Inspiration-Letters 27 - Biographies

Welcome to issue 27 of Inspiration-Letters  - on the theme of biographies.

Back Door Biography

by Sharani Robins

The library where I work has a biography section where biographies and autobiographies are grouped along a wall in order alphabetically by the last name of the person who is the subject of the book. As you stroll along the stacks which extend down a long wall under the windows, there are books that herald great and notable individuals who have withstood the test of time and are, generally speaking, household names (perhaps worldwide) in the fields of politics, the military, invention, music, art, religion, writing, royalty and more.

In some instances, the individual’s legacy is far-reaching enough that there are even museums connected to their life or their birthplace/residence has become a place to visit. In France, one can visit the Rodin museum, a Matisse museum and a Renoir residence museum to name a few. In the U.S., you can visit places like Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s residence or Taliesin West in Arizona to learn about the architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

And in the U.S. there are also Presidential libraries dedicated to preserving the artefacts, history and archives of past presidents. One located near me is the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston and it offers multimedia exhibits with glimpses of Kennedy’s life and presidential achievements.

As a student of Sri Chinmoy, I am drawn to biographies and histories that reinforce and revitalize one’s own spiritual quest. Sri Chinmoy’s book Mother India's Lighthouse: India's Spiritual Leaders, first published in 1971, provides inspiring biographies of various figures in India’s history as well as commentary on world poets and world philosophers. And his insight through his personal friendships with world figures such as Mother Teresa, President Mikhail Gorbachev and Nelson Mandela add another dimension to the more traditional assessment of such notable characters on the world stage.

As Sri Chinmoy’s student, I also am drawn to biographical stories of his life. The newest one that I am familiar with is a self-published account by Sumadhur entitled, “ Sri Chinmoy: Fully Realised Spiritual Master, His Life and Philosophy by Sumadhur D. R. Page. Sumadhur became a student of Sri Chinmoy in the 1970’s in Canada and shares his life experiences as someone who closely interacted with Sri Chinmoy for many years. His guidance to create this 600+ page tome written over a period of many years came from Sri Chinmoy himself only a few short weeks before he left the Earth plane in October 2007. This book is on my list of things to read in the new future and you can browse excerpts of it on the Amazon online bookselling website.

Sri Chinmoy has commented on multiple occasions that a biography of a spiritual person is most difficult to portray. Once when asked the question if he was going to write his own autobiography, his answer in part included the following,

"...Right now I do not want to take the time to write down stories about my past, my childhood; they will not help you at all in your God-realisation. I always discourage my disciples from looking at my past, because I am what I am now. True, sometimes when I am inspired, I tell you of my childhood and adolescence, but I know these juicy stories will not help you even an iota in your God-realisation...What I have been doing since I came to America is of real importance. Other things are not important. In the life of the Christ only three years are important. What he did before he was thirty years old, God alone knows. What do we see or get from his life before thirty? Nothing! But during the years from thirty to thirty-three he did things which are immortal. The earth-consciousness is still treasuring the things which he did: it is still treasuring his love and compassion. If you people feel: "Oh, if I could only know something about the Christ before he was thirty, then I would be saved," I will say, "No, the less you know of the personal aspect, the unimportant aspect, the better. Just pay all attention to the goal itself." On the mango tree there are many branches and thousands and thousands of leaves. But what you need is the mango. If you know where the mango is, you have everything. Why do you want to know how many leaves there are on the tree?

Sri Chinmoy, The inner journey, Agni Press, 1977

Sri Chinmoy also describes in his writings that because a spiritual biography’s subject is primarily intangible inner realities, it remains something outside the realm of traditional description since the written word is a function of the human mind.

These questions were answered by Sri Chinmoy on 20 January 2006 at the Awana Kijal Golf and Beach Resort, Malaysia.

Question: We were listening today to some of your writings that sound like reminiscences and I was wondering if you will release these writings? Are you preparing your own autobiography?

Sri Chinmoy: I have said so many things about my life, specially about my outer life. About my inner life I cannot say, because after God-realisation, every day is a big volume in the inner world. Before God-realisation, you can write your autobiography. But once you realise God, every day becomes such a thick volume that nobody will be able to write it down. Every minute, things are happening here, there, everywhere.

