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Political Hearts “Seared with a Hot Iron”

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Yesterday I watched  the House of Representatives select committee investigation of the Insurrection of Jan. 6, 2001.  Four police officers who were on the front line in defense of the the Capitol and our Congress that day offered graphic testimony augmented by terrifying videos of the event.  Yet this assault on our country has been dismissed my many members of the Republican Party, one of them even arguing that the Democrats are exaggerating a simple group of tourists touring the White House on that day in early January. This hearing graphically portraye  the grave threat that our country faced on that day…and is still facing as the Trumpian voice on display that day is still being defended by many Republicans.

Yet, even with this display of the evidence, Trumpian diehards in Congress and in our nation are not and will not be moved by what they are witnessing  This brings to mind sermon fodder of my youth, “hearts seared with a hot iron” (2 Timothy) describing people whose hearts were refusing the wisdom and Grace of God.  Hearts that are “seared” with this hot iron are endungeoned by the preconceptions and biases they have gleaned from a life experience which they found very painful and terrifying. The infantile anguish that we all harbor will tyrannize people like that and not allow them to permit the “pauser reason” to intervene and restrain themselves from acting out, emotionally and behaviorally; they are then merely the “toy of some great pain.” (Auden) Then this morning I learned the the Senate Minority leader, Mitch McConnel and his lieutenant Keven McCarthy said they had not even watched the hearings.  And conservative media has dismissed the capital policemen as mere “crisis actors” and insisting still that the violence of that day was being exaggerated. Several months ago through my blogging life I discovered a young Pakistani woman, Hibah Shabkez, who graphically and poignantly captured this “searing” and the resulting obstinate defiance with a brilliant perspective on its origin:

When you touch the edge of something hot—a frying-pan, a clothes-iron—you gasp and flinch away, before the knowledge, before the shock and the hurt and the searing of flesh. Locked in the thumping of your heart then, there is the secret triumph of assault successfully withstood, the inexpressible comfort of knowing it could not and cannot hurt you because you did and can again make it stop. But the drenching heat of liquid cannot be flung off, only sponged and coaxed away from the skin. And so they say doodh ka jala, chhaachh bhi phook phook kar peeta hai. (Urdu translation, “Once bitten, twice shy.”) It doesn’t take all men, you see, it takes only one; and just so, it takes only one vile lie to break a language’s heart.

When first you write a lie, a real lie and not simply a truth incognito, whether it be falsehood or treacherous half-truth, language recoils from you in pain, vowing never to trust you with words again. But if you must go on writing lies, for money or grundy-respect, seize the language and let it feel the sting and the trickling fear of the skin parting company with the flesh, over and over and over again, as you hold it unscreaming under the current. You must let body and mind and heart and soul be quite maimed then, until there is no difference left for any of them between truth and lie, between the coldness of lassi (urdu–”buttermilk”) and the heat of milk-tides rising from the saucepan. Thereafter you may plunder with impunity all of language and force it to house your lies. And if you will never again find words to tell a truth in, it will not matter, for you will have no truths left to tell. (https://nightingaleandsparrow.com/scarzone/)

The Unintended Consequences of Safety

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“We have made for ourselves a life safer than we can bear,” said W. H. Auden.  Life is a risky business and being human we have to deal with the competing needs for safety and risk, “risk” often being necessary when change is called for.  My clinical practice often addressed clients who were “making themselves a life safer than they could bear” or the other extreme, risk-taking run amok.  Those who were facing the challenges of too much “safety” usually involved cognitive behavioral therapy, my clinical task being to bring attention to maladaptive thinking patterns that had left them entrapped.  A common situation on that note was what clinicians call, “The Tyranny of the Shoulds” which left the individual wrapped up in a maze of, “You should do this” or “you should do that” or “you should not do this or that.”  The clinical quip was to tell the client, “Stop ‘shoulding” on yourself.”

