. . . how I tell a friendly acquaintance, who has embraced me upon seeing me, who is sitting now amidst the gregarious others, that I'm here to write, gesturing down to the quiet end of the benches, claiming a space there.
You would think I had something I was dying to say.
(Do I have something I am dying to say?)
So much already has been said. So many words cascading down in a roar that drowns out every other word: sounds, meanings lost in that roar. Behind my eyes lately: one of the imponderable cataracts of the world. Niagra. Victoria. Constantly roaring, pouring down like a kind of static destruction. Where only smells, scents remain disparate and trackable. Sound and shapes and time lost in that everlasting fall.
I get to thinking the best I can give the world is a little silence. That's what it needs more than more words poured out and roaring. An open circle somewhere. Some bubble inside the noise. A quiet room, swept clean.
And I don't think I'm going to be changing the world any more by saying again what I see: the catttails this afternoon, ravishing as I rushed by. Seed heads fluffed out, each seed precarious and readying for flight. Readying to start all over again. The engines of creation. The light (of course, always, the light) shining through that haze of seedy down. The future held there by habit just before the wind scatters everything.
Anyone driving down Highway 30 saw that, if they had their eyes open. What good does it do to say I saw it, too? So I see cattails gone to seed. I see salmon berry petals. I see the prickles on a stem. I see the serried file of spores on a fern frond.
Anyone can see that much.
But I guess that's what I'll still be dying to say until I actually do.
Anyone can see that much, just . . .
There is no excellence in mothering -- only adequacy.
Though this is the best thing my daughter ever told me: "But, Mom, you are the most adequate person I know." She tells me this now, laughing over the phone, and it comforts me and grounds me where a gusty, "You are so wonderful," would have left me heavy and shaking still.
We disagree though whether adequacy and excellence are different things. She tells me it's like long distance running, that it's the stubborn adequacies that get you there. She says my idea of excellence is a sprinter's idea.
Later I'm telling my own mom how things go these days, approaching a full year of adoption. How I think I've got it figured out and then I know I don't. My Youngest is full of certainty and vehemence. I recognize this as his superpower. But like invisibility and infinite elasticity, vehemence can be hard to live with.
In all of us I hear a ratcheted stridency, ready and waiting the moment he begins to insist and insist. In me, I hear it most of all, a rising argumentativeness. "I know, I know," says my mom when I tell her over the phone. "I know too well. I was never able to just step back and say, So why does it seem that way to you? Why don't you tell me about that."
"But that's the thing. I thought I had learned to do that. I had been proud that I didn't feel I had to argue with the older children," which makes us both sigh and laugh. "But this time, it doesn't work. All those techniques I learned, do nothing. I step back. He just says the same thing over and over, in a kind of frenzy, louder and louder. And insisting on things he knows almost nothing about. Things he has just asked explanations for."
And sigh and laugh again.
So I took him aside and said, "Look I'm concerned about all this argumentative stuff. What can we do? I can't think of anything that will fix it, can you?" My Youngest, who has liked and latched onto the idea of code words, suggests immediately, "We'll say Peaches!"
"Beaches?" I ask. "Peaches." "Okay. Hmm." "No, Oreos." "Well, let's think about it."I don't say (but I'm thinking) thatI'm a little reluctant to have Oreos be the code word for polite behavior since that's a word used already to color-code certain societal norms disparagingly. While the kind of peace and cooperation I'm hoping for comes in every color under the sky.
The next day I have a story for him, "Here's the thing. When one of us realizes that it's turning into an argument, we just need to go back to the safe place where we're going to keep our love, okay? We're at the beach and you and I have spent all day there ... building sandcastles ... flying kites ... collecting sand dollars ..." "Where's ... ?" my Youngest asks about his older brother whose acceptance he seems to prize more than anything I can offer. "Young has his own place with you and with me. But this place is just for you and me, where we keep our love safe. And now we're sitting down to a huge picnic. Everything we want. Fried chicken. Watermelon. And I'm going to say, I like peaches. Because that's what I'm bringing to the picnic. You don't have to say anything. Or you can say, I like Oreos, because that's what you're going to bring, or I like peaches, too, or I like pizza, or raspberries or anything." "What if I say, I don't like peaches?" "Hmm. I don't think that will work. Because we don't want to keep anything delicious out of our picnic, do we? So it can be anything but it has to be something you like."
