The Muse of Synchronicity: Part IV

History is a ghost story. We tell it to each other around the fire. It scares us.
—Naomi Ruth Lowinsky

The Kinship Web of Footnotes

I’ll gather you from millions of refugees
from hunger and thirst from the damp of cries
and the stink of tolerated grief… 

because you have to see differently…
this continent drifting like a big black plundered heart on the globe…
—Antjie Krog

The Muse of Synchronicity gathers disparate elements, strikes them together like a musical instrument, ringing meaning and recognition. This is happening to me yet again as I gather essays I’ve written over the last fifteen years for a book I propose to call The Rabbi, The Goddess and Jung: Getting the Word from Within. I find myself musing about re–vision—seeing again. When I see again what I saw years ago, when I revisit an earlier self, I am always amazed at how constant my themes have been; how many variations they’ve found. A central theme for me is intergenerational trauma—how the unbearable gets transmitted. Working on a chapter called “History is a Ghost Story: Reflections on South Africa, Collective Trauma and the Uses of Poetry,” I am moved, of all things, by the footnotes.

Those who know me know I’m no detail girl. I dread the footnote task—all that sensate fussiness. But in this work of gathering my writings I realize the footnotes are a web of kinship—the living and the dead who have informed my work and guided my understanding form a web of connections that hold me. I’m surprised at the joy I feel as familiar books pulled from my shelves pile up on my floor as I check text and page numbers for beloved passages, such as:

The day for which we had waited all these many long years, the day for which the struggle against apartheid had been waged, for which so many of our people had been tear gassed, bitten by police dogs, struck with quirts and batons, for which many more had been detained, tortured and banned, for which others had gone into exile—the day had finally dawned when we...could vote for first time...I was sixty-two years old before I could vote. Nelson Mandela was seventy-six....

Those are the words of Desmond Tutu, on page 3 of his soul–stirring book, No Future Without Forgiveness. Makes me cry each time I revisit it. I am surprised at my intensity of feeling as I read what I wrote about a trip many of us Jungians made to South Africa, for the International Conference in Cape Town, in 2007. It stands out in my heart as the most powerful conference I’ve attended. We were privileged to hear speakers who had themselves been engaged in the fight against Apartheid, who had witnessed the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Mamphele Ramphele

We heard Mamphele Ramphele—a tall elegant woman aglow in a red dress and shawl, who embodies South African history. In her youth, she and her lover, Stephen Biko, were among the founders of the Black Consciousness movement of the 70s. Biko was brutally murdered by the apartheid police. Ramphele went on to become a Managing Director of the World Bank. We heard the clinical psychologist Pumla Gobodo–Madikizela, who served on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, speak to us about the psychology of forgiveness. Her book, A Human Being Died That Night: A Story of Forgiveness, is one of many on my floor. It documents her psychologically penetrating conversations with a prisoner, Eugene de Kock, who was the perpetrator of many atrocities during the apartheid years and who testified to the Commission.

Also on my floor is Body Bereft, a book of amazing poems by Antjie Krog, the Afrikans poet and journalist. So is her profound non-fiction account of her experience covering the Truth and Reconciliation Committee, Country of My Skull, a book that is so forthright about the country’s suffering and her own that it is hard to read. She confronts her background as an Afrikaner, and as a poet writing in Afrikans: “How do I live with the fact that all the words used to humiliate, all the orders given to kill, belonged to the language of my heart?” This is a poet’s cry for the beloved language. I have read and admired Krog’s work for years, moved by her ability to voice the South African experience from the inside out, as only a poet can. I not only heard her speak in Cape Town, but ran into her in person. We talked poetry for a few minutes and I worked up my courage to hand her a book of my poems, which she graciously received.

