Category Archives: poetry

favorite poetry

“Prayer” by Louis Untermeyer

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Louis Untermeyer is an obscure poet who has etched himself in my heart, primarily due to the poem which I will attach, “Prayer.”  The poem itself reveals so much about the man and the inner torments which led him into the literary world.  But these “torments,” whatever they were, wreaked havoc often in his life.  He was married three or four times and one of his sons committed suicide at age 19.  Furthermore, he was a panelist on the popular TV show in 1950, “What’s My Line” but ruffled feathers so that he was forced out leading to a year-long depression and social isolation.  I think the description “irascible and cantankerous” would describe him. He knew the W. H. Auden wisdom, “We wage the war we are.”

Poetry arises from a tumult in the soul and without men and women who have had the courage to wrestle with this tumult humankind would be at a loss.  Poetry brings to the table depths of the heart that the simple prosaity of day-to-day life cannot offer.

Prayer
God, though this life is but a wraith,
Although we know not what we use,
Although we grope with little faith,
Give me the heart to fight – and lose.
Ever insurgent let me be,
Make me more daring than devout;
From sleek contentment keep me free,
And fill me with a buoyant doubt.
Open my eyes to vision girt
With beauty, and with with wonder lit –
But let me always see the dirt,
And all that spawn and die in it.
Open my ears to music; let
Me thrill with Spring’s first flutes and drums –
But never let me dare forget
The bitter ballads of the slums.
From compromise and things half-done,
Keep me, with stern and stubborn pride;
And when, at last, the fight is won,
God, keep me still unsatisfied.
– Louis Untermeyer

This “Fish” Sees Water…Kinda…And It Is Not Always Cracked up To What It’s Supposed To Be!!!

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Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real. (David Foster Wallace)

The above quote, from my last post, is the essence of the “spinning” that occurs with a fish that cannot see its water. However, a “fish” can learn to see water and my life is a story about this accomplishment.  Actually, I must confess this has not been an “accomplishment” as I was born this way and it has merely taken me half a century to find the confidence to accept and honor this lot in life.  My confidence was buoyed last year when I read…twice…the Booker-Prize winning novel by Anna Burns, “The Milkman” in which she introduced me to the notion of living “beyond the pale.” In my life beyond this pale…and yes it is the “pale” separating reality and something “beyond”…which I’m increasingly learning is not a catastrophe but is merely the endowment of what poet John Keats called “negative capability.”  (It could, though be a “catastrophe” and often is!) This stance has blessed/cursed me with the “observer” stance which Emily Dickinson alluded to when she noted, “Life is over there, on a shelf.”  It is no coincidence that Dickinson spent her life “cloistered” in her father’s attic and I myself have spent my life “cloistered” in some attic, some cerebral detachment of sorts.

But in this cloister of mine I have not escaped the predicament the David Foster Wallace noted in the quote provided above.  I, too, offer but a “spin” about the world and I, too, have tended to take it too seriously and demonstrated too often a tendency to impose it on others; as some wit noted, “Give a kid a hammer and everything is a nail.”  The ego has a difficult time ever acknowledging its machinations which are intrinsically a “spin” about the world and an attempt to make it wholly about itself.  When Humility begins to penetrate that hermetically-sealed chamber, the “spin” begins to rattle against the walls of the cage it has created and great is the “noise” to the owner of the ego…and sometimes to those looking on from the outside!

Let me close with a note about the “noise” which is clamoring in our modern world as our collective ego is under a related grave challenge.  Particularly in my country, the basic assumptions, the premises, the “water” that we “fish” cannot see, is being exposed.  In this situation, the part of our culture which most embodies this obfuscation is clinging obstinately to its ego and have found a leader who champions so vividly its cause.

In my next post, I am going to share about the “spinning” of one’s religious tradition and how that noble teachings can become merely an example of the aforementioned “kid with a hammer.”

Will a Fish Ever Learn To See Water?

