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.

Thomas Mann Poignantly Presents Shame in Old Testament Story

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PREFATORY NOTE: I have discovered that I have failed to respond to many comments over the past few years. This is not because I have so many responses! but because I am not completely on top of things, especially the intricacies of WordPress. I will try to do better!

I have a brother-in-law who has been a key figure in the development of my intellectual and spiritual life.  He is better educated, more accomplished, and more successful in all respects than I have been…or will be.  One gift several decades ago from his erudition was the Thomas Mann novel, “Joseph and His Brethren.”  I stumbled across that tome moments ago when perusing my library and it fell opened to a page, a paragraph of which I will quote shortly.  In this fictionalized story of Joseph from the Hebrew Old Testament Jacob has just learned of the apparent death of his beloved son, Joseph. Jacob was so overwhelmed that he proceeded to tear off, not only his upper garments in grief, but was in the process of what his friends and family realized would be a complete stripping of all his clothing.  This was such a profound gesture that the people turned away.  The following is one of the most powerful descriptions of shame I have ever discovered, reflecting the depth and power of this wonderful German novelist:

There is only one right and proper word for the feeling which was at the bottom of their action:  shame.  But one must understand it in its ultimate and often forgotten sense, as a monosyllabic description of the horror we feel when the primitive breaks through the layers of civilization, at the surface of which it is only active in a much softened and allegorical form.  We must regard the tearing of the upper garments in heavy sorrow as being of such a nature; it is the civilized and domesticated form of the original custom of shedding every covering and adornment considered as the badge of human dignity now destroyed and ruined by the extremity of human woe.  It is the abasement of man to mere creature  So it was with Jacob.  In the depth of his grief he went back to the original meaning, from the allegory to the crude thing itself and to the horrible reality.  He did what “one does not do”—and that, rightly considered, is the source of all horror.  For therein the undermost becomes the uppermost.  If, for instance, it had occurred to him to give utterance to the abandonment of his misery by bleating like a ram,, his people could not have felt more nauseated than they did.  (“Joseph and His Brethren,”  Thomas Mann)

The Cathartic Power of Language

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Another one of my “girlfriends” has shaken me out of my literary doldrum!  One of them, Emily Dickinson, often does this but this morning a contemporary girlfriend, Julia Kristeva, has intervened.  Kristeva is a Bulgarian-born linguist and psychoanalyst, educated in France and now practicing in Paris.  Upon awakening, for some reason I plucked from my bedside bookshelf, “Black Sun:  Depression and Melancholia” and opened it to a bookmark from earlier readings and found the following observation:

Once solitude has been named, we are less alone if words succeed in infiltrating the spasm of tears—provided they can find an addressee for an overflow of sorrow that had up to then shied away from words.

Or as George Eliot put it in the 19th century, “Speak words which give shape to our anguish…”

Oh, the power of language!  I now realize that in my early youth when I discovered language I had found my home, a sacred domain which provided an haven from the morass of poverty and incest of my culture.  And in my clinical training and practice I often witnessed the power of words being discovered by my clients…often with my facilitation…allowing them to “name the demons” that were haunting them. Leonardo Da Vinci realized this power of language in 15th century Italy, telling us:

O cities of the sea, I behold in you your citizens, women as well as men tightly bound with stout bonds around their arms and legs by folk who will not understand your language; and you will only be able to give vent to your griefs and sense of loss of liberty by making tearful complaints, and sighs, and lamentations one to another; for those who bind you will not understand your language nor will you understand them. Leonardo da Vinci, from “Of Children in Swaddling Clothes”.

A Caveat About Judgmentalism

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The excerpt from Paul Tillich’s book, “On Boundaries” I shared recently is a prophetic word for us.  And in pointing out what “ails us” a prophet is “doom preaching” in some manner and one of my readers definitely took it that way.  I appreciate his “like” of the post and his “bothering” to share with me his take on the Tillich shared there, though I disagreed with its tenor.

Tillich lived and spoke with hope as did many Germans of his day, Dietrich Bonnhoeffer and Hannah Arendt for example. Tillich, Bonhoeffer, and Arendt were seers, prophets in a very real sense as they were keenly “aware of the present moment,” this “awareness” a gift to one with a prophetic voice.The gifted historian William Irwin Thompson noted that a prophet, “is not so much having the ability to foretell the future but the ability to be aware of the implications of the present.”  We have them in our world today in the art and literary fields as well as with spiritually astute individuals like Richard Rohr, Marriane Williamson, and the Reverend William Barber, to name but a few.

