Category Archives: epistomology

Will a Fish Ever Learn To See Water?

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David Foster Wallace was a noted novelist of the late 20th,  early 21st  century who delivered a commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005 entitled, “This is Water.”  The title was a reference to the famous quip, “To ask someone to see reality is like asking a fish to see water.”  Wallace used this address to explore the way in which education is usually designed only to reinforce the prevailing reality, i.e. “world order,” and not so much about teaching a young person to think. Wallace encouraged his audience to consider the value of “thinking about one’s thinking” and that failure to do so would be risking spending one’s life as a cog in the machine-like grid-work of a pre-existing socio-cultural matrix.

Wallace knew that meta-cognition was a necessary dimension of human consciousness without which one would be subject to manipulation by the whims and fancies of everyday human discourse, in modern times certainly including the media.  Without maturity in thought one is inclined to be readily influenced by manipulation, susceptible to a demagogue who knows that many people will believe anything if they hear it frequently enough. The demagogue does not to need intrinsic value to what he is purveying in his speeches, he only needs to have some lesser-value…maybe only a self-serving one…as he realizes it will find currency in many minds if they hear it repeatedly and with great fervor.

To state an obvious truth, thinking is a good thing.  To be “human” we must be capable of at least a rudimentary capacity to think and therefore engage in the world.  Without critical thinking to some minimal degree, we will be in the position that Emily Dickinson described as, “a mind to near itself to see distinctly.”  In that event, we will not be actually thinking but will be passively “thought” by a prevailing vein of thought we have found comfortable, living out the prediction of W. H. Auden, “We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.”

Here is an excerpt from the Wallace address:

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

“As a Man Thinketh, So Is He”

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I do not think that the Bible or any Holy Writ was given us to amuse ourselves “like a kitten given its own tail to tease.” (Goethe) And it certainly was not given to us to “make us Christian.”  The Bible is Holy Writ that has come our way to enable us to live more simply and honestly.  But our ego will have the tendency to take it and run with it, shaping it into one of those kittenish baubles.

Notions such as “ye shall be judged” by the words from your mouth was a simple instruction for us to self-reflect occasionally and pay attention to that “self-narrative” from which we speak and in some manner “speaks” us. It is very revealing. Such is the case here with my sporadic musings.  If you blog, or keep a journal, or are a professional writer, you really ought to peruse your work from time to time and self-reflect and, let your musings reveal your heart. Yes, this biblical admonition conveys the power of language and is related to the Christian belief that Jesus was “the Word made flesh.” There is a sense in which our very identity is simply “a word” enfleshed, a “word” that reveals the very intentions of our heart.  Yes, “as a man thinketh, so is he.”

For example, take a gander sometime at politicians and you will find their words say so much more than what they intend. This is vividly illustrated at this time when our world is terrified by this “pestilence” the gods have sent our way. No, I am not speaking of Trump here though, though  Trump and Trumpism are part of the same pestilence. And for even greater amusement, “take a gander” at preachers.

Greta Thunberg is More Wise Than Steven Mnuchin.

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Today U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin took a swipe at the climate change heroine Greta Thunberg, saying she is in no position to give advice on the matter since she has not been to college yet.  Well, let me point out he has been to college yet he works for a man who is so insecure that he had to reassure the nation and the world about the size of his penis and lacked self-awareness to the extent that there are numerous recordings of him clearly voicing his lecherous designs on his own daughter.  And these are but two “trivial” examples of Trump’s impaired judgement. Sometimes human judgement is less impaired when one has yet to be ensconced in the comfort zone of a group think that constitutes reality in her/his culture.  And yes, she is “autistic” and thus can be described as “mentally ill” given the “authority” of the DSM-V, but “mentally ill” is not so “mentally ill” in a culture that puts a mentally ill man at the helm of its government.  This brings to mind a note by Carl Jung, “If you find a sane man, bring him to me and I will cure him.”  Jung knew well that there was a “psychopathology to everyday life” that could produce madmen who would pass as “sane.”  From Thunberg’s “seclusion” in her very private world, she has not lost the ability to peer out and look upon this human comedy and offer critique, not unlike Shakespeare who noted so famously that, “Tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in its petty pace to the last syllable of recorded time. Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”  Shakespeare saw the lunacy of his day and brought it to the attention of his fellow-travelers in 16th century England.  This lovely young 17- year old lady has the courage to offer a similar critique to our day; a prophetic vision always comes from beyond the pale.

