Category Archives: poetry and prose

Quelling our “howling appetites”

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Our life task is calming the savage beast that lives within, that dimension of life which W. H. Auden described as, “our howling appetites.” This is a battle that we fight individually and collectively. As a nation, for example, we should ask, “How can we satisfy our hunger without becoming rapacious?” And with our colonial past, we definitely have a history of rapacity as does most of the rest of the “developed” world.

The 8th century Indian poet Shantideva put it this way:

Where would I possibly find enough leather
With which to cover the surface of the earth?
But (just) leather on the soles of my shoes
Is equivalent to covering the earth with it

Likewise it is not possible for me
To restrain the external course of things
But should I restrain this mind of mine
What would be the need to restrain all else?
(Shantideva)

The writer of Proverbs captured the truth in these two verses, “He that hath no rule over his own spirit is like a city that is broken down, and without walls” (25:28); and, “He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city” (25:28)  Or, as someone else has said, “We can’t change the world, but we can change the eyes through which we view the world.”   And I conclude with my oft-quoted word from Auden, “We wage the war we are.”

D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterly, and “The Fall”

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When I first discovered D. H. Lawrence, my intent was pornographic! And, “Lady Chatterly’s Lover” fulfilled that ambition and would do the same for any young man today of similar inclination! BUT, I’ve since then discovered that it is a fine piece of literature, reflecting DHL’s astute, elegant grasp of the human condition. Here is an observation he made in one of the early versions of “Chatterly”:

Oh what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and equinox! This is what is the matter with us. We are bleeding at the roots because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of Life, and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table. It is a question, practically, of relationship. We must get back into relation to the cosmos and the universe. The way is through daily ritual, and the re-awakening, the ritual of dawn and noon and sunset, the ritual of kindling fire and pouring water.

I think the detachment Lawrence noted here is one dimension of “the fall” of the book of Genesis. We fell, or were banished, from Eden and by the nature of life are cut off from our Source. Thus, one could say that we are “lost.” Being “found”, i.e. “getting saved”, involves rediscovering our body and nature and its connection the universe; and this whole experience is the process of relating again to our Source.

 

Rabindranath Tagore’s Prayer for His Country

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Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls; whee words come out from the depth of truth;where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection; where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action–into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

This beautiful prayer from the thoughtful Indian artist/poet/musician of the early 20th century reflects such wisdom and insight about the human predicament.  I really liked that thought about the “stream of reason” needing to not “lose its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit.”  Reason is such a gift but it can sure be misused and often is; in fact, usually is.  When reason is devoid of Spirit, “dead habit” always takes over and we then become arrogant, overbearing, and even violent.  This reminds me of a word of caution from W. H. Auden re the peril of “mere habits of affection freezing our thoughts in their own inert society.”  And then Goethe noted, “They call it Reason, using light celestial, just to outdo the beasts in being bestial.”

 

Confirmation Bias and Epistemic Closure

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I learned a new word today…or pair of words—“epistemic closure.” Julian Sanchez used this term two years ago in conjunction with another term I recently learned and shared here—“confirmation bias.” To summarize, this refers to the human tendency to choose to believe what we want to, seek confirmation for that perspective, and shut out anything contrary. (See Sanchez’ observation at: http://www.juliansanchez.com/2010/04/07/epistemic-closure-technology-and-the-end-of-distance/)

Sanchez noted also that this is a human problem and not the exclusive province of any group or any ideology. But he did opine that it appeared to be a particularly egregious problem with the conservative movement in our country at that time; and, he would certainly agree that the problem is much worse in the intensity of this election campaign. This is becoming even more obvious in the past week, with Mr. Romney experiencing an hiccup in the polls, and the conservative press attacking the polls themselves, even Fox News.

The problem with this view of reality is the insularity. Feedback from the outside is discouraged and even in the greatest extremes forbidden. This always leads to madness. No, I’m not saying the conservative movement is mad; but I am saying there is madness on its extremes and these extremes have had too much influence on them. Even Karl Rove himself dismissed these extremists as “the nutty fringe.”

Emily Dickinson knew something about an insular life and her adaptation to this anguish was poetry. Here is an example:

The soul selects her own society,
Then shuts the door;
On her divine majority
Obtrude no more.
Unmoved, she notes the chariot’s pausing
At her low gate;
Unmoved, an emperor is kneeling
Upon her mat.
I’ve known her from an ample nation
Choose one;
Then close the valves of her attention
Like stone.
The image of closing “the valves of her attention” is intense and vivid, cold and brutal. The person who does this has shut out the world and, like Hamlet, retreated “to a nutshell” and there comforts himself in “being king of infinite spaces.” Mental illness is a reference problem. When we have closed off all reference to the outside world, we are nuts. And on that note, Hamlet asked, “What is it to be mad but nothing else but mad?”

