Author Archives: literarylew

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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.

Jorge Luis Borges Summarizes Life

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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’ve stumbled across Borges for decades and appreciated his wisdom, but this little poem totally grabbed me this morning, encouraging me to “wikipedia” him.  I’m glad for this brief Wikipedia venture into his very profound, complicated, and even troubling life.

“Time is the substance I am made of” is a description of our physical existence, the mundane life that we all live.  But when I call it “mundane” I say that only for emphasis to point out its other dimension, that “river which sweeps me along.”  It is this “river” that makes this otherwise “mundane” world Sublime if we ever deign to look beneath the surface of life as Borges did.  In a sense this “mundane” world is the only one that “is” but it is the Sublime that gives it value if we ever find the courage and humility to let Her peek into our lives. There is more to life than meets the eye.  But it is human nature to prefer “what meets the eye” without any further inquiry, any “internal dialogue” as Hannah Arend put it in her study of Nazi totalitarianism.  We prefer to see only the “small bright circle of our consciousness” rather than to acknowledge that “beyond lies the darkness.”

Borges here puts into words the infinite complexity of this “fall” into existence which we know as Life. At one time in my life I would have wanted to run screaming from the classroom where a teacher had presented this little poem, perhaps looking back and flashing a sign of the cross. Borges puts on the table for us a complexity which the rational mind cannot comprehend, but which, if we have the courage and humility, can read between the lines and see it only as a pointer to the Ultimate, Iliminatible, Mystery of Life..

Miguel de Unamnuno Wisdom

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“One must look for the eternal in the alluvium of the insignificant, in that which revolves around the eternal like an erratic comet, without ever entering its ordered constellation.” This great Spanish mystic/philosopher from the early 20th century grasped what C.S. Lewis described as the “sin of misplaced concreteness.” Our hard-wired familiarity with the mundane of this beautiful world in which we live can keep us from paying “attention” to the Life flowing around us often in the most easily overlooked phenomena of our day to day life. The “ordered constellation” of the mundane is certainly important; but if we never learn to meditate, perhaps on something as mundane as a flickering candle flame, or the giggles of a baby, or the “birds of the air…and the flowers of the field”, we will need to ponder the profound question of humans, like Jesus, who have asked, “What shall it profit a man/woman if s/he gains the whole world and loses his/her own soul, or what shall a human give in exchange for his/her soul?” Western culture assuages its rapacity with an attraction for “stuff,” failing to appreciate Shakespeare’s parallel quip to the Jesus-question above, “Within be rich, without be fed no more.”

Wisdom From Novelist Joan Didion

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Wisdom comes from a “literary” grasp of our life and world. It means having a relationship with the metaphor. The word metaphor means “to reach across” or venture from a concrete-thinking world into our adjoining world of meaning. Taking this step across means to loosen one’s moorings, to follow the wisdom of poet Stefan George, “To journey to a far world, it is necessary to lose sight of the shore.” Joan Didion who just died this week offered really profound wisdom in the quip I will now share with you:

We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all….I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.

Stanley Kunitz, a former poet laureate of the United States put it this way, “We have walked through many lives, some of them my own. I am not the one I was, though some remnant of being remains from which I struggle not to stray.” Following is a link to this poem, “The Layers”:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54897/the-layers

A “Merry Christmas” Thought For My Readers!

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In the presidential campaign of 2008 Barack Obama was overheard dismissing people who “cling to guns and religion.”  He was quickly attacked by the right wing for this perceived slight, not understanding that it was the “clinginess” that was the issue he had in mind; he understood that guns and religion should not be “clung to.” Guns are alright, being intrinsically innocent as is any object. Religion too is alright but not when it becomes an addiction as has been the case in the “right to bear arms” movement. When religion becomes an addiction it can obliterate the wisdom of spiritual teachers such as Jesus Christ.

Addiction is deadly in any form.  If one becomes addicted to an idea it can have the same lethal result as drugs, or alcohol, or even sex. This is vividly illustrated in the following photo in which a Republican Congressman, Thomas Massie, posted on Twitter a family photo of he and his wife, along with their five children, displaying assault rifles before a Christmas tree. Two days later another Republican, Congresswoman Lauren Boebert, followed suit with a photo of her family proudly displaying their weapons before a Christmas tree.  

