Robert Sward

Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County, 2016-2018

Muse 2

Writing a novel is like driving along a road at night with only one’s headlights to see by and the headlights illuminate the way… a couple car lengths ahead. So says my friend, novelist Jim Houston. And that’s what I feel now with this current project, Dr. Sward’s Cure for Melancholia.

I’m a fraud unless I can deliver on the promise, A Cure for Melancholia. I’m a fraud unless I can –with the help of the muse—tell a story that will engage the reader, a story that I would have liked to have come across when I was, well, just barely keeping on keeping on. At the same time I’m writing this for myself and maybe one other person. An audience of one, two people… that would make it worthwhile. This Blog, by the way, is going on in the foreground while the “other,” its counterpart, Dr. Sward’s Cure…, is going on somewhere else. But the one complements the other. Truth is, I need the one in order to write the other.

The muse Calliope had two sons, Orpheus and Linus, by Apollo, the god of prophecy, sunlight, music, and healing. Calliope was the oldest and wisest of the Muses. She was also the judge in the argument over Adonis between Aphrodite and Persephone, giving each equal time with him. She was represented by a stylus and wax tablets.

“She is always seen with a writing tablet in her hand. At times she is depicted as carrying a roll of paper or a book or wearing a gold crown.” (Wikipedia).

The muses are typically invoked at or near the beginning of a, well, let’s call it a “project.” Mine: Dr. Sward’s Cure for Melancholia. Muses are sometimes represented as the true speaker of the poem, for whom the poet is only a mouthpiece. So, in that sense, I have Calliope—and my prayer she will favor me—and, as well, my father. I invoke Calliope. I invoke Dr. Sward, my father. [I just read this posting aloud to my love who says, “No, your father is not a muse. It doesn’t work.” Hmm. Well,if he’s not a muse, can he at least be an inspiration?]

Meanwhile, a publisher has expressed (tentative, cautious…) interest in one or another of my works in progress. However, the work, whatever it is, would not appear in print until 2011 or 2012. Okay, I can live with that. I count myself lucky.

I read the following aloud to my love, who prefers that to the word “wife.” I’ve been married four times and two of the four objected to the word “wife.” “No, I’m not your wife. You don’t own me,” said one. And my love, my partner for 20 years, says she objects because “wife” is mundane, domestic and unromantic. And, too, I suppose because I’ve been married so many times.

Invoking the muse is not merely a literary device. I’m not so sure we’d even have Homer’s Odyssey, Dante’s Inferno and Milton’s Paradise Lost if they had unsuccessfully invoked the muse. No muse, no poem. These, for me, are classic examples of poets invoking…

“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.” (Homer, in Book 1 of The Odyssey, Robert Fagles, translation, 1996).

“O Muses, O high genius, aid me now!
O memory that engraved the things I saw,
Here shall your worth be manifest to all!” (Dante Alighieri, in Canto II of the Inferno, Anthony Esolen translation, 2002).

“Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
Sing, Heavenly Muse…” (John Milton, Opening of Book 1 of Paradise Lost).

The British poet Robert Graves writes, “No Muse-poet grows conscious of the Muse except by experience of a woman in whom the Goddess is to some degree resident… A Muse-poet falls in love, absolutely, and his true love is for him the embodiment of the Muse…”

I’m not in their league. I’m not even sure why I write. Most of my high school friends became lawyers. They made money. They earned a living. One became hard-living, death-defying adventurer Evel Knievel’s personal lawyer. So I’m told. Do lawyer’s have muses? Do depressed poets have muses? Anyway, I’m not a poet. Not like… “those guys.” Twenty books, twenty-five books, thirty books… scribble scribble scribble. Time I could better have spent with my children. Five children I have. Five grandchildren. Five wives, truth be told. What have I accomplished? Fuck all. Fuck all. Most of my books are out of print. Who reads this shit?

Fuck you. Fuck you!! says Calliope.

Well, not all women object. I invoke my muse, my love, my not wife:

The poem is called 108,000 WAYS OF MAKING LOVE.

