Category Archives: poetry and prose

“Judgment” vs “Judgmentalism”

5 Replies

In Shakespeare’s marvelous play, Hamlet, Laertes is grieving for his sister Ophelia who he then sees as demented and laments that she is, “Divided from herself and her fair judgment without which we are pictures are mere beasts.”
Shakespeare understood a dimension of judgment that is often not considered, that being that “judgment” is merely a decision or choice. For example, cultures always evolve a legal system in which miscreants stand before a judge or tribunal for some misdeed and there the community tells him/her, “We do not approve of the choice that you made on such and such occasion.” The collective thought reflects the decision of what is “good” and “bad” for the commonweal of that tribe. In this hypothetical illustration, a community makes a “choice” and exercises power, declaring, “we will not abide that behavior” and will then impose consequences even up to the point of death in some cultures. (This brings to mind another observation in the same play, “There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.”)

But, on an individual level…such as with Ophelia…we also exercise judgment and make choices all of which have consequences. But Shakespeare noted that Ophelia’s judgment was impaired so that her world was rigidly bifurcated between people as “pictures” or “mere beasts.” He was describing persons who see people only through two prisms—the extreme of a one dimensional idealized fantasy such as a “picture” or the other extreme…also a fantasy…a “mere beast.” Shakespeare recognized that we are infinitely complicated creatures and that our perception of others has to include the nuances between the two extremes. Yes, we are “pictures” but also “beasts” but also everything in between. And, this same impairment of judgment influenced Ophelia on the issue of “to be, or not to be” leading to seize the “bare bodkin” and take her life.

This brings to my mind the Christian notion of judgment and “judgmentalism.” Many Christians are proud that they are not “judgmental” and will piously announce this fact. However, that itself is a judgment!  Judgment is intrinsic to the human experience and we cannot help but make judgments if we have any degree of functional ability; and, come to think about it, we do so even without that level of ability! True, Jesus said, “Judge not that ye be not judged” but I don’t think that He meant that we should be so naive as to think we never exercise judgment. Jesus was merely saying, “Hey! Sl;ow down. When you are so quick to see the mote in someone else’s eye, take pause and realize that there is a beam in your own eye.” Yes, there are many times when we must exercise judgment and take a stand but if we find that we are “taking a stand” and making moral pronouncements a lot of the time, we might take pause and look closely in the mirror. “What we see is what we are.” Just to exercise judgment does not make us “judgmental” but when we find ourselves standing in judgment often of others, we might take pause and consider that “What we see is what we are” I’m learning to do this myself and the experience is not very pretty!

Shakespeare Visited Me This Morning!

4 Replies

Oh I love Shakespeare! He is one of my best friends, often visiting me in the middle of the night with memories of a finely-coined expression or phrase which plums the depths of my heart. But oh how I loathed him when in high school for he refused to speak plain English and then my teachers so often demanded that I memorize passages from his plays and, even worse, interpret them. The interpretation really frustrated me and even angered me at times making me want to cry out, “It means just what it says. There’s nothing more to say about it, damn it!” My attitude stemmed from the biblical literalism that I lived in at that time, its hermeneutical style being best expressed as, “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.”

But decades later Shakespeare and his ilk began to penetrate the pristine literal citadel in which I was imprisoned. And what devastation it has brought me! All things felt most certain are now seen as ephemeral and I am often left with doubt and anxiety with despair lingering not far behind. But I would not go back for all the money in the world as life is to be lived not to be escaped from with “well-worn words and ready phrases that build comfortable walls against the wilderness.” (Conrad Aiken)

For, the “devastation” I refer to has merely been the disillusionment I have had to encounter as my pretenses have been shattered and I’ve been left with nothing but naked reality. And, T. S. Eliot was right, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” In the “devastation” I’ve lived in for thirty years plus, structure has evolved but it has been fashioned out of Hope, setting it apart from the specious, fear-based ego contrivance that I was enconced in the first half of my life.

