eight plagues not counting the election

A few days ago, walking home with a fresh loaf of bread under my arm, I came to a halt. Ahead of me on the sidewalk was an eight-foot, black-hooded figure stood with a scythe. It was leaning over the sidewalk, blade spanning the walkway like a banner. Okay, it's October. Halloween is quickly approaching. But I stopped. I let a woman walking her dog pass me. I helpfully pointed out the danger ahead, but she merely grunted, her nose buried in her phone. She didn't so much as look up from her screen as she walked past under Death's scythe. I reluctantly followed her. What I wanted to do was cross the street and avoid the ominous figure entirely. But that was silly, I reasoned, so I walked up and took a long look: I noticed the roughly cut black burlap gown, the wires holding the scythe in place, the string that lashed the figure to the fence. It's not that I suspected it might truly be the grim reaper, it's just that it doesn't seem like a good time in my life to take death lightly.

A few months before my father's death, life put on a Serious Face. I'm naturally prone to seriousness, so it doesn't take much. However, 2016 has given us: job restructuring, my son's testing for a learning disability, my dad's death, the sale of the businesses, my brother's state of mind after the sale of the business, Charles' new (and stressful) job, unexpected & chronic health problems, and of course the horrible horrible election. And, not to be forgotten, my mother-in-law moved near us in the spring. Charles vigorously dubs it "The Year of Challenges."

I feel less vigorous. I've started reading Rilke and Mary Oliver religiously, and am rereading the Diaries of Etty Hillesum. I started journaling again and begun listening to interviews with poets and philosophers via the On Being podcast. And I walk and walk and walk. I follow a daily loop along Crystal Springs, spying herons and kingfishers, flickers and barn swallows, red winged blackbirds and bushtits. I lean longingly over the creek hoping to spot the silver splash of salmon heading upstream to spawn. I talk to my friends while walking. Jenny called as I walked in a torrential downpour earlier this week, and listened (again) my litany of woe. "What number plague is this?" she asked laughingly, "There are usually seven." Well, I think we are at eight—and that's not counting the election. I think by the eighth plague you can start to expect that things to change for the better. Already I feel a resilience in my bones that wasn't there six months ago.

As I'm walking, this line from Rilke comes to me: Now you must go out into your heart / as onto a vast plain. Rilke is a heady draught from which you can only take a few sips at a time. Because, to use his own words, "Everything must be lived" (and living more than a few lines of Rilke at a time can be overwhelming!).

But out onto the plain I go: quiet and full, empty and expectant.

Next week Jenny flies in from Kona, and while she's here there is my Father's memorial service, followed immediately by Halloween. A joyful macabre mess awaiting me. Downstairs, in their beds, my children are singing one of my Father's favorite hymns, "Come Thou Fount." I am teaching it to them so they can sing it at my Dad's memorial. First my daughter's voice drops off in sleep, then my son's. The house is locked, and I have a cup of tea next to me. Whatever may come next, I still inhabit this snug little world of clean laundry and messy desks, steaming coffee and wet elm leaves, piles of library books and muddy boots, half-sewn dresses and half-knit mittens, bikes, tears, bird books, old computers, laughter, silence, kisses.

Rilke on the last day of the beach holiday

You are not surprised at the force of the storm—
you have seen it growing.
The trees flee. Their flight
sets the boulevards streaming. And you know:
he whom they flee is the one
you move toward. All your senses
sing him, as you stand at the window.

The weeks stood still in summer.
The trees' blood rose. Now you feel
it wants to sink back
into the source of everything. You thought
you could trust that power
when you plucked the fruit:
now it becomes a riddle again
and you again a stranger.

Summer was like your house: you know
where each thing stood.
Now you must go out into your heart
as onto a vast plain. Now
the immense loneliness begins.

The days go numb, the wind
sucks the world from your senses like withered leaves.

Through the empty branches the sky remains.
It is what you have.
Be earth now, and evensong.
Be the ground lying under that sky.
Be modest now, like a thing
ripened until it is real,
so that he who began it all
can feel you when he reaches for you.

Book of Hours, II 1

the hidden place that heals

Over and over by us torn in two,
the god is the hidden place that heals again.
We are sharp-edged, because we want to know,
but he is always scattered and serene.

