Thank you, Kieran.
Yes, a light and breezy topic for you.
How is the audio, or is the sound OK?
You're good back there?
OK.
"Baba Yaga, Demeter, and the Drunken Mother--
Myth, Metaphor, and Science at the End of the World."
I want to thank everybody for coming out tonight
to talk about this subject, listen,
be part of a conversation that's going to go on here
for several months.
We all know how beautiful conversation is when
we face difficult challenges.
So this is a wonderful start tonight.
The planet is changing faster than expected.
Temperatures are rising, ice caps melting, arid zones
growing, species declining.
And people are suffering from displacement, hunger, and war.
While the pressures upon us are keen to understand, mitigate,
and adapt to these challenges, the desire
to understand our human place in Earth's story is not new.
How might some of the most enduring stories and some
of the newest forms of artistic expression
help us to see ourselves anew as we take these challenges
to heart and into our hands?
Those are the questions the Poetry Center will
address in what promises to be an exhilarating fall reading
series.
In teaching creative writing as I do here,
the emphasis is always on developing
craft, the how tos of form, voice, and language.
But writers need also to feed their vision.
What's worth caring and writing about of all the blips
that dart through our minds?
The larger subjects like the fate of the Earth
can feel overwhelming.
Yet there is a role for the literary arts in bringing home
the enormous abstractions of climate change
and sustainability so that we feel them
as urgencies in our emotional and psychological lives,
so that our empathy extends to those who suffer because
of these changes.
In one of the weirdest memoirs ever written--
if you've read it, you know.
The Education of Henry Adams.
It was written in a third person about himself.
Henry Adams writes of visiting France for the great exposition
in 1900.
He was more impressed by the Cathedral
of Our Lady of Chartres than he was
by displays of mechanical and electrical invention.
The force of the Virgin, he wrote,
was still felt at Lourdes and seemed
to be as potent as X-rays.
The woman had once been supreme not merely as sentiment but as
force.
She was a goddess because of her force.
She was the animated dynamo.
She was reproduction, the greatest and the most
mysterious of all energies.
All she needed was to be fecund.
All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin,
build Chartres.
What is our situation, a violent century
deeper into the human story?
When the impacts of human force intended and unintended
press upon us with the weight of all the old deposed gods
falling on us from their lofty obsolescence, an update de
jour.
Global warming, some call it.
Global weirding is already causing 300,000 deaths per year
due to displacement, disease, and malnutrition, this
according to the newly released report of the United States
Global Climate Panel.
They predict increases in hunger, mass migration, and war
as displaced people seek refuge.
This panel builds on the work of the United Nations'
International Panel on Climate Change, which won, as you know,
the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, reporting the work of 2,500
of the world's leading scientists
on the anthropogenic causes of climate change.
There are dead zones in the ocean.
There's an island of plastic particles
that's probably twice the size of Texas
building out in the Pacific gyre that won't go away.
It traps as many as a million seabirds every year
as well as 100,000 marine mammals.
The Arctic tundra and Antarctic glaciers
are melting faster than anticipated.
Seas are rising.
And low lying cities of the developing world
are being subsumed.
Carbon dioxide and methane produced by cars, industry,
and agriculture continue to pile up and lock heat
in the atmosphere.
And depending on whose data you look at,
something like 50% of the world's animals
are in decline due to climate change and loss of habitat.
One quarter of the world's mammals face extinction.
Your grandchildren will grow up in a world
in which the elephant-- unless Kieran kicks a lot of butt,
which he does so well, your grandchildren will grow up
in a world in which the elephant, humpback
whale, cheetah, tiger, gorilla, orangutan, spider
monkey, and polar bear, to mention only
the sexy megafauna, will have ceased
to exist as wild animals.
A few individuals were survive in captive breeding programs
in zoos and aquariums, a human generosity
for which we can be thankful.
Frogs and bats are crashing due to a fungus that
may be doing very well under the current conditions
of global warming.
A tincture of industrial agro pharmaceuticals
is flowing into rivers and oceans,
turning them into chemistry sets,
brewing a monstrous future.
Not the least of the concerns are chemicals that mess
with endocrine hormones, which are the chemicals that run
the mechanism of reproduction.
Frogs are growing extra legs.
Male smallmouth bass in the Potomac are producing eggs.
Newborn males of our species are being born with alarming
genital abnormalities.