The Word from the Times

To experience empathy for someone who has committed terrible acts against other human beings…puts one in a strangely compelling and confusing relationship with the perpetrator.
—Pumla Gobodo–Madikizela

The ghost in my essay is that of my father, a refugee from the Shoah. In life he was constantly scanning the horizon for the next Hitler. My father loved his New York Times—read it every day. He often wrote outraged letters to the editor about some injustice that enflamed him. Sometimes his letters got published. Then everyone in the family would receive a proud note in his angular hand, clipped to a Xerox of his printed letter. My father would be pleased that it was the Sunday New York Times which rang the bells of synchronicity so loudly for me on the Ides of March. There, in the Sunday Review, was an opinion piece by Antjie Krog about precisely what my essay struggles with—the problem of evil and forgiveness. She writes about the very same Eugene de Kock who is the subject of Gobodo-Malikezela’s book on my floor, the one who led an apartheid era death squad, a truly evil man, who in the context of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission became a much more complicated figure. The catalyst for Krog’s piece is that he has just been paroled after twenty years in prison. Krog writes:

As a reporter covering the often heart–rending hearings in the 1990s, I watched de Kock calmly correct facts, expose lies and name superiors who then quickly had to apply for amnesty themselves. He became the polygraph machine of the commission. Without him the “truth” part of the T.R.C. would have been sorely lacking… 

With his intimate knowledge of apartheid–era security agencies, he began to assist victims in finding the remains of loved ones. He provided answers and pointed to the places where bodies could be found. Mr. de Kock openly confessed his regret directly to victims and admitted that nothing could redeem him.

Pumla Gobodo–Madikizela

Reading this sent me back to the Jungian Conference in Cape Town, 2007 and my essay. Pumla Gobodo–Madikizela is speaking to the assemblage. She describes a scene in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s proceedings:

She spoke to us of the psychology of forgiveness. How does one who had a husband, son, grandson stolen from her, tortured and murdered in the most unbearable ways, look into the eyes of the one who did this, see his humanity? How does the one who perpetrated such a horror, look into the eyes of the victim, see her humanity, the preciousness of the life that was taken, and truly say—“I’m sorry.” When this happens, she told us, his humanity is returned to him, hers to her. 

She told us the story of an Askari—a former black guerilla recruited by the Apartheid security forces—asking forgiveness of the mothers of men he’d killed. In Xhosa he said: ”Forgive me my parents.” Pumla kept repeating the Xhosa phrase, with its click, telling us it was much more powerful than the translation. It seemed to center us—that clicking phrase, with its deep sobbing power. One of the Mothers replied, “My son, I forgive you.” We were all a watery mass of tears. 

She described how a perpetrator could become human in the process of seeing the humanity of the other. And we, who see them as monsters, begin to see them as human, when we hear their stories and their remorse.

This is too much for the ghost of my father. I wrote:

Should we cultivate empathy for the guards at Bergen–Belsen who tortured his sister Ljuba, who starved her, froze her, chopped off her toes with an axe? The Jews had already been much reproached for going passively to their deaths, for not fighting. Now they were supposed to imagine the lives and struggles of their torturers, their murderers?… My father is off and running. He is giving his familiar lecture about the Jews’ great contribution to history—the concept of justice. How can there be justice, demands the spirit of my father, when murderers are forgiven, when there aren’t real consequences for unforgivable actions, because some soft old women are afraid to stand up for truth and justice?

I am, of course, furious with the ghost of my father for disrespecting these women and their world view—Ubuntu—which, according to Bishop Tutu, means “A person is a person through other persons.”

Word from the Phantom

…the processes that make some human beings invisible to others are
themselves invisible.
—Sam Kimbles

The synchronicity bell is tolling again. I find myself reaching for a new book, just published, my friend and colleague Sam Kimbles’ book Phantom Narratives. I remember hearing Sam give a paper at the Cape Town Conference in which he began to articulate the ideas that form his new work—an important contribution to Jungian thought. He has expanded his concept of the cultural complex to include “intergenerational processes…[that] manifest as phantom narratives…[and] provide structure, representation, and continuity for unresolved or unworked-through grief and violence that occurred in a previous cultural context..." He describes phantom narratives as “the absent presence of a moving and dead history simultaneously…a closeness to a cultural trauma that is not experienced or acknowledged…”

The ghost of my father is the poster child for how the phantom narrative works in me—a kind of automatic response like reaching for the light switch where it was located in a home you left years ago. A phantom narrative then, organizes experience, is a template—my father scanning the horizon for the next Hitler. It allows nothing new, like the concept of Ubuntu, into its fortifications.

