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Poetry

Reminder

If you happen to get hectic around holiday preparations, desperately scrambling for gifts, trying to figure out how to maneuver family gatherings safely (physically re: Covid and emotionally re: we all know what…) let me remind you of something. There are existential woes out there that require attention, terrors that put our minuscule worries in context, but also simple joys that suffice, and plain determinations that move us forward rather than in circles driven by habit. Or by threat.

Shelter (The Refugees’ Dreams – 2016)

Aideed Medina, a poet from Fresno, CA and a member of Mothers Helping Mothers, an organization that helps people affected by political and environmental disasters, put it into words that guide me through this season of consumerism on steroids. Her phrases model courage, making me want to join these strong women’s dance in the face of inescapable truth. The poem is set in one of the (real-life)shelters for asylum seeking women in Tijuana, perhaps La Casa de Paso.

Repatriation (The Refugees’ Dreams – 2016)

Stone

By Aideed Medina

De piedra, sangre.

I make my own heaven. I drag it out of the streets, and inhospitable terrains.    I mixed “tabique”, brick, mortar with my hands, kneading,

I need, to make my own heaven.


It is clandestine, in broad daylight.
 

It’s microwave popcorn, from Costco, because Costco can cross the border as many times as it wants and it has never been asked to go back to where it came from. Not in this kitchen, scrubbed so clean, with bleach, that the roaches have to ask permission to scatter out onto the floor.

Sulema and I, don’t flinch. She has figured me out. We know we have lived some shit and now, it takes more than a cockroach to keep us from moving, forward.

Fuck the roaches, the military, the long nights and even longer days. There is popcorn to be made,

a courtyard of children waiting for it.

Baby girl walks in to check on our progress. She is waiting impatiently for popcorn, the smell of butter making its way around the shelter, La Casa.

The house is built on a solid foundation of Goodyear tires, and unpacked, repacked, suitcases, unpacked, repacked plans.

Today, there is popcorn.

All that matters is today.

For my sake, not Sulema’s


The flowerbeds, and the upside-down Christmas trees, drying out in the sun are beautiful.

I will remember them, when I am warm by a campfire, watching my children for signs of a chill.

I will remember them,

determined,

uneven steps, protruding out of a hillside, going wherever they need to go.

Wherever they need to go.

There is no going back.

Sulema and I both know this, standing in the hot kitchen of the TJ shelter, it is obvious.

It is a beautiful truth, it takes hesitation and beats it down, into the floor.


We danced on it.

Seeking Shelter (The Refugees’ Dreams – 2016)

No need to explain the message. But one of the secondary reasons I picked this poem has to do with the fact that the punctuation is even crazier than mine, although in her case probably intended while mine is simple ignorance…

Another reason for my choice was the name of the speaker’s partner, Sulema. It is a variant on Solomon, derived from the biblical Hebrew male name Shlomo, meaning “man of peace.” Just a reminder, that the season is theoretically centered around the birth of another bringer of peace. Not presents.

And lastly, the poem reminded me of the just opened exhibition at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education, To Bear Witness – Extraordinary Lives, which describes the fates of people who had to leave their countries and found safety here. Refugees from Austria, Bosnia, Myanmar, Cambodia, Germany, Hungary, Rwanda, Sudan, Syria, and Tibet witnessed the atrocities of war, genocide, and the Holocaust. The museum, working together with The Immigrant Story, in collaboration with Jim Lommasson and NW Documentary, tells their individual stories in a multimedia show. I am unable to review it due to renewed instructions by my oncologist to avoid public spaces, but I have previously reviewed and praised the work of the Immigrant Story folks. Check it out if you’re in town.

Integration (The Refugees’ Dreams – 2016)

Music today speaks its own language(s) on the topic.

In any event, if you still can’t get away from the gift giving or receiving scramble, here is a suggestion: Explore your local Buy Nothing network. Founded 7 years ago by two women in Seattle, the idea, based on longing for community, has spread across the country. It works with hyperlocal sites that allows people to give or receive things that are (no longer) needed, providing a direct line of help to your neighbors, friends, and other people you care for. Everything is freely given, “no money, no barter, no strings.”

On Buy Nothing, you can post three things:

  • GIFTS of items or services that others can use
  • ASKS for things you could use
  • GRATITUDES to show appreciation and thanks

If you type “buy nothing” into your Facebook Search function, it will immediately come up with local options. For us here in PDX there are multiple choices, divided by neighborhoods, or for the region as a whole. All you have to do is click “join the group” and you will see what is on offer or can offer something yourselves. All year long.

And then there is always popcorn…..

Flares at Lampedusa (The Refugees’ Dreams – 2016)

Montages are from my 2016 series The Refugees’ Dreams .

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Hope is a discipline

Hope doesn’t preclude feeling sadness or fear or anger or any other emotion that makes total sense. Hope isn’t an emotion, you know? Hope is not optimism. Hope is a discipline… we have to practice it every single day.” – Mariame Kaba

I will write about the amazing scholar, prison abolitionist and activist Kaba on another occasion. Today I want to use her guidance, quoted above, to offer a few recent examples out of my “hope exercise bag,” so we can enter this week with a smile on our faces.