The inner biography or autobiography is simply impossible to write. Only a few experiences I have told and in some of my earlier poems, my highest experiences I have tried to describe. Again, the highest spiritual experiences you cannot express in words — never! Nobody has been successful, nobody since the beginning of creation. No matter how great a poet the person is, no matter how great a writer he is, the highest experiences are far beyond the capacity of the human mind to grasp. Even the same person who had the highest realisation cannot grasp it with the mind. And for the hand to write it down is simply impossible, impossible. Higher than the highest experiences can never be described in words. To make an attempt is simply a joke. There are very few inner experiences that the mind can grasp, spiritual Masters say. That is why the highest experiences can never be written down in words.

In Sri Aurobindo's case, his autobiography was gathered from here and there, from his letters and conversations and others gave it the name 'autobiography'. In my case, the things that I have said many, many times will eventually be printed in book form. True, at that time my own words will be there, so it will become an autobiography. But if other writers use their words to describe my life, then it will be a biography.

Sri Chinmoy, My heart-door I have kept wide open, Agni Press, 2011

These selections from Sri Chinmoy's writings convey that the profound inner aspect of Sri Chinmoy’s contributions to seekers worldwide and for humanity, in general, can never be properly described. Yet I still imagine that someday my Guru’s multifaceted offerings will be presented in a museum like the ones I mentioned in the beginning of this article. I even dreamt of it one night and the vividness of the dream convinced me that someday a museum dedicated to Sri Chinmoy will come into being.

While it is easy to envision the many wings of the building, each with its own speciality reflecting all that Sri Chinmoy accomplished, I can’t help but ruminate about the personal touch as well. While a proper biography of Sri Chinmoy’s inner mastery lies beyond the veil, I keep seeing this one particular wing of the museum that would be the most poignant for us, his disciples.

When you walk into that wing, you will have entered through the back door of the biography. You will be surrounded by a testimonial wall with personal reflections, memories and tributes. They will bring to life the myriad and singular ways that Sri Chinmoy touched our lives. Whether it is a sweetest recollection of a blessing meditation from the Master or an artifact or sacred relic that tells the story of a special moment of divine interaction or the voicing of an unforgettable memory which etches the reality of God’s Compassion and Unconditional Love squarely in your heart, this is the place intertwined with tears of mercy and joy that form the sanctuary and altar of the museum for everyone whose life changed irrevocably once encountering Sri Chinmoy, whether in person, through reading his books, listening to his music, viewing his art or even taking a class taught by one of his students.

All the moments when he met with luminaries and ordinary people alike and lifted them overhead and often composed songs in their honor. All the times he offered prasad with his own hand filled with blessing light. All the regular people he met who were not even his students who would describe miracle stories - for instance a meeting I was at in the mid-2000's between Sri Chinmoy and a journalist in which he said that in his first interaction with Sri Chinmoy many years ago he was saved from serious emotional problems plaguing his life. Entire volumes of such stories have been published.

While we will never be able to fully grasp the inner world beyond speech and thought until having reached our own God-realisation, still the countless people touched by his selfless giving know that there is a biography of Sri Chinmoy, already written inside our own hearts, and we have memorized each and every page and enshrined it with endless gratitude and love.

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Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

by Dhiraja McBryde

I am half way through reading my third biography of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

I walk down towards the sea. It is warm here, exotically so, and, on the sea, there are giant white pelicans. They are startling galleons such as we do not see in my own chilly archipelago, their white sails billowing and full.

The stream I walk beside is brackish and – safe here from marauding pelicans – little fish swim in flashing shoals. I see two shoals, each of about forty individuals, each individual about the size of one of my fingers. They drift, they swirl.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was born nine years after Sri Aurobindo was and died five years after Sri Aurobindo died (1881–1955). They were contemporaries. One was an Indian academic turned revolutionary turned Hindu sage; the other a French scientist and Roman Catholic (Jesuit) priest. One might think that they had little in common but Fr Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said of Sri Aurobindo’s vision of evolution that it was basically the same as his own. Their respective visions of the world have been compared by several commentators – visions in which modern science and its manifold discoveries and insights are integrated and synthesised with ancient spiritual truths in a new perspective on the world.