—Rainer Maria Rilke
from The Sonnets to Orpheus, XVI
Translated from the German by Stephen Mitchell

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It is Bright Wednesday, or at least the dying nub of Bright Wednesday, and I am finally sitting down to write. All day a cool, steady wind passed through the trees out my window. Each time I looked the sky and river changed color as if trying on different outfits: clouds once low and thin above choppy gray water, another moment green and heavy over gold glitter.

It was a productive day, both children (finally) back in school after a lingering spring break. And I finally began preparing for Genevieve's eye surgery for esotropia next week. By prepare I primarily mean prepare myself—I have already spent plenty of time preparing Genevieve. My habit is to focus on getting through all the unpleasantness and anxieties by clenching in and checking out during the difficult moments. I want to be done with it all and take off her bandages and have her eyes see straight. I want the healing well underway. Just like I want to be done with packing and saying goodbyes and sorting the keeps from the throw-aways. I want to plug through without engaging the uncertainties; pit-pat, all squared away. But I'm learning is that while this method might have worked well for me at one point in my life, and may still function OK at times, it certainly isn't helpful for my three-year-old. (And, surprise, surprise, it isn't great help to me either.)

Fear of engaging the present moment in favor of waiting for a more serene future moment is in essence living in fear. This literally means that my back is tense, my neck and shoulders clench, and my derriere is tucked in. I am trying to keep it all together by walking around stiff as a board. And what's more: no one can keep it all together anyway. Not even God. Isn't that what we learn during Holy Week? Today the Redeemer of the world is slapped on the face. Those lines from Holy Friday always catch in my heart. I have to ask myself, was Jesus walking around stiff as a board for thirty years, dreading his crucifixion? Wanting to get this being human thing over and done with? As I recall, he only allowed himself one night of that.

Over and over by us torn in two / the god is the hidden place that heals again. To be broken and feel my brokenness, to sit with uncertainty and accept it—this is part of the goal. But more importantly I am trying shift my focus away from the things I am dreading. To instead regard the whole situation with curiosity and gentleness. To remember that we are having this surgery now because we have an awesome doctor here, a surgeon who is an expert in this procedure. I can't be sure nothing will go wrong, but that small fear is only a small part of a much larger picture. The vast majority of things in my life, and in Geneveive's life, are going incredibly well. I know that hidden place that heals again, I've been there before. Now I just have to trust and live, breathe, through it. To be there—awake—for both of us.

{ p o e t r y  w e d n e s d a y }

everything changes

E N D   O F   A U T U M N

I have seen for some time now
the change in everything.
Something arises and acts
and kills and brings suffering.

In the gardens now from day to day
is a change from green
to yellow and gray,
a slow dying-away:
how long my road has been.

Now I stand in this emptiness
and look down on the rows of trees.
Almost to the distant sea
the foreboding earnestness
of the sky lies heavily.

–Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated from the German by C. F. MacIntyre

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It has been Poetry Wednesday all day, but I have been off-balance all week. The thin slice in pie-chart of my brain where Poetry Wednesday resides has been taken up with other mysteries—mostly social & business in nature—but not excluding a reoccurring dream in which I am given a new (and lovely) item of clothing only to find it is not finished, its collar is held on with straight pins or the hems left raw and unevenly cut. I believe I've had this same dream three nights in a row now, and a few times last week too.

It is cold, finally. A heavy blanket of fat gold maple and fluted ginko leaves covers the sidewalks in the morning, as if they fell overnight in a rush to protect the ground from coming snow. Gloves and hats, now necessary, are jammed in pockets and backpacks as the walks to school in cold weather commence. My son's kindergarten teacher left for Finland at the beginning of the month, where she plans to marry and then live. I liked her, but her sudden leaving hasn't gone down that well with my son. Or anyone, for that matter. Tomorrow there are parent-teacher conferences without a teacher; things limp by in their in-between way. I don't like in-betweens any better than my son. He came home today complaining that his stomach aches because school is too loud; before bed he told me he is worried about how everyone is going to stay on our planet when it's round.

Everything changes. And life is full of the in-between places, hobbling off-balance until you get two shoes back on. Genevieve needs two simple surgeries. Ike needs a new teacher. I am good, though, because I finally got our internet working properly and some of my more pressing technology issues sorted out.

And I'm going to bed now where I'll dream about a rust velveteen cloak with a hood basted on, or a lovely navy double-crepe dress with side seams unsewn.

[ F O R T H E S A K E O F A S I N G L E P O E M ]

   Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)—they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and knows the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn't pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else—); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the stars,—and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves—only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.

