TO BECOME THE PERSON WE MUST BE

More than once, Kott [a literary critic] describes a drunken party taking place after the curfew in Nazi-occupied Warsaw. Kott enters a room, where he sees two people, Jerzy Andrzejewski (author of Ashes and Diamonds) and Czeslaw Milosz, on their knees making faces at each other.

They were making the most horrible faces at one another. They banged their heads on the floor and then, one, two, three, they raised their heads and made faces. Private and public faces, innocent and obscene faces, military and civilian faces, the faces of virgins and pederasts, and great historical faces—Beck [a German general], Hitler, Stalin. They made the faces of the archetypal father and king. Perhaps Czeslaw’s last face was Almighty God, after which Jerzy collapsed on the floor. Who or what were they bowing to? To the prewar years or to what lay ahead?

Kott was impressed that Milosz found the face Kott had been looking for in the Thomists and the surrealists, in secular humanism and Marxism—a face with which to confront a world of nihilism and cruelty, a world of round-ups and summary executions. 

~ Adam Michnik, “Gogol’s Venom: A Study in Lost Illusions,” Partisan Review 3, 2000

Reading Milosz, one needs to remember that he had the experience of walking out of a burning city. He had witnessed the Apocalypse, but what followed was not New Jerusalem and the Peaceful Kingdom, but the Cold War, and the Moloch of the Soviet Union swallowing up Milosz’s beloved Lithuania.

What saved Milosz from being locked in a kind of literary post-traumatic stress syndrome?  I think it was his ability to think in universal categories, beyond nationalism, beyond contemporary history. In one his essays, “Tiger,” I was struck by this passage:

I was convinced that as long as we live, we must lift ourselves over new thresholds of consciousness, that to aim at higher and higher thresholds is our only happiness. While living [in Nazi-occupied Poland], I crossed one of those thresholds – when we finally begin to become the person we must be, and we are at once inebriated and a little frightened at the enormous distance yet to be traveled. (Selected Essays, p. 150, emphasis mine)

It so happens that my mother, who was extraordinary, also said that she began to become herself “during the worst of times,” when she joined the Polish Resistance and said “Yes” when asked if she was willing to die. “That’s when I developed the most,” she said.

I can’t compare my own travails on my “long and winding road” to becoming a writer with my mother’s heroism. But the invocation of the worst of times reminded me that I took my first stumbling steps during the most miserable years of my life. First steps? No, that’s not quite accurate. What Milosz describes makes total sense to me:

Early we receive a call, yet it remains incomprehensible, and only late we discover

how obedient we were.

The river rolls its waters, as it did long ago, past the church of St. Jacob, I am there along with my foolishness, which is shameful, but had I been wiser it would not have helped.

Now I know foolishness is necessary in all our designs, so that they are realized, awkwardly and incompletely.

And this river, together with heaps of garbage on its banks, with the beginning of pollution, flows through my youth, a warning against the long for ideal places on the earth.

Yet, there, on that river, I experienced full happiness, a ravishment beyond any thought or concern, still lasting in my body.

Just like the happiness by the small river of my childhood, in a park whose oaks nad lindens were to be cut down by the will of barbarous conquerors.

. . . Who will dare to say: I was called and that’s the reason the Supreme Power protected me from bullets ripping up the sand close by me, or drawing patterns on the wall above my head.

From a casual arrest just for elucidating the case, which would end with a journey in a freight car to a place from which the living do not return? 

From obeying the order to register, when only the disobedient would survive? 

Yes, but what about them, has not every one of them prayed to his God, begging: Save me!

And the sun was rising over camps of torture and even now with their eyes I see it rising.

. . . All of us are called, and each of us meditates on the extravagance of having a separate fate.

. . . If I accomplished anything, if was only when I, a pious boy, chased after the disguises of the lost Reality. 

After the real presence of divinity in our flesh and blood which are at the same time bread and wine,

Hearing the immense call of the Particular, despite the earthly law that sentences memory to extinction.

~ Czeslaw Milosz, from “Capri,” Facing the River, 1995

*

I caught a couple of glimpse of my future calling early on, but they didn’t make much sense. In “Caterpillar of Smoke,” a poem that records my first encounter with unrhymed modern poetry and the wild excitement I felt reading it, I say

I was fourteen. The future flashed

as though a careless angel

opened the wrong door in time.

I didn’t start writing until English gave me a distance from words. Polish was too emotionally charged. In English I could say anything. In fact by the time I turned eighteen, I knew all the bad words in English, quickly learned during my immersion in working-class Milwaukee. A “girl from a good home,” I didn’t know the Polish equivalent for more than half of them, and still don’t.

In college I started writing short stories and what might be called “verse.” I don’t want to apply the word “poems” to those beginner’s attempts at poetry. It was the latter that brought the verdict, “Maybe the talent isn’t there.” Ignorant of the fact that even the greatest poets started by writing the most embarrassing drivel, I translated this to mean that I had absolutely no literary talent, so there was no point pursuing that path. I went through a severe depression, the worst one in my life, descending into stupor. But I knew better than to trust psychiatry. The thought of being at the mercy of an insensitive MD who’d want to treat me with electric shock kept me on this side of sanity. I settled into chronic rather than acute depression and began to study psychology.

