Lake Cottage
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

I see the sun crown the trees on the far side of the lake each morning. Its light streams sideways into the grove of mountain laurel outside my bedroom window, making the laurel’s nymph-like limbs cast plaintive shadows across the moss. At dawn, the grove is an emerald under the canopy of century-old oaks, a gem lodged in my deepest memories. I linger over the sight until the sun rises just high enough to dispel it, then get out of bed feeling as if I’d just experienced morning in its most elemental, most spiritual sense. My mother’s Irish ancestors descended from the Celts, a people who often chose oak groves and water-spots as their places of worship because of the sense of sacredness they felt when there. I always believed that my grandmother purchased this particular lake-side property out of a similar, perhaps ancient, sense of the spiritual vitality she felt here. She and my grandfather were very private people who craved an escape from the labor of their everyday lives, and the small shingled cottage he built on this property provided them with exactly that for over fifty years.

Once out of bed, I light the 1940’s stove and set the white enamel percolator on the front burner. I walk out on the porch to watch the pearl-cool mist, as Anne Carson describes it in Plainsong, lift off the lake. The cottage is quiet. The lake is quiet. A couple of fishermen drift in the bay, catching nothing. The canoe racer silently laps the lake. The heron suns herself on the rock that juts out of the cove, her black wings spread wide. And so begins my writing time.

Poets and artists have often sought such places of refuge to escape from everyday life. My refuge is this lake cottage where as a child I spent my summers, as did my mother before me, away from school and schedules. It’s where I came as an adult to escape professional and social commitments of everyday life and to dedicate time to my writing. Joan Miró had a similar refuge in his own mother’s homeland of Mallorca. It, too, was the place where he spent summers and vacations as a child, and in fact became an increasingly important refuge for him in the early 1940’s when German troops invaded his one-time domicile of Paris, and the political outcome of the Spanish Civil War made his native city of Barcelona equally dangerous for him. For Miró, the vast blue Catalan sky and rugged landscape provided both creative inspiration and spiritual shelter for his art: two essentials that turned the island into a home for his work. In the 1950’s, having come to equate the island with freedom, he settled in Mallorca for good. He famously found inspiration there for his painting and sculpting, completing some of his most important pieces. Indeed, it was undoubtedly the near-limitless space the place afforded him, markedly different from his cramped hotel rooms, studios, and apartments in Paris, that gave way to the expansive spirit portrayed on his canvasses here. For Miró, the vast blue Catalan sky and rugged landscape provided both creative inspiration and spiritual shelter for his art: two essentials that turned the island into a home for his work. His 1950’s withdrawal from the urban centers of Paris and Barcelona in favor of the quiet blue jewel of Mallorca places him in a long tradition of artists who abandon the lives they know to pursue a spiritual quest of sorts, seeking a place that would provide them with such shelter.

Rainer Maria Rilke is another who famously withdrew from the busy cities he knew to find a place to fulfill his artistic quest. He once described his native city of Prague as a “miserable city of subordinate existences”^[2] and, though initially drawn to Paris, he grew to dislike what he saw as the mundane artificiality and fruitlessness of the everyday life exhibited in its streets, which he describes in his Fifth Duino Elegy:

Rilke found the freedom he sought in the open, wind-filled expanse of Duino,^[4] in the castle of his patron, Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe, which to this day tops a rugged cliff high above the Adriatic. Unlike Miró, he could not call this his homeland, and did not even have the luxury of choosing the exact locale of his escape: living in genteel poverty, Rilke often relied on the favors of his wealthy patrons, and in 1912, he spent the off-season here. He began writing the Duino Elegies after climbing the castle ramparts one night and hearing what was to become their first line spoken out of the violent north wind: “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ / hierarchies?”^[5]

Duino Castle
(Duino, Italy)
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

The unique combination of offering respite from the machinations of everyday life and having a physically inspirational presence helps a place become a person’s creative muse, and Rilke’s experience in Duino is perhaps the strongest argument I know in support of the idea that places can hold a mystical creative power for writers and artists. When poetry or novels, paintings or sonatas repeatedly rise out of the somehow hallowed ground, the confluence of person and place becomes more than a happenstance arising simply from time spent there. I have always been fascinated by the artistic purity and power of the Duino Elegies, and so, finding myself in Eastern Europe several years ago, I made a pilgrimage to Duino with a friend. We drove our little rental car all the way from the Slovenian alps into the town of Duino, through its narrow streets where colorful laundry hung, bougainvillea grew over every stone wall, and old women sat framed in the shade of 14th century doorways. Once at the castle, we wound our way through the rooms open to the public (some areas are still inhabited by the Von Thurn und Taxis family), and up to the ramparts. To my disappointment, it was a clear blue day on the Adriatic, with no sign of storm, and not a single angel in sight. Later that night, as my friend and I were walking the steep steps up from the harborside restaurant where we’d eaten dinner, green lightning did began to streak, sending an electric current through my nerves. Then the north wind picked up and began rifling through the bougainvillea, through my hair, and rippling the hem of my summer skirt. The ever-so-slight touch of intimacy with the Duino elements that night has allowed me to read more deeply into the Elegies. For example, the whole first stanza now connotes a much more visceral experience for me than I had been able to access prior to my pilgrimage:

