that our parents survived (mine nearly didn’t) lay in the psyche. That this wasn’t anything specifically Nazi. 

Later I encountered Nietzsche’s phrase, “the Hangman’s metaphysics,” implying that a hangman feels compelled to give lectures on morality. And I remembered my teacher's courage in reading to us Kafka's visionary example of this. 

         ~ Oriana
**


Kafka has also been something of a muse for me, like Penelope. The motto over his desk was Warten -- wait.  Writing takes tremendous patience. 

Here are some less-known quotations from Kafka:

The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired. Only after death, only in solitude, does a man’s true nature emerge. In death, as on the chimney sweep’s Saturday night, the soot gets washed from his body.

I have powerfully assumed the negativity of my times.

We are as forlorn as children lost in the wood.  When you stand in front of me an look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours?  And if I were to cast myself down before you and tell you, what more would you know about me that you know about Hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful?  For that reason alone we human beings ought to stand before one another as reverently, as reflectively, as lovingly, as we would before the entrance to Hell.

Only our concept of time makes it possible for us to speak of the Day of Judgment: in reality it is a summary court in perpetual session.

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.

Questions that don’t answer themselves at the very moment of their asking are never answered.

Writing is a deeper sleep than death…. Just as one wouldn’t pull a corpse from its grave, I can’t be dragged from my desk at night. ( letter to Felice Bauer, June 26, 1913)

So if you find nothing in the corridors open the doors, if you find nothing behind these doors there are more floors, and if you find nothing up there, don’t worry, just leap up another flight of stairs. As long as you don’t stop climbing, the stairs won’t end, under your climbing feet they will go on growing upwards. (“The Advocates”)

“It is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary.” (The Trial)

Logic is doubtless unshakable, but it cannot withstand a man who wants to go on living. (The Trial)

When it became clear in my being that writing was the most productive direction for me to take, everything rushed in that direction and left empty all those abilities which were directed toward the joys of sex, eating, drinking, philosophical reflection and above all music.
–January 3, 1912


Hold fast to the diary from today on! Write regularly! Don’t surrender! Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it at every moment.
–February 25, 1912


What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.
–January 8, 1914


What an effort to keep alive! Erecting a monument does not require the expenditure of so much strength.
–March 9, 1914


The life of society moves in a circle. Only those burdened with a common affliction understand each other.
–June 12, 1914

Through a heaven of vice a hell of virtue is reached. 
–January 9, 1920.

My life is a hesitation before birth.
–January 24, 1922

We were expelled from Paradise, but Paradise was not destroyed. In a sense our expulsion from Paradise was a stroke of luck, for had we not been expelled, Paradise would have had to be destroyed.

Some deny the existence of misery by pointing to the sun; he denies the existence of the sun by pointing to misery.


Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.

You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

Beyond a certain point there is no return. This point must be reached.

Theoretically there is a perfect possibility of happiness: believing in the indestructible element in oneself and not striving towards it.

**
Oriana:
I am particularly struck by Questions that don’t answer themselves at the very moment of their asking are never answered.  One could argue to the contrary: the answer might come out of the blue twenty years later. Nevertheless, my recent experience confirms that the right question can be answered in an instant, and that instant can change your life. 


Soon after Deborah Digges' suicide, I was stunned by those lines in one of her poems (probably "The Broom") -- I quote from memory:


When was the last time I was happy?
When did the light hold me and I didn't struggle?


*


-- but "happy" was too extreme a word, too remote -- I couldn't connect with it. One of the characteristics of my chronic depression was inability to remember any happy moments, much less a whole extended period of being happy. It was only when I asked, "When was the last time I wasn't depressed?" that the answer came instantly. Thus, asking the right question changed my life. (I need to add that at long last I was motivated not to be depressed. I always knew how to pull myself out of depression, but had no motivation to make the slightest effort toward healing. I had to see that I was getting older, and life was passing me by while I stewed in bitterness, like Dante's "the sullen" who chant their repetitious hymn while sunk in mud.)

