Imaginal Journal
Imagination is Medicine
Fuck the Bread. The Bread is Over.
By Sabrina Orah Mark
HÄNSEL AND GRETEL, BY DARSTELLUNG VON ALEXANDER ZICK
In February, as a plague enters America, I am a finalist for a job I am not offered.
I am brought to campus for a three-day interview. I am shown the library I’ll never have access to, and introduced to students I’ll never teach. I shake hands with faculty I’ll never see again. I describe in great detail the course on fairy tales I’ll never offer. I stand up straight in a simple black-and-white dress. “Don’t say anything strange,” says my mother. “Don’t blather,” she says. “You have a tendency to blather.” I meet with a dean who rubs his face until it reddens, then asks me whether writers even belong in universities. I meet with another dean who asks me the same thing. There are so many deans. I cannot tell the deans apart. Another dean asks me who the babies in my first collection of poems, The Babies, actually are. “We only have a few minutes left,” he adds. “They don’t exist,” I think I say. I am hurrying. “I was writing about voices we’ll never hear,” I think I say. He stands up and shakes my hand. I shake so many hands. I can’t tell if everything is at stake, or nothing is at stake. All I know is that I am being tested, and whether or not I am offered this job will depend on the appetite and mood of strangers. “Your final task,” I imagine the dean saying, “is to make a rope out of these ashes. Do it and the job is yours.”
On the third day of the interview, the head of the creative department asks me if the courses I would be expected to teach should even exist. “No,” I wish I had said as I made my body gently vanish. “They shouldn’t exist at all.” Instead I say yes, and pull a beautiful, made-up reason from the air and offer it to him as a gift. Gold for your dust, sir. Pearls for your pigs. “Who is watching your sons right now?” he asks. “Their father,” I answer.
What does it mean to be worth something? Or worth enough? Or worthless? What does it mean to earn a living? What does it mean to be hired? What does it mean to be let go?
It’s May now. More than thirty million Americans have lost their jobs. What mattered in February hardly seems to matter now. My sons, my husband, and I are lucky. We have stayed healthy, and we have enough money and enough food to eat. In between teaching my sons the difference between a scalene triangle and an isosceles, and moving my writing workshops from my garage to pixelated classrooms, and cleaning my house, and going nowhere, and being scared, and looking for bread flour and yeast, I can barely remember what it felt like to plead my case for three straight days. It feels good to barely remember.
“You write a lot about motherhood,” says the sixteenth or seventeenth dean.
In the Brothers Grimm’s “Cherry,” an old king with three sons cannot decide who of the three should inherit the kingdom, and so he gives his sons three trials: the first, that they should seek “cloth so fine” the king can draw it through his golden ring. The second, that they find a dog small enough to fit inside a walnut shell. And the third, to bring home the “fairest lady” in all the land. In the Grimms’ “The Six Servants” a prince will win his princess if he brings back a ring the old queen has dropped into the red sea, devour three hundred oxen (“skin and bones, hair and horns”), drink three hundred barrels of wine, and keep his arms around the princess all night without falling asleep. And in “Rumpelstiltskin,” if the poor miller’s daughter spins larger and larger rooms full of straw into gold she will become queen. If not, she will die. Fairy tales are riddled with tasks like these. Some contenders cheat, and some were never worthy, and some take the dreary, barren road, and some take the smooth, shady one, and some are helped by birds, and some are helped by giants, and some by witches, and some by luck.
I call my mother. “I can’t find bread flour or yeast anywhere.” “Fuck the bread,” says my mother. “The bread is over.”
In fairy tales, form is your function and function is your form. If you don’t spin the straw into gold or inherit the kingdom or devour all the oxen or find the flour or get the professorship, you drop out of the fairy tale, and fall over its edge into an endless, blank forest where there is no other function for you, no alternative career. The future for the sons who don’t inherit the kingdom is vanishment. What happens when your skills are no longer needed for the sake of the fairy tale? A great gust comes and carries you away.
In fairy tales, the king is the king. If he dethrones, his bones clatter into a heap and vanish. Loosen the seams of the stepmother, and reach in. Nothing but stepmother inside. Even when the princess is cinders and ash, she is still entirely princess.
