Category Archives: human culture

Thomas Mann Poignantly Presents Shame in Old Testament Story

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

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

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

“Rage, Rage, Against That Good Night”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Embracing Ignorance Really Takes The Pressure Off!

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“Get in touch with your ignorance!”  That is the advice of Dave Gray in his book, “Liminal Thinking.”  I’ve been doing this for decades now and I’m discovering there is no end to it!  The more I can delve into this congenital “simple mindedness” the more I see how ephemeral my “wisdom” is and that actually…on the surface…it is just a bunch of words!  This is allowing me to find the value of these words, delving into them and exploring their depths as I revel in the field of meaning.

This “field of meaning” is simply the heart, that inexhaustible resource we are blessed with, where the Divine can be encountered.  In that interior world, that “Wholly Ground,” we learn to “pull on words” which is how one person described the making of poetry.  And as we “pull” on these words we find we are “pulling” on ourselves in a sense, our very identity is stretched taut as we do the bidding of T. S. Eliot and “wrestle with words and meaning.”  The discovery of this profound ignorance is the result.  Lest I mislead, by this “ignorance” I am still speaking of the Apostle Paul’s wisdom, “We see through a glass darkly.” ‘Tis such an humbling blow to the ego!

“Shuffling Off This Mortal Coil” of Certainty

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In my last blog, yes, my “panties were in a wad.”  They often are now as some three decades ago I stated heeding the advice of King Lear, “Blunt not the heart, enrage it.” When my fervor involves my religious past in fundamentalist Christianity, I am often given pause lest any unfortunate soul from those days of my life venture into this “dark and vicious place.” (Also, Shakespeare)

In that expression of religion, there is the tradition of “asking Jesus into my life” as a means of spiritual conversion.  To any of the aforementioned unfortunate souls who ventured there in the last blog…or even this one…I would like to reassure them that I have no doubt about their conversion experience, or “asking Jesus into my life.”  In that tradition, those words will suffice for a relationship with their Source and those words will suffice as much as any words, any ritual, or any tradition.  The mistake I made in my youth was a matter of identity; like any child, I had an ego and at that age an ego is a very fragile “thingy,” designed to cloak itself in illusions that will allow it, that is will allow itself,  to find a footing in this world. Later, with “a little bit of luck and a strong tail wind,” one can start saying to oneself, regarding his most cherished assumptions or certainties, “Hmm. Maybe there is another way of looking at that?” Or as Shakespeare put it, find the courage to “shuffle off this mortal coil” of unquestioned assumptions.

“To Gloat, Or Not To Gloat; That Is The Question.”

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In the glory days of my beloved Arkansas Razorback Basketball team in the early ’90’s, the rabid fans in the home crowd would break out into this little ditty when “we” had vanquished another foe–“Oh, its hard to be humble, when you perfect in every way” In a memorable moment, the Texas A & M coach Shelby Metcalf was so angry, he walked to center court after the gloating tune and ground his shoes into an image of the Razorback mascot on the floor as he looked up into the crowd defiantly That was delightful gloating and I will never forget it. And, yes, I have a gloating dimension with Joe Biden having been inaugurated and Trump and his insurrection having been thwarted…so far! But my gloater is modulated this time, even more than it was back in 1989 in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Gloating is a human impulse, and I’m not groveling in contrition for feeling this impulse, but it is immediately modulated with the realization that, “This is no time for gloating.” This is no time for the childish ego-delight of having vanquished a foe in an athletic competition; this is a moment about our country’s welfare and even that of the world.

My study of history is brought to the table with this moment, In 1899, in the Spanish-American War the U.S.S. Texas had just sunk the Spanish cruiser, Viscaya. When the victorious “Texas” was cruising past the burning and sinking ship, its crew was loudly cheering when its Captain, John Woodward “Jack” Phillip, chided them, “Don’t cheer boys. Those poor devils are dying.” Though it is human nature to gloat here, there are so many “poor devils” who are dying and I’m not even speaking of the Republican Party upper echelon but of the rioters who so foolishly stormed the Capitol on “01/06/21.” Many of them are sorely regretting having given into their childish, old-brain impulses, having been stirred up by a sociopath president. And even Qanon members are regretting their actions, one of them, the Buffalo-horned “shaman,” crying out, “We were duped by Trump.” Others have reported feeling foolish. Gloating is not in order and even blaming should not be first priority. This is a “mess” we have been in for more than four years and gloating and blaming is short-sighted. It is so very Trump. We have an historic challenge before us and maturity, grace, and prayer is called for. I’m trying to “whup up” those qualities inside myself.