He thinks this is brilliant. I think I am brilliant because all that day it works. And our home feels warm and joyous. Like I realize it often, even almost always, used to feel in the years before without me ever being aware of that magic. "Because you used imagination, which is your powerful gift," says my mother. "Until the evening," I tell her, when after we look at pictures together it is time for bed and I nudge him up with my fingertips lightly on his back. But he budges not. He leans back against the nudging. I say, "Come on, now. It's time to go," and nudge more consciously. He weighs his whole, not inconsiderable, weight on my hand and, as I would with any of the older children, I push with real briskness so that he has to lean the other way and stumble forward onto his bed. He swirls around, his face full of rage, his fists balled up and swinging. "What? Are you going to hit me?" I ask him, because this turn seems like lightning out of a blue sky. He shouts. He says, "Right. Just play volleyball with the Stupid Boy ball." I say, "It's time for bed. Get your pajamas on." I walk away. And go sit in my own room, feeling again inadequate. And tired. And inadequate. Again. And then I hear bare feet pattering down the hallway. There he is, in his pajamas, "I think I need to make peace with you," he says and burrows in for a hug. "I think you do," I say and feel comforted, despite our inadequacies. This is the first time he's initiated this kind of peace-making, instead of simply responding to mine. I don't know what I'm doing as a mother. I never really have. But it hasn't stopped me yet.
I take heart in my unknowing from Wislawa Szymborska who said in her Nobel acceptance speech, (though probably she said it in Polish) (and certainly she said it of poetry and not mothering):
But poets are the worst. Their work is
hopelessly unphotogenic. Someone sits at a table or lies on a
sofa while staring motionless at a wall or ceiling. Once in a
while this person writes down seven lines only to cross out one
of them fifteen minutes later, and then another hour passes,
during which nothing happens ... Who could stand to watch this
kind of thing?
I've mentioned inspiration. Contemporary
poets answer evasively when asked what it is, and if it actually
exists. It's not that they've never known the blessing of this
inner impulse. It's just not easy to explain something to someone
else that you don't understand yourself.
When I'm asked about this on occasion, I
hedge the question too. But my answer is this: inspiration is not
the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is,
has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom
inspiration visits. It's made up of all those who've consciously
chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination.
It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners - and I could list a
hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous
adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new
challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their
curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem
they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous
"I don't know."
I am still curious to see how things will turn out in each of their lives. I will tell you I got the safe-place/storymaking idea from Leonard Cohen who calmed a riot at the Isle of Wight while the embers were still glowing where the oversized crowd had already tried to burn the stage Jimi Hendrix had been performing on. Cohen got up on stage, still rumpled from sleep, two o'clock in the morning, and began, in his halting apologetic way,
When I was seven years old, my father used to take me to the circus. He had a black mustache, a gray vest, and a pansy in his
lapel, and he liked the circus better than I did. But there was one
thing that happened at the circus that I used to wait for. I don’t want
to impose upon you… but there was one moment when a man would stand up
and say, ‘Would someone light a match so we can locate one another?,’
and could I ask you, each person, to light a match so I can see you all?
It is the pansy in the lapel that captures me as I think it must have seized the imaginations of the wild children in his unruly audience. That little poem.
I can do that much. I can ask for enough light just to see where they are out there. My Youngest, like all his siblings, surpirses me over and over with the generosity of his responses.
And If I can't pat myself on the back for the surprising sweetness
and unlooked-for generosity, how he keeps trying, always trying, to get it
right, his readiness to love and to respond. If I'm not to blame for his goodness, neither can I take credit for his stumbles. Only for mine. And even then, so much in me, in both of us, is rooted in earth deeper than I can ever know, lit by invisible energies. No wonder sometimes we get it wrong. So wonderful that sometimes we get it right.
