Category Archives: poetry

favorite poetry

death of the ego

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The hero is strangely close

To those who died young.

Permanence doesn’t interest him.

His dawn is his lifetime.

Daily he takes himself off

And enters the changed constellation

Of his everlasting risk.

(Ranier Rilke, Duino Elegies)

Rilke was writing of the loss of ego consciousness with the line, “Daily he takes himself off.”  And when the ego is “taken off” one can take a leap of faith into the unknown, into the “changed constellation of his everlasting risk.”  Karl Jung taught that the crucifixion was a metaphor for this death of the ego.

But the ego dies a hard death.  It fights for preservation and wins with most people.  However, I should qualify use of the term, “death”.  The ego must not be destroyed as that would lead to insanity.  What is taught by these and other spiritual teachers is that the ego needs to lose its primacy in our lives and this “loss of primacy” often feels like a death or crucifixion.

 

More “loss”

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Renunciation -- is a piercing Virtue --
The letting go
A Presence -- for an Expectation --

Emily Dickinson was a very complicated and very troubled woman.  But as she wrestled with her demons, she found words available as a solace and skillfully articulated her anguish.

In the above poem, she was wrestling with loss and risking a descent into madness.  “Renunciation” was the term she chose for rejecting the “common sense” world she lived and breathed in—a “presence”.  This “presence” can be thought of as her egoic consciousness (see Eckhart Tolle), a bit of fiction she had subscribed to which plugged her into that “common sense” world.  Norman O. Brown once noted, “The ego is a veil we spin to hide the void.”  Emily’s “veil” was precarious at best.

In another one of her poems she described this loss of egoic consciousness as “a funeral in my brain.”  And then she concluded the poem with the lines:

And then a plank in reason, broke,
And I dropped down and down–
And hit a world at every plunge,
And finished knowing–then—

Note that she “hit a world at every plunge.”  So, even though the demons of madness were besetting her, she found a world at every step and then “finished knowing—then.  Her ego survived the descent.

prayer

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I pray daily now.  One could even say that I follow the biblical admonishment and “Pray without ceasing.”  But this “praying without ceasing” is not what I used to think it was.  I do not go around compulsively praying.  My prayer is more of an attitude of prayer, of simple acknowledgement of God’s presence and an expression of gratitude for the blessings and beauty of life.  I like the Buddhist notion of “mindfulness” and this might describe what I mean by prayer.  “Mindfulness” is just paying attention from time to time at what is going on in one’s life, in one’s day to day experience.  For example, in recent weeks it has meant being “mindful” at the beauty of a yellow warbler cavorting in the underbrush on the shores of the lake, or a mockingbird sipping water from a birdbath, or a Great Blue Heron gently and elegantly patrolling his station on the lake.  It has meant being “mindful” of the first taste of coffee in the morning, or savoring a fine glass of wine, or spending time with friends—and certainly with my lovely wife.

 

Prayer has a meditative dimension.  It facilitates focus, the reining-in of a mind that is prone to wonder, of a mind that is often consumed with idle chatter.  The Bible admonishes, “Be still and know that I am God.”  The “being still” is often difficult but spiritual wisdom tells us that it is only in primordial stillness that we can acknowledge our Source.  Gerard Manley Hopkins noted:

 

ELECTED Silence, sing to me

And beat upon my whorlèd ear,

Pipe me to pastures still and be

The music that I care to hear.

 

Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb:       

 5 It is the shut, the curfew sent

From there where all surrenders come

Which only makes you eloquent.

 

 

licensed parents?

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Someone once said, “We rattle the world for our babies.”  That poet recognized the collective effort in bringing babies into the world and implied that these “gifts” belong to all of us, not just to the individual parents. That is not, of course, to disregard the obvious—that children are the charge of their individual parents, at least in most cultures.  It is to recognize that we have a collective responsibility to make the world an hospitable place in which these precious “coins” can take root and begin to explore the world.

I am appalled how what wretched circumstances so many babies are born into.  And I’m talking about our culture, not just third world, undeveloped countries.  Sometimes in exasperation I exclaim, “We need to license parents!”  There are people who are wholly unprepared to become parents but there is nothing to stop them and as a result young children are born into and raised in horrible circumstances.  What is the solution?   I don’t really know.  I am pleased with the creation of pre-school programs decades ago.  These programs represent some effort offering a ray of hope for some of these children..

 

orhan pamuk

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Pamuk is a Turkish author who was born in 1952 and has published multiple novels which are available in English.  I’ve read two of them, The Museum of Innocence,  and Istanbul.  Of the two, Museum is my favorite.  He eloquently captures the angst that has characterized Turkish culture the past 100 years as they deal with the issue of Westernization forced upon them by Attaturk.  Museum is a love story but I did not value it so much for that as for his ability to capture the pulse of his country as it wrestled with new values and liberties.  There was, however, a pervasive sadness that came across which probably always accompanies a culture that has had its religion and value-system brought into question.

