The Muse of Tomb Envy

“It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place”

—Percy Bysshe Shelley

The Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome

Three Dead Poets

The Day of the Dead is approaching, and I find myself musing about the gravestones of poets. I had an experience with three of them recently, in the lovely cemetery for non-Catholic Foreigners in Rome. Keats is buried here. Most of Shelley is buried here—though it is said that his heart was snatched off the funeral pyre by his friend, Edward Trelawny and given to his widow, Mary. To my surprise I found the grave of Gregory Corso, the beat poet, who is of Catholic extraction, buried here as well.

Gravestones used to be a high art form. Dan and I wandered among impressive busts and marble ladies lying in eternal repose, past a stone Psyche divesting herself of her mortal coil—high on a pedestal—to mourn a woman whose husband wrote: “Her loss is as that of the Keystone of an Arch.”

Psyche

Dan took photos, I mused and took notes. As someone whose plan is to have my ashes scattered on my favorite mountain, I surprised myself with a fit of tomb envy. Imagine having a large angel slumped over your tomb, devastated by your death. 

Slumped Angel

Or imagine being immortalized by an angel with magnificent buttocks standing on a pedestal in some sort of triumphant commentary on the loss of you. I don’t care what your sexual orientation—this angel is an erotic fantasy.

Back of Standing Angel

You have to wander around to the front to be sure of his gender.

Front of Standing Angel

Eros and Thanatos seem to have been on close terms in the nineteenth century. Here a naked couple, looking as though they depict a Greek myth, stand in bas-relief on a tomb. Their little boy grasps the halter of a horse. What story are they telling about the dead Austrian gentleman here memorialized?

Tomb with Naked Couple

Goethe’s only son is buried here. So are professors from America, ladies from Australia, the Fischer brothers (I assume)—one with a cross over his name, the other with a Star of David. Therein lies a story, I’m sure.

Fischer Brothers Tomb

One with Nature

Death, like love, is a great theme for poets. What I’d not considered before is the power of a poet’s gravestone. Keats, who died at the tender age of 25, of tuberculosis, wanted the most modest of gravestones, with no name or date, but only the words: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” However his friends Joseph Severn and Charles Armitage Brown, angry at the critical reception Keats work had received, added the words: “This grave contains all that was mortal of a young English Poet who, on his death bed, in the bitterness of his heart, desired these words to be engraven on his tomb stone.” They also added the date.

Keats' Gravestone

That wasn’t enough for Severn. He had to add his own commentary, writ in stone:

Response to Keats' Gravestone

Later in life Severn and Brown regretted having disrespected Keats’ last wish.

Shelley, who knew and valued Keats, was one of those who believed that the critical attack on Keats had hastened the death of the young poet. In this lineage of sorrow, Shelley memorialized Keats with his long and passionate elegy, Adonaïs. Here are some of my favorite passages:

Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep—
He hath awakened from the dream of life… (stanza 39)

He has outsoared the shadow of our night;
Envy and calumny and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight,
Can touch him not and torture not again… (stanza 40)

He is made one with Nature, there is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan

Of thunder, to the song of night’s sweet bird…(stanza 42)

That sweet bird of course, is a reference to Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale”

in which the poet, addressing that “immortal Bird,” longs for death:

Now more than ever it seems rich to die,
   To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
      While thou art pouring forth thy soul aboard
          In such an ecstasy! (stanza vi)

In a strange variation on this lineage of death, Shelley became “one with nature” just a year later. He drowned in a sudden storm while sailing along the coast of Italy. A volume of Keats’ verse was found in his pocket. His gravestone bears the Latin Inscription: Cor Cordium (“Heart of Hearts”). His gravestone, referring to his death at sea, bears an inscription from Ariel’s song in The Tempest: Nothing of him that doth fade/But doth suffer a sea–change/Into something rich and strange.

Shelley's Gravestone

Corso, who described himself in a poem (“I Am 25”), “With a love a madness for Shelley,” made complicated arrangements and pulled powerful strings to get himself into this cemetery, just footsteps away from Shelley. Corso had had a harsh early life, been abandoned by his teenage parents, gotten into trouble with the law, done time. While in prison he read and began writing poetry. He found his tribe, his kin, when he met Alan Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. He became an important voice among the beat poets. He, like Ginsberg, was a master of the long line list-rant. In a famous poem called “Bomb” he rants about death.

