For Mother's Day: a Poem by Margaret Atwood

 

Girl and Horse 1928

 

You are younger than I am, you are

someone I never knew, you stand

under a tree, your face half-shadowed,

holding the horse by its bridle

Why do you smile? Can't you

see the apple blossoms falling around

you, snow, sun, snow, listen, the tree

dries and is being burnt, the wind

is bending, your body, your face

ripples like the water where did you go

But no, you stand there exactly

the same, you can't hear me forty

years ago, you were caught by light

and fixed in that secret

place where we live, where we believe

nothing can change, grow older.

 

(On the other side of the picture,

the instant is over, the shadow

of the tree has moved.

You wave

then turn and ride out of sight

through the vanished orchard,

still smiling

as though you did not notice)

 

 

Margaret Atwood

 

(photo is of my mother,  Florence Greene,  in 1927, at Griffiths Park in Los Angeles, Calif.)

Why I Named My Computer Penelope

 

"I was a hidden treasure and desired to be known:

therefore I created the creation in order to be known."

-- Rumi

I have a new laptop computer, which I love!  It's so fast, compared to the former model, although I retired that little computer with gratitude for years of service.  I have named my new computer "Penelope".  Penelope, the "wife of Odysseus" who sat weaving and unweaving a shroud until he should return,  derives her mythic name from most ancient origins, origins that preceed even the ancient Greek stories of the Odyssey.  The name is a name of Weaving and Weaver and Woven.....it means "with a Web on Her face".  Probably this ancient name was originally given to a Goddess of the Fates,  weaving and unweaving the lives of men and women.  It also may have been an honorific name for a Priestess/Oracle, one who in her prophesies "Saw  with a Web on her face".    

It is easy to see the diminishment and co-option of the powers of the Goddess, and hence women, in the fate of poor Penelope,  no longer weaving the lives of men, but simply waiting for her husband to return and save her from a bunch of predatory men!  One of my favorite contemporary renderings of the story of Penelope is, of course, from Margaret Atwood, the PENELOPIAD * .  As the wry and often tongue in cheek Penelope says,  "Now that all the others have run out of air, it's my turn to do a little story-making."

To return to internet savvy computers named in honor of  Penelope,  I thus like to think that some of the spirit of the Oracle, the winding and visionary Pythoness, can come through this particular "Web" that, daily, my  own face is emersed in.  

After all, the "Web" may be the most important living Metaphor for our time.  The  truth of our inter-dependancy and inter-connection with all of life is not only a metaphysical discussion, but, through Physics and Astronomy, Ecology and Earth Science, Consciousness studies and  the evolving Global Culture and our Climate  Crisis which we share with all life......we are all One.  All one in the Web of life.  I personally believe the next human evolution is to fully grasp that and create a culture that embodies that truth.  Can we do it?  I don't know.  

 "I believe that all coincidences are messages from the unmanifest – they are like angels without wings, so to speak, sudden interruptions of life by a deeper level"...... Deepak Chopra

Recently I was interviewed by a woman who is creating a documentary about Synchronicity, something I've written about a great deal in the Blog over the years.  One thing I noted in remembering my own synchronicities was that many of them occured while I was travelling, or in situations or environments that took me out of the familiar containers of my life.     The "In-between", liminal Interstices of life seem to be where there are breakthroughs into, what I like to think of, as the Great Web.  Synchronicities are among those breakthroughs, breakthroughs that can be necessary for growth or evolution.

 "There are references in the Kabala to what is called "breaking the shell". The mind set of "what you believe" is the shell, and (sometimes it's necessary) to break the shell. You have to fall apart sometimes to be put back together; because that's the only way you can be reconstructed. You cannot veneer these teachings on top of who you think or imagine who you are. " 

...........David Jeffers**

Physicist F. David Peat suggested in his book SYNCRONICITY - The Bridge Between Mind and Matter *** that syncronicities are breakthroughs that hint of the deeper, integral nature of reality.  

Carl Jung believed that Synchronicities were always meaningful to those who experienced them.  

