The Muse of Orpheus

The Muse of Orpheus

Gesang ist Dasein
Song is Being
—(Sonnet to Orpheus #3 Part I)

The Girl Who Slept the World

To the poet’s own astonishment, work on the Elegies was both preceded and succeeded by bursts of creative inspiration that birthed another, wholly unanticipated magnum opus. This unlooked–for gift of the gods was Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus.
—(Polikoff, Introduction)

In sad times, when death stalks our kith and our kin, in troubling times, when shocking events overwhelm us—young people are gunned down at a rock concert in Paris, people who serve the developmentally disabled are gunned down at a holiday party in San Bernadino, in frightening times when hatred for the stranger runs rampant and the snarl of fascism stalks the land, there’s no comfort like poetry, especially Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus. Rilke wrote his sonnet sequence “as a grave–monument for Vera Ouckama Knoop,” a nineteen year–old dancer who died of leukemia. Rilke’s great work is a temple in the woods, a sanctuary from dread and terror, beautifully rendered into English in a new translation by Daniel Joseph Polikoff, (Angelico Press, 2015)

Polikoff has devoted much of his creative life to Rilke. He has given us his monumental “Soul History,” In the Image of Orpheus: Rilke. I reviewed this book for the Jung Journal in 2012. Appreciating the influence of Jungian thought and James Hillman’s revisioning of it on Polikoff’s work, I wrote:

"Polikoff, leaning on Jung, focuses on Rilke’s anima fascinations in life and in poetry, He traces Rilke’s soul development as he separates from Lou Andreas Salome, who has been a maternal figure, and meets the lovely young artists Paula Becker and Clara Westhoff in the bucolic landscape of Worpeswede. Clara would eventually become his wife. Rilke’s understanding of the sacred shifts “away from the name and spirit of God toward the soul of nature experienced in and through the eyes of two enchanting maiden-artists” (208). Following Hillman, Polikoff understands the power of anima as …“the archetype of soul coming into its own by way of creative imagination” (202)… Later in his life the death of a maiden will become the inspiration for his Sonnets to Orpheus.

The sonnets are meditations on death, transience, the life cycle, maidens, flowers, trees, animals, the gods—especially Orpheus and his lyre—the quintessential image of the creative imagination. That maiden who died so young takes up residence in the poet’s ear, and in ours:

And it was almost a girl who emerged from
the consonant pleasure of song and lyre
and shone clear through her shady spring attire
and made her bed within my ear’s deep drum.

And slept in me. And her sleep was everything.
The trees I always marveled at, those
palpable distances, the deeply felt meadows… 

She slept the world.
—(Sonnet #2 Part I)

In her death, in her sleep in the poet’s ear, a wondrous world is created—55 sonnets in two parts. Orpheus is a “conjurer” whose “widespread/nature…knows the roots of the willow/can better bend the branches overhead.” (#6 Part I) Above and below are brought together to create the poet’s lyre, made of the roots and upper branches of the willow— a tree associated with grief. Orpheus’ magic, turns grief and decay into vineyard and grape. We are in the realm of the Eleusinian Mysteries here, where the maiden who has been stolen by the god of the underworld, returns to life as leaf and flower in the spring.

We go round with flowers, vine–leaves, fruit.
They speak a language that’s not only of the year.
Rising through darkness, some bright thing breaks clear
revealing, perhaps, the jealousy at the root 

still held by the dead, who fortify the earth.
(Sonnet #14 Part I)

Polikoff’s Introduction to his translation is a fine distillation of his writing on the origin of the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets in his Soul History. He places Rilke, a hundred years ago, in a world much like the one we inhabit today, in which “unrelenting violence rent the poet’s inner and outer world.” (p. 1) As WWI broke out Rilke struggled with the “terrible angel” of the Elegies, expressing a “heart–rending lament of alienation from spiritual being.” (p. 7) After the war, having found a home in Switzerland, Rilke was astonished by the “unlooked–for gift of the…Sonnets,” many of which came in a “dam–busting flood of poetic energy” that lasted three days (p. 2).

We are not spared the horrors of death. In Sonnet #25 Part I Rilke imagines Vera’s end:

But you—so swiftly departed—you whom I
loved like a flower whose name I did not know… 

A dancer first, whose body’s sudden pause
froze… 

Illness was near… 

Seized by dark stutterings, more and more

it gleamed of earth. Until—with horrible pounding—
it stepped through the desolate open door.

Many of these sonnets are prayers. One of my favorites holds the vast opposites of life and death:

Be forever dead in Eurydice—in praise of things
ascend, singing…
be a ringing glass that shatters even as it rings. 