On this Christmas morning, I am deeply moved with memories of this holiday, thrilled as I watch Handel’s Messiah with my lovely wife and doggie. This “birth of Christ” day has greater value for me each year as I approach my divinely allotted, “three-score and ten.” It honors an event two millennia in the past in which an irruption took place in a culture that was as frozen as ours is today, frozen in a gridwork of unexamined premises which always culminate in some form of violence.  This Christmas story is a lasting illustration of a man who announced in his words and deeds, “Hey, guys there is another way of looking at things, of seeing others with respect, appreciation, and love as it dawns on us, ‘hey, what we see is what we are’. He knew those persons we dismiss, fear, and even hate merit something other than the rage with which we usually respond.”

This different approach to that “gridwork” and its ugliness requires something Massie and Boebert lack–an ability to have an impulse and not pause a moment to consider, “Is it true, is it kind, is it necessary.” The story of Jesus is about finding the courage to recognize the gridwork in which we live and choose to not march lock-step to its dictates. This takes courage, respect, forgiveness, and humility. It shows us that we must “get over ourselves” from time to time and how painful this ego death can be.

A resounding “Merry Christmas” I offer to each of you.

Wisdom From Jim Carrey

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Jim Carrey was a brilliant, wry, “demonic” (in a good way) comedian; and he still is though he now is increasingly appreciated as a spiritually-gifted man. His sense of the comic, often absurd or even dark, has now matured to the point that he offers wisdom such as this:

“After knowing Eckhart Tolle for a while and studying the books, I woke up and suddenly got it. I understood suddenly how thought is just illusory, and that thought is responsible for most, if not all of the suffering we experience. And then I suddenly felt like I was looking at thoughts from another perspective, and I wondered, who is it that is aware that ‘I’ am thinking? And suddenly I was thrown into this expansive amazing feeling of freedom – from myself, from my problems. I saw that I am bigger than what I do, bigger than my body. I am everything and everyone. I am no longer a fragment of the universe. I am the universe.” ~ Jim Carrey

His observation about perspective is very powerful, as he realizes the wisdom of Paul Ricoeur, “To have a perspective on one’s perspective is to somehow escape it.” Jesus understood this, being born into perspectival certainty of his day, said with his words and his behavior, “Boys and girls, there is another way of looking at things; there always is.” And he concluded his life with a graphic illustration of how painful this ego-crushing experience is.

A Prophetic Word Offered in Eureka Springs, Arkansas

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Eureka Springs, Arkansas is one of my favorite spots on the map of our world. I lived for twenty years only a stone’s throw from this lovely Victorian Era village and visited it often. Here is a post from Facebook by a man who offered a prophetic for our world in 2013, Paul DeFatta:

Transfusions: (based on a disturbing dream that I had in Eureka Springs, Arkansas on 11/27/2013) Everything of genuine value, it would seem, must be earned and not stolen. Stolen goods come back to wreak vengeance upon their stealers. When precious gifts and persons come to us, stolen or unearned, we usually do not know how to properly receive them or even how to open them. To earn something—a lofty or profound insight, the heart of a rare and exceptional lover, a magnificent artistic creation—is to STRETCH to (or into) that gift, idea, heart, work of art, etc. Where there is no stretching and no earning, a human life begins slowly to wither, to ossify, to dry up, or to decompose. In short, there are countless ways to end our lives long before we actually die. Dying, withering souls that never bothered to learn how to stretch and to earn often become psychic parasites that feed off the morsels and crumbs they can filch from those around them—those whose hearts beat with even a slightly stronger pulse than their own does. When the psychic parasites in a society begin to significantly outnumber the dwindling number of vital “earners” and “stretchers,” things really begin to go downhill at a galloping pace. It becomes increasingly dangerous for healthy persons to venture out into the streets, where, as likely as not, they will be greeted by a blood-sucking, prattling army of the walking dead. They will suck the life out them with empty blather, each word of which hits the skin like a syringe or a gibbering little vampire bat. With every syllable, the host’s life blood trickles through a network of invisible tubes into tiny mouths that have gathered in the surrounding shadows. (from Facebook page, “Carl Jung and the Creative Bridge)

Shakespeare, Richard Rohr, and Prayer

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I just listened to the beginning of a sermon by my beloved “Brother” Richard Rohr from 1999.  He was speaking about prayer and explaining that it is more than most of us do when we pray, very aware that, as T.S. Eliot noted, “Prayer is more than an order of words, or the sound of the voice praying, or the conscious occupation of the praying mind…”  He explained about prayer being an attentive, keen awareness of the Presence of the moment, a “Presence” which is God Him/Herself.  Rohr knows that this is a moment of attunement with that Ground of our Being which is everything that we are…in our Essence.