ENTER YOUR OWN CARMEL

[monastery in Rytwiany, a  small town in the Mountains of the Holy Cross region in central Poland; Hermitage of the Gold Forest]


This is not a Carmelite convent, but it's Carmel that has always fascinated me, its contemplative concentration. I have read three biographies of St. Teresa of Avila. One time I had a trance-like vision of her and heard the one-sentence message she spoke to me. It was a time when my interest in poetry was waning, and I wondered if I should give any more of my time and life to it.  But it wasn't really a matter of poetry, I later came to understand; it was about being a writer in the larger sense. I was not to be silent, bashful, withdrawing my voice from the concordance. 


No Te Calles
                           
Do not be bashful with God.

                                   ~ Teresa of Avila

She scribbles with a quill, bent over her desk –

her slim escritorio in heaven,

if that’s what these drifts

of white around us mean – clouds, winds.

Glances at me, says, No te calles.

Resumes her writing. Is erased.

It means, “Don’t fall silent.” Yes.

Her whisper like a hawk cry across the city:

Enter your own Carmel.

With my sensuality? Yes. I know Teresa’s

secret: she’s in love. He stands among 
the lilies. In the doorway. By the side 

of her narrow bed. I know the nun’s 
secret, the soul of any saint,

because I have two voices, two selves:

one higher-pitched, Hispanic, sailing west.

My other self is an atheist. Yet I shiver

every time I hear the word “Carmel.”

My low-pitched self, my bashful dove,

you’re safe – all houses full. She writes,

“If, after the second time, you still

look forward to the visit from your family,

then the life of the soul is not for you.”

I would not be looking forward.

Family – lost keys to forgotten doors.

But friends, my living rosary of friends –

and morning glories’ crumpled

trumpets at my window,

and the Castilian lisping in the sway

of a eucalyptus grove – why forsake

the only paradise I have? She says,

“If only we took care to remember

what a Guest we have within,

we would not abandon ourselves

to the things of the world.”

But the lilies, are they not the smile of God?

I say “Madre mia, I don’t even know

how to pray.” She says, No te calles.

And again the shiver, though I know it

can’t be true, when she died,

the room filled with the scent of flowers.

**

On a personal note: I got interested again in my maternal grandmother's maiden name, Rytwinska. For years I kept wondering if that's perhaps a polonized form of Ryvin, the "t" being a spelling error of some provincial clerk. But going by my mother's statement that it comes from a place named Rytwiny, I finally (!!!) googled Rytwiny. It's a village not far from Zielona Gora -- the "Green Mountain" in my dream, the dream where I saw Cecilia on the tower, calling to me across the ocean and two continents that she found the one place in Poland that was not stained by the shadow of the war.

True, Jews were often called after a place  -- many had "habitational names" -- so there is still some possibility of a Jewish connection, but it's tenuous. "Rytwiner" wd be definitely Jewish, but Rytwinski sounds simply Polish. One might as well posit minor nobility, also typically named after a place, esp a rural place that could indicate an estate. The name isn't common, but it's not exactly rare either. Assuming a spelling error, it's possible that the name was once Rytwianski, derived from a little town in the Holy Cross Mountains in Central Poland (this small range includes the Bald Mountain, the site of witches' sabbath). This leaves my plausible but non-traceable Jewish ancestry a mystery as always, but it matters to me less and less. Culture trumps genes, and Catholicism left an indelible imprint. 

Saint Teresa of Avila had Jewish ancestry (Saint John of the Cross had both Jewish and Arab ancestry) -- does it matter? Did it matter to them? If so, it probably made them feel all the more close to the whole Judeo-Christian tradition. In the case of San Juan de la Cruz, we know of his great love for the Song of Songs, which inspired his own famous canticle from The Dark Night of the Soul.  I especially love the ending, the last three lines of the last stanza: 

all things ceased; I went out from myself,
leaving my cares
forgotten among the lilies.

Stanzas of the Soul

1. One dark night,
fired with love’s urgent longings
-- ah, the sheer grace! --
I went out unseen,
my house being now all stilled.

2. In darkness, and secure,
by the secret ladder, disguised,
-- ah, the sheer grace! --
in darkness and concealment,
my house being now all stilled.


3. On that glad night,
in secret, for no one saw me,
nor did I look at anything,
with no other light or guide
than the one that burned in my heart.


4. This guided me
more surely than the light of noon
to where he was awaiting me
-- him I knew so well --
there in a place where no one appeared.


5. O guiding night!
O night more lovely than the dawn!
O night that has united
the Lover with his beloved,
transforming the beloved in her Lover.