Each of those little fish in the Caloundra stream near Amalendu’s house in southern Queensland – what is its life story? Are they related? Brothers, sisters, cousins, friends, colleagues? Who is timid, who is bold? Who was born first and who narrowly escaped a pelican?

One of the best programmes on the BBC World Service is ‘More or Less’ – ‘a programme that explains the plasticity of statistics and the fickleness of facts’. A recent edition addressed a question sent in by ten-year-old Felix – ‘How many animals are born each day in the world?’

The researchers, in response, started out investigating Humboldt penguins. They took the size of the current population, the number of eggs laid, the percentage that hatched in an average breeding season, divided the resulting number by 365 and concluded that 40 Humboldt penguins were born each day on average.

That was a start but it still left a lot of baby animals unaccounted for.

At this point the programme researchers fortunately spoke to Reader in Theoretical Ecology, Axel Rosberg, a man who knows about … nematodes. These little worms are … plentiful. In any square metre of earth there ‘live and move and have their being’ about three million nematodes.

Among the many interesting things that he or she gets up to, the average nematode lays five eggs each hour. Axel’s investigations indicate that one in a hundred of those eggs hatches. That means that every day – drum roll please – 600 quintillion nematodes are born. The size of this number means that, when answering Felix’s question, one can pretty much ignore how many penguins or blue whales are born each day. 600 quintillion is written in digits as a 6 with 20 zeros after it – 600,000,000,000,000,000,000. Every day.

It is not untrue to say that each of these little wiggly fellows – incomprehensible in their numeric totality but perfectly observable and knowable one at a time – is an individual with an individual life story, his or her own biography just like the little Queensland fish. And sustained in existence and nurtured with love by the God of love. As the Son of God put it – ‘What is the price of two sparrows – one copper coin? But not a single sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it’.

All through my childhood I was aware of a book on the bookcase to the left of the fireplace in the living room – a green-covered book, a book my father bought some years before I was born, a copy of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s famous ‘Le Phénomène Humain’.

.

No doubt I read a paragraph or two over the years and no doubt found them entirely incomprehensible but always I knew that this was a book and a thinker I needed to know.

I was 52 years old when I finally swiped the book off the shelf and took it home with me – Dad was 92 and encouraging the dispersal of the family books.

Once one gets through ‘Le Phénomène Humain’ one wants to read every biography of the author and at the same time give ‘Le Milieu Divin’ and ‘The Heart of Matter’ a try.

I knew that Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a scientist and a priest, a palaeontologist and an exponent of the actions and significance of evolution in physics and chemistry and biology and theology. Reading his biographies, the thing that startled me most about his life, however, was his experience during the First World War.

The First World War was the first opportunity for humanity to apply its newly found industrialised methods not to making things but to the ancient business of killing people to advance political purposes. The word ‘machinegun’ is one we have grown used to but – think about it – denotes a shocking concept.

The Western Front has become the epitome of madness, cruelty, evil and a certain kind of suffering – a dull, pointless, bovine suffering – men huddled in mud, deafened, poisoned and simply enduring. Was it seven million, was it eight million died? And one man – we can read his biography – was a stretcher bearer in a Moroccan, mostly Muslim, regiment on the Western Front (the men of the regiment called him ‘le sidi marabout’ – the honourable holy man); a stretcher bearer in that infernal milieu for all four years of the war. In those four years he declined promotion that would have seen him moved to safer areas, declining even to act as a chaplain (despite being a Roman Catholic priest) which would have seen him further from the front. Fr Pierre Teilhard de Chardin slogged through mud under bombardment and gas attack, recovering and rescuing and tending the maimed and the suffering of tortured humanity. And he loved it!