The “Wounded Healer” and Its Pitfalls

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A couple of friends today introduced me to the work of a “wounded healer” that I had not run across, Marsha Linehan.  Linehan is a noted mental health professional, a professor of psychology, psychiatry, and behavioral sciences at the University of Washington who suffered severe mental health issues of her own earlier in her life.  Her turn around was the result of a mystical religious experience which, to cynics can admittedly be credited to “mental illness.”  I am not one of those critics.

The “wounded healer” is one who is not a detached “caring soul” who is offering an aloof “care” to someone who is suffering.  The “wounded healer” is one who has, and is, suffering her/himself and does not draw the distinction between “me and thee” that the aloof, detached care givers offer.  To those who are ensconced in the aloof, detached comfort zone…their mind and heart teeming with clinical lore…this patient or client is a “thing”.  Absent is the awareness of the relationship, the consciousness and experience that “there go I but by the grace of God.”  The wounded healer has seen, experienced, and owned his/her pain and can offer an empathy that those without that woundedness can offer.

However, the pitfall of the wounded healer is the inability to set boundaries.  If that person cannot recognize that even with that powerful empathy there is not simultaneously a distinction between “me and thee” he he/she will be sucked into a morass of self-indulgence in which he/she and the patient is done great harm.  You might want to check out the following link:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/evil-deeds/201112/linehan-and-jung-wounded-healers

 

Emily Dickinson was an Observer of Life, a “Prophet” of Sorts

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One of my favorite quips from Emily Dickinson is, “Life is over there.  On a shelf.”  Part of what makes this thought so captivating for me is that I still have buried in my heart a “literal” lew mind/heart which, when reading an observation like that wants to exclaim, “Why hell!  That’s nuts!  Life is not ‘over there’ and certainly not on a damn shelf.”  That reflects the concrete-thinking that I spent the first two or maybe three decades of my life firmly ensconced in.  But now I completely understand what Dickinson was noting and simultaneously revealing about herself.  She was an “observer” of life; she paid attention to a life in which those around her were immersed to the point being oblivious of a “hidden” dimension that she captured with her poetry. Emily was alienated or detached, allowing her to grasp the human soul and put into words its machinations, those delightful as well as beastly.  There is sense in which poets might be described as prophetic, not in the sense of being able to foretell the future but being aware of the implications of the present.  She was aware, acutely aware.  She saw that bookshelf in her room and in her heart conjoined that image with a feeling of separateness and loneliness in life.

This division of the soul is problematic without looking beneath the surface.  Such a “division” makes one think of “schizo” as in schizophrenic.  The difference is that a schizophrenic is definitely “divided” but is lacking that substrate of the soul which provides an underlying unity.  Dickinson certainly felt the anxiety and despair that she conveys in her poetry.  Who would not if they were more or less “cloistered” in their father’s attic for the whole of their life.  But she found beneath the surface that “substrate” which anchored her and allowed her to offer the profound wisdom that blokes like myself can take comfort in.  (Btw, I could easily spell substrate with a capital “S.”)

I close with a relevant bit of poetry from Matthew Arnold:

I’d like to close with a relevant quote from another 19th century, Matthew Arnold:

The poet, to whose mighty heart

Heaven doth a quicker pulse impart

Subdues that energy to scan

Not his own heart, but that of man.

 

Symbolic Communication and Susan K. Deri

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Susan K. Deri has been a profound influence in my intellectual, emotional, and spiritual life.  I only discovered her two years ago with her book, “Symbolization and Creativity.”  In this riveting book, Deri explored the creation of the symbol as it emerges from instinctual energy which has a built-in capacity for creation of this “symbol.” It is the creation of the symbol that is necessary for “symbolic communication” in which primitive, old-brain “jabberings” (Carl Sandburg term) are shaped into what we know as “language” which is the means of “symbolic communication.”  Without this facility we would still be in the stage of grunts, moans, screams, et al which precedes our ability to “wrap a word” around our wishes, including the ability to “name an object”; anthropologically this is very much related to the Old Testament accomplishment of “naming the beasts of the field.”

One critical dimension of this creation of symbols is “distance” or detachment.  We start life inside an uroboric state in which we are not separate and distinct from what the Buddhists call “the world of 10,000 things.”  We can’t “see” a rock because we are not differentiated from it, we can’t “see” a tree because we are not differentiated from it, we can’t “see” momma’s breast because we are not separate from it.  “Close up everything becomes a blur,” declares Deri.  “There must be some separation between perceiver and perceived.  Symbols, in contradistinction to signs, provide this distance.”