So much for the late, great reign of patriarchy.
Sorry, guys.
As for the sanctity of motherhood,
we don't get off, women.
As for the sanctity of motherhood,
umbilical cord blood of babies clocks in with 200 chemicals
and 21 pesticides.
Detectable rocket fuel is present in infant formula
and in the water used to mix it.
There, now I've got your attention.
This is the story science gives us.
It's no wonder some people turn their heads
and close their eyes.
So what is the nature of Mother Nature?
It's beginning to look like she is a product of human culture.
Whatever she once was, she is no longer
and never will be again, well, never in the only scale of time
that matters to human existence.
Some millennia from now human beings will be gone.
And the Earth will start over again
with what's left as our friend and colleague Alan Weisman
has so brilliantly imagined in "The World Without Us."
But if people are gone, then the idea of nature will be gone.
Earth will be, as [Auden wrote in his ode
to Gaia, till the end herself.
For now it's safe to say that the line dividing nature
from culture has become fuzzy if not illegible.
Psychologist James Hillman writes
that "the cut between the self and the other
is entirely arbitrary."
That "the psychological core issue now
should be examining the uncertainty of this boundary,
examining what happens to the self when
for instance, a person is overwhelmed by birdsong
and taps into a psyche the size of the Earth."
I want to pose a few questions about this idea of the nature
of Mother Nature questions.
I will probably not answer, but maybe you will.
And then I want us to look at two stories that
come to us from the old world.
The questions, one, can we get away
from the sentimental piety of the personification of nature
as mother?
The flowers and powdered sugar of the new age greeting card
and rediscover the force with which Henry James contemplated
the woman as metaphor, a force that promises continuity.
Two, if culture is reinventing nature
both by accident and on purpose, then
what can the literary arts do to deepen our understanding
of this process?
Three, what kind of stories, reflections, and songs
do we need now that we see ourselves
at the end of the world or at least of a certain chapter
of the world's story?
The story of our domination of nature,
a little more apocalypse, a little more transcendence,
a little more Boccaccio.
Any storytellers hanging out in the countryside
entertaining each other with drunken tales,
while in the city people are dying off from plague.
A little more polymorphous perversity,
as the feminist post-structuralist
would have it.
Sure, all of that and more.
There, I've answered one of the questions.
I'd like to look at two of the oldest and most enduring
stories stories that carry an echo of the old matriarchy,
a social order in which woman was the highest
authority in the family and in the social organization
before the regime change of male dominance
took over somewhere back at, oh, well,
the beginning of civilization.
First, "Baba Yaga."
I have no idea how old this story is.
It has pagan origins.
Baba Yaga is the demonized remnant
of the old matriarchal goddess figure representing
the wholeness of the life cycle including birth and death.
Versions of the story come out in the oral traditions
of Russia, Macedonia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Poland,
Romania, Hungary, the Czech Republic.
Many versions exist here as a kind of composite thumbnail
off the cuffish version.
Baba Yaga is a nasty, ugly, vicious old woman.
She is a witch and a trickster.
She lives on the edge of the forest in a house made
of bones surrounded by a picket fence built
with the skulls of her victims.
The eye sockets lit up with fire.
Her gate is fastened with human legs and arms.
A mouth with sharp teeth serves as a lock.
Her house stands on long legged chicken feet.
It will not reveal its door unless the proper chant
is spoken, hut, oh, hut, turn your back to the forest,
your front to me, which tells you from the start
that Baba Yaga's allegiances lie in the dark place of the wild.
She eats children who stray too far from home,
and then she's similar to other tales
in other cultures like the Kwakiutl Dzunukwa story,
"The Wild Woman of the Woods" and other cautionary tales
about these women who go out there.
And we'll steal your children if you allow them to leave home.
She can rip an animal or human apart limb from limb
in less than three seconds.
She flies through the forest riding in a mortar using
a pestle for a rudder.
She sweeps her tracks away behind her with a broom
as she flies.
Despite her alignment with evil in witchcraft,
Baba Yaga holds wisdom.
People come to her seeking it, but they do not return.
They are required to perform tasks
to earn what they ask for, and they always fail,
except Vasilisa the Beautiful.
This tale is recorded by Russian folklorist Alexander Afanasev,
the Russian counterpart of the Brothers Grimm,
who published about eight volumes of folk
tales in the mid-1800s.
