Paschal moon: bears, gowns & sarpints

Even though antics of the Klown Kar swirling around the White House provides sufficient laughs for a couple of decades, I think it’s time for something genuinely, harmlessly silly.

So, Edward Lear.

There was an Old Man on a hill,

Who seldom, if ever, stood still;

He ran up and down,

In his Grandmother’s gown,

Which adorned that Old Man on a hill.

(TBH, going all round the town in women’s clothes isn’t that much of a big deal where I come from. In fly-over country, though…)

There was an Old Man with a flute,

A sarpint ran into his boot;

But he played daay and night,

Till the sarpint took flight,

And avoided that man with a flute.

And here’s a version of the one about the Old Person from Ware (which my great-grandmother used to recite to us)—used in one of those periodicals for kids, Puzzle-Fun Comics, Spring 1946:

Paschal Moon: pacified rage

Friday the 13^th is considered inauspicious by a lot of people. Those people are most likely also the ones who steer clear of black cats, broken mirrors and spilt salt.

That black cat one is weird. In many places, a black cat is considered a harbinger of good luck. (In England, weddings often include an appearance by a chimney sweep with a black cat on his shoulder, to ensure a happy marriage. I honestly don’t know about cats of any color riding around on anyone’s shoulder in a crowd of people hitting the champagne, but it’s definitely A Thing.) But in large swathes of Western Europe and the United States, black cats have a hard life. They’re often the first to be abandoned and the last to be adopted.

I don’t think I’ve done a poem by the Austrian-Czech poet Rainer Maria Rilke before. He’s quite fascinating, because he was basically in love with all the arts—sculpture, painting, music, writing; they all shaped his sensibilities. He traveled and lived all over Europe, soaking up what each community had to offer and adding the influences to his writing. He also had passionate relationships with a number of women of all ages, and managed to maintain good relationships with most of them.

So for Friday the 13^th, let’s have Rilke’s “Black Cat”, whose beautiful fur absorbs all than a human can project, and in whose eyes turn us all into specks.

“Black Cat”

A ghost, though invisible, still is like a place

your sight can knock on, echoing; but here

within this thick black pelt, your strongest gaze

will be absorbed and utterly disappear:

just as a raving madman, when nothing else

can ease him, charges into his dark night

howling, pounds on the padded wall, and feels

the rage being taken in and pacified.

She seems to hide all looks that have ever fallen

into her, so that, like an audience,

she can look them over, menacing and sullen,

and curl to sleep with them. But all at once

as if awakened, she turns her face to yours;

and with a shock, you see yourself, tiny,

inside the golden amber of her eyeballs

suspended, like a prehistoric fly.

Paschal moon: the thunder from Sinai

Yom HaShoah, the annual commemoration of the millions of lives lost in the Holocaust, began at sundown yesterday. At 1000 local time, everything will come to a halt across Israel, and people will stand silent and still, remembering those deaths. It’s an astonishing thing to watch on my computer screen; I cannot imagine it in real life.

(Possibly the two minutes of silence at 1100 on 11 November every year in the UK is the closest approximation. But in the years I lived there, I never saw the kind of universal participation—traffic kept moving, people chattered—so, no.)

Today’s poem for National Poetry Month is by Maria Skobtsova, née Elizaveta Yurievna Pilenko in 1891 in Riga, then part of Russia. She embraced atheism in her youth, married for the first time at age 20 (to a Bolshevik), and got involved with pre-war literary circles. For a while—during and after the Russian Revolution, Skobtsova had quite the adventurous life, including a planned assassination of Leon Trotsky, from which she was dissuaded by friends. Following her divorce, she was drawn to the (Orthodox) Church; she married a second time (to a man named Skobtsov), divorced this husband and moved to Paris with her children. The short version of this journey is that she took religious vows (assuming the name Maria) and found her calling in social work and theological studies. Her home became a center for refugees, geographic, economic and spiritual; her doors were open to anyone in need of help.

I don’t know whether it was a residue of her early years as an atheist, but somewhat unusually for a follower of Eastern Orthodoxy (the term “pogrom” and its practice originated in tsarist Russia), Skobtsova welcomed Jews to her refuge (without expectation of needing conversion), including during the time following the German invasion and occupation of France. Her spiritual advisor, Father Dmitri Klepenin, issued baptismal certificates to Jews, and she both sheltered those who came to her and helped many escape the country.

Eventually the Nazis came for her. In 1943 she was sent to Ravensbrück, the concentration camp for women, where she was gassed on 31 March 1945, five weeks before the end of the war. In 2004, the Eastern Church declared Skobtsova a saint; in 1985, she was recognized as Righteous among the Nations by Yad Vashem.

Skobtsova’s poetry covered a lot of ground, but for today I’ll give you this one.

“Israel”

Two triangles, a star,

The shield of King David, our forefather.

This is election, not offense.