I send my sons on a scavenger hunt because it’s day fifty-eight of homeschooling, and I’m all out of ideas. I give them a checklist: a rock, soil, a berry, something soft, a red leaf, a brown leaf, something alive, something dead, an example of erosion, something that looks happy, a dead branch on a living tree. They come back with two canvas totes filled with nature. I can’t pinpoint what this lesson is exactly. Something about identification and possession. Something about buying time. As I empty the bags and touch the moss, and the leaves, and the twigs, and the berries, and a robin-blue eggshell, I consider how much we depend on useless, arbitrary tasks to prove ourselves. I consider how much we depend on these tasks so we can say, at the very end, we succeeded.
Tomorrow, on day fifty-nine, I will ask my sons to “find me an acre of land / Between the salt water and the sea-strand, / Plough it with a lamb’s horn, / Sow it all over with one peppercorn, / Reap it with a sickle of leather, / And gather it up with a rope made of heather.” I will tell them if they perform each one of these tasks perfectly, they will be rewarded with more tasks. And if they perform each of those tasks perfectly, they will be rewarded with more. Until, at last, they will not be able to tell the difference between their hands and another boy’s hands.
Over the years I have applied for hundreds of professorships, and even received some interviews. I’ve wanted a job like this for so long, I barely even know why I want it anymore. I look at my hands. I can’t tell if they’re mine.
“Of course you can tell if your hands are yours,” says my mother. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I have no real job,” I say. “Of course you have a real job,” she says. “I have no flour,” I say. “Fuck the bread,” says my mother again. “The bread is over.”
And maybe the bread, as I’ve always understood it, really is over. The new world order is rearranging itself on the planet and settling in. Our touchstone is changing color. Our criteria for earning a life, a living, are mutating like a virus that wants badly to stay alive. I text a friend, “I can’t find bread flour.” She lives in Iowa. “I can see the wheat,” she says, “growing in the field from outside my window.” I watch a video on how to harvest wheat. I can’t believe I have no machete. I can’t believe I spent so many hours begging universities to hire me, I forgot to learn how to separate the chaff from the wheat and gently grind.
If I had a machete I would use it to cut the mice, and the princess, and the king, and the stepmother, and the castle, and the wolf, and the mother, and the sons, free from their function so they could disappear into their own form.
But also I wanted an office with a number. I wanted a university ID. I wanted access to a fancy library and benefits and students and colleagues and travel money. I wanted the whole stupid kingdom. “And then what?” says my mother. “And then nothing,” I say as I jump off the very top of a fairy tale that has no place for me. “You’re better off,” says my mother. I look around. I’ve landed where I am.
I like it here. I feel like I’m in Gertrude Stein territory, where the buttons are so tender they’ve come undone. The whole kingdom is spilling out of itself. There are holes everywhere. To the east, a pile of impossible tasks of my own making. To the west, a mountain of broken crowns I will melt and recast into a machete. “This is so nice,” writes Gertrude Stein, “and sweet and yet there comes the change, there comes the time to press more air. This does not mean the same as disappearance.” It’s day sixty of homeschooling. Eli asks me to remind him how to make an aleph. I take a pencil, and draw it for him very carefully. “It’s like a branch,” I say, “with two little twigs attached.” “You know what, Mama?” he says. “You’d make a really good teacher.” “Thank you,” I say. And then I show him how to draw a bet.
Sabrina Orah Mark is the author of the poetry collections The Babies and Tsim Tsum. Wild Milk, her first book of fiction, is recently out from Dorothy, a publishing project. She lives, writes, and teaches in Athens, Georgia.
Moon Mothering
ALBERT AUBLET, SELENE, 1850
In most stories, the moon is a woman. Often, the sun is a man. Greek mythology has Apollo and Artemis, Roman mythology has Luna and Sol, Slavic mythology has Dazhbog and Jutrobog. In Bali, there’s Dewi Ratih, whose sexual rejection of the giant Kala Rau led to him becoming an immortal floating head that chases the moon across the sky, swallows her whole, and spits her out again. The Mayas thought the phases of the moon were associated with phases of a woman’s life. Chinese mythology includes tales of a lunar deity named Changxi, who gave birth to twelve beautiful daughters who became the twelve months.
Although I’ve come across moon gods as well as moon goddesses, it’s clear to me that the moon is a woman. Her her-ness is right there in the word, full of round letters, soft as breasts and wombs. It sounds like a mother cooing to her baby.