  • Over 40 camels barred from Saudi “beauty contest” over Botox! Organizers of the 6-year old competition are on top of tampering! All 143 attempts! No more inflated body parts, stretched with injections or rubber bands! No more braiding, or cutting, or dying the tail of the camel! Camels were x-rayed, subjected to ultra sounds and genetic analysis, to ensure true beauty wins fairly (to the tune of $ 66.000.000 no less.) There’s hope!

  • Delay wins the day! Hundreds of thousands of bees survived being buried under volcanic ash for over 50 days after the volcanic eruptions on the Canary island of La Palma. The owner of the hives had not yet collected the summer honey before the volcano erupted last September. The bees were able to sustain themselves with their own honey, after sealing themselves in by creating a resinous material called propolis. This “glue” is created by mixing saliva and beeswax with secretions from sap and other plant parts. There’s hope ! Procrastination isn’t always bad and spit, wax and honey can save you. Be prepared!
  • The cure for seasonal depression discovered! Acquire a Moomin rug and all else will fall into place (or at least you land on something soft if you fall…) There’s hope! My Moomin addiction is constantly served by new creations. (And no, I do not own this rug; it was meant symbolically. I do have a Moomin bag, though!)
  • The antidote to hate in this world is remembering its victims as one way to prevent more harm. This is not the funny kind of hope, but the real hope I strive for when practicing the discipline. In awe of the film maker Güzin Kar, with gratitude to the New Yorker that picked the short film up in this country. There is hope when people remember. (And this one probably one that Mariame Kaba would approve of.)
Remembrance (The Refugees’ Dreams – 2016)

Or at least there are glimpses that we can, should, must hold onto until real hope returns, as instructed by Adam Zagajewski, who died last March. A huge loss to the poetry community.

Try to Praise the Mutilated World

BY ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI

TRANSLATED BY CLARE CAVANAGH

Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June’s long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You’ve seen the refugees going nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.

What’s Left Behind (The Refugees’ Dreams – 2016)

There is your Monday grab bag, now go and look for the silver lining, your song of the day!

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Hierarchies

I’ve never been sold on much of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry, and not for lack of trying, from sellers and buyer alike. She was a poet who lived a passionate life, transgressing boundaries of her time, struggling with addiction, childhood abuse, rootless-, restlessness and infidelity. Yet her words mask rather than reveal, rarely allow a glimpse of vulnerability.

Please don’t lecture me on the right of people to their privacy, or the value of reticence, I get it. I just describe my emotional reaction to people feeling compelled to hide something essential under the armor of protection of privacy. In any case, today is not about the poet, it’s about the thoughts that a particular poem of her’s elicited.

The Daughter – Tied to the Moon – 2018

One Art

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

by Elizabeth Bishop

The Rivals – Tied to the Moon – 2018

This is probably one of, if not THE most famous poems on loss around within contemporary poetry. Strange villanelle, the faster, fluster, master, disaster racing each other through ever widening losses, until the very end of a relationship that’s severed. Whether through abandonment or death remains unspoken.

Apparently the poem went through 17 drafts, each successive one eliminating more details that could tie it to the personal experiences that purportedly gave rise to the poem itself: the suicide of Bishop’s former long-time partner Lota de Macendo Soares after the poet had left her, and the abandonment by her subsequent lover, Alice Methfessel, a woman some 30 years her junior. She eventually returned to Bishop, staying with her until Bishop’s death at age 68 in 1979. Maybe that personal distancing by removing identifiable details protected her. it certainly raised the possibility for the poem’s readers to project their own losses into the lines.

The Lovers – Tied to the Moon – 2018

Here is what really interests me, though. The poet, in her repetition of “the art of losing isn’t hard to master,” and the title – One Art – suggests that all losses are on somewhat equal footing, all can be tucked away, no matter if it’s a key, a library book, a friendship or a country. Even with the loss of a person the catastrophe gets only acknowledged in parentheses, (Write it!) and as a conditional – it may look like – instead of an acknowledgement – it IS a disaster.

Of course no-one doubts for an instant that the death of a person can or should be equated with the loss of a pair of sunglasses, or that Bishop really meant that. Glasses can be replaced, the dead cannot. We have a hierarchy of the severity of our losses; they might vary in some details, but the overarching arc is probably the same for much of humanity. The poem likely expressed the desperate wish that the “one art” assumption could help to ignore the reality of true disasters, losses that will haunt us.

The Photographer – Tied to the Moon – 2018

What then if something utterly new appears on the horizon, a loss that we have not contemplated before, that we lack rituals for, that we cannot even judge for its long-term consequences, where do we stack that in this hierarchy? And stack we want, since a relative placement could help us modulate our reactions.

And how do we learn to master those losses, when we can’t even categorize them? What do you call being isolated from human contact, as you knew it, during a pandemic? What do you name the feeling that danger lurks behind every human interaction and if in doubt, you need to distance yourself? How do you adapt to a situation where your general assumptions about health and medicine’s magical rescue kit are turned upside down? How do you predict the damage wrought on us essentially social creatures, when socialization during appropriate developmental stages (nursery school!) is not happening? How do you integrate the opportunity cost when teenagers can’t “try out” relationships at a time where hurt does not leave extensive scars? Will their loneliness push them into clinging relationships too early?

