6 of 7 - Bisexual Epistemologies: A Journey from Nausea to Commitment

Bisexual Epistemologies: A Journey from Nausea to Commitment 

An occasional piece by

Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio, PhD

For The Journal of Bisexuality’s 10^th Anniversary Issue

Hi dear readers!

This seven-in-one piece will be great fun--yours truly promises.  Find out all the ins and outs of 10 years of Bisexuality!  What does "epistemology"mean?  Big word, right?  Well, all it means is that when you're making love you're producing knowledge.  A good thing!

We follow The Issues with What Wisdom Accrued to Me? and will have one more post.  Really revealing of all those things about bi you've always been curious about.  Why is it so good?  What can it do for you?  For the planet?  For the future?  For authentic intimacy?  It's all here, spiced with a bit of irony and critique of why we're so behind on our agenda.  What's keeping us from being more efficient.

Also arcane words you've been told have no meaning unless you got a PhD are explained--made very easy!  "Nausea," "existentialism": it's all about the chakra system--really.  Commitment?  It's not about going to jail (as in, "being committed").  But rather, it's about "being-in-action" about things.  Being the one who makes the difference!  No mysteries.  Woooooow!  Come back for more, will you?  We'll post every week, on Tuesdays.

Namaste,

Serena

6. What Wisdom Accrued to Me?

As a guest editor with a transcultural, interlinguistic, and transdisciplinary perspective, I have endeavored to unfold the discourse of bisexuality to include voices that introduced ideas capable of expanding one’s thinking about this multifaceted trope well beyond what’s commonly understood.  I have enjoyed the privilege of having enough space to publish articles that really make a difference, that present arguments complex enough and articulate enough and profound enough to be likely to have a role in the paradigmatic shift the third planet is going though with all of us in it, toward knowledge based on love. 

This blank page, this slate without definition has been empowering to me, both as an editor and as a contributor.  There have been no word limits to the length of a piece--just its own organic completion.  No indirect censorship based on assumptions of what is and is not appropriate or correct in a given discursive arena.  Pure invention guided by insight and intuition with wide ranging knowledge and reading.  As an author whose literary initiation took place in Europe, I have a bit of an auteur syndrome.  I like to be free.  No Hayes Codes applied to my creativity.  My inspiration has been honored here.  And I have really felt like this is my cup of tea. 

My contributions have been hosted with the highest respect for their originality and uniqueness.  I tend to respect New Criticism because its practice of direct reading empowers students of literature to respond with their own emotional intelligence, rather than with surrogate constructs preapproved by their teachers.  However, I believe that everything is political, including, of course--and perhaps most of all--literature, and other visual arts that have been the object of my analysis on these pages, including cinema.  By “political” I mean embedded in a web of cultural and discursive practices related to geography, history, the sex/gender system, the race/class system, and other politically charged dynamics.  However, I tend to write about texts that inspire me.  As a scholar activist, I would not waste my time on something I don’t have the highest respect for.  Therefore, I write against the grain of being “critical,” of attacking a piece.  Sometimes people think I’m stupid, because I don’t dissect something I critique.  The things is, I am a peace activist even when I practice literary criticism, therefore dissecting is not my cup of tea.  I’d call my method of literary and cultural criticism “holistic.”  Why?  Because it integrates all the different approaches into a whole.  My piece on Lillian Hellman in the Women and Bisexuality issue is perhaps the most exemplar of this (87-116).  It is extremely political, as it dissects the lie of calling this inspiring author a liar, just because her political allegiances were against the grain of McCarthyism and the bipolar politics of the Cold War period.  Yet it also goes very deeply into the textual analysis of two texts by this author, to access the bisexual aspect of the author’s erotic fantasies that inspired them.  Obviously, this requires discussion of texts, contexts, biography, history, social, gender, and racial dynamics as an integrated whole.  When this piece found hospitality in these pages, it had been rejected a number of times for doing its job too well.  “Why does the author focus so much on the texts?” peer-reviewers wondered in cultural studies journals not aware of bisexuality’s existence.  “Doesn’t she know we want what’s ‘political’?”  In those discursive arenas, it was believed that close reading and cultural criticism could not get along.  The Journal of Bisexuality knew better than this.  This is the time to acknowledge its respect for my skills.

