Carolyn Grassi, Transparancies
(PANTOGRAPH PRESS)

Jack Foley

"Why, my dear, love was written all over your face."
          --Carolyn Grassi, "Perspective"

In Amor and Psyche: The Psychic Development of the Feminine, Jungian analyst Erich Neumann wrote, "The fundamental situation of the feminine...is the primordial relation of identity between daughter and mother. For this reason, the approach of the male always and in every case means separation." Neumann goes on: "An authentic encounter with another involves consciousness, hence the aspect of suffering and separation":

Psyche's act leads...to all the pain of individuation, in which a personality experiences itself in relation to a partner as something other...Psyche wounds herself and wounds Eros, and through their related wounds their original, unconscious bond is dissolved. But it is this two-fold wounding that first gives rise to love, whose striving it is to reunite what has been separated...Psyche's act is analogous to the deed of the hero who separated the original parents in order to produce the light of consciousness... But... there is one crucially and fundamentally different factor: although Psyche's act corresponds to the necessary development of consciousness, it is not an act of killing...Psyche's subsequent development is nothing other than an attempt to transcend, through suffering and struggle, the separation accomplished by her act. On a new plane, that is, in love and full consciousness, she strives to be reunited with him who had been separated from her and make whole again by a new union what necessity had impelled her to sacrifice.
Carolyn Grassi's Transparancies is a meditation on separation in this sense--separation, not loss. Grassi herself cites "the poetry of meditation"--a concept developed by Louis L. Martz in his book of that title:
The present study attempts to modify the view of literary history which sees a "Donne tradition" in English religious poetry. It suggests instead a "meditative tradition" which found its first notable example not in Donne but in Robert Southwell...Continental practices of meditation combined with the older traditions of primer and private prayer, and with the inward surge of Puritanism, to produce in the seventeenth century an era of religious fervor unmatched in English history.
Martz's book documents the way in which aspects of Catholicism stayed alive even in an England which was actively separating itself from the Catholic Church: "Continental methods of meditation could, and did, reach a large body of educated Englishmen, particularly those of a High Church tendency, who were by no means averse to all things Roman":
English religious poetry of the seventeenth century represents the impact of the continental art of meditation upon English poetical traditions.
Grassi herself describes "meditative poetry" as "a way of setting the stage visually for particular persons, places, scenes or events to interact and become presences who inform the poem." But for Martz (and for Grassi's poems) it is clearly more than that. "Toward the union of 'the powers of the soul,'" writes Martz, "Herbert's 'simplicity,' or Yeats's 'Unity of Being'--toward such a principle, by disciplined effort, the meditative poet makes his way, while creation of the poetry plays its part in the struggle." As it functions in Transparencies, meditative poetry is an attempt to bring together (not necessarily to "unify") various scattered, potentially contradictory aspects of the self. It tells the story of a spiritual development which proceeds by separation and which constantly struggles against loss. It suggests a religious impulse which is always mistaking itself for an erotic one--or is it an erotic impulse which is always mistaking itself for a religious one? "The past," writes Grassi, "is buried in layers of our sensual memory. We need only recover what is waiting within." The assurance of that last sentence is perhaps misleading. The concluding poem of the book, "To Lose," ends in affirmation: "It is now that I recall your voice." "Recovery"--at least for the poet--is certainly suggested here. Yet for us, the readers, there is no "voice": only the silence of the written word, "voice." As readers, we "hear" nothing: we only long for hearing. The book constantly balances us between "recovery"--the past made intensely present--and intense nostalgia, longing:
                After years of separation, finally
they're together. Hesitant, standing close

in the crowd, she fears offending those
who love them. Suddenly they're again

separated
Transparencies begins with Grassi's "Orkney Ancestors," people who "perhaps / set tall stones in a circle / to lure the dawn." Light is a considerable issue throughout the book, especially when it is a question of "Light and darkness commingling." Grassi remembers her own childhood "in Flatbush / as we ran to the lamp-post at dusk." The poem reveals a closely-guarded family secret--Aunt Nancy's webbed toes--and finally settles on Grassi's grandmother
               sitting for hours under the maples lining

