Category Archives: language

To “Be” or “Not to Be”

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This observation by Hamlet is one of Shakespeare’s most famous lines and the subject of being vs non-being was a recurrent theme of the Bard. On one level the issue in this famous soliloquy was merely that of physical existence, The morose young oedipally-conflicted neurotic was serotonin-depleted and questioned that it was worth it to toil on against those “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to” rather than opt for the “bare bodkin” (knife)

But a more substantive issue for Shakespeare than physical life or death was “being” itself—-“what does it mean to ‘be’ as opposed to ‘not be.’ This is best illustrated in Sonnet 146 when he lamented a “poor soul…pining within…painting thy outward wall so costly gay” while disregarding that inward estate which he saw as the real, concluding that we should instead “within be fed, without be rich no more.” (See http://www.artofeurope.com/shakespeare/sha6.htm)

Shakespeare saw that humanity had lost his way and was immersed in the ephemeral, making the mistake that John Masefield described as “like a lame donkey lured by moving hay, chasing the shade and letting the real be,” the state of affairs which C. S. Lewis later described as sin, “misplaced concreteness”. (For Masefield sonnets, see http://www.sonnets.org/masefield.htm)

The issue is an “external” reference point which…and here things get complicated…is not really “external” but “spiritual.” But to delve into the “spiritual” we must first use language…most of us anyway…and so we must use words like “external” to evoke images. Shakespeare was merely saying, “Hey, there is more to life than meets the eye!” and that is a message that humankind has always been averse to as it takes him out of the comfortable little orbit of his ego-bound day-to-day life. But, in spite of this aversion, there is still “more” out there and we ignore it at our own peril.

 

The “Monkey Mind” and Insomnia

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My “monkey mind” is harassing me again so that I cannot sleep. I am so full of chatter.  And I do like my “chatter” but to have any meaning it has to find the primordial silence that is its Source. And I sure appear to be fearful of this Source even though I so often affirm my faith and confidence in it/Him/Her.

I recently read Jiddu Krishnamurti for the first time, a blog-o-sphere friend having recommended Freedom from the Known to me. This book so eloquently presents what I would call a Presence as encompassing the whole of life. As I read this incredibly insightful and powerful book, I am amazed at how it resonates with me on some level and I even suspect that I have some unconscious memory of having known this Presence in my early childhood and yearn to go back there. I think that probably I did know that Presence but discovered that I lived in a world where “chatter” predominated and opted for the validation that it offered.

Here are a couple of paragraphs from Krishnamurti that really grabbed me:

You are never alone because you are full of all the memories, all the conditioning, all the mutterings of yesterday; your mind is never clear of all the rubbish it has accumulated. To be alone you must die to the past. When you are alone, totally alone, not belonging to any family, any nation, any culture, any particular continent, there is that sense of being an outsider. The man who is completely alone in this way is innocent and it is this innocency that frees the mind from sorrow.

We carry about with us the burden of what thousands of people have said and the memories of all our misfortunes. To abandon all that totally is to be alone, and the mind that is alone is not only innocent but young – not in time or age, but young, innocent, alive at whatever age – and only such a mind can see that which is truth and that which is not measurable by words.

I do not think that Krishnamurti felt that we could or should purge our minds of accumulated memories. His concern was the attachment to these memories, this “accumulated rubbish,” an attachment which keeps us from being able to “be alone” in the sense of being autonomous.

But note what T. S. Eliot said in The Four Quartets on the issue of attachment and detachment and the oblique relevance of death to the issue:

There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference
Which resembles the others as death resembles life,

 

“Herding Cats” in the First Grade!

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In recent weeks I have made several references to my work as a substitute teacher with early elementary children. I deem this the most important work I have ever done in my life as it is helping shape young children in their early formative years when they are only beginning to make “sense” out of life. Several days ago I referred to “neurological plasticity” which describes their vulnerability in neuro-physiological terms, referring to the fact that what they are learning is very malleable at this point in their life though parts of it will soon be “set in stone. One specific part that will be “set in stone” is their basic self-percept, their basic approach to the world, the basic notion of their standing in the world and their sense of efficacy. This is the reason that early childhood education is so important and why good parenting is essential. Two verses from the Old Testament had this in mind, Psalms 127 telling us, “….”As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth,” and Proverbs 22 noting, “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” (Unfortunately, I fear these two verses are often used to justify some training that could only be described as abusive!)

