In the Labyrinth

Basho's Reflection On Marriage: Akechi's Wife

 

 

Moon, come down and
come alone. I have to tell you all
about Akechi’s wife. -- Bashō

 

 

 

My husband and I will celebrate our 44th wedding anniversary this coming June. I think of all that passion at the beginning, rocking back and forth between joy and fear that it might suddenly prove ephemeral.  But for those of us now long married, that tempest has been transformed into something more reliable. Rituals that are ordinary, daily, and subtle. So how beautiful and exquisite is this reflection by Bashō, the itinerant poet-monk of 17th century Japan, on the love between two people whose relationship is wide and deep -- quietly full of intimate gestures.

"So worn out, not even sure I was on the right road, I forgot myself awhile, watching in weary amazement as his wife came and went, the two of them giving the impression of having long perfected some grave and complex dance known only to them, one of accord and the affection of two people moving hand-in-hand in the same direction, both possessed by desire while knowing themselves to be the source of that desire." Bashō, translated by Franz Wright.

Read the entire piece here at Poetry Foundation.

 

Art: Goyo Hashiguchi. 1920. "Woman in Blue"

Old Bones, New Tales

This is an odd moment. Three book ideas I have been working on lately have suddenly come into clarity as a single cloth -- not as a trilogy mind you, for each is different enough from the other -- but organically they seem to spring from the same desire to write about early, middle, and late life. I feel as though on any given day, I could write in all three manuscripts without missing a beat. Two at least are set in Italy (thank god the research here helps both novels). The third is contemporary fantasy, so familiar ground.

As I am now in my sixties, I think this sudden meta-thinking about the novels has a lot to do with my age. When studying African oral narratives, I learned that women storytellers in South Africa (and probably in every traditional society) told the same stories (with some changes in emphasis depending on the audience) to all different ages. When the audience was a mixture young to old, the tales were meant to be entertaining and to introduce the very young to the artistry of story-telling. Other times it was intended for a specific audience such as young women going through rites of initiation, and there the same stories acquired an instructional emphasis, the tales focusing on transformation to adulthood.

However, older women also performed those same stories privately to each other. All of them so well versed in a lifetime of living and of telling those tales. They knew these stories intimately, and in the variants of the tales they told each other, there was depth and nuance in the performances. It was an opportunity for them to reflect and to comment through mature and evocative performances of the tales on their past rites of passage; their lives as young women, as wives or co-wives, as mothers, and now as elders. One of the great Xhosa storytellers Nongenile Masithathu Zenani towards the end of her life performed three, one-hundred-hour epics. Each epic was performed over about 21 days --with Masithathu speaking for 5 to 6 hours each day. And like Scheherazade, each morning she picked up the tale where she left off the night before. She composed the epics from the threads of the oral narrative stories she had learned and told throughout her life, intertwined with a wealth of cultural details and a social history of the Xhosa.  (I am still waiting to read one day the final translation of these three epics which were recorded and transcribed by Professor Emeritus Harold Scheub.)

As authors, we continue to reach back into the deep well of inherited stories -- the universality of rites of passage means every generation will want to hear them, read them, and connect to them. But unlike traditional society where the oral narratives and epics could be learned at the knee and then repeated (though different variants even within a culture suggest personal embellishment and emphasis in the telling), modern authors are always required to reinvent old tales and make them "fresh" -- sometimes with wonderful results and sometimes with stunningly bad ones. (I can never get over the dreadful Beowulf movies...Beowulf in Space, Beowulf with a Golden Stiletto-Heeled Monster mother).

So I guess this is the big challenge now for me. Trying to be faithful the tales, to take the time to reflect on how they have shaped and articulated different moments in my life, and yet, satisfy the craving to create something new, something "fresh" out of very old but venerable bones.

For more reading:

* Life Histories of African Women, edited by Patricia W. Romero which contains the autobiography of Nongenile Masithathu Zenani recorded, transcribed, and translated by Harold Schueb.

**The Word and the World: Tales and Observations from the Xhosa Oral Tradtion. "A master storyteller of the Xhosa people of South Africa, Nongenile Masithathu Zenani gives us an unprecedented view of an oral society from within. Twenty-four of her complex and beautiful tales about birth, puberty, marriage, and work, as told to the renowned collector of African oral tradition, Harold Scheub, are gathered here. Accompanying the stories are Zenani’s detailed commentaries and analyses and Scheub’s striking photographs of her in performance.  The combination of these historical and cultural observations with a richly symbolic collection of tales from a single traditional storyteller make The World and the Word a remarkable document."

 

Art: Edward Hopper: In the Barber Shop, 11:00AM, Summer in the City

The Hungry Mother: Kate Atkinson and Baba Yaga

I had one of those remarkable encounters while reading Kate Atkinson's Case Histories, who was describing in almost identical words an idea I had explored years ago in a poem. It is an ambiguous moment in motherhood, knitting power and love in a fierce and consuming way. It's awful really, selfish as it expresses a desire to reclaim the flesh once freely given, as though it had it been a loan and was needed back again ostensibly to keep the child as safe as she once was in the womb, but really, as a desire to recapture youth and vigor. Jung describes the trauma of birth as the "unhealed wound" in the child's life -- but I think there is an echo of the trauma in birth for the mother too. Nine months of intimacy, of quiet internal reflection, communication, a quickening joined in blood and flesh, a fullness that is suddenly followed by an emptying. There remains a longing, because everything that comes after is a leaving, a leaning out and away from all that primal connection. 

I stumbled and then stopped and re-read this passage in Kate Atkinson's brilliant and brooding collection of intertwined murder mysteries, Case Histories.

