Sunday morning thoughts on teaching and mothering

Sunday morning.  Too early for chores.  Too early to start nagging about and facilitating homework.  Too early to start the laundry.  So, what to do?

It has been a while since a blog post went out so how about that?  I write so much now that the blog posts are extra writing “things” now rather than an outlet.  I think that is good, right?

This week, the theme seems to have been mothers and motherhood and mothering and parenting and …all of that shit.  Anyone who has had a chance to get a hold of my first chap book, or has read past posts, knows what all of that would do to me: it tinkers with my workings and fucks up the wheels and the cogs.  It has slowed me down somewhat this week, which is not what needed to happen during a short week requiring catch up at work. 

Oh, well, the Universe seems to have a better grasp on our needs than we do any way.  So I offer my reflections on this very full week in the hopes that it may be useful to someone and to give thanks to those who help me keep my shit straight.

I have to lead off with a full excerpt from my therapist and friend Neil Douglas-Tubb.  The excerpt is from his blog: There is a Door: thereisadoor@blogspot.ca

Mother

A Simple Truth of the Way of Things[1]

It is a given that every child has a legitimate need to be noticed, understood, taken seriously, and respected by their mother. 

This is beautifully illustrated in one of Donald Winnicott’s images: the mother gazes at the baby in her arms and the baby gazes at his mother’s face and in the process finds himself therein. 

This is only possible provided his mother is really looking at the unique, small, helpless being in her arms and not projecting her own expectations, fears and plans for the child onto the child.  If she, is then the child will not find himself in his mother’s face, but rather his mother’s projections.

This child is left without a mirror of self. 

He or she needs their mother to reflect them back to themselves. 

If this does not happen, if the child is left without a mirror, then for the rest of their lives they will be seeking this mirror in vain. Thus we search in vain through our partnering to find the lost and missing reflection that was missed in childhood.

Extracted from Into The Light ... available on Amazon.com

Pretty heavy, right?

I would argue that this is also how we choose our life’s work, as well as our partners.  I chose to be an adult who works with highly at risk youth because I needed the approval and love from the most challenging people…they were easier to get love and loyalty from than it was from my mother.  It served a purpose and at the time, early in my career, I had absolutely no idea that what I was doing was so unhealthy for me or for those kids.  I didn’t start to take notice until my grief work after the death of those kids in 2012.  I didn’t see any correlation between my life and their lives until then.  My caseload mostly consists of boys whose mothers were either physically absent through death or distance or were unable to mother due to addiction, mental illness, or any other number of issues. 

I wanted to be their mother.  That was my conscious goal.  I was going to be their mother, at least while they were at school, and I would make everything as good as I was capable of, while they were with me. 

They were “my” kids.  They were “mine.”  I took on all of their sorrows and woes and needs and made a mohair tunic out of their suffering.  We had so many cross-over issues that it was easy to become the champion of these cast outs, these rebels, these misfits.  I was/am, identify as a cast out, rebel, misfit.  I felt their pain and I was going to make it all better – make it go away - and if I couldn’t, it would be on me. 

Everything about them was about me:  their behaviour, their inability to stay substance free, their choices, their grades, their successes.  I was deified through my ability to suffer with them and carry on.  I was deified by my tolerance for their misbehaving and their abusive actions to themselves and others.  I was deified by the choice to stand for the voiceless (so I called them when, actually their voices are/were very strong…not many listened…even me).  I framed my identity on how great I was to work with them, to hear their painful stories and sit with them in the heart of their anguish.  I hung my whole perception of my self-worth on how many kids would pass or graduate or stay alive.  I created a whole person around my great martyr mask and how amazing I was to work with “these kids,”  and I was constantly reinforced in that identity by my colleagues and my admin teams and by district people who would say they had heard about my great work…people I didn’t even know.  I had/have young teachers who say they tried to get into my school to work with me because they want to do what I do and be as awesome as I am.

At first all of that was really great.  I would get the warm fuzzies from stuff I didn’t really do:  the kids’ successes are theirs.  Yes, an environment was created – as a group – to foster that success but that did not belong to me any more than their lack of success belonged to me.

I used to feel that I had done something wrong, missed something, was disrespected if a kid came to class high or partied so hard on the weekend they nearly died, or tried to kill themselves.  Somehow I didn’t love them enough or make them believe in their own worth.  Ironic, really, that I needed their love to give me worth.

After the car accident, about four long years after the accident, I had an epiphany:  my ego was too wrapped up in the actions of the kids I teach and I was using them for love and acceptance and to work out my life issues – my issues with my mother.  I was trying to mother my issues out on those kids.  When I really let that sink in and owned that, I was sickened.  That is abuse, people.  When we work our shit out on those around us, that is abuse…AND WE ALL DO IT.

