Simpler Things

I have been wanting, more and more lately, to curl up into a tight little ball and dream the world away. Perhaps it is because I'm on the brink of my period, my lower back is aching its first tell-tale aches of the month. Perhaps it's a new symptom I'm developing in the ever changing kaleidescope of sensitivities and pains that come a little differently each month. I'm reminded of The Red Tent by Anita Diamant- I often wish I could take time out while menstruating to honor what my body seems to want and just sit in a sacred tent bleeding into fresh straw and giggling with the other ladies or somesuch rather than dragging myself through the insanity of everyday life. When did the world become such a busy place and why do I find myself so easily wearied by it? Sometimes I think that, perhaps, I belong somewhere slower and simpler.

Blackberries, the Namesake

Blackberry-Picking
Seamus Heaney

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full,
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.
---

We analyzed this poem one early morning in an English literature class my senior year of high school. After letting us stumble over our interpretations for a while, our teacher, who I will call Ms. Olsen, gave us her interpretation:
"It's a poem about burgeoning sexuality," she said. "Innocence lost and the first sexual encounters of youth; at first these encounters are sweet and exciting, but soon the romances of youth falter to an end, rotting in the gluttony of desire, they moulder and go bad and the youth, too inexperienced yet to understand what is happening and why, feels powerless to stop it. "

The class looked squeamish.
"Eww," said a girl, "I'll never be able to think about blackberries the same way again."

I loved it. I loved the messiness of it, the sensation of ripe full blackberries bursting on tongues, thick and dark and sweet that it invoked for me so easily, the heady feeling of childhood summers. I loved the flesh and blood of it, the allusion to human flesh, to human blood, to hymens broken and a pulsing new desire. I loved too the uncertainty, the hopelessness and inevitability of failure in the last stanza. Already I identified with the struggle to reconcile passion with the deterioration of time and the failings of youth.

Over the years, this poem and Ms. Olsen's interpretation have kept coming back to me, and every time I find more to identify with. Though I've looked, I've never found another interpretation quite as inspiring as this one. So when I sat down and thought OK, I'm finally going to start a blog for real now," and I thought about my life and what I write about it was "Blackberry-Picking" that came to mind: the spoils of adolescence, the longing for the endurance of good things, the vitality of summer, sex and sweet, ripe, blackberries bursting in eager mouths. Each post a blackberry, some unripe, some perfect, some crushed, some rotten but all there for the picking. Yes, just right.