The Poetry of Resistance III

The Muse at the Oasis

Chaos has awoken from a long nap

is putting on dancing shoes and heading for the streets…

—Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, “In the Wild Wake”

High Anxiety

The Kali Yuga say the Hindus is a dark age lacks holy law
a time of hubris greed war
—Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, “In the Wild Wake”

We could use an oasis right about now, as the nightmare news cycle beats us about the head, invades our left temporal lobe, where speech dwells. It is hard to find words for the chaos we’re in. We wander a wasteland, our world torn apart at the seams, as our new president proceeds to rip up the careful advances of the Obama administration: Health Care, the Paris Climate Accord, Prison Justice Reform, wholesome food for school lunches, I could go on and on.

Taken by the Boogey Man

The boogey men are out—white supremacists, misogynists, homophobes, anti-Semites. Our rampaging president does a sword dance with Arab potentates while his supporters and his opponents duke it out on–line and in the streets. The phantoms of slavery emerge in Jim Crow–like laws, in police shootings of unarmed black men and in the Prison Industrial Complex. Immigrants who have been living in the U.S. peaceably for years, working hard and paying taxes, are deported for no good reason, their families splintered. Gunmen shoot strangers to make who knows what statement in a land where guns are king. The Russians it seems have hijacked our election. The President’s people may have colluded. There are investigations and more investigations; we are holding our breath for justice, for sanity, though we know all this will take time to untangle. We have a President who doesn’t believe in facts, in science or in climate change, who seems to care only about money, power and towers bearing his name, who keeps us in an anxiety state with relentless tweet attacks on all we hold dear: the earth our Mother, our democracy, our immigrant ancestors, our civil rights and liberties, our moral compass, our soul as a culture. He represents our cultural shadow, the worst, most shallow, materialistic, greedy side of America. How do we gain the consciousness we need to confront this?

March for Science (April 22, 2017, New York City)

Soul Medicine

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
—Emily Dickinson

Let me offer you some medicine in the form of a poem: Lucille Lang Day’s magical “Oasis.” Day comes at the truth slantwise. She gives us a poem that resists our collective chaos by creating a green and fertile place in our consciousness, a space where soul visits and the Muse begins to sing. Listen:

Oasis

At an oasis deep
in my left temporal lobe,
I encounter my soul
just before it leaves the party
at 33,000 feet, where
the dead do as they please,
and time is a circular target.

Where does meaning
lurk in a universe
where mountains are mangy
from fires and logging,
the president brags about
forcing himself on women,
and marksmen take aim?

In the heart of a hummingbird

beating more than one
thousand times each minute
during a rapid dive
in a high–speed chase,
while outside a bright theater
night ripens like an avocado,
and a gunman decides
not to shoot after all
because consciousness
is a moth that finally got in.

(First published in Talking Writing)

Mangy Mountain 

I imagine the poem’s speaker sitting scrunched up 33,000 feet above the earth, in that dissociated state we call airplane travel. Suddenly something shifts in her left temporal lobe, and she is released from the engine noise and the busy glow of lap top screens into another reality, where she encounters her soul. I know that moment—a sacred moment, a moment of grace—space and time open up, the dead show up, past, present and future converge and the poem begins to sing. The “Oasis” speaker looks down at the mountains, which, like a miserable dog, suffer from mange—a contagious skin disease caused by parasitic mites. In the case of the mountains, the disease is caused by parasitic capitalistic practices, which abuse the forest and the earth much as the president abuses women. The “Oasis” speaker looks for meaning in this ugliness. With the power of the pen she transforms reality: meaning lives in “the heart of a hummingbird/beating more than one/thousand times each minute…” This is a quintessential Lucille Lang Day move—merging a living symbol and scientific fact. Day holds a doctorate in Science/Mathematical Education; her poetry is full of healing medicine in our science-bashing times.

According to American Indian lore, hummingbird medicine evokes joy. Hummingbirds dart from one bright flower to another, sucking nectar, pollinating, able to fly backwards and forwards or to stay in one place. The poem, like the hummingbird, darts from one strong image to another: oasis, soul, the dead, mangy mountains, our misogynistic president. A single hummingbird makes a “rapid dive,” and everything changes: 

…a gunman decides
not to shoot after all
because consciousness
is a moth that finally got in.

The poem takes the reader on a journey from a loss of faith and meaning, to the miracle of grace. We find ourselves, with the “Oasis” speaker, in the company of the hummingbird. The moth of consciousness gets in. The gunman decides not to shoot. When the moth enters the poem we are in the presence of a transformational mystery. The gunman is transformed. The world, spared all that evil, that suffering, is transformed. We, the readers, are delivered to an oasis, a healing place with trees and water, where we can imagine that moth of consciousness, like the butterfly whose wings change the weather on the other side of the globe, transforming our world.

The Muse of Hillary

A woman on fire is a wonderful thing if you are dreaming of a bright new future. Burning Woman is…a trail–blazer for those of us who dream beyond the strangulation of patriarchy.

—Lucy Pearce, Burning Woman

Wishing for Hillary

Approaching the winter solstice—longest night—I long for Hillary. I miss her on the radio. I miss her thoughtful, policy wonkish voice. I miss her on TV, her radiance, her ability to laugh at herself, that little shimmy she did during a debate, when her opponent blamed her yet again, it seemed, for all the ills of the world. I watched her intently during the debates. I saw the fire burning deep within her, a fire cultivated throughout her life, since she was a young feminist leader at Wellesley in the late ‘60s. I watched her take on the bully, refuse his bait, ignore his jabs, take a deep breath and deftly pull the rug out from under him. She became my hero—a warrior woman.

