Thursday
When I learned that Kamala Harris’s first name means “lotus” in Sanskrit (associated with Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of divine energy), just for fun I went searching for lotus poems and recalled one my father wrote. In Hindu mythology, the lotus flower is often regarded as a fertility symbol, associated with life-giving waters, and that is how it is depicted in a poem in Scott Bates’s ABC of Radical Ecology.
The poem’s title—”While I on the Other Hand Is for Isis (And for Iesus and Ishtar and Ignatz and All Those Other Infinities)”—requires some explanation. My father, an immensely learned man, was fascinated by erotic symbols as they appear in different mythological traditions. Drawing on the work of Joseph Campbell and many others, he saw cosmic significance attached to male and female principles. When these forces achieve union, they achieve an ecstatic bliss where time stops, a kind of infinity. We all long for this sacred union.
Isis is the Egyptian mother goddess, Ishtar the Mesopotamian mother goddess, and many early Christians regarded Jesus as a fertility god along the lines of Dionysus. (I’m not sure about Ignatz, since the brick-throwing mouse in George Herriman’s Krazy Kat cartoon strip doesn’t make sense here.) In his collection, my father pairs I with H (that explains “on the other hand”), with H standing for “the Hero from Inner Space.” A male seeker along the lines of Campbell’s hero with a thousand faces, H “has to go/across the perilous bridge below” to reach the secret valley of the self. (For balance, I have included that poem following the Isis poem.)
In the I poem, Isis sits upon the sacred lotus (that’s for you, Kamala Harris) floating in the middle of the Nile. The epigraph, taken from the D. H. Lawrence novella The Man Who Died, refers to the resurrected Jesus turning his back on self-denying versions of Christianity and impregnating a priestess of Egypt’s fertility goddess. The Jesus in the novella has been emptied out by too much self-sacrifice and needs the healing that she represents. “I am risen” has a sexual double meaning, and their union represents the coming together of sky and earth, individual and community, self and other.
Put another way, Isis is the valley that the hero seeks. The letters featured in the poem are all, with the exception of the last one, perfectly symmetrical and therefore represent balance and completeness. The U opens up as a flower and the S, representing the goddess’ serpentine smile, is a wild card, a final mystery that eludes us.
How does this apply to “Lotus” Harris? She certainly balances out the Biden ticket, a (relatively) young woman of color balancing out an older white patrician, a life force that will rejuvenate this representative of the old order. While she doesn’t exactly have a serpentine smile—rather a boisterous laugh—she offers the hope of renewal for a land that has been laid waste by the forces of greed, self-absorption, illness, and environmental devastation.
Hopefully, voters will undertake pilgrimages to the voting booth, as to a shrine, to pay her homage in the upcoming weeks.
While I on the Other Hand Is for Isis (and for Iesus and Ishtar and Ignatz and All Those Other Infinities) “I am risen!” said Jesus making love to the Priestess of Isis…--Lawrence I is the Goddess sitting on a lotus floating on a lotus in the middle of the Nile X is her legs crossed O is her leaf U is her flower the Love of her Life and S is her serpentine smile
H Is the Hero from Inner Space
H
sits
serenely
in his chair
like Taliesin
in mid-air
among the Seven Serpents of the Way
H dreams
of how he has to go
across the perilous bridge below
in the midst of the
mountain
of
A
to
the towers of
M
the mysterious home
of the mighty Moon Mother of
A
and how he must play on his mandolin
to lull to sleep the ferocious Djinn
who is guarding the tree with the wonderful
N
in the secret
valley of
WE
I