Category Archives: existentialism

That “Deep State” That Besets Us.

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I too have a “deep state” that is besieging me!  Yes, “they” or “it” is after me.  Oh, I used to think it was “out there” in the person of all those bad people and institutions who did not “see the light” as I did; but now I realize that my fears and insecurities were misdirected.  That “deep state” was within and will always be…as long as I remain a “paltry” human. I now realize that the “deep state” I always projected “out there” is merely the unconscious, that hidden domain of my heart which I did not have the courage to acknowledge.  And, yes it is a dark and ominous region of human experience, as in Goethe’s observations, “The heart has its beastly little treasures.”  My unwillingness to withdraw my projections for most of my life has cost me the store house of treasures in my heart which I catch faint glimpses of every now and then.  But the “beastly” dimension of the heart is always there! 

What is that “beastly” dimension of the heart?  In my experience, including reading and study but certainly including the intricate, frightening dimensions of “experience”, I have found that it is believing what you “believe” in an ironclad fashion, failing to recognize and respect the limitations of our human-ness, especially cognition.  We believe what we want to believe; and even if these beliefs might be very “noble” when we elevate them to sacrosanctity, we risk disregarding the wisdom of the Apostle Paul who noted that at best we only “see through a glass darkly.” 

The problem is “believing in our belief.”  One simple example is paranoia, If you believe the world is out to get you at some point it is likely to fulfill your unconscious wishes and “come after your ass.”  That is because the deep-seated distrust of life that you harbor will eventually spill over to the point that your judgement is gravely impaired, and the legal system will have to fulfill its responsibilities to intervene.  But the core issue is the insecurity, fragility, and terror that reigns in your heart. 

AND, on the matter of “believing in your belief,” I’m reminded of my favorite bumper sticker, “Don’t believe everything you think.”  So, you believe the moon is made out of cheese???  Why not consider what some of the other people in your world think about this notion?  So, you think “the Lord has ‘raised up’ Trump,” how about toying with the notion there might be some degree of flaw in that vein of thought?  But when a vein of thought is based on profound fear and anxiety that cannot be acknowledged, one will be enthralled with that vein of thought to the point of certainty. 

Aw, the sweet nectar of certainty!!! I remember it well.

Another “Dust Bunny” Paean With a Poem

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The “dust of the earth” which the Bible tells us we were created from is increasingly such a meaningful image to me.  Yes, it is probably because I’m closer daily to that point where I will become what Hamlet famously described as, “the food of worms;” but in the meantime I increasingly appreciate and even revel in my existential status of being a “dust bunny” of sorts.  This earthiness that each of us share, a commonality superseded only by That which undergirds the whole of this “goodly frame,” is a playground for each of us, a playground which, however, does involve occasional bumps and bruises..  The following poem by Ross Gay, described prominently in his biography as “a gardener,” so beautifully describes one poet’s intimate connection with and respect for this Earth.

If you find yourself half naked
and barefoot in the frosty grass, hearing,
again, the earth’s great, sonorous moan that says
you are the air of the now and gone, that says
all you love will turn to dust,
and will meet you there, do not
raise your fist. Do not raise
your small voice against it. And do not
take cover. Instead, curl your toes
into the grass, watch the cloud
ascending from your lips. Walk
through the garden’s dormant splendor.
Say only, thank you.
Thank you. If you find yourself half naked
and barefoot in the frosty grass, hearing,
again, the earth’s great, sonorous moan that says
you are the air of the now and gone, that says
all you love will turn to dust,
and will meet you there, do not
raise your fist. Do not raise
your small voice against it. And do not
take cover. Instead, curl your toes
into the grass, watch the cloud
ascending from your lips. Walk
through the garden’s dormant splendor.
Say only, thank you.
Thank you.

Perspective From the Lens of a Camera

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Perspective.  We all have one…and if you are “lucky” you will not be aware of it! By that I am alluding to a wise quip from the philosopher Paul Ricoeur who once noted, “You can’t have a perspective on your perspective without somehow escaping it.”  The “escape” can be frightening, especially if it comes too abruptly. (See the Apostle Paul on the Damascus Road.)

