When you feel imprisoned

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graveyard in Kinsale, Ireland

The Prisoner

I
My hand has one gesture left:
to push things away.
From the rock dampness drips
on old stones.

This dripping is all I can hear.
My heart keeps pace
with the drops falling
and sinks away with them.

If the drops fall faster
an animal might come to drink.
Somewhere it is brighter than this—
but what do we know.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke
Part II of "The Prisoner" is here
translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

For some time now the word I focus on in meditation is free. I don't meditate daily; maybe a couple times a week. I close my eyes for a few minutes, focus on my breath, and while I exhale, I hear, see and feel the word free. Sometimes I'm up in the sky, with birds, coasting on air currents. Sometimes free appears as a prayer for someone. But it had not occurred to me until now that it was an unconscious "choice," this meditation word, in a time when I am bumping up against the stone walls of physical limitations for the first time in my life.

I've been slowed by hand-wrist-arm-shoulder-neck pain since December. These are repetitive strain injuries, the result of twenty years at a computer at work. I am getting manipulations by an osteopath, and learning the Alexander technique, in hopes of relieving it. Dictation software has been a mixed blessing; often I get more tension using it than not when I have to repeat a sentence many times. Last month I was also diagnosed with hypothyroidism, which accounts for some of my fatigue, and soon I'll go on the lowest dosage of medication for it, taking a prescription drug long term for the first time. I'm 55. (The natural remedies for hypothyroidism include avoiding cruciferous vegetables—broccoli, cauliflower, kale, spinach—because they block the thyroid hormone. I would rather not give these up, so I'm hoping the low dose of levothyroxine is enough to restore my metabolism and does not result in the dizzy or "drunk" feeling some people encounter. My bad cholesterol has shot up from 193 to 243, which is another reason it seems important to go on this med.)

Learning the Alexander technique from my teacher Elinore is about unlearning bad habits of hunching my shoulders, holding tension, rushing into space, pulling my head back onto my spine, affecting every movement of my body in painful ways. (This 10 minute video explains quite well how the Alexander technique helps pupils regain balance and lightness.) For years I've thrust forward into the next thing, as if life was an emergency.

More than the pain, what bothers me most is having to slow down. "Somewhere it is brighter than this," says the prisoner in Rilke's poem. Truly, somewhere it is much darker than this where I am. But this has taken some adjustment. I am no longer quick, and youthful. Suddenly I act like an old woman, not the plan I had when I became a grandma in January.

We just finished watching "Little Dorrit" the BBC series on Netflix DVDs. It's the Dickens story of a young woman who lives in a debtors' prison in London with her father. She was born there and knows nothing different. She even loves her life caring for her father and prefers it to the new life of wealth that comes to them suddenly. Her father Mr. Dorrit suffers daily from his imprisonment and degradation, however, believing he is worthy of something far better. But once he arrives at the something far better, he finds no peace there either.

I take inspiration from Little Amy Dorrit. Inside the stone walls of Marshallsea Prison for Debt she angelically loves and cares for her father in spite of his irksome resistance and condescension. Like Dickens' characters often are, she is probably a caricature of what a human can really be, in this case softer and more philanthropically positive than seems possible in her situation. But even she could not adjust to the seismic changes that came with enormous wealth. We humans are creatures of habit, even when our habits keep us confined.

"We need to stop trying so hard and allow our lives to unfold naturally," says Richard Brennan in my Alexander book. For some years now I've been doing spiritual work to learn to love what is and what comes, which is helping me with this physical learning.  To not "push it away" as the prisoner in Rilke's poem, now that's the real work.

For another take on changing habits, see a new post at sparks & mirrors, "To deliver oneself up to silence."

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Winter poem by Hayden Carruth: The Curtain

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Since I love exploring winter in all sorts of light, here is a tremendous winter poem by Hayden Carruth (1921-2008) to spread out in — to feel the contrast between the romance and beauty of winter, and the pain of existence. Carruth was an American poet from Woodbury, Connecticut. I don't know his work well, though I've known of him for years, but I mean to.

