ephemeral flowers
I cherish Seamus Heaney's bog poems. As you know, Heaney was fascinated with the story of the bog people. One spring morning, two men cutting peat in a Danish bog discovered a well-preserved body of a man with a noose around his neck. Thinking they had stumbled upon a murder victim, they reported their discovery to the police, who called in the famous archaeologist, the wonderfully named P.V. Glob, who identified the body as that of a two-thousand-year old man, ritually murdered and thrown into the bod as a sacrifice to the goddess of fertility.
Like Heaney, I love everything about this story. The archaeologist's stories of the bodies, the careful descriptions of the ropes and blindfolds that are buried with our ancient Iron age compatriots, the fantastical preservation of the bodies in the deep tannic peat, preserving them, preserving the stories of their fates, of a time of hunger, and ritual, and pagan religion, which seems dark, and mystical and ancient, and the prosaic contents of their stomachs--the winter berries, the grain.
Dog var de skabt av Jord og Ild som vi,
vi er de samma Kraefters Atterkomster,
vi vaagned op af alt, som er forbi,
Paa Dodens Trae vi grow som Nuets Blomster.
Thoger Larsen
Yet they were made of earth and fire as we,
The selfsame forces set in our mould:
To life we woke from all that makes the past.
We grow on Death's tree as ephemeral flowers.
Another body, a woman's body, was discovered at Haraldskjaer Fen, on a dark autumnal day in the 1830s. Workmen were digging a boundary ditch across the fen when they noticed a human arm and foot appearing like an apparition at a shallow depth in the ground. It was difficult to retrieve the woman's body from the bog because although she laid in shallow turf, her body had been fastened down to the peat by wooden crooks, driven down tight over each of her knees and elbows. Further, strong branches had been fixed like clamps across her chest and lower abdomen, the ends of the branches also held down by wooden crooks. The people who buried this woman were deeply afraid. Women had that power. Women have that power. Women are punished for wielding power.
She lay pinned in the bog, her head pointing east, her face towards the setting sun. Her long, glossy brown hair was well preserved in the bog. The local newspaper, entitled Light Reading for the Danish Public, dated Friday the 8th of March, 1839, described the find: "Every countryman will immediately recognize in this corpse the body of someone who when living was regarded as a witch and whom it was intended to prevent from walking again after death. Many of us have either ourselves seen, or have heard old people speak of, stakes standing here and there which have been driven in earlier times, since men first recognized the existence of such restless spirits, thought that by this means they could get the better of the ghosts. Our forefathers believed that so long as the stakes stood the ghost remained pinned in the ground. If the stakes were removed, however, trouble would start all over again. The big oak stake is certainly in favour of this explanation. On the other hand the crooks that have survived, and the spot itself, indicate that the dead person met death in a violent manner, perhaps even being buried alive."
Almost two hundred years ago, the Danes immediately recognized the presence of a witch, and knew, or had heard tell of, the measures one could take to stop a witch after her death. The archaeologists agreed with the locals, deducing that the woman had been pinned down into the bog alive. The expression on her face, the archaeologist writes, was "'clearly recognized as soon as she was taken out from the peat as one of despair'. Her small hands and feet indicated that she was a person of distinction who had not had to do hard work."
The secrets held quietly through the centuries in that Danish fen, as the children grew in the meadows, playing their version of ghost in the graveyard, the game we played as children in Ohio in the 1970s, a frightening game of tag as the dark shadows descended on the neighborhood, the fireflies twinkling, the breath caught in your throat as the hand reached out to tag you: you're it. Do we all recognize so easily, the expression of despair? How similar we look in death as in sleep.
I recently listened to a TED talk by a doctor who began moonlighting in hospice as a young cardiologist resident. The doctor became transfixed by our passage from life to death. He was struck by the ability of the hospice workers--the nurses, the social workers, the priests--to predict within a day or two when someone would die, in comparison to his ability as a doctor to accurately prognosticate. Much of the prediction turned on the quality of the visions or dreams of the dying--this doctor has gone on to study the dreams and visions of the dying. As we grow very close to death, we are visited by those who have already died, our dreams and rooms crowded with the people we loved. Our dead mothers sit on our beds, our lost siblings come to us as we sleep. These are not hallucinations or the meanderings of addled minds, but lucid visions the dying speak of with calm clarity. How deeply comforting.