During the dark days of the endless election campaign, I held myself together by reading and writing political poetry. I needed to remind myself that others had gone through dark days. Some survived, some did not. I needed to make sense of what we are going through in the way that poems do, through wild associations, leaps of imagination, mythic stories, slant– wise truth. After we lost Hillary for president my daughter sent me a link to a Facebook post: A young mother, baby daughter on her back, had met Hillary in the woods the day after the election, and taken a selfie. I was moved by that photo. Hillary was still in the world, though not on stage, not on TV. She was a woman walking in the woods with her husband and her dogs. That’s when she became my muse. I dealt with my grief and fury by working compulsively on a poem about her, about women in patriarchy, about women’s sacred circles in the woods, about our archetypal connections to the trees, the earth and the seasons.

I read this poem recently, at a poetry reading on the Northside of the UC Berkeley campus, my Alma Mater, my old stomping grounds. [Many years ago] I used to live on the Northside, walk to campus, leaving my young baby with a sitter. I realized, reading my Hillary poem, that I had come full circle in my life, for two members of the [very] consciousness raising group that had blown open the top of my head in the late ‘60s and made me a feminist, were there, that evening. Hillary was their hero too. I give you the poem I read that night, in the hope that it will speak to you who miss Hillary, who mourn her, and our country.

Wishing in the Woods   With Hillary

I wish you’d surprise me in the woods    Hillary as you did
that young mother    baby daughter on her back    the day after we lost you
for president    She took a selfie    My daughter sent me the link
Who will we be without you    in your moon bright pantsuit?
Who will stand up to the strongman    when Michelle and Barack
walk out of the White house    and speak to us only in dreams?

My wish is to see you among trees      their leaves gone gold
and crimson    or dry and dead on the earth    Your little dog
will sniff me    And you    who’ve been pilloried
your goodness debunked    as though working
for women and children    lacks gravitas    As though gravitas
is a loaded scrotum    whose natural enemy    is a woman with powers

Mother trudged from father’s study   to kitchen    to bathroom
and back when he whistled   I kid you not   He whistled   She typed
his manuscripts    cooked    bathed children   darned socks   Hillary
She was the air we breathed    the water we swam in
the earth we walked on    our hearth   our heart beat
Her powers invisible    to the kingdom of men    But O

she was fierce   about voting for you in ‘08
Now she’s lost   her way in the woods
lost my name   your fame   lost the whole world
of visible powers   lost to the outcry
the pandemonium    the kids walking out
of their schools shouting   “Not Our President”

The trees raise their boughs    and prophesy
When the moon comes closer to earth
than it’s been since the year you were born
the haters will crawl out from under their rocks
the “white only” nation come out of the woodwork
You won’t know whose country you’re in

Maybe our time is over   Hillary   All that e-mail evil
because you’re attached to your old familiar   that Blackberry
you refuse to waste time    learning new smartphones    I’m with you
But my dear   the world is passing us by   That young mother
in the woods    after we lost you for president    posted you
and her baby daughter on Facebook    It went viral   My daughter sent me the link

Hillary   my wish is to surround you   with sisters
of the secret grove   We’ll sit in a circle   kiss the earth
with our holiest lips   We’ll lift up our hands and pray
for your healing our healing the healing   of the dis–
respected    disaffected   molested   undocumented   Jim Crowed
And let’s not forget   the trees   the bees   the buffalo

We’ll breathe into our bellies    Our backbones grow
into strong tree trunks   our roots descend   While I’m wishing
let’s throw in a chorus of frogs   and the smell
of the earth after rain   For it’s downgoing time    in America
underworld time   time to hide out in a cave
How I wish for your company in the dark    Hillary

We’ll make a fire   talk story   remember our mothers’
invisible powers    Maybe we’ll sink into dreamtime   Maybe Michelle
will visit   She’ll wear a wonderful dress    remind us of grace   of joy
She’ll speak from her heart   Though the weather’s becoming
a banshee goddess    Though the “white only” nation
is trolling the web    Though the emperor elect

is tweeting our doom   My wish is   Remember
The way of women    is our way     The moon swells
the moon goes dark   pulling the tides   in and out
The way of the trees    is our way   So raise up
your branches   sisters   for we are one   gathering
Soon sap   will rise   apple trees flower

We’ll weave us a canopy   all over this land
It will be uprising time   once again
               in America

My Lady Tree

In my just published book, The Rabbi, theGoddess, and Jung: Getting the Word from Within, the symbolic meaning of the tree is revealed as I contemplate a painful childhood experience. Here is a section from the first chapter of the book:

I am haunted by a memory. When I was five or six I once drew a female figure—her arms reached upward; her feet were the roots of a tree; she was numinous to me. I called her my “Lady Tree.” Proudly, I showed her to my father. He was a college professor, a musicologist. He could make music shine. He could make a Renaissance painting radiant with his words, even to the eyes of a young child. But he couldn’t see the beauty of my “Lady Tree.”

