We Can Do Hard Things, Saturday, 3/29/20

Writer's Altar

Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for.

Seamus Heaney 

We can have hope, if not optimism.  (when hope and history rhyme)


The Cure at Troy
Seamus Heaney

This Side of the Grave

We've got to keep writing and making art.

I'm really trying to hold on to hope. Heaney's The Cure at Troy has sustained me for decades, and this morning I'm typing out the part I love right here, by memory:

Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured

The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together
A hunger-striker's father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.

History says, Don't hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there's fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.
It means once in a lifetime
That justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.








I feel not a little despair.

Did you see the thin lips of the men who canvassed the crowd, pushed through ahead of him last night as he walked in and then, again, walked out?

Struck last night during the presidential address by a memory of working with women who had been abused by their husbands, by the ways abusers show recalcitrance, how the cycle continues. His dark imposition on the world. The two behind him. I cried during his convention speech and cried again during the inaugural one. Last night I watched the widow turn her face up to the sky as he droned on and the glamorous daughter looked on and all the people cried. No tears from me. I choked on bile. I thought about the great war machine that all presidents turn on, the tyranny of the ultimate sacrifice, of valuing soldiers' lives more than those they kill. Samsara, illusion, delusion. Maya, the illusion or appearance of the phenomenal world.

This morning I see that the attorney general will not be supporting those states who have legalized marijuana, that he will, indeed, be marshaling forces to come down hard. He's got federal law to enforce and federal law pre-empts state law. I'm going to persist in believing in miracles and cures and healing wells even as prisons continue to fill and children die and the sheep are driven over the cliff.

I'm going swimming today, may a further shore be reachable.

2 + 2 Does Not Equal Five

Privileged bed

Still flat on my back.

I'm sort of tired of mincing my words, and as some of you know, I'm not a woman who generally minces my words, except when I do. I'm not going to mince my words. I've trudged like many of you, the past couple of days, months, years, lifetimes, mulling not musing about the latest murders of innocent black men. I've watched the videos and wept. I'm ineffectual. I've posted the requisite articles, including a particularly fetching black and yellow BLACK LIVES MATTER poster, under which someone posted ALL LIVES MATTER (no shit, Sherlock, as they say, but all dolphins matter, too). I'm not going to mince my words. My sons, my daughter and I have deep and committed personal relationships with black people that demand I not mince my words.

I'm a white citizen in a country with a dark stain that has nothing to do with skin. America is an apple with a rotten core. We're a violent people with a heritage of slavery and genocide. We live in a country where a police officer, sworn to protect and serve, fires a gun into a car with a child sitting in the back seat and people make excuses for that police officer. I'm not going to mince words. If you come up with some kind of argument for that policeman's actions -- his job is difficult, he operates under extreme stress, he thought his life was in danger -- you are wrong. If you say that All Lives Matter and deride the exclusive Black Lives Matter, you are wrong and you are complicit. This is not opinion. This is fact.



Disarm.



We live in a country where a white man gets a bunch of his mother's guns and goes into an elementary school and shoots a classroom full of first graders dead. We live in a country whose response to that is more guns sold. We live in a country where generally law-abiding people feel justified owning firearms as a personal right, who believe that they are protecting themselves and their families because they can kill someone in turn. We live in a country where snipers can mow down police officers, protecting and serving, in seconds, believing it's their right to do so.

At least one sniper is killed by a programmed robot.


Flags are flown at half-mast for these officers.


I receive a telephone call. A robot asks me to donate to the Police Officers' Association.


It's difficult not to make metaphor, symbol, words, mince.









So hope for a sea change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.*

The great Irish poet Seamus Heaney said that, and he was writing about ancient Greek tragedy. There is nothing new under the sun. That's Ecclesiastes.





I'm no stranger to bias as a mother of a severely disabled young woman. I have spent much of the last twenty-one years making a case for her dignity as a human being and deflecting the subtle arguments that reduce her to a commodity or me to a dependent leech on the system. Last night, Sophie had a giant seizure in her room whose sound brought me running to her door. She lay on the floor against the door, thrashing and groaning. The door is padded. Her head made only soft thuds, absorbed. I couldn't open the door. I called for Henry, her seventeen year old brother. He peered over the door, stepped back twice and then made a flying leap over it and over her. He pulled her, thrashing, away from the door so that I could open it. I opened it, knelt down and put my arms around her knees. Henry put his arms around her shoulders. We lifted her together and lay her on the bed. He bent over her and wiped her hair from her face, the drool from her cheek. What does this have to do with anything?