A quip from Shakespeare immediately came to my mind about this meditative focus from another dear “Brother” of mine, William Shakespeare.  In his play, “Hamlet,” King Claudius was kneeling in prayer, not knowing that his stepson Hamlet was approaching with a drawn sword, preparing to take vengeance on the King who, though he was the brother of Hamlet’s father, King Hamlet, had killed the king so that he could marry young Hamlet’s mother. Hamlet roiled with the notion of the “incestuous bed” that Claudius and Gertrude were sleeping in.  Still not hearing the approaching footsteps, Claudius prayed, “My thoughts fly up but my words remain below.  Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”

This memorable line from the play stunned me from the first time I read it decades ago.  It revealed a grasp of language that was finding an entryway into my own heart at that time, beginning a 35 year trek into the intricacy of language.  Shakespeare knew that the word was not the thing, that words were only pointers as in the Buddhist wisdom, “The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.” That moment in 1986 was the beginning of a life-changing transformation for me, my first “tippy-toeing” into the depths of my own heart, a venture which is giving me today some faint understanding of the human heart.

(Rohr is the founder and director of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  I invite you to check out his daily blog at—https://cac.org/category/daily-meditations/)

President Joe Biden Is Offering Us A “Profile In Courage.”

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When Joe Biden was sworn in as our President last January, I felt such a sense of relief.  Hope had returned.  In his inauguration address, he voiced hope and optimism and avoided  denigrating his predecessor.  He demonstrated that he could see beyond the end of his nose, that “this is not about me” but about this wonderful nation that had given him this honor.  In his speech, he demonstrated a faint tic here and there in speech, reflecting the speech impediment that he struggled with as a child.  I think that this impediment was, and is, an essential part of his character as he had to struggle with it and learn to “rein in” that passion that led to this stuttering problem. (See afterthought, on the neurological dimension of this problem.)J

Joe, and I think he would appreciate that I call him “Joe,” is a good man and part of that goodness is that he is aware of his “not-so-good” qualities; and I think his Catholic faith is an essential dimension of this goodness.  His faith has instilled in him the value of life, not only his own but that of the entire nation and world. This helps him endure the “slings and arrows” that those who hate him toss his way daily.

The stuttering issue of his puts on my table the childhood fear of being “different”; in our early childhood, the fear of this “difference” is terrifying and we go to great effort to fit in and be allowed to “play in the reindeer games” that Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer felt excluded from.  But this need to “fit in” can be crippling and shred any potential for individuality, thereby selling one’s own soul.  But young Joe knew that he had a problem and deliberately addressed it, learning adaptations that would allow him to not stutter any more… more or less.  This courage allowed him to accept that he still, and always will, have a verbal slip here and there and he is ok nevertheless.  The core issue for him on that matter was accepting human frailty.  If someone in the Oval Office can not be humble enough to accept that, woe is country!

Here I must clarify my early insinuation that stuttering is not neurological.  It is neurological, as is everything about us, including this moment in my life when I am sitting here by an early-morning crackling fire, sipping coffee, Petey at my side, and delighted with this moment of Grace that I have been afforded. This Grace comforts me as I “gird up my loins” for another Autumn day in the beautiful High Desert of New Mexico.  Synapses are firing away “up there” up there in my head.  But this marvelous neurological dimension of human experience lends itself to poetry, giving us the poetry of Edgar Simmons who likened stuttering to the childhood predicament of having more to say than words can contain.  (Remember Cordelia’s response to her father, King Lear, who posed the question, ‘How much do you love me?’” His lovely young daughter responded, “More than words can wield the matter.”)  Biden has tremendous passion which has led verbally slip here and there and to stumble with words also.  Here is this compelling poem by Simmons:

BOW DOWN TO STUTTERERS

By Edgar Simmons

The stutter’s hesitation

Is a procrastination crackle,

Redress to hot force,

Flight from ancient flame.

The bow, the handclasp, the sign of the cross

Say, “Sh-sh-sheathe the savage sword.”

If there is greatness in sacrifice

Lay on me the blue stigmata of saints;

Let me not fly to kill in unthought.

Prufrock has been maligned

And Hamlet should have waived revenge,

Walked with Ophelia domestic corridors

Absorbing the tick, the bothersome twitch.

Let me stutter with the non-objective painters

Let my stars cool to bare lighted civilities.