“That’s silly,” he said. “Is it a bull?” The hurt of that moment is still palpable. I imagine we can all remember moments like that, when our young spirits were crushed. Looking back I can see that my “Lady Tree” was a living symbol for me, an archetype that would shape my life and my fate. I had no idea then that the “Lady Tree” was both the goddess and her priestess, that she was sacred to the old religion in which the feminine is worshiped, that she was a divinity who would seek her way into flesh through me and many others of my time. I had no idea there was an ancient “Celtic Tree Alphabet” which Robert Graves argued was a secret code by which poets handed down their worship of the forbidden White Goddess. I had no idea that in Africa, a young man, Malidoma Somé—who was to become a well known shaman—would see the Goddess in the Tree, while undergoing his initiatory rites. He would recognize Her body glowing with green, as an expression of Her “immeasurable love.” I had no idea that the goddess was associated with trees in cultures all over the world, no idea that in the Middle Ages the tree was addressed with the honorific “Lady,” or that Hildegard of Bingen had married two words—“green” and “truth” to coin the word “veriditas,” to describe the moment God heals you with a plant. I had no idea that the Tree of Life was the sacred glyph of Jewish mysticism, or that I would spend much of my life reclaiming the living symbol of my “Lady Tree”—she would come to me in dreams, in life, in poems—she was the primordial form of my shape-shifting muse, “The Sister from Below.”

I had no idea that just a few years later I would find a tree to sit in—an oak—which would become my friend, my familiar, and in its branches I would begin to write poems. I had no idea I was becoming an oak-seer, haunted by the spiritual world of the Druids…

How could I have known then, that I was not only carrying the wound of a little girl whose father mocked her “Lady Tree,” I was carrying the wound of generations of women held in a patriarchal worldview that cut them off from their primordial roots in the earth, their arms that reached for the sky.

The Motherline, Redux

I was recently approached by two writers, Melia Keeton–Digby, whose book is called TheHeroines Club: A Mother–Daughter Empowerment Circle and Vanessa Olorenshaw, whose book is Liberating Motherhood:Birthing the Purple Stockings Movement. They both had been influenced by my book, The Motherline: Every Woman’s Journey to Find Her Female Roots, first published a generation ago. They hoped I would give them a blurb. They were being published by Womancraft Publishing, which is committed “to sharing powerful new women’s voices.”

I had no idea anyone was still reading my book. I hadn’t known of the press, or that there were women, younger than my children, writing exciting feminist books that reach down to the ancient roots of the feminine. The founder of Womancraft Publishing, Lucy Pearce, I learned, has written a powerful book called Burning Woman, in whose acknowledgements I was flattered to find my own name. I gather from the titles of her books that she shares the passions that moved me to write The Motherline, about which my daughters used to tease: “Mommy writes about the moon and the womb.”

I want to share this good news with those of you who mourn Hillary, who, like these writers, is a passionate feminist committed to improving the lives of women and children. There will be a new day after the longest night. There is a future for feminist writing that honors the archetypal feminine. The Goddess has not been forgotten.

The Heroines Club: A Mother–Daughter Empowerment Circle by Melia Keeton–Digby. 

Keeton–Digby understands the magic of the sacred circle, of story, of the talking stick. She knows that girls need heroines, need a relationship with their mothers “based on love and mutuality.” She has created a curriculum for a circle that meets once a month for a year. She has chosen twelve diverse heroines, each of whom stands for psychological theme. Among her heroines—my heroines too—are Frida Kahlo, “I Express My Feelings in Healthy Ways,” Ann Frank, “I Am Resilient in the Face of Adversity,” Malala Yousafzai, “I Am Worthy,” and Maya Angelou, “I Speak My Truth.”

Keeton–Digby writes clear and easily understandable instructions for the circles, in an intimate personal tone, based on the archetypal circle of women and the mother–daughter bond—held sacred in the Eleusinian Mystery religion and in matriarchal cultures. I wish there had been such circles when I was a girl, when my daughters were girls.

Here is the blurb I wrote for The Heroines Club:

Melia Keeton–Digby has created a wise ritual, rooted in ancient practices and invoking the issues of our times. The Heroines Club brings relational sensitivity and a fierce fighting spirit to the support of mother–daughter bonding, the creation of community, the calling forth of the Motherline and the honoring of a pantheon of heroines who inspire women’s empowerment as well as their psychological and spiritual development. A blessing for women and girls. I hope the Heroines Club will travel the world.

Liberating Motherhood: Birthing the Purple Stockings Movement by Vanessa Olorenshaw.

Olorenshaw is a sharp–tongued critic of the patriarchy and of capitalism. She’s burning mad about the denial of women’s power, disrespect for the work of mothering and the deification of the bottom line. She writes passionately of the profound experiences of embodied motherhood:

From the power of our bodies to create life and give birth, to the nurturing of our children we, as mothers, touch something outside the ‘machine’ of modern economic existence.

She dares to criticize feminism’s devaluation of motherhood:

So the work of pregnancy, birth and motherhood are overlooked in our culture (by many feminists and patriarchs alike) but so too are the joys, beauty, power, majesty and spirit.

She writes in an intimate sister to sister tone, and has a wicked sense of humor:

One biological feature that defines us as mammals is our mammary glands. They sustained our species for tens of thousands of years. Yet, the way Western culture reacts to our breasts, you’d think that they had been invented by the porn industry in 1970.

Here’s my blurb:

“The time for a mother movement has arrived,” proclaims Vanessa Olorenshaw, in her smart, funny, provocative and highly political manifesto, Liberating Motherhood. She confronts the fear and loathing of the female body, which undermines a woman’s pleasure in her glorious mammalian body. She argues that a woman’s choice should include staying home with her children without being impoverished. What a radical—in the sense of having deep roots—idea!

