NaPoWriMo, Day 2: Lawrence on Aphrodite

Because Women in Love is a 25 hour recording, and I listen to it every night on my dog walk, the influence of Lawrence's novel will affect my writing. I've never read Lawrence, though I do have The Plumed Serpent on my shelves, so must have tried. An audio recording, and Sennheiser earbuds, and I enter deep listening mode. The brilliance and beauty of his language marvels me as I walk the dark streets with my dog.

My writing has been compared to Lawrence's, which is far-fetched, surely, and yet I find I am enthralled with his mastery, as a writer, and feel a deep resonance with his work, at least as it is expressed in this novel.

Tonight, listening to Chapter 14 (of 42, I have a ways to go), a passage spoke again of concerns relevant to my Venus Poems. Birkin and Ursuala are speaking:

‘Do you smell this little marsh?’ he said, sniffing the air. He was very sensitive to scents, and quick in understanding them.
‘It’s rather nice,’ she said. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘alarming.’
‘Why alarming?’ she laughed.
‘It seethes and seethes, a river of darkness,’ he said, ‘putting forth lilies and snakes, and the ignis fatuus, and rolling all the time onward. That’s what we never take into count— that it rolls onwards.’
‘What does?’
‘The other river, the black river. We always consider the silver river of life, rolling on and quickening all the world to a brightness, on and on to heaven, flowing into a bright eternal sea, a heaven of angels thronging. But the other is our real reality—’
‘But what other? I don’t see any other,’ said Ursula.
‘It is your reality, nevertheless,’ he said; ‘that dark river of dissolution. You see it rolls in us just as the other rolls—the black river of corruption. And our flowers are of this—our sea-born Aphrodite, all our white phosphorescent flowers of sensuous perfection, all our reality, nowadays.’
‘You mean that Aphrodite is really deathly?’ asked Ursula.
‘I mean she is the flowering mystery of the death-process, yes,’ he replied. ‘When the stream of synthetic creation lapses, we find ourselves part of the inverse process, the blood of destructive creation. Aphrodite is born in the first spasm of universal dissolution—then the snakes and swans and lotus— marsh-flowers— ... born in the process of destructive creation.’

[Project Gutenberg, an on-line eBook, url to the page where this passage begins.]

From my Venus manuscript, this piece:

She Who Came Forth

The Embrace. Their children couldn't emerge into the light. He was heaven and she was earth. Uranus and Gaia, his wife, who he loved and refused to separate from. Creation waited. The embrace was tight, intimate, sensual, blissful, deeply in each other, unending. Cronus, his son, time, cruel time, cut off his genitals and threw them into the sea. Heaven and Earth separated. Out of the foam, Aphrodite was born. Love.

Aphrodite, who she was to the Ancient Greeks, though she was older than that, and linked to Ishtar-Astarte, and probably brought to the Greek islands by Phoenician sailors, Aphrodite, who later became Venus to the Ancient Romans, is one of the world's oldest divinities.

She was born from an act that separated Heaven and Earth. An ancient divinity present at the beginning of time. She Who Came Forth at the birth of the world.

Or, this is Hesiod's version in his Theogony. Aphrodite represents pure and spiritual love. From her foamy birth the Three Graces received her and wrapped her in rich garments and decorated her with gold ornaments.

The Goddess of Love.

Aphrodite Urania, or Celestial Aphrodite.

The Venus Botticelli saw, painted, understood.

And now I understand from Lawrence that her birth from the sea-foam, the sea-sperm of her castrated father, is not just the miraculous birth of love in the world, of poetry, but of death in the world, of dissolution, loss.

Venus' creation out of destruction marks her. For there is also Venus Pandemos, who, in mythology, is born of Zeus and Dione. She is associated, not with celestial love, like Venus Urania, but with the body; Venus Pandemos is the common goddess of the people. A goddess of sensuality, of lust. And hence of death, dissolution.

Once again, I find I am laying the groundwork for writing, for continuing with the suite of poems I began a few years ago, without actually writing. Yet this research is of enormous help to me, never-the-less.

And besides, you get to read a few quotes from Lawrence's Women in Love, which may inspire you to download the audiobook and listen, or the pdf and read it.

                                          

Dave's 'How to Read a Poem' read by Brenda

This afternoon I recorded a reading of a prosepoem of Dave Bonta's, and found a 23 sec clip of chimes by morgantj on ccMixter, which was slowed, split, re-arranged, pasted, joined, and enrichened by a multivoice filter and other auditory magics until it became a rendition of what I was hearing in my mind when listening to the reading.

The reading wasn't planned. I read his series of images of poetry for reading poetry and turned on the voice memo of my iPhone and recorded. While I did do another take, the first one had an openness, and as the spoken recording was my second reading of the poem, the sense of discovery remains, I hope, within it.

How to read poetry (notes to self), by Dave Bonta

As if it were any other kind of communication that means what it says, not some kind of code to be deciphered.

As if it were code, where a single mistyped letter can change everything, and turn a webpage into the white screen of death.

As if you had nothing else to do: no news to skim, no email to hurry through, no other work, no purer entertainment.

As slowly as a lover performing oral sex: forget about me, what does the poem want?

As fast as a sunrise on the equator, so the mind won’t have any time to wander.

As if each line were an elaborate curse in some nearly extinct language with only four elderly speakers left, all of them converts to evangelical Christianity.

As if the stanzas were truly rooms, and not houses lined up on some quiet street.

As if the spirit killeth, but the letter giveth life.

As if it were perfectly useless and irrelevant to the cycle of discipline and indulgence we think of as real life.

As if each poem were an oracle just for you: a diagnosis from a physician, an interview with Human Resources, the suggestions of a therapist, the absolution given by a priest.

