Category Archives: existentialism

“Whew, Trump Got By Once Again.” Or Did He?

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Yes, he screwed up with bleach and heat nonsense the other day. But his crisis-management team immediately convened and one of them quickly dug into his always-ready folder, just beside the one marked, “binders full of women,” and pulled out, “Well he can say it was sarcasm, that or ‘irony’ and both have worked before.”  Another countered with, “Just deny that it happened or was ‘being taken out of context’ and that will likely fly.”  A crusty old veteran then stood up, stroked his beard, appearing to be wise, pondering studiously for a moment,  then noted, “Hey, we could use the old tried-and-true maneuver, blaming it on Obama…or Hillary…or Biden or China. Hey, the “deep state” always works.!” So, an hour later, this group of advisors opted with the “sarcasm” defense, after sucking down tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars” to employ this “CYA contrivance”.  They quickly adjourned, pleased with themselves for again arming the president with “BS” that would satisfy Fox News and the rest of his devotees.

Speaking from experience, when you have so much to hide in the depths of your heart, any bit of lame-ass denial will suffice to satisfy your need to cover up your heart’s insecurity, fear, and anxiety.  I should know, having done that for most of my life.! And  that will keep you from admitting, “I  made a mistake. I goofed,” or even Rick Perry’s famous, awkward, admission of faltering in a debate in 2016 when he could not recall the third of “three points,” shame-facedly uttering, ‘Oops!’”

Yep, life is often tough as we plod along in the “tale told by an idiot” that we have contrived to save face, disregarding that this “tale” is always “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” But even then Shakespeare wisdom must be taken with the body of his profound work, that beneath the surface of our collective falderal there is “Something” undergirding the apparent “nothing-ness.”  But when we are so deeply ensconced in falderal, this “nothingness” we inevitably will take it to be “the real.”

And with this organized, systematized denial system, we go merrily along our way, as in Goethe’s observation, “When folks made all the week a holiday/With scanty wit, yet wholly at their ease/like kittens given their own tail to tease.” W. H. Auden put it even more bitingly, describing humankind as, “bland, sunny, and adjusted by the light of the collected lie.”

” Oh my,” I am often wont to say, realizing that honest, human admission of fault must never be utilized.! We must keep from appearing “human” even though our “human-ness,” with all its frailty and shame, is our most valuable God-given treasure.

Specious Reality Gets a “Reality Check” Here and There

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My focus here recently has been reality, as in “reality.”  My emphasis is the vulnerability that “reality” faces, as it is something other than the basic assumptions that we take for granted.  Here, I am putting on the table something that cannot actually be put “on the table.”  For “reality” is subtle to the point that we can never fully grasp it with our feeble, pea-sized brain but only with a discerning heart that can understand these subtleties, or at least understand that they can only be inferred.  In this effort I make it very complicated…because it is complicated, infinitely so…but it can be simply presented by borrowing from the Apostle Paul, “We see through a glass darkly.”

It is this “darkliness” that is imperiled with the term I employed days ago, “the judgement of God.”  Psychologist Carl Jung used the word “einfall” to describe this irruption into our consciousness, an intrusion which often rattles our cage beyond our comfort zone.  Another term I’d like to introduce here is the “black swan” popularized several years ago by Nassim Nicholas Tasseb with his book, “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.”  Tasseb uses the aberration of a swan being black rather than white to introduce the shock of cognitive dissonance, the “catastrophe” of realizing that things are not as we see them.  According to Wikipedia, Tasseb’s metaphor “lies in its analogy to the fragility of any system of thought.  A set of conclusions is potentially undone once any of its fundamental postulates is disproved.”

Our world is now being shaken to the core, with many “fundamental postulates” jeopardized.  Any country worth its salt will have leaders who will avoid blaming anyone, will focus on the problem as it applies to its own people, and offer a well thought out strategy for this perilous moment in history.  The image of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, confined to a wheelchair, calmly guiding us through the Great Depression and into the 2nd World War came to my mind.  What courage, fortitude, and faith.  He knew it was not all about him.