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David Foster Wallace was a noted novelist of the late 20th,  early 21st  century who delivered a commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005 entitled, “This is Water.”  The title was a reference to the famous quip, “To ask someone to see reality is like asking a fish to see water.”  Wallace used this address to explore the way in which education is usually designed only to reinforce the prevailing reality, i.e. “world order,” and not so much about teaching a young person to think. Wallace encouraged his audience to consider the value of “thinking about one’s thinking” and that failure to do so would be risking spending one’s life as a cog in the machine-like grid-work of a pre-existing socio-cultural matrix.

Wallace knew that meta-cognition was a necessary dimension of human consciousness without which one would be subject to manipulation by the whims and fancies of everyday human discourse, in modern times certainly including the media.  Without maturity in thought one is inclined to be readily influenced by manipulation, susceptible to a demagogue who knows that many people will believe anything if they hear it frequently enough. The demagogue does not to need intrinsic value to what he is purveying in his speeches, he only needs to have some lesser-value…maybe only a self-serving one…as he realizes it will find currency in many minds if they hear it repeatedly and with great fervor.

To state an obvious truth, thinking is a good thing.  To be “human” we must be capable of at least a rudimentary capacity to think and therefore engage in the world.  Without critical thinking to some minimal degree, we will be in the position that Emily Dickinson described as, “a mind to near itself to see distinctly.”  In that event, we will not be actually thinking but will be passively “thought” by a prevailing vein of thought we have found comfortable, living out the prediction of W. H. Auden, “We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.”

Here is an excerpt from the Wallace address:

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

That Damn Grim Reaper is Stalking Me.

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The Grim Reaper is at the threshold of my dear family.  My heart is very heavy.  The reason it is so heavy now is that I have a heart which I haven’t had in the past. This “death thingy” that we all live with is “the great equalizer” and humbles us…or at least it can anyway.  The fantasies, illusions, and hypocrisies that we hide behind, allowing us to “perfunctory” along our life’s way, disintegrate in the face of this “Humility”.  The formulaic, canned humility that I’ve used to imprison my heart can only dissipate in the face of this “Humility.” I am very humbled that one of my dear brothers-in-law has less than 24 hours left on this beautiful planet.

BUT I take comfort with the wisdom of Irvin Yalom, a gifted psychologist, that it is incumbent upon us as human being to “die” before Death, allowing us then to live as never before.  We are no longer hapless before our fragility; we can then find an anchor there that will stabilize us in the tumult of this emotional maelstrom. The tenor of Yalom’s observation is that until we “die” we will not be able to live, only “be-bopping” along our “three-score and ten,” deliberately, willingly opting to avoid the Life-giving dissipation of our persona’s grip.  Bill and I talked frequently of the “Anchor” that we were finding.  Irish poet, William Butler Yeats summed up the sentiments I have expressed here: The leaves are many but the root is one./  Throughout all the lying days of my youth, I have swayed my leaves and flowers under the sun./ Now may I wither into the truth.

The following is a link to a brilliant essay by a deeply-spiritual Quaker, Parker Palmer, in which death and fragility is powerfully presented.—   https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/08/10/parker-palmer-naropa-university-commencement-address/

Mary Trump, “Too Much and Never Enough

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The Trump maelstrom is teetering on that abyss of darkness that gave rise to it in the first place.  His niece, Mary Trump, has just released her tell-all book (“Too Much and Never Enough”) about this uncle that she describes as “the most dangerous man in America.”  I’ve read excerpts from her book, and watched a powerful interview of her by Stephen Colbert on “The Late Show” in which she described the “currency” of the intimate dynamics of that modern “Robber Baron” family as being money rather than anything near love and respect for others.