The New World – Tied to the Moon – 2018

How will we be affected when the restrictions of rights or the expansion of duties create violent reactions in large parts of the population? How are we able to tolerate a sense of unpredictability regarding time frames – not knowing which loss is temporary, however long, or which is final – we will never and nowhere escape a pandemic due to constant mutations? Are we talking a few more months, years, decades? How do we sort the moral implications of property rights vs. inoculating the world populations on a large scale? Or the moral implications of some of us being able to take safety measures vs. others who cannot afford to?

The Musician – Tied to the Moon – 2018

I sometimes think the hardest losses to accept are those that defied expectations. Children should not die before their parents, a knee replacement should not put you into an irreversible coma, a right that you and your country fought for and cherished should not simply be ripped away from you by some empowered few.

And now we have a situation where not only our (naive) expectations that a Western, developed country should be able to escape a deadly disease, are defied. We also experience that the precautions against the threat themselves are causing harm. Covid isolation led to depression, anxiety and increased substance abuse, as well as overdose deaths. (Ref.) We are facing a complete reversal of what we thought was an overall given: a life expectancy extending easily into our seventies and eighties for most, a continuance of communal experience.

“The art of losing isn’t hard to master…” well, I am at a loss. Translated into German: Ich bin ratlos, which means literally “without advice.” Unable to give advice, or not having received any, the phrasing doesn’t tell. Not exactly a disaster, but a rather anguished way of being.

Longing for Home – Tied to the Moon – 2018

Here is a trailer for Reaching for the Moon, a (mediocre) film made about Bishop’s time in Brazil and cheerful music from Brazil to get us into the weekend.

Images today from the 2018 series Tied to the Moon about women’s experiences shared across history.

The Birth – Tied to the Moon – 2018

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May Their Memory Be For A Blessing

My mother’s Jahrzeit returns this weekend for the 38. time, she did not even reach 60 years of age. Neither did another, even younger woman, artist Dorothy Goode, who died this week last year. Also a year ago we lost Ruth Bader Ginsburg, going on 90. My mother-in-law died at the beginning of this month, well into her 90s. Two years ago the poet Mary Oliver was taken from us in her 80s, her incomparable sensitivity to and insight about nature now restricted to the work she left behind. Uncountable numbers of souls departed as a result of a pandemic that could have been stemmed during the last two years. Uncounted humans were erased by climate catastrophes, poverty and violence, children among them. May they all rest in power.

Jewish custom has us say “May their memory be for a blessing” after someone’s passing, often expressed as (z”l) or in Hebrew (ז”ל) after their name, which stands for zikhronah livrakha, blessed memory, in the shorthand form. The phrase refers to the blessing a person leaves behind, from a life lived in ways that reverberate, an impact that continues to flow. Whether goodness, creativity, love, justice or any other positive mark they left on the world, the point is that something lives on, blessing future generations.

In this regard, it does not matter how many years you are granted. The issue is what you make of them, or as someone said “your legacy of righteousness,” a term deeply settled in my soul, cliché be damned.

The poet Mary Oliver resonates for me over and over again by her ability to reconstruct the familiar, give it a twist or open it to questions that reveal reversed perspectives. Couldn’t think of a better legacy. The poem I chose for today, in memory of my mother who loved all things owl, helps us to move from visions of death as something dark and frightful to the opposite:

but so much light wrapping itself around us — as soft as feathers —

White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field

by Mary Oliver

Let yourself be carried, is the transcendent metaphor in the poem, without fear.

Until then let us carry others, without hesitation.

It’s the one legacy we all can leave behind.

Photographs today are of some of the postcards sent to me throughout the last 18 months of what turned out to be among the hardest times of our family’s life, by a dear friend who knows what owls stand for in my universe. The constant stream, tucked up on the fridge, has sustained me.

Music also dedicated to my mother, an anxious rebel and a Stevie Wonder fan, who never stopped trying to reach her highest ground.

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Stones on the Heart

Once you have crossed Portland’s Burnside Bridge you will encounter a building on the Eastside that has large sheets of paper hanging in its windows. They are printed with a poem by Oregon’s current poet laureate, Anis Mojgani. It is an appeal which addresses us with loving flattery, perceptive about potential burdens we might carry, and enthusiastic in its belief that there are remedies that can help you drop the stones of your heart, as he puts it.

The suggestions made me smile, made me frown, made me feel seen as one of the multitudes who experience themselves these days as “dark and angsty” as he says. (The word angsty, by the way, from the German word Angst (anxiety) was introduced as early as 1849 by English writer George Eliot. But it became popular in the 1940s when translations of Freud’s work promoted it in the context of neurotic fear, guilt and remorse.)

I was in a dark mood indeed, having been accused of neurotic fear, well, not in those words, but in a closely related term, namely being prone to conspiracy theories. Heated voices had been raised over an essay that I tried to summarize and that found nothing but scorn in the ear of my listener. The essay was published by Timothy Snyder, author of an interesting series of essays currently on the web, Thinking Aloud. He teaches history at Yale, and is a tenured fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. His work concerns East European history, the Holocaust, the history of the Soviet Union, and the history of Ukraine, and he has been published in the NYT, the L.A.Times, the Guardian, Christian Science Monitor and many more. I dwell on the pedigree so we can agree this is not some random fantasist, dabbling in pseudo-Freudian analysis, or simply a moron (one of the less condescending terms emerging in our “debate.”) Not that learned people cannot be idiots, but I think there is something else going on here. Hear me out.