Establishing an intimate relationship with one’s natural surroundings, whether sought out or happened upon, is critical to many artists. Two contemporary poets whose work expresses this intimacy are Anne Carson, whose lines from “The Anthropology of Water: Water Margins” thread through this essay, and James Wright. A quintessential poem about the intimacy a speaker feels with the natural surroundings of a specific place is Wright’s “Blessing.” The first line of the poem places the speaker in a specific geographical locale:

The adjective “those” conveys a level of familiarity at the outset, and this familiarity grows into full-blown intimacy over the course of the poem, coming into fruition in the final five lines:

It is not the speaker’s emotions that move him to make a gesture of intimacy toward the pony, but rather the breeze that moves him to do so. In the last line, this intimacy with the natural landscape, of which theses ponies are a part, transforms him in just the same way the spring sun transforms a flowering tree or the rain transforms the grass.

Like Wright’s field in Rochester, Minnesota, my Connecticut lake cottage is not in a place as dramatically beautiful as Rilke’s cliff-side castle or the imposing Catalan landscape outside Miró’s studio. Although natural grandeur is undisputedly inspiring, an intimate connection with even the humblest of natural surroundings can provide creative nourishment for a poet.

During the summer, my sons and I live in a way that deeply connects us to the natural surroundings of the cottage. Now an amateur astronomer, my older son discovered his love for the stars here at the Lake, where he first noticed the night sky in a way he never had at home. My younger son discovered his interest in birds and animals here. He knows the comings and goings of the robins as they dig up worms to bring back to their young; he knows the nest they make in the same sassafras tree each spring. He hears the regular calls of the mourning doves and watches their soft gray figures peck at the lawn. He has spent hours playing with inchworms, urging them to creep up the ropes of the hammock. In my poem, “Lake Effect,” I write about how their summers by the lake bring them face-to-face with nature:

It’s worth noting that these lines draw inspiration from Rilke’s poem “I,” in his Book of Hours, as well as from my sons’ interactions with the cottage landscape. By the end of my poem, they find light blossoming in the darkness:

I must admit that my sons never actually dissected a water lily at the cottage’s dinner table. For me, as for Wright, Rilke, Carson, Miró, and many others, finding creative expression for one’s experience at spiritually-charged places (however each artist experiences “spirituality”) allows these places to take on the same mythical role as places in the Bible or the Odyssey or the story of King Arthur: some of the places in these texts geographically exist. Some do not, but all receive the same narrative treatment, and it is left to the reader to distinguish between real and imagined – or not. So, too, did some of the events in these texts take place, while some did not. As a poet, I wonder to what extent language itself led the writers to blend the otherworldly properties with the factual properties of the events and places they describe. This question is best left to Biblical, classical, and Arthurian scholars; to me, it doesn’t matter. The texts in themselves satisfy my spiritual yearnings. Did Rilke really hear voices come out of the violent green storm? I don’t know, and I only invent the storm’s green color to satisfy my own yearning for an intimate connection to the landscape which inspired the Duino Elegies.

How slow is the slow trance of wisdom, which the swimmer swims into.^[9]

When a particular landscape becomes the physical conduit of the “human truths” an artist discovers there, that landscape takes on a mythical nature, in that it yields an experience that cannot be explained scientifically, nor by research into historical fact, yet the experience happens nevertheless — between the artist and the water or land that surrounds him or her. The lines between mythical and spiritual are, of course, blurry: there is a rock that juts four feet out of the cove on which our cottage sits, known in our family as “The Rock.” It is not only evidence of the movement of the glacier that carved this lake out of the earth 20,000 years ago; it is a concrete reminder of the sorrows and hardships my family has endured. We have all in our turn looked out on that rock while worrying the bead of some significant loss. Perhaps it’s not unlike my Celtic ancestors, for whom the rock-studded waters of Ireland took on a similar meaning and so became deified. I’ll admit I’ve prayed to that rock more than I’ve prayed to the Christian god of my upbringing – the god that, for my mother, was symbolized by the very same rock.

Miró once said that “an artist must put down roots in the soil,”^[10] and many artists and poets would agree, feeling that we must find our own place in which to take root, or at the very least let a place find us, and — here’s the trick — remain rooted there, even when we cannot physically be there. My school-year mornings may be mayhem, getting my two sons off to school, the dog taken care of, and myself off to work, but I sip my coffee, cradling the warm mug in my hands. The cottage is quiet. A couple of fishermen drift in the bay, catching nothing. The heron suns herself on the rock that juts out of the lake, her black wings spread wide. And so begins my writing time. The Lake is here. The Rock is here. The landscape is here, inside.