Vera von der Heydt

One of the problems of life is how to get to know oneself, and how to relate to and accept who and what one really is. This is the courage to be authentic, living with the knowledge of both the good and bad present in each of us. Only then is it possible to live in the present moment.

I like the way that Vera von der Heydt – an early follower of Carl Jung, and a pioneer in the study of the relationship between psychology and religion, expresses how important it is to recognise the ‘conditionings and prejudices which keep one in a state of unconsciousness’. She understands that we can’t do this on our own and need help – it might come from a book, or a friend, therapist, or a random stranger, and ‘chance may well cast a glimmer of light on it’:

‘We need another human being to encourage us to continue our searchings when we are in the wilderness. …Sometimes, however, one is too identified with and unconscious of the nature of one’s problem to be able to listen nor to see the key which could open the door to one’s prison.’

Von der Heydt was born in Berlin to a Jewish father and a mother who was half German and half Irish; her parents had high expectations of achievement and success. As a child she felt unable to identify with any other member of her family, aware of ‘the conflicting strains within myself … and my racial and spiritual “otherness”’. Seen as delicate in her early childhood, and considered stupid but pretty, she was sent off at the age of 12 to a school where she was told it was vital to learn to think. She liked the school very much, and describes a significant experience when she asked to see the headmaster to find out whether he believed in the immortality of the soul. He advised her to read books, and she began to read the mystics, Jewish, Christian and Indian, because of this, ‘I became more and more aware of another dimension’.

After an unsuccessful early marriage led to divorce, von der Heydt felt that she continued to live in a state of unconsciousness, until gradually waking up to a realisation that what she had been looking for within herself was an inner power ‘pushing me out of a collective, conditional environment into shaping my own life.’ With Hitler’s rise to power, she emigrated to Britain to live in London and work as a secretary:

‘I had ample time to think about things, about the dreadful outer events and the reaction of various countries and various individuals to the Fascist mass movement and to the violence that was unleashed and deliberately fostered. I began to look at myself, at my own violence and wish to retaliate, my hope of avenging myself on those who had killed – murdered – people I loved.’

 Full of inner turmoil, she spent time sitting in churches. In the Brompton Oratory she sat speaking to the figure of Jesus and in her mind heard him speak to her. She then knew she had to become Catholic – ‘Actually I did not “become” a Catholic, for I realised that I had been one all my life’. Attacked by a number of people who couldn’t understand this decision given the dogma and the crimes of the church over the centuries; von der Heydt only knew that she had stumbled across her truth. Later, framing it in Jungian terminology, she understood that an archetype had been activated and a symbol had come to life within her.

‘The artist should preach nothing – not even their own autonomy. Their art should speak its own truth, and in so doing will be in harmony with every other kind of truth – moral, metaphysical and mystical.’

Thomas Merton was a writer, poet, photographer, spiritual director and monk, but as artist he has been largely ignored. There are, however, over nine hundred original drawings and calligraphies in the collection at The Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University. Roger Lipsey in his book ‘Angelic Mistakes’ looks at some of Merton’s art work from the 1960s. In his foreword to the book, Paul Pearson, the director of the Merton Center, reminds us that Merton’s parents were artists, and that in his childhood – especially after the death of his mother, the boy would have been in the company of other artists known to his father Owen. About his father’s paintings, Merton wrote:

‘His vision of the world was sane, full of balance, full of veneration for structure, for the relations of masses and for the circumstances that impress an individual’s identity on each created thing.’

For Merton his journey as artist moved from childhood drawings, to cartoons whilst a student (sometimes sexy, sometimes funny, sometimes political), from there to simple religious images when Merton first became a monk, and, then, later, Zen calligraphy and images – visual art that Pearson describes as question marks expressing Merton’s mature relationship with God, the world and self.

Initially ambivalent about his visual art in the sense of how it might connect with the values and traditions of the Catholic church, Merton found that trying, at he put it, his hand at ‘some abstract-looking art’ at a time of inner turmoil, had impressed him with its expressive potential, and its possible value as part of his religious search.

The Zen calligraphy art from the last eight years of Merton’s life, 1960-1968, Merton describes in his notes on the drawings, as:

‘… simple signs and ciphers of energy, acts or movements intended to be propitious. Their “meaning” is not to be sought on the level of convention or of concept … They came to life when they did, in the form of reconciliations as expressions of unique and unconscious harmonies appropriate to their own moment though not confined to it.’

