Edna, Flames and Open Spaces
June 19, 2020
Dear all,
This past month I had the pleasure of studying Edna St. Vincent Millay. She was a poet of great charisma, a woman who drew crowds to her like no other in her time. She was born in the late 1800’s and grew up in a family of women, with two sisters and a working mother.
In Nancy Milford’s biography of Edna she writes, “her performing self made people feel they had seen the muse alive and just within reach.” She was a brilliant flame who managed to ignite hope and courage in many others.
Her poem First Fig speaks about the burning of a candle at both ends. This poem has a great subversive energy about it. This small, fiery red head with a deliciously powerful voice speaks to us still from another century.
FIRST FIG
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!
There’s a burn. There’s the disregard for standards that tell her to stay in line, to conserve her energy, to live a life of restrained passion. But Edna defied these expectations and even flaunted that flame. She kept lighting up rooms with words blazing.
Her life was by no means a fairy tale and she was no saint. Fortunately we can learn from all aspects of anothers life. I am particularly drawn to one shortcoming:
Edna’s sister said of her that she used to fall into “sudden rages”:
“we used to say of Vincent that she had a bee chasing her. When she was bewildered by what she… I have to be careful what I say. We had to calm her down a bit. Once in a while, when reality would hit her— something she couldn’t handle in her lovely way, then she was wild.”
Anger has become a primary reaction to anxiety and guilt in my late 20’s on. I feel the weight of the above words. I understand not handling calmly reality when it doesn’t fit my mold for a lovely life.
I think, however, that one thing I’ve been learning about rage is that it’s like fire. That while it is a destructive force that doesn’t mean it’s inherently bad. Rage gives us the courage and energy to confront injustice. Perhaps some of our visions for a lovely life are worth the getting angry about and thus fighting for. When we learn how to properly hone this destruction we can choose to burn down those words, thoughts, actions that are venom to our hearts, minds and souls.
Like the words from the old union song: We can bring about a new world from the ashes of the old.
I am reminded of the reason I wrote Open Spaces in the first place. It was a response to a lot of guilt and deep depression I was encountering from young women in my life fighting their way through toxic expectations on how they should look and act.
As a person whose primary struggles revolve around guilt I felt particularly attuned to the massive amounts of guilt and shame coming from some of my dearest friends.
I wrote Open Spaces as a love song of sorts, as a call to those pushed to the margins and made to feel small, those forced to inhabit small spaces (physical and emotional) that they are indeed forces of great power and capable of filling up the spaces around them.
Though the world tells them to be thin and “pure” and pressed in on all sides they have the potential to expand both in their internal worlds and their external actions.
Purity culture is one way that people are pressed in and made to feel small. There are millions of people literally enclosed in small cells, incarcerated by a racist and classist system. There are people of color pushed to the margins and compelled to restrain their passion for justice and fabricate composure as peace. These injustices should not fit into our idea of a lovely life and that life is worth fighting for. It’s not destruction that should be denied in it’s what we choose to rid ourselves of.
Whether you want to think of it as a burning flame or open spaces my hope is that you would find ways today and the next to gain courage, to feel your value and to live an authentic life based in hope, passion and compassion. I hope you burn brightly and expand out and in.
You are open spaces
You are expanding graces
You are the loving places
You are open spaces
Until Soon,
Remona Jeannine