Sailors of the Secret Ark

Marie-Madeleine Fourcade is recruiting anti-Nazi compatriots for a spy network to feed information to the English after the Germans invaded France. One of Fourcade’s lieutenants encourages a prospect by “describ[ing] her in glowing terms, saying she had ‘the memory of an elephant, the cleverness of a fox, the guile of a serpent, the perseverance of a mole, and the fierceness of a panther.’”

That’s quite a package. Perhaps it influenced Fourcade’s decision to assign animal code names to everyone in The Alliance. Or it was the other way around? 

In any case another name was given to the spy network when the Germans captured and interrogated one of its members. The prisoner does not or is unable to reveal the real names of the leaders, only offering up “Aigle (Eagle) and Herisson (Hedgehog).” (Marie-Madeleine Fourcade was Hedgehog. A man was Eagle. That may seem sexist, but Fourcade had starry eyes for Eagle, I think.) How many more animal names did they get out of their prisoners before “the Germans began referring to the group as Noah’s Ark”?

Noah’s Ark — an ironic appellation? The animals on the ark were being saved from a disaster overtaking the entire world. If there were a Noah in this metaphor he wasn’t Adolph Hitler.

source:

Madame Fourcade’s Secret War: the daring young woman who led France’s largest spy network against Hitler

by Lynne Olson

2019. Random House, New York

Let’s not be poetry victims

Meter and rhyme isn’t much in fashion and hasn’t been for decades. But there are still people who don’t consider a poem a poem unless it presents in rhyme and meter. As a kid I felt — victimized is too strong a word — I felt pressure from people like that. I never experienced much pleasure reading rhyming verse growing up. Sure, there was the occasional poem or song lyric that got in my head in a good way. “Jack jumped over the candlestick …” I did force rhyme and meter under the gun of class assignments. It felt like math, all that counting counting counting. I didn’t always hate the result. But it did not read as fun. 

I was much more interested in fiction. You could do anything in fiction. Imagination could run wild. I wanted to get school credit for that! Naturally, including freedom in the school curriculum was frowned upon. But in high school an after school poetry class got offered, I guess as an experiment to see if students would show up. The teachers were poets; their main text was Kenneth Koch’s Wishes, Lies, and Dreams. And what it taught was freedom — poetry was a mind set loose. Even meaning could shake off its chains. I loved it. I wrote tons. Was any of it metered verse? 

Once I got hooked on writing poetry I read all over. Most of it was free verse, but one can’t help reading poetry in received forms at least sometimes. I’m a fan of Blake’s “Tyger, Tyger,” and have lines from it memorized. “Tyger, tyger, burning bright / In the forests of the night.” But metered verse can be painful — exhausted rhymes, contorted syntax, the mind-numbing barking at the fence.  

I’m not the only one who felt victimized by the way poetry was taught. “[I]n seventh grade, my English teacher in the public high school was a poet,” Annie Finch says, “and he saw that I was pretty serious about writing poetry and he said, ‘Real poets write free verse.’” Finch wanted to be a real poet, so she ditched rhyme and meter, except for that one versification course in college where the prof passed around Finch’s student poems as exemplary. That wasn’t enough to override the judgment of the seventh grade teacher, apparently, for Finch “hid all those [metered poems] in a drawer and continued to write free verse.”

I have to pause here. What is a “real poet”? 

So I’m reading along in this “conversation” with the well-published poet irritated at the way she cloaks herself in victimhood and how she is convinced that what poetry really needs is a renaissance of metered verse, how she is doing her part teaching classes and classes and classes — which everybody totally loves, every student agreeing with her that their desperate thirst is being slaked at last — when I hit the place where suddenly it comes to me that Annie Finch isn’t just a poetry conservative, Annie Finch is crazy. I mean, crazy in a way that cuts through the crap about her meeting the needs of the world. 

When she finally shook off the fettering notions of the seventh grade teacher, Finch took to scansion with a will. Making up for lost time, it seems, she became obsessed.

“I scanned all of Whitman, and I scanned all of Dickinson … I learned to start to hear things so much, for years it drove me crazy, because I would be scanning while people were talking, with a headache, and it made me feel alienated, and it was so weird. Finally I got to where I am now, where I do it but it doesn’t interfere with understanding what people are saying.” 

