Full moon in Virgo/earthquake in Chile

When I was reading German literature at university, I studied Heinrich von Kleist’s Das Erdbeben in Chile. The Earthquake in Chile. Although he lives in  an age known as Romanticism, von Kleist the writer is preoccupied with repressive order and religious tyrannies, the uprisings in Haiti in 1803, the suffering of Catholic Latin America as an earthquake wreaks havoc in Chile, the unrealistic idealizing of powerless  individuals, the failures of liberation impulses. Nothing suffices and his irony darkens, he finds the brutality of Enlightment society beyond hope. He is caught up in the significance of controlled and twitching marionette puppets, he reads Kant and despairs.  In 1811, he gets to know Henriette Vogel, an actress dying of cancer who agrees to a suicide pact. They traveled together to an inn near Potsdam where Kleist shoots Vogel and then himself.  Such a dark narrative! And yet I read Heinrich von Kleist as an antidote to glib and insufficient answers and promises.

 Pisces flickering  in watery glimpses all through February — and I have been ill in bed with bronchitis all week, listening to the body.

Now the pragmatism of the full moon in Virgo. The sun optimistic and ebullient in Jupiter. A harvest month here on the tip of Africa, bowls and baskets in my kitchen overflowing with peaches, nectarines, plums, apples, Hubbard squashes, plum tomatoes, brown onions. A time of abundance and awareness.

As it happens, I am stressed and  a little off-balance. My housemate has a knee replacement operation coming up, her second. I am in limbo as regards  my landlord’s plans for the property. Work is uncertain, unpromising. I’m not looking forward to the 2010 soccer World Cup extravaganza in South Africa because I  think too much money has been spent on stadiums and governmental showpieces rather than on schools or hospitals or building a safer community. And that is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to living in the global nightmare that is  Civilization (as viewed from the plague-stricken, neo-globalized, impoverished, drug-cartel-targeted, monocropped-out Third World) as it shudders into  chaos. Not an easy time.

But autumn is slowly approaching, the pin oak is changing colour from green to hurdy-gurdy reds and coppers and burgundy, the heavy  purple Turkish figs are splitting open with sweetness and crowding ants, my basil is racing into flower, there are ibises crying hoarsely from camphor  trees. When I go out at night in that stark moonshine of  Virgo’s revealing lamplight, I can stand on the springy spider-webbed grass and sink roots down into the warm earth, become an oyster woman in the moonlight, damp and luscious,  the tides sucking at and ebbing through my body. Virgo’s moon penetrates, urges, lays it all out there to be seen by those who care to look. Gaze on life and death, and all that comes before and after.

There is purpose and there is purposelessness and who knows which may fit best? In the spring of 1799, the 21-year-old Heinrich von Kleist wrote a letter to his half-sister Ulrike in which he talks about how he found it “incomprehensible how a human being can live without a plan for his life“. But the plan was perhaps too limiting when it appeared.

You can buy my heart and soul

Lifesized elephant sculpture from sculptor Andries Botha. “The elephant is a metaphor that awakens the yearning for forgotten conversations between humans, the Earth and all living things.” The elephant symbolism used by  this artist has been attacked by the ANC in Durban because for many years the elephant was the symbol used by a rival Zulu party called the IFP. The philistines will always be with us. And in his title for the sculpture, Andries Botha refers to the long history of elephant curios exploited for foreign buyers.   Ungayithenga inhlizyo nomongo wami — you can buy my heart and soul.

Andries Botha:

“In part it is the Colonial panacea: wildness can be contained, civilised and taken back to the ballrooms of the First World as a trophy.”

Deep ocean dying

From Carl Zimmer, hat tip Andrew Sullivan:

The acidification of the ocean today is bigger and faster than anything geologists can find in the fossil record over the past 65 million years. Indeed, its speed and strength — Ridgwell estimate that current ocean acidification is taking place at ten times the rate that preceded the mass extinction 55 million years ago — may spell doom for many marine species, particularly ones that live in the deep ocean. 

Kitchen witch

cutting greens
by Lucille Clifton
curling them around i hold their bodies in obscene embrace thinking of everything but kinship. collards and kale strain against each strange other away from my kissmaking hand and the iron bedpot. the pot is black. the cutting board is black, my hand, and just for a minute the greens roll black under the knife, and the kitchen twists dark on its spine and i taste in my natural appetite the bond of live things everywhere.

Because Lucille means light

The African-American poet Lucille Clifton has died at the age of 73. From an interview in Poetry Foundation:

Why do you say the white children would be disadvantaged because they had only mirrors?

Because they live on a planet that is more window than mirror. And they have tended to believe that the planet is a planet like them or people who wish to be like them. And it’s not necessarily so. It’s a mistake to believe oneself one’s only valid participator in life, that that is the standard, the standard for human is white. I tell children the standard for flowers is many-colored; the standard for all kinds of things is many-colored. That is also the standard for humans, though they have not been taught that.

