illuminate I could
and so
illuminate I did
Lucille Clifton said that somewhere and it just sounds right. I don’t know what to write in these parts in these days. Those of you who’ve read my tiny little mother mind™ musings on the internets for nearly fifteen years might remember when I posted daily — even twice daily — and there was always something to say, something I’d noticed, something I was thinking about or experiencing and lord knows why I thought you’d be interested, but many of you were and those now seem like the good old days. The other night I was sitting in my dining room study library craft repository bar area of my house when I heard Sophie have what we call A Big Seizure. She was in her room down the hallway and around the corner but the groan the timbre the tone has traveled that path for decades and the minute the moment it reaches my ears I am up and there in her room leaning over her bed positioning her jerking limbs putting my hand under her neck as if it can help ease the contortion the grimace the back and forth eyes. It’s okay, I say, It’s okay. And it never does. Ease, that is. Ease anything. The groans gutter out the jerks become twitches the grimace slides into slack the eyes close. I sit next to her my hand on her small wrist and cry. Nothing has been nor is easy.
I wanted to write that and I wanted you to bear witness to that.
Tonight, when I’d finished teaching, I signed on to a Zoom lecture from The Huntington Library. The title was “Blasting Into Space: The Poetics of Faith and Astronomy in 17th Century England.” Here’s a bit of the description of the class:
In this lecture, Wendy Wall, Professor of the Humanities at Northwestern University, describes how 17th-century woman Hester Pulter, while sick and confined to her bedroom after giving birth to her 15th child, sought solace in an unusual way: she wrote poems about taking off into space to explore planets in the heliocentric universe. While intellectuals of the day feared that new conceptions of astronomy undermined cherished religious beliefs, Pulter was exhilarated in incorporating cutting-edge ideas about space into a new type of devotional poem. How can this relatively newly discovered female poet enlarge our understanding of ways that writers used poetry to interconnect religion, science, and the imagination? How might Pulter's poetry reveal previously unacknowledged ways that early modern women engaged in intellectual production and the mapping of the heavens, even from their remote estates or bedrooms?
This is the kind of stuff that sustains me, and I won’t even explain why because I imagine you get it. If you want to know more, you can go on this site and poke around.
https://pulterproject.northwestern.edu/#
Here’s an excerpt of one of Hester’s poems:
“Why Must I Thus Forever Be Confined”
For I no liberty expect to see Until to atoms I dispersed be; Then, being enfranchised, free as my verse, I shall surround this spacious universe, Until, by other atoms thrust and hurled, We give a being to another world
I wondered after listening to the remarkable lecture and reading the poetry of Hester Pulter who wasn’t “discovered” until 1996 who else how many thousands of women artists and writers and scientists and thinkers who bore babies or didn’t how many were out there and how many were lost? Sometimes it feels as if the weirdness of the world and the weirdness in my head is merging and while I know this is probably a great morass, a bog made of age and caregiving and watching one’s child have seizures for decades a pandamnic if not raging has rampaged through I’m compelled to write it down.
Here you go.
Witnessing, with you, and also yes often stuck on how many women throughout history have been unwitnessed, or dewitnessed, and how their erasure has enabled a narrative that tells us women like them never existed, and who we erase now and what narratives those erasures enable ...
I have from the very beginning when I found you, been grateful that you continue to write it down. I always leave here better than I came, with an iota more understanding perhaps of how much I cannot know, and the inspiration to pursue the knowing anyway, because we are in this together, all of us, and this whole heliocentric universe is made so much richer for your eye on it, and you pen translating it. You write like a sorceress, such brilliance and music and pain, and I imagine you keep writing because you know it is important for us to bear witness to it all, to be in this morass together, until our very atoms meld to create the new. I love you and yours, and hope Sophie has a good day, a good week, you too.