MILOSZ’S TWO SOULS

I SLEEP A LOT

I sleep a lot and read Thomas Aquinas

or The Death of God (a Protestant work).

To my right the bay as if poured in tin;

beyond the bay, the city; beyond the city, ocean,

beyond the ocean, ocean, until Japan.

To my left dry hills with bleached grass,

beyond the hills, an irrigated valley where they grow rice;

beyond the valley, mountains and ponderosa pines;

beyond the mountains, the desert and sheep.

When I couldn't live without alcohol, I lived on alcohol.

When I couldn't live without coffee and cigarettes,

I lived on coffee and cigarettes

I was brave. Industrious. Almost a paragon of virtue.

But what use is that.

Doctor, I am in pain.

Not here. No, not here. I no longer know where.

Maybe it’s too many islands and continents,

unsaid words, bazaars and wooden flutes,

or toasting the mirror, without beauty,

though one was supposed to be a sort of archangel

or Saint George on St. George’s Prospect.

Witch doctor, I am in pain.

I have always believed in superstitions.

Women have only one, Catholic soul,

but we have two. When we dance,

visit in dreams faraway pueblos

and even regions never seen.

Put on, I beg you, these feather amulets,

one should help his neighbor.

I have read many books but I don’t believe them.

When we hurt we return to the shores of other rivers,

remember those other crosses with the signs of sun and moon,

and medicine men busy during an epidemic of typhoid.

Send your other soul beyond the mountains, beyond time.

I’ll wait for you to tell me what you’ve seen.

~ Czeslaw Milosz, Berkeley, 1962,

translated from Polish by Oriana Ivy

*

I am particularly drawn to this passage in the final stanza.

Witch doctor, I am in pain.

I have always believed in superstitions.

Women have only one, Catholic soul,

but we have two. When we dance,

visit in dreams faraway pueblos

and even regions never seen.

*

I was just reading one of Milosz’s essays where he talks about having two souls, and suddenly I see that already in the poem it’s obvious what he meant: the Catholic (or religious, ascetic) soul, and the pagan soul, sensual and loving the earthly life. One need not be a Catholic to understand Milosz’s point. It is enough to have developed the intellect, and thus experienced the pull of the life of the mind versus the “pagan” demands of the body.

In the essay “If Only This Could Be Said,” Milosz writes:

. . . struggling with my two souls, I cannot break free of them. One: passionate, fanatical, unyielding in its attachment to discipline and duty, to the enemy of the world; Manichaean, identifying sex with the work of the Devil. The other: reckless, pagan, sensual, ignoble, perfidious. And how could the ascetic in me, with the clenched jaws, think well of that other me? He could only aim for false sublimations, for deceptive Platonisms, convincing himself that amore sacro is his calling, and smothering the thought that I am entirely on the side of amore profano, even if I clasp my hands and primly purse my lips like a well-behaved young miss.

Contempt for the world or the love of life in all its sensory splendor? The split has been with us for millennia. Plato was, unknowingly, on the side of the Catholic soul. Some writers (D.H. Lawrence comes to mind) spent endless hours of ascetic, solitary toil praising the pleasures and power of the senses as the only truth. Others, like Tolstoy, may have thundered against sensuality, while every page of their major works is suffused with sensory richness -- and the fact of having fathered thirteen children (counting only the legitimate offspring) speaks for itself. 

Of course the idea that women have only one soul, and that soul is of the church-going kind rather than pagan, is completely ludicrous, so let’s chuckle and forget it. Nevertheless, the reason I write this post is not in order to ponder how many souls men and women may have, but to point out that it’s actually useful, when reading Milosz’s poems, to keep in mind Milosz’s Catholic soul and his pagan soul. He has poems that seem to have been written by his Catholic soul and those written by his pagan, Lithuanian soul.

I sense a split in Milosz, his reluctance to be Polish and Catholic rather than Lithuanian and pagan. In “Ars Poetica?” he states:

The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person

This is my favorite Milosz aphorism. Poetry deals with the coexistence of opposites. It reminds us how complex we are, doomed to the fact that life always says both Yes and No, as Rilke put it. We are walking oxymorons, living with our contradictions, having not one soul, but two. Some would argue for a multitude of souls or subpersonalities, but let’s keep it simple. Two brain hemispheres, two souls. 


*

In A Year of the Hunter, Milosz reminisces: “I had even published in Verbum [a liberal Catholic periodical, in contrast to “the hideous Catholicism of The Knight of the Immaculate Virgin”], and Jerzy Andrzejewski [the author of Ashes and Diamonds] and I used to go retreats there, without any good results, but at least we honestly confessed to each other that the ascetic, prayerful atmosphere produced in us a wild craving for vodka and steak.” (p. 197) This craving for sensory satisfaction, rejected by Catholicism as sinful, is part of the pagan love of life, of carpe diem rather than the hope for heaven, which another liberal Catholic described as “only another hell, a hell of boredom” (Karol Koniński, quoted on p. 193).

For the sake of clarity, let me state the obvious: Milosz was raised in old-style Catholicism with its heavy emphasis on sin and punishment. As he says in “If Only This Could Be Said”:

The Catholic upbringing I received imposed a severely repressive morality. This is one reason why I tend to distrust my own judgments. I can say nothing good about repression, which crippled me in some ways and poisoned me with pangs of conscience.

How well I know what he means . . . The anguish over trivial or downright imaginary sins, the scrupulous “examination of conscience,” the incessant self-judgment and self-condemnation. It was insufferable for anyone who took it seriously; Milosz left the church in his teens, just as I did. He returned, at least in part for political reasons, to distance himself from Communism. He fully recognized himself as a doubter and heretic. The problem of evil was eating away at him.

It has been often observed that Lithuania stayed pagan longer than any other region in Europe. It managed to preserve the pagan Baltic tradition much better than Slavic countries did when it comes to old Slavic mythologies (I know of only one Slavic god, the four-faced Światowid, “He-Who Sees-the-World”; I don’t know a single name of a Slavic goddess, utterly erased by the conquering Catholic church).