Now I see that my ego has no place in my work with these kids, or with my kids, or my colleagues or my husband…they all get to be who they are because they are who they are.  If they succeed, that’s all them, if they don’t that’s all them, too.  I am just here to mirror their true selves to them – yes, as I see it – but as I see it free of my shit…free from my reflection over theirs.

I had/have no right to use other people to reflect to me what I needed from my mother.  I have/had no right to use other people to make me feel worthy to be here because I don’t usually feel like that…that I am gate crashing this great party and not many people would have invited me, if they had the choice. 

I need to come to the place that I am a miracle just by my being here.  I don’t need to do “good works” or be a martyr… “look at how amazing she is for working with ‘those kids’”…I am amazing because I survived some fucked up shit and I am amazing because I am filled with star dust and pieces of the Universe so ancient that we would have to go back billions of years before our time begins to find the start. 

This is true for all of us.  We are worthy of love because we are here.  That is all.  No good works or money or martyrdom will make us more loveable.  Our kids’ successes don’t make us a success; their failures don’t make us failures.  We want them to but they don’t. 

So, for those colleagues, those new teachers who want to be me – don’t.  Keep your boundaries clear and strong and remember that your ego has no place in your work.  Do not wear the failure or success of the kids – do not refer to them as “your kids”…they aren’t and that just makes the emotional fallout and mess waaaay too difficult to clean up. 

They do not reflect who you are or what you do.  

You are not better than the rest of us because you work with the kids you work with.  You have higher levels of tolerance for bullshit but why?  Are you a door mat?  Was that your role in your family?  You absorb all of the toxic shit so that no one else has to feel from it or learn from it?  DON’T!  STOP IT!  You are killing yourself.

But maybe you need to learn that for yourself like I did.  Not maybe…you do.

So now, the job is different because I am not so deep in the shit…I have tried to learn to love the kids for who they are not for what they reflect to me about me.  I keep my boundaries now…try really hard to…and not let my reflections cloud theirs.  I try to reflect to them their potential, not mine.  It is really hard because I miss feeling that chaos/trauma bond for the intensity and the immediacy but I know it will kill me if I continue and I am not helping them at all. 

Thank you, Neil, for the inspiration to look into these things more deeply.  I see now why I have been living the way I have been living.

My mother is a great caretaker.  That is not a good thing.  Caretakers take care…they don’t give it, they don’t help, they take.  They help when you don’t ask.  Like my mother:  she insinuates herself into the chaos of others in order to make herself indispensable.  She martyrs herself on the pain of others and is incensed when they don’t thank her for support she gave that was never asked for.  That is me…was me…I am unbecoming that, hopefully.  I was a great caretaker, too.  I am loosening the grip on that, I hope.

It really is no surprise, then, that I became who I did, when that mirror was held up to me and made me see that I am not worthy of love without caring for the pain of others to make me look good.

Take care of yourself.  If your mothers did not mirror your worthiness of love because you are here, know that you are made of stars and have the breath of the Universe within you.  That is why you are worthy of love.

Blessed be you.

A Call to Art

Yesterday, whilst shoveling snow…for nearly three hours…I had lots of time to reflect on the year that was and the year that was becoming.  After I got over the bitterness of having to shovel snow…for nearly three hours…I found myself reflecting on the deaths from last year and a very clear message came to me from those remembrances. 

The message was loud and clear:  CREATE!  No matter what – CREATE!  Do what makes your soul sigh and feel like it is speaking from the centre of you and your deepest connection to the divinity within you.  You owe your talent to the places from whence it has come and there are people in the world, RIGHT NOW, who need to hear what you have to say, to see what you have to make, to weep at your words, to revel in your humour, to taste your wares. 

BRING US WHAT YOU GOT TO GIVE!

There are millions of reasons not to but none of them are really good enough.  None of them.

Take a second right now and remember that feeling in the pit of your stomach, the ringing in your head, the bottom dropping out of your world when you heard the news of any of those shattering losses last year.  Remember the feeling in your body…how did you feel when you heard the news about Bowie?  Where were you when you heard Rickman died?  Or Haggard? What happened to you when you heard that Prince was dead? What about that Hip concert? Ali?  Eli Weisel?

Feel it.  Really feel it.

Feel that heart ache? 

Now take another second and remember all of the joy they brought into your lives.  Think about the first time you heard Cohen’s voice or read his words.  Remember seeing Rickman for the first time.  For me, it was Truly, Madly, Deeply…yeah, I saw Die Hard, but I  *truly* saw him in Truly, Madly, Deeply.  Who brought you to Bowie or Motorhead or the Eagles?  Think about the great memories of watching Fish or M.A.S.H or The Gary Shandling Show.  How about the first time you read Night or watched Ali fight or light a fire in your heart with his passion for Black lives in America?  Or Leah’s beauty in the Star Wars movies?

