The Simple Mind

In the article, "The Inescapable Paris," featured in the October, 2005, issue of Vanity Fair, the concept of "intelligence" is tossed around as glibly as a frisbee. Paris Hilton, the beautiful heiress whose topless, vacant-eyed image graces the magazine's cover, is described as canny, transfixing, and smart. Says Chris Applebaum, director of Hilton's "hot" Carl's, Jr., commercial, "She can sometimes be a little bit of a space cadet, but I have to say, when she focuses she can be incredibly intelligent." Fingering her 24-karat yellow diamond engagement ring during the interview, Hilton demonstrates her obvious brilliance by sniffling, "I like it, but it's yellow, and I'm like, I didn't want yellow for my engagement ring. I just needed something to wear until I get [one I like]." Another outside, very credible source, a paparazzo named Ron Galello, also attests to Hilton's mental acuity. "Paris Hilton is a phenomenon," he says. "She's sexy, smart, gracious and kind..." Which explains, I'm sure, why later in the piece, when her fiance discusses his Greek surname, Kasidokostas, she chimes in: "I can't even pronounce that shit." Then, to ice the cake, the blond Mensa opens her mouth about her infamous sex video: "I used to think it was so bad, but it's like, everyone has sex. I'm sure everyone has filmed a tape..."

I'm sure everyone has, Paris, honey. Now go eat another Godiva. And give one to Tinkerbell.

To be fair, Vanity Fair does strive for some balance. The magazine consults feminists likeThe Beauty Myth author Naomi Wolf, who compares Hilton to "Muzak"and sees her popularity as a sign of our times. "We're in the most aggressively anti-intellectual, anti-literate, anti-middle class discourse," says Wolf. "It's all right. What's the big deal? Doesn't matter if people are killing people in your name. Just go to the mall." The article makes me want to write a terse letter to the editor. But then (like, hello! finally!) Vanity Fair faithfully redeems itself. In the same issue it runs "A Matter of Life and Death," a powerful, poignant, genuinely intelligent piece by the late journalist Marjorie Williams. In fact, you know what? I want to talk about Williams' memoir at length, but to do so here, in this Paris Hilton entry (next to this ridiculous photo of her posh pooch) would profane it. Thus, I'll close here and dedicate a separate, deservedly respectful, post to Williams.

In the meantime, though, I'll leave you with one final tidbit... In the Hilton article, Thomas Tadayon--manufacturer of the Hollywood Prescription, a $29.99 lip-plumping product for which Hilton is spokesperson--observes philosophically: "[Paris] makes a lot of money, and the system doesn't pay out that kind of money to airheads. You don't make millions of dollars as an idiot."Ah, but lest you forget, Mr. Tadayon, this is America.

Unutterably

Yes, I'm alone--but then again I always was. (Trent Reznor)

There is a place on the road where the solitary nature of the human journey becomes clearly seen. (Gwynneve in Confessions of a Pagan Nun)

The necessary thing is after all but this: solitude, great inner solitude. (Rilke)

I was chatting with a friend the other day, and we were talking about traveling. He asked me what place I'd like to visit. Immediately what came to mind was Rorogne, Switzerland, where Rainer Maria Rilke is buried. If I could purchase a plane ticket right now and fly to Switzerland, here's what I'd do: I'd rent a car and drive to the tiny town of Rorogne in Canton Valais. Then I'd pack a backpack and hike up to the old Rorogne church. Then I'd find Rilke's grave and unroll my sleeping bag--directly on top of the grave, to be exact. I'd camp out there six feet above his bones, under the alpine sky, with my head pillowed near his epitaph. That's it. That's where I'd go this very minute if I could.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not like the early, rather morbid, Christians who venerated the remains of fellow believers. (Julian Augustus nicknamed their churches "charnel houses.") Reliquaries, in fact, sort of give me the creeps. No, what I want to do is get as physically close to Rilke as possible. I just feel the need to rest my body against his final resting place. To rub against both the traces of his presence and the cold, earthy reality of his absence.