After no end of storms and dead ends, I began to become a writer (mainly a poet) in earnest around the age of 36. This time no one and nothing could stop me (or so I thought), even though I wasn’t done with anti-mentors, and there were more setbacks ahead. Still, looking back, my mid-thirties were indeed the time when I crossed the threshold and began to become the person I had to be.

So much delay, so many blind alleys . . .  Did it have to be so miserable and chaotic? I know better than to start brooding on that question. And I find solace in another poem by Milosz:

ONE MORE CONTRADICTION

Did I fulfill what I had to, here, on earth?

I was a guest in a house under white clouds

Where rivers flow and grasses renew themselves.

So what if I were called, if I was hardly aware.

The next time early I would search for wisdom,

I would not pretend I could be just like others:

Only evil and suffering come from that.

Renouncing, I would choose the fate of obedience.

I would suppress the wolf’s eye and greedy throat.

A resident of some cloister floating in the air

With a view on the cities glowing below,

Or onto a stream, a bridge and old cedars,

I would give myself to one task only

Which then, however, could not be accomplished.

~ Czeslaw Milosz, Facing the River, 1995

Yes, youth is wasted on the young, and, worse yet, life is wasted on people (as the protagonist of the movie “Greenberg” observes).  But if not for all that foolishness and lostness, this embarrassing wasting away with passion for the wrong men, living in ghost-empty suburbs instead of the soaring metropolis we dreamed of, or some other Eden – if not for the history of our stupidity, to quote Milosz again, what would there be to write about?

*

Another sentence in Milosz’s essay made me stop reading and start thinking: “Through poetry I wanted to save my childhood” (p. 156). For Milosz, that meant remaining in opposition to the dull grown-ups around him, entangled in romance, career, and provincial politics. For me saving my childhood meant preserving a trace of something as immense as the twilight over the river, in Carpathia, in late June when the mysterious time between sunset and night seemed to last and last, the river slowly turning gold, then silver dusking to gray sheen.

I was letting the music of that lost world transform me, transcribed into another language. I would have never intentionally chosen this strange path, this serving I didn’t quite know what, or for what purpose. But this is how Milosz defines maturity: not only as continually becoming the person you must be, but also as loving service. In “Love,” part of the extraordinary sequence written during the war, he speaks about those who arrive at the right detachment from the purely personal:

Then he wants to use himself and things
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.
It doesn't matter whether he knows what he serves:
Who serves best doesn't always understand.

I certainly didn’t understand, and when it comes to poetry, I still don’t; I have to restrain myself from asking the hopeless question, Why me? I wasn’t exactly trying to preserve my childhood. It was not volitional. It happened. We don’t choose what we write about. At seventeen, having flown from the Old World to the New, I was eager to assimilate as quickly as possible, without getting mired in nostalgia; but nostalgia had other plans. When I resumed reading the essay, I saw that in the very next sentence Milosz asks, “But what fiery sword protects the artist?” Protects? The fiery sword expels the artist from that “perfection of the life” that Yeats regrets losing in the choice of “perfection of the work.” 

But it doesn't matter; the point is to show things "in the glow of ripeness." But also, of necessity, by how that glow is refracted through the lens of one unique consciousness, that once-per-universe configuration of history, geography, and personality. Making the best of the undeniable determinism of life. We don't choose our mistakes. It's just as arrogant to blame ourselves as it is to take pride in our fleeting accomplishments. 

Milosz answers his question by invoking loyalty to values – the very thing that he was accused by some of not possessing. “No matter where I turned, there was nowhere where I felt at home. A taste for ‘ultimate things’ gave direction to my whole life, although due to various geographical-psychological peculiarities, the Polish Catholic tonality has not been dominant in this religion of mine” (p. 298). Thank goodness for that. 

globalization everywhere

Not everyone admired Milosz’s preference for dealing with ultimate concerns and universal values, far from nationalism or orthodox religion. “Here and everywhere is my homeland,” he said, claiming all human heritage. Milosz’s contemporary, Zbigniew Herbert, always an uncompromising anti-communist, a patriot for whom Poland was a holy ideal, called Milosz “a man without a face, without an identity.” Herbert was given to extreme statements, possibly a part of his bipolar disorder.

WAS COMMUNISM A NECESSARY EVIL?

But again I am getting away from the subject of Milosz’s essay I mentioned first: a Marxist philosopher, nicknamed “Tiger,” who believed that after the Communist revolution, a humanist revolution would follow; the task of the men of letters was to preserve humanist values during the period of necessary evil.

Milosz tries to defend his Stalinist friend as best he can, saying that Tiger was neither cynical nor shallow; he just believed in historical necessity. He quotes Tiger’s admiration for Hypatia, the first noted woman mathematician and head of the Platonist academy in Alexandria: “Of course Tiger adored Hypatia, the last pagan philosopher of Alexandria, not the dirty, terrifying mob of Christians who tore her apart. And yet, he said, the future did not belong to Hypatia but to the Christians” (p. 155).

