Myth of Arrival

"Your way was through the sea; your paths through the great waters. Your footsteps were not known." — Psalm 77:19, World English Bible.

You would think with a reference like that found in Psalms Christians would put more fuss and importance about our destruction of these "sweetwater seas." After all, it is not everyone who lives at the shores of the world's biggest set of fresh water lakes and Michigan is, curiously, made up mostly of Judea-Christian stock.

I am not sure where I first heard the term "sweetwater sea," as reference to the Great Lakes. Perhaps it was something the early Jesuits called it. It sounds like something Father Baraga might have written back home about, as he hiked up and down the coast of Lake Superior, debasing the local populous. Regardless, he is gone but the name remains. It's too bad Judea-Christian belief does not honor all this sweetwater the way they honor the manifestation of the divine in human form. It's a shame that our monolithic sky-father religions do not hold water dear, especially since they came from the arid, desert parts of the world where water is scarce. Other peoples do:

Water, essential to life on earth, has occupied a preeminent place in religious thought and imagery, together with the land and sky. In many cultures it is considered procreative, a source of forms and of creative energy. The life giving property of water has been projected in its almost universal perception as fons et origo, "spring and origin," the element that preceeds solid form and is the support of all earthly creation. In this context, from remote times to the present, among peoples who have perceived the world in terms of sacred and profane phenomena, springs, ponds and lakes have figured importantly in the realm of water symbolism. In many regions of the world where lakes are major geographic features, they often have been the setting of cosmogonic myths and have been invested with many meanings, historical associations and ritual functions. (Townsend, 429)

I say it is a shame that our modern religions do not deify water. Not just these sweetwaters but any body of water since without some sense of piety to a deity we will continue to pollute and destroy our last sources of fresh water.

Yesterday I mused on Shintoism, the Japanese nature religion and the idea of finding the kami in Lake Michigan. That is, the god-like essence of the lake, both in the lake itself and the spirits that might still reside in it. One thing that bothered me about some of the supporters of Shinto was the insistence that it was a belief impossible to grasp by non-Japanese people. However, the veneration of nature is a common thread found around the world. The Inca People of southern Peru and northwestern Bolivia hold a similar theological belief:

In Andean religion the border between the notion of deities and the phenomena of nature was entirely open, with emphasis placed on direct communication with the elements of nature. The worship of huacas and major nature deities was a basic theme of Andean religion. A huaca was an object or phenomenon that was perceived to have unusual presence or power beyond the range of everyday life, where the sacred may have been manifested or where the memory of some past momentous event resided … This belief system was closely tied to the formation of sacred geographies and formed part of a cosmological religion with an array of gods associated with natural epiphanies. (Townsend, 430)

Is the concept of huaca so different than that of kami? With this nature ethos the Inca could personify the angry storm waters that covered their mountain lake of Titicaca into Copacti, a jealous lake goddess that would not tolerate the worship of other deities by her people; "she was known to have toppled temples or submerged them under the waters of Lake Titicaca." (Coulter, 132) But this current culture that holds sway over the fate of the Great Lakes has no such beliefs. To pollute the lakes is just that, a little more industrial run-off, a little more PCPs; and it shows as the level of pesticides, pollutants, poisons in the lake waters rises each year. Now it is no longer safe to eat fish from our lakes. We have made the home of these huaca foul and corrupt.

The storms have stopped, though the waves are never
still. In our wake an oily path shimmers
just like footprints across a sweetwater
sea. A few large clouds over the schooner's
two masts; somewhere near shore turkey vultures
spin, turn. That is the closest the divine
will show itself on these choppy waters.
There is nothing here malign or benign,
evil or good. The waves on this shoreline
just are. Like you just are, this boat, these storm
clouds. And though the little waves make a whine
in your ears, you cannot read them. Gnats swarm
over your face; and your oily boat's wake
hides the footprints that crisscrosses the lake.

Works Cited:

Coulter, Charles Russell and Patricia Turner. Encyclopedia of Ancient Deities. London: McFarland & Co. (2000)

Townsend, Richard F. "Lakes." The Encyclopedia of Religion, vol. 8. Editor in chief Mircea Eliade. New York, N.Y.: Macmillan. (1987)

Having pneumonia is a strange thing. It attacks the lungs and fills them with fluid. You'd thing someone as interested in the mythic qualities of water as I am would welcome flood-like lungs, but no. I lay in bed with a fever and then chills. Everything aches. I have a hard time concentrating on anything. So I have been reading a bit on Shinto belief while being ill. I am looking for people who worship lakes. It passes the time.