A More “Aesthetic” and Poetic Approach to Judgement

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Today I’d like to approach the “judgement of God” more aesthetically.  Though I emphasized yesterday the metaphorical approach I had in mind, I want to further gloss the term over…if even possible… with a bit of poetic finesse. W.H. Auden wrote, “O blessed be bleak exposure on whose sword we are pricked into being alive.” Auden captured the starkness of those moments when reality stuns us, stripping us of the adornments of our personality of which we have become so comfortable.

Emily Dickinson, with her cryptic and even severe style, put it more starkly:

He fumbles at your Soul
As Players at the Keys —
Before they drop full Music on —
He stuns you by Degrees —

Prepares your brittle Nature
For the Ethereal Blow
By fainter Hammers — further heard —
Then nearer — Then so — slow —

Your Breath — has time to straighten —
Your Brain — to bubble Cool —
Deals One — imperial Thunderbolt —
That scalps your naked soul —

When Winds hold Forests in their Paws —
The Universe — is still —

Mercifully, as I’ve noted before, most of us get this “wisdom” gently over the years…if at all.  I like the way William Butler Yeats put it, “Throughout all the lying days of my youth, I waved my leaves and flowers in the sun.  Now may I wither into the Truth.”

Boundaries is the subject matter here.  I might quip, “We can’t live with ‘em, we can’t live without ‘em.”  By that I mean part of us resists restraint but fortunately we are hard wired to appreciate the “reining in” of our deep-seated desire to be unrestrained.  Proverbs 16:32 captures this inner conflict beautifully, “He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city.”

My Name is Mud…And I’m Kinda “Proud” of It

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One of the earliest stories I heard in my life was that God created us by digging into the earth and creating our progenitor, Adam.  I later learned that the name “Adam” meant “earth.”  And increasingly I realize just how much we are but “dust of the earth” and are destined to return to that dust. Shakespeare in “Hamlet” so pithily noted that we will ultimately become “food for worms.”

But from this humble origin we can become what Shakespeare described as “the quintessence of dust.”  However, achieving any degree of this quintessential…requires a lot of work, a lot of soul work, and there our dusty origins fights us tooth-and-toenail.  For one of the fundamental dimensions of our earthy, dusty origins is the constellation of the ego and that “beastly little treasure” has an intrinsic desire to never relinquish its “beastly” dimension.  Mine certainly does not! This ego is the “will of the species” and its willfulness if not mitigated by a concern for the “species” at-large will become self-destructive and that destructive energy will seek to wreak havoc on the species.  This is relevant to the Apostle Paul’s declaration, “I will to do good, but evil is present with me.” He knew the grandiosity of his spirituality…among other things!  I just visited our present day “holy ghost” (Google) and learned that 1 Corinthians 15:46-48 is very relevant to this vein of thought, Paul noting that “the first man” (i.e. “the ego”) is of the dust of the earth but the “second man” is spiritual, “of heaven.”

I want to close with a poem by the man I shared from yesterday, Samuel Menashe, who daunted my ego with the notion that my, even my name, “is mud.”  Humility is good.  It takes all the pressure off!

 

 

ADAM MEANS EARTH

 

I am the man

Whose name is mud

But what’s in a name

To shame one who knows

Mud does not stain

Clay he’s made of

Dust Adam became—

The dust he was—

Was he his name

Samuel Menashe

Fritz Perls, “Let Go of Your Mind and Come to Your Senses.”

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The story of my life has been one of discovering my own body.  That is a silly or inane thing to even say from the perspective of my background; for, “what is more apparent than our body?” I would have asked back then. But my life experiences and clinical practice, not to mention explorations of the gamut of human sciences, has led me to realize the wisdom of the quip by Fritz Perls in the 1960’s, “Let go of your mind and come to your senses.”  Perls realized just our disconnected Western culture teaches us to be from our “senses” and the affective or “feeling” dimension of life.  Carl Jung had a relevant point, noting two kinds of thinking…a)directed thinking which is designed have us fit in with the social milieu we are born into; b) and imaginative thinking which allows us to find a bit of “free-play” with this necessary “directed thinking” so that we can avoid being an ideologue.