But a “humanist revolution” is an oxymoron. Humanism can only evolve, slowly, through centuries of the widening spread of education and debate over ideas. No, we can’t forgive Tiger for having chortled at the notion that Soviet rifle butts will teach Poles to “think rationally, without alienation.” We can’t forgive him for shrugging off the gulags: “although he was splendidly informed about the millions of people behind barbed wire, he did not want to ‘weaken’; that is, to imagine the extent of their suffering” (161).

But then, who’d even remember Tiger (Tadeusz Kroński) if not for this essay? He was indeed on his way to the “dustbin of history.” He was a Hegelian and saw history as the tool of World Spirit (Weltgeist), cruel but always correct (I can’t help but see here the toxic god of “old-time religion” – and Kroński was on the side of the Christian mob who killed Hypatia precisely because Christianity was necessary to produce Hegel). And yet he could say the most amazing things, for instance: “Anyone who crosses himself in public crucifies Christ. I also cross myself, but only when no one can see me.”

During the war, Kroński, the mocker of romanticism and patriotic hyperbole, became a catalyst of that beginning to become the person that Milosz had to be. It is only in the eyes of some Polish readers that Milosz’s friendship with Kroński is a stain on the poet’s reputation. What matters is that Milosz still speaks to us with living words. He is now an acknowledged literary giant of international stature, above those old quarrels. Above politics. The world forgives those who write well enough to win the Nobel Prize and, despite a Leftist past and a degree of cooperation with a Communist dictatorship, become friends with a Pope as popular as John Paul II. Above all, the world forgives those who do penance for the rest of their life, striving never to praise death and nothingness, and to be always on the side of the human.

**

Should poetry be above politics? But what is politics worth if it’s not about freedom, justice, equal rights – about allowing people to fulfill their potential, to become what they can be? (I have softened “must” to “can” because “must” applies to cases of exceptionally strong vocation.) And what is poetry if not one of the means we have to keep reminding ourselves of the sacred trust in the fulfillment of a person’s potential, of being able to cross one threshold after another? Poetry, with its insistence on the particular that speaks to our essence, with its ability to pierce through to the emotional level (“an axe for the frozen sea inside us”) can be of great value in helping us become the person we can/must be.

Still, typically poetry and politics don’t mix because political rhetoric ruins poetry (note, for instance, its disastrous impact on Adrienne Rich). I am forced to say: yes, poetry must be above politics. But it’s a qualified yes, since I’ve come across some poems that have greatness in spite of (and in a way because of) being political. The most recent example is this poem by Margaret Szumowski (who is also the author of the delightful “into the forest” poem):

the women appear as aurora borealis

One night in the Arctic, the villages saw the “flashing elements

of female souls.” The women kept indoors, women whose windows

had been painted black, who dressed in head-to-toe black.

They floated out f their houses through the cracks to the Arctic

where they could be seen without the burka.

Luminous beauty. Their long black hair, slender bodies from so

much weeping, shadows under their eyes like the dark of the moon.

Look, Mother, with your shadowed eyes.

Soon the aurora of mirth will appear. First their bodies in the sky.

Brilliant ice maidens! Then the laughing of the heavens.

Then the laughing of the women themselves who prefer the cold,

the seals, the walrus, the ice floes, the dangerous polar bear, to

the death of the heart. My mother prefers death to leaving him.

They are laughing in the cold, and we villagers are making ice candles.

See us come out on our dogsleds. Hundreds of ice candles lead the

way to the Yypnik village. These women, a gift from the gods.

My father saw her as no gift but his.

Look how beautiful they are. Northern dancers, we call them.

They are not aurora flowers that open and die in a single hour.

They become aurora snakes to protect themselves from those men.

Poison him.

The women are gorgeous feather boas across the night sky.

Everything is called aurora in honor of the gods.

The aurora of mirth. Hear these women laughing?

You have never heard them laugh before.

They fled the harsh husband who caged them without light.

Mother, you could be all light. It’s not too late to seep from the

crack he forgot in the east wall.

~ Margaret Szumowski, The Night of the Lunar Eclipse, 2005

Originally the poet may have been inspired by the Norse myth of the Valkyries. The opposite of oppressed wives, these are the warrior maidens (“brilliant ice maidens”) who take the souls of slain heroes to Valhalla. The flashing of their shields as they ride the skies is supposed to produce the Northern Lights. What Margaret Szumowski takes from the myth is the joyful dance of the lights (auroras of mirth), and the power of those feminine spirits that are seen as a “gift from the gods.”

This is a poem imagining the escape of all oppressed women, not just the Muslim women forced to dress in black head to toe, with only a slit for the eyes (one Islamic scholar suggested that it would be more pious to leave an opening for only one eye). The poem is strange, surreal, and extremely moving. I can’t read it without feeling my eyes moisten. The address to “Mother” moves me – it gives the poem its intimacy. But mainly I feel its power as poetry because it takes me to the Otherworld – that place in the imagination where we can find refuge, almost no matter how oppressive the reality.

And yet it’s more than just some vague “place in the imagination.” This poem makes us imagine sheer beauty: the undulating lights in the Arctic sky: “Look how beautiful they are. Northern dancers, we call them.” It’s a summons – mostly doomed, we know that – to all oppressed women to connect with their strength and beauty. A political poem, yes, but a poem that does not sacrifice the strangeness and indirectness of poetry.