Where does this live for you?  What did it do for you?

Really feel that, too.

Now imagine that all of those feelings were never made available to you because those artists –all of them are artists – had chosen to not produce their art.  Imagine that they had allowed the voices in their head, or in their world, to deter them from creating what they created that changed the world. Imagine if they had lost their war with their art.

Shitty, right? 

Early in the morning of December 13, after all of my writing and mourning the death of Leonard Cohen I had a dream.  I dreamed that I sat in a greenhouse/conservatory (a la the Crystal Palace) across from Cohen.  He was waiting to do a concert in this space and the mic wasn’t working.  I had some kind of amp-thing sitting behind me and, of course, I had no idea how to work it.  I was supposed to get things ready for him and felt really badly that it wasn’t working out.  It did, however allow me to sit with him for a while.  He was practicing Song of Bernadette.  The piano played and I sang it, not thinking for a second that he was listening to me.  When the last notes faded, this exchange took place:

                        “You do it,” Cohen said to me.

                        “What?”

                        “The song.  You do it, kid.  It’s yours. You sound better than I do-make it sound better than I do anyway.”

Even in my dream I thought:  holy fuck!  Leonard Cohen just visited me and gave me Song of Bernadette!  That thought woke me up and rolled around in my head all day.  COHEN VISITED ME AND GIFTED ME WITH THE FIRST SONG I EVER LOVED FROM HIM!!!!!!!!!!!!!  In indigenous cultures, ancestors gift songs and stories to their protégés in dreams, so this was a huge deal/is a huge deal for me.    

I am not saying that I am, in any way, the next Cohen, what I am saying is that I have been charged with the responsibility to share my work with the world – in spite of and in the face of my terror of rejection and failure.  I must take the same risk that he did because to not do so would be spiritual suicide.  I have wandered the desert of self-imposed artistic barrenness and, after a year of forcing myself to rise early and write, I would never go back.  I can’t go back.

Think about this:  you are someone’s Cohen.  You have work in you that someone, somewhere needs to hear.  Maybe that is a song or a poem; a story or a tattoo; a soup or loaf of bread; a sculpture or pirouette – whatever you create that makes you feel the most connected to the divine…that is what needs to be shared.  Whatever it may be…and I mean whatever…in the face of covert and overt social mores created to shame you into not creating or expressing your art – even fucking. 

 I have shared my thoughts about how Prince gave me permission to be a sexually voracious female and how much I needed permission to be me without the shame inherent in the Judeo-Christian moral constructs around female sexuality.  He worked, and shared his work, in a world scandalised by sex – gay, straight, non-binary or any kinds.  We needed that.  Badly.

And, we need what you got, too.  More than ever before, we need what you have to offer.  The world is going to get interesting – really interesting – and there are gaps in the front lines needing to be filled.  I know you have the means and the tools to do it, so pick up the instruments of your art of choice and get in line!

My tattoo artist, Alex Rousey, and my husband, Dallas, both brought into my life a book which has transformed my courage around creating and sharing and art.  Steven Pressfield’s,  The War of Art, has forced me into commitment and discipline for my art that I had been too afraid to step to in the past.  Pressfield also left in my heart pieces of this quote which informed my reflections yesterday and informs me now as I trepidatiously step into the world of self-publishing.  Our work does not belong to us, and as such, we have no right to keep it to ourselves. 

                        THE ARTIST’S LIFE  

Are you a born writer?  Were you put on earth to be a painter, a scientist, an apostle of peace?  In the end the question can only be answered by action.

            Do it or don’t do it.

            It may help to think of it this way.  If you were meant to cure cancer or write a symphony or crack cold fusion and you don’t do it, you not only hurt yourself, even destroy yourself.  You hurt your children.  You hurt me.  You hurt the planet.

            You shame the angels who watch over you and you spite the Almighty, who created you with your unique gifts, for the sole purpose of nudging the human race one millimeter farther along its path back to God.

            Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor.  It’s a gift to the world and every being in it.  Don’t cheat us of your contributions.  Give us what you’ve got.

                                                                                    The War of Art page 165

I am not a religious person, so the God stuff didn’t do much for me but I do acknowledge that creation comes from a divine source, so that is what I substitute in my head for “God.” I know you are all clever people and get what I’m saying.

You have the means to be someone’s Bowie or Ali or Cohen or Rickman or Fisher or …..