The essay is titled Killing Parents in Bad Faith. – How historians will remember the pandemic.The main argument offered is that reckless behavior of maskless younger people endangering their older relatives, or reckless refusal of politicians to implement measures that protect the elderly and anyone else against the ravages of the virus is not simply based on stupidity. Instead it is a return to the (falsely applied) maxim of the survival of the fittest with the added benefit that it triggers wealth transfer that is direly needed by a younger generation who has seen the promise of upward mobility ground into the dust by decades of Republican politics. The author goes so far to talk about elder cleansing and generational harvesting, which would be clearly revealed in retrospect by future historians.

An extreme position, not backed up by empirical evidence, yes, I understand the varied reactions ranging from crap to idiocy I have heard when I talked about it with people. So why do I, not the most irrational person on the planet, see reason to keep an eye on the argument with a possibility that it might be true? Why do people who fully acknowledge that Republicans have embraced Social Darwinism, have refused vaccinations on the basis of non-scientific, ideologically driven beliefs, have shown publicly a willingness to sacrifice older generations, can’t go as far as acknowledging that there might be a condoning acceptance of lethal consequences when younger folks expose their elders to the virus,(if intentional parricide is a step too far?)

I wonder if Snyder’s arguments are deeply influenced by his immersion into Holocaust research, and my openness to them affected by being German. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum has a whole section devoted to the way Nazism, German people, average citizens like you and I, betrayed people deemed unworthy of life in ways that insured economic benefit to the perpetrators. As early as 1933, laws were established to force the sterilization of all persons who lived with diseases considered hereditary, such as mental illness, learning disabilities, physical deformity, epilepsy, blindness, deafness, and severe alcoholism. These people were colloquially called useless eaters.

Daily cost of feeding a disabled person and a healthy family.

The program escalated but 6 years later with Operation T 4, which instated “mercy death” of non-Jewish German and Austrian citizens by gassing. By the end of the war an estimated 275.000 people living with disabilities had been murdered. These included people who were brought to the authorities by their families for no other reason than being “difficult” spouses or defiant daughters (blamed to have mental illness) or elders who did not want to dish out an early inheritance. The euthanasia program explicitly included incurably ill, physically or mentally disabled, emotionally distraught, and elderly people.

There has been a lot of psychological research looking at how the elderly are valued over younger lives, with decisions made by participants across the world that IF they have to sacrifice some life, it will be the elderly over the teens. Those sentiments are enhanced during times of crisis. Public discourse during the epidemic (social media content analyzed by scientists) showed an increasing amount of ageism with some proportion alluding to senicide (the killing of or abandoning to death of the elderly.) Real life scenarios certainly happened in several countries across the pandemic where a lack of ventilators forced doctors to do triage with a cut-off of age as low as 65 in some places where you were no longer eligible to have your life saved. Princeton Psychologist Susan Fiske who studies prejudice and ageism finds in her surveys that “younger people want to be sure that the elderly don’t hog a disproportionate amount of time and resources. Older people are expected to step aside.” The only American cultures that have consistently positive views of the elderly are African Americans and Native Americans.

Prejudice against old people is of course a far cry away from stepping up and actually killing the old by active measures. One can look at the moral deprivation of murder at one extreme of the scale. On the other end of the continuum would be the morally justified decisions by doctors to grant survival to those who benefit most of it, the young, when means to ensure survival are limited. Then there is the vast area in-between. There is morally unacceptable action – the decision to expose vulnerable populations to maskless visitors, say or state decrees forbidding mask mandates. Or equally debatable inaction of the authorities to demand protective devices or order vaccinations mandates for people who come in contact with vulnerable populations, or the personal decisions by police, firefighters or nurses not to get vaccinated.

To get back to Snyder’s Covid scenario, yes, it might be .0002 % or whatever tiny proportion of maskless visitors to retirement homes who have consciously nefarious motives. Bad apples, etc. pp. Once a political administration justifies the sacrificing of this or that constituency under the mantle of Social Darwinism, however, personal motives can find political backing, ruthlessness can be uncorked, as history has shown. And we are very few steps away from such an administration in the years to come. Looking at some State governments, we are there already.

Stones on my heart, indeed.

Music more representative of fall than spring, but there’s still hope that spring might be rushing back….

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Shared Knowledge

“Stunningly original and haunting, the voices of Mrs. Midas, Queen Kong, and Frau Freud, to say nothing of the Devil’s Wife herself, startle us with their wit, imagination, and incisiveness in this collection of poems written from the perspectives of the wives, sisters, or girlfris of famous — and infamous — male personages. Carol Ann Duffy is a master at drawing on myth and history, then subverting them in a vivid and surprising way to create poems that have the pull of the past and the crack of the contemporary.”

So said the MacMillan publishers’ website blurb. I say amen.

The World’s Wife was sent to me as a surprise gift by a reader who had been taken by my blog about the invisibility of George Orwell’s wife. I have been reading the poems for a week now, spaced out so I could enjoy each unique, snappy, bright and at times sarcastic voice of the many wives and lovers:

Snooping around a bit on the net to see who the poet is – I had not encountered her before – I found numerous reviews that were of the “I’m a feminist, but …” kind, lamenting the sharp message that there comes a point where woman should not take it any more. Then again they came from sources such as the Literary Wives Club who read only books that have wife in the title and stress that marriages might be difficult at times, but hush, it’s all good. This collection of poems did not sit well with them, which is of course all the more reason to go and read it yourself – you will be amazed and amused, if I am your yardstick instead of the literary wives….