6. Upon my flowering breast
which I kept wholly for him alone,
there he lay sleeping,
and I caressing him
there in a breeze from the fanning cedars.


7. When the breeze blew from the turret,
as I parted his hair,
it wounded my neck
with its gentle hand,
suspending all my senses.


8. I abandoned and forgot myself,
laying my face on my Beloved;
all things ceased; I went out from myself,
leaving my cares
forgotten among the lilies.


    ~ San Juan de la Cruz

**

Translated by Kieran Kavanaugh, OCD, and Otilio Rodriguez, OCD, revised edition (1991) [ Copyright ICS Publications. Permission is hereby granted for any non-commercial use, if this copyright notice is included. Maintained by the Austrian Province of the Teresian Carmel ]

Una:

Beautiful church and I enjoyed the history that follows the name of your grandmother. Makes me wish I knew more of my ancestors, especially those that migrated from Scotland. But genealogy is such a task and my time is devoted to poetry.

There is a family disagreement about the  family name. some say it was MacNichols, shortened to Nichols. How much we are influenced by those who were before us.

If only we had listened more diligently to the stories of our elders but when I was a child visits were rare because of travel. It took much longer to get from place to place than it does now. My father had a Model T and later a Pierce Arrow and even later a Willy's with a rumble seat.

Oriana:
I was very struck by your statement, 

How much we are influenced by those who were before us. The material and spiritual foundation they laid, the way their molded their children's character. And we don't even know. Before my grandmother, I have only a hint of the family's tragedies and triumphs. I can sense the flames in that sepia light. 

I certainly wish I'd asked more questions while my parents were still alive. And I wish I didn't carelessly lose the little piece of paper where I wrote down the family names that went back as far as my mother could remember. It just wasn't precious to me at the time. All I wanted to think of was the future.

My paternal grandmother had an odd name, "Miazek" -- possibly a misspelling of a French-Belgian name (she did not look Slavic, either, but she didn't look Jewish either -- it was something different). My father, in a jocular way, talked about his Napoleonic ancestor, just as my mother, half-believing, I think, talked about her medieval Spanish ancestor, who allegedly rendered some services to the Polish king. She herself was puzzled over her possible/probable Jewish roots. It wasn't denial, but plain ignorance. Every relative she knew was a Catholic.

Still, my mother did get stopped and interrogated by the Nazis at various times, and had to prove that she was Catholic. One time she was asked, "How many gods are there?" – as if Judaism weren’t monotheistic. This was the time she liked to recall, because she could laugh about it. In fact her appearance made it particularly dangerous for her to be a member of the Resistance.

To come back to that “legendary” medieval Spanish ancestor, my almost equally legendary great-uncle Klemens, an old bachelor, a self-taught intellectual and amateur scholar whose most treasured possession was an etymological dictionary, claimed that “rytwiny” was a name for a piece land given by a king in payment for special services. I never had the motivation, time or resources to try to verify this. Besides, the alleged Spanish ancestor seemed less real than Don Quixote to me. Then one of my cousins married an erudite former Jesuit priest who specialized in old Latin documents and manuscripts. And behold, he said he’d traced the family back to the Middle Ages.

You’d think I’d be excited. But I felt, “What else is new?” And even then, I failed to ask questions, and only now I regret it. I guess it’s a sign of having become more American than I’d like to admit, this curiosity that so many Americans have about their ancestors, having been cut off from those countless European cemeteries, ancestry being everywhere and commonplace. It seemed strange to me at first, this American fascination with genealogy – almost like adoptive children searching for years, sometimes their whole life, for their biological parents.

How do I pull together this post that tries to weave together Carmel, my Spanish ancestor, and even Great Uncle Klemens? Well, my grandmother’s mother was a lay nun. Being married, she could not be enclosed in a convent as a bride of Christ, but in her way she tried to be a saint (ambition runs in my family). Each evening she walked from neighbor to neighbor, asking if she perhaps offended them, and if so, asking forgiveness. She would not go to bad until she felt forgiven and forgiving, blessed and blessing others.

As for Antonina's rather wild hat, the tendency to wear strange headgear also seems to run in the family. But look at the passion in those eyes. I think she has entered her own Carmel. 

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