Get busy!  We need you.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to a Chap book

I have been bouncing around a number of ideas lately in regards to my poetry.  I promised myself that over the break from school, I would choose pieces for a chap book – a collection of roughly 24 poems.  I have rolled a number of them around in my head and, over the last couple of days, have been gifted with a couple of pieces which will make great capstones for the book. 

The publishing bug has bitten me, and like all artists, the little taste of exposure has enticed me to chase more of it.  So I do. 

The funny thing that has happened on the way to this chap book is the exorcism of much of the poisonous blood I have carried about my relationship to my mother.  I knew that journaling is a great way to release and heal but I had forgotten the healing power of poetry…sounds so stupid when it comes onto my page…but that is what is happening.  My voices in my head have been dictating poems about her for months and, out of my Morning Pages have come many pieces with her as the star.  I don’t know if it is really helping but I know it shows the bruised places in me about our fucked up relationship and my fantasy life of how much I wish it weren’t so.

Such is the way of the world:  we are sold a bill of goods promising us that our homes will be safe, our parents will be the tv sitcom perfection we dreamed of as children, and as we age that relationship will never change but will become richer and more beautiful.  Perhaps, for some people that is, indeed, the reality – lucky them – but more likely, the reality is closer to mine than the fantasy. Let me share with you the pieces that have cracked me open.

Today I offer you a couple of pieces which will, inevitably make their way into the book.  They are new.  Brand new: one from yesterday and one from today.  I am quite pleased with them.  I hope you enjoy them, too.

to the locked up parts of me i promised to protect

Somewhere.

Somewhere in the back of her mind –

so far back it was in a place she could barely reach without the aid of a step-stool –

somewhere, deep in the back of her, lives a shadow in the figure of a girl;

a woman-child.

A shadow,

an outline –

like the carbon-burned shadow forms blasted,

melted into concrete in Hiroshima or Nagasaki –

an outline of something once female hovers

with memories of dolls and tea sets and Easy Bake ovens

but somewhere closer –

so much closer that the step-stool was useless –

somewhere close in her, lives a memory of all of that hair,

all of those eyelashes,

and ankle socks,

forming some kind of wordless allurement to touch,

sans invitation,

sans desire,

sans understanding of the weight of the hand on her thigh,

her head,

her breasts.

The laughter burned in her ears and scorched her brain

like the Hiroshima hand prints left on her body

and she shut her eyes tight in quiet solitude,

promising never to be female again.

R. L. Elke

Dec 29/16

newtonian laws as they apply to my mother

Law #1: an object (me) will remain at rest or in uniform motion (my peaceful life) unless acted upon by an external force (you).  Objects (me) will remain in their state of motion (my life) unless a force (you) act to change the motion (fucks me up).

My life remains at rest in an orbit of its own making,

with an energy allowing me constant motion forward, somehow,

in spite of the many attempts,

by other bodies,

to make it otherwise.

Your external force of “cookie and a punch” parenting launches me off course –

careening into foreign bodies –

looking for uniform motion once again.

It’s inevitable and always happens like a perpetual motion machine knocking me toward you and away from you over and over and over and over and…

Law #2:    F (net force) = mass x acceleration

This law has certain limitations (as do we).  It does not apply to changing mass or if the object is moving close to the speed of light or on an atomic scale – relativity and quantum mechanics apply, respectively, in those cases, but is effective for the solution of standard problems including the effects of friction (any time we are around each other too long).

As so was my adolescents around you,

when your disdain for my round, pre-womanly body forced me to quickly change or –

see Law #1 –

be cast into isolation from the adoration of your gaze.

I am not sure if it was my size or my masculine edge –

my connection to my father –

that forced you to slap me with that famous, transformative phrase:

You have such a beautiful face, Ramona.  Boys would like you so much more if you lost weight.

What you didn’t know is that weight is not mass.

What I am made of could not be altered –

should not have been able to be altered by the gravity of your words –

even though it weighed me down,

weighed on me for years.

Law #3:  All forces in the universe occur in equal but oppositely directed pairs (us).  There are no isolated forces; for every external force of equal magnitude but opposite direction which acts back on the object – for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction (our dance).

“There are no isolated forces” –

which dooms us, really, to this mess of back and forth,

to and fro,

embrace and push back;

in this waltz of abuse enrobed in good intention.

I push,

you reach out.

I step to you,

you move away.

So it has gone on since the beginning when I appeared,

unbidden –

bad timing and all –

forcing your life away from the one you had longed for:

a working girl in the city,

an escapee of the chattering hamlet which had cast you in a role you did not want

or deserve…

a theme in your life.

I forced you to take the role of wife and mother and you,

unconsciously/subconsciously,

reacted in an equal and opposite direction,

of rejection in order to survive the changing forces in your universe;

setting the stage for the rest of the movements of us:

to and fro,

embrace and push back,

stepping toward an running away –

the waltz of heartbreak we dance.