Merton writes that in a world cluttered with signs and digits all to do with business, law, government and war, making such a nondescript mark is part of a vocation to be outside, and to ‘remain firmly alien.’ It is part of a vocation to ‘be inconsequent’.

He sees the work then as:

‘…decidedly hopeful in their own way in so far as they stand outside all processes of production, marketing, consumption and destruction … Ciphers, signs without prearrangement, figures of reconciliation, notes of harmony … Summonses to awareness, but not to awareness of … no need to categorize.’

For Merton the only dream for the artist is when they take a brush in their hand and dip it into ink, ‘is to reveal a new sign that can continue to stand by itself and to exist in its own right, transcending all logical interpretations.’

Kathleen Raine in her essay on ‘The Use of the Beautiful’ discusses a story by Leo Tolstoy called ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’ where the hero ‘a sensual brute of an ordinary man’ is deeply affected by the beauty of Beethoven’s music, which comes to him as ‘a kind of torture, outrage and fear’:

‘It was as if new feelings, new possibilities, of which I had till then been unaware, had been revealed to me … the consciousness of this new condition was very joyous. All … appeared to me in a new light’.

What had he felt? He had experienced beauty and some kind of truth – a harmony and inner wholeness: ‘already and forever existing, something he already possessed, but as lying away in the dark.’ In the story the man rejects the glimpse of perfection which was not enough to transform his life. However, as Raine writes his momentary realization was also momentary self-knowledge, for ‘we ourselves possess beauty when we are true to our own being; our ugliness is going over to another order’ (Plotinus) –

‘…where ugliness is the absence of quality, form, unity; or as the philosophers say, reality. … The ugly and the vulgar enable us not to feel, not to think, not to live; they save us from the anguish of living.’

The music that the man in the story heard had a function, a transforming power to bring knowledge of the soul.

In contrast, the contemporary culture we live in, and to a certain extent that our society has chosen, is ‘death in small, painless doses’, and, as Raine adds, ‘fortunes are made selling it.’ Edwin Muir the poet, living in Rome and finding himself everywhere surrounded by the transforming power of beautiful architecture, sculpture and paintings, found himself contrasting the Eternal City with Glasgow where he had spent his youth. He was amazed to find everywhere ‘emblems, icons of the divine mysteries; an environment created not only for the needs of the body, but above all for the needs of the soul.’  Raine says that in such places where the needs of the spirit are met, we can feel instantly at home; this is not the same in large cities or ‘the wastes of suburbia’ where we are as exiles, living provisionally. ‘The needs of the body are met, but ‘the environment is intolerable … in the absence of the beautiful … alienation from something which they have never known.’

Notwithstanding Raine’s judgements which of course could be criticised on various counts, our cities are often built to alienate, and, as displays of money and power, which is incongruent with the ground of our being. I like the quote from Plotinus which Raine uses:

‘the soul itself acts immediately, affirming the Beautiful where it finds something accordant with the ideal form within itself … But let the soul fall in with the ugly and at once it shrinks from itself, denies the thing, turns away from it, not accordant, resenting it.’

But painful though it might be to remember a glimpse of the Beautiful, a sliver of the Truth and a recollection of some inner harmony with which the world is out of tune – it is even more painful not to remember.

Kathleen Raine

The beautiful, writes Kathleen Raine, is the active principle in any work of transforming power, summoning us to self-knowledge of what she describes as ‘the greater not the less’ – where the ‘truth’ of beauty rectifies and informs the formless reality – or unreality – of the everyday world. We can learn about beauty from beauty. In what would be a normal society the soul finds everywhere in the arts, in myths, in religious symbols, in all that people make and use, images expressive of the true order. This true order belongs at the centre of our very being.

Carl Jung sees this as the ground of the soul/psyche itself – so the arts have the power to hold before us images that awaken recollection of that inner homeland, which is why it comes to us as something deeply familiar. Raine writes ‘the greatest art seems always like our own thoughts made conscious’ in that we recognise when art speaks to us in this way:

‘We recognise … a world we seem always and for ever to have known. To experience such art is, as when we contemplate the beauty … a homecoming, though the way from this world to that is long and we may well fear the journey. …To transmit, to raise to consciousness this hidden order which we call “the beautiful” the arts have traditionally existed.’