But the reader’s response made me aware of the “tenor” of what I think, say, do, and “write” in this venue.  Even the very profound excerpt from the Tillich book, “Boundaries” makes a statement about the one who was writing and is sharing.  Someone once said, “Give a kid a hammer and everything is a nail.” Yes, the post of yesterday is another example of a “kid with a hammer” in a very real sense.  Yes, “in a sense,”  I am a very judgemental person and occasionally realize that in the formative years of my life, I would even say early moments, I “felt” judged and thus became a “judge” in a sense.  But mercifully I see this on occasion and “tone it down” a bit, look around for a moment and see the beauty of the world that surrounds me.  

For example, let me share with you a visit from Beauty which I was blessed with on Sunday morning last.  Shortly after awakening, I walked into the living room and noticed the bird-storm outside my windows, the flurry of birds delighting in the feeders I have out to win their favor.  This alone always quietens the din of heavy-handed, ponderous, pontificating that is always so ready to lure me from the Grace of simply “being here.”  There was a warm fire crackling in the wood stove to my left, a cup of hot coffee before me, and my beautiful little dachshund, Petey, curled up beside me.  Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” was playing on the Dish-satellite music channel. In a few moments my lovely wife began to rehearse on her Grand Piano for the music program at a nearby little Methodist church a bit later, via Zoom.  The old hymns from my youth stirred my soul as she played them and sang along, Petey joined occasionally when he deemed the key in tune with his musically sensitive ears.  (Admittedly, Petey’s “singing” would be dismissed by less refined listeners as a lot of barking and whining!)  In an hour or so, Petey and l shifted venues in our house to the sunroom as my wife joined her church service.  Petey and I call the lovely sunroom on this occasion, “the penalty box” as it keeps his highly-skilled and sophisticated voice from interfering with the church service. There Petey and I are delighted with the view of a sun-filled desert behind our house, the back-splash of which is the stunning Taos Mountain Range, snow-covered from recent snow-fall.  According to local lore, these mountains are sacred and their “call” leads some people to move here and take root which we did seven years ago.  We are honored because these mountains did not “kick us out” as, per local lore, will happen to some who move here but who don’t last long.  We passed the ancient test of these mountains and are honored.

Whatever out thoughts, whatever their tenor, they will pass.  As someone said, “We are not our thoughts. are the ones having them.”  Therefore, “Don’t believe everything you think!!!”

Stunning and Profound Wisdom on Boundaries From Paul Tillich

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Paul Tillich is one of the great “finds” of mine in the 20th century, shaping the course of my life henceforth.  I think he is the most important theologian I’ve ever come across and one of the most important thinkers. Being raised in Nazi Germany, he could not help but have learned a lot about boundaries and the easier path for him would have been to succumb to the inertia of his culture and become a Nazi; absolutism and certainty always solves the “messiness” of what could eventually become a mature faith!  But somewhere along the course of his young life, he found a “contrary” vein of thought in his heart which led him to follow the path of a German contemporary of his, Hannah Arendt and employ Shakespeare’s “pauser reason.” He found that boundaries had value but only if one could find the equally valuable respect for the “no boundary” dimension of life. This wisdom allowed him to write among many other things, “The Courage to Be” which is such a powerful book on the importance of “be-ing” a human and not simply become flotsam-and-jetsom in the current of contemporary thought. Here is an excerpt….

The American book, “On the Boundary” tells about several boundaries that are common to all and at the same time to my own personal destiny: about the boundaries between country and city, between feudalism and civil service, between bourgeoisie and bohemian, between church and society, between religion and culture, theology and philosophy — and lastly, quite personally, between two continents. (He had moved to the United States to escape the Nazis.)

The existence on the boundary, the boundary situation, is full of tension and movement. It is in reality not a stance, but a crossing and returning, a re-returning and a re-recrossing, a to-and-fro, the goal of which is to create a third area beyond the bordered ones, something on which one can stand for a time without being enclosed in a fixed border. The situation of the boundary is not yet what one could call peace; and yet it is the passage that each individual must and that peoples must go through to arrive at peace.  For peace means standing in the overarching thing that is being sought in the crossing and the crossing back over the boundary. Only someone who has a share in both sides of a boundary line can serve what overarches it and thus serve peace, not someone who feels secure in the momentary quiet of a fixed border.  Peace appears where in personal and political life an old boundary has lost its importance and with that its power to foment strife, even if it continues in place as the boundary for some partition.  Peace is not a tensionless juxtaposition; it is unity in something more comprehensive, in which the opposition of living powers and the conflicts between old and new are not lacking,  but in which they do not break out destructively, but rather are constrained in the peace of what overarches them.