Some die by Swamp some by sea and some by the bushy haired man in the night
O there are deaths like witches of Arc Scary deaths like Boris Karloff
No-feeling deaths like birth-death Sadless deaths like old pain Bowery
Abandoned deaths like Capital Punishment stately deaths like Senators
And unthinkable deaths like Harpo Marx girls on Vogue covers my own

How I love that last line with its sly glide from “girls on Vogue covers” to “my own.”

In an amazing turn of events Corso was reunited with his mother late in his life. They formed a strong bond that also tied him to Italy, her country of birth. I imagine that being buried near Shelley put him in the company of his soul kin, in the earth of his mother country. 

Corso's Gravestone

I am dazzled by the poem on his gravestone—one of the most perfect poems I know—9 short lines that say it all, about life and death and being “one with nature.” 

Spirit
is Life
It flows thru
the death of me
endlessly
like a river
unafraid

of becoming
the sea

I sat on a bench in the cemetery, amidst cypress tress and palms, pansies, begonias and violets, in the shadow of the Cestius Pyramid—an ancient Roman tomb. In the presence of a mysterious woman’s bust in stone—she seems to be listening to music—or is it poetry— from another realm, I wept for a poet I hadn’t read since I was young.

Listening Woman

I won’t ever have a prostrate angel mourning on my tomb. But I’ve got poems in the tradition of this lineage of poets who understand “the death of me/like a river/ unafraid of becoming/the sea." Following is the final poem in The Faust Woman Poems:

When I Die

I want the window’s yellow rose
To kiss my eyes goodbye—before
Green sisters do their rattle dance—before
I’m drunk by sun and swallowed
By the moon before the earth
Starts chewing on my bones— and you

To whom I leave my words—listen
For me in the grass— If I can lick
Your lips and steal into your ears
When I am long past breath I’ll borrow yours
And swing into your beating heart
Where I will sing a beat or two before
You breathe me out again—
                   Into the hungry sky

(First published in Reed Magazine)

Prostrate Angel

The Muse of a Younger Self

How Do I Get Back to You?

The Faust Woman Poems are about to come out. I have held the advance copy in my hands and mused about the wistful tug from my younger self that was one of many inspirations for this collection. She wants to be heard. Or maybe it’s that my aging body and soul need her voice, her “river glitter,” her “marijuana music” and “Kama Sutra dances” to sweeten and deepen my sense of my own life and that of my generation. Here is a poem I wrote for her:

In Memory’s Pan

You are river glitter
You with the long wavy hair
You with the questions

Once you saw molecules flow
    in a tree branch
Sat on a river rock
    in that old blue skirt

(Someone outside you was watching)

Now salmon have trouble leaping
Oak trees send their dead

                        downstream

I have woven marijuana music
  Kama Sutra dances
All the colors of fire
  into a shawl to wrap us both

  My pretty one
  O my fleeting one

How do I get back to you?
                     The Faust Woman Poems

Just as the final details for the book were being completed I got to see her again, or one much like her. She showed up in an Antonioni movie I’d never seen before—Zabriskie Point.

News from the Muse: The Muse of Jungian Memoir

[from the Tarot of the Sephiroth]

When inner work is brought out into the world—a poem, a memoir—it’s as though something has been constructed in the soul. The inexpressible finds expression; the unsayable is said. I’ve been reflecting on this experience, which feels magical to me—transformative. It’s not just the writing down of inner experience, the process of tracking dreams or engaging in active imagination. It is how it feels to go public with it, to present it to a live audience, or to see its transformation into print. An imaginal space is opened up and something is created there—a temple deep in the woods, past the swinging bridge, or perhaps an altar by the banks of the river, a chupah for the sacred wedding, a teepee in the meadow. This is a holy place to which one can return. It is both an expansion of inner space and creation of something substantive. Is this what the alchemists mean by the Lapis? The Kabbalists by the “Work of the Chariot?” The Hindus by Shakti? The Jungians by the Subtle Body?

The Sister from Below, my muse, informed me that I was writing Jungian memoir when I was working on her book. She told me that Jungian memoir illuminates the inner world, follows the Jungian tributaries of dreams, conversations with inner figures, synchronicities. It is the grandchild of Jung’s great memoir, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Its ancestors include the alchemists and the saints, whose spiritual autobiographies, like the Confessions of St. Augustine, connect us to the Spirit of the Depths, and to the Wisdom Traditions.