And here is a more direct poem. If we end up crying, that’s fine: it means that unlike those Hegelians who believed that history was cruel but always right, we have stayed human.

beauty pageant in Sarajevo

The young girls believe

as they parade before my eyes.

They know I have the power

to recognize beauty.

Lana floating, soft as spring leaves

in Sarajevo Park, Biljana’s legs scarred

by shrapnel, but slim and curved.

We judges enjoy their willowy forms.

Low-cut silk over delicate breasts.

Where did she get the silk? I ask

and her mother smiles.

What clothing does a fashionable woman

require? Is virginity important?

What kind of man could you love?

They hold out their arms like children

selling flowers from the family garden.

They hold out their bodies,

step forward on the runway,

speechless chorus,

slowly raising a large, white banner.

DO NOT LET THEM KILL US.

~ Margaret Szumowski

##

Oriana: 

PS. Please don't miss John Guzlowski's comment on Milosz's "negative capability" in the official comments section.

##

Darlene:

I’m surprised you didn’t mention Jung and individuation. Isn’t that about finding your true self, “becoming the person you must be”?

Oriana:

I wanted to mention Jung, but couldn’t find a way do it gracefully, without superficiality and yet without heavy theorizing, getting entangled with terms such as the collective unconscious or the Shadow. Like a good poem, a blog post probably shouldn't have more than two and a half ideas, and mine tend to have twenty-five or more, each opening into infinity. Besides, I have never been clear about what Jung means by the Self. I much prefer the familiar phrase, “finding your true self.”

Of course there is a price for that. The more you differentiate yourself, the more deeply you pursue your calling, the less at home you’ll feel at a family gathering, say. But the rewards are obviously great, even if you end up feeling like an outsider. For one thing you experience less envy, if any. You get your fulfillment from doing what you love doing. Recognition is always nice, but you are not pathetically dependent on it.

Possibly we are out on a metaphysical limb when we talk about “finding our true self” or “finding what we were meant to do.” These are approximations, figures of speech. I don’t think there is some cosmic decree that says something like, “Jim is meant to be a nature poet.” I know that New Age dogma says we choose a particular task for this lifetime just before we incarnate, but immediately after we choose, our memory is erased, so that we are born clueless and must seek and seek.

I don’t believe that there is one pre-destined task, the reason we were born, what we came here for. Contrary to Jung’s “There are no accidents,” I think there are plenty of accidents, for which we later may find destiny-type reasons. We stumble and bumble and walk in circles; then, if we are lucky, we discover the path that feels right, that makes us believe we’ve found our destiny. Then we look back and see even our catastrophes as necessary steps. Maybe. “There is no truth, only perspectives.” The important thing is to keep walking – self-actualizing, to bring in Abraham Maslow, another psychology giant. It’s by self-actualizing that we can be of greatest service to others.

On the other hand, a lot of people say, “I just want to enjoy life.” I used to think that was terribly shallow, but I’ve changed my mind. Where would I be without the palm trees and Pacific sunsets? Somewhere else, I suppose, but not quite as happy. Not thinking “paradise” as I drive down a typical California boulevard. I personally need the kind of work that is its own reward. Others say “I need to be of use.” Still others: “I need a sense of adventure.” Fortunately there are many ways to enjoy life; I’ve become quite tolerant toward those who just go to the park and feed the ducks.

Morgan:

I do love both poems, especially "The Women Appear as Aurora Borealis." The poems, especially "Beauty Pageant," remind me of Nafisi's descriptions in Reading Lolita in Tehran of the women she taught at her home in secret, who "disrobed" (down to their real, street clothes and real selves).

Scott:

I really enjoyed the Aurora borealis poem in your last blog. The Arctic has always held an attraction to me as it's so connected to explorers, whalers and is the home of my favorite animal, the Narwhal. As you came to consider yourself a poet relatively late in life, I came to appreciate verse in my middle age. Though I have dabbled in it, I feel I will always be more a reader and one who enjoys poetry than an actual poet and that's ok, one must know one's limitations.

Oriana:

Pardon my limited typing capacity at the moment. Margaret Szumowski has written some wonderful, wonderful poems -- easily lost in the static, so I want to help publicize them. More will be coming in future posts. 

