Family lines, or: Alchemising lineage. A pair of personal tunes

One of the most primal ways in which fear is programmed into our cells is through language and stories. The songs, rhythms, idioms, parables and tales we hear as babies and toddlers shape our thinking and feeling bodies for a lifetime. That surely is a reason why Struwwelpeter and Noddy, for example, have been much debated and, to some extent, adapted as to their ‘suitability’ for our children and, by implication, our future. The writer Janosch even made attempts to re-write the Brothers Grimm stories, censoring or altering the crueller parts into more innocent or jovial fare.

A case can be made – as Clarissa Pinkola Estes does in Women who run with the Wolves, and as Robert Bly does in his engaging discussion of Iron John – that conflict, rendered symbolically in frightening and gruesome incidents, conveys an indispensable message to our souls (much as the figure of Satan does in the Bible). We need to be aware that life is not without challenges, conflict and, above all, the presence of evil, whether that evil be “banal” and perfectly everyday, or self-consciously gleeful, like Heath Ledger portrays the Joker.

It is my own position that the vital factor is not so much the presence of what is ugly, awful and unwelcome, nor how the ugliness is depicted, but the happy ending. Happy endings seek to redeem the greatest horrors, if not with saving grace, then at least with understanding. Certainly a story addressing children must end or resolve, if not to happiness, then at least to peace and order. If it leaves disturbing questions hanging, it will very likely harm an innocent mind. A writer with the desire to disturb the peace needs to use their discretion as to whose peace exactly it is they wish to destroy in the name of whatever cause.

Two common German rhymes I grew up with have repeated on me willy-nilly throughout many decades. One of them is a proverb, which, however silly one may deem it to be, runs in its groove at the sight of a spider, as follows:

Spinne am Abend                                Spider at evening

Erfrischend und labend                       Refreshing and inspiring

Spinne am Morgen                              Spider on the morrow

Bringt Kummer und Sorgen                Brings grief and sorrow

Now any experienced person will quickly realise that these idle, easy rhymes (in the original)  can only come from an addict, most likely an alcoholic, whose mood of happiness at sundowner time has given way by morning to a hangover, and the spider – that mistress of endless, intricate creation and renewal – is roped into the human’s tragic cycle of self-harm and lack of will. And language, that treacherous tool, is only too willing to bend to human weakness.

Being one of those ‘sensitive’ people who are condemned to misery because of other people’s carelessness with words and images, I found that the power of those lines continued to force me to feel fear and anguish whenever the sight of a graceful daddy longlegs in the early morning triggered the ‘poem’. It was not the arachnid I was afraid of, mind you, it was the ill-humoured human rhymes.

Until I decided to act. I wanted none of this grief and sorrow thrust on me by ‘good ol’ tradition’ anymore and altered the lines accordingly:

Spinne am Morgen                  Spider in the morning

Geschützt und geborgen         Protected and sheltered [It rhymes in the German]

I repeated this whenever I saw a spider, until my new rhymes became so entrenched as to be triggered in place of the old, sour lines, reminding me each time, with a small sense of triumph, of my own true desires.

The second groundbreaking transformation came only two days ago, in relation to a truly horrific song, which my mother used to sing to us blithely as a lullaby. It goes like this:

Maikäfer flieg                                      May beetle [cockchafer] fly

Der Vater ist im Krieg                         Father is in the war     

Die Mutter ist in Pommernland           Mother is in Pomerania           

Pommernland is abgebrannt                Pomerania is burnt down

Maikäfer flieg                                       May beetle fly

This horrible ditty, with its innocuous tune, was triggered for me when I returned the hand-embroidered Christmas tablecloth to the cupboard and tucked it in underneath the hand-embroidered birthday tablecloth. My birthday is in May, and my grandmother’s hands had once upon a time lovingly stitched May beetles (cockchafers), birch tree catkins, ladybirds and four-leafed clovers into the cotton fabric that was smoothed over the table with my candle and gifts each year.

Embroidered May beetle

A spoiled child was I, to be given so much! Indeed, the wars featured magnificently and unavoidably in the transgenerational, mostly silent pain of my family on all sides, not eased by the fact that there were intermarriages with French, British and Jewish individuals, and the merry little melody with its dark lines perfectly captured the bitter contrasts. Historically accurate though they may have been, by the time we slipped into the year 2026, their purpose seemed spent and their energy far from helpful.

The birthday table cloth. Obviously I will only iron it when it comes out of the cupboard in May.