R A I N E R   M A R I A   R I L K E 
from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

{ p o e t r y   w e d n e s d a y }

alternately stone and star

© 2009 by Amber Schley Iragui, Barbados

E  V  E  N  I  N G
Rainer Maria Rilke

The sky puts on the darkening blue coat
held for it by a row of ancient trees;
you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight,
one journeying to heaven, one that falls;

and leave you, not at home in either one,
not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses,
not calling to eternity with the passion of what becomes
a star each night, and rises;

and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)
your life, with its immensity and fear,
so that, now bounded, now immeasurable,
it is alternately stone in you and star.

Translated by Stephen Mitchell from The Book of Pictures, 1902-1906

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 This is the Rilke Appreciation Club, apparently. But given that Friday's theme is evening light, it was hard to pass up this poem.

I live mostly in between. Holding together the things that sit, often incongruous, in me; desires asking for completion or merely attention. Or maybe just as a question mark, floating there, as though my heart contained a list: copper beech, Columbia Gorge, old flame, French, or the name of a childhood friend.

Last night I dreamt my father was walking beside me at a luxurious spa. There were Japanese baths and rock-lined hot springs and flowering trees above oddly beautiful exercise equipment. My father was vigorous and cheerful, wearing a pink-striped button-down, drinking some sort of expensive coffee. If you know my father you know how unlikely this is, right down the pink shirt. But I am of the school that everything we see in our dreams represents ourselves, so I am curious to watch the more curmudgeonly side of myself (sorry, Dad!) blossom and luxuriate a bit.

The point is this: we narrate our lives. There is plenty material we can elaborate upon or discard. But more often than not we are given things—stone, star—and we are left to make do. Some things refuse to go, other things are ever inexpressible or unattainable. But we just have to hold what we've been given, gently, letting it sit with us. Or, alternately, letting it unravel about us and run squawking across the yard. We are the voice narrating the sitting and the squawking, and we don't have to jump up and chase it. We don't have to make everything fit, my Dad can wear pink button-downs and I can let my question marks float along beside me, unexpressed but present. My heart ever expanding and closing, warm and cold, light and dark.

{ p o e t r y   w e d n e s d a y }

the onset of summer, with a little praise for rilke

B E F O R E   S U M M E R   R A I N

Rainer Maria Rilke

Suddenly, from all the green around you,
something—you don't know what—has disappeared;
you feel it creeping closer to the window,
in total silence. From the nearby wood

you hear the urgent whistling of a plover,
reminding you of someone's Saint Jerome:
so much solitude and passion come
from that one voice, whose fierce request the downpour

will grant. The walls, with their ancient portraits, glide
away from us, cautiously, as though
they weren't supposed to hear what we are saying.

And reflected on the faded tapestries now;
the chill, uncertain sunlight of those long
childhood hours when you were so afraid.

From New Poems, 1907-1908, 

translated by Stephen Mitchell

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It is summer, suddenly, the way that happens in New York City. When you wake one morning and spring is over, a blue-green haze hangs over the river and even the taxis' honking seems muffled after fighting through the humidity. There is a soft sensation of weight against your skin as you move.

Things are good. Genevieve is healing, and I notice she can hear better after the surgery. All that worry behind me, and the summer months nudging us forward. 

The poem above is one of my favorites by Rilke. I think I've posted it previously, but it bears reposting. Its four short stanzas paint as beautiful a description of the moments before a summer downpour as are written in English, and obviously German as well. What moves me most, though, is Rilke's understanding of how experience colors perception. It takes little imagination to see how a rain shower encompasses both solitude and passion. But here it also falls over the misunderstandings of generations in gracious, if not restrained, space—even grandiosity—, and reflects the way time slows in childhood, allowing fears to swell and settle upon a landscape.

 { more poetry wednesday }

a fresh-turned field of breath

Now it is time that gods come walking out
of lived-in Things...
Time that they came and knocked down every wall
inside my house. New page. Only the wind
from such a turning could be strong enough
to toss the air as a shovel tosses dirt:
a fresh-turned field of breath. O gods, gods!
who used to come so often and are still
asleep in the Things around us, who serenely
rise, and at wells we can only guess at
splash icy water on your necks and faces,
and lightly add your restedness to what seems
already filled to bursting: our full lives.
Once again let it be your morning, gods.
We keep repeating. You alone are source.
With you the world arises, and your dawn
gleams on each crack and crevice of our failure...