DOORWAYS CAUSE FORGETTING; PLATH'S MAD GIRL'S LOVE SONG

Existence is plagiarism. ~ Emile Cioran

~~~

BORROWER

A hesitant knock on the door.

I look out, then down.

The neighbors’ little boy,

I think his name is

Christian, stands staring at his

tennis shoes, faded T-shirt ripped

at the neck. He holds a cup tilted

at a forlorn angle, stammers,

I don’t remember

what my mother sent me for.

Standing at the blue door

of a long life,

my cup only half full,

I can’t remember either.

What did I come for?

What was it I wanted?

~ Una Hynum © 2012

           

I’ve used this wonderful poem before, in the post THE BURDEN OF CHOICE; I’m pleased to use it again. A masterpiece does not get “used up”: a great poem has the power to leave us in hushed awe time after time. (This may not be true of Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium”; in my view, that’s because, after the first three gorgeous stanzas and the perfect closure of “gather me / into the artifice of eternity,” the last stanza is relatively weak and the last two lines are flat.)

Una’s poem has a very effective, hush-producing ending. But readers also love the line that says “standing at the blue door.” Yes, that’s the final door. In life we pass through so many doors, literal and metaphoric. As we are about to pass through the last one, it is our final chance to ask ourselves what we came for and what we wanted. I think Ray Carver was among the lucky few: he managed to answer at least the second question. Dying of lung cancer at only fifty, he wrote this:

LATE FRAGMENT

And did you get what

you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on the earth.

           ~ Ray Carver (1938-1988)

If we suddenly had to “leave this plane” (as we say in California), most of us, I am afraid, would not say that we got what we wanted. But then we’d have to confess that we didn’t really know what we wanted. Or perhaps we knew it at an early age, had no courage to reach for it, and remembered that summons from destiny only when the clock of life said: Too late.

And how interesting that Carver, a successful writer (I also enjoy his poems), chose not fame, but being able to "call myself beloved, to feel myself / beloved on the earth." My chief desire has been to be on the right path in terms of work. It's when I feel I am on the right path that I feel myself beloved. And no, it has nothing to do with fame. Interesting, I keep saying to myself, interesting. Just to be doing what feels I should be doing. 

I did not have this clarity even a few years ago, so I am all in favor of saying: let us not be so hard on ourselves. To know what we want in life is perhaps the most difficult thing of all. A trivial foreshadowing of this “not knowing” is the near-universal phenomenon of walking into a room wanting something, except we can’t remember what it was.

Why can’t we remember? One reason is too many doors. The most fascinating article I found last week was “Doorways Cause Forgetting”: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mental-mishaps/201205/doorways-cause-forgetting

It happens to all of us. It’s not the beginning of dementia. It turns out that “doorway-caused forgetting” is part of normal brain function. That’s why it’s so common for people to walk into a room and there blank, with no idea of what they came for.

 “Walking through doorways empties your mind,” the author explains.  This was shown in experiments where people had to walk through doorways as opposed to continuing in space with no doorways. “When we enter a new environment, we construct a new situational model, which erases the old model.” And the old model included the information about the momentary previous self that needed to get something.

This confirms the fragmentary nature of our perception: the brain does not have a complete picture of “reality.” It has just dots to get by: the brain improvises by connecting the dots and filling in the gaps. A new environment, such as a different room, can easily erase our vague memory of what it was we needed in the other room.

One remedy, I’ve discovered, is to name the object you need, and then repeat that name as you keep walking (e.g. “masking tape, masking tape”). This little triumph of language as memory can spare you many useless trips, especially if you need to climb the stairs. I suspect it’s not only doorways that cause forgetting; step by step, stairways are even worse. The self at the top of the stairs is not the same as the clueless self at the bottom. Regardless, repetition is the mother of memory. Carrying a word is like carrying a holy icon: it can work miracles.

###

After all this self-help, let’s have more poetry – and what is poetry, real poetry, if not a kind of holy icon that keeps us in touch with our innermost reality?

Mad Girl's Love Song

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

~ Sylvia Plath, 1951; published in Mademoiselle, August 1953.

**

The first two lines are actually quite right on, and remind me of Bishop Berkeley’s precept that “to be is to be perceived” (esse est percipi). This poem could also serve to illustrate the meaning of solipsism (solus – alone; ipse – self): one can’t be sure of the existence of anything outside one’s own mind. Are other people “really real”?

I love the rhyme – I’ve always been crazy about rhyme, though now it’s forbidden and even slant rhyme mustn’t be too obvious. And of course I love the heaven and hell references: “God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade.” The fall of god extinguishes the fires of hell: the screaming and moaning cease at last, after so many centuries (though only decades in an individual’s life – still a horror). (Although it’s possible that the only way to reach paradise, in this life, includes a willingness to enter hell.)

Note that here the speaker controls the life and death of the world. She is above nature – she can make the world live, or die, simply by opening and closing her eyes. Call it solipsism or call it a keen insight: the world lives in us. We make it up in our head. 

“I should have loved a thunderbird instead” adds a touch of humor for me.

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.

The mythological thunderbird becomes more real than the lover (who may indeed be imaginary – or so rarely seen in flesh that he becomes more fantasy than a real man).

But ultimately any lover is, to a shocking degree, someone that we make up inside our head. We can experience another person only so far and no further. We can’t get inside their mind and see the world through their eyes. That’s where we come up against the “otherness of the other.”

Something that Yeats said applies here: The tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul.

