Category Archives: poetry and prose

“We wage the war we are.”

I probably use this quote from W. H. Auden more than any other, in this venue and also in my day to day life. And, yes, it is very telling for my life is, and always has been a war zone most of these sixty-three years. Of course, I carefully contained this warfare inside my canned-Christian veneer. Yeah, I kinda identify with Ben Carson!!!

Auden was an astute observer of the human heart as are all great poets. He made this poetic observation in recognition of his own conflicted heart and his poetry revealed recognition of the turmoil that rages inside the heart of all human beings. Yes, “most men live lives of quiet desperation” but Auden knew that beneath the surface of this “quiet desperation” warfare was simmering, mercifully kept under control beneath the social veneer. Well, most of the time anyway!

Why? Where does this conflict come from? Simply stated, we are spiritual beings temporarily confined within a mortal body. And, a spiritual being is infinite by definition and does not really fit inside what the philosophers call the world of “form. To illustrate, I am now so very aware of just how I want everything! I don’t want to deal with privation and on some level it even angers me! Why should I have to want anything? Who dares to get in my path at Wal Mart, or cut me off in traffic, or fail to laugh at my jokes, or scoff at my literary acumen? How dare them? On some level I have the narcissitic illusion that the world is my oyster and though I cover it up with this carefully contrived social veneer, I often catch gut-level, reptilian brain, unmitigated hunger surging in my heart. I want it all!

Though this is a literary exaggeration, it is an honest reflection of “waging the war” that I am. For, I do have these frustrations and fears and now realize I’ve had them all my life but have kept them carefully pent up, knowing that to do otherwise would not be prudent. And this “prudence” is what makes us human as without social sensitivities we would all be at war with each other literally. But at some point in our life, it is imperative that we find private venues where we can air these “grievances” about life and hopefully discover that an individual, or group of individuals, can assure us that they are fighting the same battle. I have been blessed with these venues.

The current terrorist crisis in France is an illustration of what happens when we cannot recognize our own internal warfare. Until we can own this internal conflagration, we will always see it “out there” and seek to obliterate it. “We wage the war we are” often by battling that vast category we call “them,” a convenient category comprised of those qualities of our own that we do not wish to own up to. Yes, this is true for Daesh but also for “us.”

Writing from the Heart is Costly

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“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”

This quotation from Franz Kafka speaks to deeply to my heart and explains why I have such a passion for literature that “rattles my cage” like he did. Good writing does not merely amuse, confirm one’s premises, or serve as “comfort food.” Good writing comes from the depths of the heart and speaks only to those whose heart has similar depths, hearts which simmer with the breath of Spirit and have complete disinterest with those “smooth words” which the prophet Isaiah warned against.

A social media friend of mine this morning shared a quotation of Helene Cixous which addressed this dimension of good writing. I will share a few quotes from this excerpt and then provide a link to the rest of it:

The only book worth writing is the one we don’t have the courage or strength to write. The book that hurts us (“we who are writing)” makes us tremble, redden, bleed.

Writing is the difficult, delicate, and dangerous means of succeeding in avowing the unavowable”

We go toward the most unknown and the best unknown, that is what we are looking for when we write. We go toward the best known unknown thing, when knowing and not knowing touch, where we hope we will know what is unknown. Where we hope we will not be afraid of understanding the incomprehensible, facing invisible, hearing the inaudible, thinking the unthinkable, which is of course thinking. Thinking is trying to think the unthinkable: thinking the thinkable is not worth the effort.

And I conclude with a relevant observation from W. H. Auden, who in this excerpt has the Christmas star speaking:

ll those who follow me are led

Onto that glassy mountain where are no

Footholds for logic, to that Bridge of Dread

Where knowledge but increases vertigo:

Those who pursue me take a twisting lane

To find themselves immediately alone

With savage water or unfeeling stone,

In labyrinths where they must entertain

Confusion, cripples, tigers, thunder, pain.

Control Issues and Freedom

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One of my reader’s response to yesterday’s blog has got me to thinking more about control issues and related matters. As noted yesterday, we all have control issues and address them in ways unique to our genetic, cultural, and social endowment. Hopefully our adaptation will leave us with a socially tenable persona; or, if not, one that is so “untenable” that that we don’t give a damn about the outside field of reference, basking in the comfort of some rigid ideology or cultic religion!

