When Heaven and Earth Part

SOPHIE MADLIN

"Far away from Demeter ... the daughter was playing... gathering flowers ... There were irises and hyacinths and a narcissus which Gaia grew as a snare for the girl. ...Everyone who saw it was amazed... From its root there grew a hundred blooms which had a scent so sweet that all the wide heaven and all the earth...laughed aloud. And then the girl, too, wondered at it, she reached out her hand to take this thing of such delight, but [as she did] the earth...gaped... and He Who Accepts So Many, the lord of the underworld, sprang upon her with his immortal horses...caught hold of her...and took her away, weeping, in his chariot of gold." 
~  Homer, Hymn to Demeter

"And the serpent said to the woman: You shall not die. For God knows that in the day that you eat of this tree, then shall your eyes be opened, and you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eye, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took the fruit thereof... And the Lord God said to the woman: What have you done? And the woman said: The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat."  ~ Genesis, Chapt. 3

Our town in the Northern Rockies can be pretty bleak in the winter. I sat with Alex on a rock overlooking the Carribean. We had fled for warmth, and color.

We were in an almost hypnotic trance gazing at the calm, impossibly turquoise sea, when I heard a rustling above and behind us, and turned to look. An iguana, two feet long, was perched on the top of nearby shrub. It stayed there unmoving until Alex and I rose to leave, and then it scurried down onto our sandy path. It looked at us and flicked its head up and to the left, hurried ahead, turned and did the same. "He wants us to follow him, Alex," I said giggling. The iguana kept moving until it came upon another path, one that led into the jungle. There again it turned and looking at us, flicked its head up and to the left. "Let's follow him, Alex!" My husband is a biologist. He said, "That iguana has a brain the size of a walnut." We walked back to our bungalow on the beach to shower and make love.

For the women in my family, the serpent wears a nametag. I didn't know this at the time, or I might have better understood and weighed the price of reaching for the lure.

It was two summers ago now. All morning I had been making small talk from my front porch with neighbors and strangers who had come to rummage through several years worth of accumulated junk on our front lawn. Sales were brisk. Inside, the phone rang.

When I answered, I recognized the high, breathy voice of a new friend saying, "I have wonderful news, and I didn't know who else to call. Charles is coming!" Later in the conversation I was to find out who Charles was and why he was coming, but for now all I heard was the name, and it entered my heart like arrow, painless, sharp and sure. Time slowed, or maybe it stopped altogether, and in the place where the arrow had entered, something invisible and round took shape, holding fear and joy in equal, tensive measure. It was the thrilling terror of one about to step on a rollercoaster.

A couple of weeks later we met. As dinner conversations with Charles spread over two evenings, we uncovered an astonishing degree of synchronicity in the way in which our individual creative work was unfolding. He was only in town for a weekend, to meet a few people and to find a place to live. "Meeting you is like discovering a long lost friend," he said, kindly and simply, as he was leaving. I handed him a copy of a dream I had, and my musings on its meaning. He wrote to say,  "Your work with the dream surpassess that of anyone I know." He knows those who have inspired me, and that innocent piece of praise became the hundred-headed narcissus - Eve's apple, too. In an unguarded instant, hubris swelled, I reached, and the ground of Paradise fell away from beneath my feet.

There are those who will insist that falling in love is an entry into Eden, not it's opposite, as I experienced it. But when it comes into the content and well-ordered life of one already married, it is the maw of Hades that the falling is toward, a falling away from love as one had known it.

In a moment
you have altered this beneath my feet,
...the flat rocks
have no strength
against the deep purple flower-embers,
cyclamen, wine-spilled.

~H.D. from "The God"

My dreams revealed alarm spreading like wildfire through the shady forests of night-consciousness. There were repeated allusions to matricide, and to the endangerment of my daughters - especially the one whose name means Truth. These weren't nightmares in the usual sense. There was no obvious violence. But I would wake with a sense of dread, and in reflecting on the images I would understand why.

Far away from Demeter, the daughter was playing...