Vasilisa the Beautiful, I will tell
a little bit about her experience with Baba Yaga.
You'll hear in this of course echoes
of many other European fairy tales that
may be better than this one.
Gretel is certainly in here and Cinderella.
So Vasilisa's mother dies when the girl is 8 years old.
On the death bed, her mother gives her a tiny wooden doll.
If you are in need, give the doll
a little to eat and a little to drink, and she will help you.
The mother principle is handed on as an act of imagination.
After the mother's death, Vasilisa's father
remarries a woman who becomes of course, yes,
the evil stepmother, a corruption
of the matrilineal line, which I will
define as the loss of faith in nature's ability
to renew itself.
The father has to go on a long journey of course,
and the evil stepmother moves the family
to a gloomy hut on the edge of the forest.
Vasilisa becomes a little more than a domestic slave
to her stepmother at home while the stepsisters sit
around watching television or whatever
they did, eating bonbons.
One day Vasilisa lets the family's flame go out,
the only source for their heat and for cooking their meals.
The evil stepmother rages at the girl,
sends her out to fetch fire.
Vasilisa, if you're so smart with your magic little doll,
why don't you go to the witch and ask for fire?
For Vasilisa, of course, this is a simple task.
She's one of the great hero girls of literature.
And she sets off to the woods.
When she arrives at the witch's hut,
Baba Yaga is sitting at her spinning wheel
making thread from human tendons and muscles.
Why should I give you fire?
Because I ask for it.
Complete these tasks otherwise you will be eaten.
Clean the house and yard, cook the supper,
pick black grains and wild peas from this quarter measure
of wheat.
Vasilisa is back to domestic servitude.
A woman's work and apparently a girl's is never done.
However, Vasilisa has invention.
She has the doll.
So she does the cooking, and she gets the doll
to do all the rest of the chores.
The next day Baba Yaga gives her a harder task.
Clean out the poppy seeds that have been mixed in with all
this dirt, and she does it.
And Babba Yaga is beginning to realize
she's got a very inventive creature in her midst.
Vasilisa has seen three horsemen near the chicken legged
hut, a white rider, a red rider, and a black rider.
She asks the witch, who are those riders?
Baba Yaga does not like to be asked questions.
She ages one year for each question she is asked,
and she is already old and ugly.
Her lumpy nose is said to be so big it
rattles against the ceiling of her hut when she snores.
She answers, the horsemen are my white dawn, my red sun,
and my dark midnight.
Baba Yaga the dark and terrifying one rules
over nature.
In her the matrilineal line continues, albeit with death
always close at hand and in mind.
Now Baba Yaga asks a question in return.
What is the cause of your success
in completing these tasks?
Vasilisa says, by my mother's blessing.
It is the right answer.
Again the power of the imagination
has won the day, a power that here
transcends the mother's death.
Baba Yaga gives her a fence picket
with a burning skull atop it which
she uses as a torch to find her way home in the night.
At home the skull turns on the stepmother
of course and the siblings and turns them all to ash.
And the beautiful Vasilisa lives happily forever.
And the torch burns until the day she dies.
Of course in some versions there's always a Prince,
but not in all versions.
There are many modern and contemporary adaptations,
the 1939 film by Alexander Rou, the Soviet filmmaker.
Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition"
has a section devoted to the hut on bird's legs.
Ravel, Emerson, Lake, & Palmer and even the Hellboy comics
have a Baba Yaga story.
As a child growing up in rural Connecticut,
I read and loved the story, finding
it deliciously terrifying.
Some years later, I came across Baba Yaga in a "Little Lulu"
comic book.
And only people of a certain--
Little Lulu was this great girl hero.
She was cool.
She had these little pipe curls.
I don't remember there being any adults in Little Lulu's life.
But she had problems.
She solved every problem just like that.
She was just this capable little character.
So I had the "Little Lulu" comic book
where Little Lulu goes to Baba Yaga's chicken legged hut.
It was a very safe rendition.
Of course you knew that Little Lulu was
part of a greater continuity.
It was never a question.
The weekly funnies, she'd be back.
So there was nothing to be afraid.
Of course, I knew the scary version was the truth
and felt drawn to the girl who was fearless and clever
in the face of evil and death.