We are forces of nature,

doomed to be ruled by forces we cannot see,

to ways of being we may not want

because Newton has given us no other choices

because “there are no isolated forces” –

everything seems to force our motion onto predetermined paths.

I don’t know.

Perhaps our release lay with Einstein.

R. L. Elke

Dec 30/16

On This Solstice

On this dark night – the longest of the year – I listen to Joe Rogan’s pod cast whilst preparing food for supper and for the Christian feast in 4 days.  There are men who remind us to look to the sky and re-connect with the inhabitants therein – the heavenly bodies encircling us and our ancestors…the light reaching us is the same light reaching them hundreds of thousands of years ago.  Their light is our light.

They knew the power of the solstice and the equinox and the high drama of the fight of light and dark – the fight for the survival of all of us and all living creatures with which we share this orb of earth, air, fire, and water.  They knew what to do on these nights – to go to the top of the highest place and raise hands to the sun, praying for its return.

I had planned to do that.  It never happened.  I still may go to the park yet tonight and reach to the stars and thank them for their light, protecting us from the blackening night and all of the monsters hiding therein.  What I have done, however, is to marvel at what a difference six months make…how the Sun King anoints us with his warmth and leaves us too soon.  How I had written a poem about the summer solstice and how it felt like such a rip off for the first day of summer to come even before school was out for the year…for the days to shorten before my longest, blissful days had begun. 

There is no such sorrow on the winter solstice, strangely enough.  There is no such sorrow – even in this impenetrable darkness, there is no sorrow…there is only a drive to burrow deeply into the sacred spaces of myself and confer with the elders; to sit with the ancients and feel their wisdom whisper to my bones.  Only a pull to my tarot cards and to warm soup and black teas flavoured with orange and clove and rum.  Only a desire to dress in nothing but furs, to feel that silky touch on naked skin and sigh a prayer of thanks to the creature for its touch...and to melt the darkest of chocolate on the tongue slowly so as not to never forget the taste of it.

When my older children were small, they would be allowed one gift to open for Yule.  They were allowed one gift and promised a story at bed time of the Holly King and the Oak King who fought tonight for the sun – to make sure that the sun would rise in the morning.  What I omitted was the version of the story in which the Holly King and the Oak King were two handsome men who were fighting for the hand of the beautiful consort – the Sun Queen.  The Holly King was older and had fulfilled his duty to the Queen and now it was time for the young, virile Oak King to take over until June 21, when the Holly King would fight the Oak King and the whole cycle would start again.  Both were supple and keen to serve. Both worshiped her so she would rise every morning, pleased and satisfied; for when she is satisfied, we are all satisfied.

I think of those lovers now, the men fighting until midnight, when she arrives in the doorway to say goodbye to the Holly King, and gathers up her new lover.

Gawain wore the Holly and, before the Christianization of the Arthurian Legends, was considered to be a manifestation of the Green God but also a manifestation of the Holly King.  There are stories of his banishment of the Red Knight, I believe, from the Pentecost feast in the Great Hall, which caused the disintegration of the Knights of the Round table and sent them to the four corners of the world to find the Grail…

So many interesting stories for this time of year.  So many based in reflection and taking stock and counting blessings and aching to be near those we love most.

This piece was my gift today from the angels of poetry:

For the Sun 

Deep in this fitfulness digs discontent –

a tick infecting flesh with madness,

delirium,

or dread of days darker than these.

Not today –

on this day of darkest days,

when Night holds captive the Sun

for much longer than we dare imagine,

today we love light and entice it to stay for one more drink

because, baby it’s cold outside,

and I left my coat laying on his bed.

Today we coax Night out

and create new ways to pacify his longing for darkness.

We need light today –

darkness has reigned too often this year.

Return to dance with us, beloved.

We miss your starry eyes.

R. L. Elke

Dec. 21/16

Blessed Be you this Solstice and may Light love you always.

Part 2: What is the Way to say goodbye?

The subsequent days have been better.  A talk with Dal helped me step back from the edge – he assured me that Leonard Cohen was as anxious about his talent as I am about mine and felt his smallness in the shadow of those who inspired him.  He assured me that my grief was acceptable and my doubt was natural and held me in my tempest of tears as I raged against grief and death.  He steadied my faltering footing so that the rest of the week was exhausting but less of a burden.

This morning I was up early and wrote my daily pages and poem by candle-lit darkness and decided to take advantage of the extra time and head back to the forest with my ipod to walk with Cohen and see what he could reveal to me today.  I read a couple of articles which echoed Dal’s notions from earlier in the week and I wanted to commune with the cool winds and rain and that voice…those words…to see if there was any hint anywhere of the portal to the poetry.