It means once in a lifetime
That justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.*















*from The Cure at Troy, by Seamus Heaney

Hippo Solstice

What are ya'll doing? I'm lolling about and then getting up and doing stuff like laundry and cleaning the stuff off the dining room table, then reading a bit of Flannery O'Connor's The Displaced Person (it's relevance to us and particular prescience) and then walking to OSH to buy those little carpety things that go under the dining table legs and then back to lolling and then to helping Sophie off the floor where she's lying seizing (yes, seizing, but I've done another WEAN of her gd medication, so we're in for it) and then debating whether pizza is in order for dinner -- again.



It's a long poem, but it's so beautiful. Read it silently and then read it aloud and let those words roll off your tongue.



A Dream of Solstice

Qual e' colui che somniando vede,
che dopo 'l sogno la passione impressa
rimane, e l'altro a la mente non riede,
cotal son io...

Dante, Paradiso, Canto XXXIII


'Like somebody who sees things when he's dreaming
And after the dream lives with the aftermath
Of what he felt, no other trace remaining,

So I live now', for what I saw departs
And is almost lost, although a distilled sweetness
Still drops from it into my inner heart.

It is the same with snow the sun releases,
The same as when in wind, the hurried leaves
Swirl round your ankles and the shaking hedges

That had flopped their catkin cuff-lace and green sleeves
Are sleet-whipped bare. Dawn light began stealing
Through the cold universe to County Meath,

Over weirs where the Boyne water, fulgent, darkling,
Turns its thick axle, over rick-sized stones
Millennia deep in their own unmoving

And unmoved alignment. And now the planet turns
Earth brow and templed earth, the crowd grows still
In the wired-off precinct of the burial mounds,

Flight 104 from New York audible
As it descends on schedule into Dublin,
Boyne Valley Centre Car Park already full,

Waiting for seedling light on roof and windscreen.
And as in illo tempore people marked
The king's gold dagger when it plunged it in

To the hilt in unsown ground, to start the work
Of the world again, to speed the plough
And plant the riddled grain, we watch through murk

And overboiling cloud for the milted glow
Of sunrise, for an eastern dazzle
To send first light like share-shine in a furrow

Steadily deeper, farther available,
Creeping along the floor of the passage grave
To backstone and capstone, holding its candle

Under the rock-piled roof and the loam above.


Seamus Heaney

Anything Can Happen*

Anything Can Happen

After Horace, Odes, I, 34

Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter
Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head
Before he hurls the lightning? Well just now
He galloped his thunder cart and his horses

Across a clear blue sky.. It shook the earth
and the clogged underearth, the River Styx,
the winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself.
Anything can happen, the tallest towers

Be overturned, those in high places daunted,
Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak Fortune
Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one,
Setting it down bleading on the next.

Ground gives. The heaven's weight
Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle lid.
Capstones shift. Nothing resettles right.
Telluric ash and fire-spores boil away.

Seamus Heaney
1939-2013








*Thank you, Yvonne W.

Random poetry

 Miracle

Not the one who takes up his bed and walks
But the ones who have known him all along
And carry him in—

Their shoulders numb, the ache and stoop deeplocked
In their backs, the stretcher handles 
Slippery with sweat. And no let-up

Until he's strapped on tight, made tiltable
And raised to the tiled roof, then lowered for healing.
Be mindful of them as they stand and wait

For the burn of the paid-out ropes to cool,
Their slight lightheadedness and incredulity
To pass, those ones who had known him all along.