I give you this clip just to break you into her heavy south London accent but then you have to listen to this:
All these ways of speaking truth that cannot be my ways of speaking it. But I think of this when I'm walking down the street -- not even of Portland, where it's easy to believe every fifth or seventh stranger is muttering words like this, with just this passion, just this naked blaze -- but even here in my small and dwindling badluck town, where I watch the soles of feet lift and fall, the feet of all these children who once were cheered for first fearful steps now who walk all unapplauded.
Snatching from the air just two that swirl around my head: My wicked many-greats grandfather who is casually referred to in
travel books to the south of France as "the cruel Simon de Montfort." My not-so-many-greats aunt, Fanny Mary aka "the magnificent
Mrs Bernard-Beere" who trod the London stage with Bernhardt and Kemble and had her face emblazoned on biscuit tins and cigarette cards, not to mention appearing full-figure on the front page of the Illustrated London News.
Unlike Dr. Bronner above who cared more about humanity than his own family (--Dad, I'm hungry. -- What's more important? Dinner or uniting Spaceship Earth? -- Well, you know it's kind of hard to argue with that), my greatgreat . . . grandpa de Montfort, a tall, muscular and handsome man with a magnificent mane of hair and a winning, straight-talking manner, was famous for his "conspicuous monogamy," for his unbreakable word, for his devout faithfulness. And notorious for his ruthless slaughter of the Cathars, a utopian proto-Protestant rural people in the troubadour country of Languedoc.
He and his wife, Alix de Montmorency, my many-greats grandmother, in an age when marriage was more a merger of political interests, would not bear to be separated from each other. She and the young children, one of the youngest a boy who carried a bit of the DNA that now is mine, lived in castles on the edge of the fighting, close enough that Alix would regularly roust up reinforcements and supplies and march at the head of the troops to bring aid to her doting husband. I don't know what that growing up may have been, but one son at least, Simon Jr., grew up determined to live his adult life with no authority bearing down on him ever again and set about with such steel purpose that he forced the Magna Carta on the king, thus breaking the ground for English democracy. That wasn't my line, though, which instead wandered off into Britanny, then East Anglia and lost itself in obscurity.
Allies spoke of Simon the elder in glowing terms, fearless, straightforward in his dealings and leading by example with no breath of hypocrisy, but he and Alix, as united as they were, were not kind to those outside their recognized group: she taking time to persecute the Jews in Toulouse while her dear one gouged out Cathar eyes and lopped off arms and noses and upper lips, sending defeated men home to their heretic villages with the bloody faces of living skulls. Poets' eyes that had gazed skyward on starry nights. Hands caressing lute-strings. Lips that had sung,
I go to her with joy Through wind and snow and sleet. The She-Wolf says hers I am And by God she has it right
It was my line cut them off.
On the other hand, my tragedy queen aunt was the daughter of an alcoholic landscape painter (my great-greatish grandfather) and the Other Woman in a menage a trois from which my great+ grandmother fled, preferring handcarts and sagebrush and out-in-the-open polygamy. I've read the letter our shared forefather sent his other emigrating children, a piteous piece of writing explaining why they ought never, never to drink and to forgive him if they can.
From all accounts, he lived the rest of his life in happy dissolution, painting his landscapes for people who would pay, a boon companion of Charles Dickens. He was content to be known not by his own name but as the father of the famous Mrs. Bernard-Beere, who was Thackery's goddaughter and who kept her second husband's name through all her subsequent marriages. She played some great parts, but usually picking up after Sarah Bernhardt or Ellen Terry had moved on to other roles: "a conscientious and painstaking artist," "one of the finest emotional actresses on the English stage," "an actress of some merit," "not a powerful actress but a picturesque-looking woman who dresses characteristically in rich aesthetic gowns and artistic ornaments." She was a lifelong friend of Oscar Wilde, appearing in his plays and producing later plays of his when she formed her own acting company, touring Europe, America and Australia. She is noted for the first "disastrous production" of Sullivan's The Foresters. She had no children.