He wrote an essay in 1917 during a week in ‘the rear’ called ‘Nostalgia for the Front’:

‘The Front casts its spell on me … I need the Front because I am, just as all humans ought to be, an explorer … in spite of my terror, its pain and its evil … The unforgettable experience of the Front, in my opinion, is that of an immense liberty … an emancipation … from bad egotism and narrow personality … To go up to the lines, no one will contradict me, is to go up to a kind of peace … A higher, more compelling order of reality … My life appeared to me more precious than ever; and nevertheless, I would have left life at that moment without regret, because it no longer belonged to me. I was free, and worry-free, as far as I went. I felt I was gifted with an inexplicable lightness of being … made full and nourishing by …  an immense humane Presence which filled the Front … I could, finally, plunge into the real … In this thrust, pushed nearly to the exhaustion of the self, lies supreme liberty … An irresistible and peaceful awareness, in effect, accompanies a man … he no longer lives for himself … he is freed from himself … I often noted in myself this peace and exaltation which followed in the wake of the heartrending and victorious detachment to which the soul had at last again become accustomed in its superhuman environment … this joyous expansion of the heart, this gladness in the will, this new perfume in life … When the air of Flanders stank with chlorine and shells cut down the poplars … impregnated life with a tenacious perfume, definitive, with exaltation and initiation, as if one passed through them into the Absolute. All the enchantments of the East, all of the intellectual ardour of Paris, weren’t worth it, the mud of Douaumont … Thus, when the peace desired by all nations (and by me first of all) will come, something like a light will go out suddenly on the Earth … A place was made where it was possible for men to breathe an air charged with heaven.’

Reading of his life, two other aspects of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s experiences stood out to me.

Firstly, his many years of paleontological work in China and his involvement in the discovery of, and research into, the remains of Homo erectus – the hominid who had lived in China some 500,000 years before – the so-called ‘Peking Man’. It is a fascinating story.

The second aspect was less positive – the harsh oppression that Teilhard de Chardin received from his own Church and his own religious order. (Let us note that, in our own time, popes Paul VI, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis have all expressed support for Teilhard de Chardin’s ideas, and Papa Francisco is expected to remove from official Church teaching the last ‘warnings’ against his ideas and writings.) All through his life, however, both the authorities in Rome and within the Jesuit order insisted on his exile to China and continually forbade him to publish any of his writings on spiritual matters or the interface of these matters with the ever-expanding scientific understanding of the universe. These were the very things that were his life’s work and purpose and yet, faced with this suppression of his thought, he humbly and obediently accepted the restrictions placed upon him. Only after his death were any of his works published.

His friend Pierre Leroy wrote (in his introduction to ‘The Divine Milieu’):

‘He bore with patience, it is true, trials that might well have proved too much for the strongest of us, but how often in intimate conversation have I found him depressed and with almost no heart to carry on … During that period, he was at times prostrated by fits of weeping, and he appeared to be on the verge of despair. But, calling on all the resources of his will, he abandoned himself to the supremely Great, to his Christ, as the only purpose of his being; and so, hid his suffering and took up his work again, if not with joy, at least in the hope that his own personal vocation might be fulfilled.’

Why would one spend one’s time reading the biography of this man? Or, for that matter, of any person?

We keep reading biographies. I recently read the biography of Johannes Cranach, the Renaissance artist and entrepreneur and friend of Martin Luther. The best biography I read was of Eric Gill, the twentieth-century type designer – a biography that gently revealed a man of extreme and paradoxical contradictions – ‘a revolting criminal’ as Bernard Levin puts it in his review of the book. Reading the biography of Steve Jobs, I alternated, page by page, between admiration for his genius and shock at his behavior, whereas, reading the biography of Sir Laurens van der Post, I was amazed rather at the author for undertaking such a hatchet job.

I am often surprised that I have made it to the age of 53 and actually now manage to rent a flat, own a car, hold down a regular job, occasionally travel, manage a bank account, speak to people. Life in the world is difficult. It has never seemed inevitable that I could manage to do those things. It would not be startling to me to find myself living under a bridge. How are we to function? Certainly, there are things that help – family, friends, spiritual guidance, the props of society – but there are many ways to live life, many ways that one may fulfil one’s role. And it helps to look around and see how others have dealt with existence, how they have faced life.

It might be useful to head into the biography section and find some alternatives that you may never have thought of.

Could I find inspiration and encouragement in the life of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin?

Pierre Leroy wrote:

‘The look in his eyes when they met your eyes revealed the man’s soul: his reassuring sympathy restored your confidence in yourself. Just to speak to him made you feel better … His own faith was in the invincible power of love: men hurt one another by not loving one another. And this was not naivete but the goodness of the man, for he was good beyond the common measure … It was this deep-seated spiritual conviction that led Pere Pierre Teilhard de Chardin to the practice of self-forgetfulness: self being forgotten in a sympathetic union with all men and with every individual man … In all that he did, as in all that he taught, there was no bitterness nor disillusioned cynicism, nothing but a constant optimism. Far from railing against the pettiness of men or the chaos of the world, he made it a rule never to assume the presence of evil. And when he was unable to deny the evidence of his eyes, he looked not for the damning but for the saving element in what he saw: a mental attitude that surely, if unexpectedly, provides the only road to truth.’