My life now features an openness that I used to avoid with a passion, an openness that Richard Rohr has described as “The Naked Now.” This openness can be described as a Presence which allows me to more fully accept the world as it is with less of a demand that it conform with my preconceptions. I no longer have the comfort of pretending I have no preconceptions.

Franz Kafka said that a literary work must be an ice axe which breaks the sea frozen inside us. That “ice axe” which first came my way in my teens has found me a challenge…and still does…but like any literary work, I’m an unfinished product; and we are all a “literary work,” a tale being told. Yes, perhaps one that often appears is being “told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.”

Space, Silence, No-thingness, and Spirit

Leave a reply

Caritas
(St Andrews Cathedral)
These stones speak a level language
murmured word by word,
a speech pocked and porous with loss,
and the slow hungers of weathering.
And there, in the broken choir, children
are all raised voice, loving the play of outline
and absence where the dissembled god
has shared his shape and homed us.
At the end of the nave, the east front stands
both altered and unchanged,
its arch like a glottal stop.
And what comes across, half-said
into all that space, is that it’s enough
to love the air we move through.
(by Rachael Boast)

The “air we move through.” That captured my imagination as it brought to mind the notion of “space” that people like Eckhart Tolle and Richard Rohr speak of, words which can be thought of as referring to the domain of “spirit.” For, “space” is the context in which we breath and live but it is a context that is only “there” but we can never apprehend it with our rational mind. It is the foundation of this ephemeral world that we take for granted but which is ultimately specious, though infinitely important as an expression of what I like to call the Divine or the Ineffable. It is the domain of the heart, the Spirit, of Life which gives meaning to this “dog-and-pony show” that I refer to so often. I heard a lecture by Richard Rohr recently in which he used the term Silence, a different name for the same phenomena, and describing it as “the safety net which lies underneath the tight-rope walker, those of us who walk the razor’s edge.”

I now want to juxtapose the above poem with one by Eugene Mayo that I have always loved, entitled, “This Wind.”:

By E. L. Mayo

This is the wind that blows
Everything
Through and through.
I would not toss a kitten
Knowingly into a wind like this
But there’s no taking
Anything living
Out of the fury
Of this wind we breathe and ride upon.

 

Be Here Now!

3 Replies

This admonishment used to make no sense to me and even used to perturb me for I knew it came from “one of them there damn hippies” though at that point in my life it was probably “dang” rather than “damn.” And, of course it is so meaningful to me now because it is not about “sense” (or reason run amok) but is about “presence” which is a more fundamental dimension of existence than reason. Most of my life has been spent in absence, in not “being here now”, but being immersed in my own little cognitive grasp of the world, a self-imposed prison like the one most people spend their whole lives in.

At present moment I think I “be here now.” I have just awakened and have taken my perch for “bird theater” with my cup of coffee, awaiting my three puppies to join me—two dachshunds and my wife. The darkness will lift shortly and I will again watch the birds engage in their ritual frenzy at the feeders and will be taken with the beauty of the moment. I will “be here now.” I often think of the words of Jesus at this moment, and apply a bit of literary license to his description of “the birds of the air,”  noting that they do not fret and stew but merely go about each day of their life “birding” the world. And I also often recall a beautiful poem by Wendell Berry who described finding “peace in wild things” when beset by despair, wild things who do not “tax their lives with forethought of grief.”

Be here now.

Rumi Visits Me Again!

3 Replies

Poet Gene Derwood once noted, “Big thoughts of got us.” I think she had in mind the drifts of ideas in 1950’s American culture but the observation also has personal application for me as I realize “big thoughts” have often “got me.” I have always loved to read and to study, spending lots of my early adulthood as a “professional student” in which I read voraciously in fields which had nothing to do with my actual career. I love to think. I am carried away by “big thoughts” and use this WP forum to share some of them and to discourse re my impressions from discovering these thoughts.