"...she loved her youngest child with a ferocity that didn't always seem natural. Sometimes she wanted to eat Olivia, to bite into a tender forearm or a soft calf muscle, even to devour her whole like a snake and take her back inside her where she would be safe. She was a terrible mother, there was no doubt about it, but she didn't even have the strength to feel guilty." 

 

Atkinson's passage lit up in my brain like lightning, recalling my own poem "Baba Yaga" -- which I wrote for my daughter more than a decade ago. It was eerie and familiar to read the two passages side by side.

"My daughter when you were small
How I wanted to eat you.
Cast off flesh of my flesh
I wanted to keep you in me,
Digest my fear of losing you as I swallowed
You whole, plumped and roasted.
Can you forgive the way I fretted over the oven
And took the measure of your
Wrists with my worried fingers?"  

When I was pregnant with my daughter I developed anemia, which was discovered late in the pregnancy because I confessed to the ob that the sight of sand made me salivate, and I wanted to eat it. (I didn't tell him that I actually did eat a small finger full as the children were playing in it. ) That's when I learned about pica, a condition where anemic women, especially pregnant women crave dirt and sand. I also discovered that women in the South used to keep a little container of iron-rich red clay to eat during their pregnancy. The body's search for iron looks to the soil to enrich the shared blood grown thin. How like Baba Yaga, licking her iron tusks in pleasure, sucking marrow from the bones of bad children. Are all mothers always so hungry?

This is part of my daughter Taiko's reply to my Baba Yaga poem which we published as a duet. It is an answer from a young woman who had learned a thing or two about leaving and returning, about cooking and slaking a mother's hunger without turning first into the meal herself. 

"Won't you be stunned to see,
in your weakened state, Old Woman,
that I have brought more than fish!
I will teach you, now that you have
burned your old recipes,
the new ones I remedied.
And I will uncover the hidden plants
I've stashed in my hair,
the worlds I have in my mouth,
the tattoos woven in my skin
and the sky I discovered in my breast."

"Old Woman, this will surely be your
finest meal."

 

Art: "Mother and Child" by Kathe Kollwitz, "Vasilisa and Baba Yaga" by Vania Zouravliov, "Baba Yaga" by Kinuko Craft.  

"From A Friend," the Art of the Calling Card

I have been going through a cigar box of collected calling cards from my great grandmother and I am astonished by the variety of pretty designs combined with the elegant scripts. It just seems such a lovely convention and I am rather sorry we don't do it anymore. Now we hand out "business cards" which have every conceivable method of contacting us crammed on the card -- and while it's true the designs can be quiet striking -- their function is so different than these beauties, which was simply to announce or memorialize one's visit. That my great grandmother gathered them together and stored them says something too about her visual delight in keeping them, not just as mementos but small slips of domestic art. I love too that they were used equally by both men and women.

So I thought I would share them with you and have created a little gallery of all the cards which you can find here -- or in the right hand column for future reference. Seeing them all together really makes me want to design a few for myself -- and to hell with the clever, efficient business card!

Here are some of my favorites (though I confess to being besotted by all of them):

 

 

The last calling card is especially unique as it is made from a small rectangle of birch bark inscribed with the visitor's name -- A. G. Robinson.

You can view other terrific collections online, such as the accumulated calling cards of the Washburn Family of Camps Mills, Town of Hounsfield, Jefferson County, New York, or read about the etiquette of using the cards on the Jane Austen website, or rather wistfully have a look at this gorgeous antique silver calling card case.

In the comments below, Mark wondered about the cards also using the language of flowers to send a more subtle message. Yes, of course as it turns out! There are quite few posters which help to reveal some of the more subtle meanings on the card. 

And this one from a paying site --so excuse the watermark -- but the bunches of different flowers seemed to more closely resemble the calling cards. 

 

When Joan Baez Wrote Me A Letter

Part of the joy in sifting through archived papers of my family and my own, is coming upon treasures not seen for many years. I was delighted when I uncovered this letter written in calligraphy from Joan Baez. When I was about 11 or 12, my neighbor friend -- an older teenage girl named Eddie, had been studying calligraphy and was quite good at it. I asked her to help me write a short letter to Joan Baez who I admired so very much. Eddie penned a beautiful and short letter in calligraphy, we sent it off, and forgot about it. Then two month's later, this letter arrived with a simple "Thank You" penned in a beautiful hand and signed by Joan Baez. Awesome, right. I was thrilled then, and still am when I see it now. 

Being Good At Problem Solving is a Problem

Mostly because its not my problems that I am solving. I seem to have spent the last five days putting out fires, rebuilding lost websites, reputations, getting other people's work done, and completely ignoring my own. How does that happen? I am too much of a competent fixer of problems not my own. And as happy as I am to help, it has become a burden of my own making -- an excuse not to solve my problems or face my own hard things.  

I need to be more like woman below, the problems of others muted into a much smaller elephant, nudging at my side.  But she is calm and won't be moved, focused (not unkindly) on enjoying her coffee and her own thoughts.

 Top photo: Haying in Cogne, 1959 by Pepi Merisio. Bottom photo: A photo of Dame Daphne Sheldrick, one of Africa's best known conservationists, who with her husband worked at Tsavo, Kenya's biggest National Park. She wrote an autobiography, Love, Life, and Elephants: An African Love Story, published in 2012.  (Thanks to Sarah for the heads up on this photo!)

More Field Drawings: Darjeeling, India 1964. Tibetan Lhamo Performances.

I posted a few field drawings of my mother Jeanette Snyder yesterday, and wanted to add some more of them because I think they are charming -- and remind me of the days when field researchers lugged heavy tape recorders, cameras, and note books, just in case all that heavy technology failed, leaving only the sketches and notes. You can see many more of her photos and her article about this day at the Journal of Mythic Arts.