The Journal also hosted two articles on film.  There too, my attention was devoted to auteur films in the European tradition that paid special attention to bisexuality as an element of sustainability in relational patterns that involved several participants.  These include Hamam and The Ignorant Fairies (a.k.a. His Secret Life), by Ferzan Ozpetek, and French Twist, by Josiane Balasko.  It is often said that only negative representations of bisexuality are visible in film.  This might apply to Hollywood film production.  However, in the films I chose bisexuality is a factor for inclusion in amorous communities and expansion of the ways in which love can be practiced therein.  These articles appeared in 2005 issue (now the book Plural Loves) and 2010 (Bisexuality and Queer Theory).  I am grateful that they could be included in integrity with their holistic intent.

 

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Yours truly appreciates your attention.  Stay tuned for more wonders.

Namaste,

Serena Anderlini-D'Onofrio, PhD

Gilf Gaia Extraordinaire

Author of Gaia and the New Politics of Love and many other books
Professor of Humanities

University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez

   

Follow us in the social media

Poly Planet GAIA Blog: http://polyplanet.blogspot.com/ 

Website: www.serenagaia.com 

Become a Fan: www.facebook.com/GaiaBlessings 

Author's Page/Lists all books: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001JS1VKA 

YouTube Uploaded Videos: http://www.youtube.com/SerenaAnderlini
 

5 | Friday is for Poetry | Venerdi Poesia | Introduction 1 | "A Lake for the Heart | Il lago del cuore" | Luigi Anderlini

The Old and the New:  
Synergy and Medi(t)ation in Luigi Anderlini’s Works

by Serena Anderlini-D'Onofrio


an Introduction to A Lake for the Heart, poems by Luigi Anderlini 

A Lake for the Heart 

The poems in the collection Il lago del cuore make a narrative, a story.  Lago del cuore translates figuratively as the vastness, the emptiness of the heart, and as a call to a beloved, cherished lake.  The story is about a man who is getting old, and knows he has had a life of plenitude, struggle, idealism, and compromise; a life that has fulfilled his wildest expectations and more, yet has exacted prices, and generated disappointments, disaffections, and lacerations.  This poet goes through his memories, fantasies, dreams, and obsessions, to finally prepare for death.  The last poem is about a woman, “lei,” (la morte) who comes and takes him to the “stair made of fog” (la scala di nebbia) that leads one “far, to eternal nothingness” (lontano, nel nulla eterno).  He follows her, docile, an atheist’s anticipation of a soft, sweet passage to death.  Even though in life my father had wanted to publish these pomes, it is no accident, in a way, that this edition is “posthumous.”  But then the interesting part is that in the process of preparing this translation, numerous intriguing memories have been surging.  These memories reveal a person that perhaps as a daughter I failed to see, a person who was a lot more similar to me spiritually and philosophically than the father I knew, somewhat imprisoned in his parental role.

Luigi Anderlini, public figure

Two poems in the collection struck me as especially significant in this respect, for they made me see my father as a virtually polyamorous person whose deep spirituality verged on the pantheistic.  Or perhaps this is my projection, for I have strong affinities with neo-pagan and polyamorist communities.  Yet it’s not just that.  For I am his daughter, and, while I lived an ocean and a continent away from him, the effort to interrogate the open questions of his life was an important force in leading me towards these movements.  A teacher who entered the political arena as a socialist in his thirties, in his later life my father became a pacifist, and devoted his energies to peace causes well above the melée of partisan politics.  But the open questions of his life were not resolved, including his choice of being an atheist regardless of his very deep spirituality, and his non-monogamous behavior, which he would not recognize as a deliberate choice, but rather experienced as a mistake.  Related to these, was his ambivalent relationship to modernity and industrialization, which for his generation held the promise of curing poverty and pain.  