“Her lips are full, magenta-red
in color—

“Bare-chested, she wears a yellow silk
loin cloth
I cup my right hand
under her blue chin
and bend to kiss her,
encircling her waist with my left arm…” Etc.

Then there’s KISS BITE AND MOO SOFTLY

“—Muse voice is loved woman mumbling.

“Going shopping with the muse
you come away buying the right things:
rare books and cashmere pullovers for him,
silk dresses, a gold and amethyst necklace for her…” Etc.

And one ON HER 60TH BIRTHDAY…

“’Beautiful, splendid, magnificent,
delightful, charming, appealing,’
says the dictionary.
And that’s how I start… But I hear her say,
‘Make it less glorious and more Gloria.” Etc.

And so it is I (also) call upon my father. In some sense I see him as a celestial parent. He’s dead. He’s willing to communicate with me. I may be crazy, it’s true, but he’s an inspiration, in part, because I need him and he wasn’t much present when he was alive. I’m getting more juice from him now. I’m getting more of what I need from him now. The sonofabitch, selfish selfish, we have that in common, for sure. Anyway, he owes me. He owes me lots of poems, good shit that’ll do me some good and him some good. I think he needs me. I think he’s a little lonely, in heaven, no doubt, still something of an outsider. Celestial, he may be, but still an outsider.

So I idealize him, it serves my purpose. He wasn’t much of a father alive, sad to say, but at least he didn’t leave. He didn’t walk. He just wasn’t there. The man was selfish, totally self-involved. Even as a child. So said his sister, the one relative with whom I connected. So he went on his occult trip. Jewish Rosicrucian bullshit. And it suits me fine. So I went to be with Swami Muktananda. From 1973 to 1982 I did that shit. Who’s to say? It may have done me some good.

Bibble babble. Why are you reading this shit? Don’t you have a life of your own? Dear reader, this is how he appears to me. This is what one reader calls an “idealization.” “Okay, Dad,” I’m thinking, “You owe me. Gimme a poem, okay? Gimme a whole bunch of poems and make ‘em good or when I see you again you’re really gonna hear from me. Jesus. Jesus.”

“Masked man in the half light,
Starched white jacket and pants…”
(“God’s Podiatrist”, p. 147, The Collected Poems)

*

“Wears a denim shirt, bola tie,
turquoise and silver tip,
tanned, tennis-playing, macho…”
(“Good News from the Other World”, p. 144)

*

“Greets me in the waiting room,
father with waxed,
five-eyelet shoes;
son, too, with spit-shine, five-eyelet shoes.
This is how I was brought up. I do it
to show respect.
Value your feet.”
“Arch Supports–The Fitting”, p. 145)
*

So, what is the cure for melancholia? And if one experiences the “de-materialization” of one’s mind, as I did, no mind, okay? No imagination. No… nothing. Zombie-hood. Fucked to hell empty shell of a poet. A poet? I don’t dare call me that. Fuck. I’m a journalist. A feature writer at best. Scribble Scribble Scribble.

Say, Dr. Sward, say one’s mind de-materializes. Is it possible to get it back again? No imagination. Zilch. Nothing. The best thing that happened to me besides everything else is she stayed with me. That’s “…in sickness and in health.” That’s stayin’ with someone. And she even tells me when to shut up. Enough already!”

Muse 1


Fire lives the death of earth,
And air lives the death of fire;
Water lives the death of air,
Earth that of water.
–Heraclitus

So these days I invoke the muse, Calliope (the “beautiful of speech”, chief of the muses…)

Find I’m unable to write at this time without at least touching a photo of the Simon Vouet painting, “The Muses Urania and Calliope,” in which Calliope is holding a copy of the Odyssey.

I “call upon a greater power or a spirit for help…”

Like my love, a visual artist (it was she, by the way, who drew the image that appears above) I start with a blank canvas. And it doesn’t get easier… not even after 50 years. I first began writing because in a sense I didn’t know any better. Started, really, when I was 18, an enlisted man, a sailor aboard Landing Ship Tank, LST 914, an amphibious ship so insignificant it didn’t have a name.