Here lies the sadness of our contemporary culture, thinks Raine, with ‘its soul-destroying ills’. Art is the normal environment of the soul, the normal means for us to recollect an earlier existence [she uses the word anamnesis] and orientation. Lacking this environment, we starve ‘in the midst of quantitative plenty. What is worse, we are everywhere invaded by images of a destructive – literally a soul-destroying – nature.’ And mass communication has accustomed us to the ugly and the abnormal as it grabs our attention.

We hunger for the beautiful as an ‘order of wholes, and of wholeness’ and for Raine it is impossible to speak about beauty without speaking of form.

‘Beauty is a unity, a unification; and lyric form, as all poets know, comes from something “given”, precisely when imaginative inspiration is strongest … Lyric form is itself the supreme embodiment of archetypal order, the nearest to music and number; it is beauty itself informing words in themselves ordinary; and it cannot … be achieved by the poet writing from [their] mundane consciousness, but only in that divine madness in which [they are] possessed by the “other” mind.’

Using a certain rhythm in written creative work seems to respond to something in the soul, and Raine adds this quote from the mystic theosophist and poet AE (George Russell): ‘But if we say this we are impelled to deny the fitness of verse as utterance of any feeling, imagination or reveries which has not originated in the magic fountain.’

Here a similarity with Thomas Merton from a few posts ago, who felt that for creativity to really mean anything, it had to originate from the divine centre within – ‘the magic fountain’.

The Ox Mountain Parable – Mencius

Posts in the last couple of months have covered thinking on the soul, creativity and beauty – the poet and writer Kathleen Raine draws on these same subjects in her 1966 essay called ‘The Use of the Beautiful’. She sees that beauty has taken in the past innumerable forms and styles and how our response to different manifestations does change, citing how Dorothy Wordsworth saw some Indian sculptures as hideous idols; while Hindu and Buddhist art are now seen as beautiful. Instead, Raine begins to question the issue of where reality for this civilisation is situated; where the physical, and what can be quantified is placed above spirituality, and abstract thought, and what is intellectually beautiful. In our culture the value lies in what can be seen and quantified.

‘I have often found myself wondering why the present age seems positively to shrink from beauty, to prefer the ugly, to feel safer, more at home with it; and I have come to realise that there is a reproach in the beautiful and the perfect; it passes its continual silent judgement and it requires perhaps a kind of courage to love what is perfect, since to do so is an implicit confession of our own imperfection. … it is because the beautiful is too troubling an experience to natural apathy that we avoid it; or one too painful to be endured in a world so out of tune with its order.’

Raine especially rails against television where the viewers and the viewed could change places, and nothing is altered and where people express themselves so that what is ‘true to life’, has come to mean: ‘true to the lowest expression of the lowest intelligence’. Raine may be seen here as being culturally snobbish, but she has an interesting point that if artistic creativity is a true reflection of our civilisation, then what is that civilisation … especially if it is a civilisation thoroughly mechanised, and now in 2023 thoroughly technocratic. If art just reflects back what there is (and how many wonderful poems or paintings have there been of multi-story office blocks or car parks?), then how can artistic creativity add to our knowledge, or transform our consciousness. Raine sees that:

‘Imaginative poetry alone has a real function to perform; for the pseudo-arts of realism perform no function beyond that of endlessly reporting on the physical world; which quantitative science (whose proper function it is) can do very much better. But true poetry has the power of transforming consciousness itself by holding before us icons, images of forms only partially and superficially realised in “ordinary life”’.

The painful thing to read in her essay is her comment on how consciousness contracts and contracts – we forget over and over again, until perhaps recollection is stirred by some icon of that beauty. Thomas Merton uses the Ox Mountain parable to notice the importance of the ‘night spirit; and the ‘dawn breath’ in restoring life to what has been destroyed – and, as in the forest, so with human nature and the spirit – without the spirit we cannot be true to our nature – if our nature rejects the spirit, it is barren and nothing grows from it – no new birth:

Master Meng said:

There was once a fine forest on the Ox Mountain,
Near the capital of a populous country.
The men came out with axes and cut down the trees.
Was it still a fine forest?
Yet, resting in the alternation of days and nights, moistened by dew,
The stumps sprouted, the trees began to grow again.
Then out came goats and cattle to browse on the young shoots.
The Ox Mountain was stripped utterly bare.
And the people, seeing it stripped utterly bare,
Think that the Ox Mountain never had any woods on it at all.