Since the publication of the Red Book it’s become clear how Jung’s direct confrontation with inner figures cracked open the walls of rationality and allowed the uncanny, the unfathomable back into western consciousness. Jungian memoir attends to those strange unfathomable experiences that shape our souls.

I was privileged, last April, to participate in a conference put on by the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, called C.G. Jung and the Jewish Connection. This was the swan song of our beloved Baruch Gould, who had been the creative and innovative Director of Public Programs for ten years, and was preparing to end his service. He’d been incubating the idea for the conference for years.

I was among a group of Jungian analysts and scholars approaching the subject from very different vantage points. There were historical papers, papers on Jung and Jewish mysticism, and papers I would call Jungian memoir, telling personal stories from inner lives. Several spoke as Jews struggling with Jung. I spoke as a Jungian struggling with Judaism. The Jungian memoir I wrote for that event has opened an important space in my soul, a deeper and more open connection to myself as a Jew and to Jewish mysticism—a Chupah for the sacred wedding of Tifereth with Malkuth— male and female energies in the Kabbalistic worldview—which Jung saw in a vision of the “Garden of Pomegranates” and described in Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

Now, thanks to the Jung Journal, all the papers given at the conference are available in print (Volume VI, Number 1). I hope you’ll take a look at them.


Here are some excerpts from my paper.

The Rabbi, the Goddess, and Jung

You cannot grasp these things unless you stumble over them.

The Zohar

Spiritual Exile

How does a Jew to whom God never spoke in a synagogue, who has wandered the world and the paths of other religions seeking direct experience of the sacred, stumble upon it in her own tradition? How does a spiritual exile, whose life was transformed by the Goddess, get past her issues with the patriarchal God of the Jews.

With Jung’s help…

This is the story of how Jung, or the Jungian worldview, helped me find my meandering way home to Judaism. As is my fashion I will weave in poetry, dreams, a journey and a conversation with a ghost.

I have always longed for myth, for mystery, for those moments when the world cracks open, when something uncanny, wild, awesome, enters. I have glimpsed it in Hindu temples, in Catholic churches, in Pagan rituals, in poetry, everywhere but in the Jewish world I knew as a child…

*******

The Ten Commandments of My Childhood

It was a proud thing to be a Jew in my family of origin; it was also a difficult thing. We Jews had responsibilities. We had suffered as a people. We needed to be eternally vigilant, on the look out for tyranny, oppression, discrimination— whether against us Jews or others. There were unspoken instructions for how to be a good Jew below the surface of dinner table conversations, and in social gatherings in the very Jewish neighborhood in post war Queens, New York, we lived in during the early 1950s. These are the commandments I heard:

I. Thou shalt vote Democratic.
II. Thou shalt take a stand against injustice and inhumanity.
III. Thou shalt believe in the innocence of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.
IV. Thou shalt support unions and the ACLU.
V. Thou shalt love Paul Robeson, Roland Hayes, Marian Anderson and the Weavers.
VI. Thou shalt sing folk songs, spirituals, and union songs with gusto.
VII. Thou shalt know all the famous Jews in the culture, and speak of them with pride, from Albert Einstein to Sammy Davis Jr.
VIII. Thou shalt love the state of Israel, but not forgive it its trespasses.
IX. Thou shalt know the stories of the Hebrew Bible, for thy father will tell them to you as “great literature.”
X. Thou shalt never forget “what happened.”


Upside Down Tree

I was given a gift of a dream. I am shown an image. It is an upside down tree—whose branches touch the earth, whose roots are in the sky. The tree is filled with Hebrew letters. I did not recognize what it was, at the time, though the image stayed with me, tugged at me…[It took me some time to realize that I had] been shown the Tree of Life—the symbolic expression of Jewish mysticism. I [had] stumbled into the esoteric aspect of my own tradition, which I had thought lacked a mystical, contemplative side.…

[Upside Down Tree of Life by Robert Fludd]

Black Fire Written on White Fire

It must be She, the Shekina, who is behind what happens next. In September of 2004 I find myself in Girona, Spain. My husband Dan and I have come here because it was a center of Jewish life and Kabbalistic thought before the expulsion of the Jews …

*******

I sit on the tiny balcony of our hotel room, and try to focus…despite the sounds of passing people, cars, motorcycles, water being poured, conversations in Spanish, Catalan, Italian, English, despite the bells of the Cathedral. I imagine the rabbis meditating—making contact with God amidst donkey piss and roosters crowing and children running about and bed pans being emptied.