Or Teilhard de Chardin wrote of himself:

‘Throughout my whole life, during every moment I have lived, the world has gradually been taking on light and fire for me, until it has come to envelop me in one mass of luminosity, glowing from within … The purple flush of matter fading imperceptibly into the gold of spirit, to be lost finally in the incandescence of a personal universe …’

Could I read of the life of Sri Aurobindo and learn something of how to live?

There are biographies unwritten – the life to Peking Man half a million years ago which we can never truly understand but only be amazed to imagine, the life of fish or tiny invertebrates.

All those biographies written, all those imagined biographies of fish and nematodes, they encourage us, they reinforce that we are part of a great universal family which, as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin continually pointed out, is progressing and evolving and converging towards an ultimate and perfect ‘omega point’.

Sri Chinmoy was asked about Teilhard de Chardin’s idea of an irreversible law of progression towards perfection. He replied, ‘I fully agree with Teilhard de Chardin’.

Adrienne Rich

by Mahiruha Klein

I set out to write a short essay on the life of Adrienne Rich, arguably the greatest poet in late twentieth-century English.  As I read her letters, her poems, her public lectures, however, I quickly learned that her real life is in her art.  Her outer life was fascinating; she was the most fearless public intellectual of her time, and she definitely raised the standard of discourse in my country.  But, it is as a sublime craftsman in verse that she will always be remembered.  A contemporary writer described her as the William Blake of American letters.  I find this analogy apt.

I want to look at her most famous poem “Diving Into The Wreck” and show why her poetry illustrates deep truths.  My objective, of course, is to inspire people to read her work.

Rich once quoted Muriel Rukeyser, “Breathe in experience, breathe out poetry.”  In other words, something happens between those two breaths.  The breath reaches some deep part of your being and is transformed.  Poetry is not stream of consciousness or automatic writing.  Also, we cannot necessarily connect a poem to the facts of the poet’s life, for poetry is really thoughts and sensations distilled into something finer.

Here is the text of “Diving Into The Wreck”:

Diving Into The Wreck (By Adrienne Rich)

First having read the book of myths,

and loaded the camera,

and checked the edge of the knife-blade,

I put on

the body-armor of black rubber

the absurd flippers

the grave and awkward mask.

I am having to do this

not like Cousteau with his

assiduous team

aboard the sun-flooded schooner

but here alone.

 

There is a ladder.

The ladder is always there

hanging innocently

close to the side of the schooner.

We know what it is for,

we who have used it.

Otherwise

it is a piece of maritime floss

some sundry equipment.

 

I go down.

Rung after rung and still

the oxygen immerses me

the blue light

the clear atoms

of our human air.

I go down.

My flippers cripple me,

I crawl like an insect down the ladder

and there is no one

to tell me when the ocean

will begin.

 

First the air is blue and then

it is bluer and then green and then

black I am blacking out and yet

my mask is powerful

it pumps my blood with power

the sea is another story

the sea is not a question of power

I have to learn alone

to turn my body without force

in the deep element.

 

And now: it is easy to forget

what I came for

among so many who have always

lived here

swaying their crenellated fans

between the reefs

and besides

you breathe differently down here.

 

I came to explore the wreck.

The words are purposes.

The words are maps.

I came to see the damage that was done

and the treasures that prevail.

I stroke the beam of my lamp

slowly along the flank

of something more permanent

than fish or weed

 

the thing I came for:

the wreck and not the story of the wreck

the thing itself and not the myth

the drowned face always staring

toward the sun

the evidence of damage

worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty

the ribs of the disaster

curving their assertion

among the tentative haunters.

 

This is the place.

And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair

streams black, the merman in his armored body.

We circle silently

about the wreck

we dive into the hold.