      The Ox Mountain parable by Meng Tzu (Mencius) 385 – 302 BC

Via Dolorosa by Peter Paul Rubens

Using the imagination in an active way was a technique developed by Carl Jung. He describes how he entered into a dialogue with different parts of himself that live in the unconscious. It was a technique that nearly drove him to insanity, and he had to find ways to recentre himself through the strength of his ego. It sounds as if it is a bit like dreaming while you are awake and conscious, but allowing images to rise up from the depths, and then interacting with them. The images are in fact symbols, representing deep interior parts of ourselves.

Looking at this from a spiritual perspective, it is clear that if we pray to Jesus Christ and envisage him, that is, in effect, using our active imagination to develop a relationship with this central and archetypal figure within our psyche: Jesus Christ as both an inner presence and a symbol of divinity – both immanent and transcendent. The method of Ignatian spirituality directly encourages speaking directly to God, and actively using the imagination to picture scenes from the bible and encounters with Christ, and being part of the scene or the story.

In a lecture, Jung actually commented on the use of guided imagery in the Greater Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, and took as one example the scene of the way to the crucifixion – the Via Dolorosa. Using that scene, the participant in the Ignatian exercises is encouraged to be there in their imagination by evoking the smells, colours, the jeering crowds – the dust, sweat, blood and tears. You are encouraged to feel the sharp stones under your feet and the hot sun as you move with the crowd to Golgotha, carrying the weight of your cross. Using the imagination in this way the events of Christ’s life can become so vivid that they become actual and immediate experience.

The Jungian Robert A. Johnson, who has appeared before in these posts, thought that this was fine if it truly served one’s religious purpose, and he saw it as primarily geared to ‘the medieval mentality, but much of that mentality still lives in us and we can honour it.’ But Jung said it would be better for us if we could walk, using our active imagination, on our own Via Dolorosa, and find out what there is in our individual selves, and the srosses we carry. In this way it wouldn’t be prescriptive based on authority or tradition, but rather a response to the reality of what lives inside us. As Johnson comments:

‘Of one thing you can be sure: Ultimately every road is a Via Dolorosa, for it leads us into the issues and conflicts that every person must pass through, sometimes painfully and with heroic spirit, sometimes with sacrifice, in order to be initiated into the realm of consciousness. If you have a modern mentality, you must find your own path. Go your own way, which is both terrifying and exhilarating. No one can tell you any longer the way, because there is no longer one prescribed way, but only a way – your way, which is as valid as any other as long as you live it honestly. …

No one else can tell us which final direction it should take, and no one else can walk it for us.’

Algernon Swinburne

Thomas Merton was clear that any act of creation was a taking part in the creative activity and power of God – the Creator. He saw it as working in common with the creative will ‘that transcends both our freedom and our world.’ Anything creative that is separated or divorced from being grounded as divine, is, then, by definition, ultimately illusory and self-contradictory. Merton goes as far as seeing it as an idolatrous divinization of the self as its own god, and, independent source of life and energy.

If our creativity is apart from God, Merton thought, it was then only to do with power and can become dangerous; especially when identified with the power to destroy and to prove one’s control over nature and other humans, as for example in inventing new ways of warfare. How prophetic Merton was … So, for him the absolute starting point had to be dependence on God, and a refusal to turn one’s own creativity against creation.

True creativity becomes, for Merton, a participation in creating one’s own identity, and of becoming one’s true self. In that sense it does seem that creativity can be a way of processing, and then hopefully integrating good and bad experiences. Perhaps too, true creativity is found in those who wouldn’t consciously acknowledge a grounding in the divine, but are searching for a form of truth and meaning and poetic beauty – aspects of divinity.

Another of the poets that Leonard Shengold analyses in his work on soul murder and creativity is Algernon Swinburne, who grew up physically abused by regular beatings at his boarding school – Eton. Flagellation seemed then to become an obsession in Swinburne’s poetry, novels and letters, an obsession encapsulated by the title of a collection called ‘The Flogging Block’. Deeply psychologically damaged and physically challenged – he was quite small with an overlarge head, and some sort of neurological condition that set him apart as a child – he was determined to overcompensate for his physical inferiority by daring and dangerous feats of swimming and climbing, seeking out suffering and at times provoking physical punishment. Swinburne came to associate sado-masochism with ecstatic pleasure; he wrote:

‘Once before giving me a swishing that I had the marks of for more than a month, [the tutor] let me saturate my face with eau-de-cologne. He meant to stimulate and excite the senses by that preliminary pleasure so as to inflict the acuter pain afterwards on their awakened and intensified susceptibility.’

(Surely an example of the deviant destructive creativity of the English public-school tradition – not grounded in the divine, but in power and control.)