--Rainer Maria Rilke
  Uncollected Poems 1923-1926

*  *  *

We have all been sick for over a month now. Everyone has been to the doctor, only to be told there is nothing to be done but wait. Wait until Spring, it seems, sitting around wiping runny noses. We've come to an agreement, the virus and I. We stay in, drink lemon and honey tea with elberberry syrup, spend nights curled up together around humidifiers, hacking. I offer her Tylenol and Benedryl, zinc and vitamin C, boxes and boxes of kleenex, chests and chins shiny with vapor rubs. All of which she is happy to accept, as long as they don't mean she'll have to actually go. And although lately she seems a bit thin, she's still on best terms with Genevieve. They are fast friends who won't be parted. Say, until June.

Meanwhile, these five and a half rooms and eight windows form the boundaries of our little world. I read books about inner journeys, introversion, and psychological interpretations of Greek myth. I search ebay and etsy for elusive out-of-print textiles from Liberty of London or Heather Ross, and pour over a site where I can (for at least $20 a yard) design my own fabric. I order more books on Amazon. I wipe noses, change diapers, fill the slow cooker with chicken and pork. I look for ancient ivories to redraw for a book I'm designing, I retouch badly-photographed images of Romanian icons painted on glass. I search for more images, growing weary of Byzantine art (I'm sure I've seen every one of these frescoes hundred of times!). I do the dishes, rinse the recycling, refill the humidifiers. And, disappointingly, I am irate with my children for hitting each other, for whining, for throwing food on the floor I just vacuumed for the third time today. For needing me so insistently, so loudly, so endlessly.

I am ready for the gods to walk out of these lived-in Things. From my dingy recycling bin, from the icons in the Glory of Byzantium, from me. We keep repeating, virus to virus, image to image, day to day. Toys just tidied up surge out to the hallway, beds unmake themselves, dropping pillows and socks on the floor. Leftovers grow old at the back of the fridge, tired flavors merging into lumps I cannot bring myself to revive. The same struggles, fears. I wake at night, remembering why I got annoyed at my husband over dinner. It's the same reason I got annoyed at him the day before, the hour before. Time that they came and knocked down every wall / inside my house. New page. Only the wind / from such a turning could be strong enough / to toss the air as a shovel tosses dirt: / a fresh-turned field of breath.

turning inward

G O I N G   B L I N D

She sat at tea just like the others. First
I merely had a notion that this guest
Held her cup not quite like all the rest.
And once she gave a smile. It almost hurt.

When they arose at last, with talk and laughter,
And ambled slowly and as chance dictated
Through many rooms, their voices animated,
I saw her seek the noise and follow after,

Held in like one who in a little bit
Would have to sing where many people listened;
Her lighted eyes, which spoke of gladness, glistened
With outward luster, as a pond is lit.

She followed slowly, and it took much trying,
As though some obstacle still barred her stride;
And yet as if she on the farther side
Might not be walking any more, but flying.

Rainer Maria Rilke
translated from the German by Walter Arndt

* * *
I have been reading about introversion lately, borne of the tiresome game of tug-of-war my husband and I have long played over socializing. And while it was no surprise to me that I am, most definitely, an introvert, reading about introversion has been freeing.

Even though I was raised with one very introverted parent, I nonetheless got the message that it is more healthy to be an extrovert. I'm sure this is not only the fault of my parents, but also the general culture. It doesn't take much to notice that the qualities of extroverts (assertiveness, enthusiasm, high energy, gregariousness, among others) are more valued in American culture than those of introverts. For example, my husband (who is an extrovert) had lunch with two friends recently and mentioned that I'd been reading a book called The Introvert Advantage by Marti Olsen Laney. They asked him, obviously puzzled, what those advantages could be. And even though I'd talked to him at length about the subject, he still didn't seem to know. Sigh.

I found this quote in an Amazon book review for Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain:

"Let's face it. One cannot expect people handicapped with extroversion to be able to think deeply or meditate over the serious philosophical, scientific, or artistic subjects which move the deeper among us."

For whatever reason, although most likely as a response to all the pushing and prodding to be more cheery and social, I've developed my own reverse snobbery toward extroversion. And while my best friend and my wonderful husband are both extroverts, I nonetheless identify all too well with the quote above. So many extroverts aren't able to sit still long enough to let the obvious facts sink in. And, amazingly, when they do sit still they don't seem to have the skill of following their thoughts down to their roots. Perhaps I'm being a bit harsh? Clearly many extroverted individuals can sit still and ponder--however for them to do so may not be natural. And that is what it is to be an introvert, for me at least: the innate ability to fully ponder. And, ah! pondering is so pleasurable. I can just ponder joyfully here for hours.