Two poems in the collection inspire me to write of my dad in this way.  The first is “Il lago” (“The Lake”), which is about the Lago di Bracciano, a volcanic lake in the vicinity of Rome, where he used to sail in his little boat, and which has long been used as a reservoir for the city’s water supply and is therefore free of motorboats.  My dad used to have a little week-end house near this lake, and that’s where he was alone with himself and wrote his books and poems.  The poet speaks to the lake, and in calling him tu, attributes a persona to this body of water, who was once a volcano and has now reincarnated in his current form.  The second poem is “Donne” (Women), in which all the women who were his lovers at some point in his life, either long-term or just briefly, appear to him in a dream.  These lovers appear to him as they were when he knew them, and the poet evokes his moments and stories with each of them.  The poem ends with the dream of these lovers surrounding the poet together near his bed.  “And now,” he says, “siete tutte qui . . . belle e impalpabili” (all of you are here . . .  beautiful and impalpable, 32).  This image of shared love and serenity dissipates the conventional rivalries of enforced monogamy and defeats traditional gender wars. 

Luigi Anderlini, peace activist

Listening for Luigi Anderlini, peace activist

These poems, and many others in the collection as well, speak to me of a virtually polyamorous person with pantheistic inclinations.  His spirituality goes much beyond his proclaimed atheism; it sees the magic in nature; it recognizes the environment as a being with a life of its own; and it imagines the live creature of a lake as a volcano whose metamorphosis has generated the body of water that now lives in its crater.  In the poet’s vision, the Earth is a live being, which disavows modernity’s belief in pure rationality and matter.  This realm, this vision of the imagination, also makes room for a different kind of love, one in which love only begets more love.  In life my father often insisted on the inevitability of modernity and its benefits.  I remember teasing him that for him atheism was just another religion, as I was searching for an alternative to monotheism and a more pantheistic vision of the sacred.  Yet his poems reveal his vision of life as a continuum.  The poet is aware of his own mortality, announces it, and even describes his death.  Throughout the collection, the metaphor he uses for life is prato, a grass lawn, a meadow people cross and meander in for a while, alone and together.  His personal life was punctuated with passionate and multi-faceted relationships that contributed to making it vital and interesting.  In Donne, as in a poly world, the poet wishes to have all his lovers with him at the same time, and loves them all in his memory.  In life, my father did not quite manage to have things that way, yet the poet’s wish is that the women he loves choose to love each other in his death.  In this dream of intimate peace, love expands from a monogamous to a more inclusive dimension, as in a neo-pagan tale.

To be continued . . . .

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Il Vecchio e il Nuovo:

Sinergia e Medi(t)azione nelle opere di Luigi Anderlini

di Serena Anderlini con traduzione italiana di Joanna Capra

Le poesie che fanno parte della collezione Il lago del cuore formano una narrazione, una storia.  Il Lago del cuore sta a significare la vastità, il vuoto del cuore, ed è un richiamo a un lago adorato e prediletto.  La storia è quella di un uomo che sta invecchiando, e sa di aver vissuto una vita di pienezza, di lotta, di idealismo e di compromesso; una vita che ha esaudito le sue aspettative più inverosimili ed oltre, ma ha imposto dei prezzi generando delusioni, ostilità e lacerazioni.  Il poeta riesamina le sue memorie, fantasie, sogni e ossessioni, per prepararsi infine alla morte.  L’ultima poesia riguarda una donna, “lei” (la morte) che viene e lo porta alla “scala di nebbia” che conduce lontano, al nulla eterno.  Lui la segue docile, un ateo che si prefigura un passaggio alla morte dolce e morbido.  E benché mio padre in vita avesse voluto pubblicare queste poesie, in un certo senso non è un caso che questa edizione sia “postuma”.  Ma la cosa interessante è che nel corso della preparazione di questa traduzione, si sono risvegliati in me dei ricordi intriganti.  Ricordi che mettono in luce una persona che forse, in quanto figlia, non ho saputo vedere, una persona che era molto più simile a me spiritualmente e filosoficamente che non il padre che ho conosciuto, in qualche modo imprigionato nel suo ruolo di genitore.

