adrienne rich solar plexus, susan stewart pelvic floor

This one is for Sinéad, y'all. This loss is for many, but certainly for gen x feminists, a catastrophic blow to the abdomen. Head heart and gut, she stood for everything we wanted to be. She walked the walk we only dared dream, her brave skull rising while we were hair-flipping, her combat boot stance wide and clear while we were teetering on heels that shrunk our dignity. She howled, she strutted, she camera-stared with eyes clear as the sky. The wind-filled sail of her solar plexus, like a cobra hood flaring, fucked-you-ed every possible form of invisible power-mongering, oppression-rehearsing, capitulation to the daily regime of our culture's practiced cruelties. The defiance to stand inside her vulnerability, her heartache, her loss, her pain was unlike the familiar expressions of strength we'd known. Holy shit, you can strip yourself of protective armor and still sing a war song! She lifted us into who we wanted to be when we got enough breathing room to step into our power. 

Here's an excerpt from Adrienne Rich's explanation in the LA Times for rejecting the National Medal for the Arts - so much like Sinéad calling bullshit on the Grammies: 

My 'no' came directly out of my work as a poet and essayist and citizen drawn to the interfold of personal and public experience. I had recently been thinking and writing about the growing fragmentation of the social compact, of whatever it was this country had ever meant when it called itself a democracy: the shredding of the vision of government of the people, by the people, for the people. ...Like so many others, I’ve watched the dismantling of our public education, the steep rise in our incarceration rates, the demonization of our young black men, the accusations against our teenage mothers, the selling of health care--public and private--to the highest bidders, the export of subsistence-level jobs in the United States to even lower-wage countries, the use of below-minimum-wage prison labor to break strikes and raise profits, the scapegoating of immigrants, the denial of dignity and minimal security to our working and poor people. ...Many of us today might wish to hold government accountable, challenge the agendas of private power and wealth that have displaced historical tendencies toward genuinely representative government in the United States. We might still wish to claim our government, to say, This belongs to us--we, the people, as we are now.
We would have to start asking questions that have been defined as non-questions--or as naive, childish questions. In the recent official White House focus on race, it goes consistently unsaid that the all-embracing enterprise of our early history was the slave trade, which left nothing, no single life, untouched and was, along with the genocide of the native population and the seizure of their lands, the foundation of our national prosperity and power. Promote dialogues on race? Apologize for slavery? We would need to perform an autopsy on capitalism itself. 
...What is social wealth? How do the conditions of human labor infiltrate other social relationships? What would it require for people to live and work together in conditions of radical equality? How much inequality will we tolerate in the world’s richest and most powerful nation? Why and how have these and similar questions become discredited in public discourse? And what about art? Mistrusted, adored, pietized, condemned, dismissed as entertainment, auctioned at Sotheby’s, purchased by investment-seeking celebrities, it dies into the “art object” of a thousand museum basements. It’s also reborn hourly in prisons, women’s shelters, small-town garages, community college workshops, halfway houses--wherever someone picks up a pencil, a wood-burning tool, a copy of “The Tempest,” a tag-sale camera, a whittling knife, a stick of charcoal, a pawnshop horn, a video of “Citizen Kane,” whatever lets you know again that this deeply instinctual yet self-conscious expressive language, this regenerative process, could help you save your life.
...There is a continuing dynamic between art repressed and art reborn, between the relentless marketing of the superficial... to reach through armoring, resistances, resignation, to recall us to desire. Art is both tough and fragile. It speaks of what we long to hear and what we dread to find.
...I wish I didn’t feel the necessity to say here that none of this is about imposing ideology or style or content on artists; it is about the inseparability of art from acute social crisis in this century and the one now coming up... In the long run, art needs to grow organically out of a social compost nourishing to everyone, a literate citizenry, a free, universal, public education complex with art as an integral element, a society without throwaway people, honoring both human individuality and the search for a decent, sustainable common life. In such conditions, art would still be a voice of hunger, desire, discontent, passion, reminding us that the democratic project is never-ending.
For that to happen, what else would have to change?  
​- Adrienne Rich 

To read the whole article, paste this link in your browser: 
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-aug-03-bk-18828-story.html


Adrienne Rich, “Planetarium”
 
Thinking of Caroline Herschel (1750–1848)
astronomer, sister of William; and others.
 