I was the ship’s librarian. So I read and read, Shakespeare, Whitman, Herman Melville, Carl Sandburg, a biography of Abraham Lincoln, even an account of the coming to be of the Tennessee Valley Authority. I also read and re-read catalogs of the parts we might need to repair our ship, a relic of World War 2. To this day I read and collect catalogs.

The Navy was my muse. And the books. And being away from home (Chicago) for the first time. Poems, scribblings, like letters from a distant land.

I sometimes look up the meanings of all the words in poem. I look up the meaning of the word “the.” The word “poem.” The word “love.” All those things the definitions of which I need to be reminded.

So it is with the word “Muse.” “A source of inspiration for an artist, especially a poet… One of the nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, goddess of memory. (This from Encarta World English Dictionary and, in truth, Encarta, Webster, Oxford, New Century, et al, have served as muses. I am thinking of poems of mine like “The Apteryx (1/35) of Webster’s Dictionary”; “For Gloria On Her 60th Birthday”; and a poem titled, simply, “My Muse” –all from the Collected Poems, 1957-2004, Black Moss Press.).

Thanks and credit to Gloria K. Alford for the black and white muse etching which appears at start of this “post.” This is one in an edition of ten.

Santa Cruz


Our major holiday is Holloween. More than Christmas, more than New Year’s… people dress up, wear what they want year round. I love the place.

It used to be called the PACIFIC GARDEN MALL. Now it’s just DOWNTOWN.

White lace undies worn over her jeans.
a carton of Rice Dream Milk and a reefer.

Her boyfriend: “I’ll say anything you want me to say,
buy anything you want me to buy…”

One man dressed as a chicken, another
as a Viking, wears helmet with horns.

Two cops in shorts,
guns, mace and handcuffs. This is the pot of gold, the end of the rainbow.

Forest Primeval in a silent version of the movie Evangeline.
Santa Clara in Joe Schumacher’s The Lost Boys.
San Pablo in Clint Eastwood’s Sudden Impact,
location for native daughter Zazu Pitts’ movie Thunder Mountain,
location—a crumbling 1940s resort—for Jack Lemmon’s The Entertainer.

Foxy (foxy?) lady in ankle-length granny floral dress,
wide belt / rhinestone buckle /Birkenstocks
another picketing with a sign, “Down with good grooming!”

Doodling.

Rosicrucian in the Basement

…third posting in a sequence on Imagination.

Dad was a “small businessman,” industrious, hardworking, serious about his profession, a mid-western Republican, anything but an alchemist, yet there he was in a suburban Skokie, Illinois, basement with his “liquid-filled crystal flask and yellow glass egg on the altar…” transforming what he felt to be “base” [about himself] into gold. That was his secret. That’s where he went when he wasn’t busy making money.

“There are two worlds,” he says, lighting incense, “the seen
and the unseen, and she doesn’t understand.
This is my treasure,” he says,
lead cooking in an iron pan,
liquid darkness and some gold…”

A teenager I had no idea what it was all about. My sister and stepmother thought he was crazy, but they tolerated his Rosicrucian practice as long as he kept it out of sight—in the basement.

And when I returned from India after spending a month in Ganeshpuri with Swami Muktananda, I felt superior. Callow, the word “callow” comes to mind. What did I know? And then, in the 1990s, I began “hearing” his voice, loud and clear. I began hearing and writing in that voice maybe ten years ago. My little book, Rosicrucian in the Basement, appeared in 2001, published by Marty Gervais’ Black Moss Press (Canada).

Imagination. Yeah. Something kicked in. I’m still hearing the voice. The thing takes on a life of its own. The things the kid in the poem sees and comments on. His interactions with his father. This is dad, new and improved in some respects, old and more bizarre than ever in others. But the thing is true. And, dead since 1982, dead and buried, he’s no less a part of my life now than he was. A little more playful these days and, too, helpful in 2003 when I fucking lost my mind.