Due poesie che fanno parte della collezione mi hanno colpito come particolarmente significative a questo proposito, poiché mi hanno fatto vedere mio padre come una persona virtualmente poli-amorosa la cui profonda spiritualità aveva del panteistico.  O forse questa è una mia proiezione, poiche io ho molte affinita con le comunita neo-pagane e poliamoriste.   Eppure non è proprio così.  Perché sono sua figlia, e, quando vivevo un oceano e un continente lontano lui, lo sforzo di interrogare le questioni aperte della sua vita fu una spinta importante nel portarmi verso questi movimenti.  Un insegnante entrato trentenne nell’arena politica come socialista, nella maturità avanzata diventò un pacifista e dedicò le sue energie alle cause della pace, ben al di sopra delle mischie di parte della politica.  Ma alcune questioni della sua vita erano rimaste irrisolte, compresa la sua scelta di essere un ateo malgrado la sua profonda spiritualità e il suo comportamento non monogamo, che egli non fu capace di riconoscere come una scelta deliberata, piuttosto che come una semplice confusione o errore.  A ciò si aggiungeva il suo rapporto ambivalente con la modernità e l’industrializzazione, che per la gente della sua generazione riservava la promessa di porre rimedio alla povertà e alla sofferenza.

Due poesie che fanno parte della collezione mi ispirano a scrivere di mio papà in questo modo.  La prima è “Il Lago”, che riguarda il lago di Bracciano - un lago vulcanico nelle vicinanze di Roma - dove papà aveva l’abitudine di veleggiare con la sua piccola banca a vela - e che da lungo tempo è utilizzato come serbatoio per rifornire Roma di acqua e quindi è proibito alle barche a motore.  Mio papà aveva allora una piccola casa da week-end vicino al lago, ed è lì che si ritrovava solo con sé stesso e che scriveva i suoi libri e le sue poesie.  Il poeta parla al lago e, nel dargli del tu, fa una persona di questo specchio d’acqua, che un tempo era un vulcano e che si è ora reincarnato nella sua forma attuale.  La seconda poesia è “Donne”, in cui tutte le donne che sono state sue amanti a un certo momento della sua vita, a lungo o per breve tempo, gli appaiono in sogno così come erano quando le aveva conosciute.  Il poeta evoca i momenti e le storie con ognuna di loro.  La poesia finisce con il sogno di queste amanti che circondano il letto del poeta, che dice: “E ora siete tutte qui, belle e impalpabili”.  Questa immagine di amore sereno e condiviso dissipa le rivalità tipiche della monogamia forzata e sconfigge le tradizionali guerre fra i sessi. 

