Category Archives: literature

Wisdom From Novelist Joan Didion

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Wisdom comes from a “literary” grasp of our life and world. It means having a relationship with the metaphor. The word metaphor means “to reach across” or venture from a concrete-thinking world into our adjoining world of meaning. Taking this step across means to loosen one’s moorings, to follow the wisdom of poet Stefan George, “To journey to a far world, it is necessary to lose sight of the shore.” Joan Didion who just died this week offered really profound wisdom in the quip I will now share with you:

We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all….I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.

Stanley Kunitz, a former poet laureate of the United States put it this way, “We have walked through many lives, some of them my own. I am not the one I was, though some remnant of being remains from which I struggle not to stray.” Following is a link to this poem, “The Layers”:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54897/the-layers

Dostoyevsky, Intensity, and Creativity

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I exist.  In thousands of agonies–I exist. I’m tormented on the rack—but I exist though I set alone in a pillar–I exist!  I see the sun, and if I don’t see the sun, I know it’s there.  And there is a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there.  Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Dostoyevsky was aware.  He was conscious. And thus he was torn between the twin poles of human existence, being and non-being, presence and absence. The rending of the soul in this existential dilemma is described by French psychoanalyst, Julia Kristeva, as a “tearing” from an unconscious matrix that an individual has not been able to face. Dostoyevsky lived in that existential crisis his whole life which contributed to his literary greatness.

Every human being carries this same intensity in the depths of their heart, but most of us have it “filtered” into a socially permissible abeyance.  Oh, what would we do without those “fig leaves” in our Garden of Eden experience!  This intensity also makes me recall a joke by a very bizarre stand-up comedian, Emo Phillips.  In his routine, he once asked, “Hey, you ever been in a chair, and you lean back…just a bit too far…and you realize that you are about to fall backward?  Remember that feeling you got in your gut at that moment? I feel that way all of the time!”  I don’t feel that way “all the time”;  but I do live with the intensity that Phillips was joking about and that drove Dostoyevsky to explore the human soul for us. There are times I do wish that back in 1951-52 when God was putting me together he’d have given me a brand new “fig leaf” and not the “factory-second” that I’ve had to cope with!

“Well Worn Words and Ready Phrases….

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…Build Comfortable Walls Against the Wilderness.” This quip from poet Conrad Aiken has captivated me for decades now as his work and that of other poets continue to erode my “comfortable walls.”

I was born into poetry but the hyper-conservative, linear-thinking community in which I found myself disallowed any consideration of a nuanced way of perceiving and organizing my world.  That is not to assign blame; if I had to assign blame, I would have to blame myself for lamely imbibing into the depths of my heart the world view and experience that was proffered me; I did not even try to find my own voice. I desperately felt the need to fit in, to belong, which is a very human “need.” But my desperation to obtain this belonging-ness probably created a sense of dis-ease with many of my classmates.  Decades later I would learn the label for this existential malaise was “alienation.” 

But in the mid-eighties, the breath of life breached my endungeoned heart when a friend gave me a copy of W. H. Auden poetry and I fell upon a copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets.  I have quoted Kafka on the resulting experience often before, citing his note that literature is like a pick-axe that “fractures the frozen sea within.”  And that “fracturing” of my soul was painful, and continues to be…and will always be…as the “einfall” of Carl Jung will often be. (Jung employed the German term for an irruption into a person’s psyche of what had been excluded.)

Language is not static…though static hearts can attempt to “static” it, or “staticize” it, and often succeed at least temporarily.  But poetry, or some visit from the arts, will often breach the walls of the stale prison of thinking inside a bubble, even if the bubble is inside one’s own head!  But when the bubble takes place in a group, the value of language itself is threatened as words will be used merely for perpetuating group think and the language itself will die spiritually. Here is a poem by an Irish poet, W. R. Rodgers that addresses this issue and poignantly notes the “death” that hides in a sterile language. 

WORDS (an excerpt) 

By W. R. Rodgers 

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. 

Clinical “Executive Functioning” Now Direly Needed!!!

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Executive function is a clinical term to describe one’s ability to manage his life, to deal with its stresses and strains and to manage them with wisdom. This function of the cerebral cortex offers us “working memory, flexible thinking, and self-control” which facilitates an ability to exercise this gift in fulfilling our basic needs and doing so in cooperation with others… most of which are usually busy trying to do the same. Impairment of this neurological gift will make it “hard to focus, follow directions, and handle emotions.”  Its diminishment will leave us with unconscious fears and anxieties, creating problems for our life and for those around us.

