Sils Maria

From the broken shards of the self,

Lying around me like a shattered pane of glass

Dorian Gray’s mirror having been unable to sustain my image

Anymore,

The clouds of Sils Maria having filled the valley like a snake

Meandering as if to engulf everything in its path

With no curtains left to hide behind,

How many more lows remain to endure?

The failure of self-is evident

The lack of courage to be-is obvious

The pure inertia to write and think-is stark

We have no need to confess this yet again.

But here we are nevertheless,

And the tear wells up in grief,

As the accelerating years pile on,

And the deliverance remains elusive..

Deus ex machina long forgotten,

We have banished the meaningless rituals,

Forsaken the sacred texts that speak to a lost soul

After years of mining that archive for those midrashim

that “spoke” to my broken soul,

And, waiting for godot, we hunger now in silence.

Despite the cabin in the forest

“Walden Pond” in the key of G minor,

nothing bubbles up from the deep

the brook rushes below,

its healing sound gives peace

the crackling fireplace makes the wood glow

but the inner demons remain

gnawing at the corners of the mind

just below the surface of seeming calm water.

The mature mind does have some advantages

No longer rushing in to disastrous amours

The deeper sense of compassion seems to now

Hold the impulsiveness at bay

(remember how Sean Connery lies next to Catherine Zeta Jones

and refrains in a marvelous moment, realizing his age!) [1]

The release of the field of dreams, of work and career

Allows for reverie in places hitherto unknown.

Yet the sadness of what might have been

Does not let go.

The tragedy of decades of belief…

To the inner conviction…

That my intuition about love, life, and god

Was really true

Pervades my heart.

All that effort to come to this place of self-destruction?

Releasing these notions of truth, right, morality, theology,

To the snake-mist curling though the valley

Swallowing my dreams

Now lying in shattered shards

Around me below.

The Divine? It is beyond me. There is no access.

Love? I know less than ever what that means other than pain and torture.

The tricks of language and interpretation seem banal now…

The theology behind them lies in post-modern tatters,

Worse, the certainty is forever gone,

The comfort knowing the sacred text was always there for millennia

And I might add to that tradition of learned scholars

Might continue its tradition of exegesis

Is no longer,

And, as I listen to others, however brilliant, interpret,

I no longer have patience.

The liturgy has me mute

Unable to produce the sounds from my lead lips.

The words glare at me from the pages of the siddur like angry angels.

My father turns 95

A figure of middle European kultur

A Viennese Holocaust escapee, a kindertransport child,

then a British alien internee,

Quotes his Homer and Talmud effortlessly even now,

Swimming effortlessly between cultures of Athens and Jerusalem

He recounts his life and delights in his progeny

Describing it as one of survival, gratitude and pride.

Proudly asserting his Zionism without abashment,

I listen and marvel and his produced narrative, ever aware of his audience,

He speaks of the near death experiences during the war,

The U-boats, the fear, the near starvation,

the absence of the sight of a woman for close to three years,

The discovery on return of the loss of his entire family

The guilt of his survival

I sense his unspoken sense of betrayal of parents

on leaving the train station in Wien,

And my very existence the product of his unconscious betrayal

He makes no mention of my childhood years

the intervening years of poverty and struggle

The humiliation of self when faced with a spouse who lacked his Austrian

Frugality, whose demands were beyond his capability.

As a child I suffered his humiliation

I swore never to allow this to happen to me.

All this is omitted from the narrative

Or maybe his generosity of spirit disallows its expression.

His life

Its parts

Its ending

Its symmetry

His narrative description

All makes sense to him

And gives him pride and satisfaction

Seeing great grandchildren

And adoring grandchildren surrounding him.

My life however, seems the mirror image

It makes no sense

It has no overarching narrative

It feels the lack and bereft of meaning

It mourns the decades search which proved fruitless.

I feel like an orphan

Having combed the planet for master teachers-those of inspiration

I find no one out there who might help me anymore

And going inside

Deep inside

There is only the pain of childhood

Torment, abuse, the secret moves of survival, the lies deceits and betrayals

For self-preservation,

And the character defects that point at me in accusation

Proving my failures

In this inner court of law.

Yet in this snake of mist

Lies wisdom

For this very dark serpentine cloud formation

Signifies the fallen angel of Milton

Whose wisdom forced me out of the garden…

And in order to return I must relinquish that very discerning

Of good and evil

And self judgment

And bring compassion even to this dark space

To allow a new consciousness to arise

Percolate up from the depths of despair

Until the sun burns the Sils Maria

And the beautiful valley emerges from the disappearing snake

As if it has gifted its dying to me.

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0137494/