The great unmanifest
I put tonight on my calendar along with the other events that I put on my calendar but never attend, but I knew I would go to this one, even if it meant Tin would be in tow. Right before the Dalai Lama arrived in New Orleans, Rodger Kamenetz wrote an essay about him that was so moving, I was compelled to learn more about Kamenetz. He is the author of The Jew in The Lotus, which of course I had heard about but never got around to reading when it was first published.
After seeing the Dalai Lama, I picked up Rodger’s book and read it in sort of disbelief. Here was this religion that I had grown up in and grappled with and resisted as an adult, carefully choosing atheists as partners to move me further away from my religious foundation until one day the whole house of cards collapsed. What Rodger showed me in his book is that Judaism has so much more to offer but the very essence of what I desired has been withheld from me and other Jews as Judaism became more ensconced in rationality in lieu of spirituality.
As I reframed my life the big soul doors flung open wide to a big gust of spirituality that washed over me. And interestingly enough, it was on the other side of upheaval that I picked up Rodger’s latest book, To Die Next To You. I read it one poem at a time because each one required readings for me to figure out what moved me and unmoored me at the same time. These are not necessarily poems of death, they are musings about opposing forces, about what appears to us in layers and gets stripped away and rebuilt and stripped away and rebuilt. They are not death, but life itself.
It’s as if the idea of rebirth, of multiple experiences, of plurality had transformed into ink stains on each page – one side thoughts, one side images. And what kept bringing me back was how much each of these pages spoke to me, uniquely, in my myriad lives and incarnations.
I went to hear Rodger introduce his book at Octavia Books tonight and learned that his poem were written during a reframing in his life and I also learned about his dreamwork. The dreams I’ve been interpreting on my own – the tossed sea where the bridge ends abruptly and I look out at the tempest and retreat. The nightly murders that plagued me until I realized that I had cut off a part of myself and was living a lie. The giddy joy as I tip toed around the LaLa after moving into the Spirit House.
Rodger read After the Flood, one of the more hauntingly beautiful poems in this collection. And oddly, it was not written after the 2005 Federal Flood, but years before. And when he was done, I had him sign my copy on a page that has a poem that I felt secretly spoke to me – much like the flood he hadn’t met yet. It is Miniature Elegy:
Her hair now is a memory of what her hair was.
As her smile now treasures all her smiles.
There is nothing like her, but what she has lost.
There is nothing like her, but her lost her.
And therein lies the poem that will be nailed to the door, not the final nail in my coffin nor the final nail in my brand new frame, but the nail to mark when a poet’s words were able to sum me up in a moment in time.