An exploration of spiritual bravery in Carrie Pedersen's poem
"From Duino Castle, with Love"
By Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
How do we dare to exist morning to morning in the crush and tumble crowd of those alive and the spirits of those long since proud. How do we ever dare exist in our simpleness, the earthy requirements of bathing and feeding, babies grown tall, babies grown old. The beauty of angels distains us. How do we offer greetings to those who are new when so many have already shown their faintness of faith. Even the lilacs are aware that we are not at home in this world we interpret in light and shadow. Here, where each photon teeters haplessly on. We do not understand the endings. There is no finish, no polish, just a quiet stop, and hesitant continuance as the seasons race out their haphazard rhythms. You called to your beloved with the strength of your dreams. You spent hours learning the harp just so you could begin to tell him how much, and how tenderly. He was almost there in the damp silences of days. His exhalations still lingered in the breeze, moments before you came by. Isn't there a river you can look to each day, there between cars vying for position on the too-narrow road you travel each morning, that route which wears itself into you and becomes the place the mind travels in sleep, that river whose faint but constant sound forms itself out of the flowing. Did you think it was an accompaniment for your tiny beginnings of love, you whose faith is shaken by the smallest rebuke? No, more ancient songs flowed up from the earth when you loved, a terrible cacophonous hum of mire and spark, the implacable brothers for whom conflict is their very nature. Your yearning was a path to chthonic wilderness, a tangled undergrowth where your heart sprouted out, yellow-green. When you find your heart trembling in time with the trembling heart of another, the song swelling to a fate-driven event that sorrow and joy cannot comprehend, Remember to forget the fragility of that music; it will end. Lead your beloved out to where the ocean meets the sand, listen to it endlessly sighing against its own boundary. Give him what outweighs the heaviest night: the undergrowth wrapped round in the loops you make each day. The teakettle to the sink to the stove and back: its water, its breath, its steam, its song. And when the swelling music makes its quiet stop, Dear girl, only this: that you have held the ocean close to your heart, its awful echo sighing still, and did not refuse to go on living. Carrie Pedersen
Obviously and immediately in this poem, we have the ever living division of the ideal and the real. The ideal in the poet's mind is inexhaustibly sharp and contains a reality that the mind apprehends with an immediacy that is frightening. To have a mind like that must be a little bit like taking a nap in the afternoon only to awaken before St. Peter's gate. The Saint is awful and august and demands to know why you should be let into heaven.
How do we dare to exist... in... the spirits of those long since proud. How do we ever dare exist in our simpleness... The beauty of angels distains us.
Here is the central conflict to any human to whom the ideal has a palpable reality. "We are not at home/ in this world we interpret in light and shadow." Our capacity to understand the symbols, essences and correspondences--which helps us negotiate our daily lives as civilized human beings--hamstrings us when the ideal correspondences (the chair and table of Plato) that tie these realities to human meaning become too palpable to the conscious mind, and the ideal-apprehending mind becomes too large a part of our less-than-ideal world. At that point, what ordinarily helps us, hurts us and imaginative mentality minimizes existence.
No one is more frightened by this possibility than the speaker of the poem.
"Earthy requirements" bring a consciousness of shame...
We do not understand the endings.
This ignorance and incapacity spreads out from the speaker, infecting the world at large. The seasons themselves escape our comprehension, their ideal divisions blurred in our apprehension. From the energy of angels and photons, to the cyclic change, unstoppable, of the seasons, the speaker is confronted with confusion. There is at best merely a "hesitant continuance" that occurs, a phrase that makes the tongue stop and start in saying it. Ordinary timelines, which give us certain expectations for the future and a distance from the past, are terrifyingly telescoped into instant, too-intimate vistas. "Babies grown tall, babies grown old." The day-to-day world we live in comfortably is irritatingly turned on its head. Instead of homey comforts, we get horrible catastrophes. Nothing is as it seems; and because of our ability to apprehend the ideal, nothing that really is (i.e., the ideal world) is real. We are intrinsically alienated from that which appears most "real," or significant to us.
And now the poet approaches her project: comminglings and crossovers of the ideal and the real. She starts out boldly with the common landscape and territory that ideal and real share in our daily experience. Or perhaps I should say our 'nightly experience.'
You called to your beloved with the strength of your dreams.
Dreams are a place of angels and visions; here we inhabit a Middle Realm, a place where the extraordinary seems and feels permissible, even ordinary, while we are still within the dream. Dreams are a place where the beauty of angels does not disdain us. Here we may mirror their uniqueness and greatness. The poet, however, does not explore the power of dreams to combine the ideal and real, but rather assumes its importance and immanence in the 'nightly experience' of the reader.