Made me also think, though, about the fact that the majority if not all of these poems are only comprehensible if you know the literary texts or historical and cultural events they are based on; in other words you had to have had a solid education rooted in the Western canon of Greek mythology, the bible, some basic science (Darwin) and psychology (Freud,)the occasional folk tale and a movie. Poetry for the initiated, then, and a case of the rich get richer, since these poems do enrich when compared to the narrative templates which they turn upside down – IF you get the jokes.

College curriculum-change debates about the value of teaching the writings of dead White men aside, the issue really goes back to the fact how we can have a common dialogue when education is so unevenly distributed in this country, with states deciding what materials are appropriate or to be shunned, with economic short-falls forcing so many schools to forgo anything unessential, and with American elementary and middle school readers consistently loosing ground in their ability to read literature. (The data in the link are from 2019, I shudder to think how assessments look after the pandemic.) It goes, of course, beyond discussion of poetry. Any public debate about any issue at all depends on shared assumptions, shared assessment of what the facts are, and a shared language.

Age is another factor that impedes shared understanding. I was stunned to learn – pre-Covid- during guided tours of graffiti in several countries, how this or that word or symbol means something that I had no clue about. A (visual) language I have little exposure to.

(Photographs today from a single building in NE Portland near MLK, seen last week.)

Took me years to figure out what ACAB stood for, a shorthand you see around the world. Never mind the 3 or 4 letter abbreviations that float around social media and that, beyond lol, I have trouble deciphering. Socio-cultural language changes have naturally occurred as long as new generations have been talking and trying to find their own style of communication. It is always those in power or those who fear changes to the status quo who react with horror. In fact in the recent German election campaign, the conservative party made the topic of creating new gender neutral language (a complicated construction when endings for each noun differ according to gender) a campaign issue, signaling high value of preservation over change. But this is about how something is expressed rather than lacking a shared knowledge base about what is referred to in the first place.

Here is one of my favorite poems of the collection, which includes stabs at gender fluidity, mansplaining, erotic satisfaction found in same-sex unions, and the fact that stodgy male personality characteristics will not be left behind, even when you are punished to be a woman for 7 years because you killed a female snake! Love the ‘from’ in the title, too, yet another letter to The Times reporting on more than the first cuckoo of spring. It all makes me wonder how men will read these poems compared to women. Wives or not.

from Mrs. Tiresias

by Carol Ann Duffy

All I know is this:
he went out for his walk a man
and came home female.

Out the back gate with his stick,
the dog;
wearing his gardening kecks,
an open-necked shirt,
and a jacket in Harris tweed I’d patched at the elbows myself.

Whistling.

He liked to hear
the first cuckoo of spring
then write to The Times.
I’d usually heard it
days before him
but I never let on.

I’d heard one that morning
while he was asleep;
just as I heard,
at about 6 p.m.,
a faint sneer of thunder up in the woods
and felt
a sudden heat
at the back of my knees.

He was late getting back.

I was brushing my hair at the mirror
and running a bath
when a face
swam into view
next to my own.

The eyes were the same.
But in the shocking V of the shirt were breasts.
When he uttered my name in his woman’s voice I passed out

*

Life has to go on.

I put it about that he was a twin
and this was his sister
come down to live
while he himself
was working abroad.

And at first I tried to be kind;
blow-drying his hair till he learnt to do it himself,
lending him clothes till he started to shop for his own,
sisterly, holding his soft new shape in my arms all night.

Then he started his period.

One week in bed.
Two doctors in.
Three painkillers four times a day.
And later
a letter
to the powers that be
demanding full-paid menstrual leave twelve weeks per year.
I see him still,
his selfish pale facepeering at the moon
through the bathroom window.
The curse, he said, the curse.

Don’t kiss me in public,
he snapped the next day,
I don’t want folk getting the wrong idea.

It got worse.

After the split I would glimpse him
out and about,
entering glitzy restaurants
on the arms of powerful men –
though I knew for sure
there’d be nothing of that
going on
if he had his way –
or on TV
telling the women out there
how, as a woman himself,
he knew how we felt.

His flirt’s smile.

The one thing he never got right
was the voice.
A cling peach slithering out from its tin.

I gritted my teeth.

And this is my lover, I said,
the one time we met
at a glittering ball
under the lights,
among tinkling glass,
and watched the way he stared
at her violet eyes,
at the blaze of her skin,
at the slow caress of her hand on the back of my neck;
and saw him picture
her bite,
her bite at the fruit of my lips,
and hear
my red wet cry in the night
as she shook his hand
saying How do you do:
and I noticed then his hands, her hands,
the clash of their sparkling rings and their painted nails.

Music today is the overture to the Merry Wives of Windsor – maybe I should only listen to music with wife in the title? But then I come across songs like this one….

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Mushrooms

Before we get to today’s musings, here is an urgent request (and please share the information.)

With the grocery shelf shortages, please remember NOT to buy WIC marked items. (Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) I think we used to call them food stamps.) The people who use WIC benefits to get their food are not allowed to switch to other brands or types. When those items are gone (usually labeled on the shelves) people go hungry.