ROSICRUCIAN IN THE BASEMENT

i.
“What’s to explain?” he asks.
He’s a closet meditator. Rosicrucian in the basement.
In my father’s eyes: dream.
“There are two worlds,” he says,
liquid-filled crystal flask
and yellow glass egg
on the altar.
He’s the “professional man”—
so she calls him, my stepmother.
That, and “the Doctor”:
“The Doctor will see you now,” she says,
working as his receptionist.
He’s a podiatrist—foot surgery a specialty—
on Chicago’s North Side.
Russian-born Orthodox Jew
with zaftig Polish wife, posh silvery white starlet
Hilton Hotel hostess.

ii.
This is his secret.
This is where he goes when he’s not making money.
The way to the other world is into the basement
and he can’t live without this other world.
“If he has to, he has to,” my stepmother shrugs.
Keeps door locked when he’s not down there.
Keeps the door locked when he is.
“Two nuts in the mini-bar,” she mutters, banging pots
in the kitchen upstairs.
Anyway, she needs to protect the family.
“Jew overboard,” she yells, banging dishes.
“Peasant!” he yells back.

iii.
“There are two worlds,” he says lighting incense, “the seen
and the unseen, and she doesn’t understand.
This is my treasure,” he says,
lead cooking in an iron pan,
liquid darkness and some gold.
“Son, there are three souls: one, the Supernal;
two, the concealed
female soul, soul like glue…
holds it all together…”
“And the third?” I ask.
We stand there, “I can’t recall.”
He begins to chant and wave incense.
No tallis, no yarmulke,
just knotty pine walls and mini-bar
size of a ouija board,
a little schnapps and shot glasses
on the lower shelf,
and I’m no help.
Just back from seven thousand dollar trip,
four weeks with Swami Muktananda,
thinking
Now there’s someone who knew how to convert
the soul’s longing into gold.
Father, my father: he has this emerald tablet
with a single word written on it
and an arrow pointing.

2.
JESUS

“What’s with the cross? You believe in Jesus, dad?”
“What?”
“Are you still a Jew?”
He turns away.
“Dammit, it’s not a religion, farshtehst?”
Brings fist down on the altar.
“We seek the perfection of metals,” he says,
re-lighting stove,
“salvation by smelting.”

“But what’s the point?” I ask.

“The point? Internal alchemy, shmegegge. Rosa mystica,” he shouts.
Meat into spirit, darkness into light.”

Seated now, seated on bar stools.
Flickering candle in a windowless room.
Visible and invisible. Face of my father
in the other world.
I see him, see him in me
my rosy cross
podiatrist father.
“I’m making no secret of this secret,” he says,
turning to the altar.
“Tell me, tell me how to pray.”
“Burst,” he says, “burst like a star.”

3.
ROSY CROSS FATHER

“Yes, he still believes. Imagine—
American Jews,
when they die,
roll underground for three days
to reach the Holy Land.
He believes that.”

We’re standing at the Rosicrucian mini-bar listening,
(clash of pots in the kitchen upstairs)
father
with thick, dark-rimmed glasses
blue-denim shirt,
bristly white mustache,
dome forehead.

“Your stepmother’s on the phone with her sister,” he says.

“He thinks he can look into the invisible,”
she says from above.
“He thinks he can peek into the other world,
like God’s out there waiting for him…
Meshugge!”

She starts the dishwasher.

“As above, so below,” he says.
“I’m not so sure,” I say.
“Listen, everyone’s got some stink,” he says,
grabbing my arm,
“you think you’re immune?”
I shake my head.

“To look for God is to find Him, “ he says.
“If God lived on earth,” she says, “people would knock out
all His windows.”
“Kibbitzer,” he yells back. “Gottenyu! Shiksa brain!”

Father turns to his “apparatus,”
“visual scriptures,” he calls them,
tinctures and elixirs,
the silvery dark and the silvery white.

“We of the here-and-now, pay our respects
to the invisible.
Your soul is a soul,” he says, turning to me,
“but body is a soul, too. As the poet says,
‘we are the bees of the golden hive of the invisible.’”
“What poet, Dad?”
“The poet! Goddammit, the poet,” he yells.

He’s paler these days, showing more forehead,
thinning down.

