Stuff
…Dull days at forty, false friends at fifteen;
Let her have brave days and truth.
Let her go places that we’ve never been;
Trust and delight in her youth.
Ladies of Grace, and Ladies of Favour,
And Ladies of Merciful Night,
This is a prayer for a Blueberry Girl,
Grant her your Clearness of Sight.
Words can be worrisome, people complex;
Motives and manners unclear.
Grant her the wisdom to choose her path right,
Free from unkindness and fear.
Let her tell stories, and dance in the rain,
Somersaults, tumble and run;
Her joys must be high as her sorrows are deep,
Let her grow like a weed in the sun…
Truth is a thing she must find for herself,
Precious and rare as a pearl.
Give her all these and a little bit more -
Gifts for a Blueberry Girl.
- Neil Gaiman
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Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?
- Macbeth
*
The parent who looks at the child’s face and sees only aspects of himself or herself there — his own wishes, needs, and emotions — has a narcissistic relationship with the child. The child is used by the parent as a container for his or her own problems. The child adapts to this situation. It is in his vital interest to do what the parent wants; to achieve, to minister, to protect from his worries.
…Depression can be felt when grandiosity fails, due to real or imagined loss of love or inability to keep on achieving at the same high level. Depression can also be projected outward; the grandiose adult can choose a depressed spouse whom he can care for, make dependent and admiring, and thus create a shaky prop for his shaky self-esteem. Or depression and grandiosity can alternate in the same person, in response to real or imagined achievements and fluctuations in the amount of admiration forthcoming from the external support system.1
*
It is an ancient idea, to make a promise to another person, to oneself, or to one’s god. Our species has survived partly because of our great skill at negotiating and working together. Most of our laws are based on contracts, the paper form of a promise. Because their lives revolved around exchange and reciprocity, our ancestors had many contractual obligations, and Indo-European is thick with legal terms. There is wadh-, “to make a pledge”, literally “to lead someone back home”, which evolved into our wed (leading a new wife back to her husband’s home). There is a word which means vow, which has more religious than social connotations, a word for taking an oath, and even a specific word for compensating someone for an injury. What do we “throw” when we make a promise? What do we “send forth” into the world? Because a promise foretells how one will act, it allows us the relief of knowing a small shred of the future, of relaxing some of our anxieties. Without promises we would constantly be in a fret. They allow us to solve some of the future in the present, thereby controlling it, and making it seem less arbitrary, mysterious, beyond our grasp. A promise signals trust: We entrust the promiser with some measure of our anticipated happiness or well-being. Therefore a broken promise warrants punishment or shame…The equation written in our cells, in our bones, is that keeping yourself safe will lead to love: It is the oldest and simplest promise.2
*
A Prayer for my Daughter
William Butler Yeats
Once more the storm is howling, and half hid
Under this cradle-hood and coverlid
My child sleeps on. There is no obstacle
But Gregory’s wood and one bare hill
Whereby the haystack- and roof-levelling wind,
Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed;
And for an hour I have walked and prayed
Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.
I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour
And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,
And under the arches of the bridge, and scream
In the elms above the flooded stream;
Imagining in excited reverie
That the future years had come,
Dancing to a frenzied drum,
Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.
May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end,
Lose natural kindness and maybe
The heart-revealing intimacy
That chooses right, and never find a friend.
Helen being chosen found life flat and dull
And later had much trouble from a fool,
While that great Queen, that rose out of the spray,
Being fatherless could have her way
Yet chose a bandy-leggd smith for man.
It’s certain that fine women eat
A crazy salad with their meat
Whereby the Horn of Plenty is undone.
In courtesy I’d have her chiefly learned;
Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned
By those that are not entirely beautiful;
Yet many, that have played the fool
For beauty’s very self, has charm made wise,
And many a poor man that has roved,
Loved and thought himself beloved,
From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.
May she become a flourishing hidden tree
That all her thoughts may like the linnet be,
And have no business but dispensing round
Their magnanimities of sound,
Nor but in merriment begin a chase,
Nor but in merriment a quarrel.
O may she live like some green laurel
Rooted in one dear perpetual place.
My mind, because the minds that I have loved,
The sort of beauty that I have approved,
Prosper but little, has dried up of late,
Yet knows that to be choked with hate
May well be of all evil chances chief.
If there’s no hatred in a mind
Assault and battery of the wind
Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.
An intellectual hatred is the worst,
So let her think opinions are accursed.
Have I not seen the loveliest woman born
Out of the mouth of Plenty’s horn,
Because of her opinionated mind
Barter that horn and every good
By quiet natures understood
For an old bellows full of angry wind?
Considering that, all hatred driven hence,
The soul recovers radical innocence
And learns at last that it is self-delighting,
Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,
And that its own sweet will is Heaven’s will;
She can, though every face should scowl
And every windy quarter howl
Or every bellows burst, be happy still.
And may her bridegroom bring her to a house
Where all’s accustomed, ceremonious;
For arrogance and hatred are the wares
Peddled in the thoroughfares.
How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony’s a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.
June 1919
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1 O’Connor, Richard. Undoing Depression. New York: Berkley Books, 1997. ISBN 0-425-16679-1. p. 66.
2 Ackerman, Diane. A Slender Thread. New York: Random House, 1997. ISBN 0-679-44877-2. p. 37.