Queste poesie, e molte altre della collezione, parlano a me di una persona capace di molteplici amori e con inclinazioni panteistiche.  La sua spiritualità va molto oltre il suo proclamato ateismo; vede la magia nella natura; riconosce l’ambiente come un essere dotato di vita propria; e immagina la creatura viva di un lago come un vulcano, le cui metamorfosi hanno generato il corpo d’acqua che ora vive nel suo cratere.  Nella visione del poeta, la Terra è un essere vivente che sconfessa il credo della modernità nella mera razionalità e materia.  Inoltre, questo reame, questa visione dell’immaginazione, dà spazio a molti tipi di amore, in cui l’amore genera ulteriore amore.  In vita mio padre spesso insisteva sulla inevitabilità della modernità e dei suoi benefici.  Ricordo di averlo preso in giro, dicendogli che per lui l’ateismo era solo un’altra religione, mentre io ero in cerca di una alternativa al monoteismo e di una visione più panteistica del sacro.  Eppure le sue poesie rivelano una visione in cui la vita è concepita come un continuum.  Il poeta è consapevole della propria mortalità, la annuncia, e descrive persino la propria morte.  Dalla prima all’ultima pagina della collezione di poesie, la metafora che usa per indicare la vita è un prato, uno spiazzo erboso, un campo che la gente attraversa o sul quale si aggira, sola o in compagnia.  La sua vita personale era contrassegnata da rapporti appassionati e sfaccettati, che contribuivano a renderla vivace e interessante.  In Donne - come in un mondo di plurali amori - il poeta desidera avere con se tutte le sue amanti allo stesso tempo e le ama tutte nel ricordo.  In vita, mio padre non era riuscito del tutto a sistemare le cose in questo modo, eppure il desiderio del poeta è che, dopo la sua morte, le donne che amava scelgano di volersi bene.  In questo sogno di intima pace, l’amore si espande da una dimensione monogama a una dimensione più inclusiva, come in un racconto neo-pagano. 

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Did you enjoy the Introduction?  Let us know!  Yours truly appreciates your attention.  The comments box is open.

Posts will appear every Friday at 11:00 AM.  Come back!  And get your copy of A Lake for the Heart right away!

Stay tuned for more wonders.

Namaste,


Serena Anderlini-D'Onofrio, PhD

Gilf Gaia Extraordinaire

Author of Gaia and the New Politics of Love and many other books
Professor of Humanities

University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez

   

Follow us in the social media

Poly Planet GAIA Blog: http://polyplanet.blogspot.com/ 

Website: www.serenagaia.com 

Become a Fan: www.facebook.com/GaiaBlessings 

Author's Page/Lists all books: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001JS1VKA 

YouTube Uploaded Videos: http://www.youtube.com/SerenaAnderlini
 

A Lake for the Heart

5 of 7 - Bisexual Epistemologies: A Journey form Nausea to Commitment

Bisexual Epistemologies: A Journey from Nausea to Commitment 

An occasional piece by

Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio, PhD

For The Journal of Bisexuality’s 10^th Anniversary Issue

Hi dear readers!

This seven-in-one piece will be great fun--yours truly promises.  Find out all the ins and outs of 10 years of Bisexuality!  What does "epistemology"mean?  Big word, right?  Well, all it means is that when you're making love you're producing knowledge.  A good thing!

We follow Klein's Option and Other Classics with The Issues, and will have two more posts.  Really revealing of all those things about bi you've always been curious about.  Why is it so good?  What can it do for you?  For the planet?  For the future?  For authentic intimacy?  It's all here, spiced with a bit of irony and critique of why we're so behind on our agenda.  What's keeping us from being more efficient.

Also arcane words you've been told have no meaning unless you got a PhD are explained--made very easy!  "Nausea," "existentialism": it's all about the chakra system--really.  Commitment?  It's not about going to jail (as in, "being committed").  But rather, it's about "being-in-action" about things.  Being the one who makes the difference!  No mysteries.  Woooooow!  Come back for more, will you?  We'll post every week, on Tuesdays.

Namaste,

Serena

 

5. The Issues

Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli

This was on the back of my mind when, as one who practices love as the art that heals on a personal, local, professional, and planetary scale, I set out to devote my time to the four mentioned issues, Women and Bisexuality (2003), Plural Loves (2005), Bisexuality and Queer Theory (2010), and BiTopia (2011).  The tropes are interrelated and organized around the commitment to bring forth the value of bisexuality as an epistemic portal to a world where the fear of love gives way to the love for love, or erotophilia.  The 2003 issue focused on women whose participation in bisexual cultures and communities came in a variety of ways, including appreciating the erotic sensibility of their bisexual male partners.  This was the first and has been the only issue on women with a global perspective.  In Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli’s article, “Outside Belonging” (53-86) women married to bisexual men were interviewed.  As an epistemic portal, bisexuality cannot be reified to a sexual behavior.  Pallotta-Chiarolli, an award winning author and a professor of health and social development in Australia, brought out their voices as they declared that the way their spouses practice love between men made them more well-versed and sensitive lovers of women.  I agree!  Bisexuality is interpreted as a healthy artistic sensibility that enhances the production and fruition of erotic and affectional love.  The wider horizon this collection embraced allowed for an expanded view of what bisexuality can bring to people’s existence.  This issue is now available as a Routledge book.  