This “dis-embodied” thinking is very much related to the Western attitude that we are separate and distinct from mother nature, this wonderful earth, and see it as something to satisfy our ravenous appetites.  But disembodied thought is dangerous.  I’m reminded of a line from the poet W. B. Yeats, “O God, guard me from those thoughts men think in the mind alone.  He who sings a lasting song thinks in the marrow bone.”

Just this morning I ran across a relevant thought from D.H. Lawrence about this alienation from our earthly or earthy roots:

Oh what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and equinox.  This is what is the matter with us.  We are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of Life, and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table.  D.H. Lawrence

 

Stymied by Fear in an Arkansas Chicken Pen…by a Duck!!!

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When I was a little tyke, living in the sticks of Arkansas, I recall an innocent little moment when fear etched itself deeply into my heart so that I clearly recall the event six decades later.  I was in the chicken pen and apparently alone when suddenly I found one of my fingers inside the open mouth of a furiously squawking duck.  I guess object constancy had not sunk in with me at that early age…I must have been about two-and-a-half years old…for terror overwhelmed me as if this “crisis” was about to be the end of me.  And I don’t know how this “existential” crisis was resolved, but I faintly remember “momma” calling to me from the front porch.  At that point in development, “momma” was the solution of all woes!

This tempest in the young teapot that I was probably lasted all of a second and a half but I clearly recall it as if it happened yesterday.  Experiences at that stage of development when we are only beginning to “come on line” and find the comfort of an ego to protect us from moments like those that are very intense.  For “limits” are a very fleeting phenomenon then; had this “tragedy” presented itself to me in another year or so, I probably would have been grounded enough in reality to realize, “Hey, take your finger out of the damn duck’s mouth!”  But in that second I was immobilized, stymied by fear, without the comfort of what I would later learn to describe as “reality.”

And fear will do that to one.  At any age!  Fear is part of life but we have been given the capability of addressing our fears, even the fear of fear, but only if we have the maturity and humility to acknowledge, “I’m afraid.”  Failure to acknowledge this dimension of our human-ness will leave us crippled with maladaptive emotional and behavioral strategies than can be more deadly than the thing of which we are secretly fearful.

And this brings me to my favorite “whipping boy,” Trumpism and its raucous, shrieking mouth piece in the body of one Donald J. Trump.  The Republican Party is stymied by fear that it will not acknowledge, they have their “finger stuck in the mouth of a duck” and are so overwhelmed with the threat of this darkness that they can’t employ “the purge” that our Constitution offers.  They have dug themselves in over their heads, though they had and still have the levers of governmental process to set limits with Trump; though now it appears too late for them.  They are now trapped by their own inertia, an inertia that all of us has an element of, but one they have allowed to metastasize.   They are now enthralled with Trump and have placed their emotional, spiritual, economic, and political welfare is in his hands.

So often in my “day-to-day” Jesus comes to my mind now that His wisdom is longer mere dogma; and on this occasion it is, “Perfect love casteth out fear.”  I certainly do not, however, have “perfect love” as fear is a daily visitor to this dog-and-pony show that cavorts about in my skull.  But I do have confidence that this “perfect love” is present somewhere in my heart, and always has been…even back in that pen …and this allows me to face fears that I’ve avoided all of my life.  And this “perfect love” abides in all of our hearts, even in that of the Trumpster, though I don’t have any hope that he can find the humility to seek its comfort.  Seeking this Comfort would be tantamount to admitting a need, admitting that he is insufficient in the sense that all of us are, and that he needs forgiveness; he could then find acceptance of his internal haunts and fears and no longer have to lash out at the world.  And, btw, “forgiveness” is today an easy and almost meaningless word.  But I don’t see it as a judicial decree from some “Pillsbury doughboy in the sky” but a gift that is, yes, from “out there” in some sense, but simultaneously woven into the very fabric of our being.  It is something we have to evoke from the depths of our being, an evocation which can only occur with that Pauline “fear and trembling” that comes as we “work out our own salvation.”