But the creation of this “distance” is primeval; it is the “fall” from Edenic bliss into the limitation of form and the “fall” is so painful that we are insulated from the pain by repression.  This is the “loss” that led T.S. Eliot to declare, “Human kind cannot bear very much reality” which is why we cling so desperately to our symbols, even if in doing so we disallow the symbol to accomplish its function of bridging the gap between instinctual experience and symbol.

Here I wish to introduce a relevant poem by a Mississippi poet, Edgar Simmons, who related this to an experience with the Divine:

THE MAGNETIC FIELD

Distance…which by definition
Indicates a separation from self
Is the healing poultice of metaphor,
Is the night-lighting of poetry.
As we allot to elements their weights
So to metaphor we need assign the
Weight of the ghost of distance.
Stars are stars to us
Because of distance: it is in the
Nothingness which clings us them
That we glory, tremble, and bow.
O what weight and glory lie abalance
In the stretch of vacant fields:
Metaphor: the hymn and hum of separation.

The Perilous Safety of “Hunkerin’ Down”

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There is a pale.  And there are those who spend their life beyond the pale, some so far beyond the pale that they merit the term “deviant.”  And then there are those who live very close to the pale, hovering just short of this boundary or just beyond it and do the work that offers art in its full gamut to the human race.  This pale is what defines reality and “reality” must have some definition if there is to be any civilization at all.  But there are times when the “energy” that has constellated at and just beyond the pale appears threatening to those who hover near the center of “reality” and then there is a tendency to “hunker down” and fiercely resist the precious offering of those “pale dwellers”—opportunities for change.  But the “hunker downers”, if they find a chieftain around whom they can rally, often will become adamant about maintaining the status quo and the social body will suffer, especially those who do not have the comfort of the “in crowd.”  Often those in the “out crowd” are easily manipulated and intimidated and can be convinced by their chieftain that it is in their own best interest to oppose the changes that would be good for the entirety of the social body, including themselves.

Change is scary.  As Shakespeare put it, “We cling to these ills we have rather than fly to others we know not of.”  The Bard knew that often we will prefer to maintain our misery rather than dare to take the risk that would be entailed in taking actions that might alleviate our suffering.  A psychiatrist I worked with in a psych hospital one time quipped in a staffing about a patient that we both worked with, “She clings to her mental illness with the same tenacity that most of us cling to our mental health.”  “Hunkering down” gives one, or the whole of a group, the illusion of safety.  As W. H. Auden noted, “We have made for ourselves a life safer than we can bear.”

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Here is a list of my blogs.  I invite you to check out the other two sometime.

https://anerrantbaptistpreacher.wordpress.com/

https://literarylew.wordpress.com/

https://theonlytruthinpolitics.wordpress.com/

Knowledge is Capricious

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Daniel Boorstin, a noted American historian declared in his book, “The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search to Know His World and Himself,” that, “More appealing than knowledge itself is the feeling of knowing.” Boorstin in this quote had gleaned from his study of history that the comfort of “the feeling of knowing” often, if not most of the time, would triumph over knowledge itself.  Throughout history we have records of cultures in which “the feeling of knowing” proved to lead to their demise while letting that “feeling” give way to some critical thinking could have allowed them to continue, though with a moderated view of reality.

It is comforting to feel that one knows, permitting one to “know” that one knows.  It is so comforting that human nature has hard-wired us to prefer “knowing that we know” in the interest of preserving our tribe.  But when the world grows so small…as we are now experiencing…then “knowing what we know” begins to compete with other tribes who “know that they know” with equal conviction. Then violent conflict ensues unless leadership is available which will direct us to tolerate the notion that diametrically opposing ideas of reality can co-exist. There is no need to attempt to obliterate “them” just because we see “them” as, “not knowing correctly.”

The core issue is the comfort of “feeling that we know” not understanding the wisdom of poet W. H. Auden who told us that, “feeling knows no discretion but its own.”  Auden knew that our view of the world is not a rational matter, but one whose origin lies beneath the surface in the murky realm of feelings, closely akin to the unconscious.  But to recognize this truth is to take away the certainty that we can have in believing our beliefs and discounting anything or anyone that threatens them.  Another word for this realm of feelings is the heart, that center of our being which is unlocked only when we are willing to forego the tyranny of rational thinking and permit the grace of a non-tyrannical rationality which is quickened with the intuitive wisdom of the heart.