Prospect Park where the last light
filtered past her Second Streets rooms
before it torched the Statue of Liberty.
Other poems tell of childhood enthusiasms--"An avid Brooklyn Dodger fan I exchanged / ten Elsie Borden Ice-cream wrappers / for a free pass to a Saturday game"--and of trips to places like Owl's Head Park, Jacob Riis Park Beach and Bash-Bish Falls. Past and future hover near each other in these pieces ("In six years I'll enter / the convent overlooking the Hudson River"). The central poem of this section is "Daphne and Apollo in Brooklyn," the story of Grassi's unrequited love for Jimmy Morris. Here, unlike the Greek legend, the story is of a woman pursuing a man. The poem even suggests that the boy's rejection of Grassi is a strong cause of her becoming a nun: "The legend says Daphne ran, / Apollo pursued. I entered the convent." In the convent, however,
                 I fell
in love with Joe. We married secretly
at Saint Mark's rectory in Greenwich Village
under a poster of Che Guevera.
The poet remembers a close woman friend of her childhood--also rejected in a romance--who dies young of a brain tumor: "She was the smartest, funniest, prettiest, / wildest girl I ever knew." There is also a moving reminiscence of the poet's father, who died young: "young, handsome, indestructible / or so we thought at age six or seven." The poem is specific and has no religious implications, yet its title, "Our Father," obviously suggests the Lord's Prayer. Throughout the book, there is a kind of deliberate confusion between men the poet has loved and God. Christ Himself is imagined as a "magnificent man swimming among angels." Commenting on her diversity of subjects, Grassi remarks that "No one 'voice' of the self comes through in these poems, rather the 'voices' of different times, places and versions of myself and of those I have loved."

Grassi writes of her "voluntary celibacy" in the convent, when she was "eighteen to twenty-five":

                 I suppress those places we're supposed to

ignore. Desire hides in Latin phrases
floating across the summer air
beyond dunes and a pine forest.
She speaks eloquently "Of that generation influenced by John XXIII":
                we were restless, rebellious about the Rule,
seeking "authenticity" and "personal growth,"
buzz words affecting our life-style, meaning
many would leave, including myself.
She suggests that her leaving the convent is linked to the early death of her father:
                My faith falters. I've never accepted the fact
of my father dying young.

*

Perhaps his dying six years later,
at age 51, created the crisis
I needed to question my vocation.
As the loss of a man was a factor in her entering the convent, so the loss of a man is a factor in her leaving it as well.

The central incident of the book is recounted in the third section, in which Grassi describes a love affair--perhaps imagined--with a man who, finally, like Jimmy Morris, rejects her. The pain of this loss (which may also involve growth) stays with the poet to some degree throughout the rest of the book. "Were kisses worth such anguish?" she asks:

               "What happened? An infatuation?"
"I suppose so."...

"Will we meet again?" "No, never.
Remember, I'm only your doorway."
"Please. Just one more weekend."
Transparencies becomes in the end a book about healing the dual wounds of love and consciousness. After "falling from grace," Grassi asks, "Is / pardon possible? Who will absolve me?" No savior appears, but there is a powerful, maternal sense of "Sanctuary" in the West:
                God's messenger smiles,
His tattered wings held close. Thunder and lightning.
Cymbals and hand-clapping. Sunlit wing-tips.
Colors swirl in the stained glass windows telling
the story of her life. The divine child rests in her
arms.
No grief or hope goes unattended. Every hour
of every day the door near her alcove stays open...
Grassi even rewrites the Orpheus and Eurydice legend. Usually a parable of loss, it becomes in her hands an emblem of "those who play in regions bordering / heaven and earth, night and day, loving and letting-go, caressing and waving goodbye." Amazingly, she sees the story as a way of "conjuring love's magic potion...reinventing hope,"
                as Eurydice sings by
Orpheus' ear, their emerging in light.
(Note that it is Eurydice, not Orpheus, who is singing.)

Transparencies is a fascinating attempt to reinvent not only "hope" but an entire life, a life which attempts, in an extraordinarily problematical way, to live in the example of John XXIII: to remain simultaneously spiritual and open to the world. ("Authenticity" and "personal growth" are "buzz words" that apply here too.) Even failure, death and rejection may be seen ("reinvented") as the portals of discovery. The moral of the book is stated in a quotation from Iris Murdoch: "There is only one absolute imperative, the imperative to love." Yet the center of Grassi's vision is an erotic longing which can never quite determine whether it desires the human or the divine, and which experiences the human and the divine as to some degree in conflict, so that "transgression" is a frequent, necessary component of "falling in love." And: "Love can play havoc / or lead to healing." One cannot live without desire, but desire is, Grassi states in the concluding poem,

                        a burning coal
in the heart of the rose.

Jack Foley


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