Further on How Truth Can Hide in Language

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Yesterday, I blogged about Hibah Shabkhez and an essay of hers about how truth can be hidden in language. This duplicity occurs in the depths of the heart when language is employed, by necessity, to blog out primitive, old-brain terror One writer, Nikos Kazantsakis had this in mind when he quipped the language is “but 26 toys soldiers that guard us from the rim of the abyss.” But, as the Bible teaches us, when we are a child we must “speak as a child” but as an adult we must “put away childish things” and speak as an adult. We must speak the Truth which always means we must realize that we speak as, “we see through a glass darkly.”

Here is another poet, W. R. Rodgers, grasping this same truth in the World WarTwo era:

WORDS (an excerpt)

Once words were unthinking things, signaling

Artlessly the heart’s secret screech or roar,

Its foremost ardour or its farthest wish,

Its actual ache or naked rancour.

And once they were the gangways for anger,

Overriding the minds qualms and quagmires.

Wires that through weary miles of slow surmise

Carried the feverish message of fact

In their effortless core.  Once they were these,

But now they are the life-like skins and screens

Stretched skillfully on frames and formulae,

To terrify or tame, cynical shows

Meant only to deter or draw men on,

The tricks and tags of every demagogue,

Mere scarecrow proverbs, rhetorical decoys,

Face-savers, salves, facades, the shields and shells

Of shored decay behind which cave minds sleep

And sprawl like gangsters behind bodyguards.

Hibah Shabkhez, Poetry, and Truth

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A Pakistani woman, a poet, essayest, and native of Pashtun, Hibah Shabkez, responds quite frequently to my musings in this blog. And, I am so, so honored with these visits from this extraordinary young soul who is now studying in Paris. She is about a third of my age but blessed with a wisdom, including a keen grasp of language, that I’m only now beginning to tippy-toe into,  I’ve been exploring her work on the internet, and now own a book of her poetry, “Alack, The Ashen Waves of the Sea: Selected Poetry,” which is available at Amazon.com for a very reasonable price.  But I will share here the most stunning bit of wisdom that I’ve seen put into words in my decades of spelunking about in the metaphysics of language. 

In her brief essay from the on-line journal, “Nighting Gale and Sparrow,” Hibah puts into words a linguistic complexity which has burdened me for decades.  Of late, I’ve come to somewhat understand this complexity but, have never been able to put into words as eloquently as she has. She explains that language initially blinds us to the Truth even as it assures us, often, that we have it most assuredly. The threat of understanding this wisdom that she offers is something I could not have handled most of my life; but now, it is immensely freeing, reminding me that all of us are in the same existential dilemma; and it is this “dilemma” that unites us all…if we can humbly accept its “condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything.”  (T.S. Eliot)  It takes all the pressure off and gives new meaning to the old hymnological bromide, “Burdens are lifted at Calvary”; or to word it without the hint of religious savagery, “Chill out. Carry on.  All is well. We’re in this together.”

ScareZone by Hibah Shabkhez

When you touch the edge of something hot—a frying-pan, a clothes-iron—you gasp and flinch away, before the knowledge, before the shock and the hurt and the searing of flesh. Locked in the thumping of your heart then, there is the secret triumph of assault successfully withstood, the inexpressible comfort of knowing it could not and cannot hurt you because you did and can again make it stop. But the drenching heat of liquid cannot be flung off, only sponged and coaxed away from the skin. And so they say doodh ka jala, chhaachh bhi phook phook kar peeta hai. (Urdu translation, “Once bitten, twice shy.”) It doesn’t take all men, you see, it takes only one; and just so, it takes only one vile lie to break a language’s heart.

When first you write a lie, a real lie and not simply a truth incognito, whether it be falsehood or treacherous half-truth, language recoils from you in pain, vowing never to trust you with words again. But if you must go on writing lies, for money or grundy-respect, seize the language and let it feel the sting and the trickling fear of the skin parting company with the flesh, over and over and over again, as you hold it unscreaming under the current. You must let body and mind and heart and soul be quite maimed then, until there is no difference left for any of them between truth and lie, between the coldness of lassi (urdu–”buttermilk”) and the heat of milk-tides rising from the saucepan. Thereafter you may plunder with impunity all of language and force it to house your lies. And if you will never again find words to tell a truth in, it will not matter, for you will have no truths left to tell.

Seeing Through a Glass Darkly

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We “see through a glass darkly”.  That is the best we can ever do but we have a deep-seated and potentially evil dimension of our heart that wants to see with clarity and assuredness.  This is simply “being human” and to become the best human possible is to recognize this truth and humbly accept that it applies to “me” also.  Here I write from this position of great limitation and am always beset with self-doubt–”Is this necessary?” or “Why bother?” or “What’s the point?” or, “Ain’t you got something better to do?”  It would be much easier if I had simply guzzled that kool-aid of my youth and thus have the comfort of knowing….so to speak…”Thus saiith the Lord” in all my blathering.  I think this is called “existential insecurity” but if one actually “exists” here in this world, that is, actually “dwells” here as the finite creature that we are there must be some degree of insecurity. 