By the time these children get into school, the subjective cauldron that is their identity has been largely stabilized so that they can “learn from experience” and can function, more or less, in a structured environment. Now this “cauldron” is still bubbling and one of the basic tasks of education at this level, as well as introducing the building blocks of a formal education, is teaching them to live in accordance with a social structure. And, it is fascinating to watch these lovely children as they seek to win affirmation by curtailing those teeming impulses though so often failing to do so and facing a firm but kindly “re-direction” by a teacher…or even substitute teacher. Some of them are still so “teeming” with emotion that the “re-direction” is very painful and they are sometimes crushed.

I often describe my work in the classroom as “herding cats.” These dear little children are just so full of intense emotion, desperate needs, insecurities, emotional hunger, and impulses that it is often almost impossible for them to remember the rules of the classroom. I so remember being part of a classroom like that in my youth and so often the “re-direction” was harsh and punitive, sometimes overtly shaming. I’m pleased now to work with teachers who are much more respective of the fragile world of their charges and will often merely present the miscreant with, “Johnny (or Susie), you are not making a good choice now.” And that intervention is very effective as the child wants to merit the description “good.”

Now let me get “anthropological on your ass.” Children coming into school are raw product who are beginning the process of being “milled” into a finished product who can take their place in the social body in a couple of decades. One could call it “brain washing” but that is not as bad as it sounds. The “brain washing” I observe now is merely the presenting of values and ideas of our culture and they are not presented in a manipulative or tyrannical manner. Education always involves “brain-washing” in some sense but in the modern schools in which I now work, even in conservative Arkansas, emphasizes critical thinking which will allow these children to make mature choices in their future about what values they wish to subscribe to. Some parents opt to avoid the “brain washing” of public schools and home-school their children, failing to realize that “brain washing” will take place nevertheless but the “brain” that will be doing the washing will be very narrow and often “private.” Though some parents who home-school do a very effective job, including addressing social needs, I fear many do not and their precious children are “brain-washed” into a very narrow, maladaptive worldview.

I’d like to close with a poem by Theodore Roethke which reminds me of a more conservative approach to education which prevailed during my youth, when regimentation of the “raw product” was more the goal of the educational system.

DOLOR
I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight,
All the misery of manila 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 duplicaton 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.

 

Multi-lingualism Shaping Worldview

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Time magazine recently had an article by Jeffrey Kluger which explained why bi-lingualism has a profound impact on the development of the brain. (See http://healthland.time.com/2013/04/23/bilingualism/) Kluger noted that the child is a “crude linguist from the moment of birth—and perhaps even in the womb—as he/she can begin to recognize sound patterns and to make sense out of them producing what we first hear as ‘babble.’” This “babble” is gradually refined into a language depending on what parts of the “babble” are reinforced by the parents and others in his social world. Kluger used the example of “dog-chien” for children born into one bi-lingual family, as a child in that family will discover that two different terms from what will come to be learned as two different languages are available to refer to the same object. The child can learn to “toggle” between the two different words to describe the same object and in so doing learn nimbleness in reference to language. And this “nimbleness” will be learned at a time when “neurological plasticity” is present, meaning that it is a skill that can be learned and can stay with the child for his/her lifetime. This is significant because the child can learn to apply this “nimbleness” to the whole of his/her world and see things in less rigid ways.

Kluger also cites research by Sean Lynch that multilingual kids may exhibit social empathy sooner than children who have been exposed to only one language. Lynch noted, “The theory of mind—understanding that what’s in your head is not the same as what’s in other people’s heads–does not emerge in children until they are about three years old. Prior to that, they assume that if, say, they know a secret you probably do too. There is a kind of primal narcissism in this—a belief that their worldview is the universal one.” Lynch argues that being exposed to more than one language is very helpful in facilitating a child’s ability to forego that initial self-centeredness and learn that there are other ways of looking at the world.

I found his observation about “primal narcissism” describing the belief that your world view is the universal world view very interesting in light of our own culture. For example, even the stalemate between liberals and conservatives reflects this “primal narcissism” when elements of both belief-systems fail to understand that the other side can have a viewpoint which is worthy of respect.

