Category Archives: poetry and prose

Batter My Heart, Three Personed God

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John Donne’s famous sonnet, Batter My Heart is a tale of one man’s battle to submit to God’s will.  He writes eloquently of his own stubbornness, his innate opposition to being visited by God, even though God is the very thing that he wants most.  He laments that his reason is held captive and that he finds himself “betrothed” to God’s enemy, Satan presumably.  He presents this longed-for visitation from God as a violation.  And it even has a sexual theme to it, “Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, nor chaste, except you ravish me”.

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town to’another due,
Labor to’admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly’I love you, and would be lov’d fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy;
Divorce me,’untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you’enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

 

More “mangled guts pretending”

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Earlier in the week I quoted from Tony Kushner’s Angels in America re the difficulty, the gut-wrenching pain which can accompany change.  I would like to elucidate a bit further on this score.  Kushner concludes this description of the intense pain of change with the observation, “And then up you get.  And walk around.  Just mangled guts pretending.”  His point was that at some point in your suffering you must “get up” and “walk around” even if it involves a lot of pretending.

It is very important that we “walk around” but not in the sense of wandering around aimlessly.  It is important that we act with purpose and meaning, that we act productively, even in the midst of our suffering. This can be as simple as getting up from bed and getting the kids off to school, or cleaning the dishes, or watering the plants, or visiting a friend.  And you won’t necessarily “feel like” doing these things.  But it is imperative…if at all possible…to muster up the energy to take action.  This can be an effective antidote to the actual abyss of depression which is a debilitating inertia.

Shakespeare in Hamlet noted the importance of action.  Hamlet declared, “Assume a virtue, if you have it not.”  He then elucidates, though with Shakespearean wordiness, “That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat, of habits devil, is angel yet in this, that to the use of actions fair and good he likewise gives a frock or livery, that aptly is put on.”

And in Hamlet’s famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy he notes that great ambitions and plans are often “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought” and in the process “lose the name of action.”

Marilynne Robinson and Neediness

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One of my favorite lines from Marilynne Robinson‘s novel, Housekeeping, is, “need can blossom into all the compensations it requires”  We are by nature very needy creatures, you might even say “needful things”, and one of our tasks in life is to explore this neediness and find appropriate, adaptive compensations.

And neediness is a quality that we should not insulate ourselves from; for, it should beckon to us at times in our life and we can learn that it can be the doorway into further, more mature “compensations.”

Unfortunately, we often attach ourselves to maladaptive, immature “compensations” and it is always hard to give them up.  We are often addicted to them.  We prefer to “cling to these ills that we have, rather than to fly to others that we know not of.”  (Shakespeare, Hamlet.)

 

“mangled guts pretending”

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Playwright Tony Kushner’s HBO mini-series (2003), “Angels in America” is one of the best things I’ve ever seen on television.  Starring Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, and Emma Thompson it was a poignant portrayal of 1980’s gay culture in America as it dealt with the AIDS issue.  It was beautifully written and acted.

One of my favorite lines has to do with the question, “How do people change?”  The question is posed rhetorically in a museum and a pioneer woman mannequin comes to life and answers:

Well, it has something to do with God so it’s not very nice.  God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out…and the pain!  We can’t even talk about that.  And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn.  It’s up to you to do the stitching.  And then you up you get.  And walk around.  Just mangled guts pretending.

The point is, change is difficult.  And Kushner writes poetically and thus overstates the issue.  We all find change painful but, mercifully, not that painful!  But we prefer be-bopping through our life, mindlessly following some script that we subscribed to in early childhood, not deigning to apply “mindfulness” to our lives.  To do so inevitably exposes themes in our lives, basic assumptions, that are maladaptive to say the least.  As Adrienne Rich noted once, “Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.”

And for some, gut-wrenching change is in the cards.  “Just mangled guts pretending” is their lot.  By this, I think Kushner wrote of the excruciating pain of acting purposefully when their lives have been torn asunder by “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to” (Shakespeare, Hamlet) or some particular devastating “shock.”  It takes real to courage to act, and to act purposefully, when our lives have been torn apart.

I now have a youtube clip of the above scene:

Emptiness beckons

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We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel;

But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the wheel depends.

We turn clay to make a vessel;

But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends.

We pierce doors and windows to make a house;

And it is on these spaces where there is nothing that the usefulness of the house depends.

Therefore just as we take advantage of what is, we should recognize the usefulness of what is not.

I’ve always loved this aphorism of Lao Tzu.  It pre-dates the wisdom of Jesus who taught that only when we are empty are we filled.  Specifically, I make reference to the doctrine of kenosis, or “self-emptying” taught in Phillipians 2:7 by the Apostle Paul.  It is so difficult to take pause in our day to day life, practice a “mindful” moment, and catch a glimpse of our ego-fullness.

And once again, I quote Rilke who noted re the “hero”—- “Daily he takes himself off and steps into the changing constellation of his own everlasting risk.”

Worshipful hysteria

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Formal worship is very important.  It is often a very prosaic enterprise and should not necessarily be otherwise.  The Spirit of God can be present nevertheless, ready to respond to the beckoning of a ready heart.