Seamus Heaney

Waiting and trepidation

That's Sophie when she was about 21 months old. We used the photo as our Christmas card that year, and it inspired the minister of All Saint's Unitarian Church, Galen Guengerich, in New York City to write a sermon about it on this exact day in 1996. Today is the day that we begin giving Sophie Charlotte's Web, with hope and trepidation, seventeen years later. Here is an excerpt from the sermon:

... Every new parent soon learns that the birth of a child changes lots of things substantially, the least of which turns out to be the thermostat. The essence of the Christmas story, however, is how the birth of one particular child changed almost everything. Yet my own guess is that the infant born to Mary and Joseph was not unusual at all. He was just another child born to parents who loved him, a lot like the child whose photograph adorns the front of a Christmas card I received here at the church just this week. The child in the photo is a beautiful little girl, about a year and a half old, dressed in white like an angel, with golden wings and a little halo of golden stars on top of her head. She's sitting on a bed which is covered by a white comforter, with a Christmas tree alongside. The photograph shows her face in profile as she looks upward, her arms uplifted too as if waiting.

But it's when you notice her eyes, which reveal an innocent intensity reflected in the hopeful openness of her hands and fingers, that you realize this is no seasonal charade. Her parents got it exactly right. Every child is born of his or her parents'  fondest hopes, the offspring of life's most fully-realized longing for itself. Especially at Christmas, each child is an angel in waiting. For some parents, however, the longing is more poignant, the hope more heartfelt, the waiting more riddled with trepidation.

You see, I know the angelic little girl in the Christmas photo. She is a child of this congregation, dedicated here on the chancel by you and me and her parents last December. But I also know what the photo does not reveal. She suffers from severe epilepsy, which subjects her to dozens of seizures each day and has delayed her development and put the quality of her future in serious question. The photo is no conceit: the little girl and those who love her really are waiting for a new advent of hope. In her case, it may come, but then again, it may not. 

The sermon goes on beautifully and even weaves some poetry of Seamus Heaney:

Peace on earth, men of good will, all that

Holds good only as long as the balance holds

For the little girl in the photo and countless others as well, the scales seem badly out of balance, tilted far to one side by the onerous weight of unwarranted suffering. Joy and hope, even when they make their occasional visitation, seem far too ephemeral to act as a counterweight and bring the balance back. Most of us have been lucky enough to know what life is like when the balance does hold, when pain and pleasure come our way in roughly equal measures, when experiences which bring sorrow don't finally overshadow the ones that leave us filled with laughter and contentment. But many of us have experienced the anguish of life gone awry.

____________________________________ 

Further along in the poem, Seamus Heaney admits how easy it is to stand idly by while malevolent forces or malicious people throw things out of kilter. He recognizes that none of us can restore the balance alone. Even so, he insists:

...every now and then, just weighing in

Is what it must come down to... 

The Bible is filled with stories of how God through the ages has weighed in to right the balance in this world. Whenever hope is lost and peace just a memory and good will nowhere to be found, God shows up -- through a miracle, the word of a prophet, the voice of an angel. That is exactly what happened yet again, as the story goes, almost two thousand years ago in Bethlehem. God weighed in, this time as a child, and in so doing once again united the Spirit of Life with the human heart and opened the wonder of heaven to those of us who walk here on earth.

Does that mean everything is wonderful -- that pain is banished and sorrow forgotten and evil forever vanquished? Not at all. Lest we forget the hard truths, life has an uncanny way of reminding us, through Christmas cards and newspaper headlines and late-night telephone calls. But the glad tidings of this season renew our faith that the balance will hold. To us, even you and me, a child of hope is born, this day and every day. To us, a gift is given: the gift of life, the gift of joy and laughter, the gift of love. 

The Stuff of Tragedy

When I drove by, I noticed a chorus of gods and goddesses outside of the Launderland Coin Laundry this morning, a couple of Renaissance men and a monk or two. They had come marching south, down Vermont Avenue, disgruntled by the dry air, the crackling wind, the voices discontent. Rich people lack empathy, a wise man noted. Not to mention their difficulty getting through the eye of a needle. David flexed his muscles, held on to his stone. Venus took her hand off her mons and flicked back her hair. Donuts were passed hand to hand. The cars rushed by, their inhabitants intent on misery.


Heroes. Victims. Gods and human beings.
All throwing shapes, every one of them
Convinced he's in the right, all of them glad
To repeat themselves and their every last mistake
No matter what.

