The above is a recording of this piece read by the author from a cabin where birdsong, yard work and wind chimes may be audible.
Inspiring quotations help us get through hard times. We put them on our refrigerator, or above our bed, or in a reminder on our phone. They help us recall our best selves when we are lost, and our true center when we are out of balance; they remind us we are not alone. Your favorite may be:
Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.
- Norman Vincent Peale
Or:
Nothing is impossible. The word itself says, “I’m possible!”
- Audrey Hepburn
Here’s my favorite:
When you die, you meet the Old Hag, and she eats your scars. If you have no scars, she will eat your eyeballs, and you will be blind in the next world.
Inspiring, right?!
The quote comes from Robert Bly’s Iron John in the name of Lame Deer, a Lakota holy man (I’ve written here about the impact Iron John had on me). This quote has offered me profound medicine in my life for over a decade. I love its mystery—who is the Old Hag? how does she eat scars? what is the next world like?—its visceral physicality, its radical flip of wounds into visionary gifts. It came into my life during a painful time, and has been foundational to how I have related to pain and made meaning from it ever since. Something in it speaks to my soul.
The only problem is, it’s not what Lame Deer said.
Before I get into the backstory of the quote, let’s take a winding digression into the world of fake quotations on the internet.
Recently, I ghostwrote a book. My client and I decided to include a pithy epigraph or aphorism at the start of every chapter. When it came time to edit the book, the blessedly fastidious in-house copywriter at the publisher flagged a number of our epigraphs and asked for the source. It turned out many of them came from “quote mills,” web amalgams of inspiring sayings with no original provenance. In the end, we had to cut about half of them because it was impossible to find their sources. When I dug a little deeper, I discovered the staggering breadth of popular quotations which can’t be traced back to their author or misrepresent the intended meaning. I dare you to look up your favorite quote.
Consider these chestnuts from Winston Churchill:
Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.
And:
Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.
Delightful! And inescapable on the quote mills. The latter was recently used by Ron DeSantis when he suspended his campaign for the Republican presidential candidacy.
But Churchill didn’t say them. What does actually exist is the International Churchill Society, who have this to say about the quotes:
We can find no attribution for either one of these… They are found nowhere in his canon... An almost equal number of sources found online credit these sayings to Abraham Lincoln—but we have found none that provides any attribution in the Lincoln Archives.
In fact, no one has any idea who said this stuff originally.
Churchill’s avatar is one of the most fecund sources of imaginary quotes in the memeplex. He is up there with the Buddha. Both of them have been misquoted so much that an entire body of commentary websites has arisen to set the record straight. Here is Fake Buddha Quotes, an exhaustive and hilarious dismantling of some of the Buddha’s most popular (and completely erroneous) teachings.
Also on the Rushmore of illusory quotables is Ralph Waldo Emerson. How about this beloved paean to the good life embroidered and emblazoned on untold infinities of Etsy products?
To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you lived. This is to have succeeded.
In a great piece on fake Emerson quotes in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Chris Hanlon uncovers the source: in 1906, a newspaper in Kansas held a contest inviting readers to write in with their definition of success. A woman named Bessie A. Stanley submitted her essay and it became so popular that it was frequently reprinted. In 1951, a midwestern journalist named Albert Edward Wiggam wrote his own column about success and, after revising Bessie Stanley’s text significantly, presented it as an abridged version of statements credited to Emerson. “From here,” writes Hanlon, “it was off to the races.”
Probably the most prevalent and bizarre example of misattribution concerns Marianne Williamson’s famous riff:
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, “Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?” Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you.
The quote comes from Williamson’s best-selling 1992 book A Return to Love. However, it has been widely misattributed—at innumerable commencement addresses, in the film Coach Carter, and in a dizzying array of other places—to Nelson Mandela (see image above). For me, the attribution changes the entire meaning of the quote. If Mandela said it, I experience it as an ennobling call to face the challenge of sharing my gifts and standing up for what I believe in with resilience and courage. I also blush at the thought that Mandela conceived of human dignity in terms of us being gorgeous and fabulous. But if Williamson said it, I get a creepy feeling of someone commodifying the teachings of Jesus to hype us out of people-pleasing into a kind of Capitalist rapture (this piece from Vox thoroughly interrogates the creepiness of the quote and its political implications given Williamson’s presidential campaign).
