Glenda Burgess's Blog, page 36

They Blend

SOMEWHERE
Somewhere there waiteth in this world of ours
for one lone soul, another lonely soul -
Each chasing each through all the weary hours,
And meeting strangely at one sudden goal;
Then blend they - like green leaves with golden flowers,
Into one beautiful and perfect whole -
And life's long night is ended, and the way
Lies open onward to eternal day.
- Sir Edwin Arnold (1832-1904)

In keeping with the theme of recent blogs on commitment and relationship, I found myself studying this small poem by the old English poet Sir Edwin Arnold. What struck me was his interchanging use of the words "lone" and "lonely," and the image conjured from his use of the phrase of "they blend." Not as one might think blue and red blend to purple, but that the colors combine to make something new, something not present before. In this poem, Arnold chooses symbolism wherein leaves join petals and make a whole fresh thing- a flower.

But what of the idea of two souls lone and lonely? Are these words contextually or even metaphorically the same? I would argue not, at least not in the way I define them. "Lone" is for me the definition of alone: to be by one's self, in solitude, unaccompanied. The fact of the self alone may be separate from how one feels about such solitude. I personally value my alone time a great deal. It is fecund, creative, inward. Necessary to spiritual balance. Time devoted within self, both rich and treasured. But the poet uses "lonely" as the companion to his "lone," suggesting the solitariness of alone is met with an emotional vacancy that is of infinite melancholy; unfulfilled, pining in the absence of companionship. A condition of longing that may only be relieved by the presence of the perfect other.

There are those who might tartly suggest there is greater loneliness in life paired to the wrong other. That human loneliness is resolved less by conjoined physical presence than by something more intrinsic; a comfort anchored in the blend of two souls in genuine companionship. And what is such companionship? The presence of feeling shared. The equation of you plus me equals more than either of us taken alone. We are all, I suppose, Looking for Arnold's perfect blend "into one beautiful and perfect whole." And yes, I think we seek those idealistic relationships which transcend the individuals involved and stand apart - unique and worthy and strong. Rare, I believe. But real. But perhaps the ideal is always in flux: somewhere between lone and lonely, blend and whole.

Committed

Forgive me then if at the end of my story I seem to be grasping at straws in order to reach a comforting conclusion about matrimony. I need those straws; I need that comfort. Certainly I have needed Ferdinand Mount's reassuring theory that, if you look at marriage in a certain light, you can make a case for the institution being intrinsically subversive... I have finally found my own little corner within matrimony's long and curious history. So this is where I will park myself - right there in this place of quiet subversion of all the other stubbornly loving couples across time who also endured all manner of irritating and invasive bullshit in order to get what they ultimately wanted: a little bit of privacy in which to practice love.
- from "Committed," by Elizabeth Gilbert

I have been exploring lately the idea of what marriage is and isn't at different stages of one's life and experience. The romantic bond, the social contract, the partnership, the spiritual sealing - are two bonded souls side by side, sharing of life, or zipped together like two halves of a sleeping bag? Is marriage the ultimate legalized zipper or something else entirely?

Liz Gilbert's account (quoted above) of her year of wandering with her exiled Brazillan boyfriend as they awaited permission to marry, a condition of her boyfriend's legal admittance to the United States (excerpt from COMMITTED by Elizabeth Gilbert, Penguin), made for some strange reading. Homeland Security played a very big role in the most important decision of their lives. And as two scarred, and skeptical divorced adults, the idea of second marriage had not, until then, been on the agenda. Now, marriage it seemed, was the only agenda if they were to be permitted to live in the United States. Gilbert's book is, frankly, depressing. If you really want a close look at the ugly side of the institution of marriage, as both limiting and damaging, as the controlling institution in which the State holds and enforces conditions of personal incorporation as Mr. and Mrs. Inc., then by all means go with Gilbert down her path of study of the history of marriage. Her personal solution, ironically motivated by love of the most romantic nature, is to find meaning in marriage based in a kind of ultimate subversive freedom: a private and personal space within the legal construct that even the state may not pry into. Marriage means to you, Gilbert argues, what you make of it, regardless of the license, ceremony, or social practice.

