After the death of my mother, in the autumn of 1997, I began to speak to the dark. I wanted from it not only the sacred but a presence that was sacred and feminine, something in the earth and air that I could carry with me, like the soft hooting of the spotted owl that calls at night outside our window from a rock outcropping in the desert.
A spiritual loneliness accompanies many women writers. It was a subject that came up often over the years, as I led women's writing retreats in quiet places on the ocean or in the mountains. Our world literatures, often rooted in sacred stories, are generally devoid of female mystics, who disappeared over the centuries from Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Where is our mirror, our book of myths, where the names of women do appear?
In July, 2005, fourteen women met on the coast of Oregon for a three-day retreat in which we talked a great deal about this question and wrote the poems in this chapbook. We discussed works of Elaine Pagels and other feminist scholars who are reinterpreting texts of pre-Biblical and early Common Era civilizations. We reached back into the myths and religions honoring the divine feminine, in ancient voices (H.D., Hadewijch of Antwerp, the unknown author of "The Thunder: Perfect Mind"), and modern ones (Ursula K. Le Guin, Jane Hirshfield, Jane Kenyon, Jack Gilbert, Linda Gregg). We wrote in a living room overlooking the sea, filled with summer light, surrounded by deep ochre and gold walls studded with Polish weeping Christs, kachinas, Madonnas, goddesses and other icons an international labor organizer had gathered on her many trips. This is not to mention the food and the music.
I read aloud some of the first poems set down on cuneiform tablets in Sumer, a Mesopotamian civilization of roughly 4500-1750 B.C.E., located in present-day Iraq. After years of unearthing the terraced cities, digging up relics of prosperity and might, ledgers and lengthy epics, including Gilgamesh, archeologists in 1919 discovered a small mound near the city of Ur, very near today's bombed Baghdad. They traced the walls of an early temple to Ninhursag, the mother goddess at the heart of Sumer's creation story. It was the find that actually proved the existence of the First Dynasty of Ur. (1)
In what is currently believed to be the world's first written myth of descent and return, one of Ninhursag's daughters, Inanna, visits her sister, Erishkigal, the underworld Queen of fertility. Now the radiant Inanna, like Isis, and the later incarnation of Ishtar, is originally a goddess of earth, written into many erotic poems, drawn with wings and thunderbolts sprouting from her shoulders, sculpted as a beautiful clay figurine holding up her breasts. Inanna is the always laughing, smiling, always joyous, teasing woman. But Inanna holds other titles, such as the goddess of wrath; when angry, she actually sends plagues upon the country, the first character in recorded history to do so. (2)
In a time when female life often depended on fertility, I imagine Sumerian women often retold the story of the two sisters. Inanna dresses in her finest and sets off to visit Ereshkigal, asking her attendant to send help should she not return. The seven guarded gates of the underworld through which she must pass are the corollary to the seven spheres of planets, the grotesque seven nether spheres, from which Dante took his vision of the descending circles of hell. (3)
To descend, Inanna must give up her crown, staff, jewels and robe, until she stands naked, and is condemned to death by Ereshkigal. She's hung from a hook, but with the aid of the earlier summoned spirit helpers, who have not forgotten her, Innana is reborn after three days (a time possibly correlating to the moon's disappearance for three nights of the month). She rises back to earth as the divine Queen of Heaven, the Light of the World, River of Life, the powerful Supreme One. (4)
Meanwhile, her lesser-known sister, the gentle Nanshe, grows up to become a kind of Bodhisattva, a compassionate goddess of peace and justice who shepherds the widows, comforts the sick, and takes care of the poor. (5)
Inanna and Nanshe are among numerous female figures whose stories, or fragments therof, recur in the Bible (ta biblia, "the library of stories"), in male, monotheistic form, more than two thousand years later. Mystics and scientists would agree that nothing comes from nothing. Images of the "Great Mother" have turned up in Neolithic caves, in France, Crete, Turkey, in countries at the crossroads of Asia, Africa, and Europe, in the early cosmologies, tribal stories, drawings, weavings, and sacred sculptures of Australia and the Americas. Female gods emerge quite naturally in the the songs and journeying of the forty thousand-year-old tradition of shamanism around the world. Woman appears as the numinous soul, woman on an underworld journey into the dark and light, woman as the mother of the world, the goddess figure held in the cup of the hand and in the heart. (6)