Well, I’ve come along way here in this narrative, all the way from an Arkansas chicken pen in the mid-1950’s to the “insane” notion of “perfect love” here as the year 2020 beckons. And it is “insane” in the sense that there is no place for it in the “sane” world that we have allowed to descend into madness, protected from this realization by our preference for an illusory reality.   But this salvific dimension of human experience has been with us from our beginning, and even before, if one will here indulge me here, briefly, with the notion of a pre-existent deity!  And this same maddening fate would devour us all individually, and collectively, if we ever should ever lose the vision and experience of hope.

A CAVEAT HERE ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FEAR AND ANXIETY— PERHAPS THE FEAR I’VE ADDRESSED ABOVE IS ON A DEEPER LEVEL ANXIETY.  IN FACT, THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPH FROM Samantha Harvey, in The Guardian a couple of days ago, MAKES ME FEEL THE NEED TO ADDRESS THE ISSUE OF “ANXIETY” RATHER THAN “FEAR.”  PERHAPS ANOTHER TIME!

The flight from Bristol airport passes over in a distant smear of sound. I switch on the light, get my laptop and Google I AM AWAKE. An article explains how fear and anxiety, often conflated, belong to different parts of the amygdala – fear arises in its central nucleus, which is responsible for sending messages to the body to prepare a short-term response – run, freeze, fight – whereas anxiety arises in the area responsible for emotions, a part which affects longer-term behavioural change. Fear is a response to a threat, anxiety a response to a perceived threat – the difference between preparing to escape a saber-toothed tiger that is here and now in front of you (because it’s always saber-toothed tigers in the examples) and preparing to escape the idea of a saber-toothed tiger in case one appears around the next bend. While fear will quickly resolve – you will run away, fight it or be eaten – anxiety has no such resolution. You will need to stand guard in case. Standing guard will make the perceived threat seem more real, which necessitates a more vigilant standing guard. Fear ends when the threat is gone, while anxiety, operating in a hall of mirrors, self-perpetuates.

 

(Link to Samantha Harvey Guardian article— https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/28/its-as-if-im-falling-from-a-50-storey-building-a-novelists-year-without-sleep

My Personal Struggle With the Ego

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I write about the ego a lot here and elsewhere.  Yes, I’m critical of its role in others but often admit it is very much a personal problem.  It always is if one is a human.  But only with the acquisition of the “ego integrity” I wrote about last time can one begin to recognize just how big a role it plays in his life.

When the ego is “hitting on all eight-cylinders” it is impenetrable.  I can remember pretty well in my youth when I was very insulated with a full panoply of the ego’s machinations, including hyper religiosity.  And religion is fertile ground for the ego as it offers a haven where one can be protected with the self-delusion that “the Spirit of God is leading me and therefore I see things correctly.  My judgment is sound.”  I well recall a moment when I was 18 years of age when this impenetrable religious veneer of mine was challenged in high school.  A girl I knew very well, and still know very well today, challenged the false piety I had just demonstrated in a school assembly.  I’ll never forget being taken aback, my “cage” rattled…but only briefly!  For the ego, when threatened is so adept at just sloughing off the criticism and retreating to the cacophony of internal reassurances, “No, this is not so.  This is a bit awkward, but just go away.  This is not so.”  And with that internal litany I resumed my performance art of a fundamentalist faith and fledgling ministry. But not for long!!!  In less than a year my tenuous, extremely impoverished identity would begin to submit to the “Divine threat” of Light and an adventure that continues now a half a century later.

My defensive retreat at age 18, essentially a “doubling down” inside an internal fortress is very human.  I continue this today, utilizing one of the many Divine adaptations available when the going gets too rough, relying on literature, music, philosophy, spiritual teachers, mantra’s and such.  Oh, I must not forget gardening, in season, and my marvelous canine son, Petey, two of the best “adaptations.” The God I believe in today gives us these adaptations, these “fig leaves” to cover up the existential nakedness when it becomes too much.