And, with this internet and blog-o-sphere I can explore sources from around the world and also meet and engage in dialogue with other men and women with a similar curiosity. So I continue to “hunger and thirst after” these “big thoughts.” There is even a sense in which I’m an addict. Psychologist Gerald May noted decades ago that addiction to “thinking” is not uncommon and even my “guru”, Richard Rohr, has noted that he himself is plagued to some degree with this malady.

But, please understand, this is not a “confession” or lamentation. This is just a personal observation, a disclosure of an issue that I wrestle with. I do believe there is something beyond these “big thoughts” which would satisfy this addiction, something which I prefer to describe as a Something or even a Someone! My spiritual mentor, Rumi, addressed this issue with me several mornings ago, sharing with me: You are quaffing from a hundred fountains; whenever any of these one hundred yields less, your pleasure is diminished. But when their sublime fountain gushes forth from within you, no longer do need you steal from these other fountains. I was taken aback! Seven hundred years ago and,immersed in a different spiritual tradition, he understood my dilemma. He understood what several of you have been telling me and what I already knew myself in some limited way. “Big thoughts”, even if from “big” fountains, are not the Source! Again I quote the Buddhist wisdom, “The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.”

I think that actually I’m afraid of this “gush.” Look what it did to the Apostle Paul on the Damascus Road! I’m just not wired for that kind of neurological tumult. But, I take comfort in the wisdom of another one of my confidantes, W. H. Auden, who often reassures me, “The Center that you cannot find is know to the unconscious mind. There is no need to despair. You are already there.”

I “Discovered” America!

6 Replies

Yes, in 1952 I “discovered America” although I also soon realized there were a lot of other “Americans” here already! Edgar Simmons once wrote, “We rattle the world for our babies” and early in 1952 the annual “rattle” took place and I fell to the earth in the sticks of central Arkansas.

It was a “discovery” and adventure; and continues to be. This is an amazing world that we live in. For example, at this very moment I am sitting in what I call my “bird theater” and watch junkies, sparrows, titmice, cardinals, and two or three varieties of woodpeckers raucously queue up for their moment at the bird feeders, cavorting about in the blowing snow as they wait their turn. Suddenly I am a child again and can “feel” on some level again the marvelous beauty that the world has for children before they get fully ensconced in the mundane. That was the time when my heart was still made of “penetrable stuff” and had not been “bronzed o’er” with the “damned custom…(that is) proof and bulwark against sense (or feeling).”

Now, of course, I employ my “literary license” here to recall these moments as there was no cognitive apparatus there to “remember” them with. That contrivance would come later and with it would come a more routine, mundane appreciation of the “beauty” I saw…and felt…at that time. And I use the word “felt” deliberately for early in our life we are a “feeling state” and are constantly soaking up the impressions which will stick with us for life and which will formulate the core of our identity, the roots of that unconscious domain that shapes our life. And, now, I do sense that I have some awareness of that phase of my childhood, some intuitive grasp of how the world appeared back then.

And on that subject, I don’t think I really liked much of the world…or at least the “human” part. I found all “those rules” baffling and overwhelming and preferred to stay safely tucked away in my little uroborus. I mean, there were so many of “those rules” and how could I ever get them “all” right; and, of course, being a budding narcissist, I had to get them “all” right, didn’t I? And, I might add that I’ve spent my life trying furiously to accomplish this goal but have found enough Grace in recent years to give up the quest, to humbly realize just how silly, vain and “narcissistic” it was in the first place. I really think that I felt so “judged” by the world I was discovering, and judged so disapprovingly, that I had to be “right” to compensate and the only way I saw that I could do this was to master all of the rules. Meanwhile, I was also immersed in a Jesus culture in which I was nearly almost daily about God and His mercy and forgiveness; and though I came to say I believed it all, I actually didn’t believe a word of it, did I?! The only way I felt I could be forgiven was to “be right” and that meant to follow the “rules.” When that facade began to fade decades later, I referred to it as the loss of my, “ruined, rural righteousness.” And, I might add, that in spite of what I was being “taught” by my “Jesus culture”, the subtext of that teaching was a dictate to do just as I was doing—Be Right!