Of course, these are deaths that spin out in real time, deaths in hospice care, under the watchful eyes of our families and our nurses and doctors. Did you know there are death doulas? People whose very job is to help us on the passage towards death. But sudden deaths, violent deaths--how do visions work for those who are wrenched from life because they are deemed witches, or sacrificed to earth goddesses, or shot as they sat in schools and restaurants, or pulled out of airplanes, or pulled under by riptides. I like to think that time has an elasticity that allows even those who are not given the privilege of a slow death to see the ancestors who have gone before us--perhaps seconds unspool like eternity, and the bog woman saw her mother, her children who perhaps had died young from illnesses that swept the countrysides without vaccines, without medicine, so that she was not alone as her face was forcibly turned towards the sunset. I can't imagine it any other way without despairing.
I've been thinking about the bog, as I always do, because I've been rereading Heaney's bog poetry and reading, for the first time, P.V. Glog's The Bog People: Iron Man Preserved. When I take breaks from reading, Sebby and I make our way to the bog to walk, once and twice even three times a day. Sebby is in the toddler stage of puppy hood--he is seven months old, his limbs far too long for his body--he looks like a moppet, a puppet, Cameron said, as we walked the bog together earlier today. He is wild, leaping into the air with joy when he sees one of his people, tearing into toys and shredding his pillows on a weekly basis. He's like an Amish child engaged in rumspringha--literally defined as jumping around--the elders waiting to see whether the child will choose baptism in the Amish church, and a quieted life of rules, or will leave the church. I know Sebby will choose us, we will take away his free will--he will be neutered next month, and then he will start his path towards being a quiet, love of a dog, who walks easily around the bog with his people, instead of tearing joyously from the pond to a puddle to a hill, and then throwing his body to the floor, panting in exhaustion.
Sometimes I walk alone and I try to pray. Lately I have felt closer to hearing God--there is something in the unfurling of spring that makes me feel close to God. On his birthday, Elijah unwrapped several gifts in the house, and then we opened the front door to head to the bus stop and the green was luscious and light and the flowers were alight on every bush and the air smelled of freedom and he paused, "It's another gift to us!" We all knew what he meant. It was an excited utterance, in the world of evidence--admissible because so clearly true. The nights are lush and loud, the peepers and the owls and the animals down the way shuffling in their sleep, standing in the barn, the sheep pushing against one another, the horses softly whinnying.
Mother's Day just passed--the flowers in the vase are starting to fray, the pink petals littering the tabletop. Celebrations of mothers can be traced back to Greek and Roman festivals in honor of the mother goddesses Rhea and Cybele. According to Hesiod, Cronus had six children with Rhea, named Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon and Zeus. Gaia and Uranus told Cronus that just as he had overthrown his own father, so too was he destined to be overcome by his own child. Therefore, the myth goes, as each child was born, Cronus swallowed them. This Greek myth always terrified me when I came across it in college--before I had children, it struck me as a story of a monstrous, murderous father. After I had children, I could only see the story from the perspective of the sorrowful, enraged Rhea, who along with Gaia and Uranus, devised a plan to save the last child, Zeus. When Rhea gave birth to Zeus, she gave Cronus a stone to swallow, wrapped carefully in swaddling clothes.
Anna Jarvis, the founder of our contemporary Mother's Day, had no children herself but conceived of the holiday as a personal celebration between mothers and families. In her vision of the holiday, mothers would wear white carnations as badges of honor, and the day would be spent visiting one's mother or going to church. When the day became a national holiday, it quickly was coopted by florists and card companies. Jarvis was devastated by the commercialism; by 1920, she was urging people to stop buying all the stuff, eventually actively campaigning against confectioners and florists.