Plural Loves, the 2005 issue opened up the conversation of monogamy, as a cultural institution that interferes with Fritz Klein’s auspicated ideal of “100 percent intimacy.”  How can people structure amorous lives that are inclusive of partners of different genders when the cultural norm still dictates exclusivity--and does so even more pervasively and insidiously as fears of infection and contamination have increased under the presumed threat of disease?  How can non-monogamy be practiced in ways that do not perpetuate double standards of male privilege?  Polyamory appeared to me as a subculture whose styles of inclusiveness honored gender equality, disclosure, and integrity in maintaining one’s multiple commitments.  It is, indeed, the only known contemporary non-monogamous subculture that includes women as equals.  The other two, bare-backing and polyginy (which includes Islamic polygamy), exclude women and subject them to male rule, respectively.[1]

 

Betty Dodson

This issue brought the voices of two female leaders in the sexual liberation movement to speak into the discourse of bisexuality.  In “We Are All Quite Queer” (155-164), Betty Dodson, artist of the erotic and the nude, tells the story of how she became an educator in the arts of loving too, with self-love as her specialty.  Her workshops and videos have helped generations of women develop their self-pleasuring skills, to great enjoyment for those who participate in the sacred rituals too.  Dodson’s essay brings to bear on the epistemic value of bisexuality.  When can all touch our genitals, and feeling no pleasure at all in doing so is quite difficult.  So when we practice the art of self-pleasuring we are loving a person of our own gender, and that’s bisexual.  We are also activating a modality of knowledge and self-knowledge that’s quite significant to our health and well being, and those we love too.  Nature, our teacher extraordinaire explains, makes our species capable of self-pleasuring through our hands and fingers.  We can of course add playful toys as much as we please.  The only way to keep bisexuality from being so pervasive, natural, and efficient would be to make our arms much shorter by genetic engineering!  

Dodson explores the most personal aspects of bisexual energy, while Anapol’s expands to the most inclusive ones.  A founder of the polyamory movement, Deborah Anapol is also a respected teacher of sex and consciousness, a coach, and workshop leader.  Her books include Polyamory: The New Love without Limits, and Polyamory in the 21^st Century.  Her piece, “A Glimpse of Harmony” (109-120), registers her participant observer’s interpretations of today’s Hawaiian culture and its roots in pre-Western languages and traditions.  Exclusivity comes from competition.  Cultures that interpret abundance as natural can effortlessly practice amorous inclusiveness.  Anapol’s narrative extends the concept of erotic pleasure to giving birth and bonding with one’s infant in one of today’s Hawaiian Jacuzzis, to the initiation of children to erotic pleasure in traditional Hawaiian culture, and to reverence and respect for punaluas, the partners of one’s partners, or what today’s polys call metamours.  Can you imagine gently massaging your baby girl’s genitals as you clean her, as a cultural norm that favors her development into an amorous, joyful woman?  Gently blowing air into your baby boy’s penis to prepare him for future enjoyment of sexual pleasure?  Allowing sex play among children as a way to prepare for puberty?  These, and other initiation rituals were common among the natives, who called Westerners haole, or people without breath, without spirit.  Here we see that Reich’s sense of the subconscious is not so extreme.  We may not all literally want to go back to the womb.  But babies born in water adapt more gradually to post-natal life as animals born to breathe because water provides continuity with pre-natal life in amniotic liquidity.  Girls whose mothers massage their labia will enjoy the arts of loving in adulthood.  Peace loving people are aware of these things, because peace is based in love for love, or erotophilia.  Today one gets thrown in jail for doing this.  As a result, we have lost the knowledge to initiate the young to love amorously and artistically.  There is another area where bisexual epistemology could help revive lost knowledge and generate more healthy and loving intimacy.