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Here is a list of my blogs.  I invite you to check out the other two sometime.

https://anerrantbaptistpreacher.wordpress.com/

https://literarylew.wordpress.com/

https://theonlytruthinpolitics.wordpress.com/

Emily Dickinson and John Donne Speak to Us

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Emily Dickinson knew the human heart, as do any poet who is worth their poetic salt.  Therefore, she knew about meaning and understood that it was obtained only in the inner most depths of the heart which she captured with the following poem:

There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –
We can find no scar,
But internal difference –
Where the Meanings, are –

None may teach it – Any –
‘Tis the seal Despair –
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air –

When it comes, the Landscape listens –
Shadows – hold their breath –
When it goes, ’tis like the Distance
On the look of Death –
Dickinson knew that meaning comes from “heavenly hurt” and that it leaves, “no scar” to the casual observer, those who look only on the surface of things; but those who can withstand the pain will find, “internal difference—where the meanings are.”  This “internal difference” allows an ephemeral “certain slant of light” to daunt the citadel of the heart and bring into question certainties which had, to that point, been biases and premises unsullied by the “certain slant of light” of conscious awareness.  It is in the resulting disarray, confusion, doubt, and fear that “meaning” can surface in our heart and allow “words fitly spoken” to flow from our inner most being.

To borrow from another line of Dickinson poetry,  she called this intrusion into our consciousness of this, “slant of light,” a “splinter in the brain.”  This “splintering” is a violation, a penetration, not unrelated to what the famous poet John Donne had in mind when he noted that God would not be able to penetrate the stubborn rational fortress of his egoic self, “except thou ravish me,” which would come only after the answering of his prayer, “Batter my heart, three personed God.”

“Defining Yellow”…and Our Political Mess

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Japanese author, Haruki Murakami, has offered wisdom to this moment in United States history.  He notes that regardless of how high we build the walls, that which lies beyond artificial structures will still be present and a “danger” to the illusory safety found within. W. H. Auden offered a hint at the dark side of life within walls that are too tight, declaring, “We have made for ourselves a life safer than we can bear.”  (Yes, all walls and boundaries are “artificial.”)

Boundary issues arise from the simple phenomenon of definition.  The definition of anything includes the exclusion of “everything else” so that a particular “thing” can be given attention, can have an identity.  For example, a blogging friend of mine has entitled her blog, “Defining Yellow.”  This young woman appears to understand that even a simple phenomenon as a color requires the ability to distinguish it from the rest of the color spectrum.  From the “ancient” memory of my own youth, I want to cry out, “Why hell, yellow cannot be defined! It simply is and attempting to define it is crazy!”  But yellow would not exist without the “supporting cast,” of the rest of the color spectrum which our conscious mind is able to shut out. To illustrate, imagine that everything in the world was yellow.  If that were the case, then yellow would not “exist”; for, the very word, “exist” means to “stand out” from a context.  (The word “exist” comes from the Latin terms “ex” and “stere,” “ex” meaning to stand out of and “stere” that which means, “pure.”)  If everything in our world was yellow, we would not be able to recognize yellow as it would be taken for granted.

Murakami explained the subtle peril of definition in this historical political moment we live in:

…no matter how high a wall we build to keep intruders out, no matter how strictly we exclude outsiders, no matter how much we rewrite history to suit us, we just end up damaging and hurting ourselves… just as all people have shadows, every society and nation, too, has shadows, (and) if there are bright, shining aspects, there will definitely be a counterbalancing dark side. If there’s a positive, there will surely be a negative on the reverse side…at times we tend to avert our eyes from the shadow, those negative parts. Or else try to forcibly eliminate those aspects. Because people want to avoid, as much as possible, looking at their own dark sides, their negative qualities. But in order for a statue to appear solid and three-dimensional, you need to have shadows. Do away with shadows and all you end up with is a flat illusion. Light that doesn’t generate shadows is not true light. You have to patiently learn to live together with your shadow and carefully observe the darkness that resides within you. Sometimes in a dark tunnel you have to confront your own dark side.

NOTE:  See “Defining Yellow” blog at—https://definingyellow.com/

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Here is a list of my blogs.  I invite you to check out the other two sometime.

https://anerrantbaptistpreacher.wordpress.com/

https://literarylew.wordpress.com/

https://theonlytruthinpolitics.wordpress.com/