For all his public Catholicism, Milosz felt a life-long allegiance to Lithuanian folklore. He had a Lithuanian nanny; as a child and an adolescent, he observed the life of the villagers. The meadows and forests were full of spirits; Milosz felt those spirits never left him. He was not a Warsaw intellectual. Warsaw was not his spiritual home; it was already exile from his homeland, where roadside crosses bore carved signs of the sun and moon. 

But one need not invoke the Baltic mythology to present universal inner contradictions. Below is one of the poems that acknowledges the sensual soul:

A CONFESSION

My Lord, I loved strawberry jam 
And the dark sweetness of a woman's body. 
Also well-chilled vodka, herring in olive oil, 
Scents, of cinnamon, of cloves. 
So what kind of prophet am I? Why should the spirit 
Have visited such a man? Many others 
Were justly called, and trustworthy. 
Who would have trusted me? For they saw 
How I empty glasses, throw myself on food, 
And glance greedily at the waitress’s neck. 
Flawed and aware of it. Desiring greatness, 
Able to recognize greatness wherever it is, 
And yet not quite, only in part, clairvoyant, 
I knew what was left for smaller men like me: 
A feast of brief hopes, a rally of the proud, 
A tournament of hunchbacks, literature.

Berkeley, 1985

(I have looked at the Polish original, and “clairvoyant” does not strike me as the right word. Milosz says, “with only partial clarity of vision.” The Polish word for “proud” that Milosz uses is stronger than “proud,” and closer to “arrogant.” It makes me think of the foremost of the seven deadly sins, superbia. In addition, the Polish version is faster paced, and the phrase translated [correctly] as "a tournament of hunchback" has more bite in Polish; perhaps "hunchback Olympics" would render that.)

How simple life would be without the distracting “spirit.” Note, however, that even this confession of sensuality acknowledges the poet’s desire for greatness. Not that I’d assign this desire to either the Catholic or the pagan soul, but it’s probably closer to the Greek notion of virtue, arête, excellence.  

Both the ancient Greeks with their “moderation is best,” and the Buddhist sages with their “middle way” warn that neither asceticism nor hedonism are the answer. But an intense person is interested precisely in the extremes, and the middle way seems unexciting. I understand Milosz’s refusal to pretend to be a sage who can reconcile the two souls (or you could say: the two temptations), and his admission of living with the contradiction: torn, wanting to believe yet doubting, rarely at peace.

Some of Milosz’s poems of religious yearning (rather than of sensual desire, or yearning for the Lithuanian paradise) are quite beautiful. This might be called a homesickness for an ideal future homeland, unstained with horrors of history. My favorite is “Dante.”

DANTE

To be so poor. No heaven, no abyss,

A revolving wheel of the seasons.

Humans under the stars

Walk and disintegrate

Into ash or stellar dust.

Molecular machines work faultlessly, self-propelled.

Lilium columbianum opens its tiger-striped flowers

And in an instant they shrink into a sticky pulp.

O alchemist Alighieri, how distant

From your harmony is that crazy sequence,

That cosmos at which I wonder and in which I vanish,

Not knowing anything about the immortal soul,

My eyes riveted to unpopulated screens.

Colorful slippers, ribbons, rings

Are sold as always on the bridge at Arno.

I choose a gift for Theodora,

Elvira or Julia, whatever the name

Of her with whom I sleep and play chess.

In a bathroom, sitting at the edge of a tub

I look at her, flesh-colored in greenish water.

Not at her, at nakedness, abstraction,

Which makes our bodies not our own.

Ideas, words, emotions abandon us

As if our ancestors were a different species.

It’s more and more difficult to compose love songs,

Wedding canzones, a solemn music.

And only, as once for you, this remains real:

La concreata e perpetua sete,

The inborn and the perpetual desire

Del deiformo regno – for a God-like domain.

There is my home.

I cannot help it. I pray for light,

For the inside of the eternal pearl, L’etterna margarita.

from Provinces

 

Milosz felt close to Dante because, among other things, Dante knew what the meaning of exile. But can we really imagine Milosz (or ourselves, for that matter) inside the eternal pearl, not matter how beautiful the luminescence? How utterly monotonous that sheen is, compared to the wildflowers and herbs and grasses of a Lithuanian meadow (or, in the case of Dante, the city of Florence). On the other hand, those lines could be read as longing for light, for knowledge and clarity, not necessarily for being enclosed inside a pearl as opposed to standing in a meadow. For me, the quintessential Milosz is the man who arrives in Lithuania after fifty years, and stands there hugging an oak tree.

For all its beauty, “Dante” suffers from the problem of credibility, at least for the secular reader. Can the wheel of the seasons ever come to signify poverty rather than incredible riches? And when a man sits at the edge of a bathtub, looking at a woman’s naked body caressed by the soft water, is he contemplating nakedness as an abstraction? A lustful look at the waitress’s neck is much more credible, as is, in “Undressing Justine,” the utterly pagan delight in a woman’s body, in the heft of her breast, the luxurious fall of long hair – even if that woman is a literary character.

Milosz’s Catholic-Swedenborgian, intellectual soul is dominant in his essays. Most of his poems, however, seem to have been written by the pagan soul, the soul that loves the earth and does not yearn for any other paradise. Milosz felt very close to nature, as is obvious in this poem, written when he had no hope of ever seeing Lithuania again:

In my homeland, where I will not return,

I remember, in the woods, a large lake

And slow clouds, bursting, miraculous.

And from low waters whispers in the dark

And bottom covered up with prickly weeds.

The cry of black seagulls, blush of icy sunsets,

The startling whistle of wild ducks in flight.

This thorny lake sleeps in my heaven-sky.

I bend over it and see down below

The twilight of my life.

And that which frightens me is there,

Before death consummates my shape.

