Category Archives: human connection

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.

 

Belonging, Identity, and Toko-pa Turner

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I was a joiner in my youth and early adulthood. I was not a good one, able only to offer a half-hearted commitment to any opportunity I found to convince myself…and half-heartedly again, that I belonged, that I fit in.  This intense, and often desperate attempt never sufficed. I now realize that the more one must “try” to fit in the more likely it is that the efforts themselves will be off-putting to others.  If you feel that you do fit in, it is likely that you will do so, and that you will be so comfortable in this “chez nous” of yours that you will rarely, if ever, worry about “fitting in.”

But I’ve almost totally given up in this futile quest of fitting in and am finding peace as a result.  To borrow a term from Anna Burns’ Booker-Prize winning novel from last year, “The Milkman,” I am from beyond the pale and thus, in her terms, a “beyond the paler.”  And I’m happy that this full awareness did not dawn on me until the 7th decade of my life as now I have the maturity to not be intoxicated with the intrinsic alienation of this lot in life.  I know whole-heartedly and appreciatively that those “within the pale” are the backbone of this “reality” we live within.  Arrogance is a readily available to all of us, certainly those that lie beyond this pale and harbor some deep-seated wish that we didn’t.  Arrogance just belies a failure to appreciate that the only thing that any of us have, beyond or within the pale, is “being here.”; this is relevant to the imperative of Ram Dass decades ago, “Be here now.”  We are present in this mysterious maelstrom that we know as reality and it is important that we realize that this is true for all of us.  We have only “being here now” so briefly, and that is the commonality that we all share.  Regardless of how much we vehemently disagree or even loathe anyone in our life, they share with us this humble quality of being simply an entity that is nothing more than a “being” like the rest of us. It is in this simple, but Infinite Presence that we can find the unity which can point us in the direction of living together in harmony.  Here in this Sacred Space we stand naked together, unadorned by all of the pretenses, dogmas, adornments, accomplishments, and chicaneries that have given us the illusion of our separateness.

Here I share a quote from a writer I discovered last year, Toko-Pa Turner which sums up these thoughts so beautifully:

Our longing for community and purpose is so powerful that it can drive us to join groups, relationships, or systems of belief that, to our diminished or divided self, give the false impression of belonging. But places of false belonging grant us conditional membership, requiring us to cut parts of ourselves off in order to fit in. While false belonging can be useful and instructive for a time, the soul becomes restless when it reaches a glass ceiling, a restriction that prevents us from advancing. We may shrink back from this limitation for a time, but as we grow into our truth, the invisible boundary closes in on us and our devotion to the group mind weakens. Your rebellion is a sign of health. It is the way of nature to shatter and reconstitute. Anything or anyone who denies your impulse to grow must either be revolutionized or relinquished.
― Toko-pa Turner, Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home

Franz Kafka on the Power of Books

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“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”  Kafka knew that our internal life is always “frozen” to some degree, confined to structure and routine which allows us to live our lives in a structured and routine life.  But he knew that at some time in our life this “frozen sea” needs to be broken up and that literature, i.e. “books”, are one means by which this is accomplished.  But he also noted that the only books that could serve this purpose are those that, “wound or stab us” to “wake us up with a blow to the head.”

Routine and structure provide safety and no one can fault humankind for desiring safety.   Otto Brown noted, “Reality is a veil we spin to hide the void” but he also knew that this was a necessary “veil” which provides the safety necessary to go about day-to-day life and keep the wheels of our social organization spinning.  But Kafka’s concern, and the concern of other writers and artists, is that the need for safety can become so great that life itself is stifled and instead of an interior “flow” in our heart we have only a “frozen sea.”  W. H. Auden put it this way, “We have made for ourselves a life safer than we can bear.”

If the risk of life is not acknowledged…the fragility and vulnerability of being a mere “meat suit” in a relentlessly grinding cosmos will be avoided; but so will the experience of being alive. It is disconcerting for humankind to consider his vulnerability, to realize that he is this mere “sack of bones” on a speck of cosmic dust on a lonely planet.  It is this finitude that he seeks to hide with this specious “safety” that Kafka suggested books could “crack.”