The Sunday Review for the Ides of March offers yet another amplification of this issue. In an opinion piece by Edward Ball, whose slaveholding ancestors owned a rice plantation in South Carolina, called Limerick, he imagines the scene on the day, 150 years ago, that the slaves were freed. His great–great–grandfather, William Ball, “sat in the dining room, reading from the book of Lamentations.” Meanwhile, in the black village, the freed slaves “danced and sang, while others fell to their knees and prayed.” That was a long time ago. But as Ball points out, not that much has changed.

If by some method of time travel the former slaves and slaveholders of Limerick plantation could be brought face to face with us, they would not find our world entirely alien. In place of the rural incarceration of four million black people we have the mass incarceration of one million black men. In place of laws that prohibit black literacy throughout the South, we have campaigns by Tea Party and anti–tax fanatics to defund public schools, to defund public schools within certain ZIP codes. And we have stop–and–search policing, and frequently much worse, in place of the slave patrols.

The “much worse,” of course, is the epidemic of unarmed black men shot by police that has finally reached our collective consciousness, pierced the dominant phantom narrative that keeps us from seeing the terrible truth that racism is alive and well, despite the fact that we have a black President.

And yet, maybe that is exactly the point, our consciousness about the invisibility of black lives is being raised. The great–great–grandson of slaveholders is a man with the kind of courage Antjie Krog displays—naming the inhumanities perpetrated by his own people, taking moral responsibility in the New York Times on the Ides of March.

During our time in Africa, Dan and I traveled to Botswana to see wildlife. We had a wonderful experience with elephants, which taught me about Ubuntu. It turned into a poem:

ELEPHANT CHILD

umuntu ngumuntu ngabantua
person is a person because of other people
—African saying

We are a many headed land cruising
Toyota machine—a creature agog

with zoom lenses.  One of us sees her—
the elephant child— playing alone in the water.

“Is she alright?”    “Can we get closer?”   “Where
is her mother?”   From behind

and around a sudden throng-—
grandmothers   aunts   baby cousins

her mother   lumber across the road
to save her from whatever

threat we might be.   Their mission
dissolves into play; they spray

water on each other; they wallow; they throw mud
we watch

as they rise dark and glistening
in the late afternoon light.

The little one approaches
our Toyota, holds up her sensitive trunk.

She is trying to figure us out.
We are trying to figure her out.    Is she

a problem child, a soon to be leader
the future shaman of her clan?   Her mother

has had enough of her shenanigans
herds her in close, as the sun begins to set

over the Chobe River Valley
they stand touching—

the big one
the little one

encircled by kin—
we understand—

an elephant is an elephant
because of other elephants.

           (first published in Quiddity)

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.

The Muse of Synchronicity: Part II

“My prayer is to be open to how I’m being led.”

—Charles Asher 

Part I tells the story of a thread of synchronicities that led to finding companions and publishers in poetry land.  In these synchronistic moments I’d see myself standing in the center of the kaleidoscope of my life, and suddenly it was as if all the fragments rearranged themselves into a new pattern, full of color and light.

Part II insisted on being written because more synchronicities kept revealing themselves, making new patterns, new meanings.

Wind Chimes in the Jung Journal

Any progress I have made, in becoming a vessel in which a greater
communion with all of life…is possible, is because of the great
network of immense old souls, reaching far into the heavens and
deep into the earth, sustaining me in my darkest times…for the sake
of a mystery to which we are bound and out of which we are made.

                                                                                      —Frances Hatfield
                                                                                      in The Jung Journal Fall, 2014

Frances Hatfield’s gorgeous image of immense old souls, who like trees, communicate over long distances through their roots, in her lovely meditation on her labyrinth, gives me another image of how I experience synchronicity. Waves of energy, happening below consciousness, deep in the roots of our being, connect us to earth, sky, ancestors and those souls who transform our lives. Synchronistic events are a wind chime in the breeze, noting the grace of connection.