~ Czeslaw Milosz, tr. Oriana Ivy

**

The lyricism of this poem stands in great contrast to those poems of Milosz that read more like prose essays with line breaks. Here, in the image of the lake that has become an inner landscape, the mystery, so necessary for the poetic effect, is fully present. Hushed awe interrupted by sharp cries of birds expresses the sense of the sacred that has nothing to do with going to church. This miraculous lake is indeed a place of worship. Its whisper is the whisper of the soul, and the soul is a woman, indelibly pagan in spite of catechism lessons.

Milosz felt cramped in lyrical poetry. He regarded it as the “poetry of hormones” (A Year of the Hunter. p. 166), followed by the “age of the mind.” If I regarded this idea as ridiculous, I wouldn’t bring it up. I have personally experienced this phenomenon in my own creative work – not in an absolute fashion, but still . . . I can tell which poems were written when men were still important. The lyricism of nature has not entirely left me, but poetry in general seems to have ebbed, while my love of the essay, that is, of the mind, is greater than ever.

Yet life is full of surprises. We know that Milosz did return to his homeland, and that the twilight of his life was glorious not just in terms of the recognition and adulation brought by the Nobel Prize, but in terms of the late blossoming of his creative work, including lyrical and sensual poems, though these do not predominate. But the grief of the loss announced in the first line is more universal than may seem. We all lose our magical childhood; we are all exiles – though it’s a matter of degree. Exile, you may remember, was considered by Joyce to be essential for a writer. Milosz made it more universal, saying that the secret of poetry is distance. Had he never lost the physical lake, had it not existed only in his homesick pagan soul, he might not have written about it.

Did the pagan soul win in the end? I could claim so by pointing out that his last great poem, “Orpheus and Eurydice,” is a triumph of the earth, not heaven, being able to offer solace. Such claim is made at one’s peril, of course, given the number of late poems that belong to the Catholic soul, including the wonderful “Late Ripeness.” And yet in a typical old-age poem Milosz cannot forgive God either for allowing all the wars or for having given him alcoholic genes, as though the power of biology needed further proof.

In vain would we argue that it’s human-caused evil and random genetic luck. Milosz’s only idea of God concedes nothing of omnipotence and omniscience, which leads us back to predestination and thus the hypothesis of divine cruelty, or at least indifference, or perhaps a vast experiment based on a wager with the Prince of This World, first briefly outlined in the book of Job. As for the suffering of Christ, it obviously cannot prevent suffering in the world, and to the end, Milosz cares about the world.

Only the beauty of nature never seems to fail. Below is one of my favorite poems by Milosz – maybe because I can imagine so well standing in a Carpathian meadow and feeling the same bliss. And this could be called a pagan rapture, belonging to Milosz’s second, pagan soul, which yearns for the union with nature.

A MEADOW

It was a riverside meadow, lush, from before the hay harvest,

On an immaculate day in the sun of June.

I searched for it, found it, recognized it.

Grasses and flowers grew there familiar in my childhood.

With half-closed eyelids I absorbed luminescence.

And the scent gathered me, all knowing ceased.

Suddenly I felt I was disappearing and weeping with joy.

from Facing the River

Here the earthly paradise is fully accepted. All contradictions are gone; he experiences bliss with his whole being. For fifty years, he had yearned to return to this meadow, without believing his wish would come true. In spite of the saying that you can’t go home again – the truth he learned only too well when he looked at what had become of his family estate – he was home again when he stood in a Lithuanian meadow, weeping with joy.

Charles:

Brilliant. I thought the other was the artist soul but you made it so clear.
Also the interpretation was amazing. Milosz would be proud of your translation. What's there not to love.

By the way, another great image too.

Oriana:

True, the right/left hemisphere difference is often seen as Artist (presumably more pagan, though Dante would resent that) versus Scientist (not really Catholic, but let’s just call it intellectual).

The middle image is the interior of the Gothic cathedral in Sandomierz, a lovely ancient town in Southern Poland, near the Mountains of the Holy Cross (but the highest peak is the Bald Mountain, a site of the witches’ Sabbath). Just before WWII, my mother was a young biology teacher in Sandomierz. 

Cecilia:

I gave a reading at a festival in Sandomierz a couple of years ago! The people I randomly met, on my own, in the town, and the town itself, were beautiful . . . The town – wow, so lovely. And the people I met in the cafes and just walking from the old part of town to the new – through a kind of forest, as I remember – well, there was something strange and quite magical about those "connections" and the spirit there . . .

Oriana:

Whenever my mother mentioned Sandomierz, the word “beautiful” was not far behind, and her face would light up (how beauty nourishes us – it’s a kind of happiness). She remembered walking through ravines, like Queen Yadviga’s Ravine (Queen Yadviga is arguably the most beloved monarch in Polish history -- though this honor should go to King Jan Sobieski, a military genius who saved Vienna from the Turks).  

I think the two souls become one when it comes to beauty, though I suppose the Catholic soul would prefer to take Eros out of beauty. This can’t be entirely done. I don’t mean just Mary Magdalen being presented as a sensual redhead. I found the painters’ Jesus to be strikingly handsome, and had some impure thoughts on that account. I confessed them, of course, but only in general terms; I was afraid the old priest would have a heart attack if he knew.

Ewa:

Great work, very good translation, and "A Confession" is my perfect manifesto, starting with strawberry jam and ending with literature as a bunch of tricks to get awards from the crowd – and so full of passion or rather longing for passion.

Oriana:

It’s startling to ponder how much greatness can be found in literature – I mean the kind of literature that lasts – given that it was created by very flawed human beings. The only answer I ever found was collective wisdom, including the wisdom inherent in the language itself. During the creative process, I at least am very strongly led by language itself, by the music it imposes, so that meanings emerge on their own, often surprising me. In a nutshell, “the poem is smarter than the poet.” 

Milosz has passion where Szymborska seems to be all intellect (a wonderful intellect, to be sure). In Milosz we can see the inner struggle. Herbert’s passion is different – he passionately believed in certain ideals. 