People so deep into
Their own self-pity, self-pity buoys them up.
People so staunch and true, they're fixated,
Shining with self-regard like polished stones
And their whole life spent admiring themselves
For their own long-suffering.
Licking their wounds
And flashing them around like decorations.
I hate it, I always hated it, and I am
A part of it myself

-- the Chorus, from Seamus Heaney's The Cure at Troy, A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes

Those overlooked regarded

Phillippe Petit,

Anything Can Happen

After Horace, Odes, I, 34

Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter
Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head
Before he hurls the lightning? Well just now
He galloped his thunder cart and his horses

Across a clear blue sky.. It shook the earth
and the clogged underearth, the River Styx,
the winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself.
Anything can happen, the tallest towers

Be overturned, those in high places daunted,
Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak Fortune
Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one,
Setting it down bleading on the next.

Ground gives. The heaven's weight
Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle lid.
Capstones shift. Nothing resettles right.
Telluric ash and fire-spores boil away.

by Seamus Heaney

50

It's been a good fifty years. If I live to be one hundred, which I hope to do, I'm only halfway through!

Fosterling

'That heavy greenness fostered by water'

At school I loved one picture's heavy greenness --
Horizons rigged with windmills' arms and sails.
The millhouses' still outlines. Their in-placeness
Still more in place when mirrored in canals.
I can't remember never having known
The immanent hydraulics of a land
Of glar and glit and floods at dailigone.
My silting hope. My lowlands of the mind.

Heaviness of being. And poetry
Sluggish in the doldrums of what happens.
Me waiting until I was nearly fifty
To credit marvels. Like the tree-clock of tin cans
The tinkers made. So long for air to brighten,
Time to be dazzled and the heart to lighten.

Seamus Heaney, from Seeing Things

There's random poetry, if nothing else

Vincent Van Gogh, 1853-1890

Open up a book of poetry and read something. Here's Miracle by Seamus Heaney.

Miracle

Not the one who takes up his bed and walks
But the ones who have known him all along
And carry him in ---

Their shoulders numb, the ache and stoop deeplocked
In their backs, the stretcher handles
Slippery with sweat. And no let-up

Until he's strapped on tight, made tiltable
And raised to the tiled roof, then lowered for healing.
Be mindful of them as they stand and wait

For the burn of the paid-out ropes to cool,
Their slight lightheadedness and incredulity
To pass, those ones who had known him all along.

Poetry and politics intersect

Philoctetes, by James Barry

Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.

The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker's father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.

History says, Don't hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there's fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.
It means once in a lifetime
That justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

from The Cure at Troy by Seamus Heaney

The Cure at Troy is Heaney's version of Sophocles' play Philoctetes, a Greek hero who was left wounded by the Greeks on an island where he was forgotten about until the final stage of the Siege of Troy. Philoctetes owns an invincible bow that the Greeks need to win the Trojan War, so they are forced to return to the island and ask for Philoctetes's support.

The back of my copy of the book says this about Heaney's work: Heaney's reading of Philoctetes is particularly responsive to the Greek playwright's understanding of the relations between public and private morality. "The Cure at Troy" dramatizes the conflict between personal integrity and political expediency, and it further explores ways in which the victims of injustice can become as devoted to the contemplation of their wounds as the perpetrators are to the justifications of their system.


I've read this part of this poem over and over during the last twenty years, and each time it speaks to me in a different way. During my first reading, the third and fourth stanzas leaped up and out, resonating with me as I began my arduous journey with Sophie -- Believe in miracles/ and cures and healing wells -- then those perfectly beautiful rhymed Call miracle self-healing:/The utter, self-revealing/Double-take of feeling. 


What's so fantastic about poetry, and this piece especially, is how it speaks to both one's private experience and to the larger culture. I am sure that we read into the words, taking what we want or wish or understand -- at least in our own very personal lives --  but I also think the poetry speaks strongly to our current political climate, doesn't it? Wouldn't it be amazing if our political leaders would stop talking about family values, money, American exceptionalism and all that bullshit and, rather, listen to a poet like Heaney who is able to articulate what it means to be human, to be working towards a common good, to be rhyming hope and history and justice?

(Yeah, I know. My head is in the clouds and I'm flying my poetry freak flag over here.)