I’d like to conclude with my own story of discovering a second language and how novel the experience was. When I was only six or seven years of age “French” came to the public schools in “Smallville”, Arkansas in the early ‘60’s. I found it so interesting to learn that somewhere else in the world a dog was called a “chien” or a boy a “garcon” that a father was “pere” or that an apple was a “pom.” This created in my heart even then a rudimentary notion of “difference” which continues to be a compelling interest of mine five decades later. And then one day I learned a particular expression which really nailed the phenomena down for me when I learned that when the French refer to having “goose-bumps”, they say, “I have the skin of a chicken. (avoir la chaire de poule) My little mind was at first puzzled, asking, “Well, why don’t they just use the term “goose-bumps”? “Difference” then sunk in on in some rudimentary fashion, though it would be decades before the true significance of “difference” overcome the rigid conservatism of my upbringing.

In my present employment as an occasional substitute teacher with younger elementary children, I am pleased to note that even in the conservative region of Northwest Arkansas the schools give daily attention to the prevalence of Hispanic and Marshallese children, frequently using terms and even little ditties from each of these languages. This must have a positive impact on the development of these little minds. One caveat should be noted, however. This multi-lingualism helps but it alone will not overcome other pressures in local culture, or in any culture, to maintain that “primal narcissism”.

 

“Mind Your Words”

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Freedom from the past, or anything else for that matter always comes in the very instant you stop thinking about it. (Mike Dooley)

That notion will give you pause. It does me. This is basic, garden-variety Norman Vincent Peale who I used to disparage so readily. But, I now see so clearly how the trajectory of my life has been guided by self-talk, that subtle pattern of speech that we don’t really pay much attention to and do not think as being important. But it is. I think it was Jesus who said, “As a man thinketh, so is he.” Another thoughtful person whose name escapes me said, “Our thoughts become us.”

Technically, this means that if I wake up in the morning and think like Donald Trump, I will become a very wealthy man. Well, I don’t take it that literally but I do believe that if I suddenly had the focus that he does on the financial world, and had his keen insight into its machinations, my financial circumstances would probably improve. But, “Oh me of little faith.” I think it is a little late for that kind of transformation and that is not really where my values lie. But, I do think it is important to pay attention to the thought patterns that we allow to predominate and work on changing those that might be counter-productive.

Two other thoughts on the power of words merit attention. Shakespeare noted, “Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so” and Henry Ford, of all people, said, “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, either way you are right.”

 

That Elusive Quest for Objectivity

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Marilynne Robinson is the author of Housekeeping, one of my favorite novels  which was also made into a wonderful movie with the same title. In a recent interview with the New York Times she revealed the same elusive quest for “objectivity” that has always eluded me and will always do so:

Every period is trapped in its own assumptions, ours, too, so I am always trying, without much optimism, to put together a sort of composite of the record we have made that gives a larger sense of the constant at work in it all, that is, ourselves. The project is doomed from the outset, I know. Still.

Just as has been the case with myself, she has never allowed this quest to be debilitating. She learned as I have that we can never be “objective” but we can realize…and feel…that this objectivity eludes us and always will. And we can surrender to and be humbled by the awareness. Adrienne Rich once said, “We can never know ourselves until we are aware of the assumptions that tyrannize us.”  When we gain awareness of one set of “basic assumptions” that tyrannize us, we will discover another!  But that is merely the human predicament and if we realize it we can be more tolerant of others who are subject to a similar tyranny.

 

“Come Out Ye From Among Them and Be Ye Separate”

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The biblical admonishment to “Come out from among them and be ye separate” and to be a “peculiar people” received strong emphasis in the church of my upbringing. And, looking back, God must have been proud of us for we certainly accomplished this, though with great (unconscious)  irony. We just had no idea how different we appeared, how “peculiar” we were! And, well….now, with hang-dog face and shamed faced…I have to admit, “Yep, I probably accomplished that more than the rest!”

There are so many anecdotes I could share to illustrate things we did to do maintain the illusion of this separateness. A common bromide was to never, “drink, smoke, chew, or go with the girls that do.” On the drinking part of that bromide, the onset of canned soft drinks in the ‘Sixties posed a problem as if we drank a soft drink in a can, it might appear to others that we were drinking a beer! One young adult I knew pointed out with pride that at office parties, he would drink a coke…from a bottle and with a straw…to make it clear to all parties that he was not imbibing.