The great path and not an evil.

Once more in a term fulfilled,

Once more roars the trumpet of the end;

And the fate of a great people

Once more is by the prophet proclaimed.

Thou art persecuted again, O Israel,

But what can human malice mean to thee,

who have heard the thunder from Sinai?

Paschal Moon: like a relic

The most common picture that comes to mind when we hear “First World War” is probably trenches snaking across Belgium and Northern France. We may have some vague notion of activities on the Eastern Front, or along the Dardanelles—or even Jerusalem and Damascus. But the war along the Italian Alps almost never makes the headlines (unless you’re a Hemingway fan).

And yet the Isonzo River was the scene of no fewer than twelve distinct, ghastly battles. Historian Mark Thompson sets the stage: “Imagine the flat or gently rolling horizon of Flanders tilting at 30 or 40 degrees, made of grey limestone that turns blinding white in summer.” And imagine the futility of launching attack after attack against entrenched fortifications across the seasons in that terrain.

From December 1915, Giuseppe Ungaretti served in the Brescia Brigade along the Isonzo—in his late 20s, he’d already absorbed the cultures of Egypt (where he was born to immigrants from Tuscany), Paris (where he went to study, and was influenced by Rimbaud, Apollinaire and other modernists) and Turin (where he’d trained to be a teacher). His poems are distilled down to the bare essence of his observations and experiences.

In today’s National Poetry Month entry, Ungaretti frames the confluence of the flow of his life in terms of the rivers symbolic of his experiences, converging on the Isonzo, which polishes him like a stone. It was written in August, 1916.

“Rivers”

I cling to this mangled tree

Left to lie in the crevasse

That has all the indolence

Of a circus

Before or after the show

And I watch

The tranquil passing

Of clouds across the moon.

This morning

I stretched out

In an urn of water

And like a relic

Rested.

The Isonzo rushing

Polished me

As one of its stones.

I pulled

My bones together

And off I went

On the water

Like an acrobat.

I squatted down

Beside my clothes

Filthy with war and like a Bedouin

I bowed to receive

The sun

This is the Isonzo

And here I best

Acknowledged myself

A pliant fiber

In the Universe.

My torment

Comes when

I think myself

Out of harmony. But those hidden Hands

That immerse me

Give me freely

An uncommon

Happiness.

I have gone

Through the stages

Of my life

These are my rivers.

This is the Serchio

From which perhaps two thousand

Years of my own country folk

And my father and my mother

Have drawn their water

This is the Nile

That saw me born

And saw me grow

In unawareness

On the expansive plains.

This is the Seine

And in its swirl I mingled

And I came to know myself

These are my rivers

Tallied in the Isonzo.

This is my nostalgia

That in each of them

It comes to me

Now that night has fallen

That my life to me seems

A flower

Of shadows.

Paschal moon: miracle and cures and healing wells

Today’s entry for National Poetry Month comes from Seámus Heaney. Two years ago I gave you his heartbreaking “Requiem for the Croppies”, and mentioned his linguistic mastery, which included lyrical translations from Irish, Latin and Greek. For this round, I’ve chosen “The Cure at Troy”, which is Heaney’s take on Sophocles’ Philoctetes.

All you need to know about Philoctetes is that he was one of the approximately 72 squillion suitors for Helen, and thus honor-bound to help Menelaus retrieve her from Troy. He was stranded on the island of Lemnos on the way (different versions give different reasons, but all seem to involve some kind of suppurating wound whose putrescence offended the Greeks). After many years of siege, the Greeks were told they wouldn’t win the war until they possessed the weapons of Heracles, which were…on Lemnos. As you might imagine, Philoctetes (reduced to a solitary animal-like existence in the intervening time) wasn’t exactly overjoyed at the prospect of handing over the sacred weapons to the very men who’d abandoned him (he was particularly pissed off at Odysseus), but Heracles appeared and told him to give up the artifacts and his wound would be healed by Asclepius, and he would become a great hero, a key driver of winning the war. (Some versions have him killing Paris, the little toerag who started the whole thing; others put him in the actual Trojan Horse. Either way he was instrumental in driving a stake through it.)

So there are a lot of symbolic moving parts to this one—the festering wound that won’t heal and leads to the debasement of a warrior; only by a series of redemptive decisions is he given a permanent cure, which leads to the end of a long, exhausting war.

Heaney wrote his version in 1990 as a tribute to Nelson Mandela, and an indictment of apartheid. (Its relevance to the situation in Northern Ireland is also obvious.) Note that—like Mandela—Heaney urges the reader to move beyond revenge, to the “further shore” with “cures and healing wells.” I believe these are thoughts we should keep before us in these times.

“The Cure at Troy”

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 further shore

Is reachable from here.

Believe in miracle

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.