As Hanlon points out in his Emerson essay, so many of the popular fake quotes on the internet have a way of recruiting and distorting the wisdom of the past to advocate for a pat triumphalist vision of corporate capital. It’s like that incredible moment in the Axial Age when all the revolutionary thinkers from Aristotle to Isaiah to Zoroaster simultaneously got together at a combination banking-center-and-cafe to co-evolve human consciousness, high-fiving each other and shouting, “Embrace the grind—your vibe attracts your tribe!”
Then there are the cases of mistranslation. Last year, I completed Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, itself a treasure trove of aphorisms on the creative process. One of my favorites, attributed to the Talmud, goes like this:
Every blade of grass has an angel that bends over it and whispers, "Grow, grow.”
This gives me the elevating feeling that we human blades of grass have our own angels, too, speaking to us through the quiet voice within to realize our unique potential (even this has a vaguely capitalist fragrance to it). When I went to track down the specific tractate in which the saying appears, I discovered that the original Hebrew text says something very different.
In Midrash Rabbah Bereshit 10:6, it says:
Rabbi Simon said: There is not a single blade of grass that does not have a constellation in the firmament that strikes it and says to it: “Grow!”
“Constellation” here translates mazal, as in “Mazal Tov!” Mazal originally meant a constellation of the Zodiac or a kind of horoscope and evolved into the meaning of luck. It could also mean a guardian angel. The really wild revelation is that, where the inspiring version has the angel bending over the blade of grass in a gesture of nurturing encouragement, the Talmudic original uses the verb “strikes” שֶׁמַּכֶּה shemakeh, which also means “smites,” “destroys,” “conquers,” or “plagues.” This is the same root of the verb used in Exodus 2:11 when Moses witnesses an Egyptian taskmaster beating an enslaved Israelite.
Hang on, the constellation flogs the blade of grass to make it fulfill its destiny? This vision of botanical abuse gives us a seriously different image of how the heavens exert their influence on our lives and the lives of everything that is growing. In this reality, the universe smites us into being fabulous and talented and gorgeous. I know the feeling.
Which brings us back to Bly’s quote from Lame Deer. In the chapter in Iron John where it appears, Bly is talking about the symbolic meaning of wounds and the scars they leave behind. He focuses particularly on the identifying wound in Odysseus’s thigh left by a wild boar attack. He prefaces Lame Deer’s quote like this:
What is a scar? The native Americans have a magnificent tradition about scars, which Lame Deer alludes to briefly in his autobiography. I have heard the tradition said this way: “When you die, you meet the Old Hag, and she eats your scars. If you have no scars, she will eat your eyeballs, and you will be blind in the next world.”
Bly is referring to the book Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions, by John (Fire) Lame Deer and the photographer Richard Erdoes. You can find the full text here.
However, where Bly includes the citations for much of his material in Iron John, he does not cite Lame Deer’s book at all in the Notes. I scoured Lame Deer to find the source of the quote that was so beloved to me and I couldn’t find it. My heart sank at the thought that this scrap of my soul’s scripture was just another fabrication.
Two passages come close. In the first, Lame Deer is talking about the way his people live with symbols. “From birth to death we Indians are enfolded in symbols as in a blanket,” he writes, encompassing the designs carved into an infant’s cradle board, to the beaded pattern sewn into the soles of the moccasins of the dead. This includes the tradition of getting tattoos on the wrist: “just a name, a few letters, a design.”
Then he shares the spiritual significance of the tattoos:
The Owl Woman who guards the road to the spirit lodges looks at these tattoos and lets us pass. They are like a passport. Many Indians believe that if you don't have these signs on your body, that Ghost Woman won’t let you through but will throw you over a cliff. In that case you have to roam the earth endlessly as a wanagi—a ghost. All you can do then is frighten people and whistle. Maybe it’s not so bad being a wanagi. It could even be fun. I don’t know. But, as you see, I have my arms tattooed.
