Terra Bound and the Poetics of Space

Last night in writing group, the prompt was to write a fifteen line “mirror” poem in which the first seven lines are repeated in reverse order. Here is what I wrote:








Her celestial husband is not terra bound
as he makes his home in the sky.
Each night, she climbs the stairway of trees
entering their bed of secrets in the clouds.
They do not always find themselves there.
Sometimes they bounce from sirius to cumulus,
adrift in the intimate expanse of the heavens.
Adrift in the intimate expanse of the heavens,
sometimes they bounce from sirius to cumulus.
They do not always find themselves there
entering their bed of secrets in the clouds.
Each night, she climbs the stairway of trees.
As he makes his home in the sky,
Her celestial husband is not terra bound.

I spent the entire day reading The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard, losing myself in his meditations on the ways poets daydream through, within and beyond the spaces they inhabit.

Most intriguing to me was the distinction between metaphor and image. The metaphor, he writes, comes into being after the idea has been formulated. The poet dresses her idea in imagistic language, to enhance the concept she wants to convey.

The image presupposes nothing. It just is.

Bubbling up from the depths of the unconscious, the image arrives unheralded in moments when the poet allows the walls between her conscious and unconscious to lower so what lies beneath can be seen.

Once when I was having terrible writer’s block, I asked my friend Tobi, a painter, if she'd ever experienced a similar phenomenon. She said yes, but she’d recently developed an antidote.




She’d stand before the white canvas and ask it questions waiting patiently for the answers. She might inquire, “What would it look like if I painted a hand coming through a wall?” or “What would happen if I coiled lines of purple and green around on another right here?”

And she’d wait in wonder, while the canvas would tell her what it needed to see next or what story it needed her to tell. Then she and the canvas would engage in a reciprocal dialogue until before she knew it, she was deep inside of her own creative process, bringing images to light.

I tried the same thing recently. Just sat in front of my computer screen and asked it what it was seeing and what else it wanted to see. That’s when a stone house at the edge of the forest appeared inhabited by the woman with a stone fetus inside of her body, looking and longing for a girl named Ephemera.

The image of the celestial husband came to me while I was reading the Poetics of Space in Borders yesterday, and last night I wrote of a home in the sky with no roof and only the wind for walls enclosing a welcoming bed of soft, warm clouds sitting beneath prattling stars inhabited by two people with no bodies, only voices, singing a home of their own.

Inside the Composition Book: The Stories We Tell

The summer before I entered 7th grade I wrote a book. I wrote it in one of those ubiquitous marble copy books that all American adults of a certain age will forever associate with school. But instead of writing my name, grade and subject on the appropriate box on the front cover in the spaces provided, I wrote “The Blind Love of Kirk and Ellen: A Love Story of Courage and Hope” by Marsha Rosenzweig.
If you opened the first page you would have seen a Table of Contents, the chapter titles written in ink in several different styles of handwriting. At twelve, I was shaping my identity as much as I was crafting my script, experimenting with flourishes and loops on the empty lined paper just as I would play with the thickness of black eyeliner and shades of lipstick on my blank face. Through all of the shape-shifting, there was one part of my identity that was a constant. I was a writer. Even before I had learned to write my letters, my mother told me that I would take a pencil and scrawl inscrutable symbols on whatever paper I could find, then “read” her the “stories” I had written. “The Blind Love of Kirk and Ellen” was just one of many books I wrote during my childhood and early adolescence.
Kirk and Ellen were both seventeen years old when they fell in love. They had known each other all their lives, living across the street from one another in almost identical split level semi-suburban shingle roofed homes, not a whole lot different from the one I lived in. Ellen’s bedroom, where she would talk to Kirk for hours on the telephone, hiding under the covers so her mother wouldn’t hear, was painted the same lavender color as mine and her bed spread resembled the flowered comforter I had wanted my mother to buy for me instead of the white chenille cover that didn’t provide nearly enough privacy when I would call my girlfriend Jackie on the phone and read to her by flashlight the latest chapter of my burgeoning oeuvre.
I don’t remember whether it was my idea or Jackie’s to send my manuscript to Berkeley-Highland. All of the books we owned at that time were published by Berkeley Highland Books. With authors like Rosamond du Jardin and Betty Cavannah and titles like Trish, A Date for Diane, Showboat Summer and Class Ring, these books with their signature scotch paid symbol in the upper left hand corner offered their twelve year old readers glimpses into the romance-filled world of their popular boy-crazy older sisters. What I do remember is that with Jackie’s encouragement, I bought a large envelope and lots of stamps, looked up the publisher’s address inside my copy of “A Girl Like Me” and placed my entire marble copy book inside. Along with the marble manuscript, I wrote a letter that said something like the following:

Dear Publishers:
I have been reading Berkeley Highland books for many years and I think it is about time for you to publish books for teenage girls written by teenage girls. We are better able to write about what our lives are REALLY like…. Enclosed is my book….etc.etc.
Marsha Rosenzweig, a REAL teenage girl.