Come to think of it, there is another character flaw—I’ve always had a hard time focusing on what was going on, preferring to focus on what was going on beneath the surface, in the “subtext.” I almost wonder if I had some version of ADD?

The Privilege of the Few

Leave a reply

Institutions that maintain soothing contact between men under unexpressed conditions and within unadmitted limits are certainly indispensable for communal existence; but beyond that they are pernicious because they veil the truth in the manifestation of the human existence in illusory contentment. (probably Walter Kauffman)

Culture was a pyrrhic victory for mankind. This “fig leaf” did accomplish its original purpose in that it covered our existential nakedness and allowed the development of what I often call this “dog and pony show” that we live and breath in each day. And without this contrivance we could not live together even as well as we do. We would still be a bunch of even smaller tribes always warring with each other as opposed to the present arrangement in which the number of tribes is actually quite limited though the violence and potential violence is lethal.

But our “illusory contentment”, satisfying as it might be, always comes at the price of excluding someone that we might describe as “the other” or “them.” Our smug satisfaction always rests on the backs of those who have been denied admission into the club.

There are many dimensions to this problem but let me focus on merely one, the often discussed “haves” versus the “have nots.” And technically, this poses a personal problem for, relatively speaking, I am one of the “haves” though that is the case only in comparison with the human tribe as a whole. Relative to the hordes who live in poverty, my middle class existence would have to be described as “plenty” and I would have to be considered one of the “haves.” But trust me, I am not wealthy! Everything is relative.

So, how do we solve this problem? I understand that we could solve the world hunger problem, for example, if we wanted to so why not? Part of me remembers the admonishment to “Sell all that you have and give it to the poor” and I’ve heard of those who have done so. Well, I’m not inclined to do this and do not feel it would be the appropriate thing for me to do. But I do think solving this particular part of the “have not” problem would cost me something and I can honestly say I would be willing to incur that “something” even to the point of discomfort. How could I insist on maintaining my level of comfort when millions and millions of people in the world live in squalor? But the same question needs to be considered collectively, not just with my country, but with the world and all of us would have to begin to think in terms of the human collective instead of our local tribe. We would have to begin to answer affirmatively the question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

But this would require a profound paradigm shift in world consciousness. It would require that we create some space around our tribal identity and begin to see that the “other” is human also and deserves a quality of life that we could probably help bring about. And, I’m not saying that we would have to, or even could, give up our “tribal identity” but only loosen its grip on ourselves just a little, just enough to see that other people, and other tribes, are human also. A tribal identity is just another way of saying an “ego identity” and these dimensions of reality are imperative. But another dimension of reality is also imperative, that one of “space” which unites us all, an inclusive “space” or “field” which many have termed “Spirit.” Rumi put this so eloquently when he noted, “Out beyond the distinctions of right doing and wrong doing there is a field. I will meet you there.” He was noting that beyond the distinctions that we draw with our ego or tribal identity there is a “space” and if we are willing to embrace this space…or allow it to embrace us…we can make connection with other people.

Let me close with the wisdom of a kindred spirit, my brother in Spirit, W. H. Auden, who noted:

…What except despair
Can shape the hero who will dare
The desperate catabasis
Into the snarl of the abyss
That always lies just underneath
Our jolly picnic on the heath
Of the agreeable, where we bask
Agreed on what we will not ask,
Bland, sunny, and adjusted by
The light of the accepted lie?

