Atlanta in the Spring is an Orgy

by Honora Foah
Co-president & Creative Director
Mythic Imagination Institute

[Photo: "Wisteria" © Dahlan Robert Foah, 2007. All Rights Reserved. No Reproduction Allowed.]

Atlanta in the spring is an orgy, a fertility dance of outsized proportion that usually makes the national news: "Highest Pollen Count Ever Recorded!" We run our hands over the piano an hour after dusting and our palms turn chartreuse. It's a sex blizzard. The city is shamelessly aflame with daffodils and dogwood, azalea and tulip magnolia, tulips and red bud Judas tree, star of Bethlehem, cherry, apple, pear, almost all at once. The streets are white with petals, you can hardly breathe. Pink of nymph's thigh, sigh, jonquils bright bright yellow, narcissus overpowering, hyacinth sweet and stalwart, and wisteria entwined and dangling everywhere, strong as steel.

I love best the moment when the leaves are just a red mist on the branches, not sure if you can see it even and then suddenly there are baby fingers uncurling, wet as new butterfly wings.

The world unfurls unfolds as it has been given to do. People are somehow a bit different. We have to participate in our unfoldment with love and will toward the true and the good or we will not be beautiful.

***

Reading the remembrances of Kurt Vonnegut, who died this week, has been shocking for me. I read his books mostly when I was in high school in that moment when you gulp everything down whole. Now finding quotes from his books, I'm a little flabbergasted to realize that much of his made-up religion/mythology is my own. I have to go back and read in Cat's Cradle about Bokonism or what all, I just don't remember, but I do remember the heart of it. Here is what Mr Vonnegut said to some students not too long ago in a talk at Ohio State:

Answering questions written in by students, he explained the meaning of life.

"We should be kind to each other. Be civil. And appreciate the good moments by saying 'If this isn't nice, what is?'

"To hell with the advances in computers," he said after he finished singing Stardust Memories. "YOU are supposed to advance and become, not the computers. Find out what's inside you. And don't kill anybody."

That about sums it up, don't you think?

He spoke about the Iraq war, about the culture and the economy and he said this:

"Our economy has been making money, but all the money that should have gone into research and development has gone into executive compensation. If people insist on living as if there's no tomorrow, there really won't be one."

"Things have gotten so bad, he said, "people are in revolt against life itself."

That comment, an insightful sense of why there is so much nihilism, escapism, obsession with artificial intelligence and virtual reality, youth gangs, war, and environmental degradation is what made me think about the springtime we are enmeshed in now. The world in it's simple, inevitable, violent, extravagant, inexorable, inordinate, intemperate, eternal, evolving, eternal, insistent way — is for life. We are not so sure. That is deeply strange, is it not? If we insist on living as if there is no tomorrow, there really won't be one. At least for us. That is deeply strange, is it not?

In revolt against life itself. I can understand that. Even on this blustery day with the wind and light swinging the new bright leaves, I know that I went to bed last night with images of my death. The normal everyday tragedies of disease and death, addictions, and cruelties that afflict my family as they do every family, the sheer volume and pressure of work and money, the ridiculous quixotic one-moment-always-away-from-total-failure of Mythic Imagination Institute, found me, I am ashamed to say, with images of suicide flashing through my mind as I lay down to sleep. At first I kind of freaked out. Why am I seeing this? Then I wondered, should I just go with this or is this a bad precedent? What does this mean?

I'm sure there is plenty to say about all of that, but basically, what I feel, what I think, is that the normal suffering of living was feeling overwhelming and my mind was searching for a way out of the pain. Because much of what is hurting me is clearly unavoidable, the death/disease/taxes part anyway, most avenues of escape were de facto not open. So even in the midst of this wonderful life, even in the midst of everything I have been given, everything I am and know, here was the revolt against life itself. And I do not remotely qualify for outer circumstances that would drive a person to despair. I am ashamed of this but it also gives me an inkling of the rage and sadness underlying the ugliness and destruction I see around me. That ugliness and destruction itself is often what drives me to despair.

And that is why the advice to look around and at the smallest provocation say, 'If this isn't nice, what is?', to murmur it to ourselves and to say it out loud and often to each other, is so important. The gratitude for life is, weirdly, something we have to remind ourselves and each other about and to encourage each other in this through kindness.

The opportunity to be one of the earth's stories, to feel how the story planted inside of us is trying all the time to come true, is the most profound gift imaginable. To feel balked in the manifestation of it, is perhaps the core of despair. But if we feel the pain is meaningful, is going somewhere, is creating something and is essential to the story, then we possess the essence of the ability to bear it.

***

Fortunata, the red-haired dog with the fox tail is lying in the sun next to me. When she was younger, in the spring, she danced on her light little Huskie paws for the sheer joy of the smells and breeze and the uprush of sap in the trees and grass. Now, regally, she looks around, not dancing, but clearly, clearly with a look on her face of, 'If this isn't nice, what is?'

The quotes from Kurt Vonnegut came from this appreciation by Harvey Wasserman