The story had the power of myth for,
me tapping into a well of mortal fear
while the "Little Lulu" spinoff had lost its force by keeping
the protagonist safe.
Being a pragmatist, I'm curious about the roots of this story.
What reality seeded the fantastic tale?
I found a lot of speculation about the hut.
The Samis, the indigenous, nomadic people
of Northern Europe, Scandinavia, and Russia
in the late matriarchy of the Siberian peoples
built storehouses on legs where they kept food preserved out
of the reach of animals during their absence when
they were off hunting.
And you can see pictures if you Google it of the stumps.
They used stumps of trees where the spreading roots
attached so that they would provide support.
And they're 10 feet high.
And they look exactly like the illustrations
you see in the children's books of Baba Yaga's hut.
A smaller but similar structure was used by Siberian pagans
to hold figures of their gods.
And in the late matriarchy of the Slavs,
small huts with circular fences of this type
were used for cremation.
These were found by archeologists in the '40s.
So here we have the associations with both death and fire
embodied in a forest hut.
My more preposterous and favorite premise
is that the image of the bone hut
may go back even much farther in time, all the way back
to the last Ice Age, to the mammoth bone huts made
by hunter gatherers of the late Pleistocene in what is now
Russia, Ukraine, and Poland.
And if you have-- you can see a reconstruction,
a model of one of these at the Field Museum in Chicago.
These people built huts using the jaw bones
and tusks of mammoths.
The jaw bones were the base.
The tusks were the roof.
They covered them with pelts.
This was happening 27,000 to 12,000 years ago,
peaking around 15,000 years ago.
Imagine stumbling upon the remnants
of such a dwelling when you go out picking berries.
Would it not set the mind reeling
with question and the need for a story, what unknown hands made
these structures?
Is it possible for a story or a continuity to be that old?
Stories like Baba Yaga the terrible
and Vasilia the Beautiful last, not because they yield up
a single clarifying meaning, because they echo out
in so many directions and yield themselves
to multiple readings that keep morphing over time.
Baba Yaga herself is associated widely with fertility, fate,
and death.
She's the evil witch, the trickster, the hideous crone,
a good fairy degraded to a witch.
She's the Earth mother, the woods mother, the bone mother,
the death mother.
Her evil was assuaged only by the blessings of the mother.
Baba Yaga is mothering nature that brings light and death.
For me looking at the story through an environmentalist
lens, Baba Yaga represents a rupture
in the matrilineal line.
She is what you get when people lose connection
with the force that has given them
their life, the matrix of nature.
In the tale, only the imagination
in the form of a magic wooden doll and in the form of a story
can connect the child to a sense of her own destiny,
the possibility of claiming a future that she
wants to live in.
One of the most profound renditions
of this story in the literary arts
is Isaac Bashevis Singer's "Joseph and Koza"
which locates Baba Yaga the Terrible
in the historic crossroads where agrarian paganism and Abrahamic
monotheism meet.
Set in Poland, where battling tribe--
This is a children's book.
It's the most terrifying thing I've ever seen in my life.
I would no more--
I mean, this is beyond the delicious terror
of a scary book.
Set in Poland where battling tribes believe
in devils and witches, in a village where
a maiden is sacrificed every summer to pacify
evil spirits of the river and ensure a fruitful
crop of grain, a stranger named Joseph arrives, a Jew
and goldsmith.
He tells the villagers of the one God
more powerful than all demons.
He dares them to conduct an experiment.
What will happen to their crops if they do not sacrifice
the chieftain's daughter?
It is a gamble, and they require evidence to change their ways.
Soon enough they have it.
It's an oddly empirical lesson coming
from a messenger of monotheism.
Nonetheless, the village soon finds such sacrifice
unnecessary and moves away from its life of superstition
to one of religious faith tempered by reason and will,
which brings us to the story of Demeter in Greek mythology.
She, as you know, is the daughter of Kronos and Rhea,
the goddess of harvest and fertility.
She's the sister and consort of Zeus, by whom she
has the daughter Persephone.
At Eleusis there's a large temple
built for the worship of Demeter who
instituted what became the principal religious ritual
of ancient Greece known as the Eleusanian Mysteries,
originally a secret cult perhaps begun around 1,600 BCE
to honor the annual cycle of death and rebirth of grain
in the fields, its rituals signifying
that the resurrection possible for seeds buried in the ground
might also apply to the human soul
after the body is laid to rest.