The following cartoon beautifully illustrates the danger of hyper-concern for safety:

Dostoyevsky, Intensity, and Creativity

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I exist.  In thousands of agonies–I exist. I’m tormented on the rack—but I exist though I set alone in a pillar–I exist!  I see the sun, and if I don’t see the sun, I know it’s there.  And there is a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there.  Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Dostoyevsky was aware.  He was conscious. And thus he was torn between the twin poles of human existence, being and non-being, presence and absence. The rending of the soul in this existential dilemma is described by French psychoanalyst, Julia Kristeva, as a “tearing” from an unconscious matrix that an individual has not been able to face. Dostoyevsky lived in that existential crisis his whole life which contributed to his literary greatness.

Every human being carries this same intensity in the depths of their heart, but most of us have it “filtered” into a socially permissible abeyance.  Oh, what would we do without those “fig leaves” in our Garden of Eden experience!  This intensity also makes me recall a joke by a very bizarre stand-up comedian, Emo Phillips.  In his routine, he once asked, “Hey, you ever been in a chair, and you lean back…just a bit too far…and you realize that you are about to fall backward?  Remember that feeling you got in your gut at that moment? I feel that way all of the time!”  I don’t feel that way “all the time”;  but I do live with the intensity that Phillips was joking about and that drove Dostoyevsky to explore the human soul for us. There are times I do wish that back in 1951-52 when God was putting me together he’d have given me a brand new “fig leaf” and not the “factory-second” that I’ve had to cope with!

Naomi Shihab Nye Poem on Kindness

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Naomi Shihab Nye is one of my favorite contemporary poets. Here her poem, “Kindness,” is offered as an oral presentation by the author and I will offer the text following a few words. The poem is elegant and profound with its utmost simplicity, letting me appreciate how kindness is offered in the things which we take for granted. It is the kindness afforded by life itself, often through other people, which we will not miss until we lose them or are faced with their loss. And I’m saddened to reflect back on missed opportunities to offer this kindness and failed to appreciate when it was being proffered to me.

Before you know what kindness really is
   you must lose things,
   feel the future dissolve in a moment
   like salt in a weakened broth.
   What you held in your hand,                    5
   what you counted and carefully saved,
   all this must go so you know
   how desolate the landscape can be
   between the regions of kindness.
   How you ride and ride                         10
   thinking the bus will never stop,
   the passengers eating maize and chicken
   will stare out the window forever.
 
   Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
   you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho  15
   lies dead by the side of the road.
   You must see how this could be you,
   how he too was someone
   who journeyed through the night with plans
   and the simple breath that kept him alive.           20
 
   Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
   you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
   You must wake up with sorrow.
   You must speak to it till your voice
   catches the thread of all sorrows                 25
   and you see the size of the cloth.
 
   Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
   only kindness that ties your shoes
   and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
   only kindness that raises its head                 30
   from the crowd of the world to say
   It is I you have been looking for,
   and then goes with you everywhere
   like a shadow or a friend.
        

The Cathartic Power of Language

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Another one of my “girlfriends” has shaken me out of my literary doldrum!  One of them, Emily Dickinson, often does this but this morning a contemporary girlfriend, Julia Kristeva, has intervened.  Kristeva is a Bulgarian-born linguist and psychoanalyst, educated in France and now practicing in Paris.  Upon awakening, for some reason I plucked from my bedside bookshelf, “Black Sun:  Depression and Melancholia” and opened it to a bookmark from earlier readings and found the following observation:

Once solitude has been named, we are less alone if words succeed in infiltrating the spasm of tears—provided they can find an addressee for an overflow of sorrow that had up to then shied away from words.

Or as George Eliot put it in the 19th century, “Speak words which give shape to our anguish…”

Oh, the power of language!  I now realize that in my early youth when I discovered language I had found my home, a sacred domain which provided an haven from the morass of poverty and incest of my culture.  And in my clinical training and practice I often witnessed the power of words being discovered by my clients…often with my facilitation…allowing them to “name the demons” that were haunting them. Leonardo Da Vinci realized this power of language in 15th century Italy, telling us:

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. Leonardo da Vinci, from “Of Children in Swaddling Clothes”.

