Place of Leaping

 

Place of Leaping

 

The dead tree quickens. Its leaves unfold

And become a pillar of gentle fire

That bursts into butterfly wings

And blood oranges over the tide pool

Where fresh and falling water joins the main.

 

Here, at the Place of Leaping,

Things turn into their opposites and turn again

Faster than the Monarch’s metamorphoses –

Larva into caterpillar, shell into winged soul –

Death into life, this side into the Other Side.

 

You listen to the Speaker in the tree

Who dares you to come to the edge

Telling you, “Leap now, or forever regret.”

You take off everything except your body

On the high cliff, and plunge like a diver.

 

The rocks call you and claim your flesh.

You are light as a white crane over the waves

But lose your direction until your old friends,

The dolphins, come to guide and carry you.

You stand on their backs like Aphrodite in the foam.

 

Your soul’s compass brings you across the churning sea

To welcoming faces, and places of rest and recollection

And the scholar-city, and the path of the Blue Star

Until you are called to dream your way back to us

With blue fire in your heart, singing a mermaid song.

- Robert Moss

Photo "Where Sweet Water Meets the Salt" by Robert Moss

The final metamorphosis of Ovid

In the year 8 of the common era, Augustus ordered that the poet Publius Ovidius Naso, better known to us as Ovid, should be exiled to the remotest outer reaches of the Roman Empire, to the Black Sea port of Tomis, in the thinly settled province of Moesia, for the term of his natural life. Tomis is known today as Constanţa. 
    We don't know why the emperor imposed this fierce punishment on the poet. Ovid referred to his commission of "a poem and an error". The poem may have been one of his erotic cycles, perhaps the Ars Amatoria, in which he offers laughing but explicit tips to both sexes on how to seduce each other; Augustus frowned on public discussion of such things, and the promiscuous behavior of his own daughter Julia made him very averse to the patrician party scene in which Ovid, when in Rome, appears to have been at home. The "error" may have been the poet's affiliation to a faction within the imperial family opposed to the power of poison queen Livia.
    As for what happened to Ovid after he arrived in the land of the Getae, in what is now southeastern Romania, we have the evidence of the poems he sent flying back to Rome like carrier pigeons, the Tristia and the Black Sea letters. In pleading mode, he exaggerates the rigors of the climate and the manners of the "barbarians" among whom he must now live. Reading his poetic epistles describing a frozen waste, you would never know that he was living at what is now a very popular summer resort. Yet we feel the depth of the pain of a wordsmith obliged to live among those who do not speak his own language when he declares: "Writing a poem you can read to no one is like dancing in the dark." 1
     If we track the poet's writings from exile across time, we see his attitudes evolving. He is learning the language of the Getae, and even composing poems in a local language, which might be Getic but could be the pidgin Greek of the coast; Tomis was founded by Greek colonists. How Ovid died, and where his body was interred, are historical mysteries.
    These are the facts, and the lacunae, which the wonderful Australian novelist and short storywriter David Malouf seized in order to create An Imaginary Life. The novel begins with a dream (perhaps the author's own?) attributed to Ovid. In boyhood, the poet dreams of an encounter with a wild Child who may or may not be a wolf as well as a boy. Nearly 60 years later, the dream is fulfilled, when the exiled poet meets a naked Child (always described like this, with the capital C) who speaks the language of birds and animals but no human tongue, and lives outside the walls of the fort where Ovid's Getic hosts shelter from the wild winters and the wilder Dacian horse-soldiers who come thundering over the frozen Danube.
    The poet makes it his project to teach the wolf boy human speech. But the Child is really his teacher, instructing him in the language of the birds, prising open his awareness until he can feel himself streaming with the animate world of nature about him, no longer separate. The mannered Roman poet of love, who recounted myths of gods and shapeshifters in his Metamorphoses with craft yet without conviction, starts to see and sense like a dream shaman.
     Malouf's Ovid reflects, early in his Black Sea sojourn,

We have some power in us that knows its own ends. It is this that drives us on to what we must finally become. We have only to conceive of the possibility and somehow the spirit works in us to make it actual. This is the true meaning of transformation. This is the real metamorphosis. Our further selves are contained within us, as the leaves and blossoms are in the tree. We have only to find the spring and release it. 2

     I like the way dreaming is developed as a theme in Malouf's novel. There is a fine description of a gathering experience of interactive dreaming in a scene where Ovid and the wild Child are sleeping under the same thatch. They may have been in contact

in our sleep, as we move through this room in the same liquid medium, as if floating together in a pool, some casual meeting of one dream with another, a flowing into his sleep, or his sleep into mine, at some point that the waking mind would not know of. 3

Malouf takes us further into the nature and importance of dreaming. It begins to dawn on his Ovid that the place he most wanted to avoid may be exactly where his soul needs him to be, the place where he will at last become the person he was intended to be. When he asks himself how this began to manifest, he reflects that

It begins at first, perhaps, in our dreams. Some other being that we have kept out of mind, whose thoughts we have never allowed to come to the tip of our tongue, stirs and in its own way begins to act in us. 4

Malouf imagines a scenario for Ovid's final metamorphosis and physical death. The headman who protected Ovid and the Child is dead, and his people think this is the work of a demonic animal that was brought among them by the boy. Now the poet and the boy are fleeing north across a sea of grass. And Ovid is changing. The ever-poised flâneur, rich and noble by inheritance, never short of words or self-importance, is relinquishing his old identity and streaming into something else. 

Slowly I begin the final metamorphosis. I must drive out my old self and let the universe in...Then we shall begin to take back into ourselves the lakes, the rivers, the oceans of the earth, its plains, its forested crags with their leaps of snow....The spirit of all things will migrate back into us. Then we shall be whole. 5

Wonderful writing, and a thrilling evocation of the dawning of a cosmic consciousness. 