As this pandemic continues to beset us, like a hawk circling above looking for additional prey, our nation’s, “executive functioning” is woefully inadequate, specifically with our Federal government and its “executive.”  We are immersed in a spiritual crisis; and humankind is equipped with an ability to “manage” crises, but only if we can do so with direction and a spirit of harmony. If our collective “executive functioning” functions maturely it will demonstrate a capacity to learn from experience, recognize error, and adjust our strategy.  It will accept responsibility for the crisis, not fretting over “who’s at fault” but on “how can we address this crisis?” most effectively.

We live in a world of contingency; circumstances are always present. But we have been given human “agency”, the capacity to act meaningfully toward what lies before us, hoping that as we do so we are acting toward the betterment of all. With the empowerment of this efficacy, we can facilitate a “purge” of the “common weal.”  And this brings to my mind the illimitable wisdom of Shakespeare, alluding here to his play, Macbeth, when his allies were recognizing the peril of staying with their “executive.”

Well, march we on
To give obedience where ’tis truly owed.
Meet we the medicine of the sickly weal,
And with him pour we in our country’s purge
Each drop of us.

So, will we manage to pour “each drop of us” into the “purge” that we need?  And in present day, the “medicine of our sickly weal” needs to be a spirit of unity, not any “Macduff” and his boys.  Nevertheless, we could readily utilize a leader in whom we can put our faith, providing this caveat is considered—faith in a leader always carries the risk of finding a leader who is nothing but another version of Trump.

 

 

 

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.”

My Personal Struggle With the Ego

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

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

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

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

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?

“A Foolish Consistency is the Hobgoblin of Little Minds”

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Ralph Waldo Emerson once noted, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”  But he would certainly agree that consistency is not but is the reflection of the presence of a “conscious” mind.  To illustrate, Donald Trump when running for election repeatedly criticized Barack Obama for playing golf too much but when he assumed the office proceeded to play golf much more than had any president.  He never offered an explanation and the press never pointedly challenged him on the matter.  When campaigning for the office, he criticized Obama for spending too much time on the golf course when the country had so many problems facing it and declared that, “I’m going to be working for you.  I’m not going to have time to go play golf.”

A “conscious” mind would recognize, “Oh, I said that I would not play golf like my predecessor as that would be in-“consistent” with what I said” but an unconscious mind would not be governed by any need for such any such “consistency”.  This past week a story broke which indicated that Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, suffers from the same malady it turns out that she has used a private email server in her role as a presidential adviser for her father.  This was after Trump had furiously denounced Hillary Clinton for doing this during the 2016 campaign and even created the battle cry of, “Lock her up” over the matter.  If Ivanka had been “conscious” as most of us are she would have realized, “Oh, to use a private email server” would be a bit awkward.”

Trump has demonstrated an imperviousness to rules of decorum, civility, and respect for others.  This is because in the depths of his heart he has no regard for others as he does not play by the same set of rules that we do.  For example, we would probably not tell anyone…at least in public…who had asked us a question, “That is a stupid question” and “You always ask stupid questions” as he did a couple of weeks when a reporter asked a simple question to him.  Trump can do that because of this imperviousness to these societal rules and conventions and he knows he can get by with it and has always been permitted to get by with it.  He has never had firm limits set with him and when anyone attempts he bullies them into submission.  Witness the Republican Party.

A Texas “Outlaw” Poet Demonstrates Semiotics

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In the six years that “literarylew” has existed, I’ve explored poetry at great depth.  A lot of my exploration has been in the area of semiotics, that unconscious domain where instincts and external demands of society encounter each other and an identity amenable to symbolic participation in the world is created.  If this identity is too well-endowed with instinctual energy, psychosis could emerge in the extreme.  If “external demands” rule the day, then at an extreme linear thinking will prevail one will find comfort in the world that W. H. Auden described as that of, “a logical lunatic.”  The goal is for both dimensions of human experience to freely interact with instinctual energy finding expression in socially acceptable terms.

But the poet has that “id”-stinctual energy working with more intensity than those of us who live a more prosaic life.  With the poet, words cavort about in the subterranean regions of the heart, making it challenging to, “buckle his distempered “swollen” heart within the belt of rule….as Shakespeare put it.  The energy of instinctual energy that would threaten dissolution is harnessed by the poet’s capacity to use words to bind that energy and to use words creatively. At the conclusion I will include a poem by Archibald MacLeish who so beautifully describes the meshing of what William James called the, “blooming, buzzing, confusing world of sense experience” with words.)

