All Saints Day. And Beyond.

Cimitiere Montparnasse l'automne, TiliaAmericana

The larger-than-life French writer Francois Rabalais is reported to have said on his deathbed, “I am going to see a great perhaps. Draw the curtain; the farce is played.”

I used to joke that the reason I went to seminary was to find out what happens after we die.So I started in at a progressive Methodist seminary, a place known for being inclusive and diverse. But my favorite story was of the time the Navaho chief came to perform a peace pipe ceremony. Everybody was real jazzed—diversity, inclusion and religious pluralism all in one!

But the first thing the chief did was request menstruating women to leave the room; they would not be allowed to stay for the ceremony. Big problem. Some women who weren’t menstruating left as an act of solidarity with those who were. Some men left, too. And no doubt some menstruating women stayed in order to protest their exclusion.

Worlds collide.

And I never did find out from the Methodists what happens after we die.

I finished up my studies at a Lutheran seminary with a bunch of older white male professors who taught us to keep our theology impeccable—as buffed and polished as a vintage Mercedes. If anybody was going to tell me anything about heaven, it would be this cadre of high-minded and committed intellectuals.

Seminary was a great experience in a lot of ways. But it never did teach me much about what happens after we die. And obviously there isn’t much anecdotal evidence.

My father died when I was nine. It was the finality of his absence that frustrated me the most. For years I had some semi-conscious expectation that he would return home to us, kind of like the way Sir Ernest Shackleton strolled into the whaling station on South Georgia Island after being given up for lost in Antarctica.

My mother, who died over a decade ago, visits me a lot in dreams. She shows up playing the Lucy Ricardo role, half mad, half mad-cap. But dream-life and life are not the same things. And I don’t think there is anybody who doesn’t wonder--with sweaty palms--about what happens après la mort.

Because it strikes me that it’s not faith in the unknown that’s hard—the existence or non-existence of God is, either way, a question of what you believe. It’s faith in the known that’s such a bugbear. We know we’re all going to die. What we’re all hoping for is that that unknown God will show up for it with us.

Albert Camus, the brilliant atheist and existentialist wrote: “There is but one freedom, to put oneself right with death. After that everything is possible. I cannot force you to believe in God. Believing in God amounts to coming to terms with death. When you have come to terms with death, the problem of God will be solved—and not the reverse.”

If there is value in saying the name of a loved one who has died or pausing in silence over the deaths of many, if there is value in laying a carnation into a crystal vase of water to memorialize the dead, I think it is more than simply psychological. Each action, each name is a way of letting death into our lives--not as the thing to fear, the thing that obstructs, the thing that torments--but as the force that sharpens our senses and snaps us to the awareness:

No life is ever finished. No belief in God is ever perfected. No permanence is ever fully rooted. But I think that in the varied, transient processes of living, believing, rooting, that’s where we find each other and we experience ourselves most fully.

When you get right down to it, Rabelais’ ‘great perhaps’ seems a little over-the-top, a bit of a farcical statement itself. How did he manage to time his final words just right—if these really were his final words and not just some myth? How did he know enough to be so certain in his sarcasm?

I prefer the rocky faith of Robert Frost, unwilling to crack the code of mystery:

Now let night be dark for all of me.
Let the night be too dark for me to see
Into the future. Let what will be, be.
                                     --from “Acceptance”

Not a Happy Poem About More than a Hurricane

Boone County Thunderstorm by Kyle Spradley

Waiting for the Storm

Instead of immortality, the gods gave us human affection.

                                                                          --Eugene Mirabelli

We are all waiting for the storm and there’s always a storm.
There’s always the quiet that comes before the storm and the quiet
that comes after, disaster
averted or limply borne.
We do not bear disaster bravely, even if acts of bravery
show our mettle; still we are limp before circumstance,
powerless as downed wires sheared through.
We are always waiting for the storm.
It bruits in the distance, foreboding nimbus
shadowing our hours, sheltering fears,
sapping our strength to power its own.

And we wait. Our births, deaths,
--separate storms. But there are always others
with their births, deaths and intricate
anguishes filtering through decades—
just a few decades--of mortal terror time and again.
We wait. We give aid.
And just as greedily take,
seeking shelter in the lean-to of human affection,
the human heart not meant to last a hundred years,
but strong enough to break and mend, break and mend,
over and over, an organ that grieves, receives, relieves,
and cleaves until it can beat no more,
silenced, once and for all.