I thought this discussion of relationship might open up some interesting explorations of commitment here on this blog: What we mean when we choose one another. What it means when a relationship is legalized, or spiritually sanctified, or simply given significance between two individuals. This is of course a huge topic - and inclusive of elements of cultural anthropology, history and feminism, property, religion, law, hetero and homosexual distinctions, etcetera. But I assure you, I don't plan the definitive treatise here in these musings. I will open the debate to discussions of what commitment means to me, to you, our loved ones, friends and community.

So today's question is this: If you or your beloved's legal residency required marriage and you were not philosophically inclined to support marriage, would you, as Gilbert did, marry to permit freedom of choice of country where you were allowed to live, or stand outside the system and refuse to play? Is marriage primarily a bond or a construct, or move fluidly between the two? Is something lost in translation?

Living a Life

A MAN
'Living a life'-
the beauty of deep lines
dug in your cheeks.

The years gather by sevens
to fashion you. They are blind,
but you are not blind.

Their blows resound,
they are deaf, those laboring
daughters of the Fates,

but you are not deaf,
you pick out
your own song from the uproar

line by line,
and at last throw back
your head and sing it.
- Denise Levertov

All week I have been thinking about what it means to "live a life." A life as full and long as perhaps ever intended to be, regardless of when or how life ends. Life is defined in part because of the finish. Are we any less masters of our fates then architects of endings? What is meant to be versus what happened to be? I have been thinking of the men and women of September 11, caught in mid-sentence on an ordinary day; I think of those that struggle with illness and its final conquest; I think of the accident, the blow, the abrupt conclusion. Like forceful sentences, what is short and punctuated possesses both intensity and density. The haiku is to the ballad as "Yes!" means a thousand things. Meaning is rich in reduction, much is said when we embrace our elemental essence.

I wonder if we color our lives in the laying down of days or distinguish them in the brevity of brilliant moments. Are we filled with love's completeness solely in the aftermath of tender ecstasy or in the reckoning of anniversaries? We talk about degrees of shading, of piecing together the whole of a design in all its complexity and originality. Somehow we pick our "own song from the uproar."

As the poet has written of life, "throw back your head and sing it."

Through a Child's Eyes

You who have held yourselves closed hard
Against warm sun and wind, shelled up in fears
And hostile to a touch or tender word -
The ocean rises, salt as unshed tears.
- from "Of Molluscs," May Sarton

The tremor of new truth in yesterday's American observance of the terrors of the attacks of September 11, now ten years later, was mirrored perfectly in children's faces. My own two, now 20 and 22, were then children: old enough to understand, and young enough to still hold faith with the world. They were frightened. The attacks made no sense. The uncertainty and danger of the world fully evident, they clung to a belief that the fundamentally wrong was also fundamentally unreasonable, and therefore, surely not part of the structure of life? Such blind and unprovoked attacks shouldn't have occurred in a moral world, and yet they did. Many of us placed the violence within a paradigm of what we called "momentary insanity."

Ten years later, I see that my children do not think the violence of the world, the terrorism of global dissidence, is "momentary" at all. Insane, yes. But extreme catastrophic violence is now part of every day of every year as the world polarizes around class, religion, culture, and politics. The world has become more chaotic and less comprehensible with every passing year. The violence irrational and theoretical, the impact brutal and inhumane. What is really at stake is our faith in a rational universe, in which good works, good character, and good intentions mean something. If we are targets of destruction for what we symbolize because of our differentness, our oppositional values, then fundamental commonality has been hijacked by fear. What all of us possess, our humanity, becomes irrelevant. And in that world, random violence replaces understanding. The world teeters on the brink of a loss of faith in goodness.