"Syncronicities provide a bridge between inner and outer worlds, between our private thoughts and external, objective realities. Within a synchronicity, patterns of external events mirror an inner experience. To distinguish synchronicities from mere chance occurrences Carl Jung stressed that they must always involve "meaningful coincidence" that lie beyond any explanation involving causal links and connections. In this way syncronicities reveal to us an underlying world of patterns, forms and connections that transcend any division between the mental and the material.".......David Peat

How are we linked, really? What threads are we throwing out and finding resonance with, at any given moment? What "threads of the Great Weaver" within those moments of the Interstices, become visible?  

***"Synchronicities are those mysterious and inexplicable coincidences that occasionally erupt into a life. At times we may feel that those around us are confined to a narrow world of logic and physical law, a world that admits no hint of mystery. This can give rise to a feeling of isolation within an indifferent universe and an increasing complex society whose members are reduced to ciphers. Synchronicities, by contrast, offer a doorway into a very different world. A world that also has resonances with the deep insights that have been revealed by the new sciences.

True synchronicities are more than mere chance occurrences. They are characterized by a sense of meaning and numiniousness. They provide a bridge between inner and outer worlds, between our private thoughts and external, objective realities. Within a synchronicity, patterns of external events mirror an inner experience; likewise dreams and fantasies may seem to flood over into the external world. To distinguish synchronicities from mere chance occurrences Carl Jung stressed that they must always involve "meaningful coincidence" that lie beyond any explanation involving causal links and connections. In this way reveal to us an underlying world of patterns, forms and connections that transcend any division between the mental and the material.

Synchronicities also act as markers of time, moments of transformation within a life that occur in chairos, when “the time is right”. Thus, while causality ties us to our past, synchronicity can link us to our future. They can also act as significant encounters when a door is opened through which we can pass. One notable encounter took place between the psychologist Carl Jung and the physicist Wolfgang Pauli. This meeting of people from two very different worlds led to Pauli’s series of dreams which caused him to explore the relationship between psyche and matter and believe that the time was at hand for the "resurrection of spirit” within the world of matter.

David Peat

www.fdavidpeat.com 

 

** David Jeffers, Interview with Lauren Raine, 2001 

 https://threadsofspiderwoman.blogspot.com/2010/11/lilith-as-archetypal-guide.html 

 

* THE PENELOPAID by Margaret Atwood,  198 pages

Published October 5th 2005 by Canongate U.S. 

The Penelopaid has also been produced as a wonderful Play:  https://youtu.be/X9Q2m_CZ5nc

 

Conversations Our Feet Don't Hear

I talked about summer, and about time. 
The  pleasures of eating, the terrors of the night.  About this cup
we call a life.  About happiness.  And how good it feels, the
heat of the sun between the shoulder blades.

He looked neither up nor down 
which didn't necessarily mean he was either afraid or asleep.
I felt his energy, stored
under his tongue perhaps,
and behind his bulging eyes.

I talked about how the world seems to me, five feet tall, the
blue sky all around my head. 
I said, I wondered how it seemed
to him, down there, intimate with the dust.

He might have been Buddha - did not move, blink, or frown,
not a tear fell from those gold-rimmed eyes 
as the refined anguish of language
passed over him.

Mary Oliver (from "The Truro Bear")

Old pond,
frog jumps in -

splash.

Basho

We have been underground too long

we have done our work,
we are many and one,
we remember when we were human.

We have lived among roots and stones,
we have sung but no one has listened,
we come into the open air
at night only to love
which disgusts the soles of boots,
their leather strict religion.

We know what a boot looks like
when seen from underneath,
we know the philosophy of boots,
their metaphysic of kicks and ladders.
We are afraid of boots
but contemptuous of the foot that needs them.

Soon we will invade like weeds,
everywhere but slowly:

the captive plants will rebel
with us, fences will topple,
brick walls ripple and fall,
there will be no more boots.
Meanwhile we eat dirt
and sleep; we are waiting
under your feet.

When we say Attack
you will hear nothing
at first.

Margaret Atwood, from "You Are Happy"

Circe's Lament and other Visitations

I used to write the occasional poem, but that doesn't seem to happen much any more.  Perhaps the Muse of Poetry has flown away, finding me uninteresting.  Fickle creatures, muses.  But here is a poem I wrote years ago inspired by a strange Muse - the Goddess or Enchantress Circe of the fame of the Odyssey.  Ulysses  landed on her island, and among other things, she turned his men into swine.   It was originally inspired by  Margaret Atwood's Circe/Mud Poems.** (see her poem below).  I've loved the collection since the 70's, along with her rendering of yet another Goddess/heroine connected to the Odyssey, her so very witty look at Penelope's point of view in  The Penelopiad .  Penelope, like Circe, has  a somewhat different perspective on the events of mythic history.