What I have come to understand is that the body of world literature, including the Bible, rests upon the symbols and mythology created in the millennia before it. Writers carry echoes from other times, and we are part of a continuum within which the essence of holy was once mother, daughter and wife. Even as much of the world shifted away from paganism – a religion that contained its own seeds of chaos -- ordinary people still burnt sacrifices in temples to the male sky gods, but prayed to the earth mother at meals. It was most likely during the "Axial Age," 800 – 200 B.C.E., when new ideologies, including the concept of individual conscience, were churning throughout the civilized world, and power was shifting from kings and temples to the marketplace, cultural life from primitive societies to urban centers, that the idea of woman as both powerful and sacred was sacrificed. (7)
When I close my eyes in the dark this real, sacred woman-history spirals up like a luminous vase, a shining vessel carved out of the invisible, but with the weight of oceans. This knowledge has lain in the depths of our world and our consciousness, deep in the layers of our dreaming like the geology of our earth, carved on the walls of cliffs and inside caves, in the tiny hard clay and stone figures of rounded women that have survived to stand under glass in our museums. The sacred feminine is still under excavation, literally and figuratively, and these days it appears almost everywhere I look. A chalice, a cup. A Utah petroglyph of smiling women. A Hopi bowl. The Lakota myths. A Taos Pueblo woman dancing the deer dance in the mountain-white January air, her arms held up in the exact same V as the clay mother figures of Egypt and Crete, and the yei be chai corn goddesses woven into the Navajo blanket in my bedroom.
It seems to me that in Western literature, the divine feminine was forced through one text, the Bible, like the neck of my imagined vase, a narrows where only an infinitesimally small stream of ritual and visions could flow through. But we stand, as artists, at the rim of the vase, looking down through a well of images and stories at a mirror of ourselves back thousands of years.
"The spirits of old and new ancestors perch on my shoulders," writes poet Joy Harjo. "I make prayers of clear stone/of feathers from birds/who live closest to the gods."
"Oh woman," writes Joy Harjo, "remember who you are."
The poems within this volume were written in the last hours of the retreat, following an exercise in random improvisation learned from another poet (thank you, Li-Young Lee). I chose ten words from the weekend's writing: cry, breast, lost, dream, goat, hope, anchor, desire, falter, lament, amber.
The results of the exercise were so stunning that Katherine Salzman offered to produce this chapbook. I would like to thank Katherine for her generous work, Katy Riker and Lee Schore for hosting the writers and making the retreat possible, and Vita Laume, writer and artist, who brought us jewelry made from amber, a 40,000-year-old fossilized resin, which ended up fittingly on our necks and arms and ears.
Some writers did careful revisions; others wanted the results of that magical morning to remain as is. I am struck by how the voices of this book sound like one vast poem, and how perhaps Inanna and Nanshe are present, warm with compassion, sometimes furious at the situation, mourning as they witness destruction and go down into darkness. As Eavan Boland writes, "If I defer the grief, I will diminish the gift." (9)
At the start of the serene "A Psalm of the River," a woman sits next to water that cries in the dusk, and the island on which she sits dreams of lost native fires.
"Cry, Sister" is both title and first line of an appeal to all women: "for /the bread is gone, and/We are lost."
"Lost, this morning/the goat stood tethered/in a land, still/like a dream," begins the second stanza of "Crow," taking us to a surreal yet familiar land where a crow, a goat and a woman equally search without knowing. Meanwhile, the author of "A Second Reading" studies the waves and a falling white bird "like ancients studying entrails," for a sign.