If the crossing and crossing back over the boundary is the way to peace, then the fear of what lies on the other side, and the wish that is born from that to be rid of it, is the root of discord and war.

When fate has taken one to the boundary of one’s being and has made one aware of oneself, one is faced with the decision of falling back on what one is or of crossing beyond oneself.  All persons are led to the boundary of their being now and then.  They see the other beyond themselves, which appears as a possibility for themselves, and awakens in them the fear of the possible.  They see their own boundedness in the mirror of the other, and are frightened. (W. H. Auden, “And Truth met him, and held out her hand; but he clung in panic to his tall belief and shrank away like an ill-treated child.”)

Tillich’s explanation of the subtlety of boundaries reveals how conflict arises among human beings, and technically the whole of creation. He is very astute, and very “Rumi” to recognize the value of an “overarching framework” as being the solution to what can otherwise be an interminal and even lethal conflict. Rumi, a 13th century Persian told us, “Beyond the notion of right doing and the wrong doing there is a field; I will meet you there.”  The “field” is the “overarching” Presence that Tillich had in mind.

Sparrows, Wendell Berry, Stanley Kunitz, and Paul Tillich

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I often perseverate. Just a few days ago I was perusing my library and pulled out two copies of the work of poet/essayist Wendell Berry and shared a couple of thoughts here. But this casual, even random perusal of my books has done what literature should do, it has stimulated me along a certain vein of thought. Thus my current “perseveration” which will lead me soon to even an heavy-duty German/American theologian of the 20th century, Paul Tillich. But first, from yesterday the notion of a sparrow being but “organized energy” has really grabbed me, as I realized that some similar “organized energy” grabbed me at birth…and even before…and is still here today. This is some vestige of primordial will operating through me which has led me to this phase of my life in which I bring emphasis to the metaphorical dimension of life. And there is no escape from this central entelechy in one’s body and soul, only modification so that we might more or less fit in which the entelechy that is guiding our species. Let me illustrated with the wisdom of poet Stanley Kunitz who once said in a poem entitled, “Layers” that, “I 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.” That “remnant of being” is a way of describing the very core of our soul, a primal energy that has been “harnessed” as is with the sparrow so to bring us to this moment in our life. The same could be said of our species.

This indomitable, irrepressible will, in my daily “perseveration’ in life, has brought me this morning to the aforementioned kindred spirit of mine, Paul Tillich. My next post, if this current flow of “perseveration” continues with me, will be his observation about human will and the complexities of “harnessing” it.

Is There, “A Destiny That Doeth Shape Our Ends…”?

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Shakespeare thought there was and added that, “rough hew it though we may” the result will be the same.  In the following Wendell Berry poem, the energy of this “destiny” is described as an “hunger organized” by the simple sparrow. The wisdom of these two wordsmiths tells us that we are lived by energy that we can never fully understand but even in the “rough hewing” that we do, there is purpose. This encourages me as I embark on another day of “rough hewing”!!!

A sparrow is

his hunger organized.

Filled, he flies.

before he knows he’s going to.

And he dies by the

same movement, filled

with himself, he goes

By  the eye-quick 

reflex of his flesh,

out of sight, 

leaving his perfect

absence without a thought.

“Rage, Rage, Against That Good Night”

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Poet Dylan Thomas suggest rage had its place. Shakespeare, in King Lear said, “Blunt not the heart, enrage it.” Sometimes anger does have a place in unleashing the dormant passions of unlived life. The following poem is by Lynn Emanuel in the pages of a recent copy of the New York Review of Books:

hello to the unimaginative and dim ways of my kin, hello
to the bad lot we are, to the women mean and plucked, and to the men

on the broken steps who beat down the roses with their hosings,
to the nights that rose black as an inked plate, into which an acid bit stars—

puckered, tight, hard, pale as a surgeon’s scars,
hello to all that vast, unconditional bad luck, to the sensible, the stuffy,

the ugly couture of the thrifty, to the limp of bad goods, of old
furniture, the repeated wince of the creaky rocker, and to the grandmothers

dying in its clutch, and hello to rage which like an axis can move the world.