To see if I could plug into what it was, this loss, for me – where he entered my life…not when…where…what part of me opened to him and his imagery, his permission for pain and loss.  

I remember it now…There was a child named Bernadette.  I heard the story long ago, she saw the Queen of Heaven once and kept the vision in her soul.  No one believed what she had seen.  No one believed what she’d heard: that there were sorrows to be healed and mercy, mercy in this world…

            I was in my mid-twenties and had recently moved to Victoria to go to school.  Sitting in the driver’s seat of my red Firenza, Jennifer Warnes shared the story of Bernadette and I saw, for the first time in twenty years, the “Queen of Heaven” and felt every word and note so deeply, I could feel my DNA change.  I realised, in that moment, for the very first time…that I was broken…deeply, profoundly broken.  I had seen an angel and was told I wasn’t special enough for that.  I had been the focus of sexual inappropriate appetites of family members and strangers and had buried all of it so deeply there hadn’t been a whisper of it until that moment, with those lyrics, in that front seat.  I froze.  Then I broke open like the levies after Katrina and melted into a thousand pains.

I met Cohen through Jennifer Warnes and the Famous Blue Raincoat album.  I have the entire thing memorised.

Joan of Arc spoke to me in the days before that moment in the front seat of my Firenza…the marriage of the martyr to the fire intrigued me.  I loved the incongruity and juxtaposition of the images and sentiments.  Cohen was cheeky and sarcastic.

…and lusty.  I found that layer in The Future and in the collection of his work that came out in ’93, Stranger Music.  I read the work I didn’t know and felt relief.  I had been writing pieces that could have fit there next to his.  The poems entered into my by osmosis, probably, and competed with my attention to Plath, who I was devouring voraciously at the time.  I was uprooted, a new-ish mother, and wanted to find a place for my writing in my mothering.  Therapy was happening on a fairly regular basis and causing me to look into balancing motherhood and art and who I was as a sexual person…a survivor but also as one who loved to feel desire and desired – as we all do.

Water

Whisper freedom in my ear.

Let the fingertips of your soul caress mine.

Softly.

Softly.

Softly.

I see you:

The way you’ve always been:

Alive

Alone

A man.

Pluck not a blood-red rose for me,

It pales next to your beauty.

These words repeated

Over

And

Over.

How many have said this to so many?

Let me drink in your timeless,

Breathless,

Regal face.

Sipping your lips.

Gulping the ageless wisdom of your eyes.

Touch me

Caress me

Move me to extremes.

You do this without lifting a finger

R. L. Elke 10&11/07/93

I am sure that if I had known Take This Longing then, I would have echoed take this longing from my tongue…let me see your beauty broken down like you would do for one you love. Your body like a search light, my poverty revealed… Who wouldn’t? 

At least I would have had the words for the regret and loss I had felt – missing one I was in love with, who was not my husband at the time. 

If you’ve ever loved beyond measure and lost beyond grief – Cohen gives you the language for both.  We learn how to gracefully process those lost great loves and to be ok with the aching desire for those in front of us.  Good bye has never been so beautiful. 

He has awakened in me the ache of inadequacy.  Every piece more beautiful than the last.  I mean, come on, The Sisters of Mercy is a revelation. 

Those older pieces came to me of late – I am new to them, they to me.  So beautiful and painful and perfect:  when you’re not feeling holy, your loneliness tells you you’ve sinned…

SERIOUSLY?  Where do you have to go to access that?  I go there all of the time but nothing seems to sound like that – ever:  if your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn, they will bind you with love that is graceful and green as a stem…. No words.

He did say, in a New Yorker interview that he wrote every day before the sun came up – I do that.  He also had this to say about the miracle of writing:  

Does artistic dedication begin to touch on religious devotion?...I start with artistic dedication.  I know that if the spirit is on you it will touch on the other human receptors.  But I dare not begin from the other side.  It’s like pronouncing the holy name – you don’t do it.  But if you are lucky, and are graced, and the audience is in a particular salutary condition, then these deeper responses will be produced.

Well.  Ok.  Good.  That is how I approach my kitchen table every morning a little after 5 am, or  

earlier…I just show up.  I just show up and write.  Or I walk the forest paths, like I did today, and absorb the woods and, sometimes the word, starving for the soul’s nourishment.

Losing Prince was different.  It hit different places for me.  Cohen was the foundation of who I understood I am as an artist…and human.  Famous Blue Raincoat healed me from the inside out, like good Art should.  It humbled me.