The title of her book immediately triggered the Shakespearean dimension of my brain with a line from one of his sonnets, “mad in pursuit and more in possession so.” Shakespeare had his pulse on the human soul and revealed in this sonnet 129 the voracious appetite, one spawn of which is capitalism itself and that spawn’s offspring with characters such as individuals like Trump, the personal “toy of some great pain.”  Shakespeare in this sonnet explored this bottomless pit very elegantly and concluded that it leads to hell itself:

Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame

Is lust in action; and till action, lust

Is perjured, murd’rous, bloody, full of blame,

Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,

Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight,

Past reason hunted; and, no sooner had

Past reason hated as a swallowed bait

On purpose laid to make the taker mad;

Mad in pursuit and in possession so,

Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;

A bliss in proof and proved, a very woe;

Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.

All this the world well knows; yet none knows well

The heaven that leads men to this hell.

Reason, Rationalization, Faith, and Trump.

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Faith traditions usually devolve into rigid distinctions, the “letter of the law” that Jesus chided us for. Christianity, which is my faith tradition, has a penchant for “legalism on steroids”, primarily the result of the Reformation. This has facilitated rigid distinctions leading to an “us” vs “them” mentality in many cases and a related penchant for seeing evil “out there.” This legalism coincides with the bastardization of Reason into rationalism in which our “rational-mind” orientation draws conclusions that Reason would be less likely to draw. This is related to the Goethe quote that I use here so often, “They call it reason, using light celestial, just to outdo the beasts in being bestial.”

This is vividly illustrated with a strong contingent of evangelical Christians who are passionate supporters of Trump, using that “rational” mind to conclude, “Well, the Lord has raised him up, using an evil man to accomplish God’s purpose. ” That is very good “rationalization” but not very good Reason, Reason being that quality of heart that the Apostle Paul had in mind when he described the Holy Spirit as furrowing into the hearts depths where there He can be a “discerners of the thoughts and intents” of that heart. When one has ventured into that dimension of the Human/Divine experience, the Shakespearean “pauser reason” would posit the notion, “Well, maybe it was just my ego that wanted Trump to win so that my prejudices and biases about my life, including my faith life, can be validated.” One simple illustration of this rationalization occurred in in my youth as a fundamentalist Baptist; a deacon in my church…who I remember so fondly…told my Sunday School class that if an African American happened to enter the doors of the church, he would kindly inform him that he was not welcome. And that man was a “good” man, a Christian by all means, but in the tribal culture that he was part of he could see things only that way. After all, just a decade earlier President Eisenhower had forcibly desegregated Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas and my Baptist culture had not gotten over that example of “government intrusion.”

A very relevant concluding thought…my favorite bumper sticker…”Don’t believe everything you think.”

The Prophets W. B. Yeats and Shakespeare Offered us a Word

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I had to leave the living room just now as news clips from the weekend of Trump droning-on in his voice dripping with fake sincerity and fake solemnity. I was sickened with the tape of the spectacle. I increasingly think the term “anti-Christ” applies to him though not in the traditional meaning of the term…maybe.

I no longer use the term “Christian” to describe my faith, though I do value the affirmation of one of my Arkansas friends, “I believe in the teachings of Jesus.” It is pretty easy and convenient to call one’s self “Christian” but it is challenging to let His wisdom cut into one’s heart, especially one’s “Christian heart,” and let it furrow into the depths of that “heart of darkness” that we all have. The Apostle Paul recognized this, avowing, “I will to do good, but evil is present with me.”

As Trump began his “slouching toward Bethlehem” about the same time I moved to Taos, New Mexico I became part of a coterie of friends who had found the maturity to let this darkness that all humans have get attention. We commonly refer to this as “the shadow” which is how Carl Jung put it. With these friends I have found the courage to see that “beast” within and not run from him/it any longer, realizing that as we subject him/it to the light of the day his/its power begins to diminish.

Shakespeare recognized this, telling us about a friend’s hypocrisy, “Thou has described a friend hot cooling. Ever note, Lucillus, when love begins to sicken and decay it useth an enforced ceremony. 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.” That “plain and simple faith” is sorely needed at this moment in my life and certainly in my country. It is the only antidote to the to that “beast” within which is always “stalking” as the poet W. B. Yeats told us. “Enforced ceremony” aka “canned ” religion and life will never suffice.