Never mind that this realistic teenage novel was a love story between young adults whose love is tested when the young woman Ellen is blinded after being hit by a car and the young man Kirk tracks down the man driving the car who just so happened to have been Ellen’s estranged father who is then brought to justice, serves jail time, escapes, tries to run down Kirk who ends up paralyzed. The book ends on their wedding day as a brave Ellen pledges to be Kirk’s legs, while a courageous Kirk promises to be Ellen’s eyes forever.

Seventh grade began several weeks after I sent my novel off to be considered for publication (the first and last time I ever sent an unsolicited manuscript to anyone) and I soon forgot about my authorial aspirations, instead caught up in the exigencies of the junior high school social scene. So it came as quite a surprise when several months later, a package arrived for me from Berkeley Highland Publishing Company. I opened it hopefully until I saw the tell-tale black and white markings of my copy book attached by a paper clip to my very first rejection letter.

The Vanity of Memory

Somewhere deep in my memory, there is a carved mahogany vanity.

Do they even make vanities anymore? I wonder.

The name of the furniture presupposes its use and describes one of the attributes of all of the women who’ve sat before it, gazing into beveled mirrors, rubbing their faces gently, trying to erase lines real and imagined.

There are always other vain items on a vanity: a mother of pearl comb, brush and mirror set - the comb standing erect, its teeth tucked between the brushes bristles, carefully placed next to the oval mirror always face down, showing off the beauty of the delicately carved edges and graceful handle.

And no vanity would be complete without the silver filigree tray, filled with crystal perfume atomizers of varied shapes and sizes, ready to be squeezed gently into the air by perfectly manicured fingers.

In this memory I can see my mother -- no – look again, it’s my grandmother - before her gums became diseased, her teeth rotted, her jowls sagged, before her breasts dropped to meet her navel, before she developed an allergy to dye and could no longer restore the bright red luster to the beautiful hair of her youth – before she was Bubby. Before she was old.


When I knew her, she was already Rae, but before that she was Rebecca. She had changed her name herself, Americanized it, sometime after 8th grade, which was the highest level of school she’d attended. And the only reason I know that is because I once found her 8th grade diploma while rooting through the bottom drawers of her vanity. There it was – her name in proud black calligraphy: Rebecca Feinstein.

If it’s hard for a child to imagine her mother as a girl, it is even harder to conjure the image of her grandmother, brimming with life and possibility, bouncing on the knee of a man she once lovingly called Papa, known to me only as a name on the family tree - an ancestor for whom I was named.




In this memory, I tentatively take hold of the pearl hand mirror and turn it on an angle towards the one before me atop the vanity. A line of reflections appear, starting with me and stretching back to Shirley my mother, to Rae, hers, to Fanny, hers - before history stop us cold in our tracks.

“You look just like Aunt Rae,” my mother’s cousin Jerry tells me every time he sees me.

And I wonder. What does he see in my face that looks to him like hers? No matter how we fight it, our genes will hold sway on our faces. One day, we turn towards the mirror and we’re startled to catch a glimpse of a strange version of ourselves - noses thickened, eyes down turned, chins gone slack.


I wonder what Jerry sees in my face that recalls my long deceased grandmother, his favorite aunt from his youth. She was always an old woman to me, though she must have only been in her late forties when I was a child.

Today, I am fifty-eight.

So another memory.


When I was a girl, I would sit before my Bubby’s vanity. I would try on all of her costume jewelry, brush my hair with her mother of pearl brush, and if I were sure she wouldn’t catch me, smear my face with her pancake and rim my mouth with her bright red lipstick. At age 6 or 7, I was searching for the resemblance that today I try so hard not to see.

I think I remember a photograph - maybe it was in the same drawer as Bubby’s diploma, or maybe it was in my mother’s old cedar chest, another place I would spend hours rummaging through yellowing letters, and photo albums searching for my family history, my life story.


Four generations of women: Fanny, large, grey, solid and foreboding in her broadcloth coat; Rebecca, now Rae, her hair still red, her breasts still high in her wool gabardine dress, and her teeth askew as she smiles unabashedly into the camera; Shirley, beaming with black lustrous hair and Bette Davis eyes wearing a tight-fitting white cardigan with rhinestone button, holding a round faced chubby infant in her arms.