Others began from memory, on narrative journeys that come full cycle from the past to the present: "At eight I would not cry. Instead I leaned/against our neighbor's fence wadding up balls/of wonder bread ...Eating my grief like a goat eats tin cans," writes a breast cancer survivor.
In "The Great Mother: Destroyer and Creator" the narrative impulse translates into voices of the light and the dark within a mother who rages at her daughter: "I did not raise you this way, you cry./You have lost the way."
Still others became the voice speaking out of the disappeared feminine: "Cry me a river of amber tears/As lost, I Am" mourns the start of "A Lament for Me." Another, in "Dream of the Train Ride," laments what is gone, but finds hope in what she sees outside the window.
Finally, several writers began by embracing the cries, and speaking to the invisible, as in an untitled poem: "The spirits cry/Lost no more/Goats climbing high/Dreaming into mist." In "Homecoming," a woman's lost ghosts, given bread, are happy to learn to cry again, their "fresh and pure" tears anchoring their souls to the Divine. In "The Bread," spirits wander at a mischievous banquet: "The little bells of their dreams cry out/over the meal. No one speaks/or looks at each other, although/there are hundreds of them, lost..." In "Lamentation," cries are hushed like children to start anew: "You can yet dream new worlds/where spirit feeds you."
In each of these poems, what is lost, buried or misunderstood rises into something new, a gift carried up from the underworld. The beauty is hard-won, and not without paradox. Read, as I did, with pleasure, how sorrow, once emptied, becomes joy, how lament is said to "feed the earthsoul/just as smoke rises from amber coals." Or, when lament rains "soaked with sun rays," the flames of desire become holy, and we "know our first home." Witness how, in Biblical speech transformed, the spirits dream "a perfect communion" of "this yeasty psalm, this salty breast," while the lonely traveller finds she's wearing an amber necklace of "milk and honey."
On the grieving island, eager, sexual teenagers join a praying figure to share the river's song, in lines that speak of the world's healing. Likewise, the girl who could not cry becomes a mother, who wonders: "How did my son at age eight /know to name our amber-colored dog Persephone?"
The "amber sky" shelters the crying sisters at the climax of one poem, as joy gleams golden as amber in another. The bird that falls into the open sea is drawn by the tides to "where all directions meet." Even the darkness of a mother's anger is profoundly transformed into a loving voice, one that speaks honestly of the shadow to her daughter: "But also take rage, make it your own. Nothing is pure, not even amber."
"Eat the world," another poet concludes. "Sing hungry psalms, but do not falter/Drink deep."
The voices of these pages speak clearly; we are not alone in the dark. And if we offer our attention, what the dark has to give us is sacred and luminous.
Sandra Dorr
Grand Junction, Colorado November, 2005
Footnotes:
1. Samuel Noah Kramer, The Sumerians: Their History, Culture and Character (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1963).
2. Ibid.
3. Barbara Walker, The Woman's Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects (San Francisco: Harper, 1988).
4. Ibid.
5. Samuel Noah Kramer, The Sumerians: Their History, Culture and Character (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1963).
6. Erich Neumann, The Great Mother; An Analysis of the Archetype (Princeton; Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series XLVII, 1963).
7. Karen Armstrong, A History of God; the 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam (New York: Ballantine Books, 1993).
8. Joy Harjo
9. Eavan Boland, from "The Pomegranate," In a Time of Violence (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994).
Poems:
Judith Boothby, "I Look Around for a Hand to Hold"
Birgit Nielsen, "Crow"
Vita Laume, "Homecoming"
Connie Johnson, "Cry, Sister"
Katherine Salzmann, "The Bread"
Nora Eskes, "The Great Mother: Destroyer and Creator"
Cinda McKitrick, "Lamentation"
Lee Schore, "A Psalm of the River"
Katy Riker, "Dream of the Train Ride"
Irene D. Hays, "A Second Reading -- birds lift off"
Myrna Oakley, "Untitled "
Sonja Grove, "A Lament for Me"
© Sandra Dorr