 

The elusive captivity of Truth

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Several days ago I quoted a Carl Sandburg poem about the elusiveness of Truth, a poem which concluded with, in fact, “My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive in the universe.” (I will quote the whole poem again shortly.)

I’m captivated with the notion that Truth is an “elusive captive.” Sandburg recognized that Truth is a process that is always underway, that it is always present, but it always eludes our grasp when we attempt to own it. This makes me think of something Roland Barthes (I think) said, referring to someone who is “in love with the thing which recedes from the knowledge of it.”

Jesus said, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness.” He did not say, “Blessed are those who find righteousness.” The “blessedness” comes as we hunger and thirst for that elusive prize, desperately seeking to own it, only to realize at some point in our life that there is no need to fret and stew, there is only the need to surrender to it. There is only the need to realize that, though we don’t have Truth, it (He) has us and is at work in our lives.

We learn to live with the anxiety of “not-knowing” as with the gift of faith we confidence (and hope) that we are Known. We then proceed with the task of “working out our own salvation with fear and trembling” (i.e. anxiety and doubt).

Yes, this elusive Truth is actually a captive! We have it and always have had it. We can’t escape it though we can escape its efficacy in our day to day life by desperately trying to avoid the doubt without which faith is not possible. We can opt for a specious certainty which is only a delusional system.

WHO AM I?
My head knocks against the stars.
My feet are on the hilltops.
My finger tips are in the valleys and shores of universal life.
Down in the sounding foam of primal things I reach my hands and play with pebbles of destiny.
I have been to hell and back many times.
I know all about heaven, for I’ve talked to God.
I dabble in the blood and guts of the terrible.
I know the passionate seizure of beauty
And the marvelous rebellion of man at all signs reading, “Keep off.”
My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive in the universe.

Carl Sandburg & “The Passionate Seizure of Beauty”

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I live and I write on the surface of things. My heart yearns to swim in the depths of life’s mysteries but that does not appear to be my calling. I know about these mysteries but I know about them with detachment; or, to borrow a line from Hamlet, I “stand in the rear of my affection, out of the shot and danger of desire.” I am not diminishing myself. I am what I am. Or, as Popeye put it, “I yam what I yam!”

But as I meet dear friends in the blog-o-sphere, I deeply admire those of you who have such creative power and can write with such elegance and poetic brilliance. You are at home in the “sounding foam of primal things”, you “dabble in the blood and guts of the terrible”, and you know “the passionate seizure of beauty.” These lines are borrowed from a Carl Sandburg poem which I now share:

WHO AM I?

My head knocks against the stars.

My feet are on the hilltops.

My finger tips are in the valleys and shores of universal life.

Down in the sounding foam of primal things I reach my hands and play with pebbles of destiny.

I have been to hell and back many times.

I know all about heaven, for I’ve talked to God.

I dabble in the blood and guts of the terrible.

I know the passionate seizure of beauty

And the marvelous rebellion of man at all signs reading, “Keep off.”

My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive in the universe.

Boundaries and “I and Thou”

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On Friday a man in New York City demonstrated his belief that we are one with nature by jumping into a lion pit, explaining afterward that he wanted to be “one with the lions.” Well, he almost accomplished this purpose as one of them proceeded to chew on him.

I also feel that boundaries are a nebulous construction and that we do need to realize that we are one with the world, with the animal world, physical world, and the human world. But we must never carry it to the extreme that he did and will do so only at our great peril.

One dimension of this “object separateness” issue is drawing the social distinction between “me and thee.” Where do I end and you begin? If I err on either extreme there will be major psychopathology. In the early months of our lives we begin the process of formulating a “me” (and ego identity) and if this task is impaired, our life will be very challenging. But if our “me” is defined too rigidly, it will also pose problems. Ideally, it will have an age-appropriate rigidity at first, a rigidity which can be relaxed with maturity so that our “me” can recognize that the distinction between “me and thee” is not as rigid as the social contract would have one believe.

Martin Buber wrote a marvelous book about the process of discovering this boundary subtlety—I and Thou. He also delved into the spiritual nature of the process of making this discovery and the spiritual nature of life itself. Our Source, he suggested, is found only in the “In-Between”, in that space between “I” and “Thou”, in what Deepak Chopra terms “the gap.”