The subsequent two issues are still very fresh and I’d rather refer you to the source, dear reader.  The labor of love of Bisexuality and Queer Theory was shared with Jonathan Alexander, rhetorician extraordinaire and faithful intermediator.  That of BiTopia with Brian Zamboni, who had a glimpse of what working on bisexual research means.  Regina Reinhardt was always vigilant behind the wings.  It is wise to allow time to distill what matters in the experience.  In perspective, one’s work acquires a variety of unexpected meanings it would not be cautious to try and anticipate here. 

---

[1] My sources are Tim Dean, Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking  (University of Chicago Press, 2009), Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran (New York: Random House 2008), and her Things I’ve Been Silent About (2010).

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Yours truly appreciates your attention.  Stay tuned for more wonders.

Namaste,

Serena Anderlini-D'Onofrio, PhD

Gilf Gaia Extraordinaire

Author of Gaia and the New Politics of Love and many other books
Professor of Humanities

University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez

   

Follow us in the social media

Poly Planet GAIA Blog: http://polyplanet.blogspot.com/ 

Website: www.serenagaia.com 

Become a Fan: www.facebook.com/GaiaBlessings 

Author's Page/Lists all books: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001JS1VKA 

YouTube Uploaded Videos: http://www.youtube.com/SerenaAnderlini
 

4 | Friday is for Poetry | Venerdi Poesia | "A Lake for the Heart | Il lago del cuore" | Luigi Anderlini

Hi again dear Earthlings!

Lidia D'Onofrio long before she met Luigi

And yes, you are in for another round of Friday is for Poetry.  This time yours truly feels the throbs.  This poem is about her mom.  A beautiful woman who passed away at the age of 48 due to rampant cancer.  It was the first encounter with death and perhaps the most tragic.  And yet it was forming: learning how to connect with the dead, listening to their voices, following their guidance, is what got yours truly where she is today.  As a translator, she learned what the experience was like for her dad.  This is the poem that choked tears in her throat time and time again, reading, translating, reading, translating, reading, translating, until the page was soaked.  Literally.  Her voice choking as she read the poem out loud on occasions.  Yes, as Obama would probably say, this was the best gift "from my father," Luigi Anderlini.  A dream of remembrance for a woman whose magic spins to this day.  She must have heard when he wrote the poem because we later found out that she waited until he came to join her in death.  So be it.  Namaste!

LYDIA

“Sylvia, do you still remember . . . ?”

Leopardi, “For Sylvia”

Lidia D'Onofrio

You’ve been visiting me for quite a while.

You arrive at dusk

and fill the room

with your dazzling scent.

Tangled, the skein of memories

unwinds, alive.

The kids with us.

The white sun straight up

on the blue of Lake Garda.

A picnic for four on the shore.

Furtive happiness

that expands your smile to the sky.

Small and private paradise

of a human brood.

A week in Paris.

Poor but happy and dreamy.

Hungry, we sit at a sidewalk café

in the shadow of a Danton,

stern and dusty.

“Voila deux oeufs au plat” the waiter shouts

and you ask me to kiss you

with no embarrassment.  “C’est ça Paris” you say.

I still have on my lips

the taste of that honey.

You’re still hungry.  You dare your French

and ask “S’il vous plaît, garcon

encore deux oeufs au plat.”

Serena’s first steps.

Stava, in the Dolomites.

Vacations at your favorite mountains.

Serena Anderlini, age one

Mushroom picking.

I arrive from Rome flustered.

You take away my breath

and extend our embrace.