The Eleusinian Mysteries became an official state religion,
spread to Rome, and was ultimately outlawed
by the Roman emperor in the fourth century.
The Eleusinian Mysteries as religious ritual
lasted 2,000 years.
The canonical source of the story we have
is the Homeric hymn to Demeter, which
dates from the 7th century BCE about a thousand years
into the practice of these rituals.
It's called Homeric because it implies the same meter used
in the Iliad and Odyssey, which is dactylic hexameter.
You remember the dactyl, right?
"Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, picture yourself
on a boat on the river."
The foundation of the Mysteries was the transformation
of bare ground into a vast sheet of ruddy corn at the will
of the Goddess Demeter.
I should say, there's a sidebar here for you naturalists.
The word corn is used over and over again
in every version you read of this.
It's throughout Sir James Frazer, the Golden Bough.
You see, and here is Demeter and Persephone with the ears
of corn surrounding them.
And of course it was not corn.
Corn in these translations means small grains,
probably barley in the case of Demeter,
this being the oldest cultivated crop in Europe.
Corn in Scotland is oats.
In the Bible corn is either barley or wheat.
And in recipes for corned beef, it is grains of salt.
Corn as you all know in the Southwest
was domesticated in Mesoamerica from the wild plant teosinte.
And it did not arrive in Europe until Columbus brought it back
from the New World.
So there weren't no corn in ancient Greece.
Sir James Frazer, author of the "Golden Bough," which
explores religious and magical dimensions
of early agrarianism, speaks of Demeter and Persephone
as two goddesses, each personifying grain,
Demeter the Old Corn of Fall and Persephone
the Young Corn of Spring.
The story goes like this-- because I
know not everybody gets these stories necessarily
as they're coming up through school so slight reiteration
for those who know it well.
And this is reiterated from the Homeric ode, which
is really, really interesting.
You can pull up several versions of it online.
There are elements to the story that come up in that you
don't hear that often.
So Persephone the Maiden is out picking flowers
in the meadow when the Earth gates open.
And Hades the Lord of the Dead, the Lord
of the Underworld, the Lord who receives many guests,
carries her off to be his bride.
Demeter the Mother hears her daughter's cries.
She can't figure out what's happened.
She wanders the Earth crying out in grief.
Her torch is blazing in her hands,
but not one of her fellow gods is
willing to tell her the truth.
She asked Helios the Sun, show me respect, God to Goddess.
She begs, and he tells her that Zeus has given Persephone
to Hades.
Helios cautions her.
Everybody's trying to shut these women out.
Helios cautions her.
You should not have anger out of bounds.
It is not unseemly to have Hades as a son-in-law.
He is the brother to Zeus.
His seed is from the same place as yours.
This only deepens Demeter's grief.
She shuns the company of gods of their home on Olympus
and goes to visit the cities of humans with all their fertile
landholdings.
There she's not recognized as a goddess.
For gods are hard for mortals to see.
She sits by a well appearing to be an old childless, loveless
woman.
Who are you, old woman, ask the young women
who come to the well to fill their water jars.
She does not tell them.
She just wants to work for a household that has children.
She wants to take a newborn in her arms
and nourish him well as is fitting for a woman
in her situation.
These women too caution her to measure her grief.
We humans endure the gifts the gods give us even when we are
grieving over what has to be.
They take her to the Palace of Helios.
When she enters the threshold of the King's chamber,
her head reaches the ceiling.
And she fills the whole indoors with divine light.
For some reason that I don't understand,
she's not outed at this point as a goddess.
In my reading of the story it's like, couldn't you tell?
But apparently not.
She passes a woman who starts telling her dirty jokes
and in some versions lifts her skirt
and reveals her bare crotch.
It's a moment where even in her terrible grief Demeter
sort of cracks up.
She asks for a potion of barley water mixed with penny oil.
These kind of details that are in the poem
are part of the rituals.
There's a fast, a torchlight procession, some ritual
obscenity, and dirty joking.
There's a beverage that induces visions.
Some speculate it was lysergic acid, barley
parasitized with the fungus ergot, which
produces lysergic acid.
Others say it was the psilocybin mushrooms, which had been
cultivated since ancient Egypt.
So the Mysteries might possibly have
had some empirical physical base in the chemical world.
So King Helios gives his son to Demeter to raise.