A Perspective on Perspective

Leave a reply

I once read a philosopher’s observation, “You can’t have a perspective on your perspective without somehow escaping it.” That statement grabbed me and still grabs me as continue to explore the finitude of the little prism through which I view this beautiful world. Here I want to share you a clip from CNN in which our lovely planet is seen from the vantage point of a satellite on the very outskirts of our solar system. Our planet is so small that it can hardly be seen in this photograph, while other heavenly bodies dominate the foreground. It makes me think of a line from W. H. Auden’s poetry in which he describe you and I as “clinging to the granite skirts of our sensible old planet.” (http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/13/us/nasa-saturn-earth-picture/index.html?hpt=hp_c3) And here is a relevant poem from a recent New Yorker magazine:

THE LANDSCAPE OF VILHELM HAMMERSHOI

By Vona Groarke

  • Between water reading itself a story
  • with no people in it
  • and fields, illegible, and a sky
  • that promises nothing,
  • least of all what will happen now,
  • are the trees
  • that do not believe in
  • any version of themselves
  • not even the one in which
  • they are apparently everyday trees
  • and not a sequence of wooden frames
  • for ordinary leaves.

Rumi Spoke to Me This Morning Again!

1 Reply

I am in You and I am You…
No one can understand this
Until he has lost his mind !
~Rumi

Rumi continues to speak to me, having subscribed to “Rumi Quotes” on Facebook. This bit of wisdom reminds me of something that Fritz Perls said decades ago when he was in the vogue, “Let go of your mind and come to your senses.” And then one of my favorites expressions of this kernel of wisdom was from an ancient Eastern teacher whose names I can’t recall, “Sanity is a hair cloth sheathe with a jewel underneath.”

But, once again, this “wisdom” makes no sense at all. It is just “nuts”. Well, at least to that increasingly dormant “literallew” that will always be with me. When I get to heaven, I’m gonna chide God for not letting me learn about this wisdom sooner in my life though I will have to be careful as he could respond with a surly, “To hell with you!”  Of course, He will mischieveously smile and wink approvingly of my audacity!  He really does have a sense of humor.

Emily Dickinson’s Cloistered View of the World

Leave a reply

I love Emily Dickinson. I love her cryptic, almost awkward use of words to describe the human predicament and reveal her own complicated, conflicted soul. She lived her life cloistered in her father’s attic, preferring the solace of her intricate verbal world over the “dog-and-pony-show” of her day. I identify myself with her cloistered view of the world but my “cloistering” has mercifully been metaphorical.

One of her poems that has always grabbed me was about attention, the tendency of our “soul” to fashion a world that it is comfortable with and then “close the valves of our attention like stone.” I love that image and can almost hear those valves “closing like stone.”

Here is the poem:

The Soul selects her own Society,
Then, shuts the door;
To her divine Majority
Present (or obtrude) no more.
Unmoved, she notes the Chariots
Pausing at her low gate.
Unmoved, an Emperor be kneeling upon her mat.
I’ve known her from an ample nation choose one
Then close the valves of her attention like stone.

I had often come up with the same observation about life but until I read this poem I could only offer “we believe what we want to believe”, not having the gift of poetic expression as Dickinson did. And, though this insight came with the price of “detachment,” I’m glad to have paid that price as it has helped me to remember to appreciate and value my perspective on life but to remember that everyone’s “valves of attention” creates unique viewpoints.

And in this poem note the soul’s response to her stately “visitor”. This soul, comfortable in its own private little world, turns its nose down at a visitor who should be graciously welcomed. It makes me think of Hamlet’s pining to escape his “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to” by “fleeing to a nutshell” where there he could be “king of infinite spaces.”

This poem reveals that Dickinson knew she lived detached in a private world and the body of her poetry suggests that she found a comfort there in her solitude. Emotional isolation can easily be a “private hell”….as it is when one is the “king of infinite spaces”…but the gods can afford comfort there if it happens to be one’s lot in life. And without Dickinson’s acceptance of her “lot in life”, our world would be deprived of her poetic riches.

← Back

Thank you for your response. ✨