Category Archives: poetry and prose

“Black Milk,” feminism, & depression

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I’ve read a lot of feminist literature in the past two decades, scholarly
endeavors as well as literary. Feminism was one of the powerful “isms” that the
20th century introduced and I think one of the most important of them in terms
of creating a new voice and in introducing to us the notion that new “voices”
are always in the making…or they should be if there is any “life” present in
the culture. Elif Sharak’s memoir Black Milk reflects one of these new
“voices” in Turkish culture. Sharak’s experience of becoming a new mother is
the framework of the memoir but it also delves significantly into the history of
feminism in the past century or so. She intertwines into the story line of the
memoir short vignettes of significant feminist figures in this time frame and
highlights some of the battles they fought with themselves, their romantic
partners, and their culture. She also eloquently describes her battle with a
debilitating post-partum depression.

There are many astute observations she makes in the book. I will share only
one, a piercing observation about depression which touches on faith in God. She
describes depression as, “that sinking feeling that your connection to God is
broken and you are left to float on your own in a liquid black space, like an
astronaut who has been cut loose from his spaceship and all that linked him to
Earth.”

I have read clinical tomes on the subject of depression and many of those that I
find most insightful, from a psycho-dynamic viewpoint, approach the subject of
depression as a loss, as the experience of “the lost object.” And from my own
clinical work I can note that one of the most significant signs of depression is
when a person starts breaking off connections, therefore “losing” friends, work,
family, faith…and if the downward spiral is not interrupted even life
itself. Ultimately this spiral leads to Hamlet’s famous lament, “To be or not to be,
that is the question.” These words of Shakespeare and the quotation above from
Shafak bring to my mind the famous Edvard Munch painting, The Scream. That is
one visual image of ultimate despair, the subjective experience of that
aforementioned astronaut being cut loose from his spaceship.

Turkey and Westernization

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I am reading another book by a Turkish author, this time a female, Elif Shafak. She is a popular novelist in Turkey though this particular book, Black Milk, is a memoir regarding “Writing, motherhood, and the harem within.” Earlier in my blogging life, I “held forth” re another Turkish author, Orhan Pamuk, especially his novel, The Museum of Innocence. My selection of these two authors arose from a day I was fortunate to spend in Istanbul last spring where I marveled at the beauty of their country, the kindness of their people, and the pronounced Westernization of their culture.

When I got home last spring, I quickly did some “Wiki-pedi (ing)” of Turkey and of course their famous leader from the early 20th century, Kamel Ataturk. I did further on-line reading this morning re Ataturk and am even more astounding at how he brazenly ruled that country and almost single-handedly decided to put in on the course of “Westernization.”  Incidentally, the novels of Pamuk in particular frequently allude to this transformation of his country and often evoke a sense of sadness over the loss that many people still feel in his country as a result of Ataturk’s iron-fisted, though apparently benign, rule. I think the psycho-social terms for these feelings include “anomie”, “unrootedness”, “alienation”, and “depression.”

Part of me pines for the days when a country’s leader could, by force of will (personal and political), shape the direction of his country. I think of the many good things that someone like O’Bama could do if he had the power. But that is because, of course, I’m a liberal Democrat; and if O’Bama had this power then so could the next fellow/fellow-ess. That is not the world that we live in any more. That kind of power is a thing of the past…other than in totalitarian countries of course!

Unfortunately, we are now left with a mess, a partisan political environment in which significant changes cannot be made.

Let me close with a quotation from Ataturk which reflect his pronounced Western viewpoint:

Humankind is a single body and each nation a part of that body. We must never say ‘What does it matter to me if some part of the world is ailing?’ If there is such an illness, we must concern ourselves with it as though we were having that illness.

Gosh I hope Rick Perry checks in here today.

Much to do about nothing

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I have looked for years for this version of the 11th verse from Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching. It is translated by Witter Bynner:

Thirty spokes are made one by holes in a hub,
By vacancies joining them for a wheel’s use;
The use of clay in moulding pitchers
Comes from the hollow of its absence;
Doors, windows, in a house,
Are used for their emptiness;
Thus we are helped by what is not
To use what is.