Be—and at the same time know the fathomless fount
of non–being…
—(Sonnet #13 Part II)

This is a prayer that expresses the chasm we face, mourning those we love who have passed through that veil, as we grapple with the mystery of being and non–being, of singing and shattering, of loss and release. I am always impressed by how grief changes consciousness, breaks through the rigidities of rationality and lets the living symbol in. Rilke illuminates this transmutation:

Torn open by us again and again
the god is the place that heals, unseen.
We’re sharp; we want to know all we can,
but he’s spread out and serene.
—(Sonnet #16 Part II)

The Joy of German

Any true poem lives and breathes in the nuanced confluence of sound and sense it incorporates; to try to transplant its beating heart into the strange body of a foreign language is inevitably a risky experiment. And how much more delicate the operation when the original is…a sonnet to Orpheus; a poem addressed to that God who symbolizes the very unity of music and meaning any translation cannot but betray?
—(Polikoff, Introduction)

I heard German before I heard English. My parents were German born Jews. I have little call to speak German these days, but I sometimes dream in German, and wake up with a deep longing for my lost mother–tongue. It makes me sad that in our culture the beauty and power of German is not appreciated. Its deep guttural sounds are often mocked. For me German resonates with chthonic energy. It emerges from an earthy place, a root place. English words that are rooted in the Germanic are much more potent than Latinate words to my ear and heart. In Germany recently, I found the language returning to me like water to a thirsty flower. Rilke’s Sonnet #7, Part II describes this feeling: Here is some of the German.

Blumen… 

wartend des Wassers, das sie noch einmal erhole
aus dem begonnenen Tod…

And Polikoff’s rendering:

Flowers… 

awaiting the water that will once more make you whole
after the death already begun…

The conceit of the poem is that cut flowers are beginning to die before they are brought back to life with water. And so it is with us, when we are severed from our roots, it takes the water of poetry to revive us.

Although my German is child like and unsophisticated, I get much joy from moving back and forth between the original and Polikoff’s superb translations. As a poet who sometimes works in forms, I know how difficult it is to write a good rhyming sonnet. I am amazed at how elegantly Polikoff manages to translate the complex rhymes and rhythms of Rilke’s sonnets into fine English poetry.

If you are feeling the dark of this time of the year, or grieving a loved one, or, in horror and dread as you watch the swirls of hate and intolerance take over much of the collective, I urge you to listen to Orpheus’ song as received by Rilke and translated by Polikoff. It will give you entry to that temple deep in the woods, where the spirit of the depths dwells. Here is the entirety of the wonderful Sonnet #19 Part I, which I read at my father’s funeral a lifetime ago.

Though the world too will transform
quick as cloud–shape or course
all that’s complete is born
home to archaic source.

Over all coming and going
further and freer
your song–breath’s still blowing
god with the lyre.

Suffering we do not comprehend
and love’s as yet unlearned;
what takes us at life’s end

is shrouded in veils.
Only the song over the land
hallows and hails.

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The Sister from Below invites you to hear Naomi Ruth Lowinsky read:

Jan. 3rd Poetry Unbound, 5-8 pm

Art House Gallery

2905 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley, CA

$5-10 donation

(with Lucy Day and Connie Post)

Open Mike

In the dark of the year we welcome the magic of poetry, magic that can take us travelling through landscapes of our past, of our psyches, of the natural world. Three poets guide us, Connie Post, Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, and Lucy Lang Day in “The Poetry of Place.” All three are prizewinners, one with a Lyrebird Award and two with the 2014 Blue Light Poetry Prize.

Place is a powerful Muse who can remember our childhood meadows and woods and all the homes we’ve loved and lost. The Muse of Place inspires poems of yearning, exile, diaspora, and poems about landscape and environmental desecration as well—all the harm we humans have done to our Earth. This Muse loves journeys, the sounds, tastes, smells, and sights of foreign lands and even shows up in dreams, revealing to us mysterious realms. Come to the old church at the end of a dirt road, ancestral homes and a house on stilts, the horned lark singing beside a field of silver hairgrass.