Liberating Motherhood is a breath of fresh air in a culture deadened by the soulless grip of the money machine. Olorenshaw’s call to mothers to honor the mysteries of pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding and childrearing, brings joy to the heart of this old feminist. Olorenshaw is a “Purplestocking”—her phrase—a “maternal feminist” intellectual who honors women’s life–giving power and remembers when the Great Mother ruled heaven and earth. So, all you mothers, grandmothers and children of mothers, read Liberating Motherhood, pull on your purple stockings and join the revolution: #MothersOfTheWorldUnite!

Burning Woman by Lucy H. Pearce

Though I didn’t write a blurb for this profound book, I want to praise it. Burning Woman, Pearce writes, is a lost archetype of the feminine. We know her in her negatives form, she is the pilloried, despised, feared witch, bitch, heretic, whore of the “burning times,” burned “simply for speaking [her] own truth.” We hear our latest witch hunt in the chant “Lock her up!” at the rallies of our president elect. But who is she in her positive form? Listen to Pearce:

Burning Woman is she who is inflamed by her own direct connection to the Feminine life force. She who dares to follow her own vision, who speaks up and tells her own stories. She naturally sails counter to what she has been taught…The process of unlearning is long, as she learns to uncover her own authentic source to life’s power, and claims her own authority to navigate her life according to her inner flame…

She has often been depicted in the forms of the dark goddesses: Kali, Medusa, Oshun and Hecate. When she is given her way, she gives birth to the world.

Is this a way of understanding what happened to Hillary and to us? Why her loss feels so unbearable? As though we were all expecting the birth of a divine girl child, and suffered a miscarriage?

And yet, all is not lost. I remember feeling an unbearable loss when The Motherline went out of print. Years later, my wonderful publisher Fisher King Press, reissued it, with a beautiful cover painting by my dear friend Sara Spaulding–Phillips, a cover that put the Lady Tree and the Motherline together in one image. It was read by a new generation of feminists with roots in the archetypal.

Burning Woman is grounded in a Jungian sensibility. Pearce writes that she has been researching lost archetypes of the feminine for many years. Pearce sees Burning Woman as “the archetypal Feminine we all have within us from birth, one we are programmed to be, and our role is to unwrap ourselves…” I recognize that process in my own development, and in that of the women with whom I work. One of the forms of the Self, for a woman, is Burning Woman. Pearce writes:

The process of embodying Feminine Power has a distinct pattern and structure that our bodies instinctively know. It is not the pyramid of masculine power, but the endless flowing of the spiral. It will lead you in and out of the darkness and towards the fire.

I wasn’t thinking about that when I wrote the poem I gave you, dear reader, “Wishing in the Woods With Hillary.” But if you look at it again, you will see the pattern Pearce describes. Hillary is our Burning Woman in both senses. She represents Feminine power lighting our way in the woods, and in the world.

The Muse of Vacation

Mural/Mosaic made with bottle caps

Why were you born voyager?
—Robert Hass

Hummingbird Medicine

Once a year for many years Dan and I have come to San Pancho, a village by the sea in Mexico, in winter, on vacation. To vacation is to vacate, to empty out—essential as an exhalation, as ebb tide and waning moon. For us it is a kind of annual Sabbath, a holy time to remember who we are and who we were.

To vacation is to let go schedules, traffic, everyday worries and rituals, to settle into a chaise lounge and listen to the ocean’s murmur and hush—our Mother Tongue, our origin. To watch Her is endlessly fascinating, Her rise and Her fall, Her great blue curl, white crash, spent swirls reaching for the beach.

To hear Her puts me in trance, in a reverie visited by hummingbird in intimate contact with pink hibiscus.

Hummingbird medicine, it is said, is all about beauty and joy, about the nectar of life, the love between plants and creatures—life-pollinating life. Hummingbird feathers will make you a love charm. Hummingbird sightings—the dazzle of tiny wings moving so fast they seem invisible, the bird hovering in mid air—return me to the realm of magic, the interpenetration of inside and outside, of earth, sky and water, of myth and fairy tale, birds and trees, stories and dream. The sound of the waves is cut by the whine of a saw cutting tiles for the house being worked on next door. There’s laughter by the pool, and somewhere, a Mexican love song on the radio.

“Look at those colors” says Dan, framing a shot with his ipad. He takes photos of beach restaurants: houses, playful details, birds, plants, flowers, spellbound by the radiance everywhere. The palette is different here. The bright green T–shirt I buy looks all wrong at home. But here it belongs to the joy of color.

The ocean is azure at the horizon, goes aquamarine with patches of turquoise until the swell breaks radiant white. Seven brown pelicans swoop down, caressing the waters. There’s a bright orange beach umbrella, intense blue of the roof of the house on the cliff that was lost in a lawsuit. A girl in a purple bikini cavorts with her lover in the surf. A dad, with his lime green boogey board, falls off it numerous times, until at last he rides a wave triumphantly to shore. His daughter laughs. Houses are painted bright shades on the beach and off.

Sometimes when we’re lucky, the night is clear, and the sky reveals its splendor—great wash of Milky Way and countless stars—a sight we city dwellers are never granted at home. We look up, hungry for the bounty and the mystery, until our necks ache. Dan finds the Pleiades. We contemplate the ancients, their intimacy with all those shifting stories in the dark.