Swinburne, then, in part, never really grew up, and unlike Elizabeth Bishop (in an earlier post) seemed to have little insight as an adult into his ‘perverse preoccupation.’ Drinking heavily, and for a while visiting flagellation brothels, Swinburne equated being beaten with being loved. He had no help in resolving the damage to his soul; there were no therapists to see him, and Swinburne died in 1909, ten years before Sigmund Freud’s paper on ‘A child is being beaten.’

And yet, and yet, and despite his masochism and anti-theism, the creative spirit lived in Swinburne, he responded to it and it gave him an identity – not in the powerful, destructive way that Merton is concerned about, but by creating poetry from his troubled experience that 100 years later still resonates in these melancholy verses from ‘The Garden of Proserpine’:

From too much love of living,

         From hope and fear set free,

We thank with brief thanksgiving

         Whatever gods may be

That no life lives for ever;

That dead men rise up never;

That even the weariest river

         Winds somewhere safe to sea.

Then star nor sun shall waken,

         Nor any change of light:

Nor sound of waters shaken,

         Nor any sound or sight:

Nor wintry leaves nor vernal,

Nor days nor things diurnal;

Only the sleep eternal

         In an eternal night.

 Full poem at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45288/the-garden-of-proserpine

Dragon fly on the flower –

photograph by Gordon Humphreys

Part of being alive is to be in touch with one’s own creativity – this bringing into being one way or another, through expressing and putting into form our experiences, fantasies, feelings, wishes, hopes, and fears. Through creative actions we extend our awareness of ourselves and of our world.

There seems to be agreement about the four stages of the creative process which may often begin as a way of resolving a problem – the first stage is one of preparation, but it’s characterised by being confused and baffled by something that is also intriguing. There may be a conscious struggle to sort out something in one’s mind, and there could be searching to find out more – you can be really interested in the subject but know little about it; or long to develop a new skill like photography or drawing. But the subject is huge, there’s too much information and it’s a muddle – and can I be really creative anyway?

The second stage is called incubation which has also been called a state of muddled suspense. This is a time of letting go and withdrawing from it – there doesn’t seem to be a resolution. This is a stage you repeatedly return to – losing confidence, gaining skills and then inevitably letting go of any idea of an orderly progression.

The third stage is the most interesting – something may ‘happen’ – if one is lucky. This is the stage of illumination or inspiration which may unexpectedly and suddenly emerge. Ideas often come when one’s mind is emptied – this is the letting go of trying to make sense of something. It is almost about a state of passivity. Indeed, I have had this experience, and it feels like a gift – for example, suddenly there’s a new way of thinking about the subject and it makes sense; it feels as if it could have a different meaning. I like this from an eighteenth-century mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss who has been quoted as saying: ‘Finally, two days ago I succeeded, not on account of my painful efforts, but by the grace of God. Like a sudden flash of lightening the riddle happened to be solved.’

It makes sense that our creator God is also present in all our acts of creation and indeed creative thinking – no matter what they are. This is a moment of exuberance, followed by the last stage of verification where the creativity has to be put to the test, or worked out further, and given relevant form and expression. That can be a long process – years or even decades.

I like the description by the poet Robert Lowell who when he visited Elizabeth Bishop witnessed many of her poems-in-progress, some of them years in the making, fastened to a bulletin board above her long desk. More than a decade later, Lowell dedicated a poem to Bishop in which he asked,

“Do / you still hang your words in the air, ten years / unfinished …?” These words seemed suspended in both place and time, “glued to your notice board with gaps / or empties for the unimaginable phrase.”

This is a willingness to wait for the creative moment of inspiration – waiting patiently for the perfect words with an expectation that they will come from somewhere at some time; waiting for the inspiration to paint, waiting to take the perfect photograph as the dragonfly lands on the flower– waiting for resolution.

Red flowering currant bush

Some psychoanalytical writing suggests that appreciation of aesthetic experiences exists from the very beginning of life, and it is this that enables us to create an inner life that finds expression in artistic creation, and is open to spirituality. The thinking is that the new-born baby actually perceives – or conceives, or experiences – beauty. It is as if there are psychological, or, I would suggest, spiritual processes that lie, as it were, in readiness, awaiting the relevant encounter, before they become an experience. This is about a sense of wonder and being overjoyed or delighted by something we touch, or see, and experience.