Annie Finch learned to meet her own needs! Good for her. I don’t begrudge her the evangelizing — I’m sure there are those like her that need what she needs and need to hear that it’s okay to need that and she is there to help them access it. Do I not need it? I mean, I feel a little sheepish not knowing — or caring — about the difference between an anapest and a trochee, a fritterlil and a poncydue. But I can live with it. 

Am I a real poet?

source:

“Conversation Between Annie Finch and Timothy Green”

Rattle #82

v.29 n.4

winter 2023

suicidal ideation, part IV

Here’s my suicide attempt:

I’m lying in bed, depressed, feeling useless, life a burden, this thinking exacerbated by a terrible cold. I’m suffocating on snot, every breath a struggle. If I want to die, why am I struggling to live? I know, I say to myself. I’ll stop struggling. Let nature take its course.  

Since my nose was completely blocked, closing my mouth would finish me off. Keeping my mouth closed would be the last effort I’d expend. If my body agreed with my exhausted mind, I’d die. 

Kent hated this story, I suppose because he hated me talking about killing myself. But I found it amusing. Nobody dies from holding their breath. That’s not a thing. 

After 60 seconds I’d gasp, I knew. That’s what the body does. Reflexes take over. But at least I would get a break from fretting over how to breathe. My autonomous nervous system would take charge. I didn’t need to choose life.

But my body surprised me in a different way. As I now struggled to keep my mouth shut, something changed in the nasal passages. An odd twinge, a sensation I’d never felt before. A gap gradually opened through the mucus barrier. Instead of allowing me to stifle, my nose, which had seemed my enemy, brought me breath again. 

In the many years since when my sinuses have been blocked, I have used this skill taught me by suicide attempt. I hold my breath, a passage opens. 

suicidal ideation, part III

Even the most lethal methods of suicide have their survivors. In How Not to Kill Yourself Clancy Martin talks about people still alive after gunshot wounds to the head, massive ingestions of drugs, jumps from bridges. One of the fears of a person contemplating suicide is failure, ugly failure. If you survive a shot to the head you will be badly wounded, perhaps permanently disabled. How could life be better that way? Yet Martin reports on at least one man who survived the bullet and is glad to be alive. 

What could be more lethal than a fall from the top of a skyscraper? 

Elvita Adams, at age twenty-nine, in poverty and despair, leaped from the observation deck of the Empire State Building, eighty-six floors above the street below — and was blown back by a gust of wind onto a two-and-half-foot ledge on the eighty-fifth floor. She was pulled through the window by a security guard and taken to Bellevue, with a fractured pelvis.

When I read that, my jaw dropped. I had to read it to friends. 

“The universe likes to play such jokes on suicidal people,” Martin says.

suicidal ideation, part II

In How Not to Kill Yourself Clancy Martin talks about the dearth urge. Do we harbor a hunger for death? It seems counter-evolutionary. You can’t procreate when you’re dead. But if you think about it, lifeforms are programmed to die. Opossums and octopuses living their best lives rarely get past a second birthday. We barely notice that plants choose parts of their bodies to kill off, perhaps to conserve resources, perhaps out of pique. 

We all die. It seems wrong to think anyone could strive to. But just because something seems wrong doesn’t mean it isn’t real. Maybe suicidal thoughts are connected to the bedrock, the death urge bubbling up like hot lava into the thin air of consciousness. 

Here is Clancy Martin on suicidal ideation as normal:

[W]e all desire [death], in much the same way we desire sex or food or love or fame. Some of us desire it unconsciously; some of us semiconsciously; and some of us, like me, can’t get the desire out of our heads. On this account, the suicidal person, and also the person who is often contending with suicidal ideation but not making a suicide attempt, is in her way giving death its due. She is not suppressing a part of her thinking that other people manage or subjugate more expertly.

Suicidal ideation is not a topic of your average conversation. If it is as standard in our heads as Martin suggests, wouldn’t it be more commonly talked about? Not that there aren’t universal experiences we somehow fail to process with our friends. Just about everybody masturbates, yet you’re unlikely to overhear the best brand of vibrator being discussed in a cafe. Sex is embarrassing. Death is, too.

source:

How Not to Kill Yourself: a portrait of the suicidal mind

by Clancy Martin

2023. Pantheon Books, New York