The Muse of Flight

The Poetry of Resistance II

We are pilgrims passing through

the metal detector. We remove our shoes, remove

our coats and shawls. Some of us will be hand wanded—

silver bracelets, seven quarters, three dimes—provoke

the security gods…

—Naomi Ruth Lowinsky “Root Canal”

In the Hands of the Security Gods

I was twenty–three before I took my first airplane flight. Since then, flight has become a commonplace in the lives of the privileged. Some fly for work. Many fly for pleasure, for adventure. Some fly to make pilgrimages to ancestral lands or to mythic places that speak to our souls. We return home full of images and experiences that change us, open our hearts and our minds. There is a gallery of such beloved places within me. They are numinous; they orient me to the journey of my life. I visit them often in reverie. They come to me in dreams, make their homes in my poems—South Indian women in glowing saris, Table Mountain hovering over Cape Town, a vaporetto plowing the glittering waters of the Grand Canal in Venice, the palm tree outside Lorca’s bedroom window in Granada, the green hills of Wilhelmhöhe, outside Kassel, from which my mother, age twelve, and her family took flight just before Hitler came to power.

Flight is a wonder, but also a peril. In my early years of flying the fear was that the plane would crash. Since the 9/11 attacks tore up our sense of safety, the fear is a terrorist will make the plane crash. We’ve had to learn the strange ritual required by the Transportation Security Administration—shoe removal, jacket removal, the placing of carryon luggage on a moving belt to be examined by X-ray. Sometimes we get wanded. Sometimes we get groped. Our precious, carefully packed stuff is picked through, manhandled. We are ambivalent about all this—is the TSA protecting us or abusing us? Recently, as border issues have heated up and travel bans been announced, agents are demanding that certain travellers unlock their cell phones, tablets, laptops, reveal their passwords so they can scroll through e–mail, photos, private Facebook posts. People have missed their flights while agents are poking through their personal communications without a warrant. U.S. citizens have been detained for hours, questioned aggressively and released without apology. The stink of racism surrounds these events, often targeting people with Muslim names, or dark skin.

The Last Laugh

Poems of Resistance can take many forms, evoke many emotions. Diane Frank’s lovely poem “When you fly…” uses humor to unpack this complex political phenomenon. The poem pretends to be simple and direct. In fact it is subtle and sly. A list poem, it opens by naming things that might be bombs—food, drink, musical instruments. The second stanza takes flight. We are given a suitcase full of images sacred to the traveller—the iconic symbols of east and west coast America are thrown in with the “packing cases of the San Francisco Symphony”—reminding us that flight is essential to cultural exchange. Then we’re off to Paris and to the last remaining “Wonder of the Ancient World”—the Great Pyramid at Giza. We’ve flown through space as well as through time—back to ancient Egypt, in the company, it seems of a world–travelling musician.

The Sphinx must be behind the third stanza, it is so mysterious and yet, revealing. This time the flight is inward, into the realms of mind, of the invisible, of the potential, of the mathematical. A magical twist reveals a medieval Book of Hours, a grandmother’s wedding ring. These riches of imagination and lineage are desecrated in the fourth stanza by the groping hands of the TSA agent. The poem illuminates the bewilderment and intrusion we’ve all experienced as we trudge through endless security lines, longing for flight, fearing our journey will be imperiled by the misinterpretation of the precious stuff of our lives. The political contract according to which we citizens hand over our privacy to the TSA in exchange for security is easily exploded by the abuse of power. The poem’s speaker reports that she has been violated, and then hit on. She regains her power and her authority in the final couplet, by stating the obvious— “It’s not a hand grenade;/it’s an avocado.” What better resistance than this—to get the last word, and the last laugh?

When you fly . . .

Things that might be a bomb . . .
Yogurt, avocados, lemonade, iced tea
the endpin of a cello

A banjo, a violin
electronic equipment wrapped carefully
in cotton fabric and bubble wrap
so it won’t be damaged after landing

The Empire State Building
The Golden Gate Bridge
The packing cases of the San Francisco Symphony
The Eiffel Tower
The Pyramids at Giza

The unwritten pages of a novel
in the genre of magical realism
An architectural drawing
An algorithm, a vector
An illuminated medieval book of hours
My grandmother’s wedding ring

And to the TSA agent
who groped me during the pat down
and then asked me out to lunch . . .

It’s not a hand grenade;
it’s an avocado.

—Diane Frank

Diane Frank is an award-winning poet and author of Swan Light, Entering the Word Temple, and The Winter Life of Shooting Stars. Her friends describe her as a harem of seven women in one very small body. She lives in San Francisco, where she dances, plays cello, and creates her life as an art form. The poem in Naomi’s blog, “When you fly,” will be published in Canon for Bears and Ponderosa Pines, forthcoming from Glass Lyre Press. Diane teaches at San Francisco State University and Dominican University. Blackberries in the Dream House, her first novel, won the Chelson Award for Fiction and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Letters from a Sacred Mountain Place, a memoir of her 400 mile trek in the Nepal Himalayas, is forthcoming from Nirala Press.