But some churches don’t deign to trust the Spirit of God to do its work and set out to whip-up a spiritual frenzy.  In earlier years there was the ever-present and trusty use of hysteria.  That ruse included manipulation and even outright terror.  In modern times, many churches have gone high-tech and use “sis, boom, bah” to overwhelm its membership and get them psychologically open to manipulation.

The love of God is not present in this setting; it is not viewed as adequate to accomplish the purposes of the church.  As Shakespeare noted in Julius Caesar, “When love begins to sicken and decay, it useth an enforced ceremony.”  He then added, “There are no tricks in plain and simple faith; but hollow men, like horses hot at hand, make gallant show and promise of their mettle.”

 

self soothing strategies

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In my practice as a therapist, “self-soothing” strategies were a basic intervention that I offered.  This refers to behaviors and patterns of thought which would help the client cope more adaptively with “the thousand natural shocks which flesh is heir to.”  (Shakespeare, “Hamlet”)   These could be something as simple as saying a brief mantra from time to time, planting a flower, taking a walk, watching a favorite tv show, or preparing a special meal.

I was made aware last week how this same notion of “self-soothing” can apply to spirituality/religion.  I was at a thrift shop and encountered a person who frustrated and angered me, inducing…shall we say…unsavory thoughts.  I immediately trotted out a little contrivance that I’ve borrowed from the Buddhists—“mindfulness”—and was able to then step back from moment and recognize this evocation of feelings in my heart.  I recognized that this immediately made me feel better about myself and spared me from the orgy of shame and guilt which once would have beset me.

Now some would respond to an experience like this with a trip to the confessional or would silently (or openly) castigate himself/herself for being such a sinner.  But each of these three maneuvers is merely a “self-soothing” activity and each has its place….though I much prefer mine!  It is important to have strategies to make us feel better about ourselves, to assuage our guilt/shame over the misdeeds or errant thoughts that come daily.

 

Paradigm shifts

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An old bromide I’ve subscribed to is, “What we see is what we are.”  Anais Nin put it this way, “”We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”   And I know I’m harping on this theme but am doing so because I know it has been so helpful to me personally and I think it is very relevant to our world, especially our divided political world.  Nikos Kazantzakis in his wonderful book, Report to Greco, quotes an old Byzantine mystic, “Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes with which we see reality.”

So today, I urge each of us to just give this a try.  As we are making pronouncements upon the world, our private and our public world, let us pause for a moment and practice mindfulness.  In that pause, let us ask, “Now what does this say about me?”

And then we might have to follow the advice of T. S. Eliot and, for a moment or two, “live in the breakage, in the collapse of what was believed in as most certain, and therefore the fittest for renunciation.”
 

 

“po white trash”

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Writers spend all their time preoccupied with just the things that their fellow men and women spend their time trying to avoid thinking about. … It takes great courage to look where you have to look, which is in yourself, in your experience, in your relationship with fellow beings, your relationship to the earth, to the spirit or to the first cause—to look at them and make something of them.  (Harry Crews)

Crews was born and raised in the deep South (Georgia and Florida) and raised in abject, “po white trash” poverty. In his novels and in his biography he eloquently describes the hardship of living on the periphery of the social body, the daily struggles involved in a hand-to-mouth existence. It is grim, to say the least, and often violent He is sometimes likened to William Faulkner in this depiction of “po white trash” living. Crews and Faulkner also bring to my mind Flannery O’Connor who wrote about the same experience of the Southern dispossessed, and did so with excellence, although she did not hail from that culture.

Crews made his escape from the wretched existence that was his fate. And he did so by getting educated and discovering a facility with words. And with this literary skill he was able to depict so eloquently the alienation that he was born into, an alienation which is relevant to people from various cultures. For, alienation is not the exclusive domain of “po white trash.”

In the quotation offered above, Crews emphasized the importance of looking within, paying attention to the heart’s machinations and noted that most people don’t bother to look there. In fact, the prospect of looking there is off-putting to them, to say the least. For, to look within is to discover that the heart has its “beastly little treasures” (I think it was Auden who coined that term). And the first casual observation of this “beast” is enough to thwart any further venture into the “heart of darkness.” And, all of us have this “heart of darkness” even if we do not deign to look there. And, we don’t have to look there because we look around us and see darkness abounding, not realizing that part of that darkness out there is merely our own projection. As Karl Jung said, “What we resists persists” and does so in the form of our projections.

 

Listening

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It must have been exhilarating when we learned to talk, when we learned to assign meaning to our “these squeaks of ours” (Conrad Aiken), and to recognize that these meanings were by and large shared with others.  And even now it is very rewarding when we share something very personal, something rich in emotional valence, and intuitively know that the one listening understands.  Aiken noted, “And this is peace; to know our knowledge known.”  This is the heart of the therapeutic enterprise—being a good listener.  (And I’m made to think of the opposite of “listening”, recognized in this line from some old tv show, “You aren’t listening.  You’re waiting.”)

Hundreds of years ago, Leonardo da Vinci had profound insight into the enterprise of listening:

O cities of the sea, I behold in you your citizens, women as well as men tightly bound with stout bonds around their arms and legs by folk who will not understand your language; and you will only be able to give vent to your griefs and sense of loss of liberty by making tearful complaints, and sighs, and lamentations one to another; for those who bind you will not understand your language nor will you understand them.  (from “Of Children in Swaddling Clothes”.)