Later, Lame Deer is reflecting on the meaning of the sacred cottonwood tree that stands at the center of the Lakota sun dance ceremony. Its trunk symbolizes the Milky Way, which is associated with the “road to the spirit lodges” mentioned above. At the fork, where a limb branches off, sits an old woman, the hihan kara.
When we die we have to pass her on the way to the spirit land. If we have a tattoo on our wrists hihan kara lets us pass. Our tattoo marks represent a kind of baptism. Without them we could not go to the spirit land but would have to walk back to earth as a ghost.
There are major differences here between Lame Deer’s language and Bly’s rendering. First off, is a ritual tattoo the same as a scar? For me, the first evokes a communal, initiatory ceremony performed intentionally; the latter calls up the mark left by damage to the body from an accident or an attack. Of course, there are many forms of ritual scarification in indigenous cultures, but I don't think that’s what Bly means in his version. He means the scars that life inflicts upon us that we have lost the ability to hold sacred, and can slowly learn to see as sacred again.
And then, where did the blindness in the next world come from? In both cases, Lame Deer emphasizes that without the tattoos, the dead person has to wander the earth as a ghost indefinitely—the whole point is they don’t get to enter the spirit world.
From one perspective, I see what Bly is doing: taking a specific mythical image and universalizing it to make a point. In fact, Bly’s wild acts of freely interpretive translation are what made him such a potent emissary for international poetry in America, introducing readers to a whole lyrical cosmos: Rilke, Transtromer, Machado, Vallejo, Kabir. And maybe he did actually hear the teaching that way from a wise one in the Lakota tradition. But this kind of thing has a very painful history.
In his book Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance, Gerald Vizenor, who was Director of Native American Studies at UC Berkeley, gives a postmodern reading of cultural texts that perpetuate the legacy of Manifest Destiny, the doctrine that sanctioned the genocidal land grab of America. In discussing issues of translation, Vizenor excoriates Bly as the “transient poser of tribal literature.” He catalogs the instances in which Bly freely appropriated material from tribal cultures without attribution, and altered it for his own purposes without revealing the intention or context behind his translations.
Vizenor diagnoses Bly’s approach as that of a would-be wild man “in the absence of his own stories,” and incisively notes how Bly is operating within the lack of soul that haunts mainstream white American culture (there are similar criticisms of the Rumi translations by Coleman Barks, another white soulslinger).
The miseries of a modern man in search of the other, and traces of a wild man in the stories and dream songs of the other, is the melancholia of absence and dominance.
While I acknowledge (and benefited from) Bly’s intention to re-soul his culture by drawing from the riches of others who had been better caretakers of their own sacred knowledge, I can’t sanction any soul-gathering that disrespects the souls of others.
Vizenor’s inquiry evokes the same cultural reckoning behind the New York Museum of Natural History’s decision to close its Native displays in response to new regulations requiring museums to obtain consent from tribes before displaying or performing research on cultural items. In this light, Bly’s Lame Deer quote feels to me like a beloved exhibit I visited as a child which lodged in my imagination before I understood the tribal world it had been unilaterally extracted from.
At this point, we might despair that all the fragments of wisdom that have accompanied our lives are either fake news, or garbled nonsense, or ignorant misunderstandings, or cherished traditions heedlessly torn from other contexts. It feels like human civilizations are just playing one long reckless game of “Telephone” with their wisdom.
But I’m going to offer a couple other perspectives.
Lately I’ve been learning about the Zohar, one of the foundational texts of Jewish mysticism. For centuries, it was believed that the Zohar recorded the teachings of Shimon bar Yochai, a 2nd-century rabbi and sage in ancient Judea. This was the claim of Moses de León, the Spanish rabbi and Kabbalist who first publicized the text in the 13th century. When modern scholars, notably Gershom Scholem, analyzed the Zohar for authorship, they discovered it was written in a strange artificial dialect of Aramaic and Hebrew fusing linguistic traits from the Babylonian Talmud with loanwords from medieval languages of de León’s own era. All evidence pointed to Moses de León himself as the author.
In Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Scholem notes how de León constructed the Zohar in an idiosyncratic pseudo-language from “misunderstandings and grammatical misconstructions,” “confused verb-stems,” and “wrong metaphrases.” Its Middle Eastern setting is riddled with details that betray the fact that de León never visited the Holy Land: “Whole villages are set up on the authority of some Talmudic passage the meaning of which has eluded the author.” And most significantly for our purposes,
The whole book is full of fictitious quotations and other bogus references to imaginary writings which have caused serious students to postulate the existence of lost sources for the mystical parts of the Zohar.
But in the end, “Not in a single instance are we confronted with genuine quotations from earlier writings which have since disappeared.” It turns out there is a whole genre of ancient writings called “pseudoepigraphia,” falsely attributed works where the real author made up a bunch of their own stuff then claimed it was the work of a more hallowed figure from the past.
Of the instances where de León did refer to actual writings from an earlier period, Scholem writes:
As often as not he displays a sovereign contempt for the literal text, using it freely as plastic material for his own constructive purposes and giving free rein to his imagination in making vital changes, emendations and reinterpretations of the original.
For all of its errors and misdirections and zany grandiosity, the Zohar is clearly the result of an author in a once-in-a-generation peak of creative frenzy gobbling and recombining hundreds of years of tradition and filtering it through the longings in his own guts (or we might say that the sacred tradition itself chose his prophetic guts as a vehicle to channel its own illumination). And the miracle is: this sprawling and bountiful compendium of literary falsehoods became the basis for every significant development in Kabbalah that followed, from Isaac Luria’s vision of the breaking of the divine vessels of God’s light and tikkun olam, to Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav’s uncanny fairy tales of exile.
There’s something here that makes my brain fizz. On a factual level, these quotes are all in some way fake. But imagination has other criteria for its purposes. Its uses of our memories, our stories, our lies, our thefts, our misrememberings, and our cruelties reach beyond true and false into the mysterious hungry synthesis that sustains life by making new things.
Returning to Bly and the Old Hag who eats your scars. That quote found me in my late 20s when I really needed it. Frankly, I feel like it saved my life. I was untethered in the loneliness, boredom, and loss of soul of American life, and carrying unaddressed intergenerational wounds from my own lineage. I thought all that pain was a mistake, a liability, a private and shameful problem I had failed to fix. That 32-word tale of the Old Hag and the scars told me otherwise: I didn’t have a problem, I had a passport to vision in the world beyond this one which I achingly sensed but lacked the confidence to trust. Bly may have been a domineering and irresponsible poet riddled with a sense of cultural entitlement to satisfy his various appetites. But he was also a great poet. And that line of—let’s call it what it really is—poetry took root in my imagination and haunted it into a wildly new container for the raw sorrow of growing. I came to it with a wound and it showed me how to tend it into a scar.
One final quote from Pai-Chang, a Zen master of the Tang Dynasty:
All verbal teachings are just to cure diseases. Because diseases are not the same, the remedies are also different. That is why it is sometimes said that there is Buddha, and sometimes it is said that there is no Buddha.
True words are those that actually cure sickness; if the cure manages to heal, then all are true words. If they can't effectively cure sickness, all are false words.
True words are false words when they give rise to views. False words are true words when they cut off the delusions of sentient beings. Because disease is unreal, there is only unreal medicine to cure it.
Even now, I seem to have misplaced the citation for this.
MORE:
Check out the collaboration I put together with Leora Fridman and Ellie Lobovits in the new issue of FENCE here. We each wrote lyrical essays on insomnia, Covid, and Jewish prayer. Mine starts on page 172.
For more on the intricacies and trespasses of poetic translation, check out Jake Marmer’s great piece on Lewis Warsh’s versions of the lost Jewish surrealist Robert Desnos here.