We are all waiting for the storm and there is always a storm.
The calm in the living room—gold light from the mica shade,
the clay bowl’s milky glaze—collides with the forecast
of the front headed toward us. It’s off in the distance
till the hours bear it near, hapless and dangerous,
these clouds full of woe. What do they know
of mercy or blessings? That’s left to us, all we can do
is bring our dying bodies close and closer,
shoulder-to-shoulder--what's left?--and weather the storm.

A Story that is Barely There: Half-life

            I tried vomiting. I knew other girls who did it. They were assholes, but it isn’t only assholes who want to be thin.

            I didn’t like the vomiting, but for what it’s worth, it worked. I’d eat, go to the bathroom, gag myself, vomit, take a breath mint. I’d be back in the cafeteria or in class in just a couple of minutes. It takes me longer to shit than it did when I used to make myself puke.

            But I hated it. And I gave it up. Because I like—no, I actually love—the way things taste. Throwing them back up again just messes it up completely. Nothing tastes like a cheeseburger or a bagel with lite cream-cheese or Mom’s carrot cake after it’s been acidulated or whatever by your gastric juices. Everything ends up tasting like puke. Because by that point, that’s all it is. And it makes you never want to eat it again in its original state, either.

            So I gave up the vomiting.

            The last thing that was supposed to happen was for my sister to find out. She’s my little sister, but she loves me like a mother cat loves her kitten, skewering it by the scruff of its neck. It’s love, I guess. But it hurts. I’d never be that kind of mother.

            According to my sister, I’ll never be a mother at all. I’ve messed up my periods According to my sister, I’ll give myself ulcers. According to her I have bad teeth. Except I don’t have bad teeth. It’s that my mother had pneumonia when she was carrying me. They had to put her on antibiotics. The milder ones didn’t work, so they ended up giving her drugs that crossed the placenta and left me with a yellow tinge to my teeth and enamel that’s softer than normal.

            So I’ve always flossed. And especially when I was vomiting I always flossed. And brushed. I’ve never even had a cavity. Maybe vomiting would have given me a cavity if I hadn’t been so careful. But I had been.

            You couldn’t tell that to my sister, though. Not that I even tried. She found out about the vomiting and told Mom and Mom called my dad and told him, though he had very little to say on the subject. He has very little to say on any subject.

Johns: Ciardi and Ashbery

Leave it to me to find cause for complaint, in this case about those two stellar Johns of poetry of whom I am not worthy to touch the hems of their garments. (This is an allusion to a story in the New Testament about Jesus and the woman with the flow of blood. Google it, since I'm not feeling charitable enough to 'splain, as Ricky Ricardo used to say; if you don't know "Ricky Ricardo," Google "I Love Lucy.")

John Ciardi, 1916-1986

The two Johns I mean to complain about are Ciardi and Ashbery, the former a poet and Dante translator who died in 1986, the latter an equally famous poet who doesn't live all that far south from where I do which explains the restaurant anecdote to follow.

So I'm reading chapter one in John Ciardi's How Does a Poem Mean? which is a title I've always thought cloying, but he wrote it in the 1950's so maybe saying 'How' instead of 'What' didn't seem so cutesy-ish then. In any case, I was totally in sync with what he had to say--in spite of his tedious cross-examination of a Keats' sonnet--thinking that I would have my freshmen/sophomore students read this essay as a way for them to domesticate and even enjoy reading poetry. What, ho! I thought (because that's how I think sometimes).

But then I came to this sentence (the italics are his): "No matter how serious the overt message of a poem, the unparaphraseable and undiminishable life of the poem lies in the way it performs itself through the difficulties it imposes on itself. The way in which it means is what it means."

Sorry, Charlie. That's what's wrong with some poetry. It gets so wordy it loses all meaning. That's how I see it, anyway.

So--back to Ashbery. I mean, I can read John Ashbery. I just don't get John Ashbery. Only his French translations. And that's because I can read French. So I get what he's translating. Just not when he's writing in English.

Anyway, here's the restaurant story: I'm waiting for a friend for lunch at a somewhat trendy place in Hudson, New York--which in some circles is somewhat trendy. Ashbery enters restaurant, checks in at desk, annoyed already with no apparent cause other than the need to check his reservation.

"Ashbery," he says, "Party of eight."

"Certainly," the server says, and leads him to his table where a group of black-clad, serious-faced, variously pink-haired and mildly-pierced folks slowly assemble. John Ashbery remains unfazed and seemingly displeased. Fame doesn't suit a poet, perhaps?

Figs and speck

But what do I know? Or should I parrot John Ciardi--how do I know? 