Kathleen Raine writes about remembering flowers above her pram:

‘The pink aromatic clusters of the flowering currant bush hung over my pram. I looked up at those flowers with their minute forms. Their secret centres, with the delight of rapt knowledge. They were themselves that knowledge … To see was to know, to enter into total relationship with, to participate in the essential being of each I am.’

She says this was not so much about memory, or a discovery but rather a recognition of something that was ever present coming into itself. It reads as if she were waiting to find this experience of beauty – a coming home to something deep within her soul.

Carl Jung saw creativity as one of the five main groups of instinctive forces – the other four being hunger, sexuality, activity and reflection. Creativity involves bringing something into being – usually involving qualities such as productivity, inventiveness and originality. If we engage in something creative it is about expressing our need and search for meaning. The Jungian analyst Rosemary Gordon wrote about creative acts as forming part of the process of personal growth, development, and the establishment of one’s personal identity, and this is a life-long activity. Creativity in this general sense links with the idea that birth is not just the one physical act of arriving in the world, but rather seeing it as a process of repeatedly coming into being.

Erich Fromm saw the aim of life was to be fully born, although most of us die before we are ‘thus born’. Jung too uses the idea of birth as a metaphor, an incarnation – and being ‘born’ into something always involves a separation from what was before. Creativity involves separation and destruction – actual physical birth involves leaving the womb; the creative act of separating from the parents in adolescence involves the destruction of the intimacy of what went before; and drawing and painting destroys the clean paper. Every poem written on paper destroys a tree.

In all creativity there is the opposite, and our need to create involves the same tension of opposites. The creative process involves being active as well as passive, to give as well as to receive. Being creative is part of the essence of human life – to share God’s life is to find ourselves creating with him. An art historian attributes Picasso’s greatness partly to ‘his inexhaustible power of transformation, receiving all and giving all in endless and engrossing interchange.’

Elizabeth Bishop as a child and an adult

Soul murder is a term probably first coined in the nineteenth century, and used by the playwrights Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg. Ibsen defined it as the destruction of the love of life in another person. His character speaks:

‘You have committed the one mortal sin! … You have killed the love of life in me. Do you understand what that means? The Bible speaks of a mysterious sin for which there is no forgiveness. I have never understood what it could be; but now I understand. The great unpardonable sin is to murder the love of life in a human soul … You have killed all the joy of life in me.’

The analyst Leonard Shengold who wrote two books on soul murder, uses the term to describe the wilful abuse and neglect of children by adults that are of sufficient intensity and frequency to be traumatic; and so, the child’s emotional development is profoundly and negatively affected. In one of his books, he looks particularly at writers and poets who suffered serious trauma in their childhood, but, who, despite suffering the after effects in adulthood, were able to find a creative spirit and sufficient curiosity to transform some of their experiences into beautiful poetry and prose, and so nurture their souls.

One of these is the American poet, Elizabeth Bishop who was born in 1911. Her father died when she was eight months old, and almost immediately her mother had a mental breakdown and was in and out of mental institutions for the next five years. With her daughter the mother’s behaviour was unpredictable, and at times rejecting. She was permanently committed when Bishop was 5 years old, and child was sent to live with paternal grandparents whom she didn’t like, finally living between relatives, before, as an adolescent, going off to boarding school and college.

As an adult Bishop struggled with asthma, various neurotic behaviours, complex relationships, and alcoholism, but her gifts were such that she was able to liberate herself in poetic creativity. Shengold calls it the miracle of creativity and writes that:

‘The death of her father and the madness of her mother in infancy were losses that destroyed much of Elizabeth Bishop’s sense of individuation and security. And, partly in identification and partly in relation to people she attempted to love, sexually and nonsexually, she remained fundamentally tied to her mother until her own death. And yet – what an achievement – in art and in life – to have fought with so much success against that strangling, sticky, emotional matrix of longing and hatred, to have been capable of such warm friendships and devotion, and to have created such prose and poetry.

The sense of identity Bishop finally forged, no matter how marred by self-deprecation and masochism, was magnificent.’

Her last poem ‘Sonnet’ (ostensibly about a broken thermometer) written before she died in 1979, captures some of the struggles after soul murder, and some of the glory of her creative life, and lesbian loves:

Caught – the bubble

in the spirit level,

a creature divided;

and the compass needle

wobbling and wavering,

undecided.

Freed – the broken

thermometer’s mercury

running away;

and the rainbow-bird

from the narrow bevel

of the empty mirror,

flying wherever

it feels like, gay!

Death can be a kind of liberation after being broken.