A woman in the shape of a monster
a monster in the shape of a woman
the skies are full of them
 
a woman         ‘in the snow
among the Clocks and instruments
or measuring the ground with poles’
 
in her 98 years to discover
8 comets
 
she whom the moon ruled
like us
levitating into the night sky
riding the polished lenses
 
Galaxies of women, there
doing penance for impetuousness
ribs chilled
in those spaces                        of the mind
 
An eye,
 
‘virile, precise and absolutely certain’
from the mad webs of Uranusborg
 
encountering the NOVA
 
every impulse of light exploding
 
from the core
as life flies out of us
 
Tycho whispering at last
‘Let me not seem to have lived in vain’
 
What we see, we see
and seeing is changing
 
the light that shrivels a mountain
and leaves a man alive
 
Heartbeat of the pulsar
heart sweating through my body
 
The radio impulse
pouring in from Taurus
 
I am bombarded yet                I stand
 
I have been standing all my life in the
direct path of a battery of signals
the most accurately transmitted most
untranslatable language in the universe
I am a galactic cloud so deep             so invo-
luted that a light wave could take 15
years to travel through me      And has
taken               I am an instrument in the shape
of a woman trying to translate pulsations
into images                 for the relief of the body
and the reconstruction of the mind.
 
Adrienne Rich, “Planetarium” from Collected Poems: 1950–2012. Copyright © 2016 by The Adrienne Rich Literary Trust. Copyright © 1971 W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
 
 
Adrienne Rich, “August”
 
Two horses stand in a yellow light
eating windfall apples under a tree
 
as summer tears apart and the milkweeds stagger
and grasses grow more ragged
 
They say there are ions in the sun
neutralizing magnetic fields on earth
 
Some way to explain
what this week has been, and the one before it!
 
If I am flesh sunning on rock
if I am brain burning in fluorescent light
 
if I am dream like a wire with fire
throbbing along it
 
if I am death to man
I have to know it
 
His mind is too simple, I cannot go on
sharing his nightmares
 
My own are becoming clearer, they open
into prehistory
 
which looks like a village lit with blood
where all the fathers are crying: My son is mine!
 
“August.” Copyright © 2016 by the Adrienne Rich Literary Trust. Copyright © 1973 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, from Collected Poems: 1950–2012 by Adrienne Rich. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
 
Susan Stewart, “The Forest”
 
You should lie down now and remember the forest,
for it is disappearing--
no, the truth is it is gone now
and so what details you can bring back
might have a kind of life.
 
Not the one you had hoped for, but a life
—you should lie down now and remember the forest--
nonetheless, you might call it “in the forest,”
no the truth is, it is gone now,
starting somewhere near the beginning, that edge,
 
Or instead the first layer, the place you remember
(not the one you had hoped for, but a life)
as if it were firm, underfoot, for that place is a sea,
nonetheless, you might call it “in the forest,”
which we can never drift above, we were there or we were not,
 
No surface, skimming. And blank in life, too,
or instead the first layer, the place you remember,
as layers fold in time, black humus there,
as if it were firm, underfoot, for that place is a sea,
like a light left hand descending, always on the same keys.
 
The flecked birds of the forest sing behind and before
no surface, skimming. And blank in life, too,
sing without a music where there cannot be an order,
as layers fold in time, black humus there,
where wide swatches of light slice between gray trunks,
 
Where the air has a texture of drying moss,
the flecked birds of the forest sing behind and before:
a musk from the mushrooms and scalloped molds.
They sing without a music where there cannot be an order,
though high in the dry leaves something does fall,
 
Nothing comes down to us here.
Where the air has a texture of drying moss,
(in that place where I was raised) the forest was tangled,
a musk from the mushrooms and scalloped molds,
tangled with brambles, soft-starred and moving, ferns
 
And the marred twines of cinquefoil, false strawberry, sumac--
nothing comes down to us here,
stained. A low branch swinging above a brook
in that place where I was raised, the forest was tangled,
and a cave just the width of shoulder blades.
 