Mary:

Thanks, Oriana...but I can't help but think of how late Poland too converted to Christianity, only a thousand years ago. Paganism and Christianity converge in the culture still. Maybe the two souls are not so much Christian and Pagan, but cerebrum and heart.


Oriana:


Oh, definitely, in each European country you find that pagan-Christian fusion.. Just the infusion of Greek philosophy into Christianity meant fusion. "In the beginning was the Logos" – Aramaic was a very concrete language, and we don't have Aramaic gospels (to my knowledge). In Milosz's case, he was familiar with the nature-oriented Lithuanian folklore, which also crops up in Mickiewicz. Lillian Vallee astonished me by stating that Poland's central image is the Sacred Child. For me it's more Mary as the loving mother – Serdeczna Matka, opiekunka ludzi: Loving Mother, protector of people. And that is the heart, no question.


On further thought, however, I stand by my Catholic soul versus pagan soul as a useful if imperfect distinction. Milosz was raised in old-time Catholicism with its toxic emphasis on sin and damnation, its rejection of the world, the body and especially of sexuality as evil. And this, alas, was the “Catholic soul,” full of self-condemnation, as opposed to the acceptance of the world, body, and sex as basically good – the “pagan soul.” It may not be relevant today, but it was relevant when Milosz was growing up, and even when I was growing up. I have personally experienced the psychological torments that stem from this identifying yourself as a sinner fit only for being tossed into the Lake of Fire – except for the Doctrine of Redemption, with its own archaic cruelty. The church made me believe in a cruel God. Ultimately only Mary could be trusted not to be cruel.

Even though I left the church at 14, it was only at 17, and in America, that I found more relief from what was eating at me at the emotional level, i.e. the chance, at least, that a cruel god, one I refused to worship because I would rather go to hell than worship cruelty, would indeed take revenge. One of the wonderful moments in the first weeks of my arrival in the U.S. was the first time I ventured into town (Washington, DC) on my own, and found myself standing in front of a bookstore. In the window were pasted “Desiderata,” including this statement: “You are a child of the Universe. You have the right to be here.” Immediately I felt a wave of peace. It still took years – decades – before I truly accepted myself as someone good, with a right to be alive, and to see life as beautiful and infinitely precious even if it must end. I nourish my mystical side with the mystery and beauty of nature.


The concept of being the child of the universe, whose infinite beauty I could see, versus the concept of being a child of the King, was much more consoling. The universe wasn’t out to get me. It wasn’t spying on me to see what sins I was committing, writing them down in a great book of sins that was to be brought out on Judgment Day. Though it’s not in the Gospels, that was the unfortunate picture the church put in our minds (I know I wasn’t the only one), along with devils with pitchforks. Very primitive and un-Christian, yes, but that’s what the paintings showed, and we children knew exactly was hell was like; worse, if expected to end up there, since only a minority escaped that fate – and I speak here of the minority of Catholics, never mind the billions of non-Catholics who would end up in hell regardless of having been kind, morally beautiful people.

On the intellectual level, it’s obvious nonsense, but none of it can be erased from the emotional brain, and the priests knew it and rejoiced in “Once a Catholic, always a Catholic.” There is some recovery from the cruel old-time Catholicism, but one can question if it can ever be complete because deep down it’s very difficult, after old-time Catholic upbringing, to say to yourself, “I’m OK.” Judging from his late poems, Milosz mostly remained a torn, tormented man until the end – with only moments of respite when he managed to see that the afterlife, if any, would not be about punishment or reward. In “Werki,” published posthumously in Second Space, he says:


The priests taught us about salvation and damnation.
Now I have not the slightest notion of these things.
I have felt on my shoulder the hand of my Guide,
Yet He didn’t mention punishment, didn’t promise a reward.


**


So at least he was moving toward his own version of an accepting, non-punitive deity, but the ravages of guilt and all kinds of useless suffering left their mark. What relief he found was through creative work, and not through the church.


Mary:


I am a little younger than you but unfortunately did not miss out on this kind of fear-driven, punitive, flesh-hating theology. I can remember being a very small child and contemplating how it did not fit at all with what I could know and perceive and intuit myself about the universe. The farther I have gone along in my life, the more I have left the residues of that theology behind - but it is indeed difficult to shed. What's been healing for me: understanding better the historical traumas in which such a theology originates. Some of my ancestors were refugees from the Great Hunger in Ireland, a human made genocide. After the Famine Irish Catholicism adopted this kind of theology there before it affirmed the goodness of this world.


Oriana:

Mary, I am so grateful to you for reminding me of the trauma origin of fear-driven, world-and-flesh-hating theology. This is exactly Robert Wright’s main point in The Evolution of God: hard times = monstrous, cruel deity; good times = merciful, kind deity – with overall progress since antiquity from cruelty toward more compassion. Seeing the world and the body as wicked had its peak during the Middle Ages – no surprise. Some modern social thinkers (not Robert Wright) have put forth the hypothesis that people in the prosperous Western countries simply “have it too good” to have any need to believe in God. Milosz agrees that belief is not based on rational evidence, but on emotional need, and acknowledges having this need (“my heart desires you”). If we ponder Milosz’s traumatic losses, it is all the more fascinating that Milosz did not become a one-dimensional religious writer, but, like Dostoyevski, kept presenting both the voice of doubt and the voice of belief, often in the same poem. I admire Milosz’s honesty, his fidelity to complexity.


Even when a great emotional need exists, an intellectual is likely to suffer from doubt. It’s the so-called Athens versus Jerusalem contradiction. For Milosz, maybe “Athens” is not the best metaphor for the intellect – and making it “Vilnius” would not correct the inaccuracy. Athens in general is only of historical importance now; maybe we should speak of MIT and/or the Scripps Institute of Biosciences, or UCLA’s Brain Research Institute. But is science versus faith Milosz’s central conflict? Not really. He did not grow up with much grounding in the theory of evolution, and the whole evolutionary outlook applied to practically everything, including the concept of God. His grounding in Catholic theology was much more thorough; in addition, his later adult interests were in Swedenborg, Blake, Shestov, Dostoyevski, Simone Weil – the metaphysical writers and thinkers. He desperately tried to find an “intellectually respectable” theology he could live with.