The Ballad of Time and Mutability

One of the most beautiful rooms in my life is the great room at Casa Obelisco, our B&B, where we gather for breakfast, meet strangers, hear origin stories about the town and its people. The gracious space, with three open arches framing the ocean view, and high ceilings rising to a cupola, has a Moorish flavor, remembers Southern Spain—the Great Mosque of Cordoba. Sunburst sconces light it in the evening, and star shaped lanterns fill the chapel like dome.

Outside the cupola is covered with Moorish blue tiles. We visit it to watch the sunset from the roof. It is a beloved ritual, to watch the sun go down as people have forever. Every sundown is the same and entirely different.

Time changes on vacation, especially when you stay in one place for two weeks, a place you’ve known and loved for so long. There is a timelessness about it—we’re here, we’ve been here, the gods willing we will be here again.

The Muse of this vacation is a ballad. The chorus is repeated. Our hosts discovered this enchanted place some twenty years ago, and built themselves and us a lovely B&B. They tell this story over breakfast many mornings, when entertaining newcomers. The chorus is the great room. The town is much the same and always changing. Each stanza tells the story of some new eating–place, some gone familiar place. There’s always someone building, someone tearing down. The old hotel nearby has been razed to the ground. There are differing rumors about what will be built there next. That beach restaurant we loved at sunset—where egrets flew into the palms above us, as the light dimmed—is gone. There is a new Italian restaurant right off the plaza, near St. Francis, the town saint. We sat there listening to three old guys talking rapid Italian, shades of Venice where we spent time a few months ago. Trance music, curated by a disc jockey, goes in loops, in circles, a kind of techno ballad—magical, at once familiar and strange, of now and of forever.

San Francisco (near the beach)

Time relaxes. Takes its own sweet time. The muse craves such time—time to ponder, time to get obsessed with a poem, work it, rework it, let it talk back to you in the night and show new facets of itself come morning. Time to forget the latest spasm of outrage in U.S. politics. Time to read the novel that sat on the floor of your study at home for months. Time to write about the time you’re having in your journal, make notes for your blog. Time to sleep in, to remember your dreams, to write them down and work with them. Time to meditate on Robert Hass’ “Meditation at Lagunitas.” Hass floats the notion that “a word is elegy to what it signifies.” I muse on that. My words reflect on what I love. They’re not the thing itself, not the crash of the surf, not the hummingbird. That’s gone, on invisible wings.

For me, much of the meaning in a stay put vacation is time to engage with such loss. Hass begins his poem, “All the new thinking is about loss./In this it resembles the old thinking.” How true of living into one’s seventies, where every pleasure glimmers with its loss, its built in mutability. It’s always been so, but now it’s more so. The B&B, that great room I love, is up for sale—has been for years. One day the market forces will shift and it will be gone. Some extended family from Mexico City will make it their beloved second home. And for us it will be a shadow, a longing, an old flame. My chapbook, The Little House on Stilts Remembers is all about such losses of place. Here is the opening poem:

Her Next Life

All the houses she's loved and sold
remember her
call her by name

What will her next life be? 

In the dream she must change
clothes    stitch mirrors
red thread
on deer skin dress
                             reflect her
                                    journey    temple dancer
                                                           stone chariot
                                                  river at sunset with elephants

All the pretty houses have peeled off
                                     like snake skin

Her feet are listening 
                  Song of the earth 
                                     holds her now

[Photographs -except for hummingbird- by Dan Safran]

The Muse of Kinship Libido

First generation Americans—the children of immigrants—are haunted. Though they walk in the New World, their souls belong to an Old World they’ve never seen—an ancestral world that no longer exists. Ancestors wander into memory, dream and family story, telling tales of war and persecution, of hunger and deprivation, of lost parents and dead children, of ordeals and miracles that brought them to safety.
—Naomi Ruth Lowinsky
“Self Portrait with Ghost”

Italian Immigrants at Ellis Island

Two Worlds

Gratitude for language—the German my parents spoke
the Dutch they kept their secrets in, the Italian I forgot
the sorcery of Russian—those lullabies
my father sang, his mother sang to him.
Gratitude for English—my oak grove, my oracle, my mule—
 Naomi Ruth Lowinsky
“Give Thanks for Poets”

Venice Canal Scene

A Jungian Conference, Encounters, Traditions, Developments: Analysis at the Cultural Crossroads, has brought us to the Old World—Italy. The conference was in Trieste.  We are now in Venice. I sit in an apartment which was built as a convent in the 16th century. Boats slip past our windows on the green gray waters of a side canal. The haunted magnetism of Venice, its golds and umbers, its bridges and gondolas, its labyrinths of medieval streets and canals, its smells and sounds, tug at my senses. And yet, there is the story of Trieste, unfinished. As is so often my way, living in two worlds as I do, I am in one place, reflecting on another. 

Trieste train station

The Muse of Kinship Libido took possession of me at the Trieste conference. She sang to me in many experiences and many languages. This was the Third European Conference on Analytic Psychology, though it is the first one I’ve attended. The first two were in Eastern Europe—Vilnius, Lithuania and St. Petersburg, Russia. The focus in Trieste was on culture and trauma. There were 250 participants from 37 countries. Eastern Europe was well represented. We Americans were blessedly a small group, outnumbered by those who spoke the languages of our ancestors. There were also Asians, South Americans and a spirited group of Israelis. 

There was the joy of seeing people from far away who feel like kin. Israeli analyst Henry Abramovitch, for example. Henry contributed a fine chapter to the book I co-edited with Patricia Damery, Marked by Fire: Stories of the Jungian Way. He is a friend in the written word and I was glad to see him in the fleshly world. He gave a wonderful opening talk about working clinically with people from different cultures. In his joyous and engaging way he encouraged us to work not across culture but through culture.