However, I first would like to introduce you to my most recent blog subscriber, a Texas “outlaw” poet, Jeff Callaway, whose life story and poetry so beautifully illustrates the struggle of one poet in “binding” the energy of his heart and life.  This poem is a hodgepodge of imagery, often lacking “sense” other than to one who has a heart for poetry and will intuit and feel a whole lot of “sense” by giving it a close, attentive reading.  Here I quote the initial stanza of this raucous and often bawdy poem which clearly reveals this man’s energy bursting at the seams:

the greatest poems
are never written down
but lonely and forgotten
before a pen can be found
the greatest poems never find the ink
in the time it takes you to think
slowly with time they fade
and face the guillotine
of jilted poems and unrequited lovers
or glued to my own vague memory
of what could’ve been
if only i’d had a pen
and the recollection to keep repeating
what it was i was trying to say…

For the whole of this poem, check out this link:  https://texasoutlawpoet.com/2018/02/16/the-greatest-poems-of-all-by-jeff-callaway-texas-outlaw-poet-2/

“Words in Time,” by Archibald MacLeisch:

Bewildered with the broken tongue
of wakened angels in our sleep
then lost the music that was sung
and lost the light time cannot keep!

There is a moment when we lie
Bewildered, wakened out of sleep,
when light and sound and all reply:
that moment time must tame and keep.

That moment like a flight of birds
flung from the branches where they sleep,
the poet with a beat of words
flings into time for time to keep.

**********************

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/

Boundaries, Boundaries, Boundaries!

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WHAT ARE YEARS by Marianne Moore

What is our innocence,
what is our guilt? All are
naked, none is safe. And whence
is courage: the unanswered question,
the resolute doubt, —
dumbly calling, deafly listening—that
in misfortune, even death,
encourage others
and in its defeat, stirs
the soul to be strong? He
sees deep and is glad, who
accedes to mortality
and in his imprisonment rises
upon himself as
the sea in a chasm, struggling to be
free and unable to be,
in its surrendering
finds its continuing.
So he who strongly feels,
behaves. The very bird,
grown taller as he sings, steels
his form straight up. Though he is captive,
his mighty singing
says, satisfaction is a lowly
thing, how pure a thing is joy.
This is mortality,
this is eternity.

I have referenced and explored this poem before in this venue, but I wish to delve deeply into the heart of the matter this time.  She dives into the meat of her message with “he who sees deep and is glad” to introduce the notion of furrowing into the marrow of life which, borrowing from the title of an Adrienne Rich poem I like to describe as, “Diving into the Wreck.”  For the “deep,” i.e. the “marrow” will always be murky, dark, wet, confusing, and frightening until we get accustomed to it.  But in so doing we are “acceding to mortality” which is to say we are becoming human which culture has offered us a myriad variety of ways to avoid.  But as we embrace our mortality, recognize that death is our ultimate fate…a veritable imprisonment…we can then rise “upon ourselves as the sea in a chasm, struggling to be free and unable to be, in its surrendering find our continuing.”

I have been to the ocean many times and the vivid image of the ocean crashing into those chasms, powerfully and noisily, and then surrendering into calm is so gripping.  And only in this catastrophe do the waves, in surrender, find their “continuing.”

This poem is a beautiful picture of the infinite energy that we are coming to grips with the world of finitude.  Our first impulse is to rail against the limits that we find, even death, but Moore had discovered that in accepting the circumstance of human life she found empowerment. And then there is the powerful observation, “They who feel strongly behave.”  I have seen so many who feel so very strongly that they cannot behave and succumb to a haphazard life which often includes addiction.  I know one young man, for example, who can give expression to his artistic skills only when confined to prison walls and is spending his early adulthood and soon-to-be middle ages in and out of prison.  When there he has found the answer to the famous movie line of Jim Carrey, “SOMEBODY stop me.”

“Satisfaction is a lowly thing.  How pure a thing is joy.”  Moore recognized the pyrrhic victory of immediate gratification.  C.S. Lewis described sin as, “Preference for immediate satisfaction over a ‘believed-in’ pattern of glory.”  The dilemma of modern life…so vividly illustrated in the United States currently…is an obsessive “preference for immediate satisfaction” over the interest of the long-term welfare of the country…and the species.