Category Archives: poetry

favorite poetry

“Within Be Rich, Without Be Fed No More”

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That Shakespearean quip is a succinct summary of what Carl Jung offered us decades ago:

If you remain within arbitrary and artificially created boundaries, you will walk as between two high walls: you do not see the immensity of the world. But if you break down the walls that confine your view, and if the immensity and its endless uncertainty inspire you with fear, then the ancient sleeper awakens in you, whose messenger is the white bird.

Then you need the message of the old tamer of chaos. There in the whirl of chaos dwells eternal wonder. Your world begins to become wonderful. Man belongs not only to an ordered world, he also belongs in the wonder-world of his soul. Consequently, you must make your ordered world horrible, so that you are put off by being too much outside yourself.

Your soul is in great need, because drought weighs on its world. If you look outside yourselves, you see the far-off forest and mountains, and above them your vision climbs to the realms of the stars. And if you look into yourselves, you will see on the other hand the nearby as far-off and infinite, since the world of the inner is as infinite as the world of the outer.

Just as you become a part of the manifold essence of the world through your bodies, so you become a part of the manifold essence of the inner world through your soul. This inner world is truly infinite, in no way poorer than the outer one. Man lives in two worlds. A fool lives here or there, but never here and there.“ ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 264 |

Thoughts About our Endemic Obtuseness

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The “deep state” is often brought to the table in this pandemic by the Conservative voice. Technically, “it” is present also with our Progressive voice; for there is always unacknowledged intentionality in each of us, in all groups and individuals, as none of us know objectively what we are doing, saying, or thinking. But this “dilemma” proffers us an immediate ruse, individually and collectively–simply choosing to disregard the presence of subterranean depths in our heart. W. H. Auden had this problem in mind with the poetic quip, “We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.” Satchel Paige, the brilliant, talented, and eccentric pitcher from baseball’s “Negro Leagues” in the mid-20th century often advised, “Don’t look back; whatever is there is gaining on you.”

In this current “deux ex machina” that is before us, blame is an immediate, self-serving escape from the sense of responsibility that it demands. Blaming China, or perhaps the “deep state,” or Obama, or some version of “them” only hampers our nation’s ability to address this crisis. Prophetic voices in a crisis like this become from beyond the pale, not from within it; the Reverent William Barber is a notable example. But Indian novelist and political activist, Arundhati Roy, last week also had a prophetic word for the world, describing this pandemic as, “a portal” through which we might find a turn-around in the very nature of how we grasp the world:

Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And, in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it. (from interview on Democracy Now)

This Indian wisdom brought to my mind a “war-horse” of many conservative pastors, 2 Chronicles 7:14, “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.

 

 

Poetry Arises With a Stirring in the Heart

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The poet, to whose mighty heart
Heaven doth a quicker pulse impart,
Subdues that energy to scan
Not his own course, but that of man.
(Matthew Arnold)

Arnold knew that poets harnessed energy in a different way than most of us.  Being immersed in poetry myself, though not being a poet, I think I understand what he meant.  Human beings are in essence merely energy, “pulsating” energy, and most of us have the “pulsating” curtailed into structured behavior and thought…and even feeling.  But poets are different; you might even say they have a screw loose, or to borrow from Emily Dickinson, “a splinter in their brain.”  Thus, they have free-floating energy which, being gifted with the poetry muse, they can “subdue” and thus “scan, not his (“their) own course, or heart, “but that of man.”  (The quip about “loose screw” was not meant with any disrespect!!!)

Poetry, therefore, offers us a glimpse into the depths of the human heart.  To some it will fall on deaf ears and that is not to dismiss them in the least; their lot in life is different.  But it speaks to those of us who at least have an ear…and a heart…for its wisdom.  In the mid 1980’s a friend of mine gave me a copy of W. H. Auden’s “Collected Longer Poems” and I was stunned by Auden’s wisdom.  This was the first time poetry had penetrated the linear-thinking prison I had spent my first three and a half decades in.  That little paperback book only recently broke completely in half, down the spine, just where “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio” began; but I will never throw it away, even though I have a hard bound collection of his complete poetry.

Franz Kafka offered wisdom about the impact that good literature can have on a person, how it can act as a “pick axe” to the frozen sea within us just as Auden’s work did to me three decades ago:

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.”

A More “Aesthetic” and Poetic Approach to Judgement

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Today I’d like to approach the “judgement of God” more aesthetically.  Though I emphasized yesterday the metaphorical approach I had in mind, I want to further gloss the term over…if even possible… with a bit of poetic finesse. W.H. Auden wrote, “O blessed be bleak exposure on whose sword we are pricked into being alive.” Auden captured the starkness of those moments when reality stuns us, stripping us of the adornments of our personality of which we have become so comfortable.