How that wind chime chimed when I picked up the latest issue of the Jung Journal and saw the names, heard the voices, of so many souls who touched my life and opened my path. Here’s Charles Asher, writing on the “Good Enough Prayer,” in his wry self–effacing way. His one sentence prayer—which I take as epigraph for this offering—says it all: “My prayer is to be open to how I am being led.” Luckily I was open to how I was being led back in the early nineties, when Charles invited me to teach at Pacifica. I was in the throes of becoming an analyst, struggling to sort out what kind of Jungian I was going to be, when I was thrown into an unfamiliar culture of depth psychology. They spoke a different dialect at Pacifica. Under the influence of James Hillman and Joseph Campbell they used words like poetics, polytheism, imagination, soul. They talked like poets. Actually there was a creative ferment between the enthusiasts of mythopoeisis and iconoclastic critical thinkers like David Miller, now a retired Professor of Religion, who shows up in this issue asking penetrating and disturbing questions about the unconscious biases of mythological studies.

The poets are well represented by Dennis Slattery, who is core faculty in Mythological Studies at Pacifica and writes poetry. He has a beautiful essay on Revisioning Psychology, which he calls “Hillman’s Moby Dick.” He writes, “like the White Whale, soul itself in Hillman’s lexicon is the anima mundi, the world soul, which only the deepest philosophic and poetic meditations are capable of grasping through the intuitive grappling hooks of the imagination.” Wow. This kind of talk opened new windows and doors for me, and inspired me to teach my class on basic Jungian psychology using Goethe’s Faust. I remember the day Hillman came to visit my class. He looked surprised when I explained my approach and then said, “Why didn’t I think of that?” I took that as a blessing.

Pacifica freed me to take seriously my own calling as a poet. Luckily I was open to where I was being led. I left Pacifica to pursue poetry. How synchronistic then, that this issue should include a review of my fourth book of poems, The Faust Woman Poems.

Dark Healing

Face the pain as an enemy
that you respect, that it may become a vessel
For what you love.
—Richard Messer

Those wind chimes began chiming again when I realized that Diane Deutsch’s profound review of my book, and Richard Sugg’s masterful review of my friend Richard Messer’s selected poems, Dark Healing, were published next to each other due to the intuitive sensitivity of the Review Editor, Helen Marlo. This is a synchronicity on a number of levels. Richard and I are poetry buddies. He is one of a few people I show new poems to for feedback. This happens by e-mail since Richard lives in Ohio. He gets my work and can mirror it back to me so I can get it at another level. He has an uncanny ability to sniff out just what doesn’t work in early drafts of my poems, and to explain it to me without getting my back up. He has had an extraordinarily difficult life path and his poems track his “dark healing.” Both our books are on that theme in different ways. Here is Richard Sugg’s eloquent summary:

Richard Messer’s extraordinary book of poetry and active imagination focuses on three decades-long parts of the poet’s life: the catastrophe for him and his two young children of his wife’s murder, followed by his conscious efforts to rebuild the family’s life on the new realities they are trying to assimilate, and finally the poet’s efforts to integrate the material following his wife’s murder into his entire birth–to–seventy–five–year–old life.

Using lines from the poems to make his points Sugg does an elegant job of demonstrating the power, breadth and depth of Messer’s poetic and psychological achievement. I believe Dark Healing should be required reading for depth psychologists interested in trauma.

Here is what Messer himself wrote when he was the Featured Poet in Psychological Perspectives:

Those who survive trauma and heal and go on to thrive reach out to those who are in the midst of their suffering.

Tragedy teaches what intuition always whispers—there is a realm in which we are all present to each other, we are one in the deep heart’s core. We mourn for those who die and we move on through the knowledge that what has happened to them, no matter how brutal or tragic, does not define them, or us. Our spirits and souls tell us who we are and give our lives their meaning.

Messer’s realm in which “we are all one in the deep heart’s core” resonates with that other fabulous poet’s realm, Frances Hatfield, of a “great network of immense old souls,” with which we began.

