Emily Every Day

May 12, 2010 · 5:37 pm

Contented As the Eye

Today’s poem arrives at a time when the energy feels poised over the tipping point into something new. Have had this nagging hunch lately that a significant shift is about to occur. It’s like the smell of rain in the air while the sun is shining. There is nothing obvious to suggest a change, but the hint is there below the obvious stuff.

#305, c. 1862

The difference between Despair
And Fear — is like the One
Between the instant of a Wreck —
And when the Wreck has been —

The Mind is smooth — no Motion —
Contented as the Eye
Upon the Forehead of a Bust —
That knows — it cannot see —

The lines telescope into a single moment when all is lost. Fear comes later, when you look at the wreckage and review what you’ll have to do to fix it or live with it or walk away from it. Despair is that whoosh, the floor falls out from beneath your feet. The airplane cuts into the tall building. The flood wall crumbles into the canal. Someone says, “No.” It’s a stunning and empty moment. The mind is smooth, and we become like stone. No thought. Thinking comes later. After a time, we’ll construct a narrative that makes sense or at least a story. We’ll string together events in words so that we can know where it began and where it ended.

In that no-time, no-thought space, when it all cracks open, there is no narrative because we are helplessly borne along on events. We are outside our own control. This is despair. This emptiness left after someone cuts the strings, and we go into free fall. Can’t see where we’re going or where we’ll land.

Fear produces a narrative because it carries a sense of the past and future. Fear runs the language to discuss what is lost and what might be gained. Despair takes us beyond time and space into nothingness where our verbal and intellectual grip on our circumstances becomes irrelevant.

There is a purity in despair that would appeal to an artist. It’s neat and clean. That simplicity opens one to the possibility of a new creation. Poets love that sort of thing. Interesting that Em would notice the contentment. If we were at all honest we’d have to acknowledge the perverse satisfaction in giving up our grip on circumstances. We can make wry jokes about how we’re all going to hell in a handbasket, but that despair is the embodied experience of it. That place where words, wry jokes, etc. fall away like a dry carapace, leaving raw skin and bone. In our despair, we are animals again. Something in us wants that now and then.

Happy (?) Beltane

Happy Beltane. Okay a day late, but let’s treat this holiday as though it lasts the whole month of May. Our Beltane this year is so strange. First, the sky has been a constant brooding gray with tropical winds buffeting the trees, the clouds on the edge of an explosive downpour, but not giving in. For days this heavy dark threat has been hovering overhead.

Then on top of all that, the BP oil spill in the Gulf creeps closer to the marshes along Venice and the Breton Wildlife Refuge. This morning a fleet of volunteer fishers went out in their boats to put a long line of floating boom in the water, an effort to contain the oil. It doesn’t look good. The wind is pushing the chop over the boom. Those people in their boats are noble and brave . . . and, let’s face it . . . desperate. Their livelihood is out there in the water. It’s dying . . . again.

Emily’s post today follows.

#742, ca. 1863

Four Trees — upon a solitary Acre —
Without Design
Or Order, or Apparent Action —
Maintain —

The Sun — upon a Morning meets them —
The Wind —
No nearer Neighbor — have they —
But God —

The Acre gives them — Place —
They — Him — Attention of Passerby —
Of Shadow, or of Squirrel, haply —
Or Boy —

What Deed is Theirs unto the General Nature —
What Plan
They severally — retard — or Further —
Unknown

She asks: Can’t we leave well enough alone?

Beltane asks us to fall into an embrace of the natural world, to recognize it as the source of all life. Also to see our own nature reflected back to us as procreative, lavish, abundant. To plunge into the cycle of life by making life. At the opening of May we celebrate our place in the greenness of things.

This year, with Mercury retrograde in Taurus (imagine a 3,000-pound bull zonked out on Xanax), Beltane is a somber, slow phase of missed connections. Things not falling into place, green or otherwise. We can’t embrace the possibility of future life, not with any degree of unencumbered joy, when this doom of human folly creeps up on us. Emily points out that whatever we do in the world will naturally result in our interference in a plan unknown to us. Now a suppurating wound in the ocean’s floor hemorrhages black blood. She was right, as always. If only more of us would listen to Emily.