I know Mother's Day is fraught for many women, the women who have lost children, the women who cannot have children, the women who choose not to have children. For our family, this year it carried with it the weight that all holidays carry now--this extra tug at our hearts that mark these days which stand out from the other days of our lives: will I be here at the next Mother's Day (birthday, Thanksgiving, and so on and so forth)? Having stage four cancer means that death is perched on my shoulder all the time, peering out from behind my cropped brown hair, insisting that my family notices it, pays attention to it. I told someone today that cancer stole my old life, replacing it with a quieter life with more love and more scariness.
Seamus Heaney was particularly struck with the blackened, mummified body of a young bog girl found in Windeby, Germany in 1951. The Windeby Girl. Her naked corpse had bindings over her eyes and a collar over her neck. Her hair had been shaved on the left side of her head and she was covered with birch branches and a large stone. Her body confirmed the Roman historian Tacticus' description by Germanic tribes of young women punished by adultery who had their heads shaved before they were killed. In 1951, Heaney was a young poet, who was struck by how young women who slept with British soldiers were punished by the IRA by having their hair shaved off, being stripped, tarred and handcuffed to railings in Belfast.
Punishment
I can feel the tug
of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.
It blows her nipples
to amber beads,
it shakes the frail rigging
of her ribs.
I can see her drowned
body in the bog,
the weighing stone,
the floating rods and boughs.
Under which at first
she was a barked sapling
that is dug up
oak-bone, brain-firkin:
her shaved head
like a stubble of black corn,
her blindfold a soiled bandage,
her noose a ring
to store
the memories of love.
Little adultress,
before they punished you
you were flaxen-haired
undernourished, and your
tar-black face was beautiful.
My poor scapegoat,
I almost love you
but would have cast, I know
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur
of your brain's exposed
and darkened combs,
your muscles' webbing
and all your numbered bones:
I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,
who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.
Everyday I wander my own bog, thinking of my own pending and possible death, considering my body returning to earth. What will my bones tell of my own world, of sex and death, of language and transparency, of silence and love? I will leave my poetry and words as well, to be dissected by the ones I now love. Will I come to them and comfort them as they someday pass towards their own deaths? Will their rooms be haunted by me, alight on their hospital beds, my bright eyes and loud laughter welcoming them home? I fervently hope so. In another time, perhaps I too would have been a witch. Here, I am a lawyer and a mother and a poet. All I can promise is words, of course, these words, and someday my own body, my face turned to the setting sun.
Like Heaney, I love everything about this story. The archaeologist's stories of the bodies, the careful descriptions of the ropes and blindfolds that are buried with our ancient Iron age compatriots, the fantastical preservation of the bodies in the deep tannic peat, preserving them, preserving the stories of their fates, of a time of hunger, and ritual, and pagan religion, which seems dark, and mystical and ancient, and the prosaic contents of their stomachs--the winter berries, the grain.
Dog var de skabt av Jord og Ild som vi,
vi er de samma Kraefters Atterkomster,
vi vaagned op af alt, som er forbi,
Paa Dodens Trae vi grow som Nuets Blomster.
Thoger Larsen
Yet they were made of earth and fire as we,
The selfsame forces set in our mould:
To life we woke from all that makes the past.
We grow on Death's tree as ephemeral flowers.
Another body, a woman's body, was discovered at Haraldskjaer Fen, on a dark autumnal day in the 1830s. Workmen were digging a boundary ditch across the fen when they noticed a human arm and foot appearing like an apparition at a shallow depth in the ground. It was difficult to retrieve the woman's body from the bog because although she laid in shallow turf, her body had been fastened down to the peat by wooden crooks, driven down tight over each of her knees and elbows. Further, strong branches had been fixed like clamps across her chest and lower abdomen, the ends of the branches also held down by wooden crooks. The people who buried this woman were deeply afraid. Women had that power. Women have that power. Women are punished for wielding power.