And she wants to thank him.
She's so grateful.
She wants to thank him by turning
the child into an immortal God.
So every night she lays the infant in the hearth fire
to burn his mortal nature out.
One night she's discovered doing this
by the boy's mother who freaks out.
Demeter now is outed as a goddess.
And the Eleusinians build a temple in her honor.
She's still in grief though.
Her mourning over the loss of her daughter
is of heroic proportion.
She's still shunning the company of the gods,
still refusing to let seeds grow,
keeping them hidden underground.
She stays in her temple wasting away, the Earth lying
fallow all around her.
Humans are at risk of dying out from hunger.
Many a curved plow was dragged along the fields
by many an ox, all in vain.
Finally Zeus takes notice, not out of compassion
but because he and the other guys
were being deprived of their sacrificial portions of meat
to be eaten or burned or in other versions, grain.
So all the gods come to Demeter one
by one, calling out and offering gifts.
If only they would--
if only she would join them.
And she says, only if I can see my daughter alive.
And finally a deal is struck.
And as we know, Hades makes a final passionate appeal
to Persephone, which is quite compelling.
He says if you're here in the Land of the Dead,
you will be queen of everything that lives and moves about.
And she is a bit titillated by that prospect,
but nonetheless she does come back to the Earth.
And after taking the pomegranate seeds
that Hades feeds her, one for each month of the year
that she will have to return to Hades.
And the land will lie fallow.
Demeter rejoices, makes the corn sprout spontaneously
from all the clouds of the plowed fields,
all the brood Earth to be heavy with leaves and blossoms.
She shows everybody else how to do this.
And then she returns with her daughter to Olympus.
So strong for the Elusinian Mysteries as religious practice
associated with agrarian practice
that the faith persisted among Christian descendants
at her sanctuary in Eleusis to the beginning
of the 19th century.
Crops depended on the presence of Demeter's image.
Seeds would perish or the subsequent crop run
afoul when the image was removed from the field or threshing
floor.
The religious importance of the practice is expanded.
If nature is immortal and rises up after lying fallow
in the ground, so too might the small self die,
giving birth to the great self.
And so the religious idea of death and resurrection
in the pre-Christian world comes right out of our grain fields.
Think of that next time you see a lovely field of wheat
or barley or rye or the next time
you savor a slice of delicious seeded multigrain bread.
In the folklore of many European countries
and far beyond are grain mother associations.
And Frazer makes an astounding catalog of these.
Germany's Corn Mother, who resides in the last sheaves
in the field.
Among the Slavs, the Rye Mother, a pea mother living in the last
sheaves.
Often these sheaves are made into dolls.
In Poland the doll, it was called the Baba, the old woman.
In the last sheaves sits the Baba.
In Bohemia the last sheaf was a figure of a woman carried home
on a harvest wagon.
In Krakow a woman was bound up in the sheaf
with only her head protruding.
Similar practices occur in Peru with the Maize Mother, Cocoa
Mother, and Potato Mother and in Malaysia and Indonesia
with the Rice Mother.
These figures had the power to shape the course of nature
through the physical sympathy with water and grain.
Some cultures threw the corn dough into the river
to get rain and make her heavy to get a heavy crop.
It's important to note that anyone could practice
these rites anywhere, out in the fields or out in the woods.
These were spirits not deities like Demeter and Persephone,
who are urban temple dwellers.
Some of us still keep bundles of corn stalks
on the doorstep as decorations for Halloween and Thanksgiving
though we have no idea why we do this.
It is an echo of this long human habit
of depositing the spirit of corn and fruition
in a safe place for the winter so that it
can be returned to the fields in spring as an animating force.
In the Homeric hymn, Demeter loses herself to her grief.
Is she a goddess or a mortal?
When she's pissed off at her divine family,
she enters easily into human life where her work is nurture.
However, she does not seem to appreciate
that a human family might not want its infant
to pay the price required to become a God.
They'd rather keep him as he is.
And from this conflict, the recognition
of the difference between mortal and immortal,
Demeter's temple arises.
Mortals cannot become gods.
They can only participate in rituals
that make them feel connected with the divine.
And immortals cannot become mortals because they are too
large and filled with fire to be safe inside our houses.
We are left with our fallible selves
in a mortal world filled with wounds and misunderstanding.
I've always been more interested in Persephone than Demeter.