My friend arrives. She is a ghost-writer. I am, if not a failed writer, then an unknown one. We have saved our pennies to eat our lunch at this trendy little spot with its locally-sourced cheeses, speck and beers. I don't mention that John Ashbery is just over there at the next table, glumly peering into some mineral water. What would be the point? We will never be obtuse enough to be that famous nor famous enough to resent eating here.

 

Pie-making

--for Tadeusz Borowski (1922-51), author of Ladies and Gentlemen, This Way for the Gas

Such innocence in apples, peeled—

Tadeusz Borowski, born 1922, Zhytomyr, Ukraine

pale, pock-marked, but ominous.

Pale, peeled apples not the orange excess of autumn;

Instead--shorn heads, bald and pocked,

the shorn heads of those in camps--

shorn of breath, later. (I am

remembering the Polish writer

and camp survivor, the suicide author.)

All I am doing is making pies,

pies with apples I have picked.

I am not remembering history.

Or I am trying not to.

But those bald-headed apples

bring home the pie-bald lie we try to swallow

each time we try to forget:

that apple skins are not as red as blood;

more blood's been shed

than apples peeled.

So I turn, numbed, from truth and sorrow

Toward the banal, lustrous folly--pie.

the Beautiful Pauses and the Beautiful Changes

JEH McDonald, Autumn Leaves, Batchwana Woods, Algoma, 1919

Okay, that post title sounds like an episode from Doctor Who. Or do I just create opportunities to allude to Doctor Who? Worse, am I using Doctor Who to lure unsuspecting  readers into reading poetry?
Of course not.

So, I found a great book at a good house sale on Saturday. All those college/grad school poets under one cover: Hopkins and Frost, Auden and Eliot, cummings and Roethke. The modern poets. Well, they had been.

Here's a poem by May Sarton I wish I'd written. I found it last summer, hand-lettered and framed, at a bookstore in Gloucester, Massachusetts, too pricey for me to buy. But it moved me so much that I scoured around for her collected poems and sent it out as my 2011 Christmas letter. But since she'd written it during October, it makes good sense to read now. 

Good advice: Read it slowly. (And at least twice.) That's how we do.

The Beautiful Pauses

                        --May Sarton from A Private Mythology (1961-1966)

Angels, beautiful pauses in the whirlwind,

Be with us through the seasons of unease;

Within the clamorous traffic of the mind,

Through all these clouded and tumultuous days,

Remind us of your great, unclouded ways.

It is the wink of time, crude repetition,

That whirls us round and blurs our anxious vision,

But centered in its beam, your own nunc stans

Still pivots and sets free the sacred dance.

And suddenly we are there: the light turns red,

The cars are stopped in Heaven, motors idle,

While all around green amplitude is spread—

Those grassy slopes of dream—and whirling will

Rests on a deeper pulse, and we are still.

Only a golf course, but the sudden change

From light to light opens a further range;

Surprised by angels, we are free for once

To move and rest within the sacred dance.

Or suddenly we are there: in a hotel room,

The rumor of a city-hive below,

And the world falls away before this bloom,

This pause, high up, affecting us like snow.

Time’s tick is gone; softly we come and go,

Barefoot on carpets, all joyfully suspended,

And there, before the open morning’s ended,

The beautiful pause, the sudden lucky chance

Opens the way into the sacred dance.

I write this in October on a windless morning.

The leaves float down on air as clear as flame,

Their course a spiral, turning and returning;

They dance the slow pavane that gives its name

To a whole season, never quite the same.

Angels, who can surprise us with a lucky chance,

Be with us in this year; give us to dance

Time’s tick away, and in our whirling flight

Poetry center the long fall through light.

There's another "beautiful" poem I wish I'd written. It's by Richard Wilbur and it's called "The Beautiful Changes." I can't put it up here because of copyright restrictions. But you can Google it. It just might make you happy.

From the memoir, Going Out

Franciscan Church, Bratislava

Faith of Our Fathers


The only part of the Latin Mass that I understood was the English part when the congregation said three times, very quickly “Lord-I-am-not-worthy-that-you-should-come-under-my-roof.-Speak-but-the-word-and-my-soul-shall-be-healed.”

Lord-I-am-not-worthy-that-you-should-come-under-my-roof.-Speak-but-the-word-and-my-soul-shall-be-healed.

My father said it, though I couldn’t hear his individual voice. I probably said it, too. I don’t remember. But then my father would go up to receive the parchment-papery circle of wafer that was the body of Christ. I didn’t go up. I wasn’t really a Catholic. I just went to Mass with my father for fun. That’s the kind of kid I was.

I liked the holy water in the little holders by the door. It always seemed more slippery than real water as if its power to bless and to heal was somehow related to its special viscosity.