She lay pinned in the bog, her head pointing east, her face towards the setting sun. Her long, glossy brown hair was well preserved in the bog. The local newspaper, entitled Light Reading for the Danish Public, dated Friday the 8th of March, 1839, described the find: "Every countryman will immediately recognize in this corpse the body of someone who when living was regarded as a witch and whom it was intended to prevent from walking again after death. Many of us have either ourselves seen, or have heard old people speak of, stakes standing here and there which have been driven in earlier times, since men first recognized the existence of such restless spirits, thought that by this means they could get the better of the ghosts. Our forefathers believed that so long as the stakes stood the ghost remained pinned in the ground. If the stakes were removed, however, trouble would start all over again. The big oak stake is certainly in favour of this explanation. On the other hand the crooks that have survived, and the spot itself, indicate that the dead person met death in a violent manner, perhaps even being buried alive."
Almost two hundred years ago, the Danes immediately recognized the presence of a witch, and knew, or had heard tell of, the measures one could take to stop a witch after her death. The archaeologists agreed with the locals, deducing that the woman had been pinned down into the bog alive. The expression on her face, the archaeologist writes, was "'clearly recognized as soon as she was taken out from the peat as one of despair'. Her small hands and feet indicated that she was a person of distinction who had not had to do hard work."
The secrets held quietly through the centuries in that Danish fen, as the children grew in the meadows, playing their version of ghost in the graveyard, the game we played as children in Ohio in the 1970s, a frightening game of tag as the dark shadows descended on the neighborhood, the fireflies twinkling, the breath caught in your throat as the hand reached out to tag you: you're it. Do we all recognize so easily, the expression of despair? How similar we look in death as in sleep.
I recently listened to a TED talk by a doctor who began moonlighting in hospice as a young cardiologist resident. The doctor became transfixed by our passage from life to death. He was struck by the ability of the hospice workers--the nurses, the social workers, the priests--to predict within a day or two when someone would die, in comparison to his ability as a doctor to accurately prognosticate. Much of the prediction turned on the quality of the visions or dreams of the dying--this doctor has gone on to study the dreams and visions of the dying. As we grow very close to death, we are visited by those who have already died, our dreams and rooms crowded with the people we loved. Our dead mothers sit on our beds, our lost siblings come to us as we sleep. These are not hallucinations or the meanderings of addled minds, but lucid visions the dying speak of with calm clarity. How deeply comforting.
Of course, these are deaths that spin out in real time, deaths in hospice care, under the watchful eyes of our families and our nurses and doctors. Did you know there are death doulas? People whose very job is to help us on the passage towards death. But sudden deaths, violent deaths--how do visions work for those who are wrenched from life because they are deemed witches, or sacrificed to earth goddesses, or shot as they sat in schools and restaurants, or pulled out of airplanes, or pulled under by riptides. I like to think that time has an elasticity that allows even those who are not given the privilege of a slow death to see the ancestors who have gone before us--perhaps seconds unspool like eternity, and the bog woman saw her mother, her children who perhaps had died young from illnesses that swept the countrysides without vaccines, without medicine, so that she was not alone as her face was forcibly turned towards the sunset. I can't imagine it any other way without despairing.
I've been thinking about the bog, as I always do, because I've been rereading Heaney's bog poetry and reading, for the first time, P.V. Glog's The Bog People: Iron Man Preserved. When I take breaks from reading, Sebby and I make our way to the bog to walk, once and twice even three times a day. Sebby is in the toddler stage of puppy hood--he is seven months old, his limbs far too long for his body--he looks like a moppet, a puppet, Cameron said, as we walked the bog together earlier today. He is wild, leaping into the air with joy when he sees one of his people, tearing into toys and shredding his pillows on a weekly basis. He's like an Amish child engaged in rumspringha--literally defined as jumping around--the elders waiting to see whether the child will choose baptism in the Amish church, and a quieted life of rules, or will leave the church. I know Sebby will choose us, we will take away his free will--he will be neutered next month, and then he will start his path towards being a quiet, love of a dog, who walks easily around the bog with his people, instead of tearing joyously from the pond to a puddle to a hill, and then throwing his body to the floor, panting in exhaustion.
