Author Archives: literarylew

Unknown's avatar

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.

Covid-19 Has Tippy-Toed Into My Life

5 Replies

Yes, though twice-vaccinated two friends of mine are apparently inflicted with this loathsome illness; the gentleman of the couple is showing egregious symptoms and his partner is showing significant symptoms.  This gentleman has recently visited his daughter who is part of the anti-vax movement.  He has recently done work for us in the yard, more with myself than my wife.  He and I worked in close proximity and frequently handled the same tools.  I am scheduled for my Moderna booster show tomorrow but I am now on alert myself. I have a Bio-Max home testing kit which I will utilize this afternoon. We have curtailed some events and cancelled get-togethers with friends.   I had to venture into town this morning and made a point of adding rubber gloves to my face-mask diligence and plan to make fewer of these treks into town.

My “venture” into my lovely hometown of Taos, New Mexico helped me to appreciate the diligence that Taos and its citizens have demonstrated the past two years as this “beast” has presented itself.  My friends and townspeople I encounter readily accepted the Covid-19 protocol with a few exceptions here and there.  I do have two close friends however, both lovely souls with a keen sense for the spiritual, that have steadfastly refused this vaccination.
This Covid-19 experience has deepened my belief in God, for I see it as one of Her wake-up calls to my lovely country.  She initially slapped our face with Trump and his minions and we failed to listen to Her judgement; so, she followed with the double-whammy of Covid-19.  Yes, I here share my conviction that God is more than ideology, She is not a “thing” which we so readily fail to realize our thoughts are.  Here I will not humiliate this God I believe in with my theological and metaphysical palaver.  Now having the courage to appreciate that God is not “male or female”, I even have introduced the female pronoun to His/Her name!  I see, think, and feel that God is an incomprehensible Mystery that is woven into the very fabric of our being, some “thing” that is not a “thing” but a Presence that we can find in our life if the aforementioned “Divine Intervention” can be heeded.

Another Arkansas Poetry Lover…Who Could Write Poetry!

4 Replies

Arkansas produced another wordsmith to the world in 1949, C. D. Wright.  But she was more than a wordsmith, she wrote poetry and became very successful in the literary world.  She loved words, as do I, and one of her poems is prefaced with the simple prefatory title, “I Love Words.” And please note the very bizarre title of this book of poetry  inclosed in parenthesis at the end.

I love that a handful, a mouthful, gets you by, a satchelful can land you a job, a well-chosen clutch of them could get you laid, and that a solitary word can initiate a stampede, and therefore can be formally outlawed—even by a liberal court bent on defending a constitution guaranteeing  unimpeded utterances. I love that the Argentine gaucho has over 200 words for the coloration of horses and the Sami language of Scandinavia has over a thousand words for reindeer based on age, sex, and appearance, e.g. a “busat” has big balls or only one big ball. More than the pristine, I’ll love the filthy ones for their descriptive talent as well as transgressive nature. I love the dirty ones more than the minced, in that I respect extravagant expression more than reserved. I admire reserve, especially when taken to an nth. I love the particular expressions of particular occupations. The substrate of those activities. The nomenclatures within nomenclatures.  I am of the unaccredited school that believes animals did not exist until Adam assigned them names. My relationship to the word is anything but scientific; it is a matter of faith on my part, that the word endows material substance, by setting the thing named apart from all else. Horse, then, unhorses what is not horse.  (C.D. Wright, “The poet, The Lion, Talking pictures, El Farolito, A wedding in St. Roch, The big box store, The warp in the mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire and all.)

“Hunkerin” Down Calls for Humility

Leave a reply

I just read an article by Finton O’Toole in the Irish Times in which he put on the table what I call a “hunkering down” dimension of politics.  He portrays a political impasse underway in his corner of the world in which diametrically-opposites are “duking it out” on the world stage.  This can best be described as an “us vs them” moment in which one side says to the other, “I got it…and you don’t.” This is the story of Adam and Eve writ large, two voices speaking a primordial word that still reverberates through our world today, two lonely little souls demanding supremacy. Yes, Eve lost that initial skirmish….but not really as “She” is screaming at us today as our political machinery and socio-cultural are being shaken. This is the Feminine dimension Life.

So much “hunkering down” is taking place around our world. People are dug in so deeply to their ideology that they can’t offer even a miniscule of respect to those who have “different” ideas.  “I’ve got it, and you don’t,” they quietly say to themselves.  There is no escape from this predicament unless a bolt of lightning takes place and we are capable of the humility of seeing our arrogance. TS. Eliot summed this up in The Four Quartets:

Do not let me hear

Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,

Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,

Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire

Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.”

“Us” vs “Them…Visually!

2 Replies

Here is a cartoon about one of my many hobby horses, division where there could be unity. This cartoonist humorously but pointedly puts on the table our current national…and species-wide death-knell. If we never find the humility to appreciate the wisdom of T.S. Eliot who told us we, “are united by the strife which divided them” or, divides “us” in this occasion, we are doomed. As always I am again frustrated with everyone who sees the world differently than I, when I’m again trying to convince them of the ‘right way” of seeing things. With that last statement I am wryly and ironically admitting that I have the same problem!