Forgiveness Is Not a Perfunctory Performance

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One of my blogging friends, Anne, has honored me by requesting that I write about forgiveness.  It just so happens that the subject is much on my mind, having been a recurrent theme in my exploration each morning of A Course in Miracles with my wife. For months my she and I have explored the infinite intricacy of forgiveness, learning that it is more than a perfunctory function because one is “supposed to” offer it.  Forgiveness is recognition in some sense that, “there but by the grace of God go I.”  Furthermore, if one finds himself perfunctorily forgiving people while harboring continued indignation and anger, there is no meaningful forgiveness.  ACIM even points out that forgiveness can be a way of asserting power over the other person, as in, “Hey, I forgave you for this heinous offense….so you better not forget it!”

I can offer forgiveness only to the degree that I have received it.  And “receiving” it is often avoided as it might require opening up, even to someone else, about very unsavoury things that one has done and said, so unsavoury that often they are barely remembered if at all.  It brings to mind a relevant mantra that I use often, “There is nothing wrong about being wrong other than admitting that one has been, and is, wrong.”  Each of us cannot escape our “human-ness” and to be human is to have an ingrained tendency to be wrong, often even in the pursuit of doing things that are “right.”  It is very liberating to find the grace to be able to put into words with another person, or even in a journal, moments of shame that he has recoiled from for years.

Anne made an observation when she emailed me about this subject that is highly relevant, She noted, “I do not think we can actually ‘decide’ to forgive. Maybe it happens to us where we are swept into a current.”  This “current” is so important.  Until we have begun to experience the fluidity of life, its “flow,” our linear-thinking will often confine us to habitual ways of thinking and feeling which often make forgiveness little more than a perfunctory, rote performance. This flow of life is very related to discovering the practice of meditation about twelve years ago, a practice which I happen to know Anne is much more familiar with than I am.  Until I discovered meditation I did not realize the wisdom of the teaching, “You are not your thoughts.  You are the one having them.”  This wisdom helped me to understand that the cacophony of thoughts that had free-rein in my mind and heart, left little or no space to say to myself on occasion, “Oh, I didn’t even mean that nice thing I said!  I was just reading a cue card and ‘being nice’ again.” That was the beginning of the “internal dialogue” of Hannah Arendt that I speak of often.

A Few More Thoughts About My Ignorance

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After confessing my “ignorance” yesterday, I must qualify this declaration to some degree.  I know a lot of “stuff” as the result of being, in some sense, only an “observer” in life and not an “experiencer.”  Just as my sweet-heart Emily Dickinson quipped over her version of this character flaw, “Life is over there…on a shelf.”  I have read voraciously in my life, having discovered in my first days in elementary school that words offered so much to my frightened and lonely soul.  I have a modest library today, though impressive in its character; but each volume has passed the “smell test” and found lodging in my heart.

Yes, I am one damn smart “son of a gun!”  I was so smart that my daddy called me, “Son”…to use an old joke from the 60’s! Recently I decided that all of this wisdom and erudition was so valuable that I put it all in a paper bag, took it down to McDonalds, and tried to buy a Senior cup of coffee.  “Oh yes,” they said, “we’ll take the bag of your verbosity…but the coffee will still cost you a dollar!” I took my cup of coffee, turned to find a table where I would open my copy of G. W. F. Hegel’s “On Art, Religion, and Philosophy: Introduction to the Realm of Absolute Spirit.”  But as I made my turn, I could not help but notice that the cashier took that paper bag of my brilliance and dropped it into a trash can! Facetiousness and self-deprecation aside, I recognize that I am intelligent and erudite.  But as noted yesterday, all of this leaves me profoundly “ignorant” in a very important respect; for words are but “pointers”;  or as the Buddhists have told us, “The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.”  The great Catholic scholar and author, Thomas Aquinas, in his early fifties after having gone through a mystical experience didn’t write another thing the rest of his life, noting, “It was all straw.”

This vein of wisdom began to seep into my heart in my mid-thirties, burrowing gently but determinedly into my thick skull when the pain of alienation was setting in and poetry began to find a place in my heart.  This “still small voice” was at first a simple murmur but in the past three decades it has become a loud voice, providing the view point through which I approach my world, seeing metaphor where I had before only seen “fact.”  Yes, “the letter kills, but the spirit maketh alive.”  I close with the words of the brilliant Irish poet, William Butler Yeats who sums it up for me, “Throughout all the lying days of my youth, I waved my leaves and flowers in the sun.  Now may I wither into the Truth.”