“Mad Girl’s Love Song” is a villanelle; while in college Plath wrote a lot of villanelles and other poems in form. (I first said “young Plath” — but she never got past being “young”; she was only thirty when she died; yet we can say “early Plath” versus “mature Plath”.) I love the music of this one. It shows that Plath had an astonishing mastery of craft even before The Colossus. This poem reminds me how extraordinary Plath can be — even the early Plath.

It’s possible that the only way to reach paradise, in this life, includes a willingness to enter hell, a willingness to make sacrifices for one’s vocation and take risks, such as a love relationship with an exceptional person, that may lead to a disaster.

Yet Plath held poetry close to her heart, like one of Dostoyevski’s heroines who jumps out the window hugging a holy icon to her chest. Poetry can be that icon, connecting us to the inner life —almost always, of course, in the service of life, not death — of enduring.

**

Extraordinary – I don’t use the word lightly. And again I want to quote that crucial passage from James Hillman’s The Soul’s Code:

Extraordinary people display calling most evidently. Perhaps that’s why they fascinate. Perhaps, too, they are extraordinary because their calling comes through so clearly and they are so loyal to it . . .  They seem to have no other choice . . . Extraordinary people are not a different category; the workings of this engine in them are simply more transparent. (p. 28-29)

“Extraordinary people are not a different category”; it’s just that they have clarity about their vocation and a great loyalty to it. And this brings me to another article:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/strategic-thinking/201206/why-quitters-win

The title is misleading. By “quitters,” the author, Nick Tasler, means people who can commit oneself to one option and eliminate the rest. To use an extreme example (mine, not his), Frank Lloyd Wright also loved music. But he didn’t try to be both an architect and a piano virtuoso. He chose his path early and persisted. Architecture is a kind of frozen music – but we don’t need to go that far. He made his choice, and became extraordinary.

Here we come back to the finding that less choice is better, and no choice may be best (depending on the matter at hand). REDUCE OR ELIMINATE CHOICE. Keeping options open is not only stressful, but virtually guarantees failure.

But how can we know if option 1 is the best if option 2 looks yummy also, and option 3 has its seductive angles as well? If the pull of a single option is not that distinct, we have to make a leap of faith. I hate to confess how many times I simply tossed a coin . . .  but even that is better than sitting half-dressed at the edge of a bed, like a woman in a painting by Edward Hopper. Should she put on the red dress or the blue one? (Do I hear someone say, “But Oriana, she is trying to decide if life is worth living!” – Listen, I know what it means to be a woman. She can’t make up her mind about what to wear. The problem is that it all looks good. It’s the cumulative microtrauma of trivial choices that makes women so exhausted.)

Decisiveness: the ability to choose one thing, one course of action, while “quitting” others. Eliminating the stress of choice. To quote from the article:

The inability to make what Harvard ethics professor, Joseph Badaracco, calls “right vs. right” decisions can be a fatal strategic flaw. An otherwise talented manager who can’t bring himself to focus on one customer segment at the expense of others (but what if they want to buy, too!?!) winds up taking his team in circles, and his career into a rut.  

At the heart of strategic thinking is the ability to focus on one strategy while consciously quitting the pursuit of others. Choosing what we want to do is easy. It's choosing what else we want to do that we are nonetheless going to quit doing that is the hard part—to build the school by stripping funding from the hospital; to develop this product while shutting down production of that one. As David Packard (of Hewlett-Packard fame) once said “more companies die from overeating than starvation.” The same truth applies to our careers and personal lives.

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I’m not sure if I agree with the statement “choosing what we want to do is easy.” For some people it is, for others it isn’t. Perhaps the author should have said: “choosing what we most want to do.” But even then . . . Try asking someone, “What’s the most important thing in your life?” People I know would sooner discuss their sex lives (or lack of them).

I do agree, though, that paying the price of focusing – sacrificing other attractive things and activities – may be even harder. Not particularly for me – once I have clarity, it’s relatively easy for me to be single-minded. But I’ve known people so immersed in a dozen attractive activities that they are always in a rush, frantic, unable to do anything at the level of excellence.

We live in a manic, multi-tasking, short-attention span culture. My most important motto is DO LESS. The less you do (but the more thoroughly you do it, and the more you enjoy doing it), the more you will accomplish.

Why? For one thing, you’ll be eliminating a lot of choice-making, possibly the primary source of stress in modern life. The future belongs to the decisive – the “quitters,” those who quit doing too many things.

Plath had the advantage of one huge blessing: she found her calling early in life. Call me Scorpio Rising: I love “Mad Girl’s Love Song.” With a wisdom uncanny for someone so young, Plath exposes the solipsism of being in love. It seems to us that that’s exactly when we are the least self-centered, being so connected to the Beloved. But is the Beloved mostly someone we made up, a holy icon we carry in our heads, driving with that image in our mind all the way to Canada? Even so, it’s a state of grace.

A state of grace as long as it inspires rather than interferes with our accomplishing something in the world. Remember Longfellow (I harbor a secret fondness for Longfellow):

Life is earnest, life is real,

and the grave is not its goal.

Not the grave, but accomplishing something – which could be writing poems that connect us with that mysterious Otherworld which is in this world. Or it could be having loving relationships and “gracious living.” It could be volunteering for a charity. There is enough potential “meaning in life” to fit anyone’s talents and personality. The only problem is that we “can’t have it all.” Once we accept that, the rest is . . . well, not exactly easy, but doable. As one visual artist told me, “When you concentrate on one small thing, something huge begins to unfold.”    

