Yes, there is an interloper who has hijacked the leadership of this country, the USA. Hijacked also the values, the motivations, the very structure of the government that many of us cherish as a democracy. Not that things weren’t rotting in many assorted crevices before, but the flagrant, unabashed corruption and disintegration of what makes a democracy is alarming.
I have been waiting, for these several years, for people to stop turning up the volume. To mute, to mark as “ignore” - not the concrete damage being done, but the endless harmful and ignorant rhetorical spew. I agree heartily with Ursula LeGuin, who wrote in her blog in 2017 of the golem, a creature created from mud and enlivened by language. The whole post (the whole blog archive!) is well worth reading, but here’s the key thing she said:
I honestly believe the best thing to do is turn whatever it is OFF whenever he’s on it, in any way.
He is entirely a creature of the media. He is a media golem. If you take the camera and mike off him, if you take your attention off him, nothing is left — mud.
There are things to do, such as phone banking to empower voters. Here are a couple of options: Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival and Unite Here’s Take Back 2020 campaign, calling on behalf of the hospitality workers’ unions. I’m sure you can find more, and by all means take to the streets when necessary. But I refuse to listen to, or repeat, anything uttered by this person, and fervently hope that the flood of voters, activists, and new candidates for office will reduce it to mud.
I have to believe it benefits us to look away, to cultivate our own sanity, to keep building up the notions, ideals, and convictions that are being threatened.
Looking UP - hello, trees.
What I do intend to listen to, read, and write about is poetry. My friendship with poetry goes back a long way, to earnest high school sonnet writing attempts - I’m sure they were awful, and none saved, but I was learning about structure and how a strictness of form can open up pathways of expression. I’ve constantly collected poems, written and tucked into notebooks here and there, most of them not my own, but once in a while I write them too.
There have been a few that I internalized early, and that keep me company in a consistent, affirming way. Portions of Adrienne Rich’s Transcendental Etude, a glorious long poem, do this - my favorite bit is conveniently cited here, only she cuts off the end of it. The stanza ends “only care for the many-lived, unending forms in which she finds herself.” My emphasis. I could not emphasize that part enough, at the time I started reading it. And still it rolls on, reminding me.
Another example is the Rilke poem from which this website derives its name. Have a look at the ‘about’ tab, and scroll down for the full poem in German with my English translation. I’ve had that one memorized, the German version, for almost 30 years. I remember reading, in Jung Chang’s Wild Swans book, about the imprisoned woman reciting memorized poetry to herself, and made a mental note to add some more to my own internal library. In a culture of readily accessible writing and reading, it’s easy to skip over memorization, the oral power of language. Another reason that poetry is grounding, engaging all the elements of sound, texture, and shape.
As an undergraduate, I wrote my Comparative Literature thesis on the work of Paul Valéry and Rainer Maria Rilke. I was studying their writings on visual art, but also seeing how their aesthetic manifested in their own poetry, that deep interlacement among the artist’s moral imperative, the tools and techniques, and the finished works. Oh, I can wander around in that stuff all day! And these two are rich, in that respect. So once in a while I still just hang out doing this:
Recently I’ve been rummaging in Rilke, aided by the Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows compilation A Year with Rilke. I have most of the poetry in German, and in other translations, so I read the translation in Barrows and Macy, refer to the German, and compare with Stephen Mitchell or one of the stuffy previous translators, to see how the meanings well and spread, or pool into an unutterable depth. Rilke is an acknowledged spiritual heavyweight, often quoted and well-loved, so it’s not hard to find wellsprings of inspiration there (although whoa it’s deeper than you think.)
But Valéry is a bit more… removed, austere…? Not a name you hear bantered around much, anyway. (They actually met, Rilke and Valéry. I’m reading Rilke’s letters, and haven’t gotten to that part yet ((yes, I make myself read in order, as if it were a fictional story)) - anyway, looking forward to seeing what Rilke has to say about the old guy.)
So for some reason I pulled out my fat, La Pleiade edition of Valéry’s work (shown above - the pages are fine, like that of a Bible) and imagine my surprise when, starting from the very beginning, the first poem in that whole book is called La Fileuse. The spinner. One of the earliest poems he ever wrote, and it’s about a woman spinning wool with a wheel! Somehow I made it this far, having studied this poet extensively, and having studied handspinning for the last 15 years, without knowing that there was an overlap. I had to give that page a doubletake. Then I had to sit down and read the whole thing, dictionaries at hand.
La fileuse, c’est moi!