We know that Milosz was disturbed by the scientific viewpoint, which he identified with Blake's Land of Ulro and Eliot's Wasteland. He had a faint hope that eventually there will be no conflict between scientific and religious truth (for now, though, between truth and God, it seems better to choose God, he seems to be saying). But what interests me is that at least in some poems what emerges is more the Szetejnie-Jerusalem conflict: the Lithuanian forest culture, remembered as idyllic paradise lost, and Jerusalem’s hard-times desert culture with its greater trauma and more pleas to God to wipe out the enemies.


At the same time, and this is perhaps the core of the matter (though not in “I Sleep a Lot”), there is what I would call the “Auschwitz-Jerusalem” question, or “trauma-trauma.” Milosz religious doubts stemmed from the witnessed and experienced enormity of suffering– a compassionate God, Milosz explicitly stated, would not have allowed such atrocities. The simple solution is to posit that God is not omnipotent, or at least has chosen to limit his power – something that Milosz cannot accept. He was born too early for process theology and Robert Wright, with humanity progressing toward a more gentle theology (though we know that trauma – or even simply “hard times” – could cause a relapse into the fear-and-hate-based, “kill them wherever you find them” – or else “repent, the end is near” – theology).


The unpleasant irony is that hate-driven theologies create a great emotional intensity, while love-based theologies feel tepid – except for the minority of people capable of mystical experiences. For the average person, it’s easier to be secular, seeking emotional support from other people. But that is not a tragedy; in my opinion, secularism that believes in kindness and social contract is much better than the theologies of fear and hate. An atheist can be a morally beautiful person; not so a devout cleric who recruits suicide bombers.


Lilith:


The new post is quite beautiful....wonderful selection of images, as usual. To tell the truth, I'm not all that impressed with Milosz, but perhaps it's just because the usual translations aren't as good as yours. (In fact, I think you are a better poet than many of the poets you are promoting in the blog!)


I'm frankly confused about pronouns and whom he's addressing in the poem. And his claim about one soul/two soul is stupid. Nobel prize winner or not, his claim is stupid.


(1) Must we assume "we" means men? As you say, it's a ludricrous statement. I give him the benefit of the doubt by wondering if that's really what he's saying. Women have always been shamans and practitioners of the old ways. It's men who are usually too rational for such things.

(2) Are we to assume that he is addressing the reader when he says "Put on, I beg you, these feather amulets." ? Or the witch doctor whom he addresses at the beginning of the passage? He doesn't need to tell women to put on the feather amulets....we're already wearing them!


Witch doctor, I am in pain.
I have always believed in superstitions.
Women have only one, Catholic soul,
but we have two. When we dance,
visit in dreams faraway pueblos
and even regions never seen.
Put on, I beg you, these feather amulets,
one should help his neighbor

Oriana:

I love it that you say women are already wearing feather amulets!


I think Milosz us addressing the witch doctor/shaman, hoping that this pagan mystic will bring him news of another, better reality where no one needs to rely on alcohol, for instance, to endure daily stress. Maybe it’s a retro yearning for the idealized archaic world with its dances and other nature rituals rather than the modern world with its oppressive jobs and economic necessity. Milosz is smart enough to leave the longing unresolved.


Milosz was a tormented soul – note the repetition of the word “pain” in this poem. I'm not sure if Hass and Pinsky, both quite cerebral, were the best when it came to translating Milosz's driving passions. Actually Milosz wasn't happy with being Polish either . . . this man had enough conflicts and guilt for a dozen poets.


I agree that it’s embarrassing, to say the least, for Milosz to have made the statements about men having two souls while women have only one. The interesting thing is that the soul Milosz grants women is a Catholic one. The doctors of the church would be more likely to argue that women are more bound to the flesh and less spiritual. But Milosz knows better. The assertion that women are less inclined to piety flies in the face of evidence: in religions that didn’t exclude them from religious participation, women have always been more devout, perhaps due to greater emotional need. 


These days, if not for elderly women, there’d hardly be any faithful in the more and more empty Christian churches of the Western world. "My congregation is mainly elderly women, and no, I cannot tell them that God is the power of ideals," a Protestant minister admitted in a lecture I attended. He knew, as I think most clergymen do, that Christianity has always been the religion of the oppressed, or at least the non-dominant, the long-suffering; of mothers rather than fathers; of those who do not go to university library and search for answers in books, but of those who kneel to ask for help and guidance. 


At the same time, something else is afoot: the rise of interest in pagan traditions among women of the boomer generation and younger. They see that this is an ancient tradition where women have always been priestesses, healers, and wise elders. And let's face it, those feather amulets make attractive jewelry. 

Michael (waiting for the snow pack to melt on Pacific Crest Trail):

We dissect to understand. Though I question our need to dissect (I mean, must we?), I question more our cavalier picking up the specimen tray and sliding the study into the trash and walking away with notes. Is this because we have do not have enough skill to reassemble the parts?  Did we dissect too long and the life ebbed away? Worse, maybe we're not interested in the whole. Milosz's two souls isn't the end, it isn't an ontological summary, merely an observer's notes – I wonder if he knew that. I think not. The whole is always more interesting, it is the reason.

Oriana:

Your response puzzles me somewhat. I’m sure you know that poetry is a miniature form and a poet generally presents this or that bit of his or her thoughts and feelings without aiming at an ontological summary. Some great poems are indeed profound enough to serve as a commentary on the whole, but many poems can give delight simply as a “narrow slice” – or, as you put it, an observer’s notes. An intelligent observer can give us notes that are a pleasure to read (I agree with Wallace Stevens that poetry must give pleasure; but what gives pleasure to one reader does not necessarily delight another – that’s a given).