Feb. 8th Poetry Express, 7-9pm

Himalayan Flavors

1585 University Ave., Berkeley, CA 

Naomi will be featured, reading from her prize winning chapbook,

The Little House On Stilts Remembers 

Open Mike

The Muse of Lost Homeland

A Letter to my Grandmother

Emma Hoffman as a young woman

I wish I could see
those fabled houses from before I was born
the home of my grandparents in the hills above Kassel
the home of the poet Nelly Sachs on Lessingstrasse in Berlin 

the crystal, the silver fish knives, the music room, the library
the well-tempered Bach, the Hölderin, the Goethe
Buber’s “Legend
of the Baal Shem Tov” who, it is said, 

ascended
to the radiance…
—(Lowinsky, “Many Houses Ago” in The Little House with Stilts Remembers)

Your Birthplace

Berlin, Germany
September, 2015

I write you—
You have come into the world again
with the haunting strength of letters
—Nelly Sachs, in “Glowing Enigmas”

Oma, I have come here for you. You were born here, in 1881, raised here, studied art here. You learned about family, animals, birds, trees, roads, sun, and moon here. You learned your alphabet of colors and the song of your soul here, in this Northern light, where it is fall. It’s getting cold. The young women wrap their necks with colorful shawls; the young men wear leather. You would not recognize this city. 

Most of the Berlin you knew was smashed to pieces by the allies in the last months of WWII. Many of the spare, square, renovated buildings preserve a piece of the bombed, bullet riddled past.

Oma, I don’t find Berlin beautiful. I find it exciting, interesting, respectful of its ghosts, full of life in its many forms, the kindness of strangers, ironic graffiti, and shadows from the Soviet and Nazi past. You wouldn’t be moved to paint much here, Oma. There are too few trees. The Old Synagogue is gone. Though you were never a religious Jew you liked to paint interesting buildings. Did you know the New Synagogue, built around the time of your birth? Parts of it survived the war. Other parts were renovated. That old Byzantine style cupola is so lovely. It would stand up well beside the Basilica of San Marco in Venice, where Dan and I just spent some time. The dome appears suddenly, blue and gold and gleaming, exotic in this rectangular city of blacks, browns, whites.

The New Synagogue

It is, however, painful to get near it. It bristles with metal fences and with security, because Jewish sites in Germany are at such risk of terrorist attacks. So much history here. A “Juden Frei” (Jew free) Berlin was never achieved, Oma, hard as they tried. A small band of survivors, hidden in attics and basements, preserved what they could of Yiddishkeit after the war. But now in this modern city, full of young people, wild night life, students, business people, young women with diamonds in their noses, young men with dreads, we hear that Jews are coming back to where their great grandparents made their lives. It is cheaper to live here than in Tel Aviv or San Francisco. There is an energetic feeling of new life and possibility.

What surprises and moves me deeply is the pull of German—my mother tongue and yours. I never speak it in America, though in recent years surprise myself from time to time by dreaming in German. But here, in Berlin, German pours out of my mouth so effortlessly, from some unconscious spring. And it feels good, “heimatlich—” at home.

We sit in a restaurant in our hotel, in “Die Mitte,”—the middle of Berlin, used to be East Berlin, and hear English, Hebrew, German, Danish, Italian, Turkish. We overhear business meetings, friends sharing confidences, travelers telling stories of the journey, young folk with laptops working on a project in a cozy corner full of books. It is an experience of “Gemeinshaft”—community, and “Gemütlichkeit”—comfort—that would stun you in the city where you saw Hitler staring at you in a café in 1930 and knew, in your intuitive way, that he wanted to kill you and your people.

I’m sure you knew, though I didn’t, that Jews have lived in Berlin—“the place at the end of the swamp”—since 1200 CE. Your maiden name, Osterman, means “from the East.” When did your ancestors come? Were they refugees? So many questions come to me here, in the city of your birth, almost a half century after your death.

Refugee Reality

We are refugees from that room
with its single bare light bulb
Will our visas ever be granted?
Will our dead know where we’ve gone?
—Lowinsky, “Refuge” first published as “Limbo” in Levure Litteraire

Everywhere people are talking about the refugees flooding Europe. Germany, of all countries, has offered haven for many. Can you believe that, you who fled for your life from Germany? America didn’t want to let you in, didn’t want a flood of Jews. Eventually, after what must have been frightening times crossing borders with false passports, you and your family were given safe haven. Now it’s America that wants to build a wall to keep people out. And here, in the city of the former wall dividing East and West, signs on buses and on walls declare “Alles is Möglich”—everything is possible. That used to be how things felt in America. No more.

The International Herald Tribune is full of the stories of the refugees. How they pass through Turkey, take a boat to Lesbos, just six miles into Greece, hoping to go further North, to Germany, if they’re lucky. How strange that Sappho’s little island has become the main point of entry for Europe. 2000 to 3500 migrants arrive there daily on inflatable rafts. Many don’t make it to safety.