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Hyacinth:

A neat blog.  Reading it, I realized the key word here is "KNOW." Do we ever know what we want enough to make a conscious choice? It seems more fate or luck. And everyday we wake to pass through the door of a new day and forget, if we ever knew, what we came for.

Oriana:

I love your prose poem about passing “through the door of a new day and forgetting, if we ever knew, what we came for.” Yes, each day brings such an avalanche of new challenges, sometimes I wonder how anything gets done as planned. No wonder there is a small book for “Women Who Do Too Much,” and the main idea is: “Today I’ve done (fill in the blank), AND THAT IS ENOUGH.” It’s an attempt to gain control by doing LESS. Another key word in this blog is LESS – the need for less, so we can give more attention to what is MEANINGFUL, what brings us closer to our perceived purpose.

I want to sidestep the eternal and non-resolvable debate over free will versus determinism by saying that yes, all cognitive processing is unconscious, and yet, and yet . . .  The very fact that some of it does get communicated to those brain regions that generate consciousness must have some significance. Maybe this conscious knowing, or the illusion that we know, helps us to “hold the course,” the way repeating a word virtually guarantees that we will remember what it was we wanted from another room – unless we encounter something startling on the way, and that of course has the power to erase our small and temporary “holy icon.”

And if we remember an idea – for instance, that by doing less we will accomplish more – if we keep repeating that, and offer conscious resistance against the onslaught of competing demands – then there is some hope for not being merely a straw carried by a flood.

There is also this: making a leap of faith, closing other options, and working in a full-hearted way – but also being very sensitive to feedback from all directions. A friend of a friend said he “listens to what the universe says in response to his decision.” Usually there are pretty clear signals if we are on the right or wrong track. An athlete’s training schedule may seem pretty grueling to the rest of us, but to the athlete it’s ecstasy because it has a MEANING. An athlete KNOWS what he wants: to get faster and/or stronger, to win the race, the game.

There is a power to knowing, because it’s a power of having a meaning, a purpose. Alas, self-help books tend to ask: write down ten things you want in your life. No: write down ONE thing, the one you want most. But wait: is the word WANT the right one? Should we perhaps say: the one you LOVE most?

When I look at what I loved most at the age of 12, 22, 32, 42 and on, I get an instant answer: reading interesting books. Learning. Writing is secondary to my being a learner; it grows out of it. But that’s getting into another infinity.

                                                                                                                                

Scott:

Your blog raised, as always, thought provoking issues, and with coffee by my side I will attempt to add to your excellent musings. I would be very reluctant to leave all my choices; I have, we all really do, so many. Birds, whaling, poetry, history, college football, coffee, travel and just so many others too numerous to list have been my joy and passion for so long I just don't see how I could possibly choose.

Poetry is a relative latecomer, only in the last few years has it risen to a true passion. I loved your thought on poetry as a “holy icon”– the best poetry is very akin to that. I think of how poorer my life would be today had I not discovered poetry after 40...and your blog I might add. I have written over the years so many scraps of outlines for stories, poems and other writing projects, they fill a drawer – and even a large coffee mug my daughter brought back from London: my cup truly 'overfloweth'! And the vast, vast majority have never seen completion and I sometimes take myself to task for that. But then I recall....you guessed it....a favorite quote:

  

 For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!” ~ Herman Melville, Moby Dick. 

Plath is such a tragedy: what talent and promise! It's a common refrain, I know, but why are so many poets victims of this melancholia. I ache for these “Odysseuses of the arts” who sacrifice so much for our enjoyment of their gifts. 

I have been reading a lot of Tennyson of late. He too was often distressed and anxious over his life and was renowned and lauded in his lifetime, unlike Melville. I prefer the Tolkien life, full of family, friends and a grand project that consumed him all his life. And even though his Lord of the Rings masterpiece did indeed consume him, he also found time to be a poet, artist, translator, wrote several children's book and taught at Oxford for decades. Throw in his happy home life of a wife and children who went on to have successful careers of their own.

Contrast that with Tolstoy who had fame, money and title, and for years was absolutely miserable...I'll take the Hobbit life in the Shire with food and drink with loved ones. Plath's intellect, upbringing and talent are a prime example that having good looks and brains and talent does not guarantee happiness. Plath was a fan of Moby Dick, and I came across this great quote:

I am rereading Moby Dick in preparation for the exam deluge tomorrow—am whelmed and wondrous at the swimming Biblical & craggy Shakespearean cadences, the rich & lustrous & fragrant recreation of spermaceti, ambergris—miracle, marvel, the ton-thunderous leviathan. One of my few wishes: to be (safe, coward that I am) aboard a whale ship through the process of turning a monster to light and heat. ~ Sylvia Plath, Journals, pg. 370

I wish that last line too!

Oriana:

Thank you for that magnificent quotation from Plath’s journals. Spermaceti, ambergris – I can imagine how much she loved those words. (“Ambergris” is one of my favorite poems by Jorie Graham: “We must be unforgettable or not at all.”)

I hope I didn’t create the impression that a writer should have no particular interests, and indeed even wide interests. The whole beauty of being a writer, and especially an essay writer, is that you can use practically anything that comes your way.  You learn alchemy: how to transform even the whale of the mundane into light and heat.

My point was rather that once you are aware of what is most important to you, and dedicate yourself to it, the other interests are made to serve the calling; they are subjugated. Those that seriously compete for your time will drop away. So the sacrifice is of that of other potential callings, not of activities that feed what you sense is your true calling.