Emily Dickinson, with her cryptic and even severe style, put it more starkly:

He fumbles at your Soul
As Players at the Keys —
Before they drop full Music on —
He stuns you by Degrees —

Prepares your brittle Nature
For the Ethereal Blow
By fainter Hammers — further heard —
Then nearer — Then so — slow —

Your Breath — has time to straighten —
Your Brain — to bubble Cool —
Deals One — imperial Thunderbolt —
That scalps your naked soul —

When Winds hold Forests in their Paws —
The Universe — is still —

Mercifully, as I’ve noted before, most of us get this “wisdom” gently over the years…if at all.  I like the way William Butler Yeats put it, “Throughout all the lying days of my youth, I waved my leaves and flowers in the sun.  Now may I wither into the Truth.”

Boundaries is the subject matter here.  I might quip, “We can’t live with ‘em, we can’t live without ‘em.”  By that I mean part of us resists restraint but fortunately we are hard wired to appreciate the “reining in” of our deep-seated desire to be unrestrained.  Proverbs 16:32 captures this inner conflict beautifully, “He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city.”

Momma Nature Offers Her Wisdom Daily!

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I just discovered a new poet on the website of Commonweal, Samuel Menashe.  With short, even cryptic poems, he captures some essential dimension of life which I think Ram Dass had in mind decades ago when he coined the expression, “Be here now.”  Here is a sample of his work, entitled “Rue”:

For what I did

And did not do

And do without

In my old age

Rue, not rage

Against that night

We go into,

Sets me straight

On what to do

Before I die—

Sit in the shade,

Look at the sky

Sitting in the shade and looking at the sky is really good advice, though I would suggest a dollop of the lovely sunshine here and there!  Momma nature is so gracious and loving, though culture teaches us to live in the past and/or future and avoiding the loveliness of, “being here now.”

Fritz Perls, “Let Go of Your Mind and Come to Your Senses.”

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The story of my life has been one of discovering my own body.  That is a silly or inane thing to even say from the perspective of my background; for, “what is more apparent than our body?” I would have asked back then. But my life experiences and clinical practice, not to mention explorations of the gamut of human sciences, has led me to realize the wisdom of the quip by Fritz Perls in the 1960’s, “Let go of your mind and come to your senses.”  Perls realized just our disconnected Western culture teaches us to be from our “senses” and the affective or “feeling” dimension of life.  Carl Jung had a relevant point, noting two kinds of thinking…a)directed thinking which is designed have us fit in with the social milieu we are born into; b) and imaginative thinking which allows us to find a bit of “free-play” with this necessary “directed thinking” so that we can avoid being an ideologue.

This “dis-embodied” thinking is very much related to the Western attitude that we are separate and distinct from mother nature, this wonderful earth, and see it as something to satisfy our ravenous appetites.  But disembodied thought is dangerous.  I’m reminded of a line from the poet W. B. Yeats, “O God, guard me from those thoughts men think in the mind alone.  He who sings a lasting song thinks in the marrow bone.”

Just this morning I ran across a relevant thought from D.H. Lawrence about this alienation from our earthly or earthy roots:

Oh what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and equinox.  This is what is the matter with us.  We are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of Life, and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table.  D.H. Lawrence

 

Last night God populated the street with threatening poses that grew increasingly dense: closed faces briefly lit by yellow streetlights; eyeballs flashing warnings in the gloom; mouths reluctantly exhaling into the thin haze of hopelessness. “Give nothing away,” I said. “Give nothing away.” But things were being taken. In Spokane, God nearly froze to the […]

via The City of God — Short visits with an honest God

Thoughts About a Chattering Monkey Mind

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In the following epigram, one of four epigrams under the title “Four Poems after Callimachus” by Stephanie Burtt, I discover the presence of a cautionary self-reflection with anyone who deigns to write…even in the humble milieu of the blogosphere.

(Epigrams, 60)

Lucky Orestes.
          If you know his story,
you probably think that saying so makes me a jerk.
Fair enough. But I’ve been losing my mind
in my own way this week: Orestes lost his,
but at least he didn’t insist
on asking his loyal companion to read and critique
his own book-length original fictional work.
That’s why he kept Pylades as his friend.
True friendship can exist.
          As for me,
I need to learn how not to speak,
when not to hit send.

I am “full of words”; yes, even too full of them, like Elihu in the book of Job who noted, “My belly is full of words, like a taut wineskin, about to burst.”  And that is ok; all of us have our “belly” full of something and I’m glad my stubborn willfulness is sublimated into verbiage as opposed to less benign “stuff”.  But I’m certainly learning how to “not hit send” more often and the same discretion is being exercised in my daily life.  It makes me remember a bromide from a pastor in my youth, three filters through which should pass anything we might say—-1) Is it true?; 2)Is it kind?; 3) Is it necessary?  Number three is really challenging, putting about anything we do or say into question.  I recall the tune from the ‘60’s, “Silence is Golden” by the Tremeloes.  My meditation experience of the past ten years gives rise to these thoughts about silence.  This practice continues to remind me of the chattering of the monkey mind and how that much of this chattering can take the form of “noble” thoughts.  It often is still “chattering.”  W. H. Auden noted, “We are afraid of pain, but more afraid of silence.”

