Category Archives: language

“Prayer” by Louis Untermeyer

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Louis Untermeyer is an obscure poet who has etched himself in my heart, primarily due to the poem which I will attach, “Prayer.”  The poem itself reveals so much about the man and the inner torments which led him into the literary world.  But these “torments,” whatever they were, wreaked havoc often in his life.  He was married three or four times and one of his sons committed suicide at age 19.  Furthermore, he was a panelist on the popular TV show in 1950, “What’s My Line” but ruffled feathers so that he was forced out leading to a year-long depression and social isolation.  I think the description “irascible and cantankerous” would describe him. He knew the W. H. Auden wisdom, “We wage the war we are.”

Poetry arises from a tumult in the soul and without men and women who have had the courage to wrestle with this tumult humankind would be at a loss.  Poetry brings to the table depths of the heart that the simple prosaity of day-to-day life cannot offer.

Prayer
God, though this life is but a wraith,
Although we know not what we use,
Although we grope with little faith,
Give me the heart to fight – and lose.
Ever insurgent let me be,
Make me more daring than devout;
From sleek contentment keep me free,
And fill me with a buoyant doubt.
Open my eyes to vision girt
With beauty, and with with wonder lit –
But let me always see the dirt,
And all that spawn and die in it.
Open my ears to music; let
Me thrill with Spring’s first flutes and drums –
But never let me dare forget
The bitter ballads of the slums.
From compromise and things half-done,
Keep me, with stern and stubborn pride;
And when, at last, the fight is won,
God, keep me still unsatisfied.
– Louis Untermeyer

Meditation Reining In the Spinning of My”Monkey Mind”

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In 2011 I stumbled into a meditation class at an Episcopalian Church in Fayetteville, Arkansas in which Eastern and Christian meditation were equally emphasized.  The class was exploring a book by Richard Rohr, “The Naked Now,” a Franciscan priest in Albuquerque, New Mexico who was the founder and director of The Center For Action and Contemplation.  It was this class and luminaries such as Rohr, Thich Nat Hanh, Thomas Merton, et al who brought to my consciousness the relentless “spin” of my religious mind/heart.

That class taught me there was no “right” way to meditate.  I learned that meditation was about reining in the incessant chattering of the “monkey mind” and that any daunting of that relentless mantra of the egoic mind was the goal.  The basic instruction was, “When you find your mind, wandering away, merely bring it back to a mantra, a ‘sacred word,’ or even one’s breath.  The goal was merely “reining in” that mind, not doing anything “perfectly.”  One thing I quickly realized was just how much my spiritual life was about “getting it right,” aka “perfectly.”  I gradually became aware of the relentless unconscious mantra, an internal dialogue which had haunted my life, “Do it perfectly.” This venture into the discipline of meditation brought to my consciousness the tyranny of self-talk which was a piped-in “muzak” drone designed merely to fill the otherwise pregnant void of my life.

This experience was the advent of “the light of day” to my life, inviting me to “listen” better to what I was hearing “out there” but also to the incessant grind of unexamined internal dialogue.  “Ears to hear that were ‘hearing not’” were beginning to hear for the first time; eyes that had never seen before were beginning to see for the first time.  One could even say I was being “born again” in a very real sense though without the hysteria of the “born again” culture.  I want to share here a relevant observation from a noted teacher of meditation, Laurence Freeman, who is the founder of the World Community for Christian Meditation (WCCM):


To see reality as it is, or at least to free oneself progressively of its
filters, is a major act of faith. It expresses the trusting face of faith
because our attachment to the beliefs and rituals of our tradition can
become a false and falsifying security. And so, many deeply religious
people feel an aversion or antipathy to meditation because it seems to
(and indeed does) undermine the secure boundaries that protect our world
view and our sense of being superiorly different from others.

A way of faith, however, is not a dogged adherence to one point of view
and to the belief systems and ritual traditions that express it. That
would make it just ideology or sectarianism, not faith. Faith is a
transformational journey that demands that we move in, through and beyond
our frameworks of belief and external observances—not betraying or
rejecting them but not being entrapped by their forms of expression
either. St Paul spoke of the way of salvation as beginning and ending in
faith. Faith is thus an open-endedness, from the very beginning of the
human journey. There is, of course, value in a framework, a system and
tradition. [But] if we are stably centered in these, the process of change
unfolds and our perspective of truth is continuously enlarged.