One source of my literary adaptations is the wisdom of poet T.S. Eliot who declared, “Human kind cannot bear very much reality.”  My country right now is getting an industrial-strength dose of “reality” that we’ve been avoiding, possibly since our beginning.  This reality is trying to tell us that something is amiss and now we must find the courage to let “reality” do its work, bringing to the table the harsh rebuke of Eliot, “Oh the shame of motives late revealed, and the awareness of things ill done and done to others harm which once we took for exercise of virtue”

Our Existential, Perspectival Imprisonment

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There was an interesting and very revealing exchange this morning between Joy Reid (MSNBS) and an internet respondent.  Reid described the Republicans as a, “Racial and religious cult of personality.”  The internet response from a woman who obviously was a Republican quipped, “Sounds like the far left who can’t look past their own racial and cultural identity.”  This woman brought to the table a key dimension in our nation’s present drama, noting how “racial and cultural identity” shape our view of the world.  BUT, what she probably does not realize is that the “bias” she sees with Joy Reid and Democrats also is very relevant to her and the Republican Party.

This matter of perspective I have summarized as, “What you see is what you are.”  It is impossible to not let our background and very immature, even infantile, desires influence how we see the world.  BUT, it is possible to recognize…and experience…this existential quandary and thereby find a moment of “self” awareness which can make room for others, for difference.  Philosopher Paul Ricoeur put it this way, “It is impossible to have a perspective on your perspective without somehow escaping it.”  The core issue here is of the heart, a willingness to recognize…and experience…that all of us trapped in, “the small bright circle of our consciousness beyond which lies the dark.”  This “darkness” is described by some as a “gap,” the sudden ability to see that beyond our narrow little view of the world there are others who have their “own narrow little” and it needs respect just as does ours.  On this subject, which I emphasize so often here and in my day-to-day life, I think that this perspectival trap that is endemic to being human is relevant to the famous teaching of Jesus—to find our life we have to give it up; or, as I like to paraphrase, “Get over yourself.”  We are taught in my culture to be intoxicated with our ideas, our “thinking,” and fail to ever learn that, “the finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.”  The word is not a “thing”,  but a mere pointer to the “Thing”, aka in philosophy known as, “the Thing in itself.  Refusing to acknowledge this existential dilemma makes one an ideologue.

This is a “spiritual” matter that I’m addressing, but words like “spiritual” are so tarnished by present-day life that often it means only some “mind” set we are comfortable with.  And in dressing it up with words like “god” or the “holy spirit” we fail to recognize we are often only referring to a mind set which has no reference to anything other than the aforementioned quote by Conrad Aiken, “the small bright circle of our consciousness.”  I I am finding that words like “spiritual” and other “god-talk” rhetoric are often missing the “personal” dimension.  Making these words, and the whole of any Holy Writ, has value when we allow it to sink into the secret crevices of our heart where, per Emily Dickinson, “the meanings are.”  In Christian tradition this is relevant to the Apostle Paul who described this emotional/intellectual/spiritual quest involves being open to the “Spirit of God” which is “quick and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.”  Here I will provide the whole of the above referenced Emily Dickinson 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 –

 

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.

 

Marilynne Robinson and the Importance of Need

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Marilynne Robinson’s novel, “Housekeeping” and the movie that resulted from it has really stuck with me.  Robinson has a deep spiritual dimension to her life and work because she knows a lot about spiritual depths.  One must in order to write like she does, and in order to gain the respect of someone like Barack Obama so that in his Presidency he flew to Des Moines, Iowa to interview her. That is right!  For him, to interview her!

One line from “Housekeeping” grabbed me when I read it 25 years ago, and even today tugs at my soul, “Need can blossom into all the compensations it requires.”  Need, or emptiness, is what makes us human and is what the Christian tradition has in mind with the doctrine of kenosis, the “self-emptying” of Jesus; this “self-emptying” means “to making nothing.”  It is the knowledge, and experiencing of our Absence, that represents a developing familiarity with the innermost regions of our soul.  Avoiding this neediness/emptiness is what our persona was designed to cover up until we could find the maturity to allow it to become porous a bit so that our innermost being could come to light.  Shakespeare put it like this, “Within be rich, without be fed no more.”

Our materialist, consumer culture offers us a steady array of “stuff” to invest in, to “feed upon,” and avoid this redemptive inner core.  And speaking from experience, religion can offer its own version of “stuff” when dogma and sterile ritual are relied on rather than doing the soul work which would allow this dogma and ritual to have a meaningful impact in one’s life.