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Mushrooms

by Sylvia Plath (1932 – 1963)

Overnight, very Whitely, discreetly, Very quietly

Our toes, our noses Take hold on the loam, Acquire the air.

Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.

Soft fists insist on Heaving the needles, The leafy bedding,

Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams, Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies, Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow, Bland-mannered, asking

Little or nothing. So many of us! So many of us!

We are shelves, we are Tables, we are meek, We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers In spite of ourselves. Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning Inherit the earth.
Our foot’s in the door.

Yes, this poem was actually used by the Oklahoma Ag in the Classroom, a program of the Oklahoma Cooperative Extension Service, the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry and the Oklahoma State Department of Education to teach about mushrooms. (Ref.) Together with an instruction page on the biology of mushrooms and how they grow.

No, this poem is not really all about mushrooms. Some see it as a gender metaphor, a feminist allegory about the fate of women kept small in a misogynist world, asking little or nothing. Others see it as veiled description of the fate of immigrants.

“… it was really about immigrants making their surreptitious way into a country. Hence ‘Nobody sees us’ because of their movement by night, or ‘We diet on water’ which suggests their impoverished state. The choice of vegetable is witty as these people are a ‘mush’ in the cabins through which they travel and the places they will have to secretly live in.

Plath herself is an immigrant to Britain. But it doesn’t matter if she did or didn’t mean this, the point is that mushrooms seem metaphorical for, for example, women’s rights and many other issues regarding the powerful and the powerless.”

Judge for yourselves…

Here is a lovely analysis of the poem by a biologist and poet who tries to give weight to the voices of nature as much as those of women who might try to be seen through the lens of the verses. Worth a short read.

All photographs were taken last week in my immediate vicinity. Fall has arrived.

Music today is recommended by no other than the scientists from Johns Hopkins University. Here is the link to their work and playlist when trying to figure out the effects of psilocybin (shrooms!) on patients living with depression.(carefully tailored to ascent, peak, descent of the experience.) I chose the Gorecki piece since I’ve always liked it. I think Sylvia Plath would have approved.

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‘That time of year thou mayst in me behold’

Sonnet 73

William Shakespeare 

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum’d by that which it was nourished by.
   This thou perceiv’st which makes thy love more strong,
   To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Is there such a thing as melancholy goosebumps? I’d wager yes, when judging my reactions to this sonnet set in fall. They prompted a quick turn-around to the glorious colors found on quotidian walks last week, promising that in every season there is radiance, whether we have to leave it behind or not.

The real reason I was thinking of Shakespeare, though, came from a mind boggling linguistic analysis of another of his creations that is giving us more than goosebumps, instead creeping us out: Macbeth.

Researchers set out to find the source of the fact that actors and audiences alike find the language of the play unsettling, in addition to the horrors unraveling in the plot, or the horrors imposed on us by thinking through the psychology of the main protagonists.

“Actors and critics have long remarked that when you read Macbeth out loud, it feels like your voice and mouth and brain are doing something ever so slightly wrong. There’s something subconsciously off about the sound of the play, and it spooks people. It’s as if Shakespeare somehow wove a tiny bit of creepiness into every single line. The literary scholar George Walton Williams described the “continuous sense of menace” and “horror” that pervades even seemingly innocuous scenes.”(Ref.)

They looked at the rhythm of the words spoken, some jarring ones like the witches’ spells. They looked at the frequent repetitions of phrases, moving from one set of characters to the next. And they counted words and the frequency of their use.

Some results of the statistical word count were unsurprising – yes there are creepy words galore, like “knock”, “cauldron”, “tyrant”, “weird”, “trouble”, “dagger”, “fear”, and “horror”.

Astonishingly, though, there was also an unusually high frequency of the simple word “the.” So they went back and read the play to see where it appeared when unexpected.

Consider the lines, spoken by Lady Macbeth when she is already nervous and distraught:

“It was the owl that shriek’d, the fatal bellman, which gives the sterns’t good night..”

The owl? Not an owl, which would be normal phrasing if we hear such creature in the night? Do we know which owl she’s talking about, since she assumes our familiarity with “the” owl? Something is off here; is she referring to a real thing or the proverbial idea of that messenger?

Many of those examples can be found throughout the text, and they transfer the play’s theme of equivocation – one of the reasons why it is not just a tragedy but something more akin to horror – onto the audience. “The Scottish Play” – how people who fear they might be cursed when performing, refer to it, is not just a horror play because of its body count (although if you consider, there are so many deaths caused directly or indirectly by the protagonist.) It’s not the horror of a good man corrupted into nihilism by a lust for power in front of our very eyes, or the fateful demise induced by guilt of those who share his lust for power. It is not the supernatural horror, potentially induced by real witches or real ghosts and other apparitions. It is the psychological equivocation of what is real and what might be hallucinated, what was truly prophesied or self-enacted by way of (mis)interpretation of the witches chant. It is about losing one’s mind, the greatest horror imaginable.

So much ambiguity, so much fear induced by not knowing the nature of it all. The equivocation was likely enforced by a raging debate in 1606 about the nature of witches. Shakespeare might have likely read the Discovery of Witchcraft published by Reginald Scott in 1584, arguing that it was all a hoax, contradicting royal beliefs of the times that witches were real and to be persecuted.