Paschal Moon: uninvited stain

My National Poetry Month entry today is by Mary P. Pettigrew, a woman who lives with Multiple Sclerosis, who could have been any of the participants I’ve seen in the WalkMS events I’vebeen to.

In another poem, about Annette Funicello, Pettigrew refers to sufferers as members of the MSketeer Club. This one is about the internal workings of the disease.

“Scars”

This brain, my brain

Reveals an unwanted, uninvited stain

Stealthy invaders placed an ugly mark

Though visually unseen, it's there...a permanent scar.

A tattoo, if you will

An indelible marking, perplexing until

Courageous, yet daunting intervention begins

Presenting theoretical ideas, invasive needles and pins.

The monster's mastery takes hold, you see...

Internally stalking, exploring ways to manipulate me

Wicked, determined to strike and knock me down

A bully in hiding, deploying trickery like a devious clown.

This brain, my brain

With this extraordinary, devastating stain

Brings clarity, unexpected strength, possibility

Now, determined, striving to re-define my disability.

Gratitude Monday: ratty or not, I walked

Yesterday I did the walk for Multiple Sclerosis that was held in Reston. This is the first time I’ve done it since my friend David’s death. I’ve been feeling pretty ratty lately—everything pisses me off—and I almost bagged it. But realized that wasn’t really an option.

On the ratty side, it’s really annoying to me that the organizers here in the National Capital Area do such a cursory job at this. The walks I did in the Valley They Call Silicon were just amazing. They always left me feeling energized and grateful; one of the things I found so wonderful was the enthusiastic participation of high school students, and the almost festival atmosphere. Maybe it was that it was held in a park, and not in a faux urban “town center” run by Boston Properties where they just want you to get the hell out before the punters show up, but in Los Gatos people were in for the day, with chairs and tables provided both before and after the walk for people to socialize.

Maybe it’s just the difference between California and Virginia.

(Also, in years past, the Reston walk route went through actual wooded areas, for which the community is famous. This time…it was through gardens of concrete; ugh.)

Well, anyhow—I hauled my sorry ass out to the faux urban center and around the uglified route for three miles, and I am profoundly grateful that I could do it—that, sorry as my ass is, I had the muscular control to get out and walk. And that I could also contribute monetarily to the National MS Society to help fund research.

Paschal Moon: A thousand years of poison

Last month, the New York Times woke up and realized that it has basically ignored women when it comes to publishing obituaries. Not because we don’t die in equal measure to men, but because we lack (in addition to that all-important Y-chromosome)…newsworthiness. So they’ve decided to publish belated obits in a feature they call “Overlooked”.

They started out by publishing a fistful of them, including one of the Chinese feminist, revolutionary and writer we know as Qiu Jin, sometimes styled China’s “Joan of Arc”, so you know her story doesn’t have a happy ending. Her pen name, Jianhu Nüxia, means “Woman Knight of Mirror Lake”, which gives you an idea of her character.

Born into a family of provincial gentry in 1875, one of her earliest revolutionary acts was to unbind her feet, following an arranged marriage and relocation to Beijing. She took up with other bluestockings, got into dressing in men’s clothes, learned swordsmanship and educated herself. At the age of 29 she sold her jewelry, left her family and moved to Japan, where she studied at a ladies’ university, joined anti-Manchu secret societies and wrote. When she returned to China, she founded and ran a publication that spoke out against (among other things) female foot-binding and arranged marriages.

She also learned how to make bombs.

Unsurprisingly, the revolutionary rhetoric and activities—which she took no pains to hide—brought her to the attention of the government. In 1907, she was captured and beheaded. She was 31.

I’m giving you two of her more militant poems, because Qiu speaks for me eloquently and succinctly.

“Capping Rhymes with Sir Shih Ching from Sun’s Root Land”*

Don’t tell me women

are not the stuff of heroes,

I alone rode over the East Sea’s

winds for ten thousand leagues.

My poetic thoughts ever expand,

like a sail between ocean and heaven.

I dreamed of your three islands,

all gems, all dazzling with moonlight.

I grieve to think of the bronze camels,

guardians of China, lost in thorns.

Ashamed, I have done nothing;

not one victory to my name.

I simply make my war horse sweat.

Grieving over my native land

hurts my heart. so tell me;

how can I spend these days here?

A guest enjoying your spring winds?

*I do not know who Sir Shih Ching is, or where you’d find Sun’s Root Land, but “capping rhymes” sounds like a very gangsta thing to do.

In this next poem, Qiu reflects on her life as an exile—she feels liberated, but has paid a heavy price for it.

“Preoccupation (Written while in Japan)”

Sun and moon have no light left, earth is dark;

Our women’s world is sunk so deep, who can help us?

Jewelry sold to pay this trip across the seas

Cut off from my family I leave my native land.

Unbinding my feet I clean out a thousand years of poison,

With heated heart arouse all women’s spirits.

Alas, this delicate kerchief here

Is half stained with blood, and half with tears.