I must state right off I do not think there is a lot of lake worshiping going on in Shintoism. True, there are sacred lakes in Japan; at the foot of Mt. Fuji there are five — Lake Yamanaka, Lake Kawaguchi, Lake Sai, Lake Shoji, and Lake Motosu. But they are not deified the way Mt. Fuji is deified in Shinto belief; or at least as far as I can tell from my current research.

But, you might ask, what is Shintoism? In a nut shell, a form of Japanese animism; that is, the worship of the spirit world found in the natural world all around us. Shintoism involves the worship of kami, meaning an object or entity that has, "divine, sacred, spiritual … quality or energy [to it] … virtually any object, place or creature may embody or possess the quality or characteristic quality of kami." (Bocking, 84) Thus, in Shinto belief, a mountain like Fuji would not only possess kami-like qualities, but have a kami-spirit that resides in it. Or, to put it slightly differently:

Kami is often translated as "deity," but in fact it designates an extremely wide range of spirit-beings together with a host of mysterious and supernatural forces and "essences." In the Kojiki … it is said that there are eight million kami … these include countless vaguely defined tutelary divinities of clans, villages and neighborhoods (ujigami); "spirits of place" — the essences of prominent geographic features, including mountains, rivers and waterfalls; and other natural phenomena … (Littleton, 24)

This interests me because I am going to be moving closer to the shores of Lake Michigan, one of the five largest bodies of fresh water in the whole world and everyone I know treats it as just that — a resource at best, a play or dumping grounds at worst. It is hard for me to understand people who can be in the presence of such splendor and still claim there is nothing sacred about Lake Michigan.

In short, even if I do not call it by that particular name, I want to find the kami of Lake Michigan.

But is that possible? Several critics have stated in no uncertain terms that Shinto "is a racial religion. It is inextricably interwoven with the fabric of Japanese customs and ways of thinking. It is impossible to separate it from communal and national life of the people … Although non-Japanese may pay great respect to the Emperor Meiji, for example, it is inconceivable that they should ever regard him as a kami in the same sense as do the Japanese. Therefore, this phase of the kami-faith is not suitable for dissemination abroad." (Ono, 111)

I wonder about that, that whole inconceivable stance, that such a thing as "race" can define a religion. In the year 2006 I find it strange to think of people claiming that it is unimaginable or impossible for non-Japanese people to worship kami. And this whole nonsense of "racial religion"? Is that like saying anyone not born Italian cannot be Catholic? It is this type of thinly disguised fascism that gives religion a bad name. I believe the human power of belief is much stronger than that but who am I, really?

What I hope to find is not just any kami, but the Suijin of Lake Michigan. That is, Mizugami or water-kami; "[who] recieve frequent worship under various names, particularily from women in agriculture communities and often at a small shrine set up near the water-source. The main water-kami found in large shrines and widely worshipped is Mizuhanome." (Bocking, 189) As is the case with my understanding of the world of kami, deities such as Mizuhanome no kami, Mizugami, Suijinsama are all water spirits but attached to different bodies of water. Who, then, is the kami that looks over Lake Michigan?

Who here submits to a thing? Our nature
cannot see still water as anything
other than this: a body of water
to swim, piss and play in. Not puzzling
then how there are no lake shrines, no praying
to the spirits that remain in the lake.
What sort of nature does not pray? doubting
if the lake has any spirit to make
things right. Take this bread, go to the shore. Break
it, now throw it in and say: "I'm ashamed
of all the harm we do." Do not forsake
this still water, the spirits that remained
to the very end. Feel the call, admit
it in. This lake spirit calls, now submit.

Works Cited:

Bocking, Brain. A Popular Dictionary of Shinto. Lincolnwood, Ill.: NTC Publishing Group. (1997)

Littleton, C. Scott. Shinto: origins, rituals, festivals, spirits, sacred places. Oxford, UK; New York: Oxford University Press. (2002)

Ono, Sokyo. Shinto: the Kami Way. In collaboration with William P. Woodard; sketches by Sadao Sakamoto. Rutland, Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle Co. (1962)

This will be my last entry for a week or so. I am bound on a hyperborean wind, off to Canada. Toronto waits somewhere near where the sun rises in the morning fog, if only the udder-heavy rain clouds did not obscure the sun so much. But what am I complaining about? At least it is not snowing!

When I return from my holiday I will quit my job as a nurse. Partly because after two years of drudgery I feel I have done enough and partly because my body cannot take the abuse any longer. Lack of sleep, depression, that constant chronic pain; the life of minimum wage servitude is not all it is cracked up to be (my boss was quick to point out I get paid more than minimum wage, but even so, a life slightly below living wage is no way to go week by week). Of course, the problem with changing "careers" once again is the constant happenstance, uncertainty, insubstantiality of what to do.¹ Perhaps the stress of never having had an adult career other than poet is what is constituting to my depression, lack of sleep, nervousness? Perhaps. I drink far too much coffee, too. Still, poverty sucks.