Written in the 6th century b.c., this marvelous wisdom has volumes to speak to us, though these “volumes” are qualitative, not quantitative. It is only in our emptiness that we find our fullness, in our nothingness that we find our somethingness, in our death that we find our life.  And this death can take place long before the death of our body.

Nikos Kazantzakis

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Nikos Kazantzakis was the author of The Last Temptation of Christ, Zorba the Greek, and (my favorite) the autobiographical Report to Greco.  There are so many literary treasures in Greco that I do not know where to start.  But my favorite theme of his is the role of language in quelling the beasts in the human heart.  For example, he describes the alphabet as, “26 toy soldiers that guard the rim of the abyss”.  (That is my paraphrasing.)  Here he is noting that the advent of language, individually and as a species, is a huge step in developing an identity which then separates us from the beasts of the field.

I’d like to share a note of his from the preface of Report to Greco:

THREE KINDS OF SOULS, THREE PRAYERS:

1. I am a bow in your hands, Lord.  Draw me, lest I rot.

2. Do not overdraw me, Lord.  I shall break.

3. Overdraw me, Lord, and who cares if I break?

 

 

Damn those human limitations!

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I really love e e cummings. He was just so damned contrary and here I am stuck in my plain-vanilla, humdrum life! It ain’t fair!  He didn’t even obey punctuation! How in the hell did he get by with that? His teachers must have wanted to beat his butt.

Here is one of my favorite of his poems:

WHEN GOD DECIDED TO INVENT

when god decided to invent
everything he took one
breath bigger than a circus tent
and everything began

when man determined to destroy
himself he picked the was
of shall and finding only why
smashed it into because

I really do not understand this poem. But it grabs me. The key to the poem is the limitation of the cause-and-effect world that we live in, a relic of that damned time-space continuum. And, I don’t understand that “continuum” either! Not consciously, anyway. But, I know that cummings realized the limitations that we live in and I know he must have found them very frustrating.

Ultimately, the only thing we have is “why” and that brings us face to face with the profound mystery of life. I’m made to think of Einstein’s observation that he had found that at the heart of everything was an “impenetrable mystery”, noting that this experience is what brought to his heart “religious sentiment.” I choose the term “God” but “my god”, how that term is abused.

Marilynne Robinson and the Transitoriness of life

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I have written before about one of my favorite contemporary American novelists, Marilynne Robinson. Two of her books are Housekeeping (my favorite) and Gilead for which she won a Pulitzer Prize in 2005. But she recently posted an article in The Nation entitled “Night Thoughts of a Baffled Humanist” and there demonstrated an ability to astutely address our world’s political and economic issues.

She brings what I call as cosmic perspective to the messes we are in:

Say that we are a puff of warm breath in a very cold universe. By this kind of reckoning we are either immeasurably insignificant, or we are incalculably precious and interesting. I tend toward the second view.

She sees our species as a very vulnerable creature at a very precarious point in our history. She brings to mind W. H. Auden’s description of us as creatures, “clinging to the granite skirts of our sensible old planet.” From this “cosmic perspective”, we are all “humans” and our primary identity with various and sundry nation-states is specious at best. The only way to successfully address our collective issues is to realize that we are all in the “mess” together and even more so, to borrow on old bromide, “none of us are gonna get out alive.” Therefore, our best efforts should be to work toward making this a more hospitable home for our children and for their children so that they can have even more fun in the brief moment they are allowed to cavort about on “this sensible old planet.”

Communication Perils and “Penetrable” hearts.

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“Let go of your mind and come to your senses.”  This 70’s era bromide, from Fritz Perls I think, is very astute.  Perls was encouraging us to discover our ability to forego our comfort zone—that safe cognitive haven we have created—and enter the world of sensual experience, the world of feeling.  That “cognitive haven” is the egoic consciousness that Eckhart Tolle has popularized.

And, I admit that this is easier said than done, especially for us who are so firmly ensconced in the cognitive domain.  I practice meditation but it is very hard to quiten that “monkey mind” that the Buddhists speak of—that mind that is always shrieking, chattering, and cavorting about, absolutely unable to embrace the present moment, Tolle’s “Now”.

