Category Archives: poetry

favorite poetry

difference

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We tend to believe just what we want to believe.  And, then we carefully congregate with others of like mind and persuasion.  I read somewhere years ago that “our thinking is the belated rationalization of conclusions which we have already been lead to be our desires.”  So, there is our “thought system” and beneath the surface is the real “reality”, our unconscious needs and desires.

So, how can we be “objective”?  Well, we can’t.  That is the point.  We must always realize that we are not being objective and neither are “they”.  We can, then, with a little bit of luck and a strong tail wind, be a little less arrogant and a little more tolerant of difference when we run into it.  Although, we usually try to avoid difference and isolate ourself into that safe world comprised of people who think and behave just as we do.  Relevant to this, W. H. Auden onced noted, “We have made for ourselves a life safer than we can bear.”

Isolated soul

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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.

by Emily Dickinson

 

My take on this is the soul’s tendency to isolate itself, to select from the world what is most comforting to it, and to shut out the rest.  We tend to believe what we want to believe and quickly relegate everything else to a trash heap, to attribute it to “them”.

 

oriental aphorism

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“He who feels punctured must have been a bubble.”

What a concept!  And, oh my lord, have I ever been punctured so many times.!   I’m such a damn bubble.  But God’s infinite grace covers us all.

slippery slope of spirituality

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“With devotion’s visage and pious action we do sugar o’er the devil himself,” noted Shakespeare (Hamlet).  Spirituality is a perilous journey for it so easy to become “humble”, failing to recognize that one is just being smug or arrogant.  As I like to put it…and this comes from personal experience, “Humility comes hard to the humble.”  Eckhart Tolle’s concept of “egoic consciousness” is so relevant to spirituality.  And this pseudo-humility, this “devotion’s visage and pious action” usually stems from taking oneself too seriously.

If honesty intrudes on us, we will often have to admit that our spirituality is just a song-and-dance which serves the purpose of assuaging our lonliness and isolation.  It is part of the aforementioned (in an earlier post) effort to “spin a veil to hide us from the void.” (Norman O. Brown)

Read here how John Masefield summarized this matter:

 

How many ways, how many different times

The tiger Mind has clutched at what it sought,

Only to prove supposéd virtues crimes,

The imagined godhead but a form of thought.

How many restless brains have wrought and schemed,

Padding their cage, or built, or brought to law,

Made in outlasting brass the something dreamed,

Only to prove themselves the things of awe,

Yet, in the happy moment’s lightning blink,

Comes scent, or track, or trace, the game goes by,

Some leopard thought is pawing at the brink,

Chaos below, and, up above, the sky.

Then the keen nostrils scent, about, about,

To prove the Thing Within a Thing Without.

 

Truth has us

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A fundamentalist pastor in my past once quipped, “And the truth shall set you free…but first it will make you miserable.”   I still like that.  “Truth” is out there but we are so far removed from it and we carefully guard against its intrusiveness.  Hell, “Truth” when it visits just scares the hell out of us for it makes us aware of our finitude and our tendency to be utterly self-absorbed and smug.   W. H. Auden put it this way:

And truth met him,

And held out her hand;

But he clung in panic to his tall belief

And shrank away like an ill-treated child.

And, yes, I’m still “shrinking away” daily.  BUT, I do believe Truth has me….as it does us all…and it is patiently doing its work on me.  Though I don’t have “truth”, I do have confidence that “Truth” has me and has all of us.

And I conclude with the wisdom of Leonard Cohen:  Oh bless this continual stutter of the Word being made flesh.

 

meditative prayer

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I don’t think most of the prayers in my life have made it past my halo.  Most of my prayers have been mere chatter or desperate petitions for God to undo some bit of foolishness that I had trotted out.  And I’m not for sure what prayer is about, even now; but I know it is helpful, if for nothing else than a meditative effect.  “Chatter” prayer is simple, you merely trot out the usual verbiage, the usual “well worn words and ready phrases that build comfortable walls against the wilderness.”  (Conrad Aiken).  But meditative prayer is a challenge for me.  It is so hard to quieten the mind, to follow the biblical admonishment, “Be still and know that I am God.”  Shakespeare grasped the importance of the meditative dimension of prayer.  In Hamlet, King Claudius kneels in prayer and laments:

My words fly up; my thoughts remain below.

Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

 

 

 

Mary Karr and prayer

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Mary Karr has written three best selling memoirs—-Cherry, The Liars Club, Lit.  She has also written several books of poetry.  Her writings chronicle a very difficult life in a small East Texas town in the 1960’s.  Her parents were conflicted….to say the least…and she soon turned to drugs and alcohol.  Her last memoir, Lit, summarizes again her upbringing as well as her marital woes, difficulties in raising her son, and her continued descent into alcohol and drugs.  Her writing was the only thing that kept her going.  She finally “bottomed out”, as they say, and ended up in a rehab and in a 12-step group.  Recovery was very difficult for her and one of the most difficult parts of it was learning to pray.  Her sponsor told her prayer was a necessary part of the process but, having been raised in a very irreligious, even atheistic, home prayer was difficult.  As she began to pray, she prayed angrily and disrespectfully to God.  But she was honest.  She learned that she had to kneel to pray.  That too was hard.  But slowly she relented and began to pray fervently and today prayer is an essential part of her life.  She became a Catholic  One thing she learned to do, upon instruction, was to “pray the alphabet.”  This meant going down the alphabet and finding some to correspond with each letter to give things to God for.

I now “pray the alphabet” myself.  This has a meditative dimension for me, helping me to focus and helping me to meditate.  Another thing that has helped me immensely is to realize that there is not a corporally-existing deity “out there” who is listening avidly to my prayer, waiting to heed to be beck and call.  I don’t know where the prayers go but I do believe they make a difference.  I just don’t know how and I don’t need to know.  I know that spiritual leaders over the centuries have advocated prayer.  If people like Paul Tillich, Martin Buber, St. John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart….not to mention the “upper echelon” of teachers such as Jesus…then it is important to pray.  One important dimension is that it offers good energy to others and to our world.  (See Peter Begsa re quantum physics and prayer.)  And, also check out this link for an interview of Mary Karr and her struggles with prayer, the church, and spirituality as a whole:   http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/175809 .

do fish see water?

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Adrienne Rich once noted, “Until we understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves.”  In a post yesterday re a heart composed of “impenetrable stuff”, I used the psycho-analytical term of “introjections”— material that we have imbibed from the culture into which we were born and raised.  These introjections…all of which are “assumed” to be sacrosanct…comprise a template through which we view the world.  These early introjections evolve into essentially verbal chatter, or “self-talk”, which in turn tends to become almost autonomous, carrying us through our day to day life.  If this “self-talk” happens to be consistent with the world at large, or at least consistent with our little corner of the world at large, then we will function adequately and perhaps even better than that.  If, on the other hand, we have imbibed from an abusive family or from a toxic religious environment or if neuro-chemistry has dealt us an unfortunate hand,  the resulting “self-talk” can lead to maladaptive behavior patterns.

But asking someone to look at his/her “assumptions/introjections/self-talk”, is like asking a fish to see water.

“penetrable stuff”

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Hamlet, here speaking to his mother:

Leave wringing of your hands. Peace! sit you down,
And let me wring your heart; for so I shall,
If it be made of penetrable stuff;(40)
If damned custom have not braz’d it so
That it be proof and bulwark against sense.

Hamlet felt he could not communicate with his mother, that she was unreachable, because her heart was not made of  “penetrable stuff”.  He then explained why, blaming “damned custom” for having “braz’d” (or, “bronzed”)  her heart so that it be “proof and bulwark against sense” (or feeling).  Hamlet lamented that his mother had been so enculturated with the thought-forms and ideologies of the historical moment that there was nothing else there, there was not any “feeling” which is necessary if there is to be any communication.

“Damned custom” insulates us from feeling, from our bodies, and thus from experience.  In fact, it is “proof and bulwark against” feeling.  “Damned custom” is an internalized world view, an “introject” (if I might borrow a term from psychoanalysis) which serves a useful purpose in that it allows us to function in the “real” world.  The problem lies only in failing to mature at some point and realizing…and feeling…that there is another dimension to life that is being missed.

If I might make a bit of a leap, let me quote e e cummings:

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

Or, a further leap, to the words of Jesus:

“What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul, or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?”