On Halloween, All Souls, and All Saints...

Did you decorate your house for Halloween yet? I took out my laughing bats, magic hats, and pumpkins. Yet another year of trying to tame the monster, make the grime and horror go away. I wish to replace the vulgar tastelessness of eyeball soups and skeletons on the lawn with some carnival-style whimsy... I'll be disappointed again, surrounded by plastic atrocities emerging from the closet yet again, as we circle on this merry-go-round of time that accelerates every year. When I started my "Chopin with Cherries" blog in 2010, I wrote about the composer's death, cemeteries and Halloween... Let me start this rant against Halloween, then, with a self-quotation:

  "October in America is filled with the excitement of Halloween. Now, that’s a strange celebration! People dress up as zombies. They scatter eyeballs, skeletons, and torn, bloody limbs around their houses. They convert their gardens into makeshift graveyards… All to scare death away. The spiritual roots of Halloween are in Druidic rituals of the Winter Solstice, a holiday of darkness, marking the shortest day and longest night of the year. What if the night won and the sun never came back? Monsters, ghouls, and horrible, terrifying, dangerous creatures of the dark are supposed to be roaming the world that night, saying “trick or treat” – “bribe me, or I’ll kill you.” 

In a highly commercialized current version of this celebration, a wild party-season culminating on October 31, we conquer our fear of death by dressing up like the dead and dressing our children like cute little ghouls and monsters, to cheat and trick death, pretending we are already dead. There is more to it, of course, beyond the candy giveaway and all-night, carnival parties. To me, this is a day dedicated to fear and rejection of death. We want to live forever. We mock and deny the power of death, by ridiculing it in the most atrocious way possible. People love Halloween. I’m deeply conflicted about it. As a mother, though, I made my share of costumes… 

I remember going to a cemetery on October 31, during my first year in Canada, two months after coming from Poland. It was a culture shock. There was nobody there, the place was abandoned. In the city, stores and yards were full of make-believe tomb-stones, with sculls scattered around and zombies’ hands sticking out of the ground, but nobody went to bring candles and flowers to real graves. In Poland, at this time of the year, we used to visit the grave-sites of our grandparents, great grandparents, or soldiers, or victims of the war. We used to bring candles to these grave-sites and monuments. In the rain, in quickly falling darkness of a late autumn evening, cemeteries and war memorial sites were shrouded by the warm glow of thousands of candles. People wanted to remember their dead, their fore-bearers. They wanted to reflect on the past, think about their own mortality. The All Souls’ Day, October 31, is a melancholy, yet comforting remembrance of our ancestors and a time for reflection on our own place in the dance of generations.

 In Warsaw, where we had no family graves to visit, we went to the monuments of the fallen: the Unknown Soldier, the heroes of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. (A handful of underground Home Army soldiers held out for 63 days before being defeated by the Germans, while the Allies waited for the city to bleed to death). We walked through the alleys of Powazki, the oldest cemetery in town, visited the graves of famous Poles. We brought lots of candles; children ran around and made sure all the candles were burning. They had fun: played with fire, skipped over puddles, collected dry, colorful leaves. Adults walked with their umbrellas, and said “shh, shhh… be quiet, this is a cemetery, a place of peace and eternal rest.” 


But it is not the disgusting artificial severed limbs, eyeless sockets of plastic skulls that may truly terrify you. The scary stuff happens behind closed doors, in homes that look so idyllic from afar, with their bright porch light and tidy gardens:

The Hour of Darkness

"Get out of my house!!!"

said the man.

"Look at the knife

in my hand!"

the boy answered.

The woman cried

with her heart split open.

The little girl whispered:

"I wish I were a fairy

and could make myself deaf

to not hear you..."

And it was night. 

__________________

Note: The last line is quoted from The Bible, NIV, the Gospel According to St. John: John 13:30.