But sadly, my extroverted little daughter is crying in her crib.

A last note: I've long loved the poem posted, and perhaps going blind turns one's sight inward, where one can always fly.

{ other  p o e t r y   w e d n e s d a y  posts }

You have so mild a way of being

The light shouts in your tree-top, and the face
of all things becomes radiant and vain;
only at dusk do they find you again.
The twilight hour, the tenderness of space,
lays on a thousand heads a thousand hands,
and strangeness grows devout where they have lain.

With this gentlest of gestures you would hold
the world, thus only and not otherwise.
You lean from out its skies to capture earth,
and feel it underneath you mantle's folds.

You have so mild a way of being.
                                                         They
who name you loudly when they come to pray
forget your nearness. From your hands that tower
above us, mountainously, lo, there soars,
to give the law whereby our senses live,
dark-browed, your wordless power.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Book of Hours

to post, at last, this archaic torso

A R C H A I C   T O R S O   O F   A P O L L O

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved beast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

Rainer Maria Rilke

* * *

I have long loved this poem. And many times I've wanted to post it for Poetry Wednesday, but was daunted by the enormity of the last line: you must change your life. It's intimidating to throw together a little blog post about changing my life, particularly following such a powerfully beautiful poem. And as a mother of young children, just getting enough sleep seems like a sufficient goal.

And yet I come back to this poem over and over, perhaps because it sums up my understanding of the relationship between beauty and truth. How real beauty--including the artistic creation of it--can peel away the static of our lives and put us more in touch with who we really are. It can make us vulnerable, wide-eyed and silent. At best we become a medium though which the mysterious beauty of world in which we live shines.

I would love to write more about this subject, but I fear if I try I will never post this poem. Instead I want to post something I read in this month's issue of the Sun Magazine. It comes from the Reader's Write section, which this month was about singing. The description of Murad reminds me of the torso in Rilke's poem above:

I met Murad in the summer of 2010, in Svaneti, a region of the Republic of Georgia. He and the other singers in the choir Ensemble Riho lived in villages at the base of the Caucasus Mountains, miles of snowcapped peaks that separated them from Russia.

I hardly ever spoke directly to Murad, but he conveyed a feeling, a way of existing in the world. Even if he had tried to explain his music to me, I wouldn’t have understood; we didn’t speak each other’s language.

Foreigners who had come before us had given Murad a nickname: the “Rock Splitter,” for the volume of his singing. I expected a large, hairy-chested man, but he was slight and nimble, with ruddy cheeks and silvery eyes. Between recording takes at our makeshift studio, he would stare pensively into the distance. A farmer, he spent his days under the sun, and I got the sense that he was unaccustomed to being inside.

When Murad opened his mouth to sing, his neck veins bulged, and his stomach grew taut. His voice was loud but also remarkably graceful. Something other than sheer volume gave his music its strength. After several days of watching him and his fellow choir members sing thousand-year-old chants and centuries-old tales of war and survival, I decided Murad’s power lay in his ability to embody and transmit history. He was not singing about himself; he was transforming his body into a vessel for the music, for the past, for the many people who had sung before him. That widening of the neck, those big breaths, that steady stream of immense sound were all a negation of the self.

At its best, singing is a selfless act.

Sarah Gibson
Providence, Rhode Island

world was in the face of the beloved

World was in the face of the beloved–,
but suddenly it poured out and was gone:
world is outside, world can not be grasped.

Why didn't I, from the full, beloved face
as I raised it to my lips, why didn't I drink
world, so near that I could almost taste it?

Ah, I drank. Insatiably I drank.
But I was filled up also, with too much
world, and, drinking, I myself ran over.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Uncollected Poems
translated from the German by Stephen Mitchell

{ Poetry Wednesday }

you must change your life

We're leaving Maine in a few minutes, having bought skeins of golden yarn and redeemed our filled frequent customer card. I've worked hard this last week, and completed a pdf portfolio, as well as two freelance projects. Surprisingly, I am not dreading the return to Yonkers as much as I thought I might.

I woke this morning to sunlight and remembered one of my favorite poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, it always inspires me.

Archaic Torso of Apollo

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.