I always feel the tug of kinship when I’m around Israelis. My immediate family fled Europe to settle in America, but many of my kinfolk went to Israel. Hearing Hebrew always stirs me with kinship libido.

Most people at the conference spoke English.  But a special grant supported translation for the Russians. There is now a large group of Jungians in Russia, thanks to a number of Jungians from Western Europe who have travelled there to do training and analysis. The Russians brought youth and enthusiasm to the gathering, and the mellifluous sound of their language.

I sat in a discussion group listening to Russian being spoken, and it suddenly hit me like a rush of waters—this language is engraved on my soul, though I don’t speak a word of it. My father spoke it, some. More often he sang the Russian lullabies his mother had sung to him. His parents, whom I never met, were refugees from Russia and later refugees from Germany. They didn’t survive the war. I told the group that the sound of Russian resonates deeply in me,  as well it should since my family name is Russian.

German sang to me all over the conference. I even spoke a little myself. It carries the numen of childhood and home. The song of the Italians carries me back to early childhood when my family lived in Italy, and their language was mine. Now it tugs at me but I can’t bring it back.

I love English, but I’ve gotten stranded in it. Why didn’t I keep up my German, my Italian? Why didn’t I learn Russian? My other mother tongues kept licking me all conference long, stimulating forgotten yearnings. And though I was among so many strangers from so many places, I felt among kin in some intimate primordial way.

Refugee Reality

But always I am also
in that other life—refugee reality—
the Nazis have confiscated home
—Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, “Many Houses Ago”
in The Little House On Stilts Remembers 

I came to Trieste because I wanted to tell the story of my grandmother, the painter Emma Hoffman, here, in the Old Country. Hers is a refugee story, and I carry the intergenerational trauma which my friend and colleague Sam Kimbles has called a “phantom narrative”—a ghost story shaped by collective trauma, which turns life experiences into the form of our dread. In Trieste I was surrounded by many variations on the refugee theme. Strangers became kin. We understood each other’s life stories. My Oma’s story resonated with so many similar stories. Tamar Kron, an Israeli analyst who gave a powerful talk on The Dreams of Palestinians and Israelis in a Time of War, in the same session as my talk, Self Portrait with Ghost, told me the quick version of her ghost story. Her people fled Austria. I heard similar stories from many Israelis.

Jan Wiener, one of the conference organizers, told me that her Austrian Jewish family fled to London in 1938. Her father liked to joke that the GB sticker—for Great Britain— on the back of their car stood for “Geworden British”— became British.

Among the refugee ghost stories were the stories of refugees now seeking safety all over Europe, from genocidal horrors in Africa and in the Middle East. In my discussion group a Russian woman spoke of the enormous ocean liner that had docked right in front of the hotel we were in. She imagined climbing aboard, a refugee from the cold of her native Siberia. A German said she had a different response to the ship, which was called Costa Mediterranea. It made her think of all the refugees flooding Southern Europe. She wondered whether the Italians were doing as the Greeks were—housing refugees on an ocean liner. There was a frisson of deep feeling in the group, whose members are haunted by the unbearable suffering of hundreds of thousands of people, and the difficult politics that has aroused.

Costa Mediterranea

Literary Kin

Birth and death are the ultimate bookends, and between them a muddled narrative unfolds…There crop up moments, experiences or places which in retrospect we recognize as markers…
Jan Morris, in Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere

Joyce in Trieste

For me, many of those markers on my life path are writers who influenced me early on—James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke. If I ever knew I’ve long forgotten that all of them lived and wrote in Trieste, or in Rilke’s case, just a few miles up the Adriatic Coast, until I read Jan Morris’ poetic prose about Trieste. Joyce wrote parts of Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses in Trieste. Morris, writing of the large, prosperous Jewish community in Trieste, comments: “Joyce had many Jewish friends in the city, and when he came to write Ulysses, which was inspired by Trieste almost as profoundly as it was by Dublin, he called it an ‘epic of two races.’” Joyce was in one place, remembering another. So was Mann, who wrote portions of Buddenbrooks in Trieste, in which he portrayed his German hometown, Lübeck. Those great works were among my earliest literary muses. And Rilke, who has been my companion and muse since the beginning, heard the voice of his terrible angel at Duino Castle. He was in the grips, I learn from Morris, of that terrible North Wind of winter the Triestians call the Bora, which causes all manner of physical and emotional malaise.

These writers were in Trieste in the last years of the 19th century (Mann) and the early years of the 20th century (Joyce and Rilke). During that time, I’m not exactly sure which years, my young grandmother was sent away from her home town, Berlin, because her family disapproved of her suitor. She was sent to Italy, to Florence, to study painting. She sat for hours in the Accademia copying paintings by Titian and Giorgione. I remember particularly her copies of portraits and self-portraits. Here’s one by Gorgione very like one we had in our home, of which my little brother commented:  “He looks like a she.”

Giorgione, portrait of a young man

Oma would go on to paint many portraits and self-portraits, reflecting on the passages of her life. Both Titian and Giorgione painted profound self-portraits. So did Oma. My talk, “Self Portrait with Ghost” is about some of those, and my poems in response to them.