The now adult children of September 11 were not nearly as swept away by emotion as their parents on this day of observance and remembrance. This is their world: violent, unpredictable, complicated. They do not remember the innocence of what the world felt like before. And that is a huge loss. The mark of what this day means to all of us now is that everything changed.

The Fierce Within

INVICTUS
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
- William Ernest Henley

I found myself drawn to this poem today on the news that journalist Andrea Mitchell is fighting breast cancer. Another warrior on the road. A road only her soul can travel, lighting the way from within. And even as we wish there were things we could do beyond the obvious to offer our support and care, the obvious is genuinely enough. The spiritual battle belongs to the warrior alone. The medical battle to the advances of science. You and I bring soup and good books. A foot massage. Love.

Someone recently wrote they objected to the word "war" and battle terminology to describe fighting cancer. That cancer, in their view, was something that happens, and was not therefore an enemy we oppose ourselves to but rather address as we would any other unwelcome situation. I thought back on my husband and my mother's and brother's experiences with cancer and realized how profoundly I disagree. Fighting cancer does not establish conflict against our own bodies. Because this is a disease that is not an event but a takeover, not a minor malfunction but an invasive cascading meltdown, we build a battle team, a battle front, and a battle plan.

As I read Henley's poem, I thought of the triumph of spirit against all odds. The human spirit is the one element in any fight we own. Unconquerable. Immeasurable. I offer those I cheer on a supportive spirit, and faith to prevail. I offer myself my own inner flght. What we bring to the world is a collective light.

Summer Feast

STRAWBERRIES
There were never strawberries
like the ones we had
that sultry afternoon
sitting on the step
of the open french window
facing each other
your knees held in mine
the blue plates in our laps
the strawberries glistening
in the hot sunlight
we dipped them in sugar
looking at each other
not hurrying the feast
for one to come
the empty plates
laid on the stone together
with the two forks crossed
and I bent towards you
sweet in that air
in my arms
abandoned like a child
from your eager mouth
the taste of strawberries
in my memory
lean back again
let me love you

let the sun beat
on our forgetfulness
one hour of all
the heat intense
and summer lightning
on the Kilpatrick hills

let the storm wash the plates
- Edwin Morgan

Labor Day concluded the last days of summer freedom for the children of this city. A day of biking, picnics, listening to concert music lying in the green grass of the city park under the trees. Summer is a prime number, cornerstone of the mathematical biological calendar of flora and fauna, the apex of bloom. Over our head, the leaves of the trees rustle in dark silhouette, fat against the blue enamel sky.

I'll spool away a moment, maybe several this week, in the exuberance and promiscuous abandon of these verdant days. So much green, too much sun, the garden bursts over the fence and the stakes holding the climbing beans sigh. The white Scottie lies on his belly in the cool grass in the shade of the plum tree, nose buried in the scent of warm earth. He doses. The sun bakes the roof tiles.

Peaches, plums, strawberries. The abundance of the farmers market. In just a few short weeks we will drift, dropping like the leaf, into apples and berries, the flame-colored gourds, darkening nights and chill mornings. But today, the wind shakes the leaves of summer trees.

And I had strawberries.

Just a Breather

254
"Hope" is the thing with feathers

Story Work

We read stories to get experiences we've never known firsthand, or, to gain a clearer understanding of experiences we have had. In the process, we follow one or more characters the way we follow our 'self' in our dreams; we assimilate the story as if what happened to the main characters had happened to us. We identify with heroes. As they move through the story, what happens to them, happens to us. In comedy, heroes go through all the terrible things that we fear or face in our own lives - but they teach us to look at disaster with enough distance that we can laugh at it. In non-comic fiction, the hero shows us what matters, what has value, what has meaning among the random and meaningless events of life. In all stories, the hero is our teacher-by-example, and if we are to be that hero's disciple for the duration of the tale, we must have awe: We must understand that the hero has some insight, some knowledge that we ourselves do not understand, some value or power that we do not have.
- from "Characters & Viewpoint," Orson Scott Card