Me.

1,2,3,4.

I am nothing if not linked to these women whether I want to be or not. Their stories intertwine with mine, and at times provide the counter- narrative for the one I try to compose of my life .

That picture is gone, if it ever existed outside of my memory. I have another, this one sans Fanny, three generations, the fourth one already gone.

Sitting here, holding up the mirror to the vanity of memory, I see the lines on their faces, working their way right through the blood onto my own.

Making Amends: Ringing the Bells That Still Can Ring

Amends, he wrote. Please let me make amends to you. My program requires it. The 9th step says that we must make direct amends to people we have harmed except where to do so would injure them or others.

I didn’t understand, though later I would spend hours upon hours googling AA sites learning all I could about steps, colored chips, acceptance and giving oneself over to one’s higher power.

When he wrote that he had become an alcoholic, that he had never married, never had a family, never been as successful as he had hoped he might be, I felt my heart start to burn. When he wrote that he had been well on the way to becoming that alcoholic when we were together in college, I couldn’t take my eyes off the words as they appeared on the screen. It was as if they were written in a secret code I had seen my entire life but only now, in this instant, could I decipher.

Who knew from alcoholism at 18 in 1970? Who knew that it was possible for a sweet fun loving boy to be drinking and getting high to numb himself and to keep from feeling anything – including the intense love that I felt for him – that thin wiry boy with the shaggy brown hair, dancing blue eyes and enough charisma to fill an entire dining hall. Who knew that as he lay with me on my dorm room cot atop the comforter I had brought to college from my childhood bed that he would only remember fragments of my first time - this memory blown from his head along with so many others by years of drinking and getting high.

So he asked me if he could make amends and I said yes, not knowing about dry drunks and 13th stepping and the uncanny ability alcoholics have of lying to themselves. I’m present now, he wrote. I’m whole. I’m here. Tell me our story.

I can’t say why I assented, why I went back into my memory and wrote to him about my heartbreak and humiliation any more than I could say why I looked him up on the Internet in the first place and sent that first terse and tentative message. How are you these days?

I had not been prepared for his answer.

I have a picture of you, said the latest email. I will send it to you . I cringed at the prospect and had to brace myself before opening the file. I was shocked that he even had a picture of me. I had been an ugly girl and hadn’t let many photographs be taken. I was terrified to see that pathetic image again – the one I had worked so hard my entire adult life to transform.

When the email came, I shook as I opened the attachment then quickly turned away from the computer without looking. Slowly I worked up the courage to glance back at the screen and there, in an instant, saw before me the image of myself at 18 – the soft curly black hair framing a heart shaped face – the glowing white skin with pink cheeks, the deep black eyes and pink lips bowed into a tentative smile.



I wanted to embrace this young girl who hadn’t even realized what the doctors had done to her mother. Didn’t know it because back then in the 60’s who knew of addiction to prescription drugs, the kind the doctors kept writing for her after my father betrayed and abandonned her, the kind that numbed her and made her emotionally unavailable, unpredictable, and completely incapable of loving anyone while under the influence, especially her ugly, angry and difficult daughter.

So when I was 18, barely out of my unstable childhood, I went seeking a lover I could love with fierce desperation - one who couldn’t love me back.

All of those years, I’d seen my younger self as totally unlovable and unworthy of anyone’s affections, rejected by my first lover who eventually made his way into the beds of so many of the other girls in my dorm.

It wasn’t you, he wrote. It was me. I wasn’t capable of loving anyone at that time in my life. You were standing in the light and I was standing in the darkness.

Ah, I breathed, rereading his emails, holding myself tight and loving for the first time the girl in the photograph.


When I finally saw him in person, months later, after nearly forty years, he took both of my hands in his, looked me straight in the eye and said two words I had been wanting to hear from so many people my entire life.

I’m sorry.

That’s what he said. Followed by,

I’m sorry I hurt you.

In that instant, I felt something shift inside of me.

Leonard Cohen sings, “Forget your perfect offering. There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”

It wasn't until much later that I realized how hard that was for him -- how much courage it took to reach out to me in this way. But he must have known the impact it would have on me and I will always be grateful to him for taking that step.

His simple but heartfelt apology opened up a tiny fissure in the thick defenses I had erected around my bruised and broken heart for nearly fifty years - a wall I had plastered with anger, and fortified with self righteousness and regret.

And with the sliver of light coming through the crack serving as my guide, I saw all of the possibilities for healing, love and forgiveness that could be mine.