Library of Savoia Hotel, Trieste

So it was here in the city of my literary influences—Trieste, with all the resonances of tristesse and melancholy evoked by its name— in a lovely 19th century style hotel my Oma would have appreciated, not far from Venice whose painters so influenced her, that I called up her spirit to sing her a song of her life and mine, my poems to her paintings, my soul to her soul. Her spirit filled me, and I could see her story resounding in the faces of the audience, her difficult life journey, her individuation, the gifts she gave her family and her world. When I was finished a young German woman arose and said: “Your Oma is not dead. You have brought her to life for us all, here.”

And now it’s time for me to return to Venice.

Venice Canal

The Muse of Synchronicity: Part III

We are all shape–shifters, but through your words we became human.

—Judy Wells, The Glass Ship

Mother of Pink Flamingos

It’s hard to be a palomino with a pole stuck in your back.
—Judy Wells, The Glass Ship

Judy Wells

Judy Wells made a synchronistic appearance in Part I of this blog, when, lonely for companions in Poetry Land I wandered into a poetry reading where I thought I’d know no one. Judy, the featured reader, reminded me that we had an old connection—we had been in a consciousness–raising group together in the late ‘60s. Since hearing her funny provocative poetry that night—a lapsed Catholic’s thrust and parry at the nuns, the pieties, the absurdities of a Catholic education—I have loved her wit and exuberance. But the wind chimes of synchronicity really began pealing as I immersed myself in her latest book of poems, The Glass Ship.

We poets often feel we travel alone. But in the realm of the old souls, where, to borrow Richard Messer’s eloquence, we are “one in the heart’s core,” we are companions. Judy Wells has been bitten by many of the same obsessions that possess me—the journey to other worlds, the visionary energy of what Robert Bly calls “leaping poetry,” the power of combining personal story and myth. Both of us have been possessed by a medieval tale, me, the tale of negotiating with the devil, Judy the Celtic immrama—tales of voyages to other–world islands. Both of us retell the story with a female protagonist.

Ancient Map with Sea Monsters

Judy uses the prose poem throughout this saga. It is a marvelous vehicle for telling marvels. Robert Bly says it well: “The urgent, alert rhythm of the prose poem prepares us to journey, to cross the border, either of the other world or to that place where the animal lives.” Judy does both at the same time. Here’s how she sets her story up: “A magnificent sailing ship made completely of glass” which reflects “rainbow lights like a crystal” bears down on our hero’s small boat. She sees a young couple dancing on the deck and recognizes her own parents. They don’t recognize her, however. Why?

I had not yet been born. Here were my parents deeply in love before they were married, before the four children began to come, before the toil of creating a home.

Our adventurer has clearly chosen a different life. She’s off to the Island of Pink Flamingos where she meets seventeen beautiful young women in “the shadow of a huge hibiscus tree. They wore glittery silver tops and long black skirts. They were barefoot, but their toenails were painted a glittery silver, as were their fingernails.” Color is essential in this tale, as is the number seventeen. They greet her, “Welcome, Mother.” She protests that she’s not their mother. They insist she is. “But how” she wonders. “I don’t remember ever giving birth."

Once upon a time, the young women tell her, she was the Queen of this island. She transformed them all from other shapes—butterfly, cat, flamingo—by making poems. Poetry made them human. Here we touch the realm of the White Goddess, in which poetry is magic. But our hero does not take herself so seriously. She’s on to other adventures, which is fine with her daughters who “don’t need a Queen to boss” them around, but love her anyway.

Our sailor girl shifts archetypal shapes frequently. Sometimes she is a hero, as when she releases fifty palominos from their bondage to the Purple Carousel. She follows the instructions of her carousel steed, who complains to her: “It’s hard to be a palomino with a pole stuck in your back. Every day, I pray the dwarf will release me…” He instructs her to steal the black key and the gold key from the dwarf’s shoes. The dwarf mutters, “So that’s why my feet hurt all these years.” There’s always an unexpected turn in these prose poems that brings us back from the land of faerie to the comic and human. She is a happy hero as she watches “fifty golden palominos racing down the beach into the waves.”

Sometimes she’s a fool, as when, on the Isle of Black and White Sheep an ancient couple promises to tell her the secret of immortality if she can achieve a simple task—“put one white sheep in the black flock and one black sheep in the white flock.” But this is a slippery realm we are in. The white sheep she lugs over the central wall turns black as it joins the black herd. And vice versa. No secret of immortality is revealed to this fool.

Ancient Hide Boat or Coracle

Our adventurer reveals that she is a compulsive gambler. She finds herself on the Island of Card Players with three poker playing chimps, “one in a black bowler hat, another in a white fedora, the third in a red beret.” She has “never played poker with a worse group of companions.” She thinks she’s winning big time, because these chimps have “no sense of a poker face.” But the chimps are savvy tricksters, and though she wins she loses.

Our voyaging poet’s trickster humor is constantly pulling the rug out from under our expectations, playing jokes on the reader. Playing with our natural associations to Homer’s Odyssey our sea captain embarks on a voyage to tell off Odysseus. She has planned out her speech, which she knows is not very diplomatic, but “some people just need a kick in the pants.”

Look Odysseus, you’ve spend ten years at war already. Stop procrastinating and go home.Telemachus might be begging for a little brother or sister. [Penelope] might even be in menopause if you spend ten years dilly–dallying around with nymphs, princesses and witches. Or worse, Penelope might just scoop up Telemachus and set sail on her own adventures instead of waiting for you, the bow–legged wonder.