I see us from a great height, two tiny figures parting the grassland with a shadowy crease as we move through it.. From a point far ahead I see us approaching, from a point a whole day's distance behind us, I see us moving away. 6

Now Ovid is coming close to a death he dreamed, long ago.
    I never suspended my disbelief that Malouf's narrator is the Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso. That may be partly because I know that Ovid - whatever he pretended to folks back home when trying to enlist sympathy - was not quite as remote from Greco-Roman culture as this narrative makes out. Tomis was still in many ways a Greek town, and there was a Roman governor and a Roman garrison, and some handsome buildings and elegant Grecian art, not just the thatched huts and Getic tribesmen of the novel. The people of Tomis treated Ovid with respect, exempting him from local taxes and paying tribute to him as a poet. 7
   But David Malouf's intention was not to write an historical novel, still less a biography but rather (as he states in an Afterword), "a fiction with its root in possible event." In this he succeeds brilliantly. As the Italians say, se non è vero, è ben trovato. "If it's not true, it's well found." 

NOTES
1. Epistulae ex Ponto IV 2:33-4. Translated by Peter Green in Ovid, The Poems of Exile: Tristia and the Black Sea Letters (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) 176.
2. David Malouf, An Imaginary Life (New York: Vintage International, 1996) 64.
3. ibid, 78.
4. ibid, 95.
5. ibid, 96
6. ibid 142
7. Peter Green, Introduction to Ovid, The Poems of Exile, xxxi

Graphic: Bronze statue of Ovid in the square of Constanţa

Let's become imaginal cells for collective transformation

In many cultures, the butterfly is a favorite image for soul. In Greek, the word psyche means both “soul” and “butterfly”. The cycle of the butterfly is a model for a life that is open to transformation. I know this to be true in an individual life. Let us hope that it is true for our kind on a collective level in these dark and crazy times.
     To spread butterfly wings, you must transform again and again. You must let your old identity collapse into mush. You must use your imaginal cells to overcome the resistance of the old you, the little you, who clings to what you once were. You will progress through four distinct life forms. Each time you change, those who knew your previous self may no longer be able to recognize you, because you will be radically, almost inconceivably different.
    The butterfly cycle begins with an egg, stuck on a leaf. Out from the egg comes a very hungry caterpillar that tries to eat all the green available. Eventually the caterpillar stops consuming and settles on the underside of another leaf, or perhaps in the bark of a tree. It grows a hard casing, the chrysalis. Inside the chrysalis, it turns into a restless mush, a stew of contending elements.
    In the chrysalis, as in an alchemical retort, the worm produces new cells. Science calls these imaginal cells. They are quite different from anything that has been active in the caterpillar before, so different that the killer cells in the worm's immune system target them as enemies that must be destroyed. The job of the killer cells is to resist transformation and defend the old identity of this life form as a caterpillar hungry for green
   Enough imaginal cells escape the murderous attack  to create friendly communities. They resonate with each other. They have a social network, reaching each other on the same frequency band. They gather together, and soon the imaginal movement is so strong the riot police and death squads of the immune system are overwhelmed. The revolution produces a life form that could not be imagined without the magic of the active imaginal community. It is the butterfly, ready to burst from the chrysalis on bright wings and sparkle in the light.
    I love the biologists' choice of name for the cells of transformation: imaginal. It evokes the Imaginal Realm, the realm of true imagination known to poets, mystics and shamans.
   The struggle inside the chrysalis between the defenders of the worm state and the agents of winged possibility is one that many of us surely experience in times of spiritual emergence. We may find ourselves pounded into mush, hanging upside down from whatever we can cling to - and yet have the possibility and destiny of becoming much, much more.
    You can't stay a worm, if you want to become a butterfly. You are obliged to drop  old attachments and expectations and let your old identity be broken down in the mush as a new identity emerges. And you must allow time for the new form to grow, and be fully prepared to take wing. Don’t rush the butterfly.
    There is a wonderful cautionary story about this in the autobiography of Nikos Kazantzakis, the celebrated author of Zorba the Greek. He found a cocoon in the bark of an olive tree. He saw that the butterfly was beginning to emerge. He watched for a time, then became impatient. He blew on the cocoon, intending to speed up the process of emergence with the warmth of his breath. To his delight, the butterfly emerged from the cocoon. But it had been brought out prematurely. Its wings were crumpled and unusable. They had needed the heat of the sun, not merely the hot air of a man with hurry sickness. The butterfly died in Kazantzakis’ hand. Towards the end of his life, he wrote, “That little body is the greatest weight I have on my conscience.”
    Don’t rush the butterfly, and don’t pronounce it dead prematurely. I learned about that when I started teaching at the Esalen Institute near Big Sur in California. On a chill November morning, on the path from the Big House to the ravine, I stopped with a foot in mid-air because I noticed  just in time that what I had taken for a fallen leaf was a Monarch butterfly, lying dormant with folded wings. As the sun’s rays streamed down, warming its body and drying its wings, the Monarch stirred and flew off, towards the gardens..

Let those of us who can dream and imagine become active imaginal cells in our society. Let's help to relegate the very hungry caterpillars to past history. Let's help each other survive the stew of confusion in which old fears and old habits try to abort transformation. Let's encourage each other to allow each locked-down environment to become the chrysalis in which something brighter and lovelier takes form. Let's support what is new and vital, and help our kind emerge from our time of confinement shining, spreading wings of fresh creativity and compassion and soul.

Text adapted from "The Change in the Very Hungry Caterpillar"in  The Boy Who Died and Came Back: Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist in the Multiverse by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Photo by Kevin Bruff on Flickr