Sometimes I walk alone and I try to pray. Lately I have felt closer to hearing God--there is something in the unfurling of spring that makes me feel close to God. On his birthday, Elijah unwrapped several gifts in the house, and then we opened the front door to head to the bus stop and the green was luscious and light and the flowers were alight on every bush and the air smelled of freedom and he paused, "It's another gift to us!" We all knew what he meant. It was an excited utterance, in the world of evidence--admissible because so clearly true. The nights are lush and loud, the peepers and the owls and the animals down the way shuffling in their sleep, standing in the barn, the sheep pushing against one another, the horses softly whinnying.
Mother's Day just passed--the flowers in the vase are starting to fray, the pink petals littering the tabletop. Celebrations of mothers can be traced back to Greek and Roman festivals in honor of the mother goddesses Rhea and Cybele. According to Hesiod, Cronus had six children with Rhea, named Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon and Zeus. Gaia and Uranus told Cronus that just as he had overthrown his own father, so too was he destined to be overcome by his own child. Therefore, the myth goes, as each child was born, Cronus swallowed them. This Greek myth always terrified me when I came across it in college--before I had children, it struck me as a story of a monstrous, murderous father. After I had children, I could only see the story from the perspective of the sorrowful, enraged Rhea, who along with Gaia and Uranus, devised a plan to save the last child, Zeus. When Rhea gave birth to Zeus, she gave Cronus a stone to swallow, wrapped carefully in swaddling clothes.
Anna Jarvis, the founder of our contemporary Mother's Day, had no children herself but conceived of the holiday as a personal celebration between mothers and families. In her vision of the holiday, mothers would wear white carnations as badges of honor, and the day would be spent visiting one's mother or going to church. When the day became a national holiday, it quickly was coopted by florists and card companies. Jarvis was devastated by the commercialism; by 1920, she was urging people to stop buying all the stuff, eventually actively campaigning against confectioners and florists.
I know Mother's Day is fraught for many women, the women who have lost children, the women who cannot have children, the women who choose not to have children. For our family, this year it carried with it the weight that all holidays carry now--this extra tug at our hearts that mark these days which stand out from the other days of our lives: will I be here at the next Mother's Day (birthday, Thanksgiving, and so on and so forth)? Having stage four cancer means that death is perched on my shoulder all the time, peering out from behind my cropped brown hair, insisting that my family notices it, pays attention to it. I told someone today that cancer stole my old life, replacing it with a quieter life with more love and more scariness.
Seamus Heaney was particularly struck with the blackened, mummified body of a young bog girl found in Windeby, Germany in 1951. The Windeby Girl. Her naked corpse had bindings over her eyes and a collar over her neck. Her hair had been shaved on the left side of her head and she was covered with birch branches and a large stone. Her body confirmed the Roman historian Tacticus' description by Germanic tribes of young women punished by adultery who had their heads shaved before they were killed. In 1951, Heaney was a young poet, who was struck by how young women who slept with British soldiers were punished by the IRA by having their hair shaved off, being stripped, tarred and handcuffed to railings in Belfast.
Punishment
I can feel the tug
of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.
It blows her nipples
to amber beads,
it shakes the frail rigging
of her ribs.
I can see her drowned
body in the bog,
the weighing stone,
the floating rods and boughs.
Under which at first
she was a barked sapling
that is dug up
oak-bone, brain-firkin:
her shaved head
like a stubble of black corn,
her blindfold a soiled bandage,
her noose a ring
to store
the memories of love.
Little adultress,
before they punished you
you were flaxen-haired
undernourished, and your
tar-black face was beautiful.
My poor scapegoat,
I almost love you
but would have cast, I know
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur
of your brain's exposed
and darkened combs,
your muscles' webbing
and all your numbered bones:
I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,
who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.
Everyday I wander my own bog, thinking of my own pending and possible death, considering my body returning to earth. What will my bones tell of my own world, of sex and death, of language and transparency, of silence and love? I will leave my poetry and words as well, to be dissected by the ones I now love. Will I come to them and comfort them as they someday pass towards their own deaths? Will their rooms be haunted by me, alight on their hospital beds, my bright eyes and loud laughter welcoming them home? I fervently hope so. In another time, perhaps I too would have been a witch. Here, I am a lawyer and a mother and a poet. All I can promise is words, of course, these words, and someday my own body, my face turned to the setting sun.
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