There is a reason I gravitate to these stories -- they act out for me my own central battle. On one hand, the successfully fond and cooperative marriage, found handfast with a blinding anti-poetic bigotry. On the other hand, the domestic sacrifice made for the sake of art . . . all those second-rate, third-rate landscapes and performances best (or only) remembered now by those who remember first the heartaches and betrayals.
" . . . the precious ones I overthrew for an education in the world . . . "
I thought I wanted to look at Dr. Bronner and Leonard Cohen as mystic and socially conscious poets (of rather varying degrees of ability, not to mention sanity) who do what they need to do to find a popular medium to carry their im/mortal words to a wider audience (soap labels, LP covers and live musical performance). But like everything for me, instead it boils back down to this battle between being a good partner, a good parent, and doing good work.
Aunt Fanny Mary, who remembers her now but me? Well, some scattered someones obviously, who mention her in passing. But did she really choose art over life, or did she just live the life that lay before her?
As if these were immutable sides to choose from. As if Greatish Grandpa's bohemian lifestyle or Great-Aunt Fanny's aesthetic gowns could have been a stay against artistic mortality. As if I didn't have other happily married foreparents who managed not to ravage any countryside whatsoever, nor slaughter poets. I doubt, no matter how deeply I indulge in fervent monogamy, I am in any grave danger of sudden uncontrollable bouts of eye-gouging and arm-lopping.
And I don't think there has to be this battle, this wall, this false choice between faithful family makers and serious song makers. If I could just think of anyone who lived in kindness with their children and mate and wrote with excellence. Okay, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Elizabeth Gaskell. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, if I stretch the idea of excellence a little, a very little.
Surely there are others.
I do wish though I could have been descended from William Blake. Who may have seen angels swinging from the trees and, in his middle age, was fond of taking the air in his garden all Adam-and-Eveish without even a fig leaf, his sweetly complacent Catherine by his side with only her knitting for cover, surprising afternoon callers.
So he was a little mad.
At least he managed to write well and live in domestic happiness for 45 years, until he died. Catherine believed he visited her regularly through the intervening years until she too passed, calling out to him that she was coming.
Everything tugs at everything, everything points to everything else. And that is why I return again to this modern psalm. For me it maps out the territory of praise -- our lives as praise, our work as praise --
#23 from the Book of Mercy, by Leonard Cohen
MY SISTER AND I BEING ESTRANGED,I parked my trailer at the furthest limit of her fields, the corner that is left, by law, to the poor. Her hundreds of cherry trees were blossoming, and on the road to the great stone house that they lined, a lacework of petals. It was a Saturday. I reclined against a little hill, a shoot of wheat between mysteeth, looked at the blue sky, a bird, three
threads of luminous cloud, and my heart would not rejoice. I entered
the hour of self-accusation. A strange sound trembled in the air. It was caused by the north wind on the electric lines, a sustained chord of surprising harmonies, power and duration,
greatly pleasing, a singing of breath and steel, a huge string
instrument of masts and fields, complex tensions. Suddenly the
judgement was clear. Let your sister, with her towers and gardens,
praise the incomparable handiwork of the Lord, but you are pledged to
the breath of the Name. Each of you in your proper place. The cherry
trees are hers, the grapes and the olives, the thick-walled house; and
to you, the unimaginable charities of accident in the Corner of the
Poor.
I'm sending it to you like this, on the back of an imaginary postcard, though the words are not mine believing you will hear what I am saying.
It may seem to you, my Imaginary friend, that I'm fobbing you off with quotations from other sources, keeping all my own words locked up. And maybe I am. But this is not a helter-skelter scatter I am giving you. This is my thesis, just without all the interconnecting tissue of furthermore, therefore, and thus we see. I am talking about something else but really I am pointing more intimately.
And look, another postcard underneath the first . . .
possibly Bronte Sisters, possibly by Landseer
. . . on which I have written nothing except . . .
"In praise of my sister," by Wislawa Szymborska
My sister doesn't write poems, and I don't think she'll start writing poems. She is like her mother who didn't write poems, and like her father, who didn't write poems either. Under my sister's roof I feel safe: my sister's husband would rather die than write poems. And -- this begins to sound like a found poem -- none of my relations is engaged in writing poems.