*******

In my wanderings in the old Jewish section of Girona I happen into the Nahmanides Institute of Jewish Studies. I learn that Moses ben Nahman (nicknamed Ramban by the Jews, called Nahmanides in the Greek fashion of the day) was a leading Kabbalist in the 13th century in Girona. He was of the generation before the Zohar was written down, and one of those who influenced its writer, Moses de Leon.

[from Tarot of the Sephiroth]

*******

I am filled with the presence of this Rabbi. Later, in my readings, I will stumble upon a reference to a Jewish myth in which “the soul of a great sage who has died binds his spirit to one of the living in order…to guide a person through a difficult time of transition.” This spirit is called an ibur, in contrast to the malevolent spirit known as a dybbuk.

I find myself talking to him: Ramban, I walk the Roman walls of your city and your light walks with me. I walk the narrow streets of the Call de Jueu and the light you received from Moses at Sinai walks with me. You speak in my heart. This light, you tell me, is not of memory, not of the history of our people, not the word remembered and written down. This light is now…

*******

I wonder why it is you who have come to guide me, you who are at once a mystic and a learned Rabbi of the tradition. You say it is because I need to learn your teaching, that “Everything that is done in the mundane sphere is magically reflected in the upper region…” You say I listen too much to my fears. I need to open all my senses to the Shekina. You say I need to contemplate the mystery of “black fire written on white fire —the tension between the oral tradition and the radiance, between manifest wisdom and the transcendent. Because you want me to understand that the Goddess is alive in you, that The Sister from Below is your familiar, you tell me a stanza of your mystical hymn about the birth of the soul.

He radiated light to bring her forth,
In hidden well–springs, right and left.
The soul descended the ladder of heaven,
From the primeval pool of Siloam to the garden of the King.

You say our souls stand in eternity, they are forever, we spend our lives finding our way back to them, for we are in exile from our beginnings. You say the light is now, here in this place where we meet.

********

I wrote a poem for Ramban, who became a beloved familiar in the writing of this paper. Here is the last section:

God’s Singing Tree
In Two Voices

Ramban
you are old magic with goddess eyes
you are warm fire in the dark of the cave
you gather me back to the breath of that mother
in the long long line of my great grandmothers
who picked up her baby her sack of food
and walked out of Catalonia in 1492

the vessels shattered there was contraction
there was exile you tell me
this is the nature of creation

they who listen will hear
they who open their eyes will see
there is a tree it grows from the feet
of Abraham and Sara its leaves catch the light
on this balcony where I sit with you

remember my daughter
wherever you are the poem is
black fire written on white fire
God’s singing tree

Frontpiece from the 1516 Latin translation of Gikatilla's Gates of Light 

News from the Muse: The Muse of the Dark

The Muse of the Dark

For Behold, Darkness Shall cover the Earth
(Handel's Messiah)

We are approaching the winter solstice. I always fight the dark—resisting its dark embrace. I don’t like getting up in the morning when it’s still dark. I don’t like going home from work in the evening when it’s already dark.

And yet, if I slow down and listen more deeply to myself, there is a yearning to descend into the dark—to crawl into a cave and ruminate, to vegetate. After all, I love the night. I love sleeping, dreaming. I wrote a poem about longing for sleep.

Sleep

I am crawling around the edges of you
longing for you
sweet sleep
that my grandson fell into this evening
as I walked him and sang
and his head hung heavy
on my arm

sleep
why do you hold yourself back from me
you were my first love
you wrapped me up in my mother’s dark
knew me before I knew light
filled me with all I’ve become

sleep
my oldest familiar
open your doors to the streaming stars
let lions loose to dance in the sky
and those who are gone
let them return
to speak my name

for everything that’s lost
is found in you
and everything changes
its shape

rock becomes a giant lizard
flame leaps from the rock
becomes word
becomes snake
becomes backbone
mine!

sleep
only you can wash away
the day’s bile
this one I’m arguing with
that one who rubbed me
the wrong way

lead me down into your secret pools
rub oils into my body
take my muscles in hand
and smooth them out

O sleep
lay your big blue weight
upon me

(first published in crimes of the dreamer)

Sleep is a god, a healer, a magical realm. Then why is the dark time of the year so difficult?