In bed, the gift of your body

generous, nude like a soft pink cloud.

In a whisper you tell me:

“Stay, please!  Don’t go away!

I want another child.”

Now we’re alone in the room,

you with the face of thirty years ago.

I would like to touch you,

but my fingers fall into air.

You withdraw and smile:

“No, dear” you say, “I am ashes.

Your lines give me new life.

I am your secret and infinite

will to survive.

I know what it means

to die, desperate, at fifty

The viscera torn apart

by a cruel cancer.

I have experienced the anxieties

of brutal and conscious departures,

of reckoning with eternity,

of the abyss of nothingness.

The furrow that I’ve left in the world is fleeting.

Some images, a maternal legacy.

We’re ashes--impalpable dust.

But one thing is left for us:

Let my bitter destiny buy us

a sweet, serene reunion

in death’s nothingness.”

Lidia

“Silvia, rimembri ancora”

Leopardi – “A Silvia”

Mi visiti da tempo.

Arrivi con la luce del crepuscolo

e fai piena la stanza

di quel profumo tuo che mi stordiva.

L’arruffata matassa dei ricordi

si sgomitola, viva.

I bambini con noi.

Il sole bianco a picco

sull’azzurro del Garda.

Un pic-nic a quattro sulla riva.

Felicità furtiva

che dilata nel cielo il tuo sorriso.

Piccolo ed appartato paradiso

d’una nidiata umana.

                                            Settimana a Parigi.

Paris

Poveri ma felici e trasognati.

All’ombra d’un Danton

severo e polveroso, noi affamati

seduti a un tavolo sul marciapiede.

- “Voila deux oeufs au plat” – grida il ragazzo

e tu senza imbarazzo

mi chiedi un bacio – “Ca c’est Paris” – dici.

Quel sapore di miele

l’ho ancora sulle labbra.

Hai ancora fame; osi il tuo francese;

chiedi – “S’il vous plait, garcon,

encore deux oeufs au plat” -.

                                          Serena ai primi passi.

                                          Stava: le dolomiti.

                                          Vacanza tra i tuoi monti preferiti.

                                          La raccolta dei funghi.

                                          Io che arrivo da Roma frastornato

                                          tu che mi mozzi il fiato

Luca, the new baby

e l’abbraccio prolunghi.

A letto t’offri nuda e generosa.

Morbida nube rosa

mi dici in un bisbiglio:

– “Resta, ti prego! Non lasciarmi

Ti prego! Un altro figlio”.

Adesso siamo soli nella stanza,

tu col tuo volto di trent’anni fa,

io che vorrei sfiorarti, ma le dita

affondano nel vuoto.

Tu ti ritrai, sorridi:

- “No, caro” – dici – Io sono cenere.

                                             Sono i tuoi versi a darmi nuova vita.

                                             Sono la tua segreta ed infinita

                                             voglia di sopravvivere.

Io so cosa significa

morire disperata a cinquantanni,

le viscere straziate

da un tumore crudele.

Ho vissuto gli affanni

dei distacchi brutali e consapevoli,

i conti con l’eterno,

il baratro del nulla.

Di me resta nel mondo un solco labile,

qualche immagine, un lascito materno.

Siamo cenere, polvere impalpabile.

Una cosa ci resta:

che serva a noi – amara – la mia sorte

per un sereno e dolce ritrovarci

nel nulla della morte”.

1998

Did you enjoy the poem?  Searingly honest, right?  Let us know what you think about it!  Yours truly appreciates your attention.  The comments box is open.

We will continue with the biographical chapter.  Posts will appear every Friday at 11:00 AM.  Come back!  And get your copy of A Lake for the Heart right away!

Stay tuned for more wonders.

Namaste,


Serena Anderlini-D'Onofrio, PhD

Gilf Gaia Extraordinaire

Author of Gaia and the New Politics of Love and many other books
Professor of Humanities

University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez

   

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A Lake for the Heart