The Subtle Imbibing of Spiritual Darkness

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Last evening I was sitting in my living room, dinner underway, my lovely wife and Peety at my side. (That precious little boy waves his tail so beautifully! ) We had just watched Air Force One approach its landing for Trump’s “festival” at Mt. Rushmore. Here my family is doing “lemming” again and watching this version of “The Trump Story” airing. But, I am not apologizing; we wanted to watch it! The pandemic, one expression of which is Trumpism, has challenged Trump’s ability to get the ego reward of huge throngs bowing at his feet. But last night a crowd of 7500 prostrated itself before him, feverishly giving him the validation for which his two year old soul hungers. That hunger is a gaping maw, sucking into its demonic depths, a crowd of “true believers” who have made him their avatar.

I am reminded of one of the 20th century’s greatest prophets . W. H. Auden, who told us, “We are afraid of pain, but more afraid of silence.” Early in Trump’s life his innocent heart hungered for the “noise” of a validation from his parents, especially his mother. It is in this gap, this “absence” from which we all emerge, that Donnie did not get mirrored., aka”loved.” His precious heart hungered desperately for an empathic response from his mother, the absence of which was related to his aloof and emotionally-tyrannical father. It was in that moment of vulnerability that young Donnie accepted the wooing of a nascent psychosis which 73 years later exploded into full “glory,” albeit a dark, demonic “glory.”

A “black-hole” sucks into its depths everything that tarries too long in the periphery of its orbit. Two people immediately come to my mind, Kelly-Anne Conway and Sarah Huckabee Sanders. The toll on Conway is seen in the depleted, haggard, frightened visage that she proffers whenever she crawls out of the hole in which Trump has imprisoned her. Sanders was an “innocent,” a simple little Baptist girl from Arkansas with a powerful father who was genetically wired to “drink the kool-aid.” (The image of these two innocent little girls brings to my mind an image from T.S. Eliot, “Men and bits of paper whirled by the cold wind which blows before and after time.”) These two little girls deserved better; but genetically and socio-culturally they got “dumped on”. But that is no excuse as we humans share the same fate of an emotional/spiritual “baggage” that we acquire in our formative years. We can surmount that burden only with the courage that maturity offers, gracing our lives with a whiff of “self”-awareness. That “whiff” is usually squashed before it comes to our conscious mind. As Auden noted,”Truth met him (her) and held out her hand. But he (she) clung in panic to his (her) tall belief and shrank away like an ill-treated child.”

“Its Going Away.” Oh, Well Yes, But…

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Since the pandemic first unleashed its fury on us in February, Trump has been down playing its impact, often insisting, “It’s going away.” He did this even yesterday as our nation was witnessing the largest single day increase in infections. Oh, he is right as it will “go away”….eventually! (And so will he!)! A bromide I often use in my day to day life is, “This too shall pass.” But as we wait for it “to go away,” or pass it continues to ravage our nation, body and soul, requiring the maturity to focus on the present moment and pay attention to how we can mitigate its ravages. Failure to do so will result bring unnecessary tragedy. People will suffer and die if we do not.

This brings to mind the Ram Dass quote, “Be here now.” Dass was telling us to, “Pay attention” as opposed to our usual state of mind which fails to exercise a prophetic function that lies dormant in our heart. That “prophetic function” is to stand aloof…a bit, at least…from the zeitgeist of the historical moment. It entails an ability to handle the emotional/spiritual duress that this “aloofness” presents to one, a duress that can be described as loneliness, anxiety, and fear. It requires the ability to have seen, and experienced, that we only have a viewpoint to offer, not the demon of objectivity and the seduction of its impenetrable smugness.