The latter response is what Erich Fromm had in mind half a century ago with his book, “Escape from Freedom.” Those who can’t submit their private field of reference to the external “market place” of ideas escape into the illusion of being in control but will be safe from any awareness of their dilemma. Their “freedom” is specious as hell and, indeed, might be one of the best examples we have of hell. Those who have opted to enter and confine themselves to this conflagration have found the illusory need for control so powerful that they have sold their soul. And always they will be voicing a conviction that “we are right”…usually exclusively so…to counter the deep-seated feeling that they are intrinsically wrong and even “damned.” Confinement to this narrow prism of “the right way” is the curse of death, spiritually speaking, as it reflects a deep-seated inability to self-reflect, to deign to let go of some of the very-human need to be in control, and to gently tippy-toe into the realm of a mature faith. For in the often frightening world of faith, doubts, fears, and insecurities are common.

So, why do we have such an inordinate need to be in control and thwart the heart’s natural inclination to faith? I think it stems from our unconscious “knowledge” that life is much more precarious than our tribe taught us that it was. And this tribal “fig leaf” (part of which is our persona) was very necessary just as T. S. Eliot noted with his observation, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” But if we are lucky in what Richard Rohr and Carl Jung describes as “the second half of life,” we will find the courage to slowly remove that fig leaf, tippy-toe into the nakedness that it has hidden, and learn to swim in the realm of faith. But faith, at this mature point of our life must not be the ideological regurgitation of dogma that often characterizes the first half of life. It must be a faith that, in addition to an external reference point, includes an internal reference point which is what Jesus had in mind when he told us the Kingdom is within. This faith must at some point become a faith, not only in a God who is “out there” but in the person “in here” who is “me.” It requires “The Courage to Be.” (See Paul Tillich book by same title, free on-line pdf at following link—http://www.pol-ts.com/Research_files/Source%20Material/Tillich/courageofbe011129mbp.pdf)

Embedded in our Own Thinking

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Emily Dickinson noted in one of her poems the person who “is too near himself to see himself distinctly.” This is one way of describing the human dilemma of being embedded in a private, self-referential system of thought, which can also be described as “embedded in his own thinking.” This is best illustrated in someone who merits the term “delusional” and is, perhaps, wearing a tin foil hat to keep out the rays from “out there” which are seeking to influence his mind. But it is possible to find a group of people with the same delusional way of thinking which will then provide the validation to an individual who has just ventured over into the delusional realm. The only thing that makes this group delusional is that their shared delusion is different from the delusion of the shared reality of the larger collective in which they happen to be situated.

Yes, this smacks of the demon “relativism” that I was taught to eschew in my fundamentalist youth and, yes, carried to an extreme one can find himself without any grounding and without any sense of reality and come unglued in the dark abyss of nihilism. But taking that direction is not necessary and is actually merely the easy way out, avoiding the responsibility of finding meaning in the very complicated and mysterious phenomena that we call “life.” Self-indulgent nihilism is a delightful alternative though the “delight” usually proves short-lived and is harmful to the individual and to those around him. “Meaning” is gut-level work of the heart and most people avoid it, opting for nihilism or the ready-made escape into mindless dogma.

But, discovering that we are “embedded in our own thinking” does not mean that our way of thinking and perceiving the world is inherently invalid. The discovery of this “embeddness” only opens us to considering the limitations of how we see the world and the recognition that others might…and do…see the world differently. This insight is often very painful for it makes us realize, intellectually and emotionally, our existential plight of separateness which immediately subjects us to the anguish of loneliness which culture was contrived in the first place to avoid. But this discovery simultaneously makes possible a connection we did not know was possible, one that can best be described as one of spirit/Spirit. In this realm of the Ineffable we discover the interconnectedness of the whole of life– human, animal, and plant– and even Mother Earth herself. We are “dust of the earth” just as the Bible teaches us.

Let me close with one simple illustration of how our language illustrates this embeddedness and how it shapes our view of the world. In some Eastern languages, if an individual wants to point out that he sees a book, for example, he will say, “I see the book.” But in the West, he will likely say, “I see the book.” For, here in the West, especially in my country the subject-object distinction is more pronounced which is because one of the fundamental things we learn as a child is that we are separate and distinct from the world around us. This “separateness” is important but its emphasis neglects often our inter-relatedness with others and with the world.

ADDENDUM
W. H. Auden on the “embedded thought” of the collective:

Heroic charity is rare;
Without it, 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.

Shakespeare, Jung, and the Unconscious

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Hamlet was moping about the castle one day, disgruntled and surly, the very picture of depression to those watching. Suddenly aware of the object lesson he was providing he declared, “I have within me that which passeth show. These are but the suits of woe.” Hamlet was saying, “Hey, you guys think I’m depressed. Hell, you don’t know the half of it! You think this is despair, you oughta know what’s raging down inside this ‘foul rag-and-bone shop’ of my heart.”