No secret heart, no simple solution

Marguerite Young recalling  the enigmatic poet Marianne Moore in 1946:

Marianne Moore is a woman with a narrow head and pale blue eyes which seem to gather all the light into them. She is so unfashionable that she seems extremely fashionable. She speaks in quick, enigmatic sentences which strip away the flesh of thought and leave the bones bare and shining, so that suddenly you feel that you are seeing into the secret heart of things. You are mistaken, however, for soon you realize a further complexity—there is no secret heart, no simple solution but another problem, fastidious and strange. This is the atmosphere of her speech as of her poetry, which seems only the organization of her speech—the preservative of many fleeting moments.

Black moon in Aquarius

The Year of the Iron Tiger has begun and in Chinese astrology, this first New Moon is known as the Black Moon. It is still very hot here in the mountains and the nights are filled with starlight, moonless skies like a glittering shawl — a perfect time for sktclad workings and dreaming up visions of the year now emerging. Like many others, this optimistic Valentine’s Day celebration has been darkened by the suicide of iconic designer Alexander McQueen whose fantastical and menacing lobster claw heels entered my dreams of dancing a gavotte on the ocean floor. And perhaps  that intense umbilical cord to mother love that snapped when McQueen’s mother died was his last link to this earthly plane. Shine on, bright and lovely dancer!

The New Moon in Aquarius is conjoined with Chiron the Wounded Healer and the creative surging  energies of Neptune. A little edgy? I am prone to overwhelm when Neptune floods the planetary alignments. Too much sea, too much deep water. But the Sabian symbol at 27 degrees Aquarius is especially calming and beautiful. Violets and forget-me-nots in an old earthen bowl. This is an image that recalls to me a  grandmother setting out to make potpourri, the fresh flowers tumbled together in a deep terracotta bowl, purple and scented, flowers of remembrance. Images of  a unifying sensibility, a coming together to create something lovely, the elusive beauty and impermanence of fragrance. And a small handful of violets stands for many nof us as a lesbian symbol, the sign of women-bonding. I think too of DH Lawrence’s poem Bavarian Gentians  about the luminousity of the dark, darkness blazing and  a violet power in that blue-black darkness. Another kind of descent in the dark moon, sowing seeds and dreaming and gazing down into the ocean of the Unconscious.

Bavarian Gentians

Not every man has gentians in his house
in Soft September, at slow, sad Michaelmas.

Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark
darkening the daytime torchlike with the smoking blueness of Pluto’s
      gloom,
ribbed and torchlike, with their blaze of darkness spread blue
down flattening into points, flattened under the sweep of white day
torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto’s dark-blue daze,
black lamps from the halls of Dis, burning dark blue,
giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter’s pale lamps give off
      light,
lead me then, lead me the way.

Reach me a gentian, give me a torch
let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower
down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness.
even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September
to the sightless realm where darkness was awake upon the dark
and Persephone herself is but a voice
or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark
of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom,
among the splendor of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on the
      lost bride and groom.

Green Man: my omnipresent Valentine

 

“Lying in bed I think about you …”

by Joshua Beckman

Lying in bed I think about you,

your ugly empty airless apartment

and your eyes. It’s noon, and tired

I look into the rest of the awake day

incapable of even awe, just

a presence of particle and wave,

just that closed and deliberate

human observance. Your thin fingers

and the dissolution of all ability. Lay

open now to only me that white body,

and I will, as the awkward butterfly,

land quietly upon you. A grace and

staying. A sight and ease. A spell

entangled. A span. I am inside you.

And so both projected, we are now

part of a garden, that is part of a

landscape, that is part of a world

that no one believes in.

Ocean-wracked: the sea garden of HD

In one way this blog is  all about  what a lover of Chekov called ‘the unadorned ordinariness of life’. It is about earthing, grounding, getting  on with the challenges and opportunities presented by our material and secular and profane and sacred and mundane realities. On the whole I’m not a great fan of magical thinking in that  certain kinds of escapism or fantasy are just avoidance or a kind of immature wishful thinking; for me it is vitally important to be grounded in political activism, to take responsibility, to live and work in community, even  if that is also to work on the edges of community.

In another way this blog is also about what a lover of Chekov called the ‘unfathomable strangeness’ of our  extraordinary lives. It is a blog that I have determined as a kind of poetics, a way of speaking and writing about the mythical, fantasical, imagined and imaginary aspects of the layered and unfathomably strange self. And the Other — and the power of art, the power of connectedness to all that sustains the spirit, to work on behalf of the endangered earth. Flying, dreaming, envisioning, bringing into being.

For years I have puzzled over the writer HD, and her poetry and visionary  writings have become a cryptogram for the lacunae and ellipses and unspoken within me, places and gaps that resonate or echo. Silences and the need for unsilencing. I think of HD bravely deciding to  break  secrecy on her oracular trances and  here I look back to the women who sat in Quaker meeting houses across early 19th-century America and spoke not only of messages from the dead (as did the Fox sisters) but also of suffragist rights, an end to slavery and   new ways to read the Bible through a woman’s eyes. They were radically socialist and populist speakers and oracular trance or ’mediumship’ was often the only way for a woman to find a public platform in that era. More on that another time.

But HD struggles with the passive nature of the medium’s gift, with being an empty receptacle or channel for another’s vision. She will co-operate, choose, interpret — and her visions are the source of her poetry. In the same way that  when she meets with Freud she sees herself as a student of psychoanalysis, even a colleague, not a patient.