For a while now I've been trying to come to terms with a lot of personal sadness. I find my eyes welling up at unexpected moments, though I wouldn't really characterize the experience as crying. More accurately, it's as if my body can no longer contain my interior; therefore, it brims over my edges. Perhaps, like Gwynneve, the protagonist of Kate Horsley's Confessions of a Pagan Nun, "I [am learning] the loneliness of incarnation." The more I try to live toward life rather than resist it (to, as Robinson Jeffers puts it, "feel greatly, and understand greatly, and express greatly"), the more I am drawn downward--toward soil, roots, underground caverns, underworlds, and what Jungian analyst Sandra Lee Dennis calls "the embrace of the daimon." Down here, "at bottom--in the deepest and most important things" we are "unutterably alone" (Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, Norton trans., p. 23). It's an existential loneliness; no matter how connected we long to be with another body or soul, there is no such thing as perfect union. This truth is the wormwood nectar that drips from Eros' lips: "Yearn but do not consummate." The tragedy of this--when one really allows him- or herself to look it in the eye--is devastating.

Still......

In Letters Rilke goes on to say, "We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them" (p. 69). [For an expanded version of this section to the book, click on http://mythosandlogos.com/Rilke.html.]

I want to curl myself atop Rilke's grave because it's not merely his presence I want. I want to feel the circumference of solitude as well. Seemingly dissimiliar, I know: the presence of absence, the warm breath of death, the substance of intangible hoped-fors. But these are the very things that make sense to me. They are the songs of Orpheus, the logic of the mythopoetic. And they reverberate not only audibly; they river familiarly from some inner spring. Because of them, I can somehow cope with--possibly even own--my aloneness.

The self-authored inscription on Rilke's headstone reads:

Rose, oh pure contradiction, desire
to be no one's sleep under so many lids.

Someday I'll run my fingers--lips--over the hard, etched granite.

2 Views on Loving the World

I John 2:15:
Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.

Richard Wilbur:
Love Calls Us to the Things of the World

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down in so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks

From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
And cries,
"Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven."

Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world's hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,

"Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
Keeping their difficult balance."

September 4th

Last night I woke up around 3:30 a.m. after having dreamed--or at least I think it was a dream--the following:

I'm alone, sitting in a dark, bare room. A voice speaks to me, though it is not an audible voice--nor is it inside my head. I'm aware of this: that it's both something intuitive and something transcendent. It's telling me that after we die, we are not asked whether we believed a certain creed (thus earning a crown and hearing "Well done, thou good and faithful servant!") or whether our names are written in the Lamb's Registry. Rather, we're asked why we settled for seeking connection with the (divine?) through religion. Organized religion, the voice seems to be saying, is a limitation. Don't settle for it. There is so much more.

It was weird. It didn't feel like the mythological god or heavenly beings I typically envision. The experience felt more like some kind of appointment with an unnamable, all-encompassing energy that wasn't quite "other." That sounds so New-Agey. I don't mean it to. I just don't know how else to describe it.

Perhaps poetry is the articulation of dreams. To me, it comes closest to voicing intuition and naming transcendence. Emily Dickinson spoke the language of dreams well. "Truth," she said, "is such a rare thing it is delightful to tell it." Gaston Bachelard, in his astonishing Water and Dreams, put it this way: "When forms, mere perishable forms and vain images--perpetual change of surfaces--are put aside, these images of matter are dreamt substantially and intimately. They have weight; they constitute a heart." Julian Augustus wrote, "I am not much drawn to any form which has lost its meaning."

What is the "more?" Like most truth, it is ironic. The "more" isn't the transcendence of forms nor the mastery of forms but the reception of forms into the human imagination. [Receptivity is an "anima" attribute, by the way. I just watched The Vagina Monologues and was reminded that openness is archetypally feminine.]

Okay, what am I saying? I don't know. I really need to start writing poetry again. I spent an hour at a marsh near our house yesterday watching dragonflies flit across the water's surface. There were 3" royal blue dragonflies with striped wings, smaller red ones and ones that were smaller still--silver streaks of electricity. I watched these exquisite creatures--those born in the earth's muck--chase each other through the air like helicopters then perch on the corduroy heads of willows like gemstones. I could have sat there all day. Dragonflies are mystery in flight. They are winged desire. They begin life as mud-colored larvae crawling like beetles along the silt floor. They develop in dark, primal water. Again, to quote Bachelard, "In the depths of matter there grows an obscure vegetation; black flowers bloom in matter's darkness. They already possess a velvety touch, a formula for perfume." The brown larvae mature into brilliant insects that iridate the sky. These blooms graced me yesterday with perfume. I let the scent fill my nostrils. It entered my imagination. Just like truth found in poems and dreams.