We are a culture addicted to light—the sun’s daily cycle no longer controls us. We live in electrical light, fluorescent light, virtual reality, on Facebook and Twitter, we work, shop, answer e-mail 24/7. We are lost to the wisdom of cycles—the cycle of the day, the cycle of the year, what Bear knows when she crawls into her cave. Of course, I’m no more interested than you are in giving up my illuminated nights. I love watching “Mad Men;” I love reading in bed.

However we pay a heavy price for all this light. How do we get our down time—time for our thoughts to meander, time to play, to pray, to muse, to remember, to forget, to re-create ourselves? How do we nourish the cave dweller in our souls, the moony dreamy eyed poet? Here’s a poem about that.



LET NIGHT BE FOR SLEEP

You can’t trick gold
out of the Black Sun

Nor diamonds
out of virtual space

Your wild ride
from coast to coast—

over dayglo towers
that know no night
that see no dreams
that limit you to what
can be found
on a laptop—

has screeched
to a halt:

Snake on the trail!
Is it a rattler?

You must shed old skin
Rub your irritation
all over some big rock

Sit in the dark
not knowing
your next life

When she comes around that mountain
Will you sing?


It is so hard for us to sit in the dark, not seeing, not knowing our next life. It is, however essential. When Jung built his tower at Bollingen he wanted no electrical light. And at Tassajara, the Buddhist retreat, there is no electrical light. I was at Tassajara once. I remember the dark pull of the night—so grounding, so profound. I felt attached to the earth and to myself. Daybreak was an epiphany. Trees, flowers, our cabins, the river, emerged into being as if for the first time. The world was reborn.

In Grace Cathedral to hear the Messiah I am pulled into the dark of that deep cavernous vault, pulled by the music I’ve known since childhood and its magical evocation of the Christian mystery.

The Cathedral is filled with people. They’ve added rows and rows of metal folding chairs behind the pews to accommodate us all. We’ve turned off our cell phones, disconnected ourselves from hectic brick and mortar shopping, from manic on-line shopping. We sit together in that dark cave, yearning for something ancient and sacred. Human voices call out to the divine for comfort, for meaning, for illumination as they have since the Shaman chanted.

Behold, I tell you a Mystery....we shall all be chang'd...
(Handel's Messiah)

Approaching the winter solstice I am glad to be among others engaged in this ancient ritual of the dark time.Below the Judeo-Christian strata we find the Old Religion—call it Pagan or Goddess religion—we find the myths that honor the natural cycles of sun, moon and earth, the myths of descent. Persephone went down into the underworld. So did the Innana. Betty Meador, a Jungian analyst who has devoted herself to Innana titled one of her books Uncursing the Dark.
In it she writes:

The myth discloses an archetypal pattern of opposites. On the one hand, the woman descendant is the highly civilized culture bearer; on the other hand, at the bottom of the underworld, she is the single human animal, separate and alone...

I hope in this season you'll take time to tend your soul and your animal nature, that you'll burrow down below the noise, the endless demands for activity and consumption, the addiction to light of our culture. I hope you'll find your own way to pay homage to the cycles of the natural world—the power of the night, the cave, the dream, the moon. Do so and you'll glimpse that mystery of transformation; perhaps you'll feel changed, reborn. Here’s a poem about that.


PANTOUM FOR A WITCH’S SABBATH

Long ago when night was your familiar
You knew the moon and the moon knew you
I mean carnally
Those stories about sex with the devil are about this

You knew the moon and the moon knew you
Joy from the sky made a music in your body
Those stories about sex with the devil are about this
Moon penetration stars awakening

Joy from the sky made a music in your body
Lion arose horse flew
Moon penetration stars awakening
Something from forever loved you for a night

Lion rising horse flying
Roots of the tree reach up into the sky
Something from forever loves you for a night
And the moon sings

Roots of the tree reach up into the sky
Branches touch down into earth
The moon sings
Naked you are and flying

Branches touch down into earth
I mean carnally
Naked you are and flying
Rooted in the night your familiar
(first published in The Pagan's Muse)