I spoke to my sister by phone, trying to convince her and myself that this was not about love. "It's just that our work is so amazingly aligned. It's intoxicating. He evokes me, creatively, in a way that I've never experienced." She spoke of her own brush with this creative fire, a man whose work she had admired enormously. It followed a track close to hers, and when they met, something flamed between them. He moved to be closer to her, but she was married and anxious to avoid the intensity of feeling that being in his presence aroused. After a time, he moved away. His name, too, was Charles. We laughed at the coincidence, and fell briefly silent. My thoughts drifted to the one who had originally opened the gates to the underworld for me: our baby brother, also named Charles. He was eighteen months old when he drowned in the garden pond. I was eleven at the time, and the life that I had been living, that I had assumed for all the world to be real, became at once a painted, two-dimensional screeen, now with a gaping hole. And behind the hole, where I stood, darkness.

My sister said slowly, carefully, "Did you know that Mom fell in love during her pregnancy with you?" I was stunned. Our mother? The utter paragon of virtue and faithful love? Mom? "I can't believe it! How did you find out?" 

"Dad told me a couple of years ago. I don't know why. He may have sensed that something was up when Charles was lurking around the edges of my life. Anyway, Mom apparently never allowed it to come to anything because she loved Dad, and then, there were all of us, too. But she fell hard, really hard. And I just realized: his name was Charles..." Moments later, we both remembered: Charles was the name of our mother's father, our grandmother's one and only love, the man she had married at seventeen. She left him on grounds of infidelity when our mother was barely walking. Though other handsome, kind men courted her for years, she chose never to remarry.

Have I made it clear that what this new Charles harbored toward me was the very opposite of ill intent? He was the unwitting carrier of the serpent I was destined to encounter.

In the myth of Eve, it is the serpent who is the agent of her awakening from blissful, static ignorance. The ancient Greeks say it is Gaia, the goddess Earth herself, who sets the snare. It's not a matter of malice. It's a matter of necessity. Demeter's daughter remained unnamed before her wrenching abduction, a precious part of the mother held too close to be seen for itself. While the mother-goddess grieves her loss, the daughter, meanwhile, germinates in the course of her separate underworld journey, until finally she can be named: Persephone, "she who shines in the dark."

What the Greeks knew was a necessary midlife disruption, the rules of modern society would have us trivialize and ignore. Redecorate the house, buy a sporty new car; you'll get over it. The subtext is: ignore the need for altering your homelife in a fundamental way. Ignore the need for moving through life differently. I don't know that Greek lives were thrown into any less turmoil, but they recognized as a culture that the erupting force is something divinely inspired, something to be consciously reckoned with. Deconstruction with an ultimate aim of renewal. For them, Dionysus, god of the vine, was the name of the wild force that threatens the walls of the too-comfortable city. Women who remained housebound when Dionysus, the Loosener, passed through the city were said to go mad, murdering their husbands and pulling their children limb from limb.

I dreamed that Alex and I were driving toward home. It was my car and I was driving. Suddenly the car stopped for no apparent reason. Vines began to grow all over the car and in through the windows. Alex spoke to me in blaming tones, but his words were unintelligible. "Speak in a language I can understand!" I said, angrily. He continued, still unintelligibly. "Speak in a language I can understand!" I screamed, hitting him in the mouth.

Charles came speaking a language I could understand. What I felt with him was unquestionably sexual, but the fantasies that those feelings gave rise to were not physical in nature, so being faithful in the strictest sense was not difficult. I imagined us developing a work together, passionately joining the best of our individual creative instincts in the hope of conceiving something new and unique, with a life of its own. But it was infidelity nonetheless. My heart had left the marriage. Alex knew it, but he didn't know why. When I tried to explain it to him, he found my words incomprehensible.

Who can blame him? What kind of wierd sexuality does not have, as its ultimate aim the joining of two physical bodies? But then I got to thinking: Is that really the deepest longing? Isn't the drive and extravagant pleasure of lovemaking propelled by the earth's larger desire to create new forms? And now that human population has outstripped the carrying capacity of the planet, doesn't it make some kind of evolutionary sense that the powerful, creative energies of sex would begin to be diverted from the biological plane to other planes? In a time when the survival of the species urgently demands the creation of new ways of thinking, doesn't it make sense that the mingling of ideas between like-minded souls would begin to carry a sweetly intense full-body experience that is extraordinary and compelling and seeking of expression in the world?

Alex shook his head and said, "That's just plain loony."

Conclusion, Part III