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About literarylew

I am a retired mental health counselor in El Prado, NM near Taos. I have a life-long passion for the liberal arts and a deep spiritual commitment. I will utilize my voracious appetite for the written word in this blog, delving into literature, psychology, religion, philosophy, and linguistics.

“Seared With a Hot Iron”

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A blogging friend of mine, Hibah Shabkez, a beautiful and brilliant young woman from India, offered several years ago a powerful thoughr about the human tendency to isolate him/herself in a carefully-guarded and deadly point of view:

When you touch the edge of something hot—a frying-pan, a clothes-iron—you gasp and flinch away, before the knowledge, before the shock and the hurt and the searing of flesh. Locked in the thumping of your heart then, there is the secret triumph of assault successfully withstood, the inexpressible comfort of knowing it could not and cannot hurt you because you did and can again make it stop. But the drenching heat of liquid cannot be flung off, only sponged and coaxed away from the skin. And so they say doodh ka jala, chhaachh bhi phook phook kar peeta hai. (Urdu translation, “Once bitten, twice shy.”) It doesn’t take all men, you see, it takes only one; and just so, it takes only one vile lie to break a language’s heart.

When first you write a lie, a real lie and not simply a truth incognito, whether it be falsehood or treacherous half-truth, language recoils from you in pain, vowing never to trust you with words again. But if you must go on writing lies, for money or grundy-respect, seize the language and let it feel the sting and the trickling fear of the skin parting company with the flesh, over and over repeatedly, as you hold it unscreaming under the current. You must let body and mind and heart and soul be quite maimed then, until there is no difference left for any of them between truth and lie, between the coldness of lassi (urdu–”buttermilk”) and the heat of milk-tides rising from the saucepan. Thereafter you may plunder with impunity all of language and force it to house your lies. And if you will never again find words to tell a truth in, it will not matter, for you will have no truths left to tell. (https://nightingaleandsparrow.com/scarzone/)

https://cloverandwhite.wordpress.com/2019/12/22/nestling-by-hibah-shabkhez/;

https://nightingaleandsparrow.com/;

An “Deux ex Machina” is needed!

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The ancient Greek dramatists often employed an “Deux ex Machina” when the plot reached an insoluble dilemma. The Gods would descend on a platform from above the stage and peremptorily resolve the impasse presented in the drama. This mechanical contrivance…and it was literally “mechanical”…would then offer a solution to the incomprehensible matter that the dramatist had woven into the plot This was an example of a “divine intervention” in which the gods would intervene into a plot dilemma. The Greeks understood that from time to time the plot of the human predicament in which we are implicated cannot be resolved without an heavenly intrusion.

My country is living in one of these moments. Trump’s insanity is becoming more and more intense with the assistance of “Trump Lite” in the form of Elon Musk and his coterie of acolytes. Oh let it be that an “deux ex machina” here be employed by the Gods and suddenly bring Kamala Harris onto the stage and kick Trump’s ass and his demonic minions into oblivion!

“The Way Things Oughta Be” (TWTOTB)

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Yesterday I noted that Republican Senator Joni Ernst had surrendered to TWTOTB, capitulating to Trump who she had earlier firmly disavowed. She, like hordes of previously Republicans who had disavowed Trump have opted to drink the toxic, death-dealing “Kool-aid” that wants TWTOTB. The status quo is always very appealing to any tribe…and certainly has its place…but can often create a tribal demagogue whose black-magic will proffer death-dealing destruction. Early in my adulthood I learned that life has two powerful, twin tensions, the need to stay the same and the need to include change. This is true socio-politically but is also relevant to our individual lives. These twin oppositions is an essential dimension of life itself and if either is overly emphasized there will be “hell to pay.” The “ought” in this expression reveals the deadly temptation to maintain the status quo which is present even in our body, a temptation which is relevant to the onset of cancer. Lewis Thomas in “Lives of a Cell” noted that disease in our physical body will occasionally metastacise into cancer when cellular energy that is designed to reach out and make connection with other cells opts to retreat into a self-serving cocoon. The haven of “the same” for these cells threatens death to the whole body.