I was putting together some notes for a workshop and paused to reread this paragraph by the science fiction novelist Orson Scott Card from a chapter of his popular writing guide, "The Hero and the Common Man." The title reflects our innate inner duality. Our awareness of tandem weakness and potential greatness. Joseph Campbell explored the pull of the heroic ideal in his groundbreaking work on the psychology of the mythic hero. We are all both the ordinary and the extraordinary in any given moment. Yet in our reading we seek characters who inspire us through their predicaments and a surprising ability to rise to the occasion. To be brave, compassionate, courageous, inventive, adventurous, just, even powerfully cruel.

I have been thinking all morning about the heroic and the personal cost of heroism. How those situations which may bring out the best in us are often the most difficult to endure. That those events to which we respond most bravely are too often the ones that cost us the very most. If the gift of triumph over loss is a sense of ourselves as capable, will fewer future challenges feel overwhelming as our courage muscles flex, or will we find our enthusiasm for life dulled by an awareness of experience as a two-edged sword?

I confess I do not know the answer to this question - whether challenge strengthens our vitality for life or toughens us with scars - but I might hypothesize we exist on a pendulum of sorts between the two responses, boldness and aversion. I believe stories work our predicaments: that we challenge ourselves to play-act beside the hero, exploring our own paper courage. And in shadow-boxing, realize a true, real-world strength. We use story, our own or those of others, as allegory and call to action, fable and history. So do the story work. Take a step back to laugh and a thoughtful moment in contemplation of the day and its challenges. Be in awe. You are the hero of your own story.

Gladly Beyond

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
by E. E. Cummings

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully , suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands


I am revisiting e.e. cummings today, and this poem I quoted a few lines from a year ago, specifically then the opening stanza. The language is what holds me - unexpected phrases such as "the voice of your eyes," the chiseled core of "the power of your intense fragility," and the pang, the lonely yearning of "your eyes have their silence." How does someone, anyone, ever know language and the beloved sufficiently to paint the mystery so fully?

I think it perhaps this aspect of the poet that singes most deeply: this ability to encapsulate our longing, our disoriented suffering, the single note bittersweet rhapsodies. Human emotion is a melange of spices, a stew, and a salt. It is the poet who allows us to make a meal of tart and unsettling experience. The poet who labels the most heart-stirring wine, Reserve.

The Way of Memories

XXXII
Rain has fallen all the day,
O come among the laden trees:
The leaves lie thick upon the way
Of memories.

Staying a little by the way
Of memories shall we depart.
Come, my beloved, where I may
Speak to your heart.
- James Joyce

This small stanza by the poet Joyce seemed to echo my mood of the last few days. Memories lie thick at my feet as I walk the sands of Priest Lake, run along the dusty paths, sit by the phone waiting for news of a big moment in my son's life, acknowledge the pang that never softens on the anniversary of my mother's passing. Memories float up as dust motes at the least disturbance it seems. My life feels thick with leaves of experience, laden with the musty sweetness of love and regrets, losses and hope. There is a quote I think of - "Only Hope remained there within the rim of the great jar" (after Pandora had let loose disaster and affliction). Is it not true that when life blows through us, the lingering outline of those great shifts and heaves through life is almost always hope?

Today is the 22nd day of the month. This is my number. I was born on the 22nd, the autumnal equinox. A special person in my life was also born on this day, in a summer month. My beloved Ken passed on the day of the 22nd. Passages - in and out of love and life and connection. I think all of us feel connected to one special day, in which memories seem to pivot around us like ribbons on the Maypole. Today is no exception. I am suffused - as though experience were saffron in the kitchen, heady with the flavors of life. Memories, the poet writes, tarry us along the way. Pause and welcome. The past grown gentle, accepted.

Hope lights the path home.