In my poems, it would seem that the voice of "Lexus" turned up after writing the first poem, no doubt to protest the indignity of being just an ordinary sailor, with the misfortune to be caught in someone else's epic.

CIRCE'S LAMENT

I cannot recall how it happened.

I was on fire, I do remember that,
my imagination a tropical sunset
inflamed, exultant

and for one shining
Hallelujah of an hour
everything I touched
ignited

You squeal your indignation
through ruddy snouts:

It was a misfire, I swear it.

In the splendor of my exuberance
this was nothing I anticipated.

Tell your handsome Captain
I will petition the Gods this very day.
I have grown old, absent minded

in my solitude
my spells go astray

be patient, dear ones.
Meditate upon this dark, fertile
squalor of sensuous mud
you find yourself
so horizontal in.
This low rooting through an
odoriferous cosmos of fragrant compost.

Are you so undone
by the base pleasure of it all?
This nosing, snorting self-knowing,
the delight of a half fermented carrot?
Never a sow smelt so sweetly fecund before
nor was love so simple.

Surely we have become sleepy,
half-drowned by the lethargy
of our two-legged dignity.

Consider this, if you will,
an interlude of primordial grace.

(2000)

LEXUS LAMENTS HIS FATE

All I wanted
was a touch, a kindly word,
a little ease.

Eight long Gods' forsaken years
on the stinking boat, and before that,
war, war, war, blood
and lamentation.

Who are you,
to name me thus?
Is your worth and wit
so much greater than mine

to dole out shame,
because I dared to love you
in my clumsy way?

Did I not bring you flowers
admire you from afar?

HE is adored by Goddesses,
hears the Sirens sing his wild praises,
returning at last to patient little Penelope,
his pretty kingdom.
Ballads, sung at last
beside his flowery grave.

Me - bale, Lexus, bale!
hoist the mast,
and don’t piss on the foredeck.

Who are you, to unmake me thus?
To twist and shape me
as suits your capricious humor
because my face is unlovely,
my gestures naive?

Who are you to judge my folly?

what magnitudes I glimpsed,
what private splendors
lived once within this breast?

Lauren Raine (2000)

from   CIRCE/ MUD POEMS

There are so many things 
I wanted you to have.
This is mine, this tree,
I give you its name,

here is food, white like roots, red,
growing in the marsh, on the shore,
This is mine, this tree,
I give you its name,

here is food, white like roots, red,  
growing in the marsh, on the shore,
I pronounce these names for you also.

This is mine, this island, 
you can have the rocks,
the plants that spread themselves flat
over the thin soil,
I renounce them.
You can have this water,this flesh, I abdicate,

I watch you, 
you claim without noticing it,
you know how to take. 


Margaret Atwood   (1972)

The Handmaid's Tale......

 If you think medievil thinking is a thing of the past, think again.  As we progress into a future of massive over-population, diminishing resources, and global warming,  the wise patriachs have a solution:  let's keep girls  pregnant, barefoot,  ignorant and in their place, as "He" supposedly ordains in the Bible. Remember Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale?

The right-wing has officially gone off the rails. Some have even compared Obama to Hitler - why?  Because the administration approved a rule mandating insurance coverage of birth control.Now Congress is saying they're going to overturn the mandate. "Pro-choice" used to mean abortion.  Now it is also apparently used to mean people who advocate birth control and women's rights to control their bodies.

According to NARAL  since the beginning of the 112th Congress the anti-choice majority in the U.S. House of Representatives has consistently been unleashing legislation attacking women's right to chose contraception.  They tried to eliminate funding for birth control and cancer screening at Planned Parenthood clinics nationally.   They have passed legislation that would allow hospitals to deny women emergency abortion care, even if it means she will die without it.  If this  was happening to people of color, there would be a huge outcry.  But because it's an issue of sexual control and discrimination, instead of racist, few take the time to notice.