NOTE:  Laurence Freeman, WCCM, and meditation culture are a gift to me as a result of blogging.  Freeman and many others I would never had heard of without having cyber “met” a woman from Toowoomba, Australia.  Thank you, Anne-Marie.

Brief Thought from this “Third Rock from the Sun”

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I write often about the infinite complexity of being human, dwelling on this “Third Rock from the Sun,” and witnessing and feeling the weight of fulfilling this Divinely-given task. Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, understands this better than I, and writes beautifully about it:

We become human in the act of finding a place to stand within the irreducibly difficult and mobile interweaving of diverse presentations of what is there for our minds, grasping that to know something in the world is not to arrive at a final structural scheme for it but to inhabit a process of discovery in which there is always more otherness to encounter, the otherness of new perspective and new requirements for “negotiation.” (from “The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language.)

Poetry Arises With a Stirring in the Heart

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The poet, to whose mighty heart
Heaven doth a quicker pulse impart,
Subdues that energy to scan
Not his own course, but that of man.
(Matthew Arnold)

Arnold knew that poets harnessed energy in a different way than most of us.  Being immersed in poetry myself, though not being a poet, I think I understand what he meant.  Human beings are in essence merely energy, “pulsating” energy, and most of us have the “pulsating” curtailed into structured behavior and thought…and even feeling.  But poets are different; you might even say they have a screw loose, or to borrow from Emily Dickinson, “a splinter in their brain.”  Thus, they have free-floating energy which, being gifted with the poetry muse, they can “subdue” and thus “scan, not his (“their) own course, or heart, “but that of man.”  (The quip about “loose screw” was not meant with any disrespect!!!)

Poetry, therefore, offers us a glimpse into the depths of the human heart.  To some it will fall on deaf ears and that is not to dismiss them in the least; their lot in life is different.  But it speaks to those of us who at least have an ear…and a heart…for its wisdom.  In the mid 1980’s a friend of mine gave me a copy of W. H. Auden’s “Collected Longer Poems” and I was stunned by Auden’s wisdom.  This was the first time poetry had penetrated the linear-thinking prison I had spent my first three and a half decades in.  That little paperback book only recently broke completely in half, down the spine, just where “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio” began; but I will never throw it away, even though I have a hard bound collection of his complete poetry.

Franz Kafka offered wisdom about the impact that good literature can have on a person, how it can act as a “pick axe” to the frozen sea within us just as Auden’s work did to me three decades ago:

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading 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 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 within us. That is my belief.”

Thoughts About a Chattering Monkey Mind

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In the following epigram, one of four epigrams under the title “Four Poems after Callimachus” by Stephanie Burtt, I discover the presence of a cautionary self-reflection with anyone who deigns to write…even in the humble milieu of the blogosphere.

(Epigrams, 60)

Lucky Orestes.
          If you know his story,
you probably think that saying so makes me a jerk.
Fair enough. But I’ve been losing my mind
in my own way this week: Orestes lost his,
but at least he didn’t insist
on asking his loyal companion to read and critique
his own book-length original fictional work.
That’s why he kept Pylades as his friend.
True friendship can exist.
          As for me,
I need to learn how not to speak,
when not to hit send.

I am “full of words”; yes, even too full of them, like Elihu in the book of Job who noted, “My belly is full of words, like a taut wineskin, about to burst.”  And that is ok; all of us have our “belly” full of something and I’m glad my stubborn willfulness is sublimated into verbiage as opposed to less benign “stuff”.  But I’m certainly learning how to “not hit send” more often and the same discretion is being exercised in my daily life.  It makes me remember a bromide from a pastor in my youth, three filters through which should pass anything we might say—-1) Is it true?; 2)Is it kind?; 3) Is it necessary?  Number three is really challenging, putting about anything we do or say into question.  I recall the tune from the ‘60’s, “Silence is Golden” by the Tremeloes.  My meditation experience of the past ten years gives rise to these thoughts about silence.  This practice continues to remind me of the chattering of the monkey mind and how that much of this chattering can take the form of “noble” thoughts.  It often is still “chattering.”  W. H. Auden noted, “We are afraid of pain, but more afraid of silence.”