His work humbled me.  I remember standing in front of paintings by Botticelli, Klimt, Rossetti, Gentileschi, Monet, and others in the National Gallery and aching – physically feeling aches in my body and my heart – because I would never be able to pick up a paint brush and create like that.  Cohen, Keats, Whitman, Sassoon, Brittain, Thomas, Plath, Sorley – all make me feel like that about my writing.  All I want to do is to create something that can sit next to them on a page and hold it’s own.  My throat aches with the pain of it. It’s four in the morning, the end of December, I ‘m writing you now just to see if you’re better…Jane came by with a lock of your hair.  She said that you gave it to her that night that you planned to go clear.  Did you ever go clear?

I want my poems to feel like prayers:  The birds they sing at the break of day.  “Start again,” I heard them say.  Don’t dwell on what is passed away or what is yet to be…Forget your perfect offering.  There is a crack, a crack in everything.  That’s how the light gets in.

I tried today, I really did.  I have been trying all week to capture the atmosphere and my pain on Tuesday on that walk and I just can’t seem to hear it yet.  Maybe soon.  I’ll be silent and listen for it.

Good bye

I cannot move past the anguish of souls and the ties that bind theirs to mine.

And sometimes the best thing to do is to be silent inside and listen to the voices of grievers gone before to find a way out –

or the grace to stay silent in it for a while.

Walked through the mist in a freezing November morning

when I wanted to waltz to the muted Flamenco ¾ guitar.

Balancing beside the bird on the wire, outside the Chelsea hotel.

My famous blue raincoat discount,

not Burberry.

Absorbing, by slow decay, this –

the bareness of bare branches and leaves pounded to pablum beneath my falling feet –

not feeling holy,

loneliness reminds me I’ve sinned.

Feeling guests pass by and reach out so near me I feel the tips of their fingers.

Chasing the ¾ time through the hunger, like an arch where the troops passed through.

I nearly held it – the words this longing on my tongue –

but just can’t hold them any more than I can grab a hold of this mist and the hands of the ghosts passing through.

So I walk and scream into silence the voices in my head

to learn what to say, by fire and water,

that could ever be a decent way to say goodbye.

R.L. Elke

Nov. 27/16

I dunno.

I just dunno what else to do – so I’m gunna just keep writing.  Maybe he can reach me now that he is spirit.

I hope so.

Part One: The Walk in the Darkness

It started in the same way it always starts:  the end of the bad day at school.  It began with a bad day at school and my funeral pants.  I chose to wear the fucking funeral pants.  I knew I shouldn’t.  I wasn’t going to but I had to test it.  I wore those pants to the funeral for D and for C and for R.  All kids.  All beloved and missed.  Would that energy follow me?  Oh, it did and it turned out to be a day so bad I had to run away to the forest at dusk when I got home.

So, awash with burden and anger and frustration, suffering from PTSD in the chill and wind and rain; feeling the grief again and ashamed that after nearly five years all that shit still felt fresh – as fresh as it did five years ago – I ran away to the forest in the lingering dark.

It was beautiful for my mood.  It was dreary and rainy and chilly.  I started my loop from the top of the hill near the condos.  It was perfect poetry weather. Perfect.  I scrolled through my music, before I got out into the rain, and my eyes fell on Leonard Cohen.  I immediately tapped his name.  I hadn’t properly had some time with him since his passing and Dylan had just sent me a picture of his flower laden stoop the night before.  Perfect.  Now was the time.

I pushed play, cowled myself with my rain hood, pulled my scarf up to my nose and stepped into the rain.  The opening lines of Suzanne purred into my skull and my whole body filled with warmth.  Deep, reverberating sadness, too.  I felt the poetry of the moment in the deepening dusk and the wind and the rain – in the naked trees shattering the skyline in the deepening dark – and my aching heart.  The tears slowly started to come, one at a time, and mix with the rain droplets on my face.  By the time I got to the back field it was all but dark.

And then the three-quarter time, waterfall waltz swirled around me and, for the first time I heard: O, the sisters of mercy they are not departed or gone, they were waiting for me when I thought that I just can’t go on.  I settled into the heaviness then, surrendered to it and let it come upon me in the fullness of its weight in the ever deepening dark.  By the time I got to the back field, it was all but dark.  There was enough light for me to see the ground so I didn’t slip and fall in the squelchy spots where the path was muddiest.  I constantly had to renegotiate my footing on grass as he sang his goodbyes first to the woman with the hair upon the pillow like a sleepy golden storm and then to Marriane and it didn’t occur to me until the next morning, as I wrote my pages by candle light of the early black morning, that I had lost my footing – was losing my footing – with my neediest group at school because I believed I didn’t really have it in me to fall in love with them as I have in the past…but let’s not talk of love or chains or things we can’t untie…

The deeper I walked into the darkness of the falling sky, I realised I couldn’t care anymore. I felt that I was too afraid and too tired.  I was haunted by the notion that I had chosen to wear my funeral pants because my other pants were too tight and I didn’t feel like enduring the indignity of denim squeezing self-esteem over the waist band of my jeans.