Photography has helped bring this matter to my attention.  This morning in The Guardian I discovered an Italian photographer, Olivo Barbieri, whose work is “interesting” with how it takes the happenstance of day-to-day life, captures it with the lens, and presents it to us.  This “capture” is known as “framing” in photography.  In the photography show, attached below, Barbieri displays a very wry grasp of his world and conveys it to people, such as “moi”, who appreciate the “wry” in life.  I’m sure some would look at his work and say, scratching their head perhaps, “Huh?”

Perspective is a life-long concern of mine.  If you read this “font of wisdom” very often, you will see how I focus on the matter, bringing emphasis to dimensions of life to which most people would not pay any attention.  If we lack perspective, we often will be consumed or even devoured by one of which we are not conscious; that can, too often, bode ill for us and those in our world.  Our president, and his disciples, are a current egregious example of this.

Below is a link to the Barbieri story and a copy of one of his pictures.  Several of his pictures are available if you check out the link.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2020/sep/22/eyes-playing-tricks-olivo-barbieri-italian-photographer-in-picture

Taking a “Gander” at Reality Once Again

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I have spent most of my life “gandering” at reality…as if anyone can do so.  With my intuition, and life-long study of psychology and philosophy, I realize that I was skeptical of reality from the earliest days of my life, even before cognition began to “convince” me that things were as they appeared.  I was born into a strange world and am now seeing this “strangeness” made even more manifest as Trumpian madness continues to maraud across the landscape of our soul. But a caveat is warranted.  “Reality” is not to be objectified as I am claiming to have done; daring to “think “ I have done so puts me outside of reality, beyond the pale, an offence to which I confess guilt.  Whew, what a blessing though it took me most of my life to find the existential courage to accept that lot.

Reality is a nuanced phenomenon, so “nuanced” that we are hard-wired to carve this nuanced world into which we are born into definition so that we can function in a very “defined” world.  But this same “wiring” permits us to find the courage at some point to contemplates that the world of “definitions” we have taken for granted needs a second glance.  But this “permission” is not a mandate; it lies in that “foul rag and bone shop of the heart” where, according to the Apostle Paul lie “the thoughts and intents of the heart” which require openness to the “Other.”

A Poem Relevant to Our Nation, “Bow Down to Stutterers.”

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Joe Biden put something on our table last week that Trump will never do, given a constitutional flaw that makes it impossible to admit any fault—he admitted a human flaw, stuttering.  Furthermore, he offered the stage to a 13 year old lad who he has coached recently about stuttering, Braydon Harrington. Braydon humbly accepted  this opportunity to demonstrate tremendous courage and offer a brief speech in which he did indeed stutter

Though stuttering is a neurological disorder…as is every malady, including “being human”…I immediately thought of a poem in which this malady was approached in poetic imagery.  Edgar Simmons,  a Mississippi poet who grasped the nuances of the heart and was able to present stuttering from an interesting perspective.  In the poem which I will offer, he saw stuttering as representing a heart with so much energy that conveying  its burden into words was a challenge. This poem is so rich but one particular image really speaks to me, “The stutter’s hesitation/Is a procrastination crackle/Redress to hot force,/Flight from ancient flame.”  Simmons presents the stutterer as being gripped by a passionate intensity that words cannot contain.  It brings to mind Goneril’s response to her father’s (King Lear) question, “How much do you love me?”  She responded with a simple, “More than words can wield the matter.”

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.

This “Fish” Sees Water…Kinda…And It Is Not Always Cracked up To What It’s Supposed To Be!!!