“We live in darkness and it looks like light.
Now listen to me: I’m unhooking from the world, understand?
Everything is a covering,
contains its opposite.
The demonic is rooted in the divine.
Son, you’re an Outside,” he says,
“waiting for an Inside.
but I want you to know…”
“Know what, Dad?”
“I’m gonna keep a place for you in the other world.”

Reading / Imagination


Picking up where we left off:

I couldn’t read either. Seems to me there’s a connection between IMAGINATION and the ability to engage and really enjoy reading. I think of Shakespeare and Walt Whitman and William Blake, who wrote, “To see a world in a grain of sand, / And a heaven in a wild flower, / Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, / And eternity in an hour.”

He also said, “IMAGINATION is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.”

Dictionary: IMAGINATION: the ability to form images and ideas in the mind, especially of things never seen or never experienced directly.

So, in one sense, IMAGINATION is an ability to do something, form images and ideas in the mind. A second definition, “the part of the mind where ideas, thoughts, and images are formed,” refers to the mind itself, that “part” of the mind where, in fact, acts of IMAGINATION occur. I wonder where in the mind this happens. And why, taking an antidepressant, SSRI, short circuited my ability to dream, let alone read or write. But, in fairness, some of this loss of IMAGINATION, loss of juice, loss of vitality preceded the antidepressants.

Peter Ackroyd’s BLAKE, A BIOGRAPHY, says it best. Page 148:

“No one who reads Paracelsus [an itinerant scholar and physician born in the late 15th century] can remain unaffected by him and an artist such as Blake, slowly coming to believe in his own prophetic and spiritual mission could only have been exalted and exhilarated by the celebration of the imagination in his writings.

“’I know of no other Christianity and of no other Gospel,’ Blake later wrote, ‘than the liberty both of body & mind to exercise the Divine Arts of the Imagination.’ This is the central truth of Paracelsus, who declared that ‘Imagination is like the sun. The sun has a light which is not tangible; but which, nevertheless, may set a house on fire.’

“The great truth of the universe lies within the human imagination; it is the source, the sun, and those who understand its powers are the lords of all created things. The world of Paracelsus is filled by spirit, with the elements of mercury, salt and sulphur as its trinity of dwelling places, and in his extraordinarily successful treatment of disease he considered the body as a form or definition of the soul itself. Of course Blake need not necessarily have learnt this from Paracelsus,” says Peter Ackroyd, “he [Blake] could have found it within his own heart.”

Image of Santa Cruz / sunset thanks to Wikipedia.

Imagination


When I “lost” my mind I also lost the ability to easily form images and ideas in my mind. “Easily”? It’s never been that easy… but losing my mind meant losing the juice, losing some vital energy, losing, in some sense, the core of my being. Sounds a little pompous, I know. I can’t help it. I am writing now as a passably sane human about a time when, oh, shit! I felt something less than human. At one point my wife called me a zombie, and she was right. I knew it at the time and it didn’t take an act of imagination to know she was right. Another time she called me a “ghost in a white bathrobe,” and again she was right. It didn’t take an act of imagination to know she was right because that’s exactly what I felt. And it’s hard to hide things from her. But she stuck by me at a time when someone else might have said, “You need to be committed.”

I read aloud to her what I’ve just written and she says, “That’s extreme, honey. I knew you’d get past it [i.e., the loss of my imagination] and I’d never have committed you. There’s loss as in ‘lost and found’ and there’s ‘irretrievably lost.’ That’s called death,” she says.

Anyway, do you commit someone to an institution for losing their imagination? Reason enough if the person’s a writer and the imagination shuts down and the person—even in his own mind—realizes he’s, well, “in trouble.” I’m making light of it, feeling detached enough to gingerly make a joke. Four years. Another life time.

“What was it like?” she asks. She trusts I’ll come up with a description, nothing fancy, just some crude approximation. We seldom talk about “the time,” “the setback,” the “you know…” And when we do we avoid the word “depression,” preferring “melancholia,” which, for me, calls up Robert Burton’s work, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621 (Full title The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Historically, Opened and Cut up). The work through five revised and expanded editions.