But I am sure that you didn’t mean to say that Milosz presents the two-soul metaphor as his rational attempt to understand the human condition. This is an exceptionally emotional poem, as Milosz’s poems go. It’s a lamentation on his literal exile and the hardship of his life, but also on how little help has come to him from books, from the intellect.

Doctor, I am in pain.

Not here. No, not here. I no longer know where.

. . .

I have read many books but I don’t believe them.

Maybe the answer can be provided by the pagan soul, but the poem is far from any triumphant certainty about that. I think the reason people tend to like this poem is that it seems honest and charming at the same time. We can easily imagine the speaker reading now Thomas Aquinas, now The Death of God, toasting the mirror, consulting now an MD, then a “psychic healer” (to use a New Age parlance). Given the enormous popularity of psychics in California, yes, we do understand that desperate search for answers.

We might wish for a wiser, more “mature” poem. But if this poem even briefly increases our empathy, if it makes us remember that everyone’s life is full of losses and difficulties and failed ambitions (“one was supposed to be a sort of archangel” or St. George, the dragon-slayer), then it’s not a failure. If it makes it easier for the reader to accept his or her own frustrations and other difficulties, it’s not a failure. I can appreciate poems that say as seemingly as little as “here I am, stumbling all over the place, looking for answers.” They remind me of my own stumbling, so who am I to judge someone else’s? This increase in non-judgment and compassion is enough for me.

Not that I necessarily knew all that when I chose to translate this poem. Translation is an awful labor, and a poem has to appeal to me so much that it begins to translate itself, i.e. I literally start hearing a possible English version in my head, as if trying on another soul. I know I am not the only translator to whom that happens, though probably only someone with translating experience will nod his or her head while reading this paragraph. This gives me an idea for another post . . .  thank you, Michael! One more post on Milosz, and then a post related to learning languages. 

WHAT FICTION SHALL BE MY TRUTH

 

LAST WORDS

Don't kneel to the enemy!

my mother called after me, loud,

slipping away to join the generations

of that motto in our family,

going back to the days of the Tzar.

My mother looked like Anne Frank,

except that she survived –

named me for the heroine

of a Polish author who wrote,

“Not that soon he’ll be free,

but that he goes with an angel.”

But who was my enemy, my angel?

Those who had tried to destroy

all that was different in me, wild –

they seemed pathetic now,

stunted souls who wanted to keep

everyone the color of shadow.

Was there an enemy inside,

one whom I knew and loved,

“the spirit that denies”?

Or was that an angel who goes

with me because I am blind

and need a guide who says No

to the glitter and dross of the world –

an angel of silence in Mary’s blue,

veiled with dark hair and a tranquil smile.

Rilke wrote: Life always says

both Yes and No. My beloved

Adversary or the angel that goes with me

says Yes only to my mother’s words:

Do not kneel to anyone –

that harsh blessing, or is it a warning,

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

the Mother, the Daughter,

and the Holy Ghost of not giving up.

~ Oriana

**

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

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

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

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

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

Liryka, liryka, tkliwa dynamika,

angelologia i dal.

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

Lyricism, lyricism,

tender dynamicism,

angelology and distance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

ON ANGELS

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

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

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

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

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

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

day draws near
another day
do what you can.

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

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

**

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

Una:

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

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

Oriana:

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

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

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

SELLING YOUR SOUL TO THE ANGEL

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

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

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

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

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

Mary:

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

Oriana:

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

(later)

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

For me, therefore, everything has a double existence.

Both in time and when time shall be no more.

And so, one morning. In biting frost,

All is cold and gray. And in that sleepy haze

A span of air suffused with carmine light.

Banks of snow, roadways made slippery by sleighs

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

Bells jingle nearby, then farther away, shaggy horses

Covered with hoarfrost, every hair distinct.

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

And the Bernardines’, at Saint Casimir’s

And the Cathedral, at the Missionaries’

and Saint George’s, at the Dominicans’

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

Many many bells. As if the hands pulling the ropes

were building a huge edifice over the city.

. . .

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

Together with the cities of all the continents,

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

For we lived under the Judgment, unaware.

Which Judgment began in the year one thousand seven hundred

     fifty seven.

Though not for certain, perhaps in some other year.

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

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

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

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

~ Berkeley, 1973-1974

translated by the author and Lillian Vallee

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

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

MOTHER NATURE REVISITED

The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Diego, Myself and Señor Xólotl

When you came back to me –

I painted a green day-hand and a brown night-hand
holding up Mexico, her canyons and deserts,
    her candelabra cacti.

And we were there, embraced by our land.
You were my naked baby
who is reborn every minute with your third eye open. 

Even our dog Señor Xólotl was curled
on the wrist of evening,
ready to bear our souls to the underworld if he had to.

Together, we stared out beyond the picture, saw
in the dark window a small woman in a wheelchair
cast out in a workshop far beyond the moon,

desperately mixing the colours of love
    until they vibrated –
watermelon greens, chilli reds, pumpkin orange.

She hurriedly drew the shattered arms
of the universe –
                             holding us all up

as if we were a mountain dripping roots and stones.

From What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo (Seren, 2010)

© 2011 Pascale Petit

**

The modern idea of nature is chiefly benevolent. We speak of the nurturing “Mother Nature.” We don’t hear much about “Nature red in tooth and claw.” But let us take a look at that interesting passage in Tennyson’s In Memoriam:

55.

The wish, that of the living whole

No life may fail beyond the grave,

Derives it not from what we have

The likest God within the soul?

Are God and Nature then at strife,

That Nature lends such evil dreams?

So careful of the type she seems,

So careless of the single life;

That I, considering everywhere

Her secret meaning in her deeds,

And finding that of fifty seeds

She often brings but one to bear,

I falter where I firmly trod,

And falling with my weight of cares

Upon the great world’s altar-stairs

That slope thro’ darkness up to God,

I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,

And gather dust and chaff, and call

To what I feel is Lord of all,

And faintly trust the larger hope.