Here is a marvelous poem by Edgar Simmons about this matter:

THE ART OF BROTHER KEEPING

the instant you can

accept the colon

you are christenened

in the right compromise

that no things are alike

but are related.

the greatest

the necessary

the most powerful leap of metaphor

is when I decide

I am you

the result is

a birth

a

metaphysical differentiation

carried out and on

not in flesh but in spirit–

prophetic fact in time

more than children of our flesh.

Intense emotions and surrendering

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E e Cummings said, “since feeling comes first, he who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you.” Adrienne Rich noted, “When we enter touch, we enter touch completely.”
These two poets knew a lot about intense emotion, intense feeling. They knew a whole lot more about it than I do which is the reason they write poetry and I can’t manage to do it. The best I can do is quote the poetry of others! When I met my wife, I was always quoting poetry everywhere I went, and at one point she quipped, “Mad Arkansas hurt you into other people’s poetry.” (She was alluding to a line from W. H. Auden about W. B Yeats, “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.”)
The following poem by Marriane Moore is about intense feeling also and she concludes that “he who feels strongly behaves.” So often intense feeling is associated with dissolute behavior and emotions run amok. And, that has its place. But, I do feel that “he who feels strongly (can) behave.”
And, another important point she makes, “in its surrendering, finds its continuing.” It is so important to surrender, to give up. And one of these days, perhaps, I will find the humility to accomplish this sublime task:
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,
encourages 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,

Confirmation Bias and Emily Dickinson

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A friend recently introduced me to the concept of “confirmation bias” which refers to the human tendency to accept into his/her reality only that which is consistent with a pre-existent bias. In other words, we see things as we want to see them. We see only the “small bright circle of our consciousness beyond which lies the darkness.” (Conrad Aiken). Decades ago I read someone’s observation, “Our thinking is the belated rationalization of conclusions to which we have already been led by our desires.”

Now, of course, being a mere mortal I would like to say that this no longer applies to me, that I have gone a step further and see things clearly, that I see things objectively. But I’ve afraid that I can no longer “lay that flattering unction to my soul” (Hamlet, to his mother). This is a human problem and we cannot escape it. We only see things through a prism, we do not see things objectively.

But, if we understand this notion, it can humble us a bit and we can be a bit less arrogant about our certainties, we can be a bit more accepting of people who are different than us. We might even be a bit more accepting of people who respond to this notion with a blank, bewildered stare!

Emily Dickinson wrote a poem about this tendency to construct our reality and then shut out everything else:

The soul selects her own society,
Then shuts the door;
On her divine majority
Obtrude no more.
Unmoved, she notes the chariot’s pausing
At her low gate;
Unmoved, an emperor is kneeling
Upon her mat.
I’ve known her from an ample nation
Choose one;
Then close the valves of her attention
Like stone.

We do tend to “close the valves of (our) attention like stone” and shut out any further feedback from the world. “My mind is made up. Don’t confuse me with facts.”  This is called insanity.

 

St Augustine Opines on Being and Nothingness

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St. Augustine and I are pals!  I never would have thunk it!  This is a profound observation about the majesty of God and his creation.  (This was posted this morning on (http://lowellsblog.blogspot.com/)  By the way, I intend to do a better job of giving credit for where I “steal” some of this stuff!

 

My brothers and sisters, where does time go? The years slip and slide past us, day by day. Those things which were, no longer are; those things yet to come, are not here. The past is dead; the future is yet to come, but only to pass away in turn. Today exists only for the moment in which we speak. Its first hours are already over and behind us, the remainder do not as yet exist; they are still to come, but only to fall into nothingness.

Nothing in this world has constancy in itself. The body does not possess being; it has no permanence. It changes with age; it changes with time and place; it changes as a result of sickness or accident. The stars have as little consistancy; they are always changing in hidden ways, they go whirling into outer space. They are not stable, they do not possess being.

Nor is the human heart any more constant. How often it is disturbed by various conflicting thoughts and ambitions! How many pleasures draw it, one minute this way, and the next minute, that way, tearing it apart! The human spirit, although endowed by God with reason, changes; it does not possess being. It wills and does not will; it knows and does not know; it remembers this but forgets that. No one has unity of being in himself.

After so much suffering, disease, difficulties and pain, let us return humbly to God, to that one Being. Let us enter into that heavenly Jerusalem, that city whose citizens share in Being itself.
Augustine,Commentary on Psalm 121 (Hebrew Ps. 122); CCSL 40, pp. 1801-3; quoted by Robert Atwell,Celebrating the Seasons, Canterbury, 1999, p.416

Lowell