I am sitting with Madwomen, a volume of the late poems of Gabriela Mistral—two volumes she titled Lagar, or in English, “Winepress”: image of skins crushing, bleeding, at a certain age. Welcome: a new year.
Reading her life—a childhood of relative poverty, yet middle class, Chilean, questing for an education with no official sanctioned access, only favors from a sister who taught her, and access to the libraries of other poets who helped her along the way. She was an educator. She directed girls’ schools in Chile. She left Chile for Mexico to take an educational reform post there, then Europe, Brazil, then the States.
A life of shifting continents, homes, political associations, so much change, wars, exiles: this is the first half of the 20th century for a nearly self-taught woman who was unmarried and who was not born into the literary class. She adopted a son who killed himself. After, she said she lived dangerously on two planes. She walked with ghosts. Randall Couch, translator, and the author of the volume’s introduction, writes that Mistral “collected injustices” and lead a life of “financial anxiety.” Of course. And she wrote. She wrote herself in and out of territories, states:
“The Abandoned Woman”
Now I am going to learn
The sour country,
And unlearn your love
Which was my only language,
Like a river that forgets
Its current, bed, and banks.
In 1955, two years before her death, she wrote this in a letter to a friend:
“Each poem is an adventure with new paths, including unknown animals and weapons. And one has to invent at full speed a bow capable of felling the incandescent meteor coming down on us or the vertiginous bird that circles us. I start from an emotion that little by little is put into words, helped by a rhythm that could be that of my own heart. You will smile, knowing my tachycardia . . . . But aren’t many of my poems, especially those in Lagar, riding a runaway heart?”
It is a new year. In my notebook this morning I wrote, “good to wait for things to come.”
Who and what teaches us to wait? Where do we go to school for this? Into the field of art: suspending the certainty of meaning, a cause, a purpose. I have said it before and keep needing to repeat this idea: the result of art’s action remains unknown. The poem: a performance, a field of vision into which the known appears then disappears. Living as a poet is twining a life of magic with the life of packing up the house, filling out a bank deposit slip, cleaning out your book bag. What if every scrap glows?
Beauty as electrical charge, conducting, moving, approaching, receding. There is no “before” and “after,” “darkness” then “enlightenment.” In literature borne of intensity and absence—literature of an emergency situation—there are circuits. Her poems: the rhizomorphic burrows Deleuze and Guattari describe in On the Line. No dichotomy—no need to choose one plane over the other.
“She Who Waits”
Before the threshold and before the path,
I wait and wait for the one who walks straight
and advances truer than water or fire.
He comes because of me, he comes for me,
not for shelter, nor for bread and wine,
but because of the fact that I’m his food
and I’m the cup that he lifts and drains.
The difference between anticipating and waiting—what is this difference? Maybe this:
To anticipate is to plan for possible outcomes, to prepare. To anticipate is linear. Perhaps waiting recognizes the possibility of exchange, circuit, rhizome, unknown. To wait is to map a space and occupy it, not build a road and travel toward. To wait is to be consumed by questions and even to agree to be the vessel, the delivery mechanism used by another in order to feed: “I’m the cup that he lifts and drains.” To wait is to expect exhaustion, expect to be used, emptied, strongly passive. I am summoning this in the new year.
And they know, yes my body and soul know
that he comes walking the livid
ribbon of my own shout, without
entangling himself in the glorious ash-tree
or resting on the hard-packed sands.
The waiting shouts and might be “livid.” The shout as conduit. There is no particular value to patiently waiting—a radical revision to polite society’s expectations for a girl, for a good boy.
2012 is years after having made the decision not to have children. This year I am studying menopause. My facts are dubious—please check them (I tried but came up empty handed)—but I recall hearing or reading somewhere that the theca, the outer layer of the ovary responsible for producing eggs becomes subsumed by the ovary’s inner layers: pleasure centers. “This is self-cannibalism,” I told my beloved. There is nothing unused; there is no withering, no death.
Evolutionarily speaking, why does menopause exist? There are various theories, yet none can be proven. Is the answer “because of poetry”? Another kind of language. Another life calibrated toward pleasure. Supplanting the need for progeny. So the body and the social body watches for the change, a new circuitry.
“The Other”
I killed a woman in me:
one I did not love.
She was the blazing flower
of the mountain cactus;
she was drought and fire,
never cooling her body.
She had stone and sky
at her feet, at her shoulders,
and she never came down
to seek the water’s eye.
[….]
and at her side
I bent and bent . . .
I left her to die,
robbing her of my heart’s blood.
A new year and I bend and bend, cooling, waiting for water—
