Category Archives: poetry and prose

The Hobgoblin of Little Minds

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Two days after the Obama reelection in November, the Fox News reporter, Sean Hannity announced on-air that his view of immigration had “evolved” and he was willing to take a more lenient position. And since then many Republicans are taking a similar stance, deciding that on that issue in particular they have to adjust their views if they are going to have any chance of winning more Latino voters.

There are some members of the Republicans, however, who are digging their heels in and castigating those of their party who are equivocating on this and other issues. They feel that compromise against bedrock principles of their party…and all of their principles seem to be “bedrock” to them…is completely verboten. The Republican hysteria about “compromise” was so severe last summer that John Boehner in one TV interview refused to even use the word “compromise” when cornered on the matter.

But, Hannity and his ilk can equivocate on this and other matters and still be conservative Republicans. Changing your mind on issues does not mean that you have sold your soul to anyone, certainly not the “liberals” or Obama. The ability to change your mind is a sign of mental health and emotional maturity. Ralph Waldo Emerson said 150 years ago, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Being consistent for the sake of consistency is lame, to put it mildly.

But True Believers have a hard time changing their mind because in the depths of their heart that would mean to them, “Oh no. I have been wrong!” Well, welcome to the world! Who hasn’t and who will not continue to be from time to time? All of us are short-sighted and need to have our eyes checked occasionally or perhaps clean our glasses.

(True Believers was a book by Eric Hoffer about fanaticism which is worthy of a reading evn in modern times.)

Wind Imagery and Transitoriness of Life

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T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets is one my my favorite poems of all time, It is a powerful statement of mankind’s existential plight and of hope in the midst this hopelessness. He grasped the transitory nature of life and used vivid imagery to convey this. For example, in one of the Quartets (Burnt Norton) he wrote of, “Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind which blows before and after time. It reminds me of a favorite scene in the movie, American Beauty, when two characters are silently watching a video of the wind silently buffeting a plastic bag, conveying the same message of Eliot’s line.

And on the same existential theme, here is a poem by E. L. Mayo:

THIS WIND

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.

I conclude with the context of the Eliot quotation above:

Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

 

Poetic Thoughts re Intense Emotion Running Amok

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In Hamlet, Laertes knows that his daughter is “palling around” with that wastrel Hamlet and cautions her, knowing something himself about masculine rapacity:

Fear it, Ophelia, fear it, my dear sister,
And keep you in the rear of your affection,
Out of the shot and danger of desire.

Laertes did not want his daughter to give into emotions, but to “stand in the rear” like he did and keep her distance. For, he feared that letting go of that detachment would lead to overwhelming emotion and take her totally out of control, just as he feared it would do to him. Laertes was speaking of an “observing ego” which he knew monitors our impulses and keeps them from running amok.

For, Shakespeare knew that “feelings know no discretion but their own.” (W. H. Auden) When feelings predominate…and begin to tyrannize…they cannot submit to “monitoring” and insist on fulfillment of their own needs and desires. Adrienne Rich wrote of this immersion in emotion when she said, “when we enter touch, we enter touch completely.” And e e cummings agreed with Rich, noting that, “since feeling comes first, he who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you.”

I suggest some balance is needed. (Yes, my “observing ego” is doing its magic today!) We need intense emotion, we need to be “carried away” with passion, but the “balancer” must not be discarded. When this “balancer” or “observing ego” is discarded, or lost due to neurological impairment, Shakespeare might note of us, “The expedition of his violent love outruns the pauser reason.” Or, to put it in my words, “expression of his passionate intensity outruns the pauser reason.”

 

A Poem about Parents, Family, Sex, and Life

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I never had children. I guess it was not in the cards though I fear it was merely a lack of faith, a lack of faith in the Universe and in God and confidence in myself and my wife, though mainly myself. I guess I thought too much about it and I always remember what Hamlet said about his own tendency to think too much, saying that if this pensiveness were “quartered, it would be one part wisdom and three parts cowardice.”

Here is a beautiful poem by Sharon Olds as she conjectures about her own conception, eloquently describing her parents meeting in college, the story of their life together, the doubts and fears of their marriage, and the sexual union which produced herself. Olds’ image of coitus is just stunningly beautiful, consummately poetic.