With this bit of wisdom that is always teasing me I can admit that it applies everywhere, even with my frustration and anger about the obstinate conservatism of Trump and his minions. Yes, even with that spiritual malady present in our world we all must realize the obstinacy of what seems to us as our “right” way of seeing things. I am learning to see, understand, and experience the extent to which I “hunker down” with my literary and erudite grasp of that fiction we call “reality” and fail to look deeper and see a “Reality” which undergirds the daily life of us all. I am so old-fashioned to call it “god”; and at this moment I’m so free of that intellectual and philosophical rigor that has characterized my life that I will not try to define that term!

“Relativity of Truth is More Complex than Light”; Sandeep Bhalla

Leave a reply

Early in my blogging life, I discovered Sandeep Bhalla, an Indian gentleman who has profound wisdom and courage. His country, like mine, is festering with torment; Afghanistan is doing the same. This always happens when a tribe, or some part of it, mistakes “truth” for the “Truth” and knows without any doubt that its viewpoint is “the” viewpoint and the “Truth.”

As I give a capital letter to “Truth” I practice one of those “complexities” for I too am a “knowing” creature. I “know” what I am putting forth here, but realize that so does the Taliban and its offspring in my country. That rigid certainty that they are displaying always has, “offspring.” Ideology always risks toxicity for it can easily prey on ideologues within its tribe but also other “tribes” such as my country. Certainty is a deadly toxin and will continue to wreak havoc on our world without the “deux ec machina” of ancient Greece intervening. When this conflict emerges on the stage of world history, the “simple thing” is to seek to destroy the “other.” This is because of the human tendency to “know I am right” and must obliterate the other side, the “Other” which in my arrogantly humble estimation is, “Wrong.” The only hope is that a “gap” might appear between the two contrary forces, two powers basking in the unquestioned assumptions, that each side will accept a bit of humility, acknowledging that, “Hey, they have a viewpoint also.” That “gap” was described by T.S. Eliot as, “costing not less than everything.” But metastasized “certainty” is a lethal poison regardless of how sure you are.

https://sandeepbhalla.com/author/sandeepbhalla/

Taliban takes over Kabul without firing a bullet.

Plato’s Cave Analogy, Via an Intrauterine Dialogue

Leave a reply

Things are not as they seem. They never are; for we only can “see through a glass darkly.” But if darkness is accepted as our reality, and not subject to a mite of critical reasoning, then we will never see the light, i.e. “the Light.” Plato’s cave analogy put this on the table of human consciousness 2500 years ago. Here, I will share the same primordial truth from a dialogue between two children in the womb:

In a mother’s womb were two babies. One asked the other:

“Do you believe in life after delivery?” The other replied, “Why, of course. There has to be something after delivery. Maybe we are here to prepare ourselves for what we will be later.”

“Nonsense” said the first. “There is no life after delivery. What kind of life would that be?”

The second said, “I don’t know, but there will be more light than here. Maybe we will walk with our legs and eat from our mouths. Maybe we will have other senses that we can’t understand now.”

The first replied, “That is absurd. Walking is impossible. And eating with our mouths? Ridiculous! The umbilical cord supplies nutrition and everything we need. But the umbilical cord is so short. Life after delivery is to be logically excluded.”

The second insisted, “Well I think there is something and maybe it’s different than it is here. Maybe we won’t need this physical cord anymore.”

The first replied, “Nonsense. And moreover if there is life, then why has no one has ever come back from there? Delivery is the end of life, and in the after-delivery there is nothing but darkness and silence and oblivion. It takes us nowhere.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said the second, “but certainly we will meet Mother and she will take care of us.”

The first replied “Mother? You actually believe in Mother? That’s laughable. If Mother exists then where is She now?”

The second said, “She is all around us. We are surrounded by her. We are of Her. It is in Her that we live. Without Her this world would not and could not exist.”

Said the first: “Well I don’t see Her, so it is only logical that She doesn’t exist.”

To which the second replied, “Sometimes, when you’re in silence and you focus and you really listen, you can perceive Her presence, and you can hear Her loving voice, calling down from above.”

– Útmutató a Léleknek

‪#‎Mother‬ Mother Earth News

Political Hearts “Seared with a Hot Iron”

Leave a reply

Yesterday I watched  the House of Representatives select committee investigation of the Insurrection of Jan. 6, 2001.  Four police officers who were on the front line in defense of the the Capitol and our Congress that day offered graphic testimony augmented by terrifying videos of the event.  Yet this assault on our country has been dismissed my many members of the Republican Party, one of them even arguing that the Democrats are exaggerating a simple group of tourists touring the White House on that day in early January. This hearing graphically portraye  the grave threat that our country faced on that day…and is still facing as the Trumpian voice on display that day is still being defended by many Republicans.