So the adventurer who has rejected the domestic, can speak for the domestic. The liberated poet can liberate Penelope—that queen of domesticity—with a swift leap of her imagination. There’s a kick in the pants for Odysseus. But not so fast. It’s the reader eager for the pleasure of this come–uppance who gets the kick. For the “man with brawny forearms” our voyaging poet spots, “releasing a mound of sails into his boat,” is not Homer’s hero. He is Popeye the sailor man.

There is a delightful iconoclastic bent in such rapid shifts from Homer to twentieth century popular culture to Celtic myth to the poet’s wild imaginings. For a moment we are encouraged to believe we are in the world of epic. But no, we are in a ribald, comic world and our poet has tricked us again.

In another adventure our poet reveals her lust. When she rescues a beautiful young man who is lost at sea, she confesses “an urge to bend down and kiss him…I am a woman after all, at sea for too many months without a man.” In one of the many shape–shifts in this tale, that delight our imagination, the handsome sailor is transformed into a giant bird who announces:

My name is Sweeney…and I am an eagle, a rare, proud species. I have heard of an island in these parts inhabited by seventeen beautiful young women. My destiny is to fly to this island, court one of these women, and marry her. Thank you for saving me from the sea so I could fulfill my destiny.

“Sweet” our sea captain thinks, “I’m going to be the mother–in–law of an eagle. And so it will come to pass.

The Secret of Immortality

My boat awaited me, my pen, my red book.
—Judy Wells, The Glass Ship

But not so fast. We are not yet ready for the wedding. First we must visit the land of the dead. Despite herself, our poet has a profound psychological vision for her voyaging craft. Like the poets of the Celtic immrana from whom she is descended, her purpose is to “teach the craft of dying and to pilot the departing spirit on a sea of perils and wonders.”

Sea-faring Map of Old Ireland

We find ourselves on the Island of Joe where our hero meets her old friend Joe “reading a book, with a crimson bird feather cape around his shoulders.” The book is the story of his life, which he has written. He reads to her from his concluding chapter:

I was in the desert, lying on a stone slab, emaciated, ready to die. I felt myself taking my last breath—and then silence, stillness. My spirit arose, a great crimson bid in the sky, and looked down on my withered body, now attracting dark–winged scavengers of the desert. Then my spirit soared to this island, where the crimson bird gave me back my body and sacrificed its own. I plucked its carcass carefully and created my feathered roof and my wonderful red–feathered cape. 
                                                                                           I am at home here.

Is it possible we fools, who are all of course, on a voyage to death, are being initiated into the secret of immortality after all? Joe closes his book, smiles and says, “And now you must write your story?” Are we reading the product of that wisdom from the dear departed? The Glass Ship is the poet’s immortality?

But not so fast. We know by now that our trickster poet will not allow us so sanguine a vision for long. For now we have voyaged to the Island of Ash where we meet Joe again, and our poet’s other recently departed friend Rose. “‘Time’s up for me says Joe,’” and we watch in dismay as his body begins “crumbling into ash…Finally only his head remained, covered/with a battered straw hat.”

Rose still sat on the surface of the mountain of ash. “You meet the most interesting people here,” she said, “but they always tend to disappear.” As she spoke, her body began to fade as if a brilliant red rose gradually turned light pink, then invisible. 

I felt a great emptiness in my soul as my friends disappeared. Retreating to my boat I lay down and drifted out to sea. A mysterious voice whispered…Go carry the living. 

And so she does.

Mother–in–law of an Eagle

One shape shifting must be paid for by another.
—Judy Wells, The Glass Ship

The wedding at the end of our tale—as in most good comedies—gathers the dramatis personae, human and animal, dead and living, our adventurer met as she wandered other worlds. And, as it happens in faerie tales, our hero has a difficult task to perform. The Mother of Pink Flamingoes must compose a poem that will break the spell that has turned her beautiful daughter, the bride, into a pink flamingo. This daughter, who was enamored of Sweeney’s beautiful body as she watched him cast off his bird feathers and become a man, when he came to her island to court her, and who was so fascinated by that magical protuberance between his legs, is anxious to get on with the ceremony. She says: “The wedding feast is all prepared, the guests have arrived, and Sweeney, my intended, is growing impatient. O Mother, I beg you to compose the poem that will break the spell of my bird–body.”

Our poet, who never signed up for the role of mother, turns into a mother. Concerned at the anguish in her daughter’s voice, she strokes her pink feathers. “I lay awake half the night wracking my brains for a poem and could only come up with two pitiful stanzas.” What poet hasn’t spent a night like that, especially when so much rides on a poem.

Her poem asserts, “human flesh is best,” though “I myself was not sure of this. Perhaps being able to fly with one’s own wings is exchange enough for the wild imagination we humans have been given.” Her words do the trick—the spell is broken. Her daughter is released to be the bride, the sacred triple bride of Celtic lore—maiden, mother, crone—is consecrated. All is well with the world, no? Not so fast. Our mother of the bride notices “tiny feathers poking from my flesh…” and realizes, “one shape–shifting must be paid for by another.”

So Judy Wells, my long ago companion in the wild adventure of Women’s Liberation, who sat with me and others in a consciousness raising group that blew off the top of our heads and transformed us all, has charmed, enchanted, made me laugh out loud with her saga. We, who were palominos with poles stuck in our backs, going up and down on the carousel of the conventional female roles we were born into, have been freed to run into the waves. We, who are on a voyage to our deaths, have been taught in the Celtic tradition, by a wise, and wisecracking bard.