Jorie Graham Offers an “Incarnated Word”

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Jorie Graham is one of my favorite contemporary poets.  In the following poem she exquisitely explores the vulnerability of human subjective experience, a dimension of experience which is often blocked in our Western world of compulsive linear thinking.  This vein of thinking, described by Carl Jung as “directed thinking” is intentional with the intention being to comply with the expectations of the external world into which we have been born.  Jorie writes from, and certainly lives from what Julia Kristeva describes as the “semiotic” dimension of human experience.  This is the realm that W. H. Auden described as “flesh and mind” having been “delivered from mistrust.”  I see this as an incarnated experience where one has found the power to speak freely from the heart with consideration for his/her context but not a slavish consideration.  This is when truth and wisdom are presented to our world.

Self-Portrait: May I Touch You

Jorie Graham

here. May I touch your
name. Your
capital. May I
touch outcome, kindness, slur down my caresses to
throat, eyes, end of the tunnel. Come out. Now your name is changed. How do I reach
right name, right bandage – the character that you will be for now
in the dark, where there is need – is there still need? – can you be for this short time
singular? You need to be singular. There you are changing again. These words are
furrows. Now they are
arrows. Don’t touch where it says no. It says no everywhere. Where is the spot where you
are faking it. That spot. So well. Can you tell. Doesn’t work for you. What works for you.
The rouge you have applied to see who you would be for a while. You
change your mind. You change the shade. You recognise yourself for a while
then it grows old. The pupae in the mud grow old. They’ve slicked it smooth as skin with
perfect perforations. All entrances and exits. The only way, right way, the pupae morph
to their winged
stage and grow. They exit not to return. Those who laid them do not return. They
change from
unborn to being here now, 67 degrees under the eaves as they come out. I watch. Nothing
can change out here in the given. It is given and it is received. If ants find the pupae
they eat the nest through. Sometimes they get to live their life. I know you need to be
a significant player in
the creation of
your veri-
similitude. Abide abide. Do you do nude. Can I touch your apparition, your attitude,
multitude, your eternally misunderstood solitude – do you do adulthood, husbandhood,
motherhood – listen: sap in the dogwood – not like blood, crude, flood, lassitude – I want you
to come unglued – clad in nothing but blood – in it – dripping wet – appearing always re-
reappearing,
of course wearing your camouflage – whatever you currently identify as – clad in your
surface your newest reason – may I touch it – your phantom your place-
holder, undelivered, always in the birth canal, undiscovered – your personal claim on
the future, residue of all the choices you’ve made thus far, also the purchases, invoices, in
voice where your change resides, in vice where it settles – skin – a win win – the management
wishes to express concern – can I touch there where you appear in the mirror – where you lay
your simulacra down – lave the mercurial glass – bypass being – hardly a pingwhere you
boomerang – here you are back outside – ghost money –
do you not want to feel
the fierce tenacity of
the only body you can sacrifice – the place where it is indeed your
fault – there in the fault – no heartsearching? Me with my hands on the looking glass
where your life for the taking has risen, where you can shatter into your million pieces –
all appareled refusal. What are you a sample of today –
what people.

Langston Hughes, “A Dream Deferred”

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Poetry is disruptive.  If it does not “disrupt” then it is not doing its job; non-disruptive poetry treads only in the shallow waters of the heart.  But here is a poem that is from the depths of the heart and dives directly into my heart.  It is very disruptive to me, “disruptive as hell” in a very real sense, for it shocks, threatens, and jars the myriad preconceptions in which I’ve spent my life.  And one who spends his “three-score and ten” trapped in his preconceptions is living in a hell of some sorts. Hughes, like all poets, knew about dreams and the temptation to stifle them.  Even more so, poets like Hughes who was a black man living in the 20th century, knew the oppressive system of racism stifling the dreams of black men and women in America.

HARLEM BY LANGSTON HUGHES

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Symbolic Communication and Susan K. Deri

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

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

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

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

THE MAGNETIC FIELD

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

I’m Getting a Reservation in Doggie Heaven!!!