“Palimpsest: The Deceitful Portrait” by Conrad Aiken

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I chat via phone with a very gifted writer from New York City who lived here in Taos, New Mexico until about two years ago. This “confab” that we have bi-weekly is one of the most spiritually invigorating experiences I have in my life. She is writing an essay now on eidetic memory which brought to my tangentially-oriented mind the word “palimpsest.” And this, in turn, brought that same “tangentially-oriented” mind to the poet who introduced me to that term decades ago when I discovered the poet, Conrad Aiken.

A biographical note is in order. Aiken was born to a 1889 to a respected Savannah, Georgia physician and eye surgeon and his wife, the daughter of a prominent Massachusetts Unitarian minister. When he was eleven years of age, one morning he heard two gun shots ring out in his home and discovered that his father had shot his mother and then himself.. You can imagine the terror that gripped him. I share this anecdote because of a note that W.H. Auden made in a poem about William Butler Yeats, “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.” For that murder-suicide to have happened, you can only imagine the madness the reigned in Conrad’s household and certainly “hurt” Conrad into poetry also.

Here I wish to share a bit of an Aiken poem, followed by a link to the entire poem. It begins with how we “walk through many lives” and carry a bit of each of them with us as we constellate an identity. With the resulting synthesis we “see but the small bright circle of our consciousness, beyond which lies the dark this powerful poem, Aiken explores the intricacies of identity, the art of subterfuge inherent in daily life, the sadness, the narcissism, the disappointment, and the courage we find to carry on before the taunting of despair:

And, as it is with this, so too with all things.
The pages of our lives are blurred palimpsest:
New lines are wreathed on old lines half-erased,
And those on older still; and so forever.
The old shines through the new, and colors it.
What’s new? What’s old? All things have double meanings,—
All things return. I write a line with passion
(Or touch a woman’s hand, or plumb a doctrine)
Only to find the same thing, done before,—
Only to know the same thing comes to-morrow. . . .

If this poem speaks to you in the least, I encourage you to follow the link provided as it is a deeply moving poem from the heart of a poet full of very intense emotion with consummate skill is conveying his heart’s sentiments.

http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/conrad_aiken/poems/441

I’ve Been a Worm Eating Grapes, And Still Am!

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And I fear I’m not though with that dim-sighted lot in life. It is so hard to “stop and smell the roses” (song by Mac Davis, link follows) if you have been busy paying attention the “ruck and reel that teases sight.” Rumi had insight, a degree of which I’m pining for:

There’s a worm addicted to eating grape leaves.Suddenly, he wakes up, call it grace, whatever, something wakes him, and he’s no longer a worm. He’s the entire vineyard, and the orchard too, the fruit, the trunks, a growing wisdom that doesn’t need to devour. Rumi

https://www.google.com/search?newwindow=1&client=safari&channel=iphone_bm&sxsrf=ALeKk01v0vwCgpjPlHcnMyOf14q8_6kpyQ%3A1612823946426&source=hp&ei=ir0hYOv0Fov9-gSFr5KYDw&iflsig=AINFCbYAAAAAYCHLmjdRyTDKFkRKcTFAqoI6M6XH8Wlv&q=mac+davis+stop+and+smell+the+roses&gs_ssp=eJzj4tFP1zcsNM2qKjMyKzFg9FLKTUxWSEksyyxWKC7JL1BIzEtRKM5NzclRKMlIVSjKL04tBgCcahER&oq=mac+davis+stop+and+sme&gs_lcp=CgZwc3ktYWIQARgAMgUILhCTAjICCC4yAggAMgYIABAWEB4yBggAEBYQHjIGCAAQFhAeMgYIABAWEB4yBggAEBYQHjoHCCMQ6gIQJzoECCMQJzoECC4QJzoFCAAQkQI6BQguEJECOggILhDHARCjAjoECAAQQzoECC4QQzoOCC4QxwEQrwEQkQIQkwI6CgguEMcBEKMCEEM6BwguEEMQkwI6CwguEMcBEK8BEJECOggILhDHARCvAVCdJli7V2DSd2gBcAB4AIABhwOIAdghkgEIMC4xNC42LjKYAQCgAQGqAQdnd3Mtd2l6sAEK&sclient=psy-ab