I am she: I am he

 

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes

whose breasts still bear the stress

whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies

obscurely inside barrels

half-wedged and left to rot

we are the half-destroyed instruments

that once held to a course

the water-eaten log

the fouled compass

 

We are, I am, you are

by cowardice or courage

the one who find our way

back to this scene

carrying a knife, a camera

a book of myths

in which

our names do not appear.

From Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972 by Adrienne Rich

This poem seems like a feminist allegory.  She says in the last line, about the book of myths, where “our names do not appear.”  A poet is a mythmaker.  She sees herself creating a new set of myths in which women will have a place.  She’s diving alone into the sea, exploring territory where men have gone “who have always lived here”, but women have not.

Rich was a true artist, and so her poems cannot be reduced to any political theme or idea.  Definitely this poem is a story of women claiming their lost history, “the treasures that prevail” in spite of the shipwreck, which in this case may mean the centuries-long suppression of women’s creativity.

Does the poem have other, more universal meanings?  I read this poem for the first time just one week ago, but I knew I had to learn it by heart, and I have.  I have repeated it many, many times.  It’s become part of my consciousness. Why is it special to me, even though I am not a woman and it is not speaking to my experience?

The answer is that this poem sheds universal truth.  Just look at the richness of the language, the lush and captivating word music!  If we just take the first stanza:

 

“First having read the book of myths,

and loaded the camera,

and checked the edge of the knife-blade,

I put on

the body-armor of black rubber

the absurd flippers

the grave and awkward mask.

I am having to do this

not like Cousteau with his

assiduous team

aboard the sun-flooded schooner

but here alone.”

 

Wow!  “The body-armor of black rubber, the absurd flippers, the grave and awkward mask.”

Such beautiful rhythm, such living images: absurd flippers, black rubber, grave mask.  In a way, these lines seem an echo of Milton’s boast from the beginning of “Paradise Lost”.  He says that his poem “with no middle flight intends to soar above “th’ Aonian mount while it pursues things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme”.

Like Milton, Rich is saying she is getting ready to do something great, to explore the depths of poetry, to write something enduring.  Writing poetry is always an act of consecration, of surrender.  Surrender is not a one-day achievement.  It takes lots and lots of preparation.  All artists of the highest order reach a point where they surrender their will to a higher will, to the thing that really needs expression in and through them.  It is a ritual, like the Vedic offerings.  She is putting on the body armor, the flippers, the mask, as part of a ritual of surrender- to dive into something beyond herself, and yet, as a woman, to see if there are things that she can uniquely express through her own poetic voice.

At the same time, even though she is suiting up, and making clear that she is prepared to do something, to offer something, to ‘dive’ the same way that Milton wanted to soar, yet the “absurd flippers” tell us that she doesn’t take herself too seriously.  In other words, she knows she’s on a journey.  When you are on a journey, the journey becomes your real reality.  Everything you are becomes part of that traveling, and so therefore you carry as little as possible.  It’s only by having a sense of humor, some levity towards life with all its disappointments and tragedies that we can fly, dive and run the fastest.

In the next stanza:

“There is a ladder.

The ladder is always there

hanging innocently

close to the side of the schooner.

We know what it is for,

we who have used it.

Otherwise

it is a piece of maritime floss

some sundry equipment.”

 

I don’t know what this passage means, exactly.  But l love the sound of the words!  “Maritime floss”, “sundry equipment”, “The ladder is always there.”

Perhaps it is someways connected with this poem by Sri Chinmoy:

“When we look at life,
It frightens us.
When we look into life,
It surrenders.”

(Sri Chinmoy, The street beggar, Agni Press, 2003)

Adrienne Rich examined the lives of the dispossessed, the neglected, in her poetry.  She had a vast empathy for people of all walks of life.  Maybe the ladder here means that there is always a way to deal with life’s problems and mistakes.  And that way is not an escape, but rather it leads us deeper into life itself.  In the first stanza, she suits up, and gets ready to write poetry.  In the next stanza she talks about this ladder, hanging innocently “close to the side of the schooner.”  Maybe writing itself is the ladder that allows us to go deep into ourselves. Simone Beauvoir said all writing is prayer.  This ‘sundry’ equipment, the ladder of creative self-expression, can be taken up by anyone.  We know Mahler forbid his wife from composing music, even though she was very gifted.  Maybe Rich is offering this ladder to all those whose voices are suppressed.