This is a personal issue for me, thus a recurrent theme in my daily life and in this blog.  Literature has been the primary means whereby the “frozen sea” in my heart has been shattering for the past three decades since a good friend gave me a copy of Shakespeare’s Sonnets and introduced me to W. H. Auden and T.S. Eliot.  Good literature comes from the depths of the heart and speaks to the depths of the heart, described by the Psalmist as, “deep calls unto deep.”

Here is the Kafka quote in  full:

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief.

“Good” and “Bad” Shame

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Theodore Roethke with his poem, “Dolour” capture so poignantly the prison that shame can create for us.  He captures the daily grind of routine, devoid of spontaneity and spirit, which Emerson had reference to when he bemoaned that, “Most men live lives of quiet desperation.”  For desperation is what ensues in spiritual deprivation, which always leads to addictions such as drugs, alcohol, ideology, (including religious ideology), and consumerism:

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight,
All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,
Endless duplication of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces. 

Healthy shame is necessary as it can nudge us into the tribe we are born into, teaching us to “make nice” in the interest of group coherence.  We then respect rules of decorum, civility, respect for each other, and even agreed upon ruses that have an important function in making the tribe cohere.  But toxic shame often steps in and these necessary “rules” are forced upon children, sometimes with subtle and often not so subtle brutality so that the whole tribe is force-marched toward some unknown end, driven only by the force of habit etched deeply in the old brain.

Toxic shame breeds a tribe/nation of automatons who are readily manipulated by the power structure which controls the reins of the economy and government. And in the modern world, particularly in present day America, we find ourselves enthralled by a demagogue who in less than two weeks could further squash dissent and allow him to continue his assault on traditional American values, including those that we like to describe as “Judeo-Christian.”  People who are shamed into submission lack the capacity for critical thought; critical thinking would evoke in their heart the experience that Rick Perry suffered in 2011 during a debate, an excruciating spasm of self-awareness, when he realized he had made an ass of himself and had to utter the famous word, “Oops.”  It is very hard to admit “oops” when you are shame-bound as you just cannot admit having made a mistake.  (Now how Rick Perry did it, I don’t have an explanation.  But it did speak well of him!)  We make asses of ourselves, much more often than we are willing to admit, and when it happens it is redemptive if we can say…perhaps, merely…”oops.”  Oh, if Trump could just learn this simple word!

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/

 

“Making Nice,” Trump, and the Social Contract

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Donald J. Trump is a little boy who needs to be loved.  Never having learned the rudimentary dimensions of making himself loveable, he discovered that he had wealth and privilege to manipulate and intimidate people into a pseudo love.  One of the earliest lessons about love takes place when we enter school and find ourselves on the playground where negotiation with others involves a subtly that a child has often not had to deal with before.  The rules of “being liked” are not explicit but depend on an emotional maturity to pick up on the nuances of social life.  I like to think of it as learning to “make nice,” to not say or do the first thing that comes to your mind when you feel slighted.  It involves a tacit agreement to put up with another’s irksome attitudes and behaviors…to some degree…in return for the tacit response of others putting up with yours. This is the nuts-and-bolts of what we call the social contract.

If someone comes along to the playground who will not abide by the terms of this social contract, he will soon be known as a bully.  If you are “ugly and your mom dresses you funny” he is the one who will point it out while others will not say a thing, unconsciously knowing that you will not point out their own flaws and short comings. This reminds me of Trump on the “playground” of the debate stage in 2016 when he was rude and obnoxious, breaking all rules of civility and decorum.  On any debate stage, the candidates usually have a great dislike of others on the stage but there is an unwritten rule to not attack each other personally. Trump stomped all over that rule and as Senator Lindsey Graham put it, “The rest of ran and hid in the corner.”  When faced with a bully, one has a natural response to try to escape.

