A Charm
I have a twin who bears my name;
Bears it about with him in shame;
Who goes a way I would not go;
Has knowledge of things I would not know;
When I was brave he was afraid;
He told the truth, I lied;
What’s sweet to me tastes bitter to him;
My friends, my friends, he doesn’t love them;
I walk the daylight in his dream;
He breathes the air of my nightmare.
–David Ferry
This is a season of shadows. Fall arrives and the sun begins angling its light, deepening the dark silhouettes of the trees along my road. Shorter days. Putting away the white summer clothes and donning the protection of winter black.
A heightened contrast of light and dark is also apparent on a metaphoric level in our culture at large–the recent high stakes meltdown of the financial markets, the struggle of poverty that coexists with chokingly excessive wealth, the deep divide between our current presidential options and the implications that these two choices mean for our world’s future.
This poem haunts. It haunts because Ferry doesn’t let any of us wrangle our way out of owning our own personal dark energy, our very own, custom-made shadow. And that burden feels particularly heavy at a time when so much is at stake on every level. Why are elections held in November, right at the cusp of the long and bleak winter season? Would the outcome be different if it we held the vote in the spring or summer? The mantra going forward: Bundle up.
***
David Ferry has been a poetry mentor for several of my friends while they were enrolled in the masters program in creative writing at BU. They still speak about him with a deep reverence.
In addition to his own poetry, Ferry has done a number of translations including a well received rendering of Gilgamesh. The poet W. S. Merwin has described Ferry’s work as having an “assured quiet tone” that communicates “complexities of feeling with unfailing proportion and grace.”
On the same page today! I was thinking it was doleful to go to the polls with the wind chasing leaves and the shadows reaching for our ankles as we scurried along. Then it occurred to me, James Frazer might say it was a harvest festival — the culmination of intense vying for the soon-to-be vacant priest-king slot, the reckoning up of our crops’ yield and the drawing of lots. Can we elevate a Corn Lord so dark and young — one who comes from the city? Is he provident, rooted and wise? Is the old soldier just too old, too old and yet not wise? But the gruesomely fertile wolf-slaying woman whose pups raise themselves — she could rule the winter.
Oh wise E, please don’t be right about that long dark winter of a vision…wolf-slayer is the manufactured narrative, but empty suit is the reality.
Vision peace and harmony and do no harm. Our words and vision have power!
I actually don’t believe we are stupid enough to elect Palin — ample proof that I do think good thoughts, and think them hard. But her presence is a horrible, horrible warning, because — exactly like Obama — she is among other things a powerful expression of a stirring in the land. Neither of them could have risen to dominance if that were not so. It’s one thing to know that history is the record of a constant struggle between regressive forces and those that are forward-looking, and quite another to see these forces embodied in two individuals with archetypal qualities we don’t even have to scratch the surface for. Seeing the mythic side of people and events, or the Greek aspect, or the Shakespearean, usually results in a kind of clarity, not in negativity. I think negativity comes from failing to understand — without having tried. If you work to defeat anybody you think is evil, ignorant and ascendant, it helps rather than harms to ponder why they have struck a chord.
Bravo. This is brill, E. Framed so beautifully, and you are right–both Obama and Palin are responses to powerful stirrings in the land. I love that phrase, it captures the inchoate nature of this.
And Di, I’m needing to remember how words and vision have power. These are dark times, and it is easy for a solitary candle to blow out.
What an excellent commentary on the poem, the season, the times, and our psyches.
It’s true, that to recognize something dark, we have to have experienced it ourselves, within our own hearts and mind.s We can deny the shadow all we want, but really in our deepest selves, we know.
Is that a photo or a painting above the poem? It’s an interesting image, kind of murky, mysterious, filtered. I really like the textures in it, the way the people are frozen in time, the wistful look on the girl’s face.
Christine,
It may be a sign of optimism to believe that down deep, we know our shadow selves. I’ve always thought that, but now I don’t know for sure. So much is like that–the longer you live, the more you know you don’t know.
Thank you for looking so deeply at the image. It is a haunting photograph, for me at least. I took it in Jerusalem 2 years ago, shot through a weather worn bus stop shelter at two people I met while I was in Israel. For me it spoke to the obstructed vision we often have of our own shadow; of what, for others, may be seen very clearly.