I recently spent about 27 hours in Istanbul and found it a lovely city.  I loved its tavernas—–a popular beer Effes and the historic raki.  And its people were wonderful.  Also, tulips were abounding at that point, in late April.  They were spectacular.  Here is one picture I captured of the tulips.

essential oils

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In the aforementioned John Masefield sonnet, he noted “the straitened spirit’s possibility.”  He posited the notion that when the human spirit is “straitened”, or undergoes adversity, it is possible to discover hidden dimensions of life, dimensions of life which empower the individual to soar, “to stream our fiery hour like a comet.”  Emily Dickinson also knew the value adversity:

 

Essential Oils—are wrung—
The Attar from the Rose
Be not expressed by Suns—alone—
It is the gift of Screws—

The General Rose—decay—
But this—in Lady’s Drawer
Make Summer—When the Lady lie
In Ceaseless Rosemary

By the “gift of screws” she was using the image of an old screw press, in which rose leaves were pressed between plates of steel which were tightened together by turning screws.  Thus the essence of the rose was extruded.  She was speaking from experience, that when life’s difficulties weigh down on us it is often possible that “essential oils are wrung.”  She was saying that when “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir too” (Shakespeare/Hamlet) become overwhelming, we should maintain hope that from this moment something could might follow.

 

 

the “glib and oily art”

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In his play, King Lear, Shakespeare noted the “glib and oily art, to speak and purpose not.”  Words are usually trotted out….yes, glibly…and that is fine.  Words are the currency of any particular culture.  If we had to sit down and ponder re the meaning of what we were about to say, then our culture would quickly disintegrate into a morass of self-contemplation, “navel gazing.”  But the problem is that often people never into their entire life get beyond “the glib speech of habit, well-worn words and ready phrases that build comfortable walls against the wilderness.”   (Conrad Aiken).  We are often verbal auto-matons, offering the appropriate “words and phrases” for the various circumstances in our life.  We then fail to ever offer an authentic word, a word spoken from the heart.  We fail to acknowledge the wisdom of Shakespeare in the concluding lines of King Lear, “The weight of this sad time we must obey, speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.”  It is sad to realize that many people…..most people…never speak an authentic “feeling” word.  Even more so it is so sad to realize that our culture is set up to prevent authenticity, it depends on people trotting out those “well worn words and ready phrases.”  We are fortunate to live in a culture where there is some freedom to individual expression, in spite of the weight of socio-economic pressure, in spite of social regimentation.

shakespeare sonnet

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SONNET 146 by William Shakespeare

Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,
(Thrall to) These rebel powers that thee array;
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? is this thy body’s end?
Then soul, live thou upon thy servant’s loss,
And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more:
So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,
And Death once dead, there’s no more dying then.

 

Shakespeare said it all.  No one has grasped the human psyche like that man.  Here he echoed the words of Jesus, who once posed the question, “What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul?”  Shakespeare recognized that there is a center, a quiet place, which often goes without notice.  It is a place which is largely not recognized by our current culture.  We are busy compulsively “painting our outward walls so costly gay”, ignoring the admonishment to, “Within be fed, without be rich no more.”  We are guilty of the sin of misplaced concreteness, taking for real what is only ephemeral.  And the price tag for this is a loss of perspective, a missing connection with the spiritual dimension which alone gives life meaning.  John Masefield noted, “We chase the shade, and let the real be.”

 

Here is the Masefield sonnet:

 

Man has his unseen friend, his unseen twin,

His straitened spirit’s possibility,

The palace unexplored he thinks an inn,

The glorious garden which he wanders by.

It is beside us while we clutch at clay

To daub ourselves that we may never see.

Like the lame donkey lured by moving hay

We chase the shade but let the real be.

Yet, when confusion in our heaven brings stress,

We thrust on that unseen, get stature from it,

Cast to the devil’s challenge the man’s yes,

And stream our fiery hour like a comet,

And know for that fierce hour a friend behind,

With sword and shield, the second to the mind.

 

why do i do this?

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Well, as noted in the book of Job…and I paraphrase…”my belly is full of words.  It is like a full wines-skin, about to burst.”  Or, to borrow a line from Shakespeare, I “unpack my heart with words.”  This is in some part a therapeutic effort.  I do believe it is helpful to open the heart and offer a verbal “deed to oblivion” (to paraphrase t.s. eliot).  And oblivion is no where more available in our culture than the internet.