I Go Back to May 1937

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips black in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don’t do it–she’s the wrong woman,
he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don’t do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

Oscar Wilde “Playing” with Reality

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I am currently reading Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey. I have seen the movie years ago and loved it; but the novel itself has so much more to offer. Wilde has an as astute grasp of human culture in the 19th century and could eloquently convey which way the winds were blowing. He, and other astute individuals, certainly had some insight into what was going to unfold in the 20th century.

For example, modern science was toying with human culture at the time and leaving it in the throes of relativism, ambivalence, and uncertainty. Truth, and even reality itself, came to be seen as paradoxical, leading Wilde to declare in this novel, “The way of paradoxes is the way of Truth. To test reality, we must see it on the tight rope. When the verities become acrobats, we can judge them.” T. S. Eliot would later echo this perspective on truth, declaring that to know truth, or reality, we must “live in the breakage, in the collapse of what was believed in as most certain, and therefore the fittest for renunciation.” (The Four Quartets)

So, today, a century plus from Wilde’s death, we live in the tumult of what he, “modern” science of his day, and literary license would produce. We wrestle with the question of, “What is real and what is unreal?” In my country (the United States) I feel that this is the essential issue that divides the country, that is wreaking havoc on our political system, and even spreading confusion within the erstwhile hermetically sealed “safe” confines of the Republican party.

And, ultimately I feel we must discover that “Real” is apprehended only by faith and once apprehended, we have to realize that we don’t actually “apprehend” it at all. We only intuit it, “faith” it, and hope for it. But, that does not diminish the power of its Presence. It merely humbles us, reminding us of the wisdom of the Apostle Paul, “We see through a glass darkly.” But this Presence is with us, and in us, each day as we seek to “work out our own salvation with fear and trembling.”

 

The Essence of Religion, Part Deux!

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In “The Essence of Religion” posted several days ago, I shared a lovely poem by Hafiz about what religion is always about.  To sum it up, in the Words of Jesus, “Love your neighbor as yourself” though Hafiz broadened this to include the whole of God’s creation.  And he noted that just about any religious passion, or ritual, or belief system is quite okay…IF…it facilitates the love of God’s creation.  It is so easy to “love god” and do so with “sound and fury” (often signifying nothing) but it does not mean jack if the whole of your life demonstrates a disinterest, contempt, or hatred for any part of God’s creation.  Someone has said, “It is not so important what you say as what you do.”  “Saying” is important, yes, but not without behavior to back it up.   Again I share one of my favorite bits from Shakespeare, “With devotions visage and pious action they do sugar o’er the devil himself.”  And here again I share the Hafiz poem:

 

Becoming Human

by Hafiz

Once a man came to me and spoke for hours about
“His great visions of God” he felt he was having.

He asked me for confirmation, saying,
“Are these wondrous dreams true?”

I replied, “How many goats do you have?”

He looked surprised and said,
“I am speaking of sublime visions
And you ask
About goats!”

And I spoke again saying,
“Yes, brother – how many do you have?”

“Well, Hafiz, I have sixty-two.”

“And how many wives?”

Again he looked surprised, then said,
“Four.”

“How many rose bushes in your garden,
How many children,
Are your parents still alive,
Do you feed the birds in winter?”

And to all he answered.

Then I said,

“You asked me if I thought your visions were true,
I would say that they were if they make you become
More human,

More kind to every creature and plant
That you know.”

 

 

Heaven on Earth

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Here is a poem by W. R. Rodgers, an Irish poet from the 20th century.  He describes a beautiful world that we all long for, a world which can basically be described as Eden or Heaven.  It is a dream we all have and one to which we are all working but one which I don’t think we will ever realize literally.  But we need to seek it, especially to seek it in our own personal life.  I think the opening line is most important, describing a land where all “Is, and nothing’s Ought.”  The tyranny of the “oughts” is the ego run amok.

 

Neither Here Nor There

by W. R. Rodgers

In that land all Is, and nothing’s Ought;
No owners or notices, only birds;
No walls anywhere, only lean wire of words
Worming brokenly out from eaten thought;
No oats growing, only ankle-lace grass
Easing and not resenting the feet that pass;
No enormous beasts, only names of them;
No bones made, bans laid, or boons expected,
No contracts, entails, or hereditaments,
Anything at all that might tie or hem.