(The obscure quote, “ruck and reel”….google John Masefield if your are curious)

Trapped Inside,”A Life Safer Than We Can Bear”

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This cartoon made me think of the W. H. Auden wisdom, “We have made for ourselves a life safer than we can bear.” Auden knew that it is mentally healthy to take care of oneself, to maintain diligence about his own safety and welfare but that this precaution could easily go beyond the pale and create a dungeon, or a cage for oneself. There is a certain amount of risk in being human; after all we are physically and emotionally vulnerable and we are daily exposed to circumstances, socially and even physically where others wish us harm. Yes, growing a “thick skin” with firm ego boundaries is important but even this evolutionary tendency can go beyond the pale when beneath the surface we have not resolved the need for establishing a certain autonomy in life. Finding this autonomy, and its concomitant authenticity, will equip us to withstand even the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” making the cage unnecessary.

It is common also for a group to become trapped in a self-imposed prison, or “cage.” There they “hunker down” inside the cocoon of their belief system and wallow in the squalor of, “Why do they hate us so much?” when only a blip of self-awareness would answer the question. But the fear-base of a cultic group of this sort can only intensify their resolve to fight on, knowing that “right” or even “God” is on their side. The tighter the coil of their mindset becomes, the greater the likelihood of violence, on self and/or others.

This process, individually or collectively, is just “another day at the ranch” for an ego. We all have one and it is an incredible accomplishment to gain a degree of awareness to the point that we can daily watch it ply its trade in our heart…or at least try to. There is, in a sense, nothing “wrong” with this; it is just part of the “human-ness” that each of us is blessed/cursed with. This awareness is related to humility but only if this “humility” can achieve what I call “humility-ization” which makes this otherwise “accomplishment” a simple experience in the warp and woof of our daily life, and never a “fait accompli.”

Poetry and Me

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I have spent more than three decades immersed in poetry, always that of others. I can’t write my way out of a paper bag as far as poetry goes. I know a few poets, and read of many more, and I think that what separates me from them is that they swim in, cavort in the cauldron of poetry and emerge to put it into words for people like me. I look down into that same cauldron but am not “man enough” to “dive into the wreck,” hoping that I will arise with poetry in my mouth and hand. I’m not complaining or bemoaning any fate of mine. I love poetry and deeply appreciate the gift it has been to my life.

Here is a poem by Susan Howe which came to me via a poet friend of mine this year. Susan and her sister Fanny are two wonderful poets of our day though Fanny departed not long ago. This poem of hers is entitled, “from My Emily Dickinson” and I think it would be described as a “narrative poem”:

     When I love a thing I want it and I try to get it. Abstraction of the particular from
the universal is the entrance into evil. Love, a binding force, is both envy and
emulation. HE (the Puritan God) is a realm of mystery and will always remain
unknowable, authoritarian, unpredictable. Between revealed will and secret will
Love has been torn in two.

     DUALISM: Pythagoras said that all things were divisible into two genera,
     good and evil; in the genus of good things he classified all perfect things
     such as light, males, repose, and so forth, whereas in the genus of evil
     he classified darkness, females, and so forth.
                              (Thomas Aquinas, “On the Power of God,” p. 84)

     Promethean aspiration: To be a woman and a Pythagorean. What is the communal
vision of poetry if you are curved, odd, indefinite, irregular, feminine. I go in
disguise. Soul under stress, thread of connection broken, fusion of love and
knowledge broken, visionary energy lost, Dickinson means this to be an ugly verse.
First I find myself a Slave, next I understand my slavery, finally I re-discover
myself at liberty inside the confines of known necessity. Gun goes on thinking of
the violence done to meaning. Gun watches herself watching.