Some jottings:

Fragment #1 During 1944 the poet HD participates in spiritualist seances in London. At the same time, she is writing her  memoir of the psychoanalysis with Freud undertaken in 1933.

Fragment #2 During 1944, HD, preoccupied with the destruction and ruins of bombed London, the impact of  a world war, her memories of the Egyptian Valley of the Kings from 1923,  studies the spiritualist  writings of  Air Chief Marshal Lord Hugh Dowding, the Commander-in-Chief of the new RAF Fighter Command from its formation in 1936 to the Battle of Britain in 1940, someone who believes himself to be in contact with the spirits of dead air pilots. In 1945, HD is herself contacted by the ghostly pilots who warn her of environmental disaster following the atomic bomb.

Fragment#3 Her claims as a medium are ridiculed and dismissed by Lord Hugh Dowding. HD sees this as a repudiation of her psychic gifts and suffers a severe nervous breakdown in 1946, after which she never again works openly as a medium.

Fragment#4 The initial visions of HD: a jellyfish-like hallucination in Sicily in 1919. A dazzling hallucination of dolphins and a glimpse of a male friend aboard a boat to Greece in 1920. A series of light pictures projected onto a wall in Corfu, again in 1920. Always the ocean.

Fragment#5 What can be said of these crucial, cryptic, inexpressible visions of the sea sorrow, the redemptive ocean, the hidden depths of the  psyche? HD  at last writes in the first person:

I sense my own limit,

my shell jaws snap shut

at the invasion of the limitless

ocean-weight;  infinite water

Fragment#6 When HD speaks of ‘purpose’, ‘prophecy’ and ‘papyrus’ in Trilogy, she attempts a new hieroglyphics, a new ocean-wracked runic mythmaking. A speech forever cryptic, partial, but precise and actual.

Fragment#7 In her youth, HD spends time alone and with her then-lover Richard Aldington in a reconstructed temple to the Nereids brought to the British Museum from Turkey in 1848. Here she comes under the spell of the Nereids, those oracular, fractured and tormented water nymphs who inhabit a space between witnessing and redeeming, between fight and flight, between the stormy ocean surfaces and the hidden sea gardens far below: the coral beds and  watery tombs and shipwrecks and  the birthing places of dolphin lore, the origins of prophecy.

These lovely female figures survived decapitated, but

their lithe bodies have been restored in positions “half running, half flying…at

intervals between the columns” (Guidebook 66). The statues carry associations of

the sea in their damp garments and the distinct marine symbols at their feet—a

water bird, a seashell, a crab, a cuttlefish.13 The beautiful and elegant Nereids in

their diaphanous drapery dampened by sea mist create a breath-taking first

impression, but contrast strikingly with the images of atrocities in low relief

around the temple base. In its visual mixed-message, the monument stands as a

site of intense conflict, ambivalently committed to both beauty and brutality.

Tug-of-war

There is a shallow planter with scalloped edges attached to my garage wall. It was there when I arrived and I filled it with earth and planted a tough little beauty, an indigenous ivy-leaved pelargonium that would thrive in limited root space and  not enough water. It bloomed abundantly and I watered it once a week and forgot about it, except for the odd handful of compost or mulch.

A month ago I realised that an invader had moved in, the poisonous hepatotoxic weed Lantana camera. I have always found Lantana rather lovely with its tough thorny roots and smell of black currants and yellow and orange umbels of flower. But I live in a farming area and cattle die if they eat Lantana — the berries are spread by birds. So I decided to intervene, something quite rare in my wild gardening ways. Nature usually knows best and I leave it to her.

The plant was still young and I decided to just take it out and chop it up. I cut back and scratched my hands on the prickly stems and leaves, tugged and dug all in vain. The invader loved my interference and  flourished. Lantana thirves on competition andexercises its dark powers of  alleopathy, chemically suppressing the germination and growth of other species. The little ivy-leaved pelargonium just stayed  quiet. My respect for hardy, beastly Lantana grew.

I can’t defeat or tear out that root system. It is the toughest radical network I have ever  come across and my digging and uprooting is simply damaging my little pelagonium. The flowers of the invader flicker from from white to yellow, orange to red, pink to rose in unlimited combinations. Very soon the shiny black berries will appear, to be eaten and dispersed by birds. I am torn, a tug-of-war goes on inside me.

Elsewhere in the world Lantana camara is used as a herbal medicine (with caution). It has anti-microbial, fungicidal, biocidal properties and extract trials have shown it can suppress tumours and that it is immuno-suppressive. It is an old folk treatment for leprosy. A feared and despised plant that  is impossible to contain or  domesticate. There are government programs all along the east coast of Australia and  deep in Malaysia and Kenya to eradicate Lantana  undergrowth. I don’t plant toxic species in my garden but I have a sneaking admiration for this  lovely monster.

What to do? And it talks me me as I go about the garden before dawn (my soon-to-be-lost garden), I can hear it coaxing and chuckling and growing, spreading, tenacious of life, as tough a survivor as I myself am. What to do?