Faust in the Light of the Moon

The moon glows,…and calls out of the poet by the poet’s
attunement to the moon, an attunement to herself.
—Diane Deutsch

Diane Deutsch, who reviews The Faust Woman Poems, is another one of those souls who has touched my life in unexpected ways. I met her in a poetry workshop led by Diane di Prima, a brilliant and wild poet in the Beat tradition. Having returned to poetry I struggled to make peace between my analyst self and my poet self. They quarreled all the time. I suffered from a split in me, in my family of origin, and in the culture, between the values of those passionate souls, like Diane di Prima, like my father, who follow their muse, and those devoted souls, Jungian analysts, my mother, who support other people’s creativity. Could I get them both into one body, one life? Their quarrel became my book, The Sister from Below, but that’s another story. The story about Diane Deutsch is that one day she announced she was becoming a candidate at the San Francisco Jung Institute, and blew up my categories. To me she became a bridge figure between the wild realms of poetry and the contained realm of the consulting room. How appropriate that she would be the one to review my book of poems in the pages of our Institute Journal.

The catastrophe in Messer’s book and life came from outside him—a terrible visitation from pure evil. The catastrophe, in my case, came from the devil in me, who, as Deutsch notes, is female, “comes from the realm of the goddess…breaks things;…is a home wrecker.” Deutsch understands that it is the devil who ignites the individuation process, in Goethe’s Faust, and in my poetry. Healing requires destruction, especially of the “cultural accretion of constrained and repressed female sexuality.”

Deutsch and the editors of the Jung Journal went to the trouble of publishing a full color image of the cover of my book, a painting by Remedios Varo, Papilla Estelar, “depicting a wan moon being fed a concoction by spoon, ground by a pale artist.” I love what Deutsch does with this image:

Taking imagination and spirit, working it into poetry,
feeds the moon spirit, feeds the feminine moon energy,
feeds the poet. In the painting the moon looks weak,
anemic, and is held in a cage. She is being strengthened
by being fed the poetry that comes out of the hard work
of taking imagination, spirit and experience and turning it
until poetry comes.

My gratitude to the Jung Journal for this gathering of souls—like trees in the forest we are connected to each other through our roots, and for the spirit that moves the wind chimes of synchronicity.

To Be Continued.

The Muse of Synchronicity: Part I

There is only one way and that is your way, there is only one salvation and that is your salvation. You must fulfill the way that is in you.

—C.G Jung 

The Light at the Core of Darkness, C.G.Jung

The Sister from Below

is delighted to announce that

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky and Lucille Lang Day

are co–winners of the

Blue Light Poetry Chapbook Contest for 2014.

Sisters of the Blue Light

Everything happens at once and forever.

—Lucille Lang Day

Behind this award, dear friends, lies a story of synchronicities. To Jungians, synchronicity is the Muse of Muses, those moments in your ordinary life when you’re touched by forever. You experience a “meaningful coincidence,” something that connects your inner world to the outer world. You’re walking in a meadow, for example, telling your companion about your dream of a coyote, when a coyote appears and engages you in that uncanny gaze across species. Your senses open to the radiant world; you feel touched by the eternal. Whatever has blocked you, whatever you’re stumbling through, opens up and your path is revealed. You can’t explain it rationally, but it is as though you are standing in the center of the kaleidoscope of your life, and suddenly all the fragments rearrange themselves into a new pattern, full of color and light.

That was how I felt when I got a phone call from Diane Frank, Chief Editor of Blue Light Press, informing me that I had won their chapbook contest, along with Lucy Day, who, unbeknownst to Diane, is a dear friend of mine. I had a visionary moment—saw how my path and Lucy’s had been interwoven over many years to culminate in this joint affirmation. I contemplated the chain of synchronicities that had brought us here. Blue Light Press, by the way, publishes visionary poetry. How fitting.

In our causality-oriented culture it is difficult to talk about such experiences without seeming slightly crazy. Jung struggled with this. He was a doctor, loved the sciences, respected causality and the scientific method of “breaking everything down into individual processes.” But, he pointed out, this attitude has the “disadvantage of obscuring the…unity of the world” which Jungians call the “Unus Mundus,” the one world in which everything is interconnected. The Unus Mundus, of course, is an ancient concept. Some call it the Tao, some call it The Tree of Life, some call it Brahman, some call it Grace. Mystics experience it, as do visionary artists. I feel so grateful to have my work published by a press that celebrates such vision.