This ambiguity is now extended to the audience, when subtle use of words like “the” which signal that we should be familiar with the item mentioned – are we? Why would we be? Do we know ourselves or have we missed something? Uncertainty hinted at, established. Disquieting creepiness ensues. (More examples can be found here where I was alerted to all this in the first place.)

Clever, clever. Back in goosebump land, however.

Below are some stunning performances of the play.

Music is – one of my favorite of all times – Verdi’s Macbeth.

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Unacknowledged

Newspeak. Doublethink. Thoughtcrime. Big Brother. What’s the first thing that comes to mind when reading these words? George Orwell, 1984? I had planned to write about how the author, frequently misquoted no less, is claimed by the extreme Right these days. They are raging about all things “Orwellian,” cancel culture and authoritarian moves by a democratic administration.

While I pursued that topic I chanced on a biography of Orwell’s first wife which turned out to be much more interesting, revealing snippets rarely found in the hagiographic descriptions of the famous author. It also provided general food for thought about what happens – and I guess it happens frequently enough – when women subordinate their own interests, careers, needs to those of their (to be made) famous spouses. Mercedes Barcha Pardo, wife of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, comes to mind, or Sophia Tolstoy, Zelda Fitzgerald, Elias Canetti’s wife Veza or, in the realm of science, of course Albert Einstein’s wife, Mileva Marić. We see no or little corresponding acknowledgment of their contributions, even if they heavily impacted the intellectual output of the spouse in question, and not just served towards his comforts.

Eileen O’Shaughnessy, one of the first women to graduate from Oxford with a degree in English, met George Orwell (born Eric Arthur Blair) while she was pursuing a degree in child psychology. Apparently rocky from the start, their relationship was not made easier by the fact that she moved in with him into a damp, moldy little farmhouse in rural England. Their cottage at Wallington – “The Stores” – was supposed to enable them to live a self-sufficient life, with animals and vegetable gardens, crops sold in their store a well. The bulk of the hard physical labor fell to her, even if he chipped in occasionally, and then there was the typing and editing she did for his manuscripts. (Photographs today of what she might have planted, weeded, and harvested.)

Their marriage was supposed to be open, although it seems that he took advantage to have numerous affairs, while she mainly devoted her time to help him flourish as a writer. And not just her time – she introduced him, who had never finished a higher education, to modern English writers and all she had learned for her degree at Oxford. Several ideas or even whole phrasings and passages from her own writing made it into his later work. She followed him to Spain, nursed his wounds incurred in the Civil War, and helped him escape back to safety when his political leanings endangered him.

She took on jobs to supplement his meager income, long before he became famous for his major novels, something she did no live to see. She agreed to adopt a child – their shared desire for a family likely scuttled by his infertility. He was unwilling to get tested due too his abhorrence of masturbation (needed for the testing procedure.) His additional squeamishness regarding female sexual organs led her to keep a secret of her diagnosis of uterine cancer, (also played down so it would not interfere with the adoption of their son Richard.) Here she was, settled with an infant, riddled with tumors, living in London which depressed her to no end, and Orwell took off on assignment for reporting from Europe. Only a week before her hysterectomy – she died on the operating table at age 39 – did she write and inform him of her condition, worried that he might also balk at the monetary cost.

Here is a biography that delivers the details. The author, Sylvia Topp, argues that O’Shaugnassy could have had a successful academic or clinical career. Enrolled as a postgraduate student in educational psychology at University College, London, she was a protege of Sir Cyril Burt. Burt was ahead of his times, having demonstrated, against the contemporary consensus, that girls were intellectually equal to boys, and who had, in addition, argued that all children, male and female, should have equal access to education. Eileen could no longer pursue the degree when her time, energies and focus were absorbed by the needs of her husband – whose talent she clearly recognized and supported, though she did not live to see his fame.

Beyond the sacrifice, though, she was deeply unhappy in the relationship, with the two of them violently fighting more often than not. What keeps women from pursuing their own fates? It is not necessarily a circumstance influenced by any given historical era. We see it often enough in modern times as well. At the time, perhaps the stigma or divorce or living in separation might have been too large to bear, although much of it was spent during the war years where society was much more in flux with so many men absent.

And if anyone was aware of female capability, it was Eileen who had been raised in a household unusually devoted to giving both sexes equal educational opportunities, and who was the one who financed the couple with her work. I am stumped why the pattern persists, just looking at the unevenly distributed numbers of hours spent with domestic work nowadays, even among couples where no-one is particularly gifted.

Here is a poem she wrote, long before the two of them met. Engulfed by news of the growing horrors of governments led by Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, she feared that the world of scholarship and cultural life that meant so much to her, was being destroyed. Orwell took part of its title, after her death, for his most famous novel – and certainly you can find some of the seeds of the novel’s concepts and dystopian visions in the poem as well.

End of the Century, 1984

Death

Synthetic winds have blown away

Material dust, but this one room

Rebukes the constant violet ray

And dustless sheds a dusty doom.

Wrecked on the outmoded past

Lie North and Hillard, Virgil, Horace,

Shakespeare’s bones are quiet at last.

Dead as Yeats or William Morris.

Have not the inmates earned their rest?

A hundred circles traversed they

Complaining of the classic quest

And, each inevitable day,

Illogically trying to place

A ball within an empty space.

Birth

Every loss is now a gain

For every chance must follow reason.