Because at thirty-six I still had not
a clue what to do with Life I checked out
a book, "Your Wastrel Life: Get A Clue What
To Do" for help. It had a big foldout
map of odd head lumps, which left little doubt
to what sort of drudge I'd be best suited
at. "Male Trollop in a Pirate Hideout,"
"Car Hop for Our Lady of the Sacred
Poisoners," "Stilton Cheese Monger." Rancid
jobs, all. But still, my classical "squishy"
head? my odd pitched brow? I've always needed
you to tell me what to do. Poverty
still sucks. There is no end for this but tears
and blood. My wastrel life, my stupid fears.

1. I am not exactly sure what I will do with myself when I return. I gave my last day as May 31, a Wednesday. When I was younger I thought I'd be dead at 27, maybe from some heroic demise fighting the Fascists in Spain. But I missed that by eighty years. The Japanese have a term for a person who "death overlooked." It was coined after World War II when many young men felt at loose ends simply by living, survivor's guilt. They were expected to have died in some grotesque manner for the Emperor like so many of their friends and simply by surviving left them paralyzed with indecision. After all, if you do not give yourself to a Great Cause, what is this life worth anyway?

   I identify with that very strongly. The cultural heroes I respect all had Great Causes to live and die for. Perhaps what I suffer from is not so much survivor's guilt as due to war, but a sense of indecision with my life; a sense I have wasted so much of it through procrastination, inactivity, waiting. In a way, there is a great irony to my adult life. I am surrounded by people, friends and family, who love me deeply and want me to be happy, but because I seem to be seen as a person who cannot make up his mind what to do I have thus been encouraged throughout my life to pursue anything I want, provided I stay close at hand and do nothing dangerous, risky or foolish. Ten years ago it would not occur to me to be dangerous but the paradox now is that is all I really want to do. That ugly voice in my head screaming, quit your whining and DO something, loser! countered by the calm voice that says, now, now, you've never has a career, remained sober, been in a successful long term relationship; these are noble ventures as well … And thus I do nothing as these forces pull me in one direction and then the other.

   It is sort of like the chicken and egg syndrome; I have no idea anymore which came first anymore; my desire for adventure or my willingness to attempt a "normal" life in not seeking that same adventure, which causes the desire to swell to paralyzing proportions inside me. Then there is the question as to whatever "normal" is? The more I try to head to it the farther it seems to flee away.

   So I drift through this adult life, working jobs barely above poverty level, writing my sonnets, translating, thinking, and much of the time wondering when this anxiety, joylessness, dread will end. [back]

For Mother's Day we went to the Detroit Institute of the Arts and viewed the traveling Walter O. Evans Collection of African American Art. One sculpture that stopped me and I have gone back to numerous time in my memory was Chicago artist Richard Hunt's bronze Model for Middle Passage Monument (1987). That we have no monument in America recognizing the Middle Passage speaks just as loudly as the fact I do not recall being taught anything about this large section of American history in the East Lansing public school system:

Middle Passage: the leg of the Atlantic slave trade that transported slaves from Africa to slave markets in North America, South America and the Caribbean. It was called the Middle Passage because the slave trade was a form of Triangular trade; ships left Europe with goods for African markets, sailed to Africa where the goods were sold or traded for slaves in the African slave markets, then sailed to the Americas and Caribbean (West Indies) where the slaves were sold or traded for goods for European markets, and then returned to Europe.

The most we have in memorial is Mr. Hunt's model, showing the front half of a wooden ship hull, representing the boats that carried men, women and children to the Americas. And while these are not the same schooners I have been romanticizing my entire life, it gave me pause to think the same boats I have seen as symbols of escape and bounty and youthful liberty were also capable of horrific deeds. And while my slim family tree had no hand in the Atlantic slave trade (as far as I can gather my father's side was living quiet Jewish lives in the Ukraine as clock makers, while my mother's side came to Georgia as itinerant Italians; both around the turn of the last century) it affects me just as it affects you.

I find it curious that so few modern poets who did not have direct family experience with the Middle Passage have written so little on the subject. Why is that? It is still part of our collected history, even if it is a shameful part. Perhaps it is because if many of us begin to scratch the surface we shall find our forefathers were intricately bound up with the Middle Passage in ways that will be far from flattering? Perhaps. Or, more likely, today's poets are far more comfortable creating book after book of word salad that never challenges anything, never means anything, never risks anything. We live, after all, in the great postmodern age, where things like lyrics, apologizes and narrative flow are terrible banalities. As if we were above banality. As if we had the prerogative, privilege, divine right to be above all of this. As if.