You can understand what I am doing when I think of the entry--
and the marred twines of cinquefoil, false strawberry, sumac--
as a kind of limit. Sometimes I imagine us walking there
(. . .pokeberry, stained. A low branch swinging above a brook)
in a place that is something like a forest.
 
But perhaps the other kind, where the ground is covered
(you can understand what I am doing when I think of the entry)
by pliant green needles, there below the piney fronds,
a kind of limit. Sometimes I imagine us walking there.
And quickening below lie the sharp brown blades,
 
The disfiguring blackness, then the bulbed phosphorescence of the roots.
But perhaps the other kind, where the ground is covered,
so strangely alike and yet singular, too, below
the pliant green needles, the piney fronds.
Once we were lost in the forest, so strangely alike and yet singular, too,
but the truth is, it is, lost to us now.
 
“The Forest” from The Forest. Copyright © 1995 by Susan Stewart. Used by permission of University of Chicago Press. 
 
 
 
POETIC THEMES
            The month of August is associated astrologically with the sun, and I have to go personal for a beat here, and not just because Adrienne Rich is my poetic sun. My dad was in a poetry class with Rich at Harvard, and I remember him describing how everyone was struck dumb when she first read aloud. I couldn’t get that image out of my head. Rich’s story was like mine—an upbringing pressured by her dad’s intellectual ambitions for her—and like my mom’s, marrying a professor. She did divorce him to carve her own path, and she wrote “August” in the throes of processing his subsequent suicide.
              The poem begins with an image of the sun’s yellow light illuminating two horses quietly eating apples under a tree (with all this creature’s ancient association with the sun, in Greek myth, Hebrew Scripture, and Vedic lore). But the poem breaks quickly from this sunny scene, as summer burns itself out in the solar flare of August, with its staggering milkweeds and ragged grass. The progress of the poem can only be autobiographical, trying to break from the nightmare entrapment that opens from her own story to history, or rather a prehistory, of separations marked by paternal claims and blood. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Rich’s departure from traditional marriage was also her departure from patriarchy, launching her into position as a leader in second-wave feminist thought. Diving into the Wreck, her most famous collection, in which these poems were published (along with others from the three years following her divorce), established her true voice. Margaret Atwood described hearing Rich read from it: “It felt as though the top of my head was being attacked, sometimes with an ice pick, sometimes with a blunter instrument: a hatchet or a hammer.” Tantamount to a solar explosion, she blew everyone away.
            We found in my dad’s study a note from Rich saying, essentially, “Thanks for last night.” He declined comment. When I met her at a reading and asked her about the note, a coy grin stretched across her wrinkled face and she said, “Yep. Sounds like me in college.” Maybe my dad reminded her of hers. The descriptions of her father sure remind me of mine: a literary snob who gave her daily writing assignments and lauded her poetic achievements especially when they best replicated Western canonical form. Her departure from her father’s language to find her own brilliant, blinding voice was like Minerva bursting from Zeus’s head. I’m still trying to get there. When I can afford it, my plan is to tattoo the final lines of “Planetarium” onto my heart, in some kind of outward-spiraling explosive shape:
“Iamaninstrumentintheshapeofawomantryingtotranslatepulsationsintoimagesforthereliefoftheboddyandthereconstructionofthemind.”
Maybe it will help. 
            “Planetarium” is dedicated to the famous German astronomer Caroline Herschel, whose biography is a lot like Rich’s, struggling with typhus as Rich had struggled with arthritis, relegated to assisting her brother’s scientific work and struggling to emerge as an astronomer in her own right all the way until he died, and after his death, busily cataloguing nebulae and star clusters and comets. Herschel’s gravestone reads, “The eyes of her who is glorified here below turned to the starry heavens.” One might say the same of Adrienne Rich. In “Planetarium,” looking up at the night sky, Rich sees “galaxies of women, there / doing penance for impetuousness,” until the poem encounters a nova, an astral phenomenon that expels solar masses of material at the speed of light and sends shock waves that can even trigger the formation of new stars. That’s a pretty good way to describe Rich’s effect on the world. She captures the experience of finding her “untranslatable language” so viscerally: “every impulse of light exploding / from the core / as light flies out of us….” The heart, here, is configured as its own sun, exploding outward.