Yet, even with this display of the evidence, Trumpian diehards in Congress and in our nation are not and will not be moved by what they are witnessing  This brings to mind sermon fodder of my youth, “hearts seared with a hot iron” (2 Timothy) describing people whose hearts were refusing the wisdom and Grace of God.  Hearts that are “seared” with this hot iron are endungeoned by the preconceptions and biases they have gleaned from a life experience which they found very painful and terrifying. The infantile anguish that we all harbor will tyrannize people like that and not allow them to permit the “pauser reason” to intervene and restrain themselves from acting out, emotionally and behaviorally; they are then merely the “toy of some great pain.” (Auden) Then this morning I learned the the Senate Minority leader, Mitch McConnel and his lieutenant Keven McCarthy said they had not even watched the hearings.  And conservative media has dismissed the capital policemen as mere “crisis actors” and insisting still that the violence of that day was being exaggerated. Several months ago through my blogging life I discovered a young Pakistani woman, Hibah Shabkez, who graphically and poignantly captured this “searing” and the resulting obstinate defiance with a brilliant perspective on its origin:

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 and over again, 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/)

The Unintended Consequences of Safety

Leave a reply

“We have made for ourselves a life safer than we can bear,” said W. H. Auden.  Life is a risky business and being human we have to deal with the competing needs for safety and risk, “risk” often being necessary when change is called for.  My clinical practice often addressed clients who were “making themselves a life safer than they could bear” or the other extreme, risk-taking run amok.  Those who were facing the challenges of too much “safety” usually involved cognitive behavioral therapy, my clinical task being to bring attention to maladaptive thinking patterns that had left them entrapped.  A common situation on that note was what clinicians call, “The Tyranny of the Shoulds” which left the individual wrapped up in a maze of, “You should do this” or “you should do that” or “you should not do this or that.”  The clinical quip was to tell the client, “Stop ‘shoulding” on yourself.”

The following cartoon beautifully illustrates the danger of hyper-concern for safety:

Dostoyevsky, Intensity, and Creativity

2 Replies

I exist.  In thousands of agonies–I exist. I’m tormented on the rack—but I exist though I set alone in a pillar–I exist!  I see the sun, and if I don’t see the sun, I know it’s there.  And there is a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there.  Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Dostoyevsky was aware.  He was conscious. And thus he was torn between the twin poles of human existence, being and non-being, presence and absence. The rending of the soul in this existential dilemma is described by French psychoanalyst, Julia Kristeva, as a “tearing” from an unconscious matrix that an individual has not been able to face. Dostoyevsky lived in that existential crisis his whole life which contributed to his literary greatness.

Every human being carries this same intensity in the depths of their heart, but most of us have it “filtered” into a socially permissible abeyance.  Oh, what would we do without those “fig leaves” in our Garden of Eden experience!  This intensity also makes me recall a joke by a very bizarre stand-up comedian, Emo Phillips.  In his routine, he once asked, “Hey, you ever been in a chair, and you lean back…just a bit too far…and you realize that you are about to fall backward?  Remember that feeling you got in your gut at that moment? I feel that way all of the time!”  I don’t feel that way “all the time”;  but I do live with the intensity that Phillips was joking about and that drove Dostoyevsky to explore the human soul for us. There are times I do wish that back in 1951-52 when God was putting me together he’d have given me a brand new “fig leaf” and not the “factory-second” that I’ve had to cope with!

Naomi Shihab Nye Poem on Kindness

Leave a reply

Naomi Shihab Nye is one of my favorite contemporary poets. Here her poem, “Kindness,” is offered as an oral presentation by the author and I will offer the text following a few words. The poem is elegant and profound with its utmost simplicity, letting me appreciate how kindness is offered in the things which we take for granted. It is the kindness afforded by life itself, often through other people, which we will not miss until we lose them or are faced with their loss. And I’m saddened to reflect back on missed opportunities to offer this kindness and failed to appreciate when it was being proffered to me.

Before you know what kindness really is
   you must lose things,
   feel the future dissolve in a moment
   like salt in a weakened broth.
   What you held in your hand,                    5
   what you counted and carefully saved,
   all this must go so you know
   how desolate the landscape can be
   between the regions of kindness.
   How you ride and ride                         10
   thinking the bus will never stop,
   the passengers eating maize and chicken
   will stare out the window forever.
 
   Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
   you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho  15
   lies dead by the side of the road.
   You must see how this could be you,
   how he too was someone
   who journeyed through the night with plans
   and the simple breath that kept him alive.           20
 
   Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
   you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
   You must wake up with sorrow.
   You must speak to it till your voice
   catches the thread of all sorrows                 25
   and you see the size of the cloth.
 
   Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
   only kindness that ties your shoes
   and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
   only kindness that raises its head                 30
   from the crowd of the world to say
   It is I you have been looking for,
   and then goes with you everywhere
   like a shadow or a friend.