Again, I was gripped by a sudden urge to strengthen myself by means of linguistic alchemy. The mention of the Father and Mother figures in the May beetle song made me think of my parents as they are now – together in a home for people with dementia, both in nappies, my mother half-paralysed in a wheelchair for ... going on nine years in April. When she suffered her debilitating stroke, my father dropped his work, all future travel and research plans, and transformed himself from a pampered, tempestuous patriarch into a patient house husband and carer of his beloved wife. He learned to cook, took her on outings, wiped her bum, and generally ran the household as best he could at the tender age of 78. (Although I am the eldest daughter, I could not assist as I had been expected to do, as my husband was busy dying and I had to tend to him at the time.)

That was the one time in my life that I witnessed my mother eating with a hearty appetite! She put on so much weight with my dad’s dishes that we had to replace her kiddies’ wheelchair with an adult one. She’d been a pretty discontented wife all her life, and her frustrations had made her an expert at tiny, toxic remarks to and about my father, whose love she diligently kept at arm’s length, and whose retorts and behaviour in turn I leave it to you to imagine.

With my father’s self-engineered career change from award-winning physicist to devoted minder of my mother, she fell in love with him all over again, and her respect for him blossomed in a completely new way. Despite this, however, he never managed to upstage two rivals (whom he himself wisely never perceived as rivals), namely, Beethoven and the sun. Since her stroke, the sun is definitely my mother’s first love; as for Beethoven, he has always been the one she wants to be the first to greet her when she gets to heaven. Or wherever. She isn’t altogether sure about post-mortem geo- or celestiography, but that’s beside the point. She has always been touched by and grateful for my father’s goodwill and total absence of jealousy in this regard. I confess I have seen him just a little bit envious of her adoration of the sun every now and then. But let’s be bighearted enough as to let that pass.

My parents directly inspired my reconstitution of the May beetle song as follows:

Maikäfer flieg                                                  May beetle fly

Der Vater hat den Sieg                                    Father has the victory 

Die Mutter trinkt das Licht der Sonne             Mother drinks the light of the sun           

Beide haben ihre Wonne                                  Both are blissful, having fun

Maikäfer flieg                                                   May beetle fly

I wasn’t sure about the word “victory”, as it’s of course closely tied to violent conflict and war. I ran the lines by my sisters, who also felt that it was wrong. My youngest sister (she is seven minutes younger than my middle sister, as they are twins) – anyway, my youngest sister came upon this perfect solution:

Maikäfer fliege                                                 May beetle fly [above]

Der Vater hat die Liebe                                    The Father has the love

We are officially shedding the cruel karma planted through our soft ears into our bodies, and are literally singing a new song. I look forward to my birthday. It might take a lifetime to get to re-write ‘a harmless ditty’, but more’s the pity of you don’t!

My parents on their diamond wedding anniversary, in the sun, perusing their wedding album.

Diamond wedding anniversary outing.

Self-tuning: The Tonic of Choice Words

I would like to present you today with two poems by Norman Morrissey, which perform very lucidly a dance of change in the spirit of a man. This change concerns a self-healing process, recorded in words, moving from a divided to a more integrated sense of self. 

For me, one of the most remarkable qualities of my late husband Norman – as man AND poet – was his determination to self-examine, to self-edit the tissue of his being and writing alike, in order to enact a continuous transformation of both poetry and psyche into a truer timbre. Self-tuning would be a choice word here.

 

Conscientious nerves

 

You talk

of a life

without regrets

 

– some line walked always true

so you never must

ache for your myriad mis-steps.

 

I’ve never been

that lucky,

there’s no recall of any day

 

my shoulders didn’t stoop:

memories,

conscientious nerves

 

rooting

in

my marrow.

 

– Norman Morrissey, first published in Sound Piping, Ecca Poets, Hogsback, 2015

 

I confess that I’ve long felt accused by this poem – of failing to be ‘conscientious’ in examining my wrongdoings – but this is probably due to the fact that the poem models the act of self-accusation by means of the conscience: describing the man’s very bones (“my marrow”) as being strung through with “conscientious nerves”. The lines, which alert the reader to this, are:

  there’s no recall of any day

 

my shoulders didn’t stoop

 

There’s an open display here, a FREE EXPRESSION of feelings of low self-worth and shame as performed by the body. 

Now I remember my father – a self-proclaimed atheist, fervently reverent of life – reminiscing on conversations with a pastor friend, in which he took issue with the Christian term ‘sin’. I can do wrong, he maintained, I can, as a human, do harm – but that does not make me a sinner. 