“A poem is not an expression, nor is it an object. Yet it somewhat partakes of both. What a poem is is never to be known, for which I have learned to be grateful.” ~ Hayden Carruth

The Curtain

by Hayden Carruth

Just over the horizon a great machine of death is roaring and rearing.
We can hear it always. Earthquake, starvation, the ever-renewing sump of corpse-flesh.
But in this valley the snow falls silently all day, and out our window
We see the curtain of it shifting and folding, hiding us away in our little house,
We see earth smoothened and beautified, made like a fantasy, the snow-clad trees
So graceful. In our new bed, which is big enough to seem like the north pasture almost
With our two cats, Cooker and Smudgins, lying undisturbed in the southeastern and southwestern corners,
We lie loving and warm, looking out from time to time. “Snowbound,” we say. We speak of the poet
Who lived with his young housekeeper long ago in the mountains of the western province, the kingdom
Of cruelty, where heads fell like wilted flowers and snow fell for many months
Across the pass and drifted deep in the vale. In our kitchen the maple-fire murmurs
In our stove. We eat cheese and new-made bread and jumbo Spanish olives
Which have been steeped in our special brine of jalapeños and garlic and dill and thyme.
We have a nip or two from the small inexpensive cognac that makes us smile and sigh.
For a while we close the immense index of images that is our lives—for instance,
The child on the Mescalero reservation in New Mexico sitting naked in 1966 outside his family’s hut,
Covered with sores, unable to speak. But of course we see the child every day,
We hold out our hands, we touch him shyly, we make offerings to his implacability.
No, the index cannot close. And how shall we survive? We don’t and cannot and will never
Know. Beyond the horizon a great unceasing noise is undeniable. The machine,
Like an immense clanking vibrating shuddering unnameable contraption as big as a house, as big as the whole town,
May break through and lurch into our valley at any moment, at any moment.
Cheers, baby. Here’s to us. See how the curtain of snow wavers and then falls back.

*Note: This page says that Carruth's Selected Poetry was a finalist for the 1987 poetry Pulitzer, but I do not see evidence that he won for 1996, which the Poetry Foundation claims. He won the National Book Award for Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey in 1996, the volume this poem is from. NPR has this moving article upon his death in 2008. Read more about him at the Poetry Foundation.
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What to do on Thanksgiving

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Take

the torch

down from the wall

and bravely wake

the sleeping giant

of your soul

Stir

dormant magnificence

out of her crouching

fraction of light

Strengthen

hibernating

hips arms and legs

into stomp

and thunder

on the dance floor of

your particular praise!

This is my daily goal, not just on Thanksgiving.

Friends around the world do not necessarily know about American Thanksgiving, how it began and why we celebrate, what we celebrate. Here's an explanation I wrote to a friend in another country. It's the traditional, happy, non-NativeAmerican view of the holiday:

Legend is that it began with the first European settlers to America. They didn't know about the New World's agriculture. The Native Americans befriended and helped them understand and raise the crops that were new to them, like corn. So when harvest time came, they had a big feast and included their new friends, celebrating together. Every year they celebrated again, and so the tradition continued. Abraham Lincoln made it a national holiday in the 1860s. Since then it has become the most beloved holiday in the U.S., because there is no religious affiliation, no gifts to buy, no commerce outside of food, no complications (except family). People just gather and express thanks for what we have. Traditionally we eat a turkey, which they would have eaten in the 1600s, along with fish and other meats and vegetables like pumpkin, squash and corn. It is a beautiful idea.

BUT the truth is that the European immigrants to the New World brought the most horribly annihilating devastation to the Native Americans that it almost seems like a cruel joke that we celebrate with thanks today. (I also sent this information to my friend.) I don't know how to reconcile these two perspectives, and I don't think there is any reconciliation. I do think the day provides an opportunity to face straight on what has been done in the name of God (the Pilgrim settlers thanked God, not the Native Americans), commerce, and "progress." You can watch a powerfully honest look at the Native American view of Thanksgiving here; I warn you, it isn't pretty or happy.

So, this is what we do. We investigate our shadow and destruction. We do what we can to make it right. We wake up. As Rob Brezsny says, we can always, always be thankful for all our blessings, both the pleasurable ones, and the painful ones, because they wake us up.

Wake up, wake up, and be thankful that you are awake. Love your family and friends, love your neighbor, love your enemy, and celebrate when you stop seeing them as your enemy. Isn't that something to dance about, in wild abandon?

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Bedlam: A fresh look at an old horror

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I am interested in how openly we share intimate stories of cancer, lupus, stroke, heart attack, and other physical maladies, but we are still fenced in about mental illness. Even Alzheimer’s is all right to discuss: it is a physical disease. But when it comes to mental disease, we hesitate to talk about disorders within our families, let alone personal struggles, feeling stigmatized by the mere association.

The days are still too close when people paid money to see the freak show: not bearded ladies, giants, Siamese twins or Elephant Men, but the insane. The wards of the infamous Bedlam asylum were salons for gawking, where fine ladies came to be entertained by raving lunatics.

Tom Rakewell ends up in Bedlam after a profligate life;

one painting in a series of paintings and engravings 
by William Hogarth called "The Rake's Progress"

Bedlam, now Bethlem Royal Hospital, is known as the oldest institution for mental patients (1247) and is notorious for its tortuous and dastardly treatment of patients. Remarkably, now it is a major center for research that promotes the best and most humane psychiatric practice and care. (See the history of Bedlam here.) But the word bedlam will always mean the uproar and chaos exemplified in that madhouse.