I find this, and the very idea of government determining the availability of birth control........scary.  This pushes the envelope towards theocracy, a theocracy of the religious  right that, ironically, also reacts violently to any suggestion of "socialism" and a "welfare state".  It seems that girls may not protect themselves from becoming pregnant, but after conception, they and their children are on their own.....punished, just like the good days, for the great sin of not having been "chaste".

I know from first hand experience what it's like to be a very young girl, pregnant, and alone. I have great compassion as well for children born to children themselves.    I know  how hard women have fought for the right to vote, to work, to own property, and to control their own bodies, rights only available within the relatively recent past. Remember:  It wasn't until the end of the 19th century that a woman could own property, or control her own assets.   Black men were given the right to vote in 1870.  But women (of any color)  were not allowed the right to vote until 1920, 50 years later!  Until very recently, birth control was still illegal in some states, including Connecticut ( in 1965, the Supreme Court  ruled in the case Griswold v. Connecticut  that prohibiting the use of contraceptives violated the "right to marital privacy"). In 1972, the case Eisenstadt v. Baird expanded the right to possess and use contraceptives to unmarried couples.  1972!
Here's a petition circulating to support birth control today:

http://act.weareultraviolet.org/sign/congressbc/?referring_akid=a418651.99468.hFKWrT&source=copy_thanks_email

Old Photos

 Griffith Park, 1928

Girl and Horse, 1928

by Margaret Atwood

You are younger than I am, you are
Someone I never knew,
you stand under a tree,
your face half-shadowed,
Holding the horse by its bridle.

Why do you smile? Can’t you
See the apple blossoms falling around
You, snow, sun, snow,
listen, the tree dries
and is being burnt, the wind

Is bending your body,
your face ripples like water
Where did you go?

But no, you stand there
exactly the same,
you can’t hear me,

forty years ago you were caught by light
And fixed in that secret place
where we live, where we believe
nothing can change, grow older.

(On the other side
of the picture, the instant
is over, the shadow
of the tree has moved.

You wave,

then turn and ride
out of sight through the vanished
orchard, still smiling
as though you do not notice)

old photos,

escaping a tin box:

stories with wings

 butterflies, or white moths

fluttering at the glass

lighter than air, these memories

quietly,
through 

an open window

(2011)

Circe

An odd poem I rediscovered recently, originally inspired by Margaret Atwood's Circe/Mud Poems.** I re-read this collection recently, after reading Atwoods (much later and incredibly witty) The Penelopiad as well. The voice of "Lexus" turned up later after writing the first poem, no doubt to protest the indignity of being caught in someone else's epic.

CIRCE'S LAMENT

I cannot recall how it happened.

I was on fire, I do remember that,
my imagination a tropical sunset
enflamed, exaltant

and for one shining
Hallelujah of an hour
everything I touched
ignited

You squeal your indignation
through ruddy snouts:

It was a misfire, I swear it.

In the splendor of my exuberance
this was nothing I anticipated.

Tell your handsome Captain
I will petition the Gods this very day.
I have grown old, absent minded

in my solitude
my spells go astray

be patient, dear ones.
Meditate upon this dark, fertile
squalor of sensuous mud
you find yourself
so horizontal in.
This low rooting through an
odoriferous cosmos of fragrant compost.

Are you so undone
by the base pleasure of it all?
This nosing, snorting self-knowing,
the delight of a half fermented carrot?
Never a sow smelt so sweetly fecund before
nor was love so simple.

Surely we have become sleepy,
half-drowned by the lethargy
of our two-legged dignity.

Consider this, if you will,
an interlude of primordial grace.

(2000)

LEXUS LAMENTS HIS FATE

All I wanted
was a touch, a kindly word,
a little ease.

Eight long Gods' forsaken years
on the stinking boat, and before that,
war, war, war, blood
and lamentation.

Who are you,
to name me thus?
Is your worth and wit
so much greater than mine

to dole out shame,
because I dared to love you
in my clumsy way?

Did I not bring you flowers
admire you from afar?

HE is adored by Goddesses,
hears the Sirens sing his wild praises,
returning at last to patient little Penelope,
his pretty kingdom.
Ballads, sung at last
beside his flowery grave.

Me - bale, Lexus, bale!
hoist the mast,
and don’t piss on the foredeck.