I do not believe womanhood is located in the body. I believe womanhood is a state that one can opt into and out of, that it is culturally coded and culturally enforced. And yet, my own experience of womanhood is tied to my breasts, my womb, my menstrual blood, my mother, and my motherhood. As my body changed from a girl’s to a woman’s, it softened and opened. For a long time, I resisted this—I wanted to be angular and sharp with elbows like arrows and collarbones that cut. I didn’t like the idea of being reduced. That’s what I believed my body was trying to do: reduce me to a biological statement about fertility and purpose. I didn’t know, until I experienced pregnancy myself, how much you can gain from your body, how much beauty and joy it can give. I didn’t know that I could be like the moon. I didn’t realize I could wax and wane.
HIROSHIGE, AUTUMN FLOWERS IN FRONT OF FULL MOON, 1853
In ancient verse, women are often alone. One of the most famous fragments of ancient poetry, sometimes attributed to Sappho, is called the “Midnight Poem.” It consists of just a few short lines and has been translated dozens of times, but the bones of the poem are always the same—a woman, alone, with the moon above. This is Henry Thornton Wharton’s 1887 translation from the original Aeolic Greek:
The moon has set
And the Pleiades;
It is midnight,
The time is going by,
And I sleep alone.
It’s a small poem, a sketch made from a few curved lines. But those strong lines sweep without hesitation. They gesture toward an experience that feels, in my marrow, familiar. I, too, have been alone with the moon. Like Elizabeth Bishop, who based her poem “Insomnia” on this tiny verse, we have had so many sleepless nights, the moon and I, both of us “by the Universe deserted,” as Bishop writes. Insomnia is a lonely condition, particularly if you’re sharing a bed with someone. But I learned that it is less lonely if you’re sharing a body with someone, if there’s a pair of small, long feet that sometimes kick your lungs until they ache. It is less lonely if you swell with expectation.
KARL SCHWENINGER, LUNA, 1903
I was twenty-four and drinking too much. I lived in a city that was brick red and too expensive and I slept in an apartment with three other women, none of whom liked each other. I had a job that kept me up late, staring at the pale blue light of a laptop screen, swaddled in my bed, which was also my desk and my kitchen table and my couch.
A man would come visit me after his shift at the bar. He would run the six miles from his part of the city to mine, and throw pebbles at my window. He called me his moon. “Because I only see you at night, and you outshine everything else in my life,” he wrote once on a scrap of notebook paper, wedged under my doorway. It was the most romantic thing anyone had ever said to me.
Months later, he would break up with me. Years later, we would get married. We would make a child. He would never stop calling me his moon. The name was a gift. I had never had a nickname before, at least not one I liked. I had always wanted to be seen that way: nocturnal, luminous, singular.
OSCAR FLORIANUS BLUEMNER, MOON RADIANCE, 1927.
We see ourselves in the moon. We read its shadows as faces, and with our hubris, we turn the orb into a mirror. “The moon is my mother,” Sylvia Plath once wrote. “She is not sweet like Mary … She is bald and wild.” Some cultures see animals in the moon (in Japanese folklore, it’s a rabbit) but even those animals are personified. The moon-rabbit wound up in the sky because he offered himself as a sacrifice to a hungry beggar. The rabbit gave itself to sustain another, and as a reward, was set upon a pedestal. I can’t think of a more apt metaphor for the things we ask of mothers.
For centuries, people have viewed women’s bodies as contiguous with the moon. It was common belief (still is, in some places) that our menses follow the lunar cycle. The moon waxes and wanes for twenty-eight days. The average cycle of human ovulation follows the same basic structure. Yet the two things do not happen in tandem.
Once, I tried to match my cycle with the moon. I read about how to do this online, and while most sources said it wasn’t really possible, some Wiccan forums advised using a light to trick my inner clock. They suggested using a nightlight on days when the moon is full, and sleeping in absolute, complete darkness (with help from a silk sleep mask) when the moon was gone. The thought was that, by mimicking the experience of sleeping out under the moon, I could nudge my hormones into cycling up with her. We could match, she and I, like coyotes sharing a den. I wanted to feel wild like those strange yellow matriarchal dogs. I was already nocturnal and predatory, like them. I already lived tucked away in the woods. But still, I wanted more wilderness. I wanted more wildness. I wanted to shrug off my own domestication.
