Tag Archives: Artemis

Topanga

26 Tuesday Jan 2016

Posted by in Meditations and Poetry, Melancholia, Motherhood

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I don’t write anymore. I haven’t had a regular practice in weeks, and my ballet shoes are probably growing mold. Why don’t I write? I suppose I haven’t much to say. Why not practice? I suppose the fatigue from a newly diagnosed autoimmune disorder has something to do with it… And dancing, my heart, my heart – it is lost somewhere out in the ether. And every time I form a search party to find it, the plan falls away, like a curtain from a stage, and the stage is empty, the theater hollowed out; even the props look tired.

There are secrets to a woman’s life. To every life, of course, there are great secrets to be found, and I am sure there are a universe of them in the heartbeat of the house cat as she lowers her stomach to the earth, scanning for mice. But the secrets with which I am familiar are of the feminine sort, the maternal sort; to be even more specific, the old-fashioned, rarely seen dependent sort. Can I list them? I think suddenly of Clarissa Dalloway as she gathers flowers early in the morning. The party is that evening: she must rush, but only in the most languid of ways, as women of her time and class were permitted.

Even Clarissa, whose mind was revealed to us so intimately, remains removed, apart from us even as the elegant clarity of Woolf’s prose reaches into every synapse of her character. She has secrets. The secret of loneliness? The secret of love’s lack? Her own, and others…

I recently read Woolf’s essay “On Illness.” She was famously often ill, in both limb and mind, and she made the point in this essay, obvious to yogis, that in illness one slows and becomes acutely aware of one’s surroundings, of existence itself. Observation becomes possible, more possible to the ill than to the bustling well: the goings-on in a tree become a reference point, a reality, a connection, to the ill, as those in health hurry past the tree or, in our time, more probably make plans to cut the whole thing down. Illness is a meditation. It is a slowing and a strange sort of gift. So says the woman who was so frequently ill.

So between my illness and the inward life of an introverted melancholy housewife, secrets abound. My marriage…. the love for my children that connects and smothers simultaneously… the understanding, too late, always too late, that my nature is not one that flourishes in one place, under one roof…. but these are whispers, I cannot be so brutal as to reveal the savage nature of my heart. I believe more in Artemis than Jesus, and possibly even more than the Buddha himself: our spiritual beliefs tend to reflect our true nature, and it is certainly her being to which I most relate: a wild being with a wild heart, solitary and self-contained, utterly feminine and totally without need, filled with a protective rage, a hunter and a lover of all she hunts. She, to me, is the representation of every value I hold highest.

How, then, did I come to live as a combination of Aphrodite and Hera? The most important secrets we withhold from ourselves.

I am an absurd romantic, I always have been, and this fact more than any other is what keeps me from being fully active in the world. Illusion is my great and dear friend, and artifice more real to me than whatever might be its opposite. But it is all artifice, yes? All reality, forever morphing, is quickly, quicker than the eye can trace, changing its mask and form.

At any rate, lately in my romantic way I think often of Topanga Canyon, specifically of that place as it must have felt in, say, 1964. The early hippies and the emptiness of that dirt road as it wound its way up and up from Malibu, where the kids hung out smoking and shooting up and bathing their bodies in the salted high-waved sea. Topanga, the hidden place of red earth, shade, brush, and views all the way to Mexico. Lost runaways with bad drugs and rich kids with even worse, and the music and the land and the yearning. The kids set up trucks and teepees to live in, and bathed in rivers, and drank and fought and when the war came close they debated not about its merits but the best way to end it. A lot of them were probably silly, but Topanga… a wild beauty fit for a goddess. Perhaps Artemis lived there for a time, before the Geffens came to buy real estate and the cafe culture set up shop.

Secrets. They had their own. Not the secrets of the feminine sort sitting at home thinking about decor and graduate school in equal measure, but secrets nonetheless.

Maybe writing will come back to me. What did Seamus Heaney say?
“Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.”

 

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Heat

30 Friday Oct 2015

Posted by in Grief, Meditations and Poetry, Melancholia, Yoga

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Heat

Six hours of restless sleep. The baby keeps stirring. Doesn’t she? Husband, gone. Fighting. We’re fighting. First there was not enough love making and then that changed and for a long while there was the new erotic pull, sex as if with a hidden god. Usually I am Artemis. She is my guide and my shadow. Every story, not a myth – something I have lived. I know the warmth of Actaeon’s stag-blood as I praise my sated hounds. The rivers, as they wend themselves to the salt sea, are my whispering friends, and my companions love solitude as much as they love me. Wild white skin, slender and virginal, protective of the feminine urge, in a round round wooded world that says: Beauty is safe here, unviolated, self-creating, sexless yet whole.
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But then I became Aphrodite, all smell and shared flesh and pull of the body. Sensation. And sensational. He – husband – loved it, loved me more, I think, because of the opening and the grasping sort of love. But she is mercurial – she is born from the seeded sea after all, and as jealous in her way as Artemis, and rage is as much a part of her bones as fucking and beauty.

So now, the rage. And the empty bed. The anger seeps and drips. Without the protective garments of love and touch we realize it: we are in a damp blackened cave, blind and wet and cold. Better to be the water loving hunter, contained, controlled, all long neck and watchful eyes. Better to be the goddess who protects the childbearing woman than the woman who bears the child.
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Many years ago on this day a girl/woman named Amy died. She died and she was young so young no one could even believe in the touch of death. But it came and now she is dead.

I don’t dream of her anymore.