Dreaming: The Shadow

I have always been afraid of my shadow. And yes, I mean it in both senses of the word – the Jungian shadow buried deep in my unconscious containing all of the psychic material I had long ago stuffed there like old childhood clothes crammed into a trunk with a metal lock threaded into a brass hasp, the key swallowed – and my physical shadow, that substance-less absence that only shows itself in the light.

Pure mind is how I like to describe myself, and I have so subsumed my sensory function, pushed it so far down the well of my unconscious, that I had a terrible time learning how to drive, can't line edit to save my life, and have to pinch myself sometimes during sex to remember that yes, this act is indeed a sensory, not intellectual experience.

So in the dream, I am standing before the entrance to an attic, and I cannot remember how I got there. I recall nothing before the creaking sounds my boots make as they press into the loose planks of the wooden staircase that is leading me to this place.

It feels like it might be my grandmother’s house, though it can't be really, because Bubby never had a house - only a series of drafty apartments in sub-divided brownstones where she lived alone except for when she rented out a room or two to borders - strange lonely men from Russia or Poland with no children and no place to go on the Jewish holidays.

I’d had nightmares about Bubby’s apartment before, decades ago, when my mother had left me there from time to time to spend the night.

“The man upstairs is going to get you,” Bubby would snap, whenever I’d misbehave, which usually meant I’d spoken too loud or scrunched up on my knees instead of sitting properly at the dining room table.

And just as Bubby would utter her warning, as if on cue, the building would start to creak or moan, and I was certain that as soon as I was alone in the dark, lying on the cold narrow cot that Bubby had unfolded in the back room, the man upstairs would come into my bed, smelling, as old men do, of stale smoke, onions, and tooth decay - and suffocate me.

Years later, I realized that perhaps Bubby was talking about God, which thinking about it now was just as, if not more, frightening than a smelly border living on the third floor, given the way God was known to write people’s names in the Book of Life or Book of Death.

God had come for Bubby almost forty years ago, but somehow, in my fifty plus years of life, I had eluded Him.

Or had HE eluded me?

The failure of God to appear in my life is as awe-full to me as the absence of light in my shadow.

But now, in this dream, as a fleeting wisp of darkness floats across the attic’s entrance way, I let my body enter.

Dreaming: Herself

So it happened again last night - the big dream - the recurring one I have had in various iterations since the first terrifying time when I was eleven years old.
In each of these dreams, which have haunted me for over forty-five years, there is a baby and this baby is in my care and somehow, I fail to keep this baby safe and it dies.

Sometimes, like the first time I had the dream, the baby is an actual child. Randy is a little girl I used to babysit and in the dream she (three or so) and I (eleven) are walking along the curb on the cul de sac where we both live. I am playing with a bob-a link, my favorite toy from that time. It has a red plastic ball around 4 inches in diameter with a 1 inch hole on the bottom. The ball is attached by a string to a short wooden pole. As I am walking, I let go of Randy's hand to flip the ball in the air, and maneuver the stick to try to get the ball's hole to land precisely atop the pole.

It's a perfect fit.

When I look over at Randy, I become very frightened. It appears as if she is beginning to shrink. She gets smaller and smaller until she's only about six inches tall. As I bend down to pick her up, it starts to rain hard - torrents of water blind me and before the Nooooooo! can escape from my throat, the little girl is swept into the teeming gutter and disappears down the sewer.

I awake, guilty, terrified and utterly ashamed.

Another time, years later, I am a new mother and this time the child in the dream looks like it could be mine. It has the same chubby round cherubic look of my daughter. In the dream, I sit her upon the granite countertop in the kitchen and watch in horror as she turns all blue and pink and shiny like a ceramic cookie jar.

I make no move to support her and like Humpty Dumpty she falls to the tile floor, breaking into pieces.

There have been other babies over the years turning into balloons then slipping through my fingers. Still others have been dragged off and eaten by wild animals, their bones buried beneath my feet.

In a particularly devastating one, an intruder enters her bedroom, steals my baby from her crib and places her beneath the wheel of my car in my garage. I awaken in terror just as I am about to get into the car, turn the key in the ignition and hear the motor rev.

In last night's dream, the baby speaks to me.

She is only six months old, but has the deep sultry voice of a grown woman who has smoked too many cigarettes. When I look at her, I can tell that she understands everything that is going on around her. She is just too helpless to take care of her own physical needs.

In the dream, I forget about her. I don’t feed her or change her diaper and when darkness comes, I leave her lying cold and alone on the family room floor as I go upstairs to sleep.

In the morning, when I wake up (still dreaming) I sheepishly creep downstairs to the room where she lies cold, wet, hungry and helpless on the floor.

It's her painful, knowing tone that punches me in my gut.

