Housing the "Homeless Heart"

on the Via Negativa in menstrual magic, theology, and poetry, and on loving "the nothing that is"

“A poem is never finished, only abandoned.”

—Paul Valéry

As I write this, today is 8/8, the Lion’s Gate portal, and J & D are camping out at Shasta: hiking up the volcano, taking sunny snow baths, and soaking in the vibes. I was supposed to go along, but my cycle had other plans, so I spent the weekend reading, visioning, and meditating at home.

The steep drop-off of physical energy in the luteal phase can induce emotional vulnerability, a feeling of transparency (hence the desire to avoid going out or being seen). This transparency, however, functions as a two-way mirror to the other side: stillness coaxes intuition to open its arms and receive all manner of insights and revelations.

I squinted out of the void and its timelessness tenderly, yesterday (day 5), and looked at my calendar. After seven days of committed rest, my restlessness is rising. I called RSW to let him know I’ll be in his town later this week, and to suggest we meet up for a walk on the beach. He recommended we meet at the coffeehouse attached to St. Joe’s, Guardian of the Redeemer, right on the water—“and hey, I’m not tryna convert you or nothing!”—where I brought my mother one year and NB another. Before this invitation, though, he read out an Ashbery poem I had never heard before, a small prose poem from the 2012 collection Quick Question. It is called “Homeless Heart”:

HOMELESS HEART

When I think of finishing the work, when I think of the finished work, a great sadness overtakes me, a sadness paradoxically like joy. The circumstances of doing put away, the being of it takes possession, like a tenant in a rented house. Where are you now, homeless heart? Caught in a hinge, secreted behind drywall, like your nameless predecessors now that they have been given names? Best not to dwell on our situation, but to dwell in it is deeply refreshing. Like a sideboard covered with decanters and fruit. As a box kite is to a kite. The inside of stumbling. The way to breath. The caricature on the blackboard.

RSW read me the poem quickly and clearly, tumbling where appropriate, each phrase a morsel for contemplation, chuckling in disbelief at the closeout. “—As a box kite is to a kite! Are you kidding me? Isn’t that something? I’d never heard it before. I mean, he’s a genius. The indwelling spirit, ‘the being of it.’ And ‘the way of breath’—the hallmark of Zen. He gets it. Had you ever heard that one?”

This little piece took pride of place in my heart right away: that it is so brief; that it is in prose; that the sentences are seemingly carelessly connected; that their syntax is simple in order to hold the stupefying profundity of their concepts. Besides, any Millennial would be moved by the sacramentalization of renters. (If you want to care about a piece of writing, have it read to you out loud by someone who cares—about it, about you, or generally.)

Wall mural, Santa Cruz, California

As he often does, in this poem Ashbery swivels on and thematizes Paradoxicality: in this little paragraph, almost a fragment, he comments on the polarities across which the “cardiac brain” travels: joy vs. sadness; doing vs. being; dwelling on vs. dwelling in. I imagine the heart of the speaker shuttling between these ends of the infinitely-describable spectrum of experience. Ashbery dwells always in and on the fulcrum of experience, the transitional, transformational moment when sadness passes the torch to joy, or doing to being, and their hands and eyes meet: where the tail of Ouroboros meets the teeth.

Anonymous costume drawing, 1801: nun wearing a snake necklace (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

In their book Wild Power, Alexandra Pope and Sjanie Hugo Wurlitzer contextualize the menstrual cycle as women’s ultimate inbuilt spiritual practice. They describe the cycle in two halves: the via positiva (from menstruation to ovulation) and via negativa (from ovulation to menstruation). These paths meet regularly at the poles of menstruation (when we bleed) and ovulation (when we release an egg). Pope and Wurlitzer write:

“The via positiva is about transcendence [...] the via negativa is about immanence, vulnerability, and intimacy [...] The two vias are at the crux of our relationship with power and our ways of being and creating in the world. They are like the two different arms of power. The old power story overvalues the via positiva, but we can begin today to validate the via negativa. That’s how the new power story gets written.” (Wild Power p86)

In a very different context, these are terms familiar to religious scholars as technical in Christian medieval theology, two sides of the spiritual path that have been put in mutual exclusivity to each other by arguments over time. Both point to the possibility of mystical union with God: one by affirmation, the other by a radical denial of all human definitions. The cycle understands they require each other to exist, and must be equally balanced for either to function. The tail and the teeth. . .

In the recast terms of the menstrual cycle, the via positiva emphasizes agency, exertion, egoic assertion, and doing, while the via negativa emphasizes encounter, surrender, rest, and simply being. The spiritual value of detachment, the center of Buddhism and the teachings of Meister Eckhart, restores some of the power to the via negativa that has been neglected or erased by the irrepressible overwork of ‘the modern West.’ It is this value that underscores Ashbery’s contemplation of his finishing a work:

The circumstances of doing put away, the being of it takes possession, like a tenant in a rented house.