The Visitation of Poetry on a Meagre Life

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“Poetry” first visited mere nearly 35 years ago and my life has never been the same. I’m not a poet, but a devotee to the art, and an appreciator of the following poet and his beautiful, profound personal note following this “Rattle” post today:

T.R. Hummer
SURGE
At the Senior Center, nobody is playing cards. The tables are folded and leaned against the wall; the Queen of Hearts is stuffed in a box upside-down and backward, jammed between a joker and the three of clubs. Down the street, the local diner is emptier than a Hopper painting, bacon grease coagulating in a cold tin can. No one in the shops, no one on the street except one black-masked old man in a worn peacoat with a dog-eared paperback stuffed in one pocket, sitting on a bus stop bench, clenching his fists and weeping. This is the way contagion works. The tears of the poet were in the reader all along. —from Rattle #78, Winter 2022
 
T.R. Hummer: “Having been writing poetry seriously for over 50 years, I have belatedly come to the same conclusion I came to when I was in my 20s: I don’t write poetry; poetry writes me. When I was young, I knew that but misunderstood it; now I misunderstand it in a completely different way. Then, I wanted poetry to remake me in some radical and idealized way that was beyond me to do on my own. Now, I feel it in what I imagine to be Heraclitus’s way: ‘Listening not to me, but to the logos, it is wise to agree that all things are one.’ At 22, I would have thought that sentence was a three-part non sequitur; now, I simply concur.”

Must We Be “Some”-Body?

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I’M NOBODY by Emily Dickinson

I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Are you – Nobody – too?

Then there’s a pair of us!

Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!

How public – like a Frog –

To tell one’s name – the livelong June –

To an admiring Bog!

********************

It is very challenging to be the “Nobody” that Emily Dickinson presents to us in this poem.  Becoming a “nobody” is one of life’s greatest challenges, hardwired from birth on-ward to find our place in the world we are driven to finding our place in this mysterious world in which we find ourselves, and the desire to be “some”-body.

ves, an urge which always includes a grandioseour ego to driving us toward signficance, often more significance than any human can merit! desire to be “Somebody,” even if only vicariously through a cultural or political leader who vicariously satisfies that need of ours.

Dickinson knew that pursuit of prominence means prostituting ourselves to that “admiring bog,” those people “out there” who we early-on learned we must compare ourselves to. Rene Girard and James Alison have powerfully offered us the notion of “mimetic engulfment” in which humans are taught to be a slave to “sameness” and therefore the need to fit in, and eventually succeedf i the effort…… And “fitting-in” is part of being human but not when it is pursued so much that we completely forgo any impulse to find a vestige of autonomy as we participate in a social body.  It is the absence of personal autonomy that can turn a social body into a tyranny, an organized madness which will always find itself a voice to articulate its rage.

Notice that Dickinson described those masses whose attention we often seek to an “admiring bog,” before we often spend our life croaking like a frog. I’ve listened to movie stars and other famous people lament their realization that their loving and admiring fans often see them only as puppets of some sort, on the stage only to sing, dance, and perform for their mindless amusement.

Human existence demands only for us “to be” which T. S. Eliot described, “a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything.” This always entails what Christian tradition terms “a self-emptying” (kenosis, in the Greek. But this “self-emptying” is very challenging to ego which is horrified at this death. The Christian story of the Cross, an image of an excruciating pain, a death experience which alone can offer Resurrection. Until this “resurrection” takes place we will only be a shell of a human being, an “humanoid” often demonstrated in “card-board christian performance art.” This “performance art” of “christian” is one stage of becoming a follower of the teachings of Jesus, but at some point “the flesh” must be crucified and only then can we meekly, humbly follow in the steps of Jesus.

Having been born and raised in Christian culture, most of my life has been an expression of this “performance art.” If I’d have continued on that path, I well could have become “somebody” in Christian culture and even climbed to upper echelons of Christian ministry. But that have cost me my very soul even as I presented myself to my little world as a “SOUL winner for Jesus.”

J

The Dilemma of Human Connection

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Loneliness does not come from having no people around but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding views which are different from others.   Carl Jung

Solitude is very important, but so is social interaction and connection.  We are hard-wired to learn engagement with our fellow humans as our Creator knew, and knows, that one cannot be human without other people.  It is often a challenge to mature to the point of finding a home between these two extremes.  If we err toward the solitude, psychosis will be the result, relevant to an old bromide, “The one who lives by himself and for himself will be spoiled by the company he keeps.”  But the opposite extreme is equally deadly as the social demand to “fit in” can become so important that one has no solitude at all and the whole of his/her life can be marching in lockstep with the dictates of the tribe.  Group psychosis is equally deadly but is not recognized by those who have been consumed by the group.

The challenge of any group dynamic to lessen the risk of soul-destroying loneliness, especially on the family level, is to create an environment where each individual learns he/she has a voice and that this voice will be respected. Without this dynamic, sterility will set in and death-wielding toxicity will result. Paul Tillich called this toxic environment, an “empty world of self-relatedness.”