(c) 1997 by Maja Trochimczyk 

Sometimes the pain that outlasts all others is internal, invisible, untouched: 

Love Horror

I saw you at the opera:

So royal in your splendidness,

you dispensed favors

left and right,

bestowing graces.

What did you see

in me, a Shulamite

dancing darkly

among throngs

of chaste-less virgins?

Love is a horror of distance -

silent scream

for one kind hour 

(c) 2000 by Maja Trochimczyk

And then, of course, out of a broken heart, a broken present, and no future:

Last Wish

Kiss me with the kiss of death

so my lips stop breathing

kiss me with the kiss of Lete

so its waters wash away

my memory

kiss me, please,

so I could go in peace

to the empty fields of Elysium

for a well deserved stroll in the park

of the late graceful

(c) 2003 by Maja Trochimczyk

Sometimes, things happen that you do not want to remember, do not want to forget. April 4, 2000. The day my parents were shot. May 12, 2001, the day my Father died, after a year in and out of the hospital. His last words to me? About a week before his death: "Majusiu, your Dad has become a vampire! I live off other people's blood." And we laughed at this joke about a very serious matter. His spine cells, exhausted by months of malnutrition, stopped producing red blood cells. He lived because he had a blood transfusion every two weeks. Indeed, a vampire.

Then: July 4, 2013, the day my Mother died. I would not believe it was serious, that trip to the hospital (again!), in an ambulance (again!). I had time to get used to to these phone calls from Poland, month after month, year after year, ambulance, hospital, home, convalescence... I have not written any poems in Poland, any about Her death. I'm still in denial. But I wrote this, when they were shot, on the plane back to L.A., returning after 10 days sitting in the hospital, by their bedside in Warsaw:

The Polish Easter

The bullet pierces the lung,

blood spills in darkness:

shortness of breath,

mouth tied with tape

agony in the basement

cold cement floor

How does one live after that?

Does one live?

Without the stomach,

kidneys, intestines and spleen?

Plastic pipes carry out

all kinds of liquid.

The Polish Easter

is a celebration of

overeating. Food is life.

Would Dad ever eat again?

Would Mom ever breathe without gasping?

Honor your mother and father.

I do.

They did not.

(c) 2000 by Maja Trochimczyk

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Now, both of my parents are gone to the All Souls world.  Where is it? I do not know. What is it? I cannot imagine. It exists, I'm quite certain, as I often feel their presence with me. They both look over my shoulder as I write this, making sure I'm being a good girl. How? Certainly not like that overzealous Guardian Angel in a short story by Slawomir Mrozek; so eager to take care of his charge, a very active boy, he kept hitting and slapping and punishing the youngster for his every move. Unwittingly, the angel caused an adverse reaction. The boy, unable to run out and play with kids without being slapped by his Angel, instead got a chemistry kit, made a bomb, blew up his house, and ran away, followed by the Guardian Angel, limping...

Funeral portraits (taken from coffins), 17th century Polish nobles and noblewomen.
Wilanow Art Gallery, Poland.

All Saints, then. Saints in Heaven. The realm of pure, white satin robes, gold halos, harps hanging on willow branches. Endless boredom. According to Mark Twain, at least. I have not been there yet, only peeked inside a couple of times. Looked and forgot what I saw.  We are not saints. Not yet.

Green shone the wings

of the dove - the Psalm says

with erudite certainty

that I don’t share

touched - as I am -

by an angel

of forgetfulness

and inattention.

______________________________________

Photos (C) 2011-2013 by Maja Trochimczyk

Poetry (c) 1997-2013 by Maja Trochimczyk 

Midsummer Lessons from Mars and Lascaux

 It is never too late to learn something new. Two bits of scientific knowledge have recently captured my attention. First, a new method of dating ancient artifacts with radioactive isotopes resulted in rewriting the chronology of Paleolithic art: apparently, the astounding frescoes of bisons and horses in the caves of Lascaux, France, were not painted 20,000 years ago by our direct ancestors, homo sapiens, but, instead, were created over 43,000 years ago when Europe was inhabited by the Neanderthals. Therefore, we have to change our preconceived notion of the hairy Neanderthals as ape-like primitive brutes. What a discovery!