I liked the genuflecting and the kneeling. I liked the marble columns that had pink veins running through them. For some reason they reminded me of Beechnut Fruit Stripes chewing gum that had been sculpted into these lovely columnar shapes. I always wanted to take a bite out of one.

Votives at St. John Cantius Church

I loved the incense. The mysterious sanctus bells. Mostly, I guess, I loved the little memorial candles that flickered willy-nilly in their blue or red glass votives. From time to time my father would let me light a memorial candle for Aunt Alice or Grandpa or for his own father, Pop, who had died before I was born.

My father would give me coins to drop into the metal box that sat next to a pile of thin, wax-coated wicks. I would pick up one of those long wicks, light it from another candle and then choose the votive I wanted. When my candle’s flame began to flicker along with its companion candles, I would drop the wick into a metal tray and its flame would gradually die out.

After my father died I used to light memorial candles for him whenever I was in a Catholic church. I imagined him watching me as I set a little tongue of flame into a blue or a red votive cup. I imagined that he knew I was lighting it for him and that somehow, in a way I didn’t pretend to understand and could scarcely allow myself to trust, it made me feel closer to him.

I liked the memorial candles best. But I also liked the hollow sound of the priest’s voice echoing throughout the walls of the church. I liked the way the ushers swished the offering baskets—on their broomstick handles—quickly up and down the pews, twice each service.

That’s how you could tell it was a Catholic church. They took the collection twice.

In our church—my mother and sisters’ church, my church—they took it only once and it was gathered slowly, the shining brass basin passed from hand-to-hand by every person.

Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church was very different from St. Augustine’s Roman Catholic church where my father went and where nearly all of my classmates—Catholics, like my father--went.

Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church was a better church, of course, a more godly church. Somehow I had been brought up to believe that. I’m not sure why we thought we were better. Maybe it was because in my mother’s church I was so much more terrified of God than I was in my father’s church.

For one thing, in my mother’s church there was so little to distract you from the fact of God’s awful presence. The pastor was a boring preacher who spoke unconvincingly of a loving God. In our hymns we sang of a God who existed, it seemed, only in order to menace us so that we should know ourselves as sinners, first and last: “Chief of sinners though I be, Jesus shed his blood for me;” and “Come to Calvary’s holy mountain, sinners ruined by the fall;” and “Go to dark Gethsemane, All who feel the Temptor’s power.”

They didn’t sing in the Catholic church. They just murmured responses and kneeled a lot. Maybe the Catholics couldn’t carry a tune. I’d never heard my father sing, but my best friend, Denise, was a Catholic and she was most definitely tone-deaf.

The Catholic kids got to take Communion by fourth grade. I wasn’t allowed to take Communion in my father’s church because I was a Lutheran. 

I wasn’t allowed to take Communion in my mother’s church either. I wouldn’t be able to do that until I was fourteen. That was not only because I wasn’t good enough, but because I wasn’t old enough to know just how not good enough I was. I would know a lot more about that by the time I was fourteen.

After Apple-picking, after Frost

With Frost, it’s all about frost. He’s got

a crop to harvest. That’s what it seems like.

I don’t mind that he’s a curmudgeon. I heard

he was a bad father. Who knows what kind of husband?

I only know him as a poet, a swinger of birches—used to be, anyway.

I know him as somebody who outwalked the furthest city lights,

as one acquainted with the night. And so on.

He didn’t know if the world would end in fire.

Or in ice. And once by the pacific (should I say

“Once by the Pacific” since that is what he said?)

he intoned the glum evangelist’s ire:

“It looked as if a night of dark intent

Was coming, and not only a night, an age.

Someone had better be prepared for rage.”

Why not? I’ve loved his Ingmar-American-Bergman nod—

(“Word was I was in my life alone/Word was I had no one left but God.”)

Cold comfort there, despite the moth-bit, hand-knit sweaters.

He’s spot on; we die—by fire or ice, what does it matter?

And in “After Apple-picking” he’s tired, a pane of glass

From the drinking trough that’s just ice just shatters.

It’s no mirror, no clue whether he will sleep for good

or just sleep somehow. But he says, without doubt,

“I’m done for apple-picking now.”

But I have been picking of late from this delicate harvest,

A tall daughter beside me, reaching beyond me.  

Our fingers sticky, our sacks heavy, our feet in the mud

No foreboding or theology in our late summer plunder.

No Frost to chide me, tramping through trees—

Ambrosia and Empire, Winesap and Spies—all the names runes

for Eden’s lost promise.

Unless Frost and God were both a bit wrong—

and what a wonder, what resurrection—

if there were still summer in fall. 

..