A crystal palace meets the rain

That falls at its appointed season.

No book disturbs the lucid line

For sun-bronzed scholars tune their thought

To Telepathic Station 9

From which they know just what they ought:

The useful sciences; the arts

Of telesalesmanship and Spanish

As registered in Western parts;

Mental cremation that shall banish

Relics, philosophies and colds –

Mañana-minded ten-year-olds.

The Phoenix

Worlds have died that they may live,

May plume again their fairest feathers

And in their clearest songs may give

Welcome to all spontaneous weathers.

Bacon’s colleague is called Einstein,

Huxley shares Platonic food,

Violet rays are only sunshine

Christened in the modern mood.

In this house if in no other

Past and future may agree,

Each herself, but each the other

In a curious harmony,

Finding both a proper place

In the silken gown’s embrace.

Music today by Stevie Wonder from the album Talking Book, which is a favorite. One of the tracks, Big Brother, is in reference to 1984.

 

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Unseen.

“I want things to unfold slowly, often my things are quiet and simple enough that it takes time—a kind of slow overlapping—before people feel it.” – Anna Valentina Murch

Unfold slowly it did. It took me a full decade not jut to feel the art but to actually see it.

I’ve walked by that elevator shaft on the waterfront for years without ever noticing that the windows contained images of water, different configurations of waves illuminated by differences in light depending on cloud formation or time of day.

Created in 2011 by Anna Valentina Murch (lovingly remembered (and quoted) after her untimely death in 2014 by a friend here,) the unassuming public art is called River Wrap. It consists of 40 photographic images on glass that frame the corners of the ten story elevator tower that connects the Darlene Hooley bridge to the Moody plaza below. The photographs are of reflections of light moving across the surface of water echoing the bordering landscape, the Willamette river.

The idea of water seemingly filling a tower might have had different connotations in 2011 compared to 2021. Then it represented beauty, perhaps intended to be soothing, a reminder of waves lapping gently. Now I can but think of the hurricane-induced flooding of buildings, or memorials to rivers run dry, if not the drowned – art does change when historic context changes.

The elevator is currently closed, so I had no chance to explore what they would look like when you travel up and down at slow speed, or if they can be seen from within at all.

Murch was a British installation artist based in San Francisco. Solo works or those together with her husband Doug Hollis often focussed on ways to make people spend time and look: accentuating reflections, sparkle, glow and change in color of light on various surfaces, often water. A more familiar work here in Portland is the light art attached to the Tillicum Crossing Bridge. It uses 178 LED modules to illuminate the cables, towers, and underside of the deck. The base color is determined by the water’s temperature. The timing and intensity of the base color’s changes, moving the light across the bridge, are determined by the river’s speed. A secondary color pattern is determined by the river’s depth, that changes on the two towers and the suspension cable.

Other notable art installations by her can be found here.

So why did I notice River Wrap now and not before? A possible proximal cause: the light hit it just right to sparkle. But it was a gray, diffuse afternoon.

A two part answer could be:

(1) Distraction.

The elevator tower is across the street from the aerial tram station, where comings and goings of those futuristic looking passenger capsules draw your attention. There is also a never-ending stream of people entering or exiting the OHSU medical building, bound to draw your gaze. There is the new(ish) bridge glimpsed in the background at the river, usually the destination for my walks, beckoning the camera. So I never attended to the west side of the Moody Plaza before.

(2) Increased Attention.

Due to restricted movement, my radius of exploration has so incredibly shrunk. No more travel, no more visits to indoor spaces including exhibitions in galleries and museums, alike. No more walking or photographing where crowds of people congregate, all due to the pandemic. Those spaces, then, that are still open to me therefore are looked at in search of anything that is new, or worthwhile thinking through, or good for surprises while I walk there over and over and over again…

After all, the poem below does not apply to me (although I love it, like so much of her work.) I do behave in the cosmos as advised. At least I try to think so of myself…

Distraction

I misbehaved in the cosmos yesterday.
I lived around the clock without questions,
without surprise.

I performed daily tasks
as if only that were required.

Inhale, exhale, right foot, left, obligations,
not a thought beyond
getting there and getting back.

The world might have been taken for bedlam,
but I took it just for daily use.

No whats — no what fors —
and why on earth it is —
and how come it needs so many moving parts.

I was like a nail stuck only halfway in the wall
or
(comparison I couldn’t find).

One change happened after another
even in a twinkling’s narrow span.

Yesterday’s bread was sliced otherwise
by a hand a day younger at a younger table.

Clouds like never before and rain like never,
since it fell after all in different drops.

The world rotated on its axis,
but in a space abandoned forever.

This took a good 24 hours.
1,440 minutes of opportunity.
86,400 seconds for inspection.

The cosmic savoir vivre
may keep silent on our subject,
still it makes a few demands:
occasional attention, one or two of Pascal’s thoughts,
and amazed participation in a game
with rules unknown.

Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012): Distraction, from Colon (2005), translated by Clare Cavanagh in MAP: Collected and Last Poems, 2015

One thing is clear, though. So much public art is so in your eye, so prominently placed or gaudily executed that it is almost impossible not to be aware oft it. The quieter kind, like today’s example, then packs the punch of discovery, unbidden, serendipitously,creating a louder and longer lasting emotional echo, at least in my case. A gift.

Water-related music today by Sibelius.

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