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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. (David Foster Wallace)

The above quote, from my last post, is the essence of the “spinning” that occurs with a fish that cannot see its water. However, a “fish” can learn to see water and my life is a story about this accomplishment.  Actually, I must confess this has not been an “accomplishment” as I was born this way and it has merely taken me half a century to find the confidence to accept and honor this lot in life.  My confidence was buoyed last year when I read…twice…the Booker-Prize winning novel by Anna Burns, “The Milkman” in which she introduced me to the notion of living “beyond the pale.” In my life beyond this pale…and yes it is the “pale” separating reality and something “beyond”…which I’m increasingly learning is not a catastrophe but is merely the endowment of what poet John Keats called “negative capability.”  (It could, though be a “catastrophe” and often is!) This stance has blessed/cursed me with the “observer” stance which Emily Dickinson alluded to when she noted, “Life is over there, on a shelf.”  It is no coincidence that Dickinson spent her life “cloistered” in her father’s attic and I myself have spent my life “cloistered” in some attic, some cerebral detachment of sorts.

But in this cloister of mine I have not escaped the predicament the David Foster Wallace noted in the quote provided above.  I, too, offer but a “spin” about the world and I, too, have tended to take it too seriously and demonstrated too often a tendency to impose it on others; as some wit noted, “Give a kid a hammer and everything is a nail.”  The ego has a difficult time ever acknowledging its machinations which are intrinsically a “spin” about the world and an attempt to make it wholly about itself.  When Humility begins to penetrate that hermetically-sealed chamber, the “spin” begins to rattle against the walls of the cage it has created and great is the “noise” to the owner of the ego…and sometimes to those looking on from the outside!

Let me close with a note about the “noise” which is clamoring in our modern world as our collective ego is under a related grave challenge.  Particularly in my country, the basic assumptions, the premises, the “water” that we “fish” cannot see, is being exposed.  In this situation, the part of our culture which most embodies this obfuscation is clinging obstinately to its ego and have found a leader who champions so vividly its cause.

In my next post, I am going to share about the “spinning” of one’s religious tradition and how that noble teachings can become merely an example of the aforementioned “kid with a hammer.”

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.

That Damn Grim Reaper is Stalking Me.

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The Grim Reaper is at the threshold of my dear family.  My heart is very heavy.  The reason it is so heavy now is that I have a heart which I haven’t had in the past. This “death thingy” that we all live with is “the great equalizer” and humbles us…or at least it can anyway.  The fantasies, illusions, and hypocrisies that we hide behind, allowing us to “perfunctory” along our life’s way, disintegrate in the face of this “Humility”.  The formulaic, canned humility that I’ve used to imprison my heart can only dissipate in the face of this “Humility.” I am very humbled that one of my dear brothers-in-law has less than 24 hours left on this beautiful planet.

BUT I take comfort with the wisdom of Irvin Yalom, a gifted psychologist, that it is incumbent upon us as human being to “die” before Death, allowing us then to live as never before.  We are no longer hapless before our fragility; we can then find an anchor there that will stabilize us in the tumult of this emotional maelstrom. The tenor of Yalom’s observation is that until we “die” we will not be able to live, only “be-bopping” along our “three-score and ten,” deliberately, willingly opting to avoid the Life-giving dissipation of our persona’s grip.  Bill and I talked frequently of the “Anchor” that we were finding.  Irish poet, William Butler Yeats summed up the sentiments I have expressed here: The leaves are many but the root is one./  Throughout all the lying days of my youth, I have swayed my leaves and flowers under the sun./ Now may I wither into the truth.

The following is a link to a brilliant essay by a deeply-spiritual Quaker, Parker Palmer, in which death and fragility is powerfully presented.—   https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/08/10/parker-palmer-naropa-university-commencement-address/

“Oops!”

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Hannah Arendt’s work has emboldened me recently to “assail” reality, blessed with some dimension of her “internal dialogue”. Taking a critical stance toward reality is a dangerous endeavor as the attempt to “view” reality entails an assumption that one is separate from it.  That very assumption can easily lead to sheer madness as it implicitly gives one the temptation to think with delight, “Oh boy, I’ve got it!  Lay down world and take it! I’m special, having a word from ‘on high’ that you need to listen to.”  The imperious attitude that one has achieved objectivity is the very same peril that I’m so “arrogantly” hoping to not share here.