In that land, all’s lackadaisical;
No lakes of coddled spawn, and no locked ponds
Of settled purpose, no netted fishes;
But only inkling streams and running fronds,
Fritillaried with dreams, weedy with wishes;
Nor arrogant talk is heard, haggling phrase,
But undertones, and hesitance, and haze;
On clear days mountains of meaning are seen
Humped high on the horizon; no one goes
To con their meaning, no one cares or knows.

In that land all’s flat, indifferent; there
Is neither springing house nor hanging tent,
No aims are entertained, and nothing is meant,
For there are no ends, and no trends, no roads,
Only follow your nose to anywhere.
No one is born there, no one stays or dies,
For it is a timeless land, it lies
Between the act and the attrition, it
Marks off bound from rebound, make from break, tit
From tat, also today from tomorrow.
No Cause there comes to term, but each departs
Elsewhere to whelp its deeds, expel its darts;
There are no homecomings, of course, no goodbyes
In that land, neither yearning nor scorning,
Though at night there is the smell of morning.

W. R. Rodgers
Irish poet 1909-1969

The Essense of Religion

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In the following poem, Hafiz offers true wisdom into the essence of religion. And it is not about lofty theology, or philosophy, or powerful mega-churches. There is so much egotism in spirituality–such a great desire to have “great” visions of God, or attend “great” churches, or be a “great” Christian.  (Hafiz was a 14th century Persian poet!)

Becoming Human

by Hafiz

Once a man came to me and spoke for hours about
“His great visions of God” he felt he was having.

He asked me for confirmation, saying,
“Are these wondrous dreams true?”

I replied, “How many goats do you have?”

He looked surprised and said,
“I am speaking of sublime visions
And you ask
About goats!”

And I spoke again saying,
“Yes, brother – how many do you have?”

“Well, Hafiz, I have sixty-two.”

“And how many wives?”

Again he looked surprised, then said,
“Four.”

“How many rose bushes in your garden,
How many children,
Are your parents still alive,
Do you feed the birds in winter?”

And to all he answered.

Then I said,

“You asked me if I thought your visions were true,
I would say that they were if they make you become
More human,

More kind to every creature and plant
That you know.”

The Merits of Silence

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Sometimes I think God wants us to remember his admonishment, “Be still and know that I am God.” Sometimes, I think he might want to be more emphatic and tell us simply to, “Be quiet” or even, “Shut up! I don’t need to hear all of your regurgitated verbal platitudes, your obsessive jargon. Just give it a rest for a while.” And then he would offer reassurance, “Now you will get it back in due time. But for a moment in your life, take a break! As it is, this is mere chatter.”

And I fear so much of our religious communication is mere chatter, “god talk” with value similar to that of “car talk” or “sports talk” or “talking politics”—providing social grease to reassure and confirm our social connections. We do need silence from time to time and some go for years before the Silence has done its work and “the letter of the law” has become “Spirit.”

St. John of the Cross said, “Silence is God’s first language.” Rumi pithily noted, “Silence is an ocean. Speech is a river” and, “Silence is the language of God, all else is a poor translation.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote a marvelous poem about “The Habit of Perfection” part of which I will now share. Note that he emphasized that only in silence, “Where all surrenders come” will we find “eloquence.” It is Silence that gives meanings to our words and especially The Word.

Elected Silence, sing to me
And beat upon my whorled ear,
Pipe to me pastures still and be
The music that I care to hear.

Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb:
It is the shut, the curfew sent
From where all surrenders come
Which alone makes you eloquent

 

“Beastly Little Treasures” of the Heart

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“Your defects are the ways that glory gets manifested. Whoever sees clearly what’s diseased in himself begins to gallop on the way.” (Rumi)

It is not fun to acknowledge our limitations, the minor ones and certainly not the major ones. Jesus noted that it is easier to focus on the mote in someone else’s eye than pay attention to the beam in our own. But spiritual teachers throughout the centuries have taught us that staring our demons in the face, “naming them”, is the way to deliverance. But, it hurts like hell! And, if you approach spiritual literature carefully, you have to wonder if one dimension of hell is living in the anguish that lurks beneath the surface when we refuse to “name our demon.” Or to phrase it differently, hell is refusing to acknowledge the anguish of our inner torments. This deliberate ignorance of these torments does not make them go away and probably makes someone near and dear to us pay for them.

I think it was Ranier Rilke who said that the heart has its “beastly little treasures.” In one of his essays…or poems…he said that if one has the courage to confront this “beast” face to face, stare in down, he/she will discover that beneath it lies the Pearl of Great Price.