"You forgot about me," she accuses. "What kind of woman forgets to take care of a baby?"

And with that, this resilient little baby's eyes become mirrors.

Over the years, decades actually, I have tried to make sense of this recurring nightmare. And for years, I thought the image of the baby was to be taken literally - that it expressed my unconscious fear of being responsible for the lives of others.

But during those years, I managed to raise two healthy children and launch them into adulthood and I successfully taught thousands of other people's children over the past thirty five years.


So now I am thinking that perhaps I need a different approach to this recurring dream - one that sees each image in the dreams as aspects of my own psyche - the dreamer dreaming herself.

Through this lens, the image of the baby becomes the neglected, wildly unmothered part of myself. And if this is the case ( and why shouldn't it be?) last night's dream is a hopeful one.

For this baby, unlike all of the other babies of my dreams, though left alone in the dark without food or care, is still here in the morning.

She survives the neglect and looks at herself as if to say, "I am Marsha, and I am here."

And the dreamer, dreaming herself replies, "Welcome."

Finishing the Hat: Following the Urge to Create

There's a part of you always standing by,
Mapping out the sky,
Finishing a hat...
Starting on a hat..
Finishing a hat...
Look, I made a hat...
Where there never was a hat




Finishing the Hat. This is the title of a new book by Stephen Sondheim, a collection of his lyrics replete with his personal reflections of the process of songwriting. ( The complete title of the book is "Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes.)

Finishing the Hat is also the title of a song from Sunday in the Park with George, a musical about the neo-impressionist painter Georges Seurat. The actor playing Seurat sings this song after completing his most famous painting, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. The stage becomes graced with live actors perfectly still behind a translucent scrim, wearing the exact clothing and standing in the precise positions as the figures in the painting. The actor re-enacts the moment when the artist is "finishing the hat" putting the final details onto the masterpiece, in the last orgasmic thrust of creative energy propelling the artist to push forth the painting, like a baby bursting from a womb. The masterpiece is delivered to the world, alive and complete.

In the song, he laments losing the lover who wouldn't wait for him through this process. He'd hoped she would have understood, suspected that she might not yet despite this, he knows that he is powerless. Once in the grip of this generative force, he has no choice but to succumb to the surging waves of labor that will not be denied its completion.

I've been feeling a bit of this lately -- the heady, almost giddy elation of creation as I learn how to make mosaics and experiment with photography. I become enrapt in the artistic process and I dream of the feel of cool pieces of broken glass on my fingertips, and I see familiar images in new and surprising ways.

Playing with the possible. It's how I once thought about teaching, for me, also a very creative endeavor. If I ever would have written my dissertation, that would have been the title. "Playing with the possible," or perhaps, its mirror image, "imagining the real.

Somewhere there is a place that exists between the conscious and unconscious mind - a wild borderland on the margin of sanity where images rise up from some deep ancient place and merge with shapes and patterns; where words heavy with the symbols they carry intersect with rational thought.

This is a captivating place to live, where there is no map other than the one you make with your own traversing of the territory, a place you must go to with abandon.

Stephen Sondheim was my friend Adele Magner's favorite lyricist and composer. Sometimes we'd talk to each other in Sondheim lyrics. "Send in the clowns," she'd say and I'd answer with a Jewish accent in the form of a question, "There's got to be clowns?"

Or she'd sing, "Careful the things you say," and I'd sing back, "Children will listen."

And I will never forget her favorite line from her favorite Sondheim play, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum - from the ironically titled "Impossible" - "The situation's fraught, fraughter than I thought, with horrible, impossible possibilities."


Adele created a program that enabled young people to feel the power of their own impossible possibilities -- to imagine the real and play with the possibilities of their lives, by introducing them to the process of play writing. These adolescents, my students and thousands of others, were invited to give voice to their inner visions and outer conflicts and through the process of creating their plays, their very lives were transformed.

She was my teacher, my mentor and my friend and she taught me how to listen closely to what my students weren't saying, to follow their steps in this complex dance, then lead them gently back to themselves.

Adele had cervical cancer and she suffered with it for three years before it took her. The horrible impossible possibility that lies deep in the dark and terrifying woods reared its head and swallowed her whole.

It was she who told me I could invent what I desire. It's taken me ten long years since her death to finally get it -- not just intellectually or as an academic concept but to fully GET IT. It isn't just about cutting and reassembling glass, nor capturing surprising images in the shutter of a camera or juxtaposing words in unexpected ways. It's about giving yourself over completely to the process of invention and committing to it fully.

And it's about loving not the finished product but reveling in the pure joy of finishing the hat.