The alienation that I labor with always brings to mind the quip from Emily Dickinson, “Life is over there…on a shelf” as if it was a book or a curio on a shelf.  That “blessing/curse” gifted us with the brilliant poetry of Dickinson though I have achieved only a critical viewpoint that I share here occasionally. “Reality” is a set of assumptions and biases that we live by, a body of “givens” that is necessary to be able to wake up in the morning without the task of “making sense” of our world all over again.  When we awaken in the morning, the implicitly agreed upon worldview will still be with us and we will again be able to put our pants on one leg at a time.  BUT, as this “reality” unfolds over the passing of time, it accrues sinister notions that need to be addressed.  In my life, that has involved disavowing, for example, that women are to be submissive to their husbands, that persons of color are inferior to we honkies, and that my spiritual tradition did not have toxic dimensions.  When critical thinking begins to set in, it can leave one with a sense of having become unmoored.  It is frightening to have the insipid experience that, “I don’t see things as I was taught to see them.” But I am today coming to accept this “internal dialogue” that insists that I have something to offer…but only to “offer” and not a view point that I can wield like a hammer.  Remember the old adage, “Give a kid a hammer and everything is a nail?”

I like to describe “reality” as a mere “dog-and-pony show” to which we are taught to subscribe.  Shakespeare described it with the cryptic observation that it was “a tale told by an idiot.” His insight makes me cringe at times when I recall the many times this has been the case with me, and inevitably still is! But the humility of this insight makes it easier for me to utter the famous wisdom of Senator Ted Cruz when I am wrong, “Oops!”

Here I Elaborate Further on Recent Post About Hannah Arendt…

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My last post was dense, convoluted, and “self-reflection” running amok.  That is ok as it was “me” and I shared from this “me” that has helped me stumble through “mite near” seven decades of life. But two days later, I’d like to simplify things…once again, “a mite”…and kick around for a moment “internal dialogue.”

Hannah Arendt described Adolph Eichman as totally bereft of this human quality, not able to stand apart from the mausoleum of thought that he was.  This character flaw of his was symptomatic of the Third Reich which Arendt, in assessing Eichman, described as “the banality of evil.”  This banality is what happens when we are so immersed in our cognitive grasp of the world that we disallow the possibility of other humans having a “cognitive grasp” of their own which deserves respect.

This internal dialogue is the capacity to have a vein of “self-talk” in our heart which allows us to occasionally pause, look at some of the things we are most certain of and ask ourselves, “Hmm.  Maybe this “rock of Gibraltar” in my consciousness merits another look-see.”

There are so many examples in life today of this malady, but I want to put on the table a trivial anecdote from decades ago.  A news clip in the mid-seventies described a man in Dallas, Texas who became so frustrated and angry when his Cowboys football team lost a game that he grabbed his shot gun and blew out the TV screen. This must have stunned his neighbors as a gun shot next door led them to calling the police. I love sports myself and the Dallas Cowboys were, and still are, my favorite team.  I have suffered many disappointments with them over the decades as too often I’ve suffered the ignominy of watching them get beaten.  BUT, I’ve never been THAT upset! That poor bloke, demonstrated what it is to be “a brain stem with arms and legs,” allowing his seat of emotions to overwhelm him and suspend judgement.  He acted without the presence of the “pauser reason”  that Shakespeare has given us. The Grace of God has equipped most of us with this discretion and we are able to check ourselves throughout the day and avoid “acting out” like that.  Without this taken-for- granted contrivance in our heart, we too would that “brain stems without arms and legs” and catastrophe would unfold.

The complicated machinations of the human heart that I wrote about two days ago can be simplified with Arendt’s notion of, “internal dialogue.”  It is this human quality that permits us to reduce that cognitive/emotional tumult with an automatic filter, of “common sense.”  Without this “common sense” that most of us comply with routinely we will wreak havoc on our world.  Only if  we happen to live in a world, or even a little corner of a world that has also suspended common sense and shut down this “internal dialogue,” we can get by with it.

“Lord, in your infinite Grace, help us.”