Thinking about the Sunny Noon of Life

Hello friends,

Chicago has more or less thawed from the deep freeze of the past few days (the longest since the late 1800s). We had to keep our taps running to make sure the pipes didn’t burst. The constant drip was a bit irritating. In addition, we have all had the same phlegmy coughs for weeks now. So our house has felt either like a sanatorium for consumptives or a Chinese water torture chamber. Plus it was negative nineteen degrees outside. I am now an expert at layering clothes.

We stayed with my parents over the weekend to have some company and ward off cabin fever. My mom and Chad and sometimes I worked on a jigsaw puzzle with a picture of very shiny donuts. Then, on Monday, we all braved the cold to see The Boy and the Heron. I found it very moving. Chad and I streamed Oppenheimer last week and we thought The Boy and the Heron was a fitting, albeit distressing, companion film.

I had trouble sleeping that night—maybe it was due to the film’s more disturbing imagery, or maybe it was the dripping faucet—and I had this weird dream about a heron emerging from a stack of donuts.

Thank you for reading Mushroom Head. If you like it, why not share it with a friend? If you don’t like it, then share it with an enemy.

Moving on to the mail section...

In response to my ouroboros reference last week Megan asked if I knew of “the Ouroboros frontispiece for Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century, and her poem which it illustrates?” I did not know, or if I had known, I had forgotten.

This gave me an excuse to revisit Megan’s excellent biography, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, a page-turner which reads so much like a novel that if I open that book at any point I literally cannot put it down.1 For those who may not know, Fuller was an American writer and feminist who is associated with the transcendentalist movement (Ralph Waldo Emerson was a close friend and supporter of her work). She was sent to Europe in 1846 by the New-York Tribune, becoming the first female war correspondent when she began covering the revolutions in Italy.

She first sketched this ouroboros in her notebook, then used it for the cover image of her book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century. “Whether or not readers understood the image,” Megan writes, “its message of radiant unity galvanized Margaret’s narrative and worked its way into her closing paragraphs, in which she invited women to follow her own example by turning away from regrets, resentments, all that bound and fettered them. ‘I stand in the sunny noon of life,’ she wrote, and ‘what concerns me now is, that my life be a beautiful, powerful, in a word, a complete life.’”

And here is Fuller’s Ouroboros poem:

Patient serpent, circle round
Till in death thy life is found
Double form of godly prime
Holding the whole thought of time,
When the perfect two embrace,
Male and female, black and white
Soul is justified in space,
Dark made fruitful by the light,
And centred in the diamond Sun,
Time, eternity, are one.

Love,

Claire

ps—I am making a few changes to Mushroom Head. Mainly moving to a new platform. I think I may also start sending it on Monday instead of Friday morning. I am also introducing a new serial which I really hope you like. All shall be revealed shortly—as in next week!