Diotima and Memory
A friend recently wrote me about her husband’s memory loss. Faced with this challenge, she has taken it on herself to provide leadership and direction. The most helpful thing, she wrote, is to read poetry to each other, and to write poems back and forth, sometimes collaboratively. In this way she finds the antidote for estrangement, she tends the fire. Along the way, she’s discovered that poetry is the spiritual glue between them. It is the same energy that is at work in this poem by Frederick Pollack.
Diotima
Regrettably she has no sponsor
in our world, and when she applies
for a visa, it’s denied—
bureaucratic fingers
balk at “Purpose of Visit.”
(How thick the walls of our embassy,
its windows narrow, blank, and barred.)
Then Diotima shrugs,
turns. Beret, trenchcoat,
perfume again pass
our guard (it is her imperturbability
he loathes), re-cross the boulevard,
reclaim her table on that street of tables.
There, unbothered—
nobody tries to pick up Wisdom
though all desire her—she takes out
her notebook, reflects.
With Plato she was an enabler.
For Hölderlin, a joy just out of reach.
What might she have whispered
to me, if Immigration had let her through?
She fills a page, removes and crumples it.
At the edges of the street,
fast-food joints have begun to replace
the cafés, but for the moment
it’s four o’clock; trumpets sound from the castle;
a carriage brings a smiling and waving archduke.
Diotima is the mentor of Socrates, whom he credits with having taught him all about love. She is also the Greek goddess of love. In this poem we meet her as a refugee without sponsorship or visa. Dressed like a spy, she coolly returns to her outdoor table and makes notes in her notebook about Plato and Holderlin, while all who pass desire her but cannot make effort at picking her up.
Suddenly, the narrator stands in for all of us asking “What might she have whispered/to me, if Immigration had let her through?” There is information—Wisdom—one could benefit from if only a connection could be established with this woman/goddess. There is also the missed opportunity for deeper understanding of love, but in this scene only frustration and the threat of impending disaster seem possible. Diotima writes in her notebook but tears it out and crumples it.
At the street’s edges the cafés are giving way to fast-food joints. The disconnected, sleepwalking future encroaches, but in the strange, pre-twilight moment of the poem, the veils between worlds and times flutter, and it is still a fragile moment of time when a member of a royal family can be assassinated and spark a devastating world war.
Writing Play
Imagine meeting the classical Goddess of your choice in a contemporary setting. How would you go one step further than the narrator in Pollack’s poem and connect with her? What would you say to her? What would you ask her for, or what would you ask her to do? Write a poem or journal entry about it.