Vaclav Havel on Hope

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Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good, not because it stands for a chance to succeed. (Vaclav Havel)

“Hope is a state of mind, not of the world” and I would add, “a ‘mind’ working in harmony with a heart.”  This hope is grounded in the Spiritual, a Divinely inspired, intuitive understanding that is not based in what is so often an ersatz “joy” of the common-sense reality that most of us call home.  “Joy” is very wonderful but we often fall victim to a common-sense definition of that word which is but a quest for what C.S. Lewis called, ”a quest for immediate gratification over a believed-in pattern of glory.” Hope is most real when we face the grim dirge of hopelessness when circumstances seem beyond the pale of any rational hope.

Here is one of my favorite poetic approaches to this hope/hopelessness continuum from the pen of T. S. Eliot in “East Coker,” one of “The Four Quartets”:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

(AFTERTHOUGHT—Havel was the last president of Czechoslovakia, and then the Czech Republic, serving from 1989-2003.  He was an author, a playwright, and memoroist whose literary skills were used to criticize the totalitarian Communist regime that oppressed Eastern Europe.)

The Southern Baptist Church And Sexual Abuse

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The Southern Baptist Convention is being racked…again…by its history of sexual abuse and systematic efforts at covering it up.  I grew up in a Southern Baptist church….mine a split-off from the SBC which it castigated for being “too liberal”….and I know a lot about “hiding stuff.”  My life has been one ego-driven cover-up which is now mercifully being shredded, a dissolution allowing me to see, and even experience, what I so glibly back then described as “the Grace of God.”

Religion, in all forms and expressions, is subject to the whole gamut of “sins of the flesh.”  The riotousness of my  youth and most of my life was covered up with an hypocritical need to “not be found out.”  This is just the “sin” of being human as, per T.S. Eliot, “humankind cannot bear very much reality.”  This is because if we allow reality to intrude into our little self-serving fortress, ou r facade would be in jeopardy and it is easier to just deny what is so very obvious to others.  This “intrusion,” if and when it comes, is always frightening, motivating our “flesh” dimension to double-down in its denial system.  This violation, though, I now realize can be a visitation from “the Spirit of God.”

In the following link, you can read a report of a former notable Southern Baptist Church leader, Russell Moore, castigating his erstwhile church for its hypocrisy on the matter of sexual abuse.  But the “hypocrisy” goes much further than sexuality as this church, like all religious traditions often falls prey to the very human temptation to use spirituality as a facade to cover up “the flesh,” whereas the Gospel taught us we could opt for more human-ness—vulnerability, anxiety, and even despair as the Spirit of God does Her work on us.

A caveat is in order.  Today, long past my Baptist years and its fundamentalism, I am still very proud of that tradition which offered me a “hunger and thirst after righteousness” which is being somewhat sated as I wrestle with that “beast” called “humility.” (See T.S. Eliot quote at conclusion.)  This tradition offered me the gift of Holy Writ, only the Bible at that point, but also an intuitive insight that there is more to the whole of life than the perfunctory.

…………………………………………………………………………………….

T. S. Eliot, “Oh the shame of motives late revealed, and the awareness of things ill-done, and done to others harm, which once you took for exercise of virtue.” (The Four Quartets)

Link to news story about the SBC sex scandal—https://www.rawstory.com/southen-baptists-abuse/

Borges, Jung, and Individuation

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Time is the substance I am made of.  Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger;  It is the fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.  Jorge Luis Borges

I often have second thoughts when I post here on this blog.  Last week when I offered this wisdom of Jorge Luis Borges I had another flurry of recriminations stemming from the childhood fear, “Oh, my this is just too crazy to be thinking.”  I now realize that in my very early life I feared I was not “thinking right” but had an uncanny awareness of this “flaw” and so quickly set my precocious little mind/heart dynamo to learning how to “think right.”  And I’m glad I did as otherwise I would have had a very hard time finding a place in the world in which I found myself and would have created great difficulty for myself and others, especially my family.  But as I hyper focused on thinking, and behaving, in the “right way” I did subscribe to linearity but with some reservation, a hesitancy which has dissipated here in my later years.

Borges with this astute poetic observation put into words the profound Mystery I discovered upon my birth in 1952.  And, yes, it was a “discovery” even then as my innocent little mind/heart contrivance was alive and kicking, and had been even in the womb, as it is with all of us…… and the conclusions we draw shape the balance of our lives.  These “conclusions” are in the realm of perception which precedes cognition, a realm which will then shape the cognitive framework we formulate. Depending upon our neurological wiring and the familial/cultural environment in which we find ourselves, we can often find ourselves “hard-wired” in a cognitive framework from which we can never escape.  This framework is an algorithm which will dictate how we think and seek to make sure that we think in an “appropriate” way as defined by the social venue in which we find ourselves ensconced. We are then set on the path in which the Jungian phenomenon of individuation is challenging or even impossible.  The resulting quandary will be my focus next time.