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My beloved 11 year old daughter is now in doggie heaven, chasing butterflies, ground squirrels, rabbits and scratching furiously in the celestial dirt for “divine” insects.  She has found her brother and sister, also delightful dachshunds, and they are comparing notes with each other about the parental “mistakes” they were subjected to down here. In a text I just received, she told me that all of them completely forgive us and love us dearly.  She also told me she already put in my request with Dog that a place be reserved for me and their mother as “Doggie heaven” sounds like a better idea to both of us!  Lassie told her to tell us that She would “keep us in mind.”

I had a nice talk with this darling little girl this morning before we took her to the vet.  I told her how she had continued the lesson in loving in which her two predecessors had already done the “heavy lifting.”  For I had learned through them, and in my marriage to their mother, that love is not so much a thing that you “do” as it is something that you are “open to” and thus receive.  A 13th century Persian poet Rumi said it is what happens when you discard all the barriers you have constructed to keep it from happening.

With these three doggies working in consort with their mother for the past three decades I have learned that the heart offers evocative potential, an infinite source of riches which cannot be accessed without the ability to recognize the resistance that Rumi noted.  When the heart is open…Toni Morrison described it as “petal open”… it is full of “penetrable stuff” (Shakespeare) and a Divine work of art like a puppy, or a delicate tulip, or a beautiful sunset, or a lovely wife can “evoke” a Divinity that has always been there.  This experience is what the spiritual tradition of my background termed, “the Spirit of God”; and that notion is now profoundly meaningful to me.

There is an absence in my soul this afternoon.  This absence can be described as an “Absence” for it is during loss that we can feel a dimension of our heart that is closely akin to the Divine.  For this experience can bring to our awareness…on a deeply emotional and experiential level…the profound connection that we can have with the whole of this world if we find the courage to “lose our mind and come to our senses.” (Fritz Perls, saw “senses” as the “feeling” dimension of human experience.)

A Thoughtful Poem from Historian, William Irwin Thompson

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Am I more than I “know I am”? Historian, and former MIT professor, William Irwin Thompson thinks so and makes a powerful argument in his poem, “Four In the Morning.”  Thompson was just coming on the scene in history studies in the early 1980’s when I was doing graduate work in history at the University of Arkansas.  Thompson was an avant-garde historian, thinking out of the box and even “out side of the box that the box was in.”  The following poem demonstrates this “global” perspective on life, a view that could also be described as cosmic.

FOUR IN THE MORNING

The universe is crawling with unseen life:
angels and djinn and spiritual guides.
Like the excess in a stagnant pond,
this abscess of the Absolute
is obscenely corpulent
in every nook and cranny,
armpit and crotch
of the Great Mother
of dark energy and dark matter
we do not see anymore
than the germs in our guts see us,
because they are not germs
but neurons of a larger brain
in which an I is only an organ,
or rather an artificially imposed
membrane drawn arbitrarily
amid a mass of interactive
molecular gates with ions
coming and going as they please
without a thought of me.
Savages knew this once
and could feel it like an itch
beyond the reach of scratch.
Christian missionaries called it animism
and tried to beat it out of them,
bringing brassieres to contain breasts,
and bibles to contain minds,
but nights when I cannot sleep,
I wake at something the clock
marks as three or four,
with my mind teeming and itching
with alien cosmologies
of journeys through other galaxies
and I wake, knowing more than I am.

“Four in the Morning” comes from his blog, “Meta-psychosis” and appears to be a descent into a maelstrom which could be taken for lunacy, other than for his ability to wrap a perspective around disparate verbal imagery and tie it all together to make his point; what would otherwise be closely akin to psychotic word-salad is a thoughtful, poetic look at the intricate complexity of the beautiful world we live in.  Thompson’s study of history, and the liberal arts, and science, allowed him to present this beautiful poetic essay about the process of life itself in which our individual life is seen as but a component dimension of the pulsating energy field that is life itself.  He makes a persuasive argument that we are “more” than we think that we are, driven by something akin to what Shakespeare had in mind when he noted, “There is a divinity that doeth shape our ends, rough hew them how we may.”