            Compare this vivid description of the effects of heat, light, and blinding sun to the conditional uncertainty of “August.” She has yet to truly know her burning brain, throbbing dream “like a wire with fire.” She seems to crave the knowledge of how her flesh threatens the patriarchy. The poem’s description of the sun’s power could be describing the effect of Rich’s own, neutralizing the protection of magnetic fields to pierce right through to the bone. And she does. I go back, again and again, to the explosive last stanza of “Planetarium,” my future tattoo. Maybe to live in the shadow of the solar event that was Adrienne Rich is to strive to digest the impulses of this culture and transform them for the liberation of others. To seat feminine power in the solar plexus, reclaiming the sun from its association with masculinity, is to conceptualize feminine power as the capacity for transmutation, the witchlike translation of one thing into another form.
            But in the burning heat of summer, perhaps we could marry this with a cooler model. “The Forest” is the perfect mulchy answer to the call to ground down and cool off in the heat of August, beginning with its direct order: “You should lie down now.” The language that captures a new quiet in the air, a new stillness and movement toward the end of summer—“disappearing,” “gone now,” “lost to us”—is joined to the hint of nature’s changes in early autumn: the air’s “texture of drying moss,” something falling from “high in the dry leaves,” and the increasingly covered ground. The forest floor is such a useful and evocative image for the ground floor of our being to which we need so badly to return. We settle down into the poem’s musical repetitions, like a chorus returning again and again, “light a light left hand descending.” The layers of grounding, going back and back, “fold in time,” grounding us in the places we remember. The forest floor as “the first layer” calls up the physical reality of the pelvic floor whose layers are crisscrossed. As the source of life, the pelvic floor issues a call to remember, to go back to beginnings, again and again—root, family, origins, home, tribe. This covered ground is the home turf of Mama Earth, eternally feminized. It is both an entry, a doorway back to our early lived experiences, and a “kind of limit,” as we are unable to change or truly inhabit them. 
           A lovely image for the grounding principle is the left hand on the piano, regardless of what tinkling upper keys the right hand might be playing. This is such a useful way of imagining the two hemispheres of the body. With the heat of this month, its fire and solar flare, we need the balance of the left side, always present, associated in myriad traditions with the moon and the grounding principle. So perhaps Susan Stewart’s forest floor is a model of female power that balances Rich’s solar flare. The strength of the pelvic floor is in its layering and its multi-directionality, strong enough to hold not just the content of one body but more than one. As a metaphor, this would claim the capacity for holding multiple views, experiences, and truths without having to choose one, sustaining not just one person but guaranteeing the survival of many—a departure from the zero-sum culture of competition and dominance. Perhaps you resonate with one of these models more than the other. In any case, they are not mutually exclusive to our experience: the two can hold hands with one another.
 ​

PRACTICE
            The two diaphragms, solar plexus and pelvic floor, move together like a dance. Both naturally lift up when we breathe out, and both drop down when we breathe in. If this diaphragmatic tango is new to you, try lying on your belly with a pillow under your abdomen. Gravity accentuates the feeling of the belly pressing into the pillow in the inhale. Picture the diaphragm dropping into the abdomen, stretching the striations of muscle around the solar plexus like sunbeams. This, in turn, helps us ground, as we naturally align the pelvic diaphragm with the abdominal diaphragm, dropping downward on the inhale. If it’s elusive, consider placing a hand on the pelvic floor, receiving the added pressure when your belly swells. If possible, spend a little time reflecting on the experience. Does one or the other of these muscle groups feel more familiar, toned, or powerful to you, or do they feel balanced? Do you relate to one or the other as home-base for some material/essential (pun intended) quality of femininity? Are there any recurrent images or thoughts emerging?