But I speak as a “born writer,” or however we may want to call it. Some people might want to put a derogatory label on it, such as “workaholic.” They think great achievement is due strictly to “talent,” something one is born with; then they read the famous person’s biography, and discover a “workaholic” – which should be a source of inspiration rather than dejection – but it’s a rare person who wants true achievement.

I do, even if my accomplishment is bound to be modest. It’s not about fame; for me it’s about enjoying my life, being able to shape and release my thoughts. In the morning I can’t wait to read something good, and then to get to the keyboard.

Now I can hardly believe that I went through periods – years – and not long ago, but even quite recently – when I felt I had no venue for my gifts and intelligence; no one wanted what I had to offer. It took enormous labor to get a handful of people to attend a poetry workshop – no matter how much praise I received for my innovative workshops. Poetry was so marginal for others, while it was central to my life. As a poet in a family-centered community – after having developed within the Los Angeles poetry scene, not so permeated by the idolatry of the family – I felt I was truly “from another planet.” From that kind of isolation it’s only a step to suicidal depression. You can imagine how blessed I feel now.

I’ve discovered that a sense of calling is a great source of strength. Now, whatever life throws at me, I can transmute into writing. (Ideally, that holds true for poetry also, but poetry is a hundred times more difficult than prose.) What a difference from being constantly devastated (and over time it took less and less adversity and rejection to feel more and more devastated). All this fortunate change because now I can say, “I am a writer.” I confess I am astonished.

Note also that prose writers don’t have the startling suicide rate that poets do. A poet is at the mercy of inspiration; a non-fiction prose writer can find inspiration in anything – what joy! 

Plath is a tragedy, but also a triumph. Look, we are reading her words . . . her brain children live . . . her stars continue to waltz out in red and blue.            

Sarah:

The early Plath poem is extraordinary – glorious! and so is your post, particularly the bit actually about doorways causing forgetting. I am not sure I agree about the stairs, but the passing through doorways – it's a small felt shift, a flash of satori, every time, and one I never noticed. We forget what we wanted and who we are and it feels – well to me it feels good. So while knowing what you want and getting it before the final doorway is of vital importance in life, at the same time the second we are through that doorway it is not going to matter at all.

This brings me into a discussion I was having with a colleague yesterday about choice and self and how intertwined they are, and how the illusions of and attachments to both can be dropped, leaving us with actually a more solid existence.

Oriana:

Plath’s villanelle is indeed glorious, and deserves to be better known. It’s very odd, given its importance in Plath’s life (the Mademoiselle award that led to Plath’s experiences in New York, and later to The Bell Jar), that Ted Hughes somehow “forgot” to include it in The Collected Poems.  

When I think of the dreadful waste of my chronic depression, I see that one of my central problems was getting stuck on both self and choice. I thought that I, a definable self, made a terrible choice, the fount of all the disasters that followed. Eventually I realized that, given the circumstances, my inexperienced and quite forgivable early self really had no choice. It wasn’t even about forgiving myself so much as understanding that there was no need to forgive. The choice had been illusory. The solution was to embrace my circumstances and make the best of “fate.” When I found myself making the best of it, I came to see the obvious: I love my quiet life. What a privilege! How crazy that just several years ago I was having crying fits because my life was what it was, quiet rather than exciting.

To the Buddhist saying, “No self, no problem,” I’d like to add: “No choice, no problem.” That’s what the second article, “Why Quitters Win,” keeps affirming. Commit yourself and close the other options. “When standing, stand; when sitting, sit. Above all, don’t wobble.” 

I also need to correct myself about stairs and forgetting. In my experience, as I go downstairs, I often forget what it was that my upstairs self wanted from the kitchen or the dinette; but as I ascend, I begin to remember what it was downstairs that I forgot to bring with me (and yes, to get to the stairs I pass through a doorway; the piece of paper on which I scribbled some morning insight remains a part of the “dinette context,” instead of being envisioned near the computer). I admire the wisdom of grandmothers: never go upstairs empty-handed.

Charles:

Love the first image.

Love Cioran’s quote, “Existence is plagiarism.”

Thank you for explaining why I forget so often when walking into a room.

Love it that you are still on the topic of God.

Speaking of forgetting going from room to room, in a Jewish home the Mezuzah is put on the doorpost of every room to remind people of Divine energy and the oneness of the universe. Not exactly what you are talking about but an interesting aside.

Oriana:

Yes, the Mezuzah is an interesting example of a “reminder.” As you walk into the house, the transient outdoors self is discarded, and now you are reminded of religion. It was interesting to read that the parchment in the Mezuzah often contains the name Shaddai, or the letter shin meant to stand for El Shaddai. There are various names of god used in the Hebrew scriptures that are essentially lost in translation. The serene, generous Elohim in the first chapter of Genesis does not seem the same deity as the lying, vengeful Yahweh. “Shaddai” is probably “god of the mountain,” but it’s interesting that a female biblical scholar suggested an association with Shadayim, “breasts,” implying nurturing. In the future there will no doubt be other interpretation, according to the spirit of the times. With more female scholars, will there be a renewed interest in Asherah, the Hebrew equivalent of Ishtar? It’s impossible to predict.

Jack Miles, in his award-winning “God: A Biography,” writes: "The God whom ancient Israel worshiped arose as a fusion of a number of the gods whom a nomadic nation had met in its wanderings” (p. 20).