The Muse of Catastrophe

The Sister from Below Announces a New Series: 

The Poetry of Resistance

Hermes, Greek God of thievery, writing, roads, and more

                            

                                     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

      —Naomi Ruth Lowinsky

      “Wishing in the Woods With Hillary”

The Muse of Catastrophe 

But who can resist this all–engulfing force…? Only one who is

firmly rooted not only in the outside world but also in the world within.

—C.G. Jung

Thoth, Egyptian God of Writing

In early 1933 Jung gave a lecture in Germany. He spoke of a “feeling of catastrophe” in the air. We are in such a moment in America. How do we withstand the “all–engulfing force” of chaos, hysteria, terror, and rage which rampages the land? How do we stay connected to our inner life, our deep natures when we are assaulted and over–stimulated by outrageous events and disturbing threats, haunted by ancestors who were slaves, refugees from catastrophe, stateless, disenfranchised, oppressed? Catastrophe, it turns out, can be a muse. That is what the Sister from Below whispered in my heart one day when I was feeling overwhelmed and impotent, struggling to find my mode of resistance. She said: “You’re a poet. You know many fine poets. Do what poets do. Use your blog to post resistance poetry. In times of catastrophe, the people need poetry.

But, you may ask, as did the poet H.D., “What good are your scribblings?” H.D. answers herself, in her great poem written during the catastrophe of the London blitz, “The Walls Do Not Fall:”

this—we take them with us

beyond death; Mercury, Hermes, Thoth
invented the script, letters, palette;

the indicated flute or lyre–notes
on papyrus or parchment

are magic, indelibly stamped
on the atmosphere somewhere,

forever; remember, O Sword,
you are the younger brother, the latter–bon,

your triumph, however exultant,
must one day be over,

in the beginning
was the Word.

H.D. is claiming the power of the Word over that of the Sword, the power of Creation over that of Destruction. And yet we know she wrote this during wartime, when all she held sacred was threatened and her city was in ruins. When our souls are battered, our hearts broken, is often the time when we open to the deep river flow of poetry, when we find words to “translate the dry rattle of the newscast into image and myth. Poetry says the unsayable, bears the unbearable, speaks for the voiceless, transports us into the spirit realm, the ancestor’s lodge, ushers us, in Jung’s words, through the “small and hidden door that leads inward.”

A Poem by Daniel Polikoff
The first Poem of Resistance came to me by synchronicity. It was during the recent storms which caused flooding, mudslides and other disruptions in Northern California. The national news was disturbing, causing political storms and public displays of resistance all over the country. At the time I was in dialogue with the Sister from Below, about catastrophe as muse, about poetry as medicine for the soul, about devoting my blog, for the duration, to Poems of Resistance, when a beautiful poem showed up in my e-mail, by Daniel Polikoff. I knew when I read it that I wanted it to open this series.

The weather and the news remind us of Biblical stories of catastrophe as an expression of God's wrath. This is where Polikoff goes in his poem, only his focus is on a "heavenly mother...weeping/for her lost children." The poem's speaker voices our grief and disorientation, and names our collective shadow, for we have "gone forth and built/sky-scratching cities," and we have "forgotten/her name." This is the voice of the prophets--those ancient poets of resistance.

Weeping Icon

Flood
February 7, 2017

Rain floods the streets and overflows
river banks and inlet sluices,
pours from the water-bearing sky
as if a heavenly mother were weeping

for her lost children. The puddle on the red-
brick patio; the streams that run
down the twin cheeks of Spring Drive;
the spreading lake that drowns the footpath—

tears, all tears. For she who bears us
endlessly in her heart
is weeping, weeping endlessly
over her children, the numberless

ones who no longer know her,
all the children who have forgotten
her name. They have gone forth
without regard; gone forth and built

sky-scratching cities; gone forth
and closed their doors against her,
locked their gates and bolted the chambers
of their steel domes. She has come

often to those proud towers; come
and rattled the gate-chains; come
and wrapped upon the heavy doors
of their bronze hearts. But they

do not choose to hear her soft
or loud alarms; dumb and unmoved,
they stand upon their feet of clay,
statues in the hall of a putrid king.

And so the widespread waters of pain,
the tears of grief and of mourning
pour from the sockets of heaven, pour
ceaselessly down, as once did

the flood that drowned the earth—
for the wrath of the Father
and the Mother's deep sorrow
will not part like ancient seas.

Daniel Joseph Polikoff is a poet and internationally recognized Rilke scholar. The most recent of his six books are Rue Rilke (a creative non-fiction account of his initiatory Rilke pilgrimage) and a new translation of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus. Daniel lives with his wife and family in Mill Valley, and will be teaching a course at Pacifica Graduate Institute this spring. For more information see danielpolikoff.com

"Tower of Babel" by Lucas van Valckenborch

Announcement 

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky will be a speaker, along with Steven Nouriani and Carolyn Bray on The Role of the Divine Feminine in the Transformation of Consciousness. The program will take place on March 18th at the SF Jung Institute, 9:30 -1:30. We need Her right about now. Please join us.

[https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-role-of-the-divine-feminine-in-the-transformation-of-consciousness-tickets-26502497684]