  

 56.

‘So careful of the type?’ but no.

From scarped cliff and quarried stone

She cries, ‘A thousand types are gone:

I care for nothing, all shall go.

‘Thou makest thine appeal to me:

I bring to life, I bring to death:

The spirit does but mean the breath:

I know no more.’ And he, shall he,

Man, her last work, who seem’d so fair,

Such splendid purpose in his eyes,

Who roll’d the psalm to wintry skies,

Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,

Who trusted God was love indeed

And love Creation’s final law–

Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw

With ravine, shriek’d against his creed–

Who loved, who suffer’d countless ills,

Who battled for the True, the Just,

Be blown about the desert dust,

Or seal’d within the iron hills?

No more? A monster then, a dream,

A discord. Dragons of the prime,

That tare each other in their slime,

Were mellow music match’d with him.

O life as futile, then, as frail!

O for thy voice to soothe and bless!

What hope of answer, or redress?

Behind the veil, behind the veil.

~ here Nature’s indifference to human needs is duly lamented.  “I care for nothing; all shall go” is her reply to man’s desperate plea for immortality – and if not immortality, then at least of some show of caring.

Man’s helplessness was presented earlier in Canto 54:

So runs my dream, but what am I?

An infant crying in the night,

An infant crying for the light

And with no language but a cry.

~ together with the “lame hands of faith,” Tennyson, though in the end defending religion, seems mainly to have eloquently stated the case for nature’s alleged “cruelty.” Cruelty, however, implies that nature is deliberate evil; in fact, nature is merely amoral, as innocent as that “infant crying in the night.”

It’s interesting that Czeslaw Milosz, known for poems praising the beauty of nature, was not in fact all that far from from Tennyson’s position. He writes,

Amost every day, Public Television airs nature programs, mainly for young people. About spiders, fish, lizards, coyotes, animals of the desert or of alpine meadow, and so on. The technical excellence of the photography doesn’t prevent me from considering these programs obscene. Because what they show offends our human, moral understanding – not only offends it, but subverts it, for the thesis of these programs is: You see, that’s how it is in Nature; therefore, it is natural; and we, too, are a part of Nature, we belong to the evolutionary chain, we have to accept the world as it is.

If I turn off the television, horrified, disgusted by the images of mutual indifferent devouring, and also by the mind of the man who filmed it, is it because I am capable of picturing what this looks like when translated into the life of human society?

. . . The makers of those films have a scientific outlook and show the truth, nothing but the truth; furthermore, they appreciate the splendid photogeneity of nature.

. . . Is hunting and devouring each other the very essence of Nature? It is, that is why I dislike Nature.

~ A Year of the Hunter, pp 48-50 (1994; emphasis mine)

But, as usual, Milosz shows that he has two souls. The prose quoted above was written by his more elevated, Catholic soul. But his cat-loving pagan soul wrote this charming defense of nature:

To Mrs. Professor in Defense Of My Cat's Honor And Not Only

My valiant helper, a small-sized tiger 
Sleeps sweetly on my desk, by the computer, 
Unaware that you insult his tribe. 

Cats play with a mouse or with a half-dead mole. 
You are wrong, though: it's not out of cruelty. 
They simply like a thing that moves. 

For, after all, we know that only consciousness 
Can for a moment move into the Other, 
Empathize with the pain and panic of a mouse. 

And such as cats are, all of Nature is. 
Indifferent, alas, to the good and the evil. 
Quite a problem for us, I am afraid. 

Natural history has its museums, 
But why should our children learn about monsters, 
An earth of snakes and reptiles for millions of years? 

Nature devouring, nature devoured, 
Butchery day and night smoking with blood. 
And who created it? Was it the good Lord? 

Yes, undoubtedly, they are innocent, 
Spiders, mantises, sharks, pythons. 
We are the only ones who say: cruelty. 

Our consciousness and our conscience 
Alone in the pale anthill of galaxies 
Put their hope in a humane God. 

Who cannot but feel and think, 
Who is kindred to us by his warmth and movement, 
For we are, as he told us, similar to Him. 

Yet if it is so, the He takes pity 
On every mauled mouse, every wounded bird. 
Then the universe for him is like a Crucifixion. 

Such is the outcome of your attack on the cat: 
A theological, Augustinian grimace, 
Which makes difficult our walking on this earth.


~ Czeslaw Milosz, Facing the River (1995)

**

Here Milosz acknowledges the innocence of nature. Only humans mistakenly say: cruelty, and imagine the kind of deity who cares for every mouse and bird. Yet if this is so, “then the universe for him is like a Crucifixion,” Milosz brilliantly observes. This position – that nature is “cruel” – only makes our life more difficult. Much as he would like to believe in a totally caring god, Milosz will not condemn his beloved cat. The cat is as innocent as Frida Kahlo's dog, Señor Xólotl "curled . . . on the wrist of evening." 

But wait! The human psyche and human values cannot be so easily dismissed. We are the ones capable of pity for all suffering – and of remembering the beings, human and animal and vegetal, who are no more. Lois P. Jones sent me this beautiful French poem by Rilke:

WHAT SURVIVES 

Who says that all must vanish?
Who knows, perhaps the flight
of the bird you wound remains,
and perhaps flowers survive
caresses in us, in their ground.

It isn’t the gesture that lasts,
but it dresses you again in gold
armor – from breast to knees –
and the battle was so pure
an Angel wears it after you.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke, tr. A. Poulin 

***


Michael (at Mile 410 of the Pacific Crest Trail)

I enjoyed wrestling with the thoughts in your most recent post.

A great injustice, an unfortunate thoughtlessness, is the inappropriate use – the gross use – of and in humans and nature – there is no and, humans are nature. We are as much nature as any other creature (and gasp! we haven't even begun talking about the so-called inanimate...). The AND in Human and nature has lead to a world of fear and division and disregard and power-over.