Second, the inventive laboratory-on-wheels Curiosity landed on Mars without a glitch and began sending back to Earth photographs of its rocky surroundings. I had seen a life-size model of the probe during the annual open house at JPL: with legs taller than me and two wheels on each leg, this futuristic vehicle was able to drive in any direction, over piles of rocks under one leg and smooth sand under another. On a Sunday night in August I was a guest at JPL’s California control station watching the Curiosity landing – or, rather, watching rows of engineers in blue shirts doing something important and intently staring at their screens. We enjoyed lectured lectures by JPL staff between computer animations of Martian landscapes traversed by the spacecraft, while waiting for the numbers on a small screen on the side to confirm that all engines fired, the silicone parachute deployed, all temperature sensors reported normal data, etc. Not only was it a “blind” landing on instruments alone: the landing was actually operated by the machines pre-programmed to follow a certain course of action.

The radio signal, traveling at the speed of light, takes nearly 15 minutes to come to Earth from Mars. Our screens reported each stage of the action 15 minutes after it already happened! What a feat of human ingenuity! But this 15-minute delay also tells us how important it is to live in the present, here on Earth (Memento Vitae). We are stuck here, for now. It is really too far to go somewhere else.


________________________________________________

A poem of mine, "Memento Vitae" was published in Serbian translation in the largest daily paper; French, Spanish and Chinese versions are in the works… Thanks to my friend Dr. Mira Mataric, who translated five of my poems for a Serbian literary journal, I now have a publication in the same alphabet (though not language) than my Belorussian grandparents used. The publication in the daily paper was quite a surprise. I hope we all cherish our lives 43,000 years after the Neanderthals first decorated their caves. How? Read my poem "A Lesson for my Daughter!" But first comes a reflection from the beach...

    Walking on Seashells

broken pieces of fish bones
lie scattered by the tide
where sandpipers feed

hermit crabs move into empty shells
whose former inmates
lost their future, devoured

the ocean of death surrounds us

ants troop in and out of the eye
of the beetle that lies
in the middle of my path

crushed sea shells paint the beach
bone-white – prickly sand
slowly changes into rock

fossils capture cruel snapshots
of transient past

unperturbed, we march on,
treading on traces of old tragedies

insects die first, yet outlive us
we do not mind their deaths
 
with a gaze fixed above,
we ignore countless incidents
of random murders, as we walk into
the gaping mouth of the Behemoth

 Memento Vitae 

Let's talk about dying.
The gasp of last breath.
The end. Or maybe not,
We don't know.
Let's talk about the last day.
What would you do
if you knew?
Whom would you love?
Would you find your dearest,
most mysterious love?
Or would you just stay
in the circle of your own?
Would you rob, steal
or insult anyone?
Would you cry?
Burn your papers?
If the fabric of your future
shrank to one day,
or maybe just an hour?

Let's talk about living, then.
The next breath,
that will take you
to the next minute,
the next heartbeat.

Just about – now.

© 2008 by Maja Trochimczyk
  

A Lesson for My Daughter 

After a ruby-colored glass of Merlot
I told my daughter the secret of the Universe.
I solved it at noon, by the river.

Questions do not matter.
The right answer to life is: "Yes."
If you build a circle of "Yes" around you,
Affirming the essence of beauty,
You'll be safe.

If you say "I love you" to everyone
(Very quietly so they can't hear, but you know),
You'll walk in a sphere of gladness
No insult or curse may pierce.

You'll be whole and holy:
Living deeply where love blossoms,
Laughter bubbles, and joy overflows.


© 2006 by Maja Trochimczyk      __________________________________________

NOTE: Photos from San Francisco and Los Angeles, (C) 2012 by Maja Trochimczyk