There are no old poems in my sister's files and there aren't any new ones in her handbag. And when my sister invites me to lunch, I know she has no plans to read me her poems. Her soups are excellently improvised, there is no coffee spilt on her manuscripts.
There are many families where no one writes poems, but where they do -- it's rarely just one person. Sometimes poetry splashes down in cascades of generations, creating terrible whirlpools in mutual feelings. My sister cultivates a quite good spoken prose and her writing's restricted to holiday postcards, the text promising the same each year: that when she returns she'll tell us all all all about it.
These two postcards are meant to comment on each other.
If I sent you enough of them you could arrange them
and rearrange them on your wall and read my whole story.
Of course, just because anyone can cover a Cohen song, doesn't mean anyone can do it as well. Just because his nothing-special gravelly voice fools anyone into thinking anyone can do better, doesn't make it true. Some versions, though full of all kinds of passionate sincerity . . .
. . . completely miss out on the self-deprecating humor that makes a song like this a reason to rejoice in the idea of growing old.
Because in his seventies, Cohen woke one morning to the fact that his friend, a woman he trusted as business manager had embezzled most of his retirement savings.
And what does he do? What would you do?
Go on world tour, of course. Which as some reviewers have commented, could have been pathetic, considering the necessity, but turns out to be one great big party . . .
Not to mention, offering real answers to the mysteries of it all.
Don't you love how this is an old picture come to life? And "raise me like an olive branch, be my homeward dove" -- isn't that the best kind of love, the safety after storm, the cradling ark, the promise of peace despite destruction. One of the things that fascinates me and delights me is how Leonard Cohen, still living, writes songs that can become anyone else's song. His own revisions seem to allow this:
Here's an early video version that is more weird Maya Deren experimental film dreamscape, bizarre and jokey, sung I think a whole octave higher than where he will settle a decade or two later . . .
. . . or this gorgeous, heartbreaking and for me, definitive video version. I can't tell you how much I love these old couples, dancing before their own wedding photographs, keeping faith. Their careful and aching embraces in contrast with the easy spins and dips of the newlyweds. It captures some of the beauty in loss, some of the persistent rapture despite terror of his original inspiration. Cohen says he wrote this song after hearing about the quartets of prison camp inmates made to play while their companions were marched into the crematorium. This is the creative transformation that turns horrors into a stubborn claiming of beauty and comfort even to the last moment. This video, in contrast to his earlier one, is more tragic but more full of hope, so that "raise the tent of shelter now though every thread is torn" becomes the wedding canopy and the sky overhead, both still valiantly carrying on over long love and unavoidable grief:
This last reminds me that song, dance, poetry, and drama all had their birth together. We have divided them up again, only to keep trying to put them back together again. Which maybe is what creation is all about -- light from darkness and then light shining in darkness, light encompassing, fulfilling, comprehending darkness though the darkness comprehendeth it not.
I think it matters -- a plea for sore-needed help (which is how Cohen wrote it) or a fatalistic resignation (which is how it is misquoted with a disheartening regularity). Which is your own last resort in the animating narrative behind all your choices?
meanwhile . . .
#23 from the Book of Mercy, by Leonard Cohen
MY SISTER AND I BEING ESTRANGED,I parked my trailer at the furthest limit of her fields, the corner that is left, by law, to the poor. Her hundreds of cherry trees were blossoming, and on the road to the great stone house that they lined, a lacework of petals. It was a Saturday. I reclined against a little hill, a shoot of wheat between my teeth, looked at the blue sky, a bird, three threads of luminous cloud, and my heart would not rejoice. I entered the hour of self-accusation. A strange sound trembled in the air. It was caused by the north wind on the electric lines, a sustained chord of surprising harmonies, power and duration, greatly pleasing, a singing of breath and steel, a huge string instrument of masts and fields, complex tensions. Suddenly the judgement was clear. Let your sister, with her towers and gardens, praise the incomparable handiwork of the Lord, but you are pledged to the breath of the Name. Each of you in your proper place. The cherry trees are hers, the grapes and the olives, the thick-walled house; and to you, the unimaginable charities of accident in the Corner of the Poor.