Eerily and perfectly timed for the end of Halloween week, two friends of mine have just opened an art exhibit of their Bedlam project. Robert Turney is an art photographer in the media of gelatin silver prints and wet-plate tintypes. (He happens also to be married to my professor, mentor and friend, Diane Wakoski.) Stephen Rachman is an American Studies scholar and chair of graduate studies in my department.

I really love Robert's photographs. Here is a sampling of his previous work, in gelatin silver prints.

Robert's gelatin silver prints

Rio Chama, New Mexico

Shack and Seatless Chair

Goldfield, Nevada

 New York #5

New York #9

New York #10

Robert's wet plate tintypes

And here is a sampling of Robert's more recent work, wet plate tintypes. To watch a stop motion video of Robert developing wet-plate collodian tintypes, twenty minutes shortened to two minutes, go here.

 

You know I love these two still lifes:

Moonflowers

Previously Robert and Steve collaborated on a subject happier than Bedlam: moonflowers. Robert created 10 x 10 inch gelatin silver photographs, shooting the moonflowers he grew potted in his wonderful town garden, at night. (Robert's garden is famous for certain rows of basil that went into Diane's legendary pesto with twenty-five, yes 25, cloves of garlic, that I ate with abandon, and after which Don would not sleep in the same room with me.)  Of course Robert photographed them at night, when they open. Robert's evening dance in his driveway with lights, medium format camera and moonflowers is enough to send a poet off for a week's contemplation, but combine it with Steve's gorgeous essay "Evening Glories," published with images of Robert's gelatin silver prints in the Red Cedar Review, and I am truly inspired. Below are a couple of Robert's gelatin silver moonflowers and excerpts from Steve's essay; see the twelve piece portfolio here. Read Steve's essay about Robert's moonflowers called "Evening Glories: Robert Turney's Moonflower Photographs" here:

"From 1999-2001, in this seasonal way, Turney pursued the flowers, under clouds, under stars, under the glowing coal of his cigarette. . . . It would be easy to misconstrue Turney’s moonflowers as conventionally romantic. . . . If they are romantic at all then they refer to the romance of ordinary beauty, sensuality, and sex. . . . "

~ excerpt from Steve Rachman's essay "Evening Glories"

Two of Robert Turney's gelatin silver prints of moonflowers:

"One secret of the moonflower photos lies in that Turney has photographed flowers as if they were movie stars from the 1930s and 40s. Think of Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, and Martha Graham rendered by Edward Steichen . . ."    ~ Stephen Rachman, from "Evening Glories"

Bedlam

So what led these two to another textual and photographic partnership, this time about the insane asylum? Robert got to talking about the tintype self portraits he was developing, and Steve began to imagine a fiction about a psychiatrist and a patient, with tintype photography as therapy! The gallery show has single rows of tintype portraits of the patient (Robert himself, acting as G.G.), separated by text written by Steve: imagined journal entries by the psychiatric doctor about his patient G.G. He brings the patient into his studio, observes him under the lens, and sees an improvement in his demeanor. As you progress around the room, the patient in the portraits evolves from a state of violent agitation to calm melancholy.

A sampling of Robert's self portraits, as asylum patient G.G., with some of Steve's journal text,
progressing from extreme agitation to almost beatific calm:

"G.G. converses rationally on most subjects often with amiable feeling and charming manners; and yet he is incapable of going among people without severe mental agitation and reflection. G. G. exhibits great terror and excitement at the prospect of crowds."

". . . And this, it occurred to me, might in the end be what the camera reveals: I have always been struck by this phenomenon in cases of insanity. The insane pose for the sane in postures of madness—or feigned sanity—much as we pose for the camera."

(This one, above, is my favorite of Robert's tintypes;

it moves me in ways I cannot describe.)

Here are two fascinating pages of Stephen's text, which are especially interesting to me, in light of our discussions about translation and poetry at the Rilke blog. I hope you can read my images of them:

I asked Robert if he found himself in any emotional distress while photographing himself as Bedlam patient G.G. "No," he said. "I just made faces." And he asked if I knew the work of Sally Mann, who photographed her children, at home, in intimate poses, sometimes naked. Yes, I did. He said, "She is the only one who could take those photographs, they are her children, in her rural home." He said that these self portraits are like that. He was not exploiting a patient in a mental hospital. He was imagining himself as one, yet thankfully (?) with emotional distance.