Only the Blind Can See

Only Blind Willie Johnson
Can sing your way home
—Naomi Ruth Lowinsky

For years I’ve been sending chapbooks—small poetry collections—to contests. Chapbooks are a way to gather poems, often following a theme, into a coherent shape. My poems often demand to be put together in these small books. They want to make their way into the world in a larger form that an individual poem in a literary magazine. I can’t remember how many times I’ve submitted how many chapbooks to how many presses. Sometimes I get a nice note saying my chapbook “came close.” Mostly I get form rejections. You get used to this in poetry land. Over the years I’ve come to understand that this is a function of how many wonderful poets there are writing now. All you have to do is look at the recent issue #22, of Spillway, a fine poetry magazine, edited by Susan Terris. This issue’s theme is “Muse & Music.”

Of course my muse insisted I submit poems and was delighted when my poem, “Only the Blind,” was chosen. It is one of over a hundred poems that make uncanny connections and transport the reader into enchanted realms. Many of them reach that deep place, where ordinary life touches the Unus Mundus. Being a poet in America today is, for me, an exercise in humility. Perhaps there are so many amazing visionary poets writing because in our materialistic, fame-worshiping culture there is a great collective hunger for what only the inner eye can see.

Synchronicities are often inner experiences for me, and catalysts for poems. “Only the Blind” began when I heard a piece on the radio about the early gospel blues singer Blind Willie Johnson, and later that day read about Isaac the Blind, the 12th Century Rabbi who, it is said, first wrote down the oral tradition of Jewish mysticism we call the Kabbala. “Only the Blind can see” was the phrase that beat in me, joined by “You have always belonged to the moon.” Music was my muse in working on this poem as it frequently is. Here’s the poem:

ONLY THE BLIND

You have always belonged to the moon
Though sometimes it leads you astray

Past willows across the swinging bridge
To somebody’s grave by the river

Stuck in the cave of your skull
You grope for the disappeared moon

Down where it’s blue so blue
Only Blind Willie Johnson

Can sing your way home
Only Isaac the Blind can see

The banshee has got your bones
She’s beating her drum with your bones

And you’re stuck in the cave of your skull
No willows no swinging bridge

Who will plant you deep in the earth?
Who will water your toes?

When the banshee has got your bones
When she’s beating her drum with your bones

You have always belonged to the moon

Only Isaac the Blind can show you
That glow beyond the bridge

Only Blind Willie Johnson
Can sing your way home

Blind Willie Johnson

The Muse of Muses

I dreamed I flourished back in drenching turmoils from the land
into ocean of you and my spirit drifted into skies of you
—John Gardner

In my life the Muse of Muses, synchronicity, often graces me with Her presence when I feel stuck, lost, unsure of my path. The story of how I met Lucy Day is a good example of this. It happened 15 years ago. I had returned to poetry after a long absence. I’d been writing seriously, sending poetry out, learning to tolerate rejections, getting the occasional acceptance. My poems are both imagistic and musical and I knew I needed to be reading them aloud to poetry audiences. I also wanted to put together a book. I longed to be part of a community of poets but it felt scary to walk into some unfamiliar place and read my weird visionary poems to strangers. Maybe they’d think I was nuts.

One evening I screwed up my courage, walked into a coffee shop which hosted a regular reading, and signed up for the open mike. It was a scene. The espresso machine hissed and gurgled. All kinds of people read poems at the open mike, some very accomplished, some who seemed to have scribbled some raw deep feeling in a notebook that day. I was moved by the democracy of it all. Anyone who signed up for the open mike could read. The featured reader was a woman with a blaze of red hair named Judy Wells. She had just published a book of poems called Everything Irish, about growing up Catholic. Many of her poems were laugh out loud funny, about nuns, pagan babies, and her second grade class being the cause of their teacher’s nervous breakdown.

At the end of the reading Judy approached me, saying “Don’t you remember me? You and I were in a consciousness raising group together in the early ‘70s.” She introduced me to her publisher, Lucy Day. Lucy liked the poems I’d read. She said she’d decided to start her own publishing house, Scarlet Tanager Books, because so many good poets were not finding publishers. I asked if she’d consider publishing me. She invited me to send her a group of poems.