One such consequence is the world as an animal Auschwitz – 58 billion land animals senselessly killed each year for food, worldwide. The creatures taken from the sea are many, many more. I saw a butcher buying goats in NW China. He lead them to his cart, grabbed them by the skin on the back, and hurled each over the 6' side of the cart and let each drop on its back, on the floor. For him, the goat was apart from him. He believed in the AND. Nature is to be controlled. Disregarded. Killed. Not worthy of respect, nor is there reason to be concerned for its suffering.

Last week I was a hiking a few miles south of The Devil's Punchbowl on the PCT and rounded a corner and nearly bumped into two young men. From their clothing I guessed they were on their first day-hike, venturing into the wilds with only Hollywood as a guide. The meeting was sudden, neither of us had heard the other coming. One of them said, "Damn, I thought you were a bear." A bear. Right. But he was serious and to support his concern, he held a handgun, a version of the famed 1911 pistol, hammer back. I wanted to laugh and at the same time slap him silly for being so naive and stupid and for endangering my life and those of others hikers. He believed in the AND.

In a general way it might be said there are two kinds of Pacific Crest Trail hikers: First, those who believe nature is a force to reckon with, to be wary of, and they plan for her volatile ways – these folks carry gear for every contingency – one, two, or even three first aid kits, a satellite phone or tracking device, GPS, maps for several miles in every possible direction, food for an extra day or two, a back-up water filter, too much clothing, snow shoes (in spring and summer?), a shovel, etc. They believe in the AND. The second kind believes nature is benevolent and they pack lightly. These are the ultra-light backpackers. They may carry an extra pair of socks. That's it. Enough food for the miles, no back-up gear. These hikers are nature.

It's the view. Of nature. That allows for these different approaches.

Not far from where I live in San Diego someone has scratched into the concrete sidewalk: WE ARE ONE WITH EVERYTHING! Yes, we are. And the walk we must learn to walk is the one without the AND.

I hear the reasoning of the deep ecologists in your discussion--deep ecologists acknowledge the interconnected of systems, but have little concern for the individual. So the earth didn't pause its ponderous revolution when I was born, nor will it pause when I die. But what would happen if humans ceased to exist? If the oceans died? Or the polar ice caps melt? 

Oriana:

The ice caps are already melting, of course. Humans who run the world (presidents, generals, CEO's) seem like a bunch of young male teenagers. The gang mentality. The adolescent belief that we are “separate, different, and superior.” Why are we superior? Because we have morality, while nature, we were taught, is “red in tooth and claw.”

And anyway, by the time the polar caps are totally melted, that will posterity’s problem, and who really cares for posterity? It’s been observed that some people never use the future tense. 

Even having children and grandchildren does not necessarily make them care. I remember having chatted with a real-estate developer. He said he was working on “developing” the hills around San Luis Obispo. “Not those hills!” I moaned. “That’s such a beautiful area.” “I know,” he replied. I used to hike there when I was in college.” “And where will your children hike?” I asked. At first he pretended not to hear. Then he said, “People need housing,” and became busy working on his laptop.

After all, most agree that profit is more important than nature.

You are correct in your argument that people don’t seem to realize that they ARE nature. Hence either the romanticized, deified version of Nature, or the degraded rape-her-while-you-can nature. But Milosz has gotten himself into a different conundrum. He is disgusted by the food chain: all this devouring. He wants a divine order where maybe we can just feed on light. This reminds me of Linda Pastan’s wonderful poem:

The Imperfect Paradise 

If God had stopped work after the fifth day

With Eden full of vegetables and fruits,

If oak and lilac held exclusive sway

Over a kingdom made of stems and roots,

If landscape were the genius of creation

And neither man nor serpent played a role

And God must look to wind for lamentation

And not to picture postcards of the soul,

Would he have rested on his bank of cloud,

With nothing in the universe to lose,

Or would he hunger for a human crowd?

Which would a wise and just creator choose:

The green hosannas of a budding leaf

Or the strict contract between love and grief?

~ Linda Pastan

Nevertheless, Milosz is sane enough not to call nature “cruel.” After having witnessed a huge amount of human cruelty, he knows very well that it’s not his cat that is cruel. And he realizes that not even the God of Love (as opposed to Blakean “Nobodaddy”) could open up to all suffering, because then the universe would be a constant crucifixion. And even God wants to be happy! So, in midst of sorrow, we must choose to live in joy. Only a basically joyful person, I suspect, can be emotionally strong enough to try to actively minimize suffering and environmental destruction. 


But what I particularly fear is people who don’t seem to have any sense of the sacred or, what may be equivalent, a sense of beauty. 

Scott:


Where DO you find those pictures?! The clarity of the images for your posts are really striking. I really liked the Chinese fisherman with his cormorants, saw one of those birds just this weekend on the coast of Georgia. The Chinese fisherman image on your post brought to mind, oddly enough, the thought of the Quakers and their being known as
Children of the Light; Lowell's 'Quaker Graveyard on Nantucket' comes to mind as well. 

Which that leads to Melville(Lowell as you probably know makes many allusions to 'Moby Dick'). Melville was haunted by Calvinism most of his life. Like Milosz he never fully escaped his upbringing though at the end of his life he seemed to have acquired some peace.

Oriana:


For images, I scour the Internet. The best images are often not attributed, to my astonishment. But maybe it’s better that way, in line with Internet generosity.

That's a wonderful comparison of Melville's Calvinism to Milosz's old-time Catholicism. Either way, it's not a lovable deity. I think Milosz had at least some moments of peace – several late poems indicate that. He felt that at least in his old age he’d be accepted “as is” – but certainly without any apologies for the huge amount of suffering he had to witness or experience, for the silence when he prayed that the suffering of others be relieved. I think Milosz arrived at moments of blissful acceptance and moments of agonized acceptance.