64: The Two Hands of Life

64

 

The Two Hands of Life 

“Adventure most unto itself /The Soul condemned to be;

      Attended by a Single Hound— /Its own Identity.”

                                                   

Emily Dickinson

It happened on Country Road 6, another perfectly-timed coincidence that confirmed the reality of the moment, a conversation that we were having on our way to Midland to pick up my weekend papers and a few items for the Spanish Chicken and Rice recipe that Penny was making for dinner; I was telling her about the poet Adrienne Rich who wrote something that inspired today’s spiritual musing: “A life I didn’t choose to live chose me.”

This radically different life that chose the young wife and mother of three children was the life of a lesbian poet activist that David Zugar in Poet and Critic described as “a life of prophetic intensity and ‘visionary anger’ bitterly unable to feel at home in a world ‘that gives no room /to be what we dream of becoming.’”

“Robert Frost meets Emily Dickinson in Adrienne Rich,” I said to Penny, but I had to explain what I meant by my insight into the lesbian/activist poet’s life.

This insight came to me the night before while watching an online video of a memorial tribute to Adrienne Rich shortly after her passing at the age of 82, the impression forming in my mind that she was a natural amalgam of Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson, and I said to Penny, “I’m glad I’m not going to my grave angry. That’s my gift to myself.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, intrigued by my comment.

“My gift to myself is that I’m not going to die angry,” I replied, with an ironic smile at the price that I had to pay for my gift to myself. “I’ve been doing some research on Adrienne Rich, and I understand now why she was so angry at life. That’s why I wrote Old Whore Life, Exploring the Shadow Side of Karma. I know her anger well, Penny. I was no less angry, if not a thousand times more; but I resolved my anger. Adrienne Rich didn’t.”

“How do you know she didn’t?” Penny asked.

“Her poetry doesn’t speak resolution. On the contrary, it speaks to the messy human condition, especially the life of women. That’s why she became an outspoken feminist. But hers is a strange story. Her father was a Jewish doctor who taught at Johns Hopkins University, and her mother was a Christian concert pianist who gave up a career in music for her husband. Her father encouraged her to read and write poetry, though; and she graduated with a degree in English from Radcliffe College. She married an economics professor when she graduated and had three children, but her marriage was so strained that she had to leave her husband. The same year she left him he killed himself, and few years later she moved in with her lesbian lover. Adrienne Rich experienced the whole gamut of a woman’s life: gifted young poet, housewife and mother of three boys, and confirmed lesbian; not to mention being Jewish and Christian. She had a lot of issues to work through, that’s what fueled her poetry.”

“We all have issues,” Penny said, with a wry smile.

“True. But some of us have more karmic baggage than others. That’s life. But it doesn’t matter who we are, unless we learn to resolve the two sides of our nature we’re always going to be in conflict with life. That’s the human condition. That’s what Adrienne Rich’s poetry is all about—the messy human condition. “The war poetry wages against itself,” she wrote in one of her poems. That’s why she was so angry. Robert Frost said, ‘Poetry grabs life by the throat.’ Adrienne Rich grabs life by the throat with her poetry, just like Frost; but she was also driven like Emily Dickinson to find her own identity. But you can’t find your identity until you resolve the two sides of your nature, and the only way to do that is to make our two selves into one, the inner like the outer neither male nor female with no hypocrisy—” 

“The hands of life!” Penny jumped in, excitedly.

“What hands of life?” I asked, confounded by her remark.

“Didn’t you see them?” she asked.

“No. What?”
“There were two gloves on the side of the road. One up and one down. The two hands of life, just like you were saying—”

“What a coincidence,” I said, and smiled as I always do whenever synchronicity speaks to us; and I turned the car around and went back to confirm what Penny saw, and there they were on the side of the road: two discarded white gloves, one facing up and the other down, just like the two sides of our nature—our conscious ego personality and our unconscious shadow self, confirming with symbolic certainty what I was saying about Robert Frost meeting Emily Dickinson in the angry visionary poet whose shadow lesbian life chose her to help resolve the bifurcated nature of her identity; and what an adventure it proved to be as Adrienne Rich explored the alluring country of her genderless soul! 

 

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