But thinking gets in the way of any such humility.  By virtue of this Divine gift we have been subjected to the temptation to take our cognitive apparatus and its product–thinking, too seriously.  We have then glommed onto a body of thought with which we are intoxicated to the point that we are incapable of any humility, believing in our belief rather than the Ground upon which we and within which we are rooted.  This takes faith and faith is risky, entailing much more than clinging to the product of that “cognitive apparatus.” The cognitive trap that I am addressing is a prison from which one can escape if he is willing to pay the price, and the price was summarized by T.S. Eliot as, “…a condition of simplicity, costing not less than everything.”  This price tag for myself has been the simple understanding and experience of recognizing this “trap,” a recognition which begins to loosen the bars of our imprisonment.

My country is currently demonstrating this entrapment with Trumpism.  Hordes of Republicans “believe in their belief” of Trump; the resulting  enthrallment by a cognitive apparatus gone awry cannot end without tragedy.

Distance, Metaphor, and Edgar Simmons

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Last evening I stepped out into the bitter cold to witness Saturn and Jupiter come close to each other as if they were going to lovingly embrace, if you can consider “embracing” while separated by millions of miles. I can use the word embracing as in “touching” here only with the realization that in reality I am viewing this moment in our cosmic history from a physical distance of millions of miles. Even those two planets, appearing to be in “conjunction” are separated by five plus million miles. It is our “perspective” that allows us to witness this incredible moment in our history, giving us the necessary separateness that allows us to bring delight, joy, wonder and appreciation to the table. Before our perspective took roots in our early childhood we did not have the “luxury” of distance as we were part and parcel of a “moment” that we were immersed in and not able to cognitively/spiritually understand it. At that moment there was no “object separateness”…. to employ a bit of clinical jargon. It is the Biblical “fall” that gave us this detachment without which there would be no human culture. Spiritual maturity can gradually come to us in our “four-score and ten” when we grasp the wisdom of this Great Round of which we are but a part, a visitation of “Grace.”

The abysmal distance left us with a hunger to “close it up,” to find the lost connection and return to the delightful “Garden of Eden.” We pine for the relief from the burden of life in which we are separate and distinct, where culture seduces us into believing its artifice can give us that “Grand Conjunction” where grace awaits us. Culture, certainly language, can guide us in that direction but only if we see…and feel…that words will never suffice; they are but “pointers” to the Ultimate. The Buddhists so profoundly teach us, “The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.”

Here I want to share another Edgar Simmons poem which beautifully and profoundly captures the experience of distance:

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 Story of My Life, Simply Told

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I am increasingly fascinated with the realization that I am just a blob of protoplasm, frantically scurrying about on this chunk of cosmic granite with a bunch of other blobs.  In some sense I am part of an ant hill, a simple ant drone going about my daily life thinking that I am separate and distinct from all the other ants, oblivious to the fact that I’m not in the least.  To use another metaphor I, too, am just a single letter in an alphabet…quite often upside down…gradually finding the humility to accept my meager status in this cosmic adventure.

I began this sojourn very simply, just a simple gleam in my daddy’s eye which shortly thereafter took root in my dear momma’s body and soul.  There the magic of life came into play, designing me to go far beyond the pulsating quiver of energy I might have been without this “grand design.”  Thanks to Her wisdom, I “chose” to unfold meaningfully, and contriving arms and legs, a head, a torso and…oh my Lord…genitalia! And, pretty close to an “essence” of this, I found myself with a tiny “will” that is today, nearly seven decades later, still whirly-gigging my way through something I eventually learned to call “life.” I just looked up the term “whirly-gig,” btw, and found the urban dictionary describing it as “an unspecified object that has some sort of rotational point.”  That’s me!!!

I wish I could have discovered this ignominy earlier in life, allowing me to just “whirly-gig” to my hearts to delight rather than being a slave to this “rotational point” that I was.  Hey, I might have occasionally just kicked my heels and screamed with delight, seeing this world as “puppies and flowers all over the place.”It is delightful to look around me this morning, watching the news, chatting with my wife and canine son, Petey and watching this bitter-cold New Mexican Saturday unfold under a marvelous sunny sky.  My wife and Petey too are but “blobs”; but then the whole world is composed of these pulsating sacks of energy, these “meat suits” that we usually take to be who we are.  Wouldn’t it be nice if humankind could find this humility and embrace the notion that we are all in this “thing” together and could get along if we wanted to?

AFTER THOUGHT—The alphabet point was an illusion to Kierkegaard who also felt he was an outside—“I feel like a letter turned upside down in an alphabet.”