Dreams become a place a viable action...
The preparation that the speaker undertakes for this communication and communion, amounts to readying herself to dream. Hours are spent learning the harp, a form of communication without words. Music being the most abstract language, it is closest to the ideal forms, and can take our emotional imprint to the very gates of heaven. There is a near acknowledgment of the unreality of this preparation in the regretful phrase "he was almost there in the damp silences of days." The beloved, ever present in the poet's mind, is never quite present in the real world. He is "almost there" and then only in the silences between the twin claims of the harp strings. The beloved is a rarified rumor, an odor of incense after it's been extinguished. The speaker is chronically too late to meet the real form of her ideal. In fact, we are told that his "exhalations" only lingered in the breeze before the speaker arrived. Now that the speaker has arrived they may or may not be there.
This ideal reality of the beloved being absent or impossible to apprehend in the real world, the poet turns to the surrounding mundane reality to anchor her thoughts, feelings, ideas and ideals that dreams can make so real to us, trapped as we are in our subjectivity. The river outside the window and the traffic flow down the road "become the place the mind travels in sleep." The real world becomes co-opted by the dream world, and thus perhaps becomes presentable to the angels, or to the beloved. Perhaps this dream road is the road on which the poet and the beloved may meet.
The poet, however, is anchored in the real world...
Now comes a magnificent turn in the poem, one which gives the reader the feeling of witnessing a Phoenix, an extraordinary conflagration of feeling rising from the peripherally sifted ashes of the dreams she has just consigned to destruction. What seemed at first to have been a rhetorical question, downgrading the power of dreams to play any part in reality at all, while castigating the speaker for her hubris for using the ideal strength of dreams as part of her own reality-creation, becomes transformed at a single stroke into the gathering up of all reality into the world of dream. And even the gathering up of the ideal world that underlies the ideals that touch us in the dream.
No, more ancient songs flowed up from the earth when you loved, a terrible cacophonous hum of mire and spark, the implacable brothers for whom conflict is their very nature. Your yearning was a path to chthonic wilderness, a tangled undergrowth where your heart sprouted out, yellow-green.
"No," the dream does not serve as accompaniment to the speaker; "no," reality may not co-opt the ideal; "no," the beloved may not step off of his pedestal. No to each and all debilitation, degradation, or downgrading of the dream. Instead "ancient songs flowed up from the earth," the earth arose to the strength of the dream, and began to participate in the ideal world, which is the real world. But this process is not painless or seamless. No, indeed. There is an orgy of noise and violence, the seriousness and danger of which is somewhat compromised by the implicit faith of the speaker in the strength and truth of the ideal. The transformation is described slightly humorously as a "hum of mire and spark."
The yearning of the speaker for the beloved "was a path to the chthonic wilderness." This is a radical elation, a visionary trance, the ideal consuming or subsuming all of the world's physical reality into its realm. It is the ancient method of combining myth and reality through passionate subjective experience.
The yearning of the speaker for the beloved "was a path to the chthonic wilderness."
A good description of the experience of just such "tragic joy" is given at the start of the next stanza: "the song swelling to a fate-driven event that sorrow/ and joy cannot comprehend." That this tragic joy comes only in intervals, intermittently, erratically, fragilely to human lives and loves does not undercut its reality, its supremacy. The momentary nature of tragedy for the eternal self must be embraced. Bravery, courage and leadership are needed to keep one spying on the ideal and to keep bringing that ideal into life.
Lead your beloved out to where the ocean meets the sand, listen to it endlessly sighing against its own boundary.
The ocean meeting the sand, its endless sighing, are common enough emblems of eternal. But the next brave thing that an individual must do to bring the ideal into the real is to insist that it is already there. To coerce or create the beloved into existence, into a real person who is already there requires that the beloved be given "what outweighs the heaviest night." What could this be? Daily life, daily routine. The household loop from teakettle to sink becomes the breath and song of the Phoenix, because that is what its song already is, since the real world has been transformed into heaven by the strength of dreams.
This is a gargantuan and reckless task that the speaker of the poem urges us to undertake, ironically as a Quaker, in "quiet," in the pauses between things. There is a certain strong and simple way of looking at things that is insisted on in this poem. A poem that, humbly and bravely enough, insists too on its being given the historical parentage of Rilke's Duino Elegies. There is bravery and chutzpah aplenty in here, and we will need it all if we also want to dare to exist.