I have skylights in my bedroom, and thus I do sleep under the light of the moon. For almost a year, I let her keep me awake at night. In the winter, the light was shockingly bright. It streamed through the bare branches of the trees outside and into my bedroom. I watched the moon move across the sky. I felt the cold blue light filtering through my eyelids, through the neurons of my soft, gray brain, all the way into my pineal gland. I could almost feel the light changing me, shaping my insides, rearranging me on a cellular level. I imagined the moonlight reprogramming my very DNA. Perhaps turning me back into an animal, soft and hairy and moved by instincts. Primal.
Of course, that’s not how it works. Moonlight is romantic. It has mythological power. But its power is a placebo. It’s real only because we want it to be. Faith can sometimes birth a goddess, if it’s strong enough. Even the much-publicized belief that women living in close proximity will sync their cycles through pheromones is overblown. Studies done in the past two decades have shown no evidence for it. Scientists who study these things have cast doubt upon the entire idea of human pheromones. We secrete hormonal messages, maybe, but no one knows if we have receptors for these complex molecules. These theories, exciting as they may sound, may not lead anywhere solid.
When it comes to our bodies, it’s hard to know what’s real. Belief can change the body. Trauma can change our DNA. We know so much about how the human body works, and yet we still know so little. Bodies are murky lakes, especially women’s bodies, understudied as they’ve been.
I didn’t sync with the moon. Maybe someday I’ll try again, once my hormones have resettled and gone back to normal. I haven’t had a proper period in over a year. I don’t know when it will come again. I’ve been disrupted. My moon has gone dark. I used to hate having my period. Now, I miss it. I’ve been eclipsed.
EVELYN DE MORGAN, LUNA, 1885
Twelve people have walked on the moon. All of them were men. There have been women in space, but I don’t know any of their names. I only know the name of Laika, the female dog who was sent to space. She died within hours of takeoff. They chose to send a female dog to space because “they were smaller and apparently more docile.”
If you want to see a place where women outnumber men, you’ll have to fly to Jupiter. Jupiter has seventy-nine known moons. They are named for his lovers and his daughters (and a few of his sons and male lovers, but the majority are female). These space stones orbit the king of kings, the god of gods. They are all lesser than him. Lesser still is his wife, the jealous Juno. Juno is the name of a spacecraft that NASA sent to Jupiter to “check up on him.” Juno is also the name of my daughter. Her full name is Juniper, after a witch I once worshipped.
EDWARD MUNCH, MOON LIGHT, 1895
The nurse kept telling me to hold on, just wait, just a little longer. She told me the anesthesiologist was coming soon, my epidural was coming, she said, I just had to wait. The hospital was overwhelmed—too many births at once, too many women in pain. That is why I had been shuttered into a tiny triage room with no bathtub, shower packed full of medical equipment. That was why I was laboring for hours without any medication. That was why there was no one there, yet, to help me. “It’s a full moon,” the nurse told me later, when I was able to hear her again. “Ask any medical professional. Hospitals are always insane on the night of a full moon.”
For the first eight hours of labor, I gasped and choked and vomited all over the medical equipment. I spit water on myself. It was more like an exorcism than I had anticipated. I wasn’t a goddess bringing new life into the world. I was a body possessed by fire, spitting acid. I didn’t scream curses, I just moaned. I mostly asked for help, my husband told me later. “Why won’t anyone help me?” I kept saying.
Finally, someone did. I loved my epidural. After that, everything was quiet. I took a break from labor and lay in the hospital bed for a few hours, unmoving. Then, it was time to push. Forty minutes later, I had a baby on my chest. She was small and red and covered in fine blonde hair. She had long fingernails. Fur and claws.
My doctor was a no-nonsense woman, with blonde hair dyed all one shade and silver glasses. She smiled in a perfunctory way, like she knew that she should smile at patients. She moved quickly. If she wore heels, she would clack brusquely from place to place, but she didn’t wear heels. I found her businesslike manner reassuring. When it comes to doctors, I like a little abruptness. I like them to be blunt and maybe a little rude. It calms me.
But even she attributed some power to the moon. After I had my epidural, there was a lull, waiting for the child to come out. The anesthesiologist, the nurse, my doctor—they all talked about the full moon.
We have no evidence that the full moon brings more babies. We have no evidence that it causes brains to go mad or bodies to go haywire. Yet these ideas persist, and they hold their own logic. Maybe people go outside more when the night sky is lighter, and in the midnight hours, they do wild animal things, like fuck and kill and love. Maybe when the moon is dark, we stay home. Maybe the moon gives us license to be our lunatic selves more fully.