Shakespeare recognized the need of feeling and its primacy over cognition.  In the famous scene in which his mother is compulsively wringing her hands, he admonished her to “cease wringing your hands and I will wring your heart.  And so I will if it be made of penetrable stuff, if damn custom hath not bronzed it o’er so that it be proof and bulwark against sense” (sense-experience, or feeling).  Here Shakespeare is noting how cognition, one dimension of that “damn custom”, tends to “bronze o’er” the heart and make it “impenetrable.”  When the heart is open to the feeling mode, it is full of “penetrable stuff” and communication can take place.  But when this “damn custom” or cognition predominates, there is only a robot-like exchange of data.  It makes me think of the scene in the movie Rain Man where two autistic men are engaging in a conversation.  But the “conversation” consisted of each man delivering a spiel to the other only to have the other respond with a spiel of his own, a spiel having nothing to do with the other spiel.  I’m reminded from a line from one of T. S. Eliot‘s plays, in which he describes people locked in formulaic, rote conversations as “people too strange to one another for misunderstanding.”

And note the lyrics from the beautiful Simon and Garfunkel song,  “Sounds of Silence”:

And in the naked light I saw

Ten thousand people maybe more

People talking without speaking

People hearing without listening.

And I close with the words of the Psalmist (Psalms 115:4)

They have mouths but they speak not:

Eyes have they, but they see not;

They have ears but they hear not.

 

 

Wrestling with God

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One of my favorite contemporary novelists is Marilynne Robinson.  Housekeeping is my favorite of he novels and it has been made into a movie with the same name.  It was a wonderful movie and the novel is even better.   She has also written Gilead and in that novel she made the following observation:

In every important way we are such secrets from one another, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable – which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, intraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us. (my emphasis)

It is the “spaces between us” that intrigues me and compels me.   Human culture is the contrivance that unites us, it is the “veil we spin to hide the void” (Norman Brown) but spirituality is a quest to delve deeper, to penetrate that very necessary and essential fiction of our enculturation and dance, from time to time, with the emptiness.  I insist that it is in this “emptiness” that we find our Source.  Or, better stated it is in the wrestling with that emptiness, i.e. “wrestling with God” that we find our Source.  Technically, it is not even “human culture” that unites us, it is the emptiness.  Very Zen, huh?

Cognitive arrogance

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I discourse frequently about cognition and its limitations.  This is no accident as it is very relevant to me personally.  So much of my life has been limited by various cognitive grasps of reality which only later do I discover to have been very confining and….ahem….very narcissistic.  The key is, not to attempt to discard cognition….as if that were possible in the first place…but to recognize that there is a world out there beyond our cognitive grasp of the world and that in embracing that “world out there” we become a little bit more humble and tolerant of those who look at things differently.

Here are a couple of quotes I’ve ran across recently on the subject:

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. — William James

I happen to feel that the degree of a person’s intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting attitudes she can bring to bear on the same topic. — Lisa Alther

It is in fact a part of the function of education to help us escape — not from our own time, for we are bound by that — but from the intellectual and emotional limitations of our own time. — T. S. Eliot, Unknown 

And this last one I came across 30+ years ago but just cannot remember the author.  He said, “Our thinking is the belated rationalization of conclusions to which we have already been led by our desires.”  To summarize, he was saying, “We think just what we want to think.”

Richard Rohr on ideologogy

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Following up on yesterday’s post, and on a recent post on ideology, I offer you the daily-posting of Richard Rohr:

We are all powerless, not only those physically addicted to a substance. Alcoholics simply have their powerlessness visible for all to see. The rest of us disguise it in different ways and overcompensate for our more hidden and subtle addictions and attachments, especially our addiction to our way of thinking.

We all take our own pattern of thinking as normative, logical, and surely true, even when it does not fully compute. We keep doing the same thing over and over again, even if it is not working for us. That is the self-destructive nature of all addiction, and of the mind in particular. We think we are our thinking, and we even take that thinking as utterly “true,” which removes us at least two steps from reality itself.

Addiction to our mind is subtle but its reach is incredible.  We then find ourselves failing to adhere to the wisdom of Buddha, who said, “The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.”  The “word” is not the “thing.”  Words are but pointers.  We don’t own “the Truth”.  But, this does not leaving me doubting the presence of Truth in this void, doubting only grasp of it.  Or, as said yesterday and so frequently, “We see though a glass darkly” or “we hold this treasure in earthen vessels.”