Syrian Refugees Arriving in Lesbos

Hungary has closed its borders, built barbed wire fences, tear gassed, water cannoned, beaten, the war terrorized, hungry, exhausted refugees looking for haven. Here we are again, Oma, the dangerous border crossings our family knew in your time—how my father snuck across the border from Germany into Holland in the middle of the night, how my 18 year old mother and her older cousin took the train from Austria to Holland in 1938—when borders were closing—terrified that the cousin’s left wing connections would land them both in detention. In America there are people seeking refuge from dangerous gang riddled countries like Honduras. There are mothers and children, as well as unaccompanied children crossing borders, riding the tops of trains, risking everything to escape the impossible situations behind them, and to find their relatives in America. If they make it to the American border they are held in detention. There are politicians running for president on the promise to keep out the refugees, people like we were, fleeing for our lives. Round it goes, round and round. Where it will stop nobody knows.

There have always been refugees. Exodus and diaspora, go back to the beginnings of human history when our ancestors wandered out of Africa. Did they do so out of curiosity, the urge to explore? Were they driven by conflict or drought? When Dan and I were in Venice I read Jan Morris’ fine book, The World of Venice. She writes:

Venice was founded in misfortune, by refugees driven from their old ways and forced to learn new ones. Scattered colonies of city people, nurtured in all the ease of Rome, now struggled among the dank miasmas of the fenlands…They learnt to build and sail small boats, to master the treacherous tides and shallows of the lagoon, to live on fish and rain–water… 

If we are to believe the old chronicles, the foundation of Venice occurred on 25th March 421, at midday exactly.

Are we at the end of one era, entering another, like the ancient Venetians?

Forsaken City

O the habitations of death,
Invitingly appointed
For the host who used to be a guest—
—Nellie Sachs in “O the Chimneys”

In Berlin, Oma, it feels different. There are commemorations of the lost Jews all over “Die Mitte.” There are “Stolpersteine—”stumble stones—brass markers embedded in the ground so passersby will stumble over the names of those who lived here and were murdered in concentration camps. There are powerful sculptures, like one by Willie Lammert, called “Frauengruppe,” Group of Women—concentration camp figures emerging out of their nightmare, looking disoriented and gaunt.

Frauengruppe, by Willie Lammert

There is the Jewish Museum, which was an overwhelming experience for us. The old building, late 19th century, is connected to the new building by an underground passageway. One is forced down, down narrow steps into the dark gray walls and confusing maze of the building by the esteemed architect, Daniel Libeskind, who shaped his creation like a shattered Jewish Star.

Berlin Jewish Museum

One can follow the axis of the Holocaust, the axis of exile, the axis of continuity; there are voids to symbolize the lost fragments of European Jewry. One gets lost, disoriented, exhausted. The Holocaust Tower is a strange dark place, a very high triangle at the apex of which a crack of light is seen. When the heavy door closes behind one it is hard not to panic.

I was particularly taken by exhibits of Jewish family life in Germany before the Second World War, the time during which you were raising your big family, before all the deaths and the horrors. I was amazed to see a beautiful portrait by your teacher and mentor, Lovis Corinth, of his Jewish wife–to–be, Charlotte Berend. The portrait was made in 1902. You would have been twenty-one. I think you were studying with him then. Did you know Charlotte? She was just a year older than you, also a painter and a student of Corinth. I could see his influence on you in the warmth of feeling, the exquisite brushwork, and the feeling of interiority touched by light from without.

Portrait of his Charlotte by Lovis Corinth

There is a sculpture of a table, one standing chair and one chair knocked over, in bronze. It is called “Der Verlassene Raum—” The Forsaken Room—by Karl Biedermann. Around the edges of the work one can read inscribed lines by the great poet of the Shoah, Nelly Sachs— an essential muse to me. Did you know her work? She was born in Berlin, the same year as you were. I’d love to imagine you, Charlotte Berend and Nelly Sachs, lovely young women in a Berlin cafe, talking about your creative lives. What difficult futures lay ahead for you. A quote from Nelly’s poem is: “O ihr Schornsteine, /O ihr Finger, /Und Israels Leib im Rauch durch die Luft! “ O you chimneys/O you fingers? And Israel’s body as smoke through the air!

The Forsaken Room by Karl Biedermann

* * * * *

You can find more poems and stories about my grandmother, Emma Hoffman, in the Summer 2014 Issue of The Jung Journal, V. 8, # 3, in my book of poems, Adagio & Lamentation, and in The Motherline: Every Woman’sJourney to Find Her Female Roots.