A Further Sojourn Into Hannah Arendt’s Prophetic Work

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I continue to explore the work of Hannah Arendt from which I shared in in recent posts.  And, from this blog-o-sphere that I participate in I have received nice feedback as well from friends I know in real-time.  Arendt’s work details how the absence of critical thinking will leave one mired down in the unacknowledged recesses of the mind and heart.  This venture into the heart’s machinations is disillusioning and frightening. Arendt offers us a powerful exploration of totalitarianism and its impact, individually and collectively on critical thinking. Without it a mind-set emerges and marches on, grim faced and determined to cling to preconceptions and biases that harm themselves and others, lacking any “interior dialogue” or self-talk.

In my morning sojourn through the cyber world today, I discovered related wisdom that I would like to share.  The first is from Gene W. Marshall in his book “Jacob’s Dream,” in which he writes from what I would describe as a post-modern view of Holy Writ:

Spirit freedom is not the same thing as the so-called free will that is often written about. The ego (as I have defined it) has free will but the ego’s definition of free will is limited by the ego’s definition of itself.  The ego is a construction of the human mind.  This construction may allow for the presence of some elements of our essential Freedom.  But because it is a human construction, the ego also restricts the full expression of our Spirit Freedom. (As I noted in last week’s blog, “We want only what we want.” and cannot see beyond our narcissistic view of the world. “The world is my oyster”!)

Here, Mr. Marshall’s thought leads us directly into the abyss that I shared from Arendt’s observations about Hitler and totalitarianism.  My vein of thought was very convoluted and even involuted as I tried to put into words that which cannot be put into words. This effort can take us into a murky world which is very “Zen like,” a state of being which I used to formulate in terms of “the working of the Holy Spirit.” And this biblical formulation still has merit for me.  The Apostle Paul described this process as the “Spirit” furrowing into the depths of our heart where we can “discern the thoughts and intents” of our heart, individually and collectively. (I recall a note by Rumi pointing this truth out in 13th century Iran, “Out beyond the distinctions of right doing and wrongdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there.”)

In the on-line journal, “The Mind Matters” I also discovered this morning a paragraph from Andre Gorz that is relevant:

For society is no longer to be found where it institutionally proclaims its existence…Society now only exists in the interstices of the system, where new relations and new solidarities are being worked out and are creating, in their turn, new public spaces in the struggle against the mega-machine and its ravages; it exists only where individuals assume the autonomy to which the disintegration of traditional bonds and the bankruptcy of received interpretations condemn them and where they take upon themselves the task of inventing, starting out from their own selves, the values, goals and social relations which can become the seeds of a future society.”

Gorz, who was a Marxist philosopher, captured the dynamic dimension of a social body and described bringing it to life, paralleling the process of a“human body”…an individual… self-reflect ing itself into “coming to life.” His term, the “interstices of the system” in sociological thought parallels our own individual heart in which components are roiling about in an effort to come to grips with our interior life, aka those “thoughts and intents of the heart’ that the Apostle Paul wrote about. This process can produce “life”, aka “Life” that is beyond the pale of the perfunctory life that our world offered us as a child. This makes me want to scrutinize further the bromide from my youth, “being born again.””

I know that my thoughts here are again convoluted and involuted.  I am trying to summarize that life is more than we know it to be.  I am more than I “think” that I am and I live in a world which is more than it “thinks” it is.  I am exploring a dimension of life that is mysterious and incomprehensible.  I can never “figger it out,” I can only pay attention to what is going on in my heart and what is “going on” out there as I “chop wood and carry water” for another day. Presently, I can only “pay attention” to the glory of a beautiful doggie lying here beside me, the cup of coffee I’m sipping, and the crackling of the fire in the wood stove. Shortly, the morning will begin to dawn and I will saunter outside into the cool of the morning air, pay homage to the plants and flowers that are thriving, and bow before the majestic tapestry of morning stars that linger before disappearing for another day. One poet described this as the mystery before which we can only, “glory, bow, and tremble.”