To my comrades (with an update)

MIRACLE

Not the one who takes up his bed and walks

But the ones who have known him all along

And carry him in --

Their shoulders numb, the ache and stoop deeplocked

In their backs, the stretcher handles

Slippery with sweat. And no let-up

Until he's strapped on tight, made tiltable

And raised to the tiled roof, then lowered for healing.

Be mindful of them as they stand and wait

For the burn of the paid-out ropes to cool,

Their slight lightheadedness and incredulity

To pass, those ones who had known him all along.

-- Seamus Heaney, from Human Chain, 2010

I realize after posting this poem, that it's only as good as you knowing the Biblical passage that inspired it, the healing of the paralytic at Capernaum by Jesus. Here's the link to the passage on Wikipedia.

Staying sane and how to do it

In some ways, I am a machine. I have formidable organizational skills, can fry the bacon up in the pan, balance a seizing teenager, a growing almost-teen and a nine year old thumb-sucker with a fair amount of agility and copious amounts of love. Right now, on the day before the start of the school season for my two sons, I hardly have time to do this post, but I AM doing it. I'm posting because I love the postcard that my good friend Moye sent me that I scanned and posted above.  It's ridiculous how much I have to do -- the paying of bills and not paying of bills, the juggling around of limited funds, the thank-you notes for birthday presents, the filling out of school forms, the registering of Sophie in a new school that I'd forgotten about until now, when it's only a week until school, the bloodwork I have to get done before the start of my fellowship
(My fellowship? Yes, I got a fellowship -- quite an honor and something that I'm very excited about, but I don't have time to tell you about it until I go to the orientation on the 15th), the calls I have to make to all the other board members of the Epilepsy Foundation of Greater Los Angeles to encourage them to start participating in our big walk/fundraiser in October, the reviewing of a document for an incredible organization devoted to helping foster care children and for whom I am dying to work part time, the Room Parent Manual that I need to write as Head Room Parent of my boys' school, the music therapy fundraiser this month where I'm reading an essay, the Cub Scout meeting this Friday where I'm doing a presentation on the Epilepsy Walk, the scouts' fall service project, my writing that is at once explosive and languishes on the side --

Like it says: Greetings from the Edge of Reason.


Did I mention that I have to, I just have to figure out a time to exercise and do yoga? It's gotten obscene how long it's been...

With all of this to do and think about, though, do you know what pulls me back from the edge? Moments when I become mindful of what I truly love.

Like this:

A poem by Seamus Heaney, read by the poet himself.

I can listen to that, those words, that voice, those thoughts and images and the edge or reason is just that -- an edge, only an edge. There's an expanse beyond reason where I abide.

The Selkie

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge
Believe that a further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.

From The Cure at Troy by Seamus Heaney

The last movie I saw before I gave birth to Sophie on March 8th, 1995 was based on a story about selkies called "The Secret of Roan Innish." A weird and wonderful movie, it would become almost emblematic for me after Sophie was born and we found ourselves on the path that would lead us to California. Celtic mythology relating to the sea is magical, and what has always fascinated me were the stories of selkies -- seals who shed their skins and take human form. A female Selkie leaves her skin and comes ashore as a beautiful maiden, and while most sea creatures in myth are frightening or hostile, seals, with their soft, mournful eyes are transformed into gentle earthly beings. If humans capture her skin, the selkie is forced to stay human and is described, generally, as a fine, wistful woman. If she finds her skin, however, she immediately returns to the sea, leaving those she loves to mourn for her.

Sophie's hair is soft and curly and her features are fine. She holds herself delicately, almost gingerly, and is often described as otherworldly. When we began taking her to an osteopath in southern California after a good year's worth of fruitless medical treatment in New York, we noticed that her symptoms subsided by the ocean. Fourteen years later, to this day, Sophie is transformed by the ocean. The moment her bare feet feel the sand, she pulls insistently toward the water. We have said that the water is pulling her toward it, so dramatic is the change in her level of alertness. She doesn't have seizures by the sea. She looks out, over it and smiles a half-smile. I like to think that like a selkie she is searching for her lost world and that she is actually lost in ours. She shed her skin and was born to me, pulled unwittingly into a world that insists on keeping her.

We went to the ocean today, Sophie and I. We walked on the sand and down to the water. Sophie lifted her head and really gazed out to the sea. Happy Birthday, my Sophie-girl, my selkie.