The Hidden World: Notes on an MFA Project

By Pauline E. Reif, poet, writer, and student in the MFA in Writing and Consciousness program

Today, I’m thinking of this program – the Master of Fine Arts in Writing and Consciousness at CIIS – and how grateful I am to be entering into the hidden depths of my MFA Project, a play about Etty Hillesum, companioned by writers, artists, women, and men who are willing and able to travel where they must to find what they will. I’m thinking of the ways in which artists feed artists—across time and in time—inspiration and wise support flowing in a steady stream from this particular CIIS community. It’s also good to know that I’m in the real and still fertile company of the ancestors who let me see through their eyes into living moments captured on a page. 

Today, I’m thinking of Etty with whom I’ve had a particular resonant connection with for the last 15years. At 29 years old, she died in Auschwitz in 1943 after transforming her inner realities in such a way that she could live fully, and with love, until the end. Today, I read in her diary that she sees three stars in the still dark morning through a patch of black glass.  With a pen at her desk she writes herself into meaning. And I’m thinking of Hélène Cixous, writer, philosopher, and poet who seeks “the skin of light”– that which is “hidden amongst the visible, the secret” – she who says: “I night…I write at night. I write: the Night.”

I’m thinking of birds, women, and writers, all those deemed unclean by prior priests and kings, those willing to tangle their hands, souls, words, blood, and wings in both worlds in order to see what’s true – the secrets – the not-surface – the above and the below. The unclean transform dead waste into useable matter, like the birds that see and hunt at night (owl, gull, and bat), or kill and/or eat the dead by day (eagle, hawk, heron, osprey, vulture, and crow—as in Leviticus, 11:13-19) as do poets who eat from both hands, mingling dirt with sky, and women who bleed perfect blood. It would seem to me that the unclean can enter the danger zones, the not tidy, and somehow in the darkest darkness retrieve something pure that is not simple. We retrieve the moment.

Declared as unclean, a woman, writer, and a Jew, Etty chose to use both hands, her heart, and her mind to defy any untruth that kept her from the solid ground of her own being, even as she lived and died in the midst of unspeakable horrors. She chose to live everything and for me continues to redefine the meaning of sacred as that which can hold both light and darkness. In the blinding darkness of annihilation and unthinkable disaster, Etty offers her life to us, her words, giving this reader courage to use both hands and giving my words new life.  She wrote in the desert. She wrote “the Night” and in it offers a cup of water.

On Reading Hélène Cixous on desert and disaster and “Birds, women, writing”
By Pauline E. Reif

When stars fall
and sky crumbles –
disaster on earth
without nurture;
Do roots still thrive
in the desert, the thing
unclean, that flies and bleeds
in no-mans-land, bear
witness to night,
twisted, raw, alive, not
cooked to order?

Is this where poets
 sing, their hands digging
 down, tangling underneath,
 below where bones are buried
 and young seeds dream morning?

What can one    two see
where sacred and defiled mingle
in the moment?
Where nothing is, 
can words answer with 
a tent,
a garden,
a glass of water?

Is this where I reaches
for the other? When 
stars fall
and sky crumbles,
vultures fly, women
bleed and poets
speak that which is not
simple.
Joy.

For more information on Etty Hillesum, check out "Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum."  For more on Helene Cixous, check out "Stigmata and Readings: The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, Kleist, Lispector, and Tsvetayeva."  

Comments

[Sarah Stone]

Thanks for this beautiful posting, Pauline! I find it a wonderfully inspiring entry to read in the middle of attempting to “mingle dirt with sky,” and to “enter the danger zones… and somehow in the darkest darkness retrieve something pure that is not simple.”

I’ve been reading a lot of Hilary Mantel recently, and am reminded of something she said in an interview:

“For some years I lived in Africa, in Botswana, and people there used to say that to see ghosts you need to look out of the corners of your eyes. If you turn on them a direct gaze, then, like Eurydice, they vanish.

“The whole process of creativity is like that. The writer often doesn't know, consciously, what gods she invokes or what myths she's retelling. Orpheus is a figure of all artists, and Eurydice is his inspiration. She is what he goes into the dark to seek. He is the conscious mind, with its mastery of skill and craft, its faculty of ordering, selecting, making rational and persuasive; she is the subconscious mind, driven by disorder, fuelled by obscure desires, brimming with promises that perhaps she won't keep, with promises of revelation, fantasies of empowerment and knowledge. What she offers is fleeting, tenuous, hard to hold. She makes us stand on the brink of the unknown with our hand stretched out into the dark. Mostly, we just touch her fingertips and she vanishes. She is the dream that seems charged with meaning, that vanishes as soon as we try to describe it. She is the unsayable thing we are always trying to say. She is the memory that slips away as you try to grasp it. Just when you've got it, you haven't got it. She won't bear the light of day. She gets to the threshold and she falters. You want her too much, and by wanting her you destroy her. As a writer, as an artist, your effects constantly elude you. You have a glimpse, an inspiration, you write a paragraph and you think it's there, but when you read back, it's not there. Every picture painted, every opera composed, every book that is written, is the ghost of the possibilities that were in the artist's head. Art brings back the dead, but it also makes perpetual mourners of us all. Nothing lasts: that's what Apollo, the father of Orpheus, sings to him in Monteverdi's opera. In Opera North's staging, the god took a handkerchief from his pocket, licked it, and tenderly cleaned his child's tear-stained face.”

It sounds sad, but there’s something celebratory in the sheer madness of trying to capture Eurydice. Many thanks for taking us into the underworld and reminding us how the sacred holds “both light and darkness.”