After all, hers is the love story.
She's taken by a lover who possesses
dark and powerful passion, the Lord who
receives many guests, who can make her queen of all
that lives and moves.
I was irritated by Demeter because she seemed paralyzed
by anger and grief.
But only in her acute suffering did
she come to live among the humans and bring to them
her wisdom.
The more I thought about her, the more
I saw in her the nature of Mother Nature
as both nurturing and withholding,
creating and destroying, overwhelmed with weeping,
and then rejoicing, each in its season.
Even a goddess, it appears, suffers mood swings.
Surely this is a bit of wisdom that has trickled down
from the old matriarchy.
But what sticks in my mind as I think of the peril of the world
today is that the old corn is powerless unless there
is a promise of new corn.
So too our lives dwindle into powerlessness
unless we have a sense of a future worth living.
The sense of the continuity in agrarian cycles of nature
has been sown into the human psyche for about 10,000 years,
which is about when agriculture allowed people in the Fertile
Crescent, in China, Africa, and the Americas
to stop being nomads and settle down so
that we could go to the opera and movies and cafes.
One of the most frightening aspects
of environmental destabilization and collapse
is the loss to us of a sense of a future
both physically and psychically.
Louise Glück's poem sequence "Averno"
taps into the psychological dimension through the story
of Persephone when she writes of her desire to restore to Earth
its ability to console.
And speaking of the environmental crisis
as the defining issue of the age,
I do not mean to leave the issue of social justice
as the also ran.
This is a false dichotomy as we are
coming to see more clearly as the effects of global climate
increasingly call us to have empathy for people, places,
and species that suffer the most deleterious effects
of these changes.
Environmental ethics, as Aldo Leopold taught us
in his Land Ethic, asks us to expand
the sphere of our moral regard beyond family, culture, nation,
race, class, gender, sexual orientation,
to the entire biosphere.
All creatures deserve the opportunity
to find their full evolutionary potential, which brings me
to my closing metaphor, The Drunken
Mother, a metaphor from the short Wallace Stevens poem
"Meditation, Celestial and Terrestrial."
And I'll read it.
It's a really short poem.
And you may not be familiar with it.
Meditation, Celestial, and Terrestrial.
The wild warblers are warbling in the jungle of life
and spring and of the lustrous inundations flood
on flood of our returning sun.
Day after day throughout the winter,
we hardened ourselves to live by bluest reason
in a world of wind and frost and by will unshaken
and florid in mornings of angular ice
that passed beyond us through the narrow sky.
But what are radiant reason and radiant will to warblings early
in the hilarious trees of summer, the drunken mother?
Here mother nature in the figure of wild warblers
in early summer is just a bit out of control, cheerfully
so as the original meaning of hilarious
simply meaning cheerful, not how we feel when we watch
Jon Stewart--
just a bit out of control cheerfully so certainly
out of the range of control by human reason and radiant will.
It's an odd image suggesting that nature's cheerfulness lies
beyond the reach of human grasp.
But a drunken mother is very likely
to be a neglectful and abusive mother.
So all is not quite right in the Denmark
of this breezy little poem.
Taken in the present context, the poem
raises another specter.
If we are not separate from nature but rather are
the loudest manifestation of nature inhabiting the planet,
then we are the drunken mother, a bit hilarious, a bit out
of control, our judgment clouded by our inebriated state
but, oh, so much mindless fun to listen to as we warble on.
We're not quite up to the task of understanding
the enormity of the damage we're doing
to the planet though reason and will do seem to be taking hold.
Still the problem will remain too large and too abstract
for us to see clearly until art joins science
in helping us understand what's going on
and how we might help the drunken mother to sober up.
We've seen how magical and religious thinking have helped
people in the past to read the nature of Mother Nature
and figure out their right relationship with her.
Now science is our greatest ally in understanding what's
going on around and in us.
We live in the story that science has given us
about the nature of our lives.
But science isn't enough.
We need art to show us what we feel and what we value
and what to care about and what not to care about.
We need art to educate our emotions
and extend our compassion beyond the narrow self-interest that
has led us here.
One doesn't have to write about this subject
of the end of the world.
But one can be attentive to this larger
story as the context for the personal narrative
bearing accurate and truthful witness to the world
as it unfolds before us, a world unlike one that has ever
been apprehended before.
Thank you.