Suddenly I was in a community of poets with whom I had a history. Judy and I had become feminists together, and Lucy, it turned out, had found her voice in the Berkeley Poets Cooperative in the 1970s, as had I. I left the Co–op just before Lucy joined, but I knew Ted Fleishman, Lucy’s ex. It seems there are nodes in our lives, vibrant centers of connection and energy that resound into our future without our conscious knowledge. I was blind, groping my way in poetry land, convinced I was all alone, and then one night in a coffee shop poetry reading I realized I had a community, I had connections!

Lucy published my first book of poems, red clay is talking, in 2000 and my second, crimes of the dreamer, in 2005. Lucy amazed me, in fact she still does. She is so well organized, so capable. She taught herself the ropes of publishing. She seems not to be overwhelmed by the sorts of practical details that overwhelm me, and I assume, most poets. She is a scientist, a biologist, who for years was the director of the Hall of Health, a Science Museum for children. I know I’m not the only one who is forever grateful to her— she is so generous in her support of other poets.

Another synchronicity—a book came out last year, called The Berkeley Poets Cooperative: A History of the Times, edited by Charles Entrekin. It is a collection of essays by some of us who were part of the Co–op. As Entrekin says, the book is a testimonial “to a way of life that emphasizes beauty and human enlightenment instead of quarterly profits and unequal distribution of wealth. A cooperative way of life. It still seems possible.”

Lucy and I both have essays in this collection. Lucy writes about how she came to realize she is “more a writer than a scientist” at the Co–op. I wrote a memorial to my friend John Gardner, a Co–op regular who, I wrote, “was the first serious poet who took my poetry seriously.” He was an ecstatic, a mystic, a visionary who gave me the courage I needed to follow my own ecstasies. He died far too young.

Song of My Life

Some say a god made us humans out of red clay.
Some say we humans make our gods out of red clay.
Others say, it doesn’t matter who makes whom.
What matters is the play between the human and
divine realms, and the joy of creation.
—Naomi Ruth Lowinsky

Synchronicity is the Muse of Muses for visionary poetry. Both happen in the play between the human and divine realms. Elevated moods, intense feeling states are the context for the experience of synchronicity as well as for the writing of poetry. I remember how such a mood came upon me and led to my writing the poem, “before,” which opens my first collection, red clay is talking. During the intermission at a concert I ran into a colleague. She talked ecstatically about the joys of singing in a chorus, performing the great choral works in her own voice among many. I remember those joys. In college I got to add my voice to the glories of the Brahms Requiem and Bach’s Saint Mathew’s passion. But when my colleague insisted that I needed to join a chorus now, I was surprised at the bolt of fury that leapt through me. I saw myself in my childhood basement piano practice room, toiling over a Bach fugue, afraid my father would come thundering down the stairs to tell me that I was playing it all wrong. I heard myself say to my colleague in an intemperate tone of voice: “I was raised to sing other people’s songs. Now it’s my time to sing my own.” Out of that anger came this poem —my declaration of being a visionary poet— published by Lucy Day’s press, Scarlet Tanager Books:

before

life after life
I stand by the road
and look for a home
—Mirabai

she had been raised to sing
other people’s songs
but in the third morning of the new time
with the wisteria blooming outside her
kitchen window
and the shadow of the earth
about to fall upon the moon
she looked at the sky
the comet had inhabited
saw four geese fly east
toward devil mountain

heard the telephone ringing
the man in her house running
up circular stairs
calling her name

and suddenly remembered
the lips of the one who had sworn her
to silence
in dark waters
                            whispering—
                                                    wait for me—
                                                    one morning when the children are gone
                                                    I’ll call—

                                                    put on your brown sandals
                                                    wrap yourself up
                                                    in your tree of life shawl
                                                    come walk with me
                                                                                  to devil mountain

                                                                                                      singing the song
                                                                                                      we were singing
                                                                                                      before

                                                                                                           you
                                                                                                           were born

P.S. My chapbook, The Little House on Stilts Remembers, and Lucy’s Chapbook, Dreaming of Sunflowers: Museum Poems will be published in the spring of 2015. We’ll let you know when they come out.

To Be Continued . . .