Birds and Saints by Eve Müller
This is the second book by Eve Müller that Plan B Press has had the privilege to publish. Here is some well deserved praise for her book :
I remember Rajneeshpuram from a distance—seeing people in red heading north to a rural corner of my home state back in the 1980’s. This imagined account of one girl’s entry into that infamous cult offers an intimate glimpse of emotional terrain: the allure of transcendence, of becoming like a bird or saint with purpose beyond oneself—and an underlying hunger to be chosen, special, desired, loved. This book is a journey of longing and disillusionment, an unsettling and provocative glimpse, indeed. – Kelly Terwilliger, Riddle, Fishhook, Thorn, Key
Longing can lead to peculiar places. In Birds and Saints, a 17-year-old girl joins a remote commune, willingly immersing herself in the cult’s strange ways, where desire and devotion merge. Müller imagines her way into the barely-believable-but-true story of Rajneeshpuram, going beyond reported facts to invoke a metaphysical coming-of-age. This book’s muscular language and brilliant imagery bring Oregon’s high desert country to life and help us recall the beauty of even our worst youthful mistakes. – Cecelia Hagen, Entering
They say his eyes are wildfire/blackening sage brush/coyote nests/juniper and wormwood/His eyes are a car wreck/no survivors.” We may begin reading the narrative poem Birds and Saints with an assumption that the central voice of a young woman and former cult member is “not us”—but rather a victim of aberration and fraud, her former devotion to the Rajneesh an idiosyncratic flaw.
Yet the lyric passages become evidence of our own susceptibilities to false promises of escape from the burden of ourselves, our histories, our fear of being ordinary and forgotten, and of our willingness to ignore hypocrisy for the reassurance of redemption: “The lucky ones wax His cars/offer Him meals of curry and rice./We make ourselves porous./We serve Him, and wind whistles through us.”
The lyric sequence of Birds and Saints embodies the violence of silence through which the Rajneesh wields charismatic influence and summons service to Himself in Buddha field— the descent into murderous paranoia following the initial embrace of brothers and sisters of the cult: “crowds of men and women/ dressed in scarlet/ bright as poppies. I fell into their arms.”
The more-than-human life of the desert inhabits the narrative through spare and stunning images that resist distortions of cult ambition. Even while a believer in the purpose of Buddha field, the speaker craves time for being with the vitality of the earth surrounding her: “Were you happy in Buddha field?/I did not care for happiness/but learned there was never enough time/to inhale thistle and thorn/odor of mud, creosote and bitter brush/never enough time to lie and watch the/vultures circle overhead/searching for life and its remains.”
The lyric verses throughout the narrative become the poet’s subtext of devotion through attention to the more-than-human life, that which exists for its own sake. The speaker’s increasing capacity to name this life becomes the means to her recovery. “I remember endless ribboned sky/bliss of finding mule deer hoof prints/pocketsful of sand./He is no longer with us/but the desert remains.”
Yet how disturbing, the final lines of this narrative— the former cult member’s longing wide open, as she waits and waits for him, her back against the earth, her mouth opening to release a cloud of ravens, her eyes starry with visions of tiny cars. We come to know through this narrative poem that both susceptibility to and recovery from the false promises of heaven, of freedom from own difficult truths, are ongoing. For her. For us.
Carter McKenzie, Book of Fire and Stem of Us