Sorry. I’m an ex-English teacher, now retired, and sometimes lapse into lecture mode. Anyway, what was it like: Imagine your color TV going black and white and, then, taking a turn for the worse, everything appearing fuzzy and unreal. It’s not so much that television is a wasteland, but you yourself are an extension, a hollowed out counterpart of the very horror that you are watching. You’re there, but you’re not in the picture, you’re not in your right mind, you’re not in your life. You’re a zombie staring blankly blank blank at the wasteland that is TV. Truly, a stranger in a strange land.

–
Soul retrieval becomes [in addition] the retrieval of the imagination. Retrieve one and you retrieve the other. And, the inability to sleep tied in with the inability to dream which tied in with the inability to imagine… well, there were exaggerations and misunderstandings, as in the inability to register clearly the “back story,” say, or people’s intentions in saying what they said. But that’s very different from what we mean by the word “imagination,” especially when the word is applied to a literary work, a poem, a story, a novel… a work of imagination. I frightened myself.

The Immigrant and the Beauty Queen

My parents met in 1927 and married in 1929, just in time for the Depression. My sister jokes they fell in love with one another’s good looks. In photos from the 1920s Dad looks like a cross between Charlie Chaplin and Errol Flynn. Ambitious, hardworking, he longed to become a physician, but because of the Depression, he turned instead to podiatry.

In his 70s, he moved to Palm Springs, where he passed the California board exam and started a second successful practice. In his early 80s, even after heart surgery, he continued to work.

Hyman David Swerloff (1880-1929), father of my father, was an orthodox Jew, and the first Sward. In 1905, in the company of other survivors of government-sponsored pogroms, Hyman and his family journeyed from Poltava, Russia, to New York City. Immigration authorities at Ellis Island changed the Russian “Swerdloff” to the more American “Sward,” as in “greensward, turf green with grass.” In Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, for example, the poet speaks of “A thick carpet of most delicious greensward.” So it was a twenty-five-year-old Russian tailor immigrated to America to have thrust upon him a name with Old English roots dating back to A.D. 900.

An aside: My Dad’s sister, my Aunt Leah, described the pogroms, the Czar and his followers on horseback charging into Poltava, beating and killing Jews for no reason. For me, the word “Liberal” has a wonderfully positive connotation because Leah would say, “and then there were Liberals, good Czars who kept the peace, who cared… no men on horseback.”

The World is Broken

In this series– the poems in my father’s voice–I’m not so much writing as channeling. I hear them being spoken, then copy them onto the page and do the usual editing, the reading aloud, the looking up of words in a dictionary. While some have what my friend Peter Klappert calls “the musical attributes of lineated poetry,” they appear on the page as prose paragraphs. It’s just the form they take. Whatever the form, may you, dear reader, hear in them the rhythm of conversation.

—

THE WORLD IS BROKEN

Podiatrist Father:

“What? What do you think I am? I’m alive, I’m dead. Same as everyone else. And you? You’re the one who’s deadened. You got a wife, she wants a divorce. You got another wife. She wants a divorce. Now *Eudaimonia is gone. And you, you want a divorce from—who? Yourself? So. One side of the self is at war with the other? The question is: Which side is which? So divorce yourself and see what happens. You think the world is broken? Of course it’s broken. Enough! Enough! Thoughts have souls. Souls have souls. Everything’s a covering. And you, with that mug of yours, what are you covering? Tell me, What is a human being? What makes a person a person?

“Yes, you’re broken. And yes, you’re only visiting your life. So, fine, fine. Why not live then as if you were still among the living? Don’t start eternity being depressed.”

[reprinted from Ambit #190, The “Dr. Sward’s Cure series,” Fall, 2007]

* Eudaimonia, virtue, conscience. Eu, it means ‘happy.’ Daimon, ‘spirit.’ Eudaimonia you need, order you need to be happy!

Dr. Drug Rep


Oh, and by the way…

Dr. Drug Rep
By DANIEL CARLAT
During a year of being paid to give talks to doctors about
an antidepressant, a psychiatrist comes to terms with the
fact that taking pharmaceutical money can cloud your
judgment.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/magazine/25memoir-t.html?th&emc=th

Yep, drug rep pens now a popular item on eBay!