Who are you, to unmake me thus?
To twist and shape me
as suits your capricious humor
because my face is unlovely,
my gestures naive?

Who are you to judge my folly?

what magnitudes I glimpsed,
what private splendors
lived once within this breast?

Lauren Raine (2000)

**
There are so many things
I wanted you to have.
This is mine, this tree,
I give you its name,

here is food, white like roots, red,
growing in the marsh, on the shore,
I pronounce these names for you also.

This is mine, this island, you can have
the rocks, the plants
that spread themselves flat over
the thin soil, I renounce them.
You can have this water,
this flesh, I abdicate,

I watch you, you claim
without noticing it,
you know how to take.

Margaret Atwood, CIRCE/MUD POEMS, (1972)

a "Webbed Vision"

“What might we see, how might we act, if we saw with a “webbed vision“?.....The world seen through a web…as delicate as spider’s silk, yet strong enough to hang a bridge on.”

Catherine Keller, FROM A BROKEN WEB

As the juices of spring flow (and it's well into high spring here in the desert), and the psychic juices of months of therapy also seem to be flowing in my psyche, I've been noticing a lot of syncronicities lately.

(I have many times noticed that syncronicities follow the threads whorls and weavings of my thoughts and imaginative processes. If one can understand that dreams are a conversation with the inner self by means of symbols that interact, then why can't syncronicities reflect the symbolic conversation World is having with us.......or perhaps we're having with World? )

I've been thinking about PENELOPE - the myth, its origins, and origins of the name itself. I've been reading the 1989 book "From a Broken Web" by theologian Catherine Keller. What struck me particularly are her reflections (as the quote above) on what kind of world we might co-create with if we could truly re-claim or truly internalize a new universal vision of a paradigm of interconnection. If we could see the world, as she put it, with a "Webbed Vision". She derives this concept from her analysis of mythologies about Spiders and Weavers, including Penelope, who wove and unwove a shroud every night as she waited for the return of her husband Odysseus.

The name, "Penelope" actually means, in Greek, something like "with a Web on her face". Here's what I opened to in the Tucson Weekly's Theatre Section this morning, while still bleary-eyed over coffee:

The movie showing in Tucson theatres has nothing to do with the Odyssey, or weaving (it's a charming film about a woman with a pig's snout and a curse she has to resolve) - but following the threads of my thoughts about Penelope, suddenly there she was, with a kind of web over her face, looking up at me from my newspaper. I love it.

Here's what Wikipedia has to say about Penelope:

In Homer's Odyssey, Penélopê (Πηνελόπη) is the faithful wife of Odysseus, who keeps her suitors at bay in his long absence and is rejoined with him at last. Her name[1] is usually understood to combine the Greek word for web or woof (πηνη / pene) and the word for eye or face (ωψ / ōps), very appropriate for a weaver of cunning whose motivation is hard to decipher.[2] Until recent readings, her name has been associated with faithfulness,[3] but the most recent readings offer a more ambiguous interpretation.

Ambiguous interpretation indeed. It seems fairly clear that here is a much earlier Goddess. The Weaver who "sees through a web". Another variation, for me, on Spider Woman - the Fate, with her 12 maids. The 12 maids are interesting too - perhaps, as I'm sure many have speculated before me, is the magical Goddess number 13 (representing 13 lunations of the year, 13 menstual cycles, the very number that became so "unlucky" in later patriarchal myth spinning). Bythis same re-mything process, Penelope became gradually diminished in the Odyssey, becoming the faithful wife, waiting for her adventuring husband (he was kind of the last word n the "hero's journey") to come home. And when he does, after eliminating the suitors who have been infringing upon his kingdom, he hangs Penelope's 12 maids as well, (for having been seduced or raped by the various suitors).

A much earlier Goddess, an earlier paradigm of the Web and the Sacred Feminine. Perhaps, at last, Penelope, weaving her Spider Web, reveals another transparent thread, an ancient myth that winks at me, at least, from my morning paper.

Margaret Atwood, the Canadian novelist, poet, and feminist wit, had a few things to say about the Odyssey recently - from the point of view of Penelope - in her 2005 novel

THE PENELOPAID

http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2007.10--margaret-atwood-novel/

I loved the book, would love to have seen it on stage as well - apparently, complete with the 12 hanged maids as Greek Chorus.