I like thinking the moon ushered in my child. That for a little while, we were alone with the moon. Me and Juno and the planetary body above.
Katy Kelleher is a writer who lives in the woods of rural New England. She is the author of Handcrafted Maine.
Repost via The Paris Review
Pandemic
Pandemic
What if you thought of it
as the Jews consider the Sabbath—
the most sacred of times?
Cease from travel.
Cease from buying and selling.
Give up, just for now,
on trying to make the world
different than it is.
Sing. Pray. Touch only those
to whom you commit your life.
Center down.
And when your body has become still,
reach out with your heart.
Know that we are connected
in ways that are terrifying and beautiful.
(You could hardly deny it now.)
Know that our lives
are in one another’s hands.
(Surely, that has come clear.)
Do not reach out your hands.
Reach out your heart.
Reach out your words.
Reach out all the tendrils
of compassion that move, invisibly,
where we cannot touch.
Promise this world your love--
for better or for worse,
in sickness and in health,
so long as we all shall live.
--Lynn Ungar 3/11/20
Phases of Descent to Soul - Enactment
#5
Enactment
This is the fifth part of a five-part Musing (
The Descent to Soul is a psychospiritual expedition into one particular precinct of the underworld — the precinct I call Soul Canyon — and, if fortunate, the eventual emergence from those depths having been radically transformed by an encounter with soul. My names for the five phases of the Descent are Preparation, Dissolution, Soul Encounter, Metamorphosis, and Enactment.
The fifth and final phase, Enactment, is when you learn to embody your mythopoetic identity in acts of service to your community. It’s when you activate or switch on your giveaway, when you begin to wholeheartedly perform your vision for your people to see. It is when you start to deliver your mature gift of love-service to your world.
Enactment supports, amplifies, and deepens your Metamorphosis, but for many people their Metamorphosis phase can go on a long time before they move into Enactment. Most people begin Enactment while still in the life stage of the Cocoon (and still primarily identified with the archetype of the Wanderer). But Enactment continues into the next stage (early adulthood) of the Wellspring (and its archetype of the Soul Apprentice) and beyond. In one sense, the Enactment phase of a Descent to Soul is the rest of your life.
As noted in the first Musing of this series, a Descent to Soul always ends with an ascent from Soul Canyon, but do keep in mind that once the ego begins being rooted in soul (by way of our first Descent), we never really leave those depths. Our everyday lives in the Village world above the Canyon become expressions of those depths. As our lives unfold — as we continue to grow — our ego is rooted ever deeper in the mysteries of soul as our center of gravity spirals down always closer to the core.“
Content from SoulCraft Musings, Animas Valley Institute
Phases of Descent to Soul - Metamorphosis
#4
Metamorphosis
This is the fourth part of a five-part Musing
“The Descent to Soul is a psychospiritual expedition into one particular precinct of the underworld — the precinct I call Soul Canyon — and, if fortunate, the eventual emergence from those depths having been radically transformed by an encounter with soul. My names for the five phases of the Descent are Preparation, Dissolution, Soul Encounter, Metamorphosis, and Enactment.
The fourth phase, Metamorphosis, is the shape-shifting of your ego in light of and in accordance with your revelation or vision. To become a true adult, the ego needs much more than a spectacular vision, much more than a cognitive revelation, much more than a blueprint for a mature human. The ego needs to actually be reshaped, reconfigured, metamorphosed. The dismembered adolescent ego must be re-membered into its adult form. This re-memberment takes place in part as a result of your efforts to embody your mythopoetic identity — your new ego, your new self — by showing up in the world as the person who occupies the unique eco-niche that you do. Metamorphosis, however, does not require you to engage in acts of service (which is the “ of the next phase). There are many other ways to support and intensify the soul-directed refashioning of your ego. In fact, this shape-shifting will take place even without your cooperation — possibly even in the face of your active resistance.
Metamorphosis takes place while you are metaphorically on your way up from the depths of Soul Canyon on your way to the Rim on the opposite side of the canyon from which you descended.
Metamorphosis, it should be noted, can take a while. You wouldn’t want to rush it. Plan on a couple years though it might be quite a bit less.”
Content from SoulCraft Musings, Animas Valley Institute