Author Lydia Millet who has just published Love in Infant Monkeys:
Animals, though they inspire our passions from a very young age–our age, not theirs, that is–are also the objects of such dismissal, of such condescension, because, I think, we can’t assimilate them in some ways into our view of ourselves as the center of the world.
A fragment scratched on a shard of pottery by a careless hand in the third century before the Common Era. A hymn of the type called ‘kletic‘, a calling hymn or lyric invocation by Sappho, for the beloved Aphrodite. Translated here by Anne Carson.
. . . . [come] here to me from Krete
to this holy temple where is
your graceful grove of apple trees and altars
smoking with frankincense.
And in it cold water makes a clear sound through apple branches
and with roses the whole place
is shadowed and down from radiant-shaking leaves
sleep comes dropping.
And in it a horse meadow has come into bloom
with spring flowers and breezes
like honey are blowing. . . .
In this place you Kypris having taken up
in gold cups delicately
nectar mingled with festivities:
pour.
(frag. 2)
Sappho, lover of the goddess Aphrodite
At some point in our lives, we hit rock bottom, find ourselves in a dark place, lost and unable to carry on. It might be depression, the ravages of cancer, abandonment, rape trauma, war, addiction, prison, a locked ward. I found myself in this living death and recalled somehow that She had gone before me, had descended into the darkness by choice and that She had been destroyed, her violated and tortured body left to hang green and rotting on a a meat hook. Abnegation, the world of non-self. The abyss.
And friends had come to search for her, those who loved her and were loyal to Inanna followed her down into the underworld known to the Sumerians as the Great Below. Helpers are created from the dirt under Enki’s fingernails, two androgynous servitors who will follow the instructions:
”Go to the underworld,
Enter the door like flies.
Ereshkigal, the Queen of the Underworld, is moaning
With the cries of a woman about to give birth.
No linen is spread over her body.
Her breasts are uncovered.
Her hair swirls about her head like leeks.
When she cries, ‘Oh! Oh! My inside!’
Cry also, ‘Oh! Oh! Your inside!’
When she cries, ‘Oh! Oh! My outside!’
Cry also, ‘Oh! Oh! Your outside!’
The queen will be pleased.
She will offer you a gift.
Ask her only for the corpse that hangs from the hook on the wall.
One of you will sprinkle the food of life on it.
The other will sprinkle the water of life.
Inanna will arise.”
Inanna has to pay a price for her freedom — she has to send another down into the depths to suffer in her place. She has to surrender her heart, one might say. Her lover will go away into the darkness for six months of the year. She will journey alone, will resume her life in the Great Above with the joy of regained freedom offset by sadness, a knife in the heart. The greatness enlarged, the goddess radiant. Inanan the murdered has come into her power over life and death.
This is the Sumerian legend first told in the valleys of Mesopotamia in what is now bloodied Iraq. The hymns to Inanna are found in Eheduanna’s poetry, some 4 300 years old.
When humanity comes before you in awed silence
at the terrifying radiance and tempest,
you grasp the most terrible of all the divine powers.
Because of you, the threshold of tears is opened,
and people walk along the path of the house of great lamentations.
In the van of battle, all is struck down before you.
With your strength, my lady, teeth can crush flint.
You charge forward like a charging storm.
And the echo of that reverence and wonder comes down to us through the centuries since:
Your torch lights up the corners of heaven,
turning darkness into light with fire.
No one can lay a hand on your precious divine powers
You exercise full woman power over heaven and earth;
you hold everything in your hand.
Mistress, you are magnificent, no one can walk before you.
The goddess Inanna holds a special place in my heart. I entered into her myth and lived there for many years, serving my apprenticeship to her dark wisdom and power.
She is the sky goddess of Sumerian folklore who goes down into the darkness to meet with her sister and rival Erishkegal. The descent of Inanna is a story about encountering the Shadow, the mercilessness of sibling rivalry, betrayal, enduring shame and loss and death. As Inanna descends down into the realm of darkness, she is strippped of her clothes and jewels and aspects of her humanity, passing through the seven gates of the underworld in order to stand before her sister and the judges naked and stripped of all power. Her death is graphic and filled with images of shame and violation. Her corpse is left to hang on a meat hook, she has expereinced the ultimate dehumanizing act of violence at the hands of an intimate.
And yet she will be found and renewed, regain her immortality, climb up through theose circles of hell and pass through those heavy gates and step into the sunlight of the spirit.
“After she had crouched down and had her clothes removed, they were carried away. Then she made her sister Erec-ki-gala rise from her throne, and instead she sat on her throne. The Anna, the seven judges, rendered their decision against her. They looked at her — it was the look of death. They spoke to her — it was the speech of anger. They shouted at her — it was the shout of heavy guilt. The afflicted woman was turned into a corpse. And the corpse was hung on a hook.“
From the poet Margaret Aho :
“Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of all my poems really derive from dreams because it’s the access to what cannot be manipulated by me can’t be controlled by me. It is a gift and your job is to put it down as truly as you got it.”
The poet and mystic HD, from Eurydice:
I live with somebody who is pure Scorpio and it is her birthday on Thursday. She will be 68 years old. Next month she is going white-water rafting on the Orange River. Scorpio is a water sign linked with intuition, sex, death and regeneration. Strong women awe me, and those born in Scorpio are intuitive , possessive , cunning and ferociously loving. Forever young.
This is a time of crucible, bracing myself for the sting of truth, the wound that pierces. The small golden scorpion with upturned tail, the hidden danger, the scorpion flat under the stone, the dart or arrow that punctures illusion. A time of some trepidation. The dark moon hovering with concealed surprises. I am living through a time charged with power and danger, alive to both possibility and threat.
There are showers of radiant Leonids set to fall from the night skies on 17 November. Sparks in the lunar darkness.
To catch a falling star. As Marge Piercy wrote:
we lie eyes open to the flowers
of white ice that blaze over us
From Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes:
It’s like this. When I think of witches. I seem to see all over England, all over Europe, women living and growing old, as common as blackberries, and as unregarded. I see them, wives and sisters of respectable men, chapel members, and blacksmiths, and small farmers, and Puritans. In places like Bedfordshire, the sort of country one sees from the train. You know. Well, there they are, child-rearing, house-keeping, hanging washed dishcloths on currant bushes; and for diversion each other’s silly conversation, and listening to men talking together in the way that men talk and women listen. Quite different to the way women talk, and men listen, if they listen at all. And all the time being thrust down into dullness when the one thing all women hate is to be thought dull.
I’m dreaming brown rivers, taken at the flood. More here. And I’m dreaming about the night skies over Africa.
Marguerite Duras:
“I can’t really remember the days. The light of the sun blurred and annihilated all color. But the nights, I remember them. The blue was more distant than the sky, beyond all depths, covering the bounds of the world. The sky, for me, was the stretch of pure brilliance crossing the blue, that cold coalescence beyond all color. Sometimes, it was in Vinh Long, when my mother was sad she’d order the gig and we’d drive out into the country to see the night as it was in the dry season. I had that good fortune- those nights, that mother. The light fell from the sky in cataracts of pure transparency, in torrents of silence and immobility. The air was blue, you could hold it in your hand. Blue. The sky was the continual throbbing of the brilliance of the light. The night lit up everything, all the country on either bank of the river as far as the eye could reach. Every night was different, each one had a name as long as it lasted. Their sound was that of the dogs, the country dogs baying at mystery. They answered on another from village to village, until the time and space of the night were utterly consumed.”
Dreaming in a kind of topsy-turvy balance. Image found here
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