Do you mind if I just talk about this poem for a while? I’m not interested in explication, or analysis - just a personal response, a musing. What else is poetry for, after all? I like the way Karl Ove Knausgaard talks about poetry, saying that when you start to read a poem, it either opens itself up to you and lets you in, or it doesn’t. There are plenty of times I feel unwelcomed by poetry, and I leave and don’t come back to that work. But often enough, especially with poets I know, I enter as if to a familiar place, even if I have to look up half the words. Somehow the surroundings are drawing me in, telling me things, and I try to hear and translate what they’re saying - even if it’s purely internal, or more of a visual image.
This poem is like that, highly visual for me. I can grasp it better as a complete, interactive picture than as a word-by-word translation. The poem is written out in French, and with an English translation here (scroll to the bottom), but I’m going to write a prose description, a narration of it. Let me say, right off the bat, that I don’t know what this poem means. Really, I don’t. It forms part of the Album de Vers Ancien, which includes poems about Helen and the birth of Venus, so perhaps this spinner is one of the Fates, but there is nothing that indicates her actual role in the world…. which makes it an interesting evocation. We know a woman is spinning, but there is no why.
Ok here’s the scene: the garden, a melodious garden, is rocking, swaying, balanced on the crossing of two paths. The woman who spins sits there, in the blue, intoxicated, exhilarated, transported by the sound of the wheel, a snoring. She sits in the blue of the crossing, au bleu de la croisée. This is repeated at the end, it’s an important space, this blue. I think of it as a place where the sky opens up, because as the paths cross the trees and tall bushes recede from one’s field of vision. I also can’t help thinking of it as a crossbar whorl on a spindle, with that point where the yarn is fixed and rotating coming out from the center. And indeed, the garden se dodeline at this point, which means to balance or lightly rock one’s head (or an infant.)
She is tired, having “drunk the azure” - I think of when you’ve been basking outdoors all day and you get lulled by so much sky - and she starts to dream and doze, even while spinning la câline chevelure. Now the definition of câline in my Petit Larousse is amazing - it says this means one who enjoys caresses, who expresses sweet tenderness. Kid you not, that’s a real definition in the French dictionary. And chevelure is human hair, not usually a word used for animal fibers. So the fiber likes to be stroked, like a child or a cat, and the lullaby implications of dodeline are reinforced - this spinning is a rocking, a soothing, a caressing into being of a dream state.
This fiber liked to be stroked. Spindles made by Janet Scanlon (not available, they were unique gifts from a unique and gifted woman.)
There is a shrub that sprinkles small flowers all around, like a water hose. There is a tree branch that bows graciously and pays respect to the spinning wheel, offering a rose.
The sleeping woman continues spinning une laine isolée - it could be the single wool thread that is alone, it could be the spinner who is isolated in herself. Meanwhile, the shadows begin to braid themselves into the the thread she has spun.
The dream winds off the spindle (now see, we can’t help but wonder, we fiber folks, if this is just an artist playing loose with terminology… the wheel would have a bobbin, unless it’s a driven spindle, and the yarn would wind on, not off - but the words used imply winding off, and fuseau is spindle, so I get stuck in technicalities.) But she’s also still caressing the chevelure, so we are still in the realm of multiple, shifting meanings, as in a dream. The azure blue starts fading, the woman is enveloped in light and foliage, the last tree lights up as if burning.
Then suddenly, the spinner is “you” - and your sister, the huge rose where a saint smiles, scents your brow with the luff of her blameless breath, and you feel the burning - you are extinguished.
In the blue of the crossing where you spun wool.
Valéry said that he wrote this while sleeping. And the whole thing is about creating while sleeping, and all the elements are intermingled in the slippery logic of dreams: the flowers sprinkle like water, the fiber is a living being enjoying the caress, the sun radiates as a rose, all is overbright with color and light, especially blue.
I see la fileuse as sitting au bleu de la croisée, like a jewel set in the point of a cross, that point a fulcrum on which all is balanced. And as I mentioned, it’s also the point at which the spinning happens, where the yarn is formed - in other words, it is the point of twist, with the whole “garden”, that is to say creation, the world, rotating around it. And she becomes as if inebriated, but could this be the spiritual intoxication of a Sufi saint spinning, entering into a dream state that is not oblivion but a continuation of creative action? She is extinguished there, but “extinguish” is a synonym for release, or liberation… possibly a mystic merging with the wind and the light and the blue, as one more invisible element of life force.
As I said, I don’t know what this poem means - I’m just giving my own take on the vision it gives me. Spinners and weavers will understand the appeal of my interpretation, the magic of becoming the point of twist, dissolving into the act of creation - and I’m impressed that Valéry somehow knew that it’s really all about caressing the fiber.
One last PSA for those in the US: you may know of Resistbot, but if you don’t, text the word RESIST to 50409 and your messages can be quickly converted into letters sent to your representatives in Congress.