There is a certain insincerity to, “making nice.”  It is not, “telling it like it is” which Trump avowed and which many of his supporters cited as a reason they liked him.  “He’ll tell the truth, unlike those lying, hypocritical politicians we are used to,” they said.  Yes, but Trump’s “truth telling” is closely akin to that of someone with Tourette’s Syndrome who, severely lacking impulse control, will “tell it like it is,” and announce to a woman he has just met, “My you have a nice set of tits.”  This Tourette’s Syndrome man is certainly saying what nearly all other men are thinking but most of us have a social filter and would not say something like that.  (And I apologize for the “locker-room talk.”  Seriously.)

“Be Best,” Don’t Bully!”

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In clinical practice, I often had to deal with bullying, though mainly the more “mature” variety as seen with teen-agers.  Younger children, however, would occasionally present to a counselor in her office, plaintively asking, “Why don’t they like me?”  The counselor would first offer some reassurance and then begin to offer coaching on basic social deportment, how to behave in a less obnoxious manner, not rudely and intrusively.  The young bully who actually sought help of this sort, who could ask the question, “Why don’t they like me?” was demonstrating that he had the maturity to be aware of the problem and therefore was probably amenable to being helped.  The real problem lay with those children who could not imagine the possibility that there was anything wrong with their behavior and then lash out at those who appeared to not like him.

Self-awareness is an essential dimension to the bullying issue.  Most children who get to the playground age in public schools already have social antennae so that they are amenable to feedback from the social context in which they find themselves.  They even will feel a sense of shame if they breach the unwritten rules of the social contract and then amend their ways in an effort to fit in.  Some, however, will not have internalized a sense of healthy shame and will brazenly stomp on social convention and find themselves frequently in trouble with the principal and eventually in a residential treatment facility.  Some will not be amenable to the rules even then and will grow into adulthood and begin to “rock n roll” with their anti-social attitude and behavior until they find some conflict-habituated place in the social structure.  Some, perhaps, will even become successful businessmen and/or politicians and maybe even find themselves as the leader of their country.

This “self-awareness” is the gift of the neuro-cortex which gives us the Shakespearean, “pauser reason,” a filter with which we check our impulses.  For example, if one encounters a belligerent bully as an adult he will usually know that he cannot respond with bullying behavior without risking severe conflict.  This makes me think of an old Jim Croce tune from the 1970’s, “You don’t tug on superman’s cape/ You don’t spit into the wind/You don’t pull the mask of the old lone ranger,/And you don’t mess around with Jim.”  If you remember the famous tune, you recall that a man wandered into town who did not regard the admonishment, “You don’t mess around with Jim.”

Yes, I’m curious what is gonna happen this Tuesday in Singapore.

Where There is No Vision, the People Perish.

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“Where there is no vision, the people perish.”  Heard this often in my youth and realize now that referred to those who don’t see and understand the world as I did at that time.  There is vision and then there is “vision” and learning this lesson requires as step one, realizing that at very best we “see” through a glass darkly.  To put that in more human terms, we “see” only in accordance to a deep-seated need to “see” the world that we are accustomed to.  For example, in my youth in the state of Arkansas, I clearly saw that “Negroes” were not as intelligent and virtuous as were white people.  “It is obvious,” I’m sure I told myself.  What I failed to understand then is the dictate from my culture which mandated that I saw “Negroes” in this way and that seeing them in such a manner fulfilled my personal and tribal need to have someone that was beneath me on the social ladder; they were “the other” in my early life.  The irony of that was that my family was close to the bottom of the ladder itself the first decade or so of my life when those values were being imprinted.