The next two stanzas are maybe the most important of the poem:

“I go down.

Rung after rung and still

the oxygen immerses me

the blue light

the clear atoms

of our human air.

I go down.

My flippers cripple me,

I crawl like an insect down the ladder

and there is no one

to tell me when the ocean

will begin.

 

First the air is blue and then

it is bluer and then green and then

black I am blacking out and yet

my mask is powerful

it pumps my blood with power

the sea is another story

the sea is not a question of power

I have to learn alone

to turn my body without force

in the deep element.”

 

Contrast Rich’s phrase “I crawl like an insect down the ladder” with Milton’s “That with no middle flight intends to soar above the Aonian mount”.  She becomes very small as she enters into this mystic realm of poetry.  This is appropriate.  You rightly approach the creative source, that mysterious inspirational fountain and guide within us, with humility.  The Upanishads say: “Anor aniyan mahato mahiyan. Atmasya jantor nihito guhayam.” This means “Smaller than the small, larger than the largest, the soul abides in the secret heart of man.”

The last line of that stanza, “And there is no-one to tell me when the ocean will begin” is reminiscent of Wallace Stevens’ immortal poem “The Idea of Order at Key West”.  The first part of that poem ends with a meditation on the human voice of the sea, “…that was not ours, although we understood, inhuman, of the veritable ocean.”

I like the phrase “I am blacking out and yet my mask is powerful/it pumps my blood with power”.  And then the next few lines are an interesting contrast:

“The sea is another story

The sea is not question of power.

I have to learn alone

To turn my body without force

In the deep element.”

Please read the whole first stanza of Steven’s poem “The Idea of Order At Key West”, to see why these lines echo that poem so powerfully.  You can find it here:

 

If I look at the last three lines:

“I have to learn alone

To turn my body without force

In the deep element.”

 

How do you turn without force?  I am reminded of those lines from the Isa Upanishad:

 

“It moves, It moves not.

It is far and It is near,

It is within all this,

And It is outside all this.”

 

For Adrienne Rich, as a feminist, the ocean as the supreme Mother would have a deep resonance.  Also, learning to submit to this vast consciousness connects with the need for surrender.  Look at Beethoven.  His late music, after he lost his hearing, is so radically different from what he wrote before.  I feel the surrender element in his last pieces.  He became a voice for the Will.  Rich says she must learn alone “to turn my body without force in the deep element.”  Here, too, there is an aspect of submission to a higher will.

The motor image of these three lines reminds me of Shakespeare:

“Seal up the ship-boy's eyes, and rock his brains
In cradle of the rude imperious surge”

(From Henry the Fourth part two)

We look at the next two stanzas and we see an intensification of images and tone:

“And now: it is easy to forget

what I came for

among so many who have always

lived here

swaying their crenellated fans

between the reefs

and besides

you breathe differently down here.

 

I came to explore the wreck.

The words are purposes.

The words are maps.

I came to see the damage that was done

and the treasures that prevail.

I stroke the beam of my lamp

slowly along the flank

of something more permanent

than fish or weed”

 

I love the phrase “swaying their crenellated fans between the reefs”, a wonderful combination of sound and sense.  When she says “among so many who have always lived here”, she is claiming a place for herself not only as a woman among male poets, but also as a new poet among older poets, who have already been accepted in the canon. This is why it is daunting for me to write poetry.  After Shakespeare and Milton and Stevens, why bother?  Yet, we all take the plunge, and try to offer something new.  I once spoke to a composer who told me it is daunting for him to write string quartets because Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, and Brahms all put some of their very best music into the form of the quartet.  You just eventually have to write.  So, don’t forget your purpose, don’t be overwhelmed by those who have gone before, grasshopper!  You have your own task to perform.

 

“The words are purposes.  The words are maps”.

Writing itself is an act of resistance against all those forces outside you and inside you that tell you that you are insignificant, that you are weak, that your voice doesn’t matter.  By aspiring in any way, and also by translating that aspiration into creative self-giving, you matter.

Similarly, when I read the line “The Treasures that Prevail”, for some reason I remember the course I took in college on Holocaust studies.  An older Jewish man kept a journal of his experiences in the Lodz ghetto.  He opened it by writing, “Listen and believe this- even though it happened here, even though it sounds so old, so distant and so strange.”