As in the cycle, where the busy work of ovulation gives way to the curtain call of menstruation, here the circumstances of doing give way to sheer being. The rented house could be the physical body or the corpus of an artist, his body of works. Or it could suggest that the process of doing itself, more than any tangible object or subject, is the real ‘owner’ (or perhaps architect?) of the ‘house’ in which experience unfolds. He seems to prefer, or is in this moment prioritizing, contemplation (the via negativa) over action.

Gelassenheit, or, “don’t ease me in”

“Where are you now, homeless heart?” The tenderness in the question does touch the heart: the immediacy. Where are you now? I felt a shudder of recognition and kindness in this poem’s recitation, since RSW knew me during my van days, and knew how hard it was on me, how it made finishing any work impossible. Something in the circumstances sent the heart into hiding. The work or practice of artmaking, the expression of the heart, was halted until it was safe to come out. “Where are you now?” It is also a multilevel question any older person might ask, even rhetorically, of a cherished younger person: the psychic “check-in” moment, the bid for emotional regulation, or the bid for awareness. Probably age doesn’t matter in this exchange.

It’s a variation on the question that I hear my best friend and her partner warble to their baby as she gains confidence and speed in crawling, standing. With newfound mobility, the world is becoming her oyster. “Where ya goin now?” It’s sweet to hear, as a grownup, because to us it seems that she’s got no idea at all where she is headed, but she’ll be damned if she doesn’t get there! It’s that she’s going that matters, finally, in this stage of her development. The heart, too, in its ceaseless cycling of blood, favors movement over meaning.

On a figurative level, we may ask related, more abstract or existential emotionally-loaded questions. But first, to be literal in order to get figurative: the heart resides in the chest cavity, is at home there. “Where are you now, homeless heart?” Is this a heart out of a body? Is this a description of a heart-centered “out-of-body experience”? A materialist mysticism? Less literally: If one’s heart is homeless, is there anywhere for it to go? There is nowhere to call home. Or does everywhere become home? The capacity to experience a sense of belonging is stored in the heart, is one of its core competencies. Home is where the heart is. What then to make of the paradox of the homeless heart? 

rainbow of hearts decorate a shrine (Bolinas, California)

Ashbery annotates an encounter with the void, what Eckhart would call grunt, or ground of being, residence of divinity (the uncreated, eternal aspect of the soul). In Ashbery’s case, he encounters the void upon finishing a work, upon contemplating finishing a work (presumably a poem or book project). To the writer or artist, the other side of the terror of the blank page, equally terrifying, is that anticlimax when you figure the work is finished, when you feel or decide it’s time to give it up. Declaring something “finished” is risky, not least because we know, on a deeper level, that there’s no such thing as doneness. There always seems to be a definite chance you’ll never write (or paint, or choreograph, or perform) ever again. The doneness casts a spell: possessed by the tail of the snake, we are numb to the teeth (not to mention exposed to the possibility of criticism).

Best not to dwell on our situation, but to dwell in it is deeply refreshing. Rather than fret over the existential terms of creation, why not attain ultimate refreshment by abiding in presence? Toggle between the ten thousand created things and the great Nothing. I think that Ashbery here, very subtly, is putting in a vote for the formalists when he says, As a box kite is to a kite. “No ideas but in things.” Let form, or specificity, or the ten thousand things, refresh and make over the idealism of more shapeless categories, the “nothing that is” that Wallace Stevens referenced. Not just any kite: the box kite. The choice to specify, to shape in an even, pleasing square, affords us refreshment as welcome as fresh fruit and wine at a party.

To me, Ashbery is the deepest and plainest contemplative poet the US has produced in the last hundred years. His paradoxical depth-in-plainness reveals his awareness of the presence of the divine.

Lighthouse Field State Beach, West Cliff, Santa Cruz

This morning, after sleeping on it, “Homeless Heart” brought to my mind a late untitled piece by Rilke (this English translation is Mitchell’s.)—the fragmentary form, the heart center, the open questions, the deceptive simplicity of rhetoric, the paradoxicality of simultaneous denial and awareness. The transparency, or sheerness, that characterizes the experience of the via negativa half of the menstrual cycle, “the being of it” taking “possession,” is echoed here in the helpless exposure of the high and silent cliffs—that yet produce singing blooms. I’ll leave it here:

Exposed on the cliffs of the heart. Look, how tiny down there,

look: the last village of words and, higher,

(but how tiny) still one last

farmhouse of feeling. Can you see it?

Exposed on the cliffs of the heart. Stoneground

under your hands. Even here, though,

something can bloom; on a silent cliff-edge

an unknowing plant blooms, singing, into the air.

But the one who knows? Ah, he began to know

and is quiet now, exposed on the cliffs of the heart.

While, with their full awareness,

many sure-footed mountain animals pass

or linger. And the great sheltered bird flies, slowly

circling, around the peak’s pure denial.—But

without a shelter, here on the cliffs of the heart. . .

(Irschenhausen, September 20, 1914)