The Underneath

Painting of Mary Magdalene by Filippino Lippi, 1497

This is the last devil, or obstacle to the creative pattern, in this series on Marie Howe's poem: Magdalene– The Seven Devils. (As she continues to change her mind about which is first–)

Toward the end of the poem there is the line:

The underneath —that was the first devil. It was always with me.

What is the underneath? This, I think, is the key to Marie Howe's poem. In the voice of Mary Magdalene, as she rambles through the poem citing obstructions– and ends up with the invisible, the underneath.

Most of us have a myriad of ways to avoid the underneath, which is always with us. We are generally more comfortable with what we can see or measure. With the underneath, we don't know what we will find. It is what is hidden, what we can't see or touch, but sense is there. It is both the discomfort we feel with silence and the blessing that comes with staying there. In the voice of Mary Magdalene that is behind the poem we can see her willingness to stay with whatever is presented to her. It is what the psychologists call the awareness we develop by making a link between the conscious and the unconscious. It is this underneath that fuels our dreams and creative work.

The underneath meets us with full force in the poem when Howe is a witness to her mother dying. She says:

No, not the sound – it was her body’s hunger finally evident.–what our mother had hidden all her life.

Here we get the sense that her mother did not allow herself to reach for what she wanted–

So being a maker is an act of bravery, of going where we are afraid to go, to reach for what you are hungry for, to where we don't know what will happen. It goes against culture, which is more interested in how things appear than how they are. The underneath doesn't care about appearances and is not impressed with bravado or fancy tricks.

In our poem, the underneath takes precedence– and is an aspect of every other devil: For example: What propels busyness into an occupation? What is underlying worry? What is beneath the need to make ourselves separate from others? What compels us to disguise envy? Where is our aversion to something coming from? What am I afraid of?

Howe concludes by saying the underneath is the first devil, and is with her all the time. But this devil comes last in her list. So it is the first and the last, the beginning and the end.

It brings to mind the famous quote from T. S. Eliot:

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

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For reference, here is the entire poem by Marie Howe:

“Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven devils had been cast out” —Luke 8:2.

The first was that I was very busy.

The second — I was different from you: whatever happened to you could not happen to me, not like that.

The third — I worried.

The fourth – envy, disguised as compassion.

The fifth was that I refused to consider the quality of life of the aphid,

The aphid disgusted me. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

The mosquito too – its face. And the ant – its bifurcated body.

Ok the first was that I was so busy.

The second that I might make the wrong choice,

because I had decided to take that plane that day,

that flight, before noon, so as to arrive early

and, I shouldn’t have wanted that.

The third was that if I walked past the certain place on the street

the house would blow up.

The fourth was that I was made of guts and blood with a thin layer of skin

lightly thrown over the whole thing.

The fifth was that the dead seemed more alive to me than the living

The sixth — if I touched my right arm I had to touch my left arm, and if I touched the left arm a little harder than I’d first touched the right then I had to retouch the left and then touch the right again so it would be even.

The seventh — I knew I was breathing the expelled breath of everything that was alive and I couldn’t stand it,

I wanted a sieve, a mask, a, I hate this word – cheesecloth –

to breath through that would trap it — whatever was inside everyone else that

entered me when I breathed in

No. That was the first one.

The second was that I was so busy. I had no time. How had this happened? How had our lives gotten like this?

The third was that I couldn’t eat food if I really saw it – distinct, separate from me in a bowl or on a plate.

Ok. The first was that I could never get to the end of the list.

The second was that the laundry was never finally done.

The third was that no one knew me, although they thought they did.

And that if people thought of me as little as I thought of them then what was

love?

Someone using you as a co-ordinate to situate himself on earth.

The fourth was I didn’t belong to anyone. I wouldn’t allow myself to belong

to anyone.

Historians would assume my sin was sexual.

The fifth was that I knew none of us could ever know what we didn’t know.

The sixth was that I projected onto others what I myself was feeling.

The seventh was the way my mother looked when she was dying.

The sound she made — the gurgling sound — so loud we had to speak louder to hear each other over it.

And that I couldn’t stop hearing it–years later –

grocery shopping, crossing the street –

No, not the sound – it was her body’s hunger

finally evident.–what our mother had hidden all her life.

For months I dreamt of knucklebones and roots,

the slabs of sidewalk pushed up like crooked teeth by what grew underneath.

The underneath —that was the first devil. It was always with me.

And that I didn’t think you— if I told you – would understand any of this -