Obtaining vision requires a capacity for paradox, realizing that we see only when we realize that we don’t see, that we see “only through a glass darkly.”  This paradoxical capacity introduces us to the experience of “the other” and awareness of our existential loneliness.  We are all very much alone in this world and it is only through the illusions of cultural contrivance, the object world, that we can superficially connect with others and pretend that we have connection.  And this “pretense” serves a very useful function in this very necessary world of appearance; but it is only when we venture beneath the surface, beyond the pretenses of our persona, and flirt with what W. H. Auden described as the, “unabiding void,” that we can enter the meaningful realm of spirit in which a more genuine connection is possible.  You might even say that our tippy-toeing near or into the void, “scares the hell of us”….or it least it can…as hell is living one’s whole life on the surface, failing to answer the famous question of Jesus, “What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul; or, what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?”

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AN AFTERTHOUGHT — What prompted this post is a story in The Economist about the state of Oklahoma and its egregious lack of vision.  Their “lack of vision” so closely parallels the obscurantism of the Republican Party in my country. Here is a link to that story:

https://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21736102-low-teacher-pay-and-severe-budget-cuts-are-driving-schools-brink-whats-matter

Paean to Mothers and Home

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Home is increasingly important to me.  I like to go places, I’m not to the point of isolation, but I always like to get home.  If I travel, the further I go the more disconcerting and troubling I find it.  I immediately want to get back to the safe and warm confines of my simple little home with my wife, lovely dachshund Elsa, my garden, the birds, and my dear friends who live in the town.  I know this is from my childhood when the home that my mother created was the safe respite from the scary world “out there” that the first grade told me I had to learn to adjust do.  And I did learn to adjust to it but I’m now realizing, as I round third base in my life and head for “home” plate, that certainly “home is where the heart is.”

I stumbled across a notion about the importance of “home” in Greek mythology and was reminded of the emphasis of returning home in their stories, especially the story of Odysseus who was always focused on returning to the comforts of heart and home.  Furthermore, I learned that he actually tried to fake illness to avoid going on the long voyage that would lead to a long war and keep him subjected to great dangers for many years.  And, when he finally was able to head home, many were the obstacles that the fates placed in his way.

Recently I was reminded of an old hymn from my youth about the safety and security of the heavenly home which was promised as the reward for our earthly sojourn:  This world is not my home, I’m just a passing through.  If heaven’s not my home, O Lord what will I do?  I think this old hymn, and the Greek myths do convey to us the unconscious duress that human experience puts on our soul and the comfort we find in “home.”  And though fathers are an essential part of making a home, an emotional dwelling place for the children, it is usually the mother who carries the brunt of this deeply important emotional/spiritual burden.  And on this Mother’s Day, I’m grateful for my dear mother, Dorothy Lucille Stough Chamness Smith who did such a fine job for which she is often rewarded by reading “Literarylew” from heaven!!!  And, if she does, I hope she doesn’t yawn and roll her eyes very often!!!

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Two other blogs of mine are listed here which I invited you to check out:

https://anerrantbaptistpreacher.wordpress.com/

https://literarylew.wordpress.com/

https://theonlytruthinpolitics.wordpress.com/

We’re Just a Bunch of Drunken Cells!!!

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A Drunkard – by Ko Un”

I’ve never been an individual entity.
Sixty trillion cells!
I’m a living collectivity.
I’m staggering zigzag along,
sixty trillion cells, all drunk.

This simple little poem so beautifully illustrates the principle of coherence that permeates life and might even be described as life itself.  Disparate phenomena somehow miraculously “cohere” and an identity is formed, or born.  Without taking pause and contemplating we will spend our lives thinking we are an “individual entity” when actually we are a small part of a broad fabric, so “broad” that actually it is infinite.  At this very moment you are witnessing the result of the drunken “sixty trillion cells” that I call myself, an entity or identity whose “drunkenness” is somehow contained enough that I am writing coherently.  I hope!!!!  Grasping and understanding the wisdom offered in this poem makes us aware of our profound finitude which is given meaning only when we contemplate that we are part of a larger whole.  But the ego does not want us to understand this, demanding that we remain submitted to its tyranny and bask in the comfort of assuming and therefore thinking that “my view of the world is the only valid one.” W. H. Auden captured this wisdom in his poem, “In Sickness and in Health,” an excerpt of which I offer here:

Rejoice. What talent for the makeshift thought
A living corpus out of odds and ends?
What pedagogic patience taught
Preoccupied and savage elements
To dance into a segregated charm?
Who showed the whirlwind how to be an arm,
And gardened from the wilderness of space
The sensual properties of one dear face? 