For me, through Robert's faces I felt the pain of mental disease, and the terrible history of ostracism and stigma surrounding it. Yet I did not feel disturbed the way I anticipated feeling at Robert and Stephen's exhibit, linking to the ghosts in my own family's history, like that shadowy hand mysteriously moving between candlesticks in Robert's tintype, above. These were after all imagined portraits and journal entries. (Before attending the show, I thought Stephen had discovered real Bedlam documents.) There was jaunty jazz playing in the background. Stephen's fictional journal entries reflected sometimes humorous aspects of the patient's world, stepping over the sacred line of treating mental illness in only morose and somber terms. This kind of open exploration and artistic imagining can help us bust down fences about the ways we may feel threatened by the topic of mental disabilities.

But no matter how painful the topic—and reality—remains, we will still have the tender melancholy of moonflowers for comfort. In the end, perhaps it is only a full frontal look at ourselves, that includes our dark shadow side, that will heal us and make us whole.

"There is one that Turney doesn’t particularly care for (because the blossom appears more like a pansy than a moonflower) but might just as easily serve as an emblem of the study. It consists of a full frontal blossom. It is the moon almost full but for a petal edge bending into a deep shadow, the moon become a flower, a flower become the moon."    ~ Stephen Rachman, from "Morning Glories"

Robert Turney and Stephen Rachman,

Bedlam art exhibit at Scene Metrospace in East Lansing, Michigan

The show opened Friday and will run until December 11.

I hope you'll forgive me for going on a little longer in an already too-long post for a blog. While I stood before one journal entry at the exhibit, in dialog with my friend Reade about my findings in the bits of research I'd done on Bedlam and how people paid money to see patients writhe in torment, I told her about William Hogarth's painting "A Rake's Progress" at the top of the post. She then told me about the opera by Igor Stravinsky (libretto by lifelong friends and collaborators, the poets W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman) of the same name, based loosely on Hogarth's paintings and engravings of Tom Rakewell whose dissolute life led to the poorhouse, and then to Bedlam. Here is another imagined Bedlam story, in which Tom cavorts in London with a bad sort of fellow, Nick Shadow, who turns out to be the Devil. It is a moralistic tale, and Rakewell ends up in Bedlam, affirming the belief held by some that "For idle hearts and hands and minds the Devil finds a work to do." Dawn Upshaw sings a lullaby, "Gently, Little Boat" as Anne Trulove, Tom's betrothed, in this touching scene toward the end of the opera.

I'm grateful that psychiatrists like James Hillman, who continued the work of Carl Jung, have encouraged us to stop moralizing about our dark side, denying or rejecting our shadow selves. I want to keep that open and eager spirit alive and working, to gently love the shadows in myself and in others, or as Hillman puts it, to see generously:

Shadow is the very stuff of the soul, the interior darkness that pulls downward out of life and keeps one in relentless connection with the underworld. . . . the shadow may be reconceived. (James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld)


. . . you find your genius by looking in the mirror of your life. Your visible image shows your inner truth, so when you're estimating others, what you see is what you get. It therefore becomes critically important to see generously, or you will get only what you see; to see sharply, so that you discern the mix of traits rather than a generalized lump; and to see deeply into dark shadows, or else you will be deceived.” (James Hillman, The Soul’s Code)

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Poem: My hair returns

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I have no idea why I am writing and posting so frequently these days. I hope it is not a hardship for you. But why should it be? You don't have to read, or comment, or nothin'. But I gotta keep this pen pumping for some reason. Whatever the lasting value (and that doesn't matter much to me) I am compelled. If you come and read, bless you, and bless you if you don't! Let it flow on by.

Here is a little bit of surreal whimsy as the sun rises over my shoulder.

My hair returns

My hair flows
out my office and
down the corridor at work,
the old, high-ceilinged university hall
with industrial lights hanging down
like dangle-pearl earrings,
not bright enough to read by.
Sadly, the old hall will come down
next year after its hundred-somethings.

My hair is gold again, in rushing waves
like in my college youth
not unlike these students who wait
outside my door
lined up in bands and ribbons
on their stiff wooden chairs on
the banks of my river-hair, with
bright white apples on their laps—
a virtual picnic!

They come for advice,
as if I am a scryer,
and my hair the crystal river
running on to their future life.

Did I tell you, I stopped straightening it
with flattening irons and other
falsehoods? And now my curls,
when you come in at last
to my room from the hall,
are the wiry wisps of a crone
who skips upriver
on the backs of stones.

Here is a photo of the top of my curlier-than-ever-it-was head at my office desk, taken by my own white apple mac magic camera. I haven't stopped coloring over the gray yet, maybe that will come. If I had Don's salt-and-pepper hair, I wouldn't think twice. Humor me, I'm taking this aging thing in baby steps.

Oh look, I just realized how like Stanisław Wyspiański's sewer I am!
Do you think she's really a redhead,
or did she (or he) color her hair too?

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