Shakespeare had a brilliant grasp of the human unconsciousness, that murky domain beneath the surface of life which terrorizes us into this “civilized” behavior that we call reality. In this scene Hamlet was wallowing in a despair that Shakespeare knew was beyond the grasp of words and deeds, finding faint expression…mercifully for all parties…only through behavior and words. He knew that without the gift of sublimation, the phenomena known to philosophers as “the thing-in-itself” would violently irrupt and the social body would have more to deal with than a morose malcontent moping through the castle breathing out “threatenings and slaughterings.”

The Bard knew about the terrors…and delights…of the unconscious. We don’t know the details of how he acquired this knowledge but it was not in school or books but in dealing with the daily grind of a relentless reality. And, as he went about this “daily grind” he found an ability to look into his own heart and learn what the Universe was trying to teach him then so that he could eloquently and artfully present it to us in his poetry and plays. Matthew Arnold recognized this hard-earned talent of gifted souls, noting, “The poet, in whose heart heaven hath a quicker pulse imparted, subdues that energy to scan, not his own heart, but that of man.”

But modern life does not want to recognize these subterranean depths and for good reason. It would be painful. But we ignore them at our own peril for these demons which we haunt us will always “out” in some fashion. This is currently glaringly apparent in my own country (the United States) as I watch intelligent and well-educated men and women in our Congress take ridiculous positions without even a doff of the hat to “the pauser reason” which would allow them to be more moderate in their stances.

It is important to note that these subterranean depths offers more than ugliness if we would deign to go there. Shakespeare knew very well that beauty and joy could be found there as we acknowledge and embrace what Carl Jung called our shadow. His work presaged what Ranier Rilke would note, “the heart has its beastly little treasures” which, if acknowledged and embraced, can introduce us to the refreshing breath of Wholeness which, in my spiritual tradition is called the Spirit of God.

Back in the “Flow” of Life!!!

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This ends my longest hiatus from “literarylew” in the four years I’ve been offering this verbal “deed to oblivion.” I’ve had technical problems with WP but the real “technical problems” are with the rusty technology of my heart which has spent 63 years hiding my “light under a bushel.”

For over a year now I have been immersed in the works of Carl Jung and have found it stimulating and deeply challenging. Jung did not live on the surface of things and his writings lead one into a plunge into the subterranean depths of the unconscious, a plunge which is disconcerting to say the least. On this note, I often think of the title of an Adrienne Rich book of poetry, “Diving into the Wreck” for any descent into the hoary depths of the heart is certainly like “diving into a wreck.” T. S. Eliot described it as daring to “live in the breakage, in the collapse of what was believed in as most certain and therefore the fittest for renunciation.”

Jung wrote extensively about the Christian faith, my spiritual bailiwick, and his perspective emphasized the power of myth which, if one can lay aside the comfort of biblical literalism that I grew up in, can allow one of explore the rich layers of meaning in the Judeo-Christian tradition. But this cannot be done without daring to see one’s own life as mythical, to realize that the narrative of our life is fictional in a sort, and that in this narrative there can be found a real “Presence” which is the essence of who we are. Or, as Stanley Kunitz put it, “I have walked through many lives, some of them my own. I am not the one I was, though some remnant of being remains from which I struggle not to stray.”

Jung and Kunitz grasped the dynamic nature of life, its eternal flux. Life is not static, though our ego constantly demands that we cling to a static view and experience of life even if that view and experience is devastating to ourselves and to others. When we begin to tippy-toe into the “flow” of life (i.e., the “Spirit of God”) we find the experience unnerving.

Thoughts About Identity

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Identity has always been a fascinating subject for me because, I now realize, I had such a hard time constructing one in my youth and maintaining a sense of identity through the course of my life. But I’ve always been blessed with some core sense of who I am, some basic center, which has allowed me to function well though often with self-doubt and insecurity.

A Spokane, Washington woman has just made the news with her parents exposing her duplicity of passing herself off as a black woman for years even though she is white. With her dark complexion and hair style, she has adopted “black-ness” for decades and achieved some prominence in the Afro-American community. (http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/rachel-dolezal-tried-really-hard-be-black-why?sc=fb)

This is just a fascinating story and I’m so curious about what motivated her to perpetuate this ruse when there was so much she could have done for the Afro-American cause as the intelligent Caucasian woman that she is. But she had some deep-seated need to be “black” and that this ruse has been exposed, I’m concerned for her. All of our identities are a pose in some sense and to have them suddenly torn from us, to be exposed, is to open us up to the nakedness that underlies our persona.

W. H. Auden had the following to say regarding the illusionary dimension of identity. In this poem a father is speaking to his young son:

I wish you first a sense of theater.
Only those who know illusion
And love it will go far.
Otherwise, we spend our lives in confusion
Of what to say and do with who we really are.

AFTER THOUGHT—A new development in this story answers all questions about this matter. The family now reports that Rachel had four adopted Afro-American siblings while growing up.

literary lew

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