There lies the dockyard, creak of rig, jib, boom;
their masts puffing out sail. There whisper blue
peppered foam, scag glittering crests. There gloom
the dark broad seas. The seas I love and you
fear and all who furrowed through, all who flew
over fallowed blue waves, all of us, all
of us now speak this language. Who came? Who
went off on that middle passage? Those tall
masted ships hold words I do not recall
being taught in school but my ignorance
is as wide as these wide seas and these small
hulls hold more stories of human grievance
than I'll ever know but it's a passage
we all speak of, this language, this knowledge.

Last night at work as I was reading a back issue of the New York Times, I came upon an article by Sarah Lyall, Aid Workers Are Said to Abuse Girls. I reprint it here:

LONDON, May 8 — Liberian girls as young as 8 are being sexually exploited by United Nations peacekeepers, aid workers and teachers in return for food, small favors and even rides in trucks, according to a new report from Save the Children U.K.

The report said the problem was widespread throughout Liberia, a small country struggling to get back on its feet after a long and bloody civil war.

Save the Children based its findings on interviews with more than 300 people in camps for displaced people and in neighborhoods whose residents have returned after being driven away by war. They said men in positions of authority — aid workers and soldiers, government employees and officials in the camps — were abusing girls.

"All of the respondents clearly stated that the scale of the problem affected over half of the girls in their locations," the report said. "The girls reportedly ranged in age from 8 to 18 years, with girls of 12 years and upward described as being regularly involved in 'selling sex,' commonly referred to as 'man business.' "

In a statement from Liberia, the United Nations said that eight cases of sexual abuse and exploitation involving its workers had been reported since the beginning of the year and that one staff member had been suspended, Reuters reported.

"It's unacceptable behavior," Jordan Ryan, the United Nations' humanitarian coordinator in Liberia, said in an interview with BBC radio from Monrovia, the Liberian capital.

Save the Children said Liberia and the United Nations should set up an office to investigate cases of the sexual exploitation and to work to ensure that the behavior stops, prosecuting the offenders, among other steps.

It also said United Nations workers accused of sexual exploitation should "go through judicial proceedings," and if found guilty, should not be sent elsewhere as peacekeepers.

If being witness to the evils of the world is one of the jobs of the poet, or at least one of the jobs I wish our modern poets would take up, then I call upon Athena to guide us in these dark times.

We all hold delusions, illusions, wishful thinking that desperately need shattering. I, for example, hoped that the very Peace Keepers we sent in to help victims of genocide would be better than the thugs and soldiers who committed the original crimes. That the men we bring in to help would … help.

That is, apparently, my own delusion. But I need wisdom as well as rage, as do we all, when contemplating terrible actions. That is why I call on Athena, the Greek goddess of war, as well as the intellect, the arts, industry, justice and skill. The child of Zeus, Athena balances both justice and wisdom to rage and action, something I have seen very little of this century, perhaps ever. Ryan Tuccinardi writes:

In fear that Athena's mother, Metis, would bear a child mightier than himself Zeus swallowed Athena. Metis began to make a robe and helmet for her daughter. The hammering of the helmet caused Zeus great pain in the form of headaches and he cried out in agony. Skilled Hephaestus ran to his father and split his skull open and from it emerged Athena, fully grown and wearing her mother's robe and helmet, armed for battle.

I have been thinking far too much of late. There will come a time, as there always does, when thinking will lead in circles and some sort of action will be called for. The Japanese writer Yukio Mishima based an entire philosophy on that, his frustrations that his writing led to non-actions, that words somehow failed, when what was needed was nimbleness, quickness, savvy activity. But I also know that even as all the world seems to turn permanent red I have yet to act. That is the sorrow and irony I am dealing with. Hurry, hurry, Zachary, I am calling to myself, hurry, hurry.

This is urgent. Here is the first bullet
concealed in the long gun's long chamber.
There are more. Here in the past the poet
has not made the good Peace Keeper, soldier,
legionary, swashbuckler. After
the war, we write how terrible that war
was. And after the rape, pastoral anger
vilifies the man. We know rapists are
not like you, or you, or me … or us. The star
of blood fire Athena is not our fire.
But it should be; let her be our fire, our
star. War goddess, guide us in these dire
times. Will we be like the poets, silent
to this? Pick up the gun. This is urgent.