Some of the images and phrases in the next stanza are monumental:

“The wreck and not the story of the wreck…worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty.”

And

“The ribs of the disaster/ curving their assertion/ among the tentative haunters.”

When you come to the following stanza, and then the penultimate stanza, we encounter the richest imagery of the poem:

“This is the place.

And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair

streams black, the merman in his armored body.

We circle silently

about the wreck

we dive into the hold.

I am she: I am he

 

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes

whose breasts still bear the stress

whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies

obscurely inside barrels

half-wedged and left to rot

we are the half-destroyed instruments

that once held to a course

the water-eaten log

the fouled compass”

 

We saw in the first stanza how Rich suited up, put on the flippers, the body-armor and the mask, and then, after “blacking out” in the fourth stanza, she has become both mermaid “whose dark hair streams black” and the merman “in his armored body.”  The critic Albert Gelpi described that stanza as “an interplay of images and pronouns in a circle of hallucinatory assertions”.

Like Whitman, she has become the universal eye that observes everything, “circle silently about the wreck”, and identifies with everything and everyone: “I am she: I am he”.

Rich was close to her Father, the Jewish pathologist Arnold Rice Rich, who had a huge library and encouraged, even insisted that her daughter become an intellectual and writer.  So, “silver, copper, vermeil cargo” echoes lines of the Old Testament that she would have studied.  It also points to her love of knowledge, her appreciation for the talismanic power of words, and for the role that art plays in keeping us civilized.

The lines “We are the half-destroyed instruments/ that once held to a course”, I think may echo Langston Hughes’ great poem “What Happens to a dream deferred”:

Of course, the instruments are only half-destroyed.  As long as there are divers, like her, they can be recovered.  There is always hope, even in the face of the worst shipwreck, the worst tragedy.

The poem concludes with a generous invitation:

“We are, I am, you are

by cowardice or courage

the one who find our way

back to this scene

carrying a knife, a camera

a book of myths

in which

our names do not appear.”

 

A knife is a weapon, a camera records who did what, and a book of myths immortalizes the story.  She is giving women, and in fact, anyone, the tools to tell their story in the face of all thugs, naysayers and critics.  This poem is a feminist parable.  It is also a poem of poetic transformation, how to rise above the individual ego to offer universal truth and delight.

Rich wrote in her great essay “Blood, Bread and Poetry”:

            “I should add that I was easily entranced by pure sound and still am, no matter what it is saying; and any poet who mixes the poetry of the actual world with the poetry of sound interests and excites me more than I am able to say.”

(From “Blood Bread and Poetry  Selected Prose 1979-1985)

Hence, “Diving into the Wreck” is more than just images and a message, it is ultimately word music, and it pleases my ear and my heart at the same time.  This is how I recognize a great poem.

Adrienne Rich won the1973  National Book Award for poetry for book of poems in which “Diving into the Wreck” appears.  I am measurelessly grateful to her for being one of my models and traveling companions in verse.  I have recited her poems like “Diving Into The Wreck”, “Tattered Kaddish” and “What Kinds of Times Are These” in coffee shops, libraries and the checkout line.

I work with many scholars and academics in the supermarket.  Once I was bagging a customer’s groceries and I asked my fellow bagger, a former Literature Professor, if she had read Adrienne Rich.  She said “Of course.  I’ve taken my Women’s Studies!”  I told her that I find it irritating that Adrienne Rich is taught mostly in Women’s Studies as I think she should just be taught in Modern Poetry period, as she’s one of the true masters.  My friend responded that there is nothing wrong with an oppressed group celebrating somebody who is their voice, in this case women.  I took her point.

The New York Times obituary of Adrienne Rich quoted her lifelong goal: “To create a society without domination.”  So, in that line I can quote Guru’s words on the Kurukshetra battle and why that ancient war was actually a form of art:

“To conquer ignorance, to conquer undivine forces, is a true form of art, because when you conquer ignorance, you clear the path for light, the light that needs constant expansion, constant manifestation.”

(Sri Chinmoy, Art's life and the soul's light, Agni Press, 1974)

 

--Mahiruha

 

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