This obsessive need to be the “peculiar people” of the Old Testament reflected a core identity problem . For, people who have a secure identity do not have to make a show of who they are in any respect to any dimension of life, certainly faith. They can merely “be” and have confidence that their “be-ing” in the world will suffice. These people of faith who are secure in their identity do not have to be ostentatious with their faith as it will not be a suit of clothes they wear, but merely be part and parcel of their life, a completely natural part of that life. They do not have to announce with word or deed, “Hey, world! I am a Christian, or Buddhist, or Hindu, or whatever!” Their faith is very personal and is not for the purpose of show.

Now a person of faith will certainly stand out in an important sense as their life will reflect values different than most people have. Their focus will not be on the ephemeral, but on Value itself. In our culture, they will not be so obsessed with “stuff” though they well might have plenty of “stuff.” The roots of their heart and soul will not be in mass culture. they will not subscribe to the adage, “He who has the most stuff at the end of the game wins.”

Shakespeare described this ostentatious faith as that of “hollow men” who have to “show their mettle…like horses hot at hand.” When I watch a televangelist or some smug, oily Christian who is “strutting his ‘Christian’ stuff”, I often pictures a team of wild horses pawing the air, shrieking to anyone interested in looking on, “Hey, lookee here! Lookee here! See me! A’int I pious?”

And T. S. Eliot wrote a powerful poem entitled, “Hollow Men.” Speaking of mankind as a whole, not just with respect to spirituality, he described shallow, empty, “hollow men…stuffed men leaning together, headpiece filled with straw.” His poem beautifully captures the futile emptiness of alienated lives bereft of any spiritual connection to self, others, the world, or God.

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

“The Giant Sucking Sound” of Words

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You ever lost a job? You ever been “let go”, or “not needed any longer” or “fired” or “down-sized.” It is not fun. I’d like to recommend you read a blog from (http://architectofthejungle.wordpress.com/) which describes the writer’s emotional turmoil to her husband having been “down-sized.” And in her description, she demonstrates her skillful artistry with words which is my real focus here. She uses imagery that evokes experience. Words can readily “denote” in which they merely convey information but only in a prosaic fashion. And prose certainly has its place in language. But when you run across someone who can write with artistry, he/she plies wizardry and can evoke from the depths of your heart an experience which is an essential part of words being, “fitly spoken.”

When she heard the words “down-sized” fall from her husband’s lips, she reported she felt, “as if I’ve been plunged into a dream state, sucked in through the lips of a horrible word. I’ve never thought of words as capable of gobbling me up, but some of them are just that gruesome, just that hungry.” She then writes of the fear of disappearing, “entirely into the belly of this most hideous modern verb.” And she describes how this emotional experience resonated with the whole of her life and she realized that in some fashion she had been living only on the periphery of life, noting “to this day, I hadn’t known (a truth) that only lived in my head. How could I have known it (this truth) yet to make its (truth’s) heroic descent into the whole me? I couldn’t have known….I feel the truth had entered an undiscovered region.” (Note: I have deliberately edited selectively here to make my point about words and truth. Please read her blog to get the context.)

Now part of me wanted to ask, “Now how in the hell can a mere world like ‘down-size” create such a tumult in someone’s heart?” Sure, it is a scary notion as no one likes losing his/her job or having one’s spouse suffer the misfortune. But, to be “sucked in through the lips of the word “down-size”???? And, how in the hell could you even come up with the notion of disappearing “into the belly” of any damn word???? And, how could this anguish lead to a descent into “the whole of me” and “what in the hell is ‘the whole of me’”? The “whole of me” why, shit, I am just me, there is no “whole of me” other than just me. Why not just say, “This really rattled my cage!” Or, “Gosh, this upset me.”