But I remember her voice. And the wordless cues of her long body, her oddly long legs and pale freckled skin. She was sarcastic. In the mornings before school I would watch her flip her head upsidedown and take a strong firm brush to her already bizarrely thick hair. She would brush and brush, while singing to an LP (Bowie, Byrne, Beatles – so young as to still be on the B’s). When she brought her hair up, a brown black aura around her full-lipped face, it looked like an afro.

My grandfather’s family received land from King George. A large farm in the hills of North Carolina. I remember his voice rolled like those hills, lulling and slow. His family, they owned slaves and sometimes I think there is a brutal inheritance to be seen in my black-girl lips, in hers too, and her crazy kinked hair. Except her lips, her hair – they burned along with the rest of her.

Burning and burning and burning. All the human race desires to burn. In my practice this is called Tapas, a Sanskrit term relating to heat, both of the literal biological sort, as well as the burning intensity needed for spiritual birth. We take the ashes of the practice, all the embers and all the heat, we lift them up to the effulgent sun, and make an offering. But the offering is emptiness, no-thingness; it has burned or it was never even there.
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The emptiness is a relief, a freedom, a liberation. It is an either or an or. It is neither. Because language itself is incinerated by the heat of practice.

Is this then the origin of spiritual pain? The body aims itself, a perfect arrow. The mind absorbs and melts into the soul, the Atman, like a rainless cloud. Language gestures and refers – language is like an old gossip sitting in a dark cafe out in the banlieues at dusk, discussing everything in which it cannot participate: the dying away of itself, the fading, the fading, the fading from belief in meaning to the certainty of its opposite.

No. That is not quite right. The certainty of meaning’s opposite is only another meaning. Language twists itself like white linens in the wind: this way, then that way, and the settling is only a momentary pause between the pendulum. Or it is rather like the writing and reading of these words. Somewhere, some day, someone might read these words. He might have an understanding of them, but the understanding will be his, not the author’s.

Is this, then, also the origin not only of spiritual pain, but all pain? We grasp within our small subjective minds to reach one another, touch to touch, word to word. And yet the very method of our reach is an objective construct, using symbols meant to be universal, but forever understood individually.

Tapas also refers to solitude.

Gesture.

Nothing is in and of itself. Artemis and the Angels of Milton, Jesus and Buddha and Patanjali: ideas about ideas about ideas. All existence an infinite regress, a contradiction built upon a riddle.

Yoga also refers to trickery.
BlackDakini

Dream

12 Wednesday Aug 2015

Posted by in Grief, Meditations and Poetry, Melancholia

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In the year after my sister died her brutal and sudden death, the same year I realized but did not yet understand the full extent of “alone-ness,” I had a recurring dream.

I was a grown woman. My body had the long pale limbs of a phantom; it was nothing but bone and white skin. I had hair, dark as a moonless night, hanging in rivulets to my hips. The face of this woman, this woman who was me/not me, was all carved cheekbone and wide watching eyes. The eyes, yes, I remember vividly, of a solitary animal. Not a hunted one, but one who hunts.

The me/not me woman was a confusion and a draw: I looked nothing like her, but I was her, or was to be her. At the time of this dream’s visitation, I was a beautiful, round, apple cheeked child, with full hips and breasts and tanned skin and a rose stained mouth and frightened kohl lined eyes. I was as full, as voluptously full, as this woman was empty. But she was not empty of soul, as I think, perhaps, I was at the time. She was empty of need. I loved her.

The image, which was a story but also a blurred picture that wavered and shimmered in my young mind, returned night after sisterless night. Preparing for sleep in my huge bedroom, silent save the occasional startle of traffic beneath the window, thoughts drifted and embedded themselves in my mind: the bed across the hall was empty. That bed had just months before been inhabited by this being of my own blood, this being who indeed was so similar to me I was able to give to her the marrow of my own bones. Bone and blood, bone and blood, we were joined, like twins, like clones. But the blood we shared turned sour and toxic in her beautiful young body while mine continued its hearty path…how did this happen, how had my bones not saved hers?

No one, of course, understood. No friend, no mother, no father, no teacher, no lover. Always a solitary child, I shrank further and further into an empty cave. Nowhere, safety. Nowhere, companionship. Until the dream.

In the dream I could follow the me/not me woman as if watching a film. Never did she address me, though I sensed she knew I was there. She lived alone in a small, three of four room cottage above an angry ocean. Storm, grey rocks, grey cloudfront, white rushing crests of sea. The wind blew almost all the time, but it was a wind one soon got used to, even appreciated as an element bringing purity and renewal to the rocky shore.

The cottage was high above the sea; I remember a lane leading down to the water. It was steep and sanded, and connected directly to her front steps. The cottage was spare to the point of emptiness, save for brilliant white walls, pale smooth floors, books and, most importantly, music. Music was everywhere; it permeated the wind strewn air like a touchable substance. The music was power. It was joy. It was contentment.

Nothing happened in the dream. The me/not me woman spent her days in solitude, surrounded by music and sand, which she would sweep over and over again, brushing it patiently out the door, which she left forever open to the mercurial sea.

This dream has stayed with me as one of my great companions, a tremendous friend, over the many years since its first appearance. I have thought about this woman sometimes as a creature outside myself, almost as a goddess, or guiding archetype. She carries very much the solitary, sensual strength of Artemis within her. Sometimes, however, she is just me, and I know she presented herself to my young grieving mind as a hope, a visionary wish, that one day I might possess my solitude as something strong as the sea, something chosen, something with an element of fierce sensuality and at the same time completeness, in need of nothing. It is a dream of self-containment.

My outer life shows all the marks of someone who went down a very different path: I am married, I have three children, and animals and even a tiny palm-full of friends. But I know she is there, and sometimes, despite the happiness of motherhood and a deepening love for my husband, I am convinced that she is all that is and all that ever will be.