Hiding in this rejection of a fallen state is the heathen’s freedom, but also his innocence (though innocence is, of course, not necessarily innocuousness). The word ‘heathen’ originates as a designation of the ‘uncivilised’, but probably largely harmless, folk, who populated the rural areas (heaths) beyond the precincts of state and religious control. The online etymological dictionary observes:

It is most probably that the Germanic word haiϸana (heathen) referred to a person living on the heath, i.e. on common land, i.e. a person of one’s own community. It would then be a neutral word used by heathen people in order to refer to each other rather than a Christian, negative word denoting non-Christians.

I don’t see an untouched Bushman with “stooping shoulders” due to a deep, inner “ache” for his “myriad mis-steps”. But, on being told he is a sinner, surely her or his posture will change.

Nietzsche, in his critiques of the tenets of Christian civilization, examined the ominous build of resentment in the collective human psyche, due – if I recall his writings rightly – to unacknowledged guilt and shame over the fact that our species had murdered God;  resentment, then, being a phenomenon whereby negative feelings (grief, horror, shock, rue) are not felt and expressed, but denied and repressed, thus generating a continuous acid reflux (the metaphor is mine) of powerful energies denied the opportunity for natural transformation or –mutation back into the flow of life. 

The miraculous turning-point in the Christian story is, of course, that our wrongdoings, including, I would guess, the murder of God – surely our ultimate crime – are forgiven and, moreover, REDEEMED, through penitence before that same God, resurrected. The orthodoxy (Bible) prescribes words for us, with which to realise that miracle, which I understand even today serves the more non-verbal among our species, who are not given the listening tongue – but, for the poet, there is a different kind of freedom, that is to say, the freedom of conscientiously elected words. Consider the “shift” in the heart of him here:

The story

 

Something has shifted

in the deep of me:

the constant memories

 

– starting like a grouse at my feet –

fly differently,

don’t lurch

 

sickly

into shame and griefs

and thoughts

 

of clumsiness and wrong-headedness

– of ineptitude and folly.

There’s still

 

the whirr at my feet

and the wings beating

at my face:

 

but each visitation

starts to whisper

new words:

 

starts to hint

a new

language of belonging,

 

the replays

start making a movie

that shows the essential me.

 

I still have a script

of bungles and crimes

– but at least

 

it’s becoming a screenplay,

becoming a history

that makes sense:

 

and that changes

the shape of the story

as something to live with.

 

– Norman Morrissey, first published in This Moment’s Marrow, Ecca Poets, Hogsback, 2017

 

What I notice in this poem is the transition from a prevalence of guttural sounds and clipped consonants in the first four stanzas – sh, ch, f, t, c, s – to a lovely in-breeze of gentle w and wh sounds, and even the s in ‘visitation’ is heard as a soft z, in stanzas 5–7 – as if the breath itself were taking command to expel fearful tension in the body. 

The image of the grouse in stanza 2 – which strikes me as strange, foreign, even – suggests itself, to me at least, as an unconscious memory, “in the deep” of the poet, of the German word Graus (horror) – a word, which is pronounced the same as ‘grouse’. In the fifth stanza, this gives way to a softer, much more English-sounding “whirr”. 

“each visitation/ starts to whisper/ new words” we read, as the last four stanzas take on more measured, calmer rhythms and employ longer, soothing vowel sounds; while a prevalence of alliterative s’s snake confidently through – perhaps delivering a shimmer of Hippocrates’ staff of healing? Indeed, that staff is invoked in ‘Grasp’, a subsequent poem in the collection, whose last line names ‘This Moment’s Marrow’.

The poet’s use of the word ‘story’ to mean something he has shaped “to live with” must be firmly distinguished from recent usage of the word in a negative sense as ‘the story you tell yourself, which repeats old patterns’. Norman’s “story” is one which he has built himself, resulting in a sovereign, “essential me” – HIS history and life, which, despite “bungles and crimes”, he CAN live and, by implication, be at peace with. 

The choice of the word ‘crimes’ is particularly interesting, and, in my view, suggests that – unlike the sin-free heathen, or atheist – the poet faces his “essential me” as inextricably entwined into a species NOT FREE OF a violent and sacrilegious past.

Between ‘The Story’ and ‘Conscientious nerves’ lie two years; the last two years of the poet’s life. They record a process that took place inside the man, and allow readers to witness genuine self-healing, self-tuning, as it were, by the tonic of choice words.

For a more indepth examination of the minute particulars whereby Norman tuned, exercised and trained his voice to become the medication it could be for his soul, see John van Wyngaard’s superb Introduction in Gripscapes. This posthumously published book contains two of the three poems referenced here. Reading MORE of my beloved late husband’s carefully crafted poems CLOSELY may be the best thing you could do today, in order to prepare for tomorrow.

– Silke Heiss, February 2023