A Fair Hope of Success

I am sitting on the porch of a pretty house in Fairhope, Alabama. Last evening I read the visitor’s brochure to Geoff over dinner. He shelled the steamed shrimp, while I explained that we were visiting a Utopian Society. Back in 1894, someone said this little town had “a fair hope of success.” The original settlers (who came from Iowa) identified with an idea. They called themselves “single taxers.” Took us a while to figure this out in contemporary terms. We settled on calling it a type of social engineering that was supposed to discourage land speculators from holding property without improving it, while all around them their neighbors toiled to maintain and improve their own properties. The “single tax” is a flat tax levied on all properties, regardless of its state of repair or dishevelment. So the tax code does not “punish” people who invest in their properties by raising their taxes, nor does it “reward” lazy landowners who do nothing by letting their taxes stay low. Well, gosh, this is just a hop and a skip from socialism. What were these people thinking?

They really did see themselves as creating a Utopian Society. That was their stated mission, not just my snarky take on it. The town does seem idyllic, if not exactly Utopian, whatever that means. We also found in our brief research that pretty much all the experiments in “Utopian Societies” of the late 19th century in America (many of them in upstate New York) failed. Except Fairhope, Alabama. Not sure how to explain that. Perhaps Fairhope is small enough and its founding idea, the single tax, simple enough that it could survive the inevitable chipping away of idealism that comes with time and more people. Honestly, the only Utopian Society that works is one devoid of human involvement because people always wreck things. To attempt a utopian society is to pursue the notion that a well thought out system can eradicate badness (or at least the propensity toward wreckage) from human nature. Picture this, okay: A society whose success depends on everyone being rational and responsible and abiding by the founding ideal. In order to work, the society assumes that when you let people into your society, they are magically shorn of chaos, greed, envy, deceit, hostility, rage, petty meanness, (name it!) the moment they cross the threshold. Further, that people really prefer to be good, and bad can be removed from human nature and behavior by the strength of a rational idea. Surely, that will result in Eden on Earth. Makes perfect sense. It’s kind of sweet really. This longing for the Garden. Sweet and absurd.

Here’s a fun fact: The first librarian of Fairhope, over a century ago, was a nudist. She was known to settle on the public green with her book, bathing her unadorned self in the morning sun. I’ll bet any amount of money she was some Yankee bluestocking, a graduate of Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, no doubt.

Emily has something to add to this discussion:

#1238, c. 1872

Power is a familiar growth —
Not foreign — not to be —
Beside us like a bland Abyss
In every company —
Escape it — there is but a chance —
When consciousness and clay
Lean forward for a final glance —
Disprove that and you may —

Emily says power is inevitable. Put another way, any place where power is pre-eminent, there love cannot also exist. Power and love cannot occupy the same space at the same time. At the moment that power walks in the front door, love scoots out the back. Impossible to hold a true heart-felt compassion, if you also assert some form of power. To love is to be helpless, without delineation of self-hood. The exercise of power demands separation from others.

Em says that as long as we exist in bodily form, “that consciousness and clay” we will grapple with this tension between power and love. The concrete shape and delineation of our human form brings a person inevitably to Self or selfishness. We want what we want because this fortress of flesh is all we have. Or so it seems. We think we depend on it. With power there is no merging of fortresses, no letting down of those battlements. Not really. We can play at it from time to time, but we always return to the fortress and pull up the drawbridge because that is the only home our limited consciousness can conceive. We might glimpse something more expansive, but we don’t trust that. We forgot the Garden a long time ago.

Only at the end as we are about to be wrested from the fortress by the force of Death, may we, if wise and careful, consider a life without the delineations of power. Emily suggests that we may shed our desire for power. Although not everyone does it. You have to die first. Or maybe she means “die first”. The death she suggests may feel as drastic as the literal death of the body, but I’ll warrant it’s a death of another sort. One that shatters the felt sense of separation.

Emily Every Day

Contented As the Eye

Happy (?) Beltane

A Fair Hope of Success

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