But, she was being a gifted writer and she used words and images which conveyed nuances which just grabbed me, much like she had been grabbed by her husband’s experience. Her words “evoked” an experience with me which is what good writing will do. A simple narrative merely narrates and gives report but a “word fitly spoken,” a dynamic, vital, breathing word will always evoke and penetrate the heart. (I heard someone quote Kafka last night in a movie, “Literature is the axe that cracks the frozen sea inside.)
And we all need to be “sucked through the lips” of a word or words every now and then. If we listen, and if we read and read carefully, we will learn things which that “giant sucking sound” has to offer.
Let me share a little bit about T. S. Eliot and his awareness of this compelling, chaotic beauty of language:
Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them.
(From Burnt Norton in The Four Quartets)

 

“Post Hypnotic Trance of Early Infancy”

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R. D. Laing once said that most of us life our lives in a “post hypnotic trance of early infancy.” Laing recognized that most of us live life unconsciously, driven by fears and anxieties that we acquired in our very early life before we had acquired reason. Most people do not realize that this earliest period of time was one of intense “conscious” awareness as we were soaking up the world in a way that would not be possible once the dawn of reason came at about age one and a half. (Aldous Huxley once posited the notion that our brain is basically a filter that selects what part of experience we will be open to.)

This core experience stays with us and will shape everything we do the rest of our lives. This core is inherently emotional, a “feeling state” that provides the basic orientation we have to the world and even to our own view of our self and that world. It will reflect our perception of our very place in the world and the perception of how much power we have to shape that world.

Asking someone to recognize this part of his/her existence is challenging and often impossible. I often use the following notion—it is like asking a fish to see water. A blog-o-sphere friend recently shared another image which I love—it is like asking someone who has fallen into a jar of marmalade and lived there all his/her life to see anything but marmalade. And this perceptual field is mutli-faceted, if not infinitely-faceted. But one facet will be the answer to this question, “Is this world an hospitable place?” Those raised in abject poverty are more inclined to answer “no” and adopt a stance of disappointment and hopelessness, a life confined to one poor choice after another. One that is born into a world that is stable is more likely to adopt a world view that sees potential, that sees the beauty…and the ugliness…in the world and says to himself/herself, “Hey, I can do this!”

A key task in life is the gain a perspective on our perspective and as one philosopher has said that to do so is to “somehow escape it.” I would qualify his observation with the notion that this meta-cognition is at least a step in the direction of escaping it. The next step will require courage, the courage to take the step beyond from time to time, to step into the beyond. And someone has noted, “When taking a far journey, you can’t see the destination until you have lost sight of the shore from which you departed.”  It makes me think of the Call of Abraham who was asked to forsake everything and “go unto a land that I will show thee.”

Paean to the East from a Southern Cracker

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The Eastern thinkers really speak to me. Those of ancient eons but those of today, including a handful of you I have met recently in the blog-o-sphere. You just don’t “think the right way.” You deign to look at the world differently. You look different. You sound different. How could that be? How could that have happened?

This world is just not as it was presented to me. It is not static but always intrinsically dynamic, always a “process in a process in a field that never closes.” ( W. H. Auden) It has taken me 61 years to get to this place where humility is teasing me, inviting me into its solace, and I’m absolutely loving it! Sure, I’m still kicking and screaming a bit but I’m gonna get there. And I think of the observation of W. B. Yeats when he “got there,”—Throughout all the lying days of my youth/I waved my leaves and flowers in the air./Now may I wither into the Truth.

Here is a wonderful poem by Bei Dao, a contemporary Chinese poet, with favorite stanza highlighted:
ANSWERS

Cruelty is the ID pass of the cruel,
honesty the grave stone of the honest.
Look, in the sky plated gold,
crooked reflections of all the dead float around.

The glacial epoch is over,
so why is there ice everywhere?
Good Hope was rounded a long time ago,
so where are these thousands of boats racing on the Dead Sea?

I came into this world
with only blank pages, rope and my fingers;
therefore, before final judgements are given,
I need to speak in all the voices of the defendants.

Just let me say, world,
I–don’t–believe!
If a thousand challengers are under your feet
count me as challenger one-thousand-and-one.

I don’t believe the sky is always blue;
I don’t believe it was thunder echoing;
I don’t believe all dreaming is false;
I don’t believe the dead cannot bring judgement.

If the sea is doomed someday to break its levees
my heart must flood with all the bitter waters.
If the land is destined to form the hills again,
let real human beings learn to choose the higher ground.

The latest, favorable turnings, the twinkling stars
studding the naked sky,
are pictographs five-thousand years old.
They are the eyes of the future staring at us now.