I just knew something bad was going to happen when I put on those pants.  Maybe that thought – that energy – poisoned my day.  I thought about that, too, as I approached the graveyard parallel to the path I walk.  By now Famous Blue Raincoat played and my whole body filled with heaviness.  I felt every chill and just wanted to sit and listen to Cohen sing my hurts and frustrations and hopelessness away.  I wanted to sit on a bench and look out into the valley, with its golden yard lights on weeping farms, and dream of days in my childhood when I would look for city lights, or stars, at the darkest part of night, before I knew the Northern Lights.

The day had started so beautifully with a gorgeous pink sunrise and a vivid rainbow in the west when I was on my way to drop Dante off at school before my meeting.  I remembered none of those things trudging, wet and cold, up the hill back to the car to The Chelsea Hotel filling my head. 

Then it hit me.  Leonard Cohen is dead.  This God among poets is dead and only people like me have been left behind to carry on what he started. 

The last thought made my breath catch…a hiccup almost…of sheer panic; complete terror or maybe shame.  And just under the murmur of The Guests came the realisation that I would never be able to write anything as good as Cohen.  Ever.

I had to sit down.  I perched myself on a metal bench and looked out into the dark valley at the headlights creeping over the Mission bridge – the caterpillar of light – and kept feeling that realisation over and over and over, deeper into my body. Hallelujah started and confirmed the thought.

I just wept there on that cold bench, for the world without poetry and wondered how we would ever survive it…clenching your fist for the ones like us who are oppressed by the figures of beauty…well never mind, we are ugly but we have the music. 

I went back to the car and wept some more for the dead philosopher poet and my aching heart for the boys I could not love so I could survive in a job that daily does its level best to kill me.  And I tried to write a poem about the burden of stepping in the footprint of the giants, knowing that his shoes will never be filled because I go barefoot:

In this November dark,

by Cohen, I try to find the same paths which comfort by day.

Now in dusk, whispers away from darkness,

there is a privacy in my hood to weep for the world and my tired heart

burdened by the weight of the job to take up the torch of word and song...

To continue the reverberations of Hallelujah in the tower of song and the weight of it all buckles my knees...

blinded by the mascara in my eyes...

wishing for a pen instead of a glowing slab of plastic

to do him justice.

It's too heavy a burden and I am terrified I will never write a decent piece again - 

Nothing will ever be as transcendent as his.

Ever.

While he lived all possibilities were available

but now it's over and too heavy...too much.

There is nothing left in me now.

Love is not enough...and I cannot reach it any more...

the burden of the word is too heavy now.

I have no Suzanne or Marianne and this waltz trips me up now on my grey words.

Maybe I'll feel stronger soon but right now,

in this dark November rain, it is all too heavy to bear.

R. L. Elke

Nov. 22/16

I got home and tried to connect with my husband and son over dinner but just couldn’t do that.  I went to bed to write…then a dear old friend texted me to let me know that a friend of ours from our school days had passed and we missed the funeral.  He had suffered from depression for a long time but was doing well, according to the herald of the news. She had been in contact with him recently – more recent than my correspondence with him over a year ago.

I remembered his impish grin and his wavy brown hair and how was always saying pervy shit – but it was funny…one by one the guests arrive, the guests are coming through.  The open-hearted many, the broken-hearted few…And I realised that we were the losers – the herald, her brother, the deceased, and me – always on the outside looking in at the “cool kids.”  I didn’t know that then.  They were just my friends – the first people to embrace me on my arrival to my millionth school.  I spent the most time with those kids – more time than anywhere in my life to that point.  We were the losers and one of us felt that burden into adulthood…we all felt that burden but one of us couldn’t reconcile it and free it…it became so heavy for him that the burden was too heavy for him to bear. 

I made several attempts to write poems to capture that walk and the weight of the realisation of my inadequacy to become a mentor of the next generation of poets, and it just became too much.  I turned off my light, after closing my book and putting the pen in its spine.  I turned off my light and wept to The Guests and The Song of Burnadette – which kills me everytime – and I Came So Far For Beauty.   

I wept for poetry, and my career, and for Dusty – sweet, strange Dusty – who felt so lonely and other that he needed to leave.

One by one, the guests arrive,

The guests are coming through,

The open-hearted many

The broken-hearted few…

And those who dance, begin to dance

Those who weep begin

And “welcome, welcome” cries a voice

“Let all my guests come in.”

Never.  My bare feet are too tiny to fill these shoes.  Nov. 23/16