Rejoice, dear love, in Love's peremptory word;
All chance, all love, all logic, you and I,
Exist by grace of the Absurd,
And without conscious artifice we die:
O, lest we manufacture in our flesh
The lie of our divinity afresh,
Describe round our chaotic malice now,
The arbitrary circle of a vow.  

That reason may not force us to commit
That sin of the high-minded, sublimation,
Which damns the soul by praising it,
Force our desire, O Essence of creation,
To seek Thee always in Thy substances,
Till the performance of those offices
Our bodies, Thine opaque enigmas, do,
Configure Thy transparent justice too.

 

For complete poem, see this link:  https://thepoetrycollection.wordpress.com/w-h-auden-1907-1973-in-sickness-and-in-health/

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I have two other blogs.  Hope you check ’em out sometime!

https://anerrantbaptistpreacher.wordpress.com/

https://literarylew.wordpress.com/

https://theonlytruthinpolitics.wordpress.com/

Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche and the Trans-gender Issue

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, the Nigerian born novelist and feminist, has created a stir with her views on the trans-gender issue that is so much in discussion currently. (See link to The Guardian article at bottom.) The problem occurred when she noted that a trans woman who had been raised a male certainly was not uninfluenced by the power that accompanies “male-ness” even if “he” has become a “she.”  Adiche was roundly criticized by feminists and the Left but refused to apologize, merely noting that her critics had not listened carefully.  She furthermore chided them for clinging to “language orthodoxy” without employing a discriminating ear, i.e. “critical thinking.”  Adiche declared, “…I don’t think it’s helpful to insist that unless you want to use the exact language I want you to use, I will not listen to what you’re saying.”  She pointed out that critical approach to speech and language is necessary and just because something we hear or read does not fit into our “orthodox” view of the world does not mean that it should be immediately dismissed.  This point is often made of the Left about conservatives but Adiche called attention to its presence in liberal thought.  For, this “uncritical ear” is a temptation to any vein of thinking.

Adiche, being a talented writer, understands the nuances of language and the whole of culture as she demonstrated in her excellent novel, “Americanah.”  In this current controversy, Adiche is reflecting the belief in the bumper sticker, “Don’t believe everything you think.”  She encourages us to listen better, open our hearts more than is our first nature, realizing that as we do so we might find something being said has more value than we first thought.

She declared, “If we can’t have conversations, we can’t have progress.”  She understands that a closed mind, one religiously devoted to “orthodoxy,” is a conversation stopper or, better stated, a dialogue stopper.  Conversation in the sense of mindless palaver…chatter…can go on endlessly without accomplishing anything.  But the dialogue that Adiche has in mind is meaningful exchange of ideas the effect of which will lead to an opportunity to broaden one’s world view, or mind-set.  Orthodoxy always brings dialogue to a screeching halt, best illustrated by the congressional impasse of my country.

Here are a couple of paragraphs from the newspaper article:

She suggested in an interview last week that the experiences of transgender women, who she said are born with the privileges the world accords to men, are distinct from those of women born female. She was criticized for implying that trans women are not “real women”.

“I didn’t apologize because I don’t think I have anything to apologize for,” she said on Monday. “What’s interesting to me is this is in many ways about language and I think it also illustrates the less pleasant aspects of the American left, that there sometimes is a kind of language orthodoxy that you’re supposed to participate in, and when you don’t there’s a kind of backlash that gets very personal and very hostile and very closed to debate.

“Had I said, ‘a cis woman is a cis woman, and a trans woman is a trans woman’, I don’t think I would get all the crap that I’m getting, but that’s actually really what I was saying.

(https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/21/chimaman da-ngozi-adichie-nothing-to-apologise-for-transgender-women)