As if the real poem were buried like a deer tick ass-up in the flesh of your ear.

I like the edges of surrealism in How to read poetry (notes to self), the variety of images, all quite rich and meant to evoke the reader's imagination, that the only extended metaphor is the poet who is dreaming up a series images of the world that emerge with a cadence of similes, analogies, that, if followed, bring the reader (who is reading or speaking) back to the poem, the poem's reading.

And the touches of humour, as in the last line.

If you were inclined to record this poem, I'm sure Dave would be delighted!

                                          

NaPoWriMo, Day 1: Lawrence on Love

An extraordinary passage in D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love, between the characters, Ursula Brangwen and Rupert Birkin, who fall in love (though I am only on chapter 15 so don't know the outcome). When Ursula visits him alone, he explains his position.

Birkin says, "If we are going to make a relationship, even of friendship, there must be something final and infallible about it." He continues:

'I can't say it is love I have to offer--and it isn't love I want. It is something much more impersonal and harder--and rarer.'
There was a silence, out of which she said:
‘You mean you don’t love me?’
She suffered furiously, saying that.
‘Yes, if you like to put it like that. Though perhaps that isn’t true. I don’t know. At any rate, I don’t feel the emotion of love for you—no, and I don’t want to. Because it gives out in the last issues.’
‘Love gives out in the last issues?’ she asked, feeling numb to the lips.
‘Yes, it does. At the very last, one is alone, beyond the influence of love. There is a real impersonal me, that is beyond love, beyond any emotional relationship. So it is with you. But we want to delude ourselves that love is the root. It isn’t. It is only the branches. The root is beyond love, a naked kind of isolation, an isolated me, that does NOT meet and mingle, and never can.’
She watched him with wide, troubled eyes. His face was incandescent in its abstract earnestness.
‘And you mean you can’t love?’ she asked, in trepidation.
‘Yes, if you like. I have loved. But there is a beyond, where there is not love.’
She could not submit to this. She felt it swooning over her. But she could not submit.
‘But how do you know—if you have never REALLY loved?’ she asked.
‘It is true, what I say; there is a beyond, in you, in me, which is further than love, beyond the scope, as stars are beyond the scope of vision, some of them.’
‘Then there is no love,’ cried Ursula.
‘Ultimately, no, there is something else. But, ultimately, there IS no love.’

[Project Gutenberg, an on-line eBook, url to the page where this passage begins.]

Yes, I understand this. In meditation, I, too, have discovered what Lawrence writes about. But can I write about the void that is beyond love? Even a few lines will do - only a draft and a re-entry into my Venus Manuscript.


We can love only when we are emptied of ourselves. When we have given ourselves to the other.

In the depths of this giving, profound, scary, unsettling, is a union beyond self, ego, personhood, the particular state of time and space in the here and now that we are.

If we enter this spiritual state of being, dependent as it is on the erotic, on the sexual forces of attraction, desire and excitement, melt into the beyondness of the orgasmic moment, and allow it to be a portal where we can spin, tilt, go deeper into the mystery, letting ourselves dissolve, even to the point of extinction, giving ourselves over to the enigma, then, yes.

There remains something alone in each of us even in the union of love, and there is a "beyond, in you, in me, which is further than love."


And I apologize, this is as far as I can go tonight. Tomorrow images may emerge to give flesh to these thoughts; who knows.

                                          

Na(tional)Po(etry)Wri(ting)Mo(nth)

While I've written some novellas during NaNoWriMo, and wrote a script once during April's script writing frenzy, I haven't tried the poem-a-day gauntlet of NaPoWriMo.

Because poetry is so much harder? Perhaps. And because it's a public writing - the others were private unless you wanted to post, and at the end you sent in your mms. for a word count. NaPoWriMo isn't like that. NaPoWriMo is less centralized, for a start. There are many different organizing sites participating. And they all offer 'prompts.'

This is where I run into trouble. I don't need 'prompts.' I have too many unfinished projects on the go as it is. What I need is focused finishing power. What I need is a NaPoWriMo site that exists solely to help poets focus on longer projects, of their own choosing.

This morning I searched for such a site, without success.

Many of the prompts I saw seemed more appropriate to writing skits - funny, clever, cute. But nowhere did I see any prompts that attempted the ineffable - to help the poet elicit the deeper poetry within. I can't imagine Paul Celan, or Rilke writing on any of the prompts I saw.

Why isn't there a site where you can march to your own drums but together with other similarly idiosyncratic eccentric poets?

NaPoWriMo isn't anything like the novel writing month, or the script writing one.

Are poets secretly autocrats? I began to wonder during my search for a community to join for the coming month.

How come there's no invitation anywhere to simply write what you want to write? There must be, somewhere. And perhaps I'll discover it, or someone will point me in the right direction.

In the mean time, I have decided to go ahead, valiantly, willy nilly, and write a poem a day. If my writing seems to co-incide with a prompt at one of the sites I've looked at, I'll enter it for that round. Otherwise, I'm beating my drum in my own jungle of words alone.

I'll label each of these posts NaPoWriMo 2011.

And I am diving back into my stalled manuscript of Venus Poems.

Found the mms. in my Google Docs tonight, browsed it, groaning. Still, continue...

I am currently listening to a wonderful recording of D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love by Ruth Golding that I downloaded from LibriVox (all the readings, of public domain books, by volunteers, and free to download, a rich site of many delights). Lawrence was so articulate about love. Life, the flowers of death, the mystic universe, limits of love, and the forces, and what is deeper than all of these. Do such intellectual lovers still exist?

Lawrence's meditations on love as voiced through his character Gerald in Women in Love is a good place to start on my way back into my manuscript on love.

Hopefully, I'll have something written before midnight!