An Exploration of Trump’s “deity”

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I’ve long noted a rock-solid “belief” that many Trump supports have in him, so firm it is almost like he is a god.  I do think that divinity is an issue with him, though it is a dark divinity.  Carl Jung pointed out that the notion of god, if explored deeply and honestly, would always expose the ambivalence of the heart.  A theological term, aseity, is relevant.  This term means “in and of and for itself.”  In Christian theology this is often called the pleroma or the god-head.  This is the god who is the prime mover, able to move others but incapable of being moved by anyone or anything outside of himself. This is a valuable term for an exploration of Deity but when it is discovered in a human being, to any degree it will be malignant narcissism and catastrophic in its consequences.

This Trumpian darkness has been present throughout Trump’s life.  For example, in 1995 walking into the dressing room of Ms. Teen USA beauty pageant where young girls were in various stages of undress or nude.  He explained later, “Well, I owned the pageant.”  And he frequently voiced in public…video is still available… his lascivious designs on his daughter Ivanka.  God’s can even intrude into the incestuous realm.  In the 2016 campaign he avowed, “I can stand in the streets of Manhattan and shoot someone” and not lose my support base; this is being proven almost daily.  In the impeachment furor currently underway, his minions are speaking in explicit terms of Trump’s invincibility and inviolability, Lindsey Graham declaring earlier in the week, “All I can tell you is from the president’s point of view, he did nothing wrong in his mind.”  Someone quipped on Twitter, so astutely, that the same could be said of Jeffrey Dahmer.  Then yesterday Alan Dershowitz contributed to the aseity-complex demonstration, declaring that as President there are no limits for Trump, adding that if he deems his re-election as President is best for the country he can do what he needs to obtain that re-election.

Group-think has enveloped the Republican Party and is threatening the entire country.  Their investment, their “faith” in this dark “savior” is so intense that they’ve pledged more loyalty to him than they have any awareness of.  They have “drank the Trumpian kool-aid” and it is more deadly, in the long run, than the Jim Jones flavor.  People who have been devoured by group-think have lost the ability to “think” and are completely subservient to premises which they will not dare to look at.  This reminds me of an intense argument I had decades ago when I was in college with a girl friend who was studying law.  My argumentation was proving too much for her and she suddenly, in exasperation declared, “You are arguing to make a point and I’m arguing to stay alive.”  We later explored that exchange and I learned she meant that she was arguing to “stay on top” or win the argument and found herself in dispute with someone who merely wanted to make a point. She could not handle “losing” the argument though winning/losing was not on any agenda I had in mind.

The problem in Congress on display here…reflecting a problem in the American soul…is that the GOP is “arguing to stay on top” making compromise impossible.  If they did not suffer from that Trumpian insistence on “being right” as in “not being able to concede the possibility of ‘being wrong’”, they would be able to see that there are national interests that supersede this fracas and focus on any of these problems would diminish the internecine hostilities.  But this is not a matter of reason.  They have “dug in” with Trump, dug in so deep they cannot get out, and he knows it.  Their judgement is impaired and you can’t reason with someone or “someones” whose judgement is impaired in this fashion.  On a lighter note, but actually not so light, they might wonder at some point, “Hey, putting a man who is so insecure about his penis size that he had to reassure the entire world about the matter on Tv was not such a good idea.”

Carl Sandburg and Greta Thunburg

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I forgot to append a Carl Sandburg poem yesterday to my musings about Greta Thunburg.  And I admit I am a bit sheepish as the poem likens her unto a weed, but I have a hunch she will readily identify and appreciate the “likening unto” a weed.  She is used to it.  She has always been different and has become accustomed to it  She and I have that in common…and I don’t think her “diagnosis” is far removed from mine.  Perhaps more on that later.

Greta is accustomed to being “out there.”  And the awareness of being “out there” can be so terrifying that one is driven into a pathological orientation to life. It can drive one into such a radical estrangement that one feels the world is “out to get me” and thus something to be fearful of; this is paranoia.  This paranoia can find expression so readily in political and religious orientations, always pitting one view of the world against the rest of the world.  This profound distrust fails to realize that we can never escape the reality that we are in and of the same world and the attempt to escape this realization is at our own peril.  The “them” that we loathe is “us.”

Please read this beautiful wisdom from Carl Sandburg:

There is a desperate loveliness to be seen
In certain flowers and bright weeds on certain planets.
With the weeds I have held long conversations
And I found them intelligent
Even though desperate and lovely.
The flowers however met me with short spoken.
“Yes” and “No” and “Why” were their favorite words,
And they had other slow monosyllables.
They seemed to find it more difficult
Than the gaudy garrulous bright weeds
To be intelligent, desperate, and lovely.
Take a far journey now, my friend, to certain planets.
Meet then certain flowers and bright weeds and ask them
What are the dark winding roots of their desperate loveliness.
See whether you bring back the same report as mine.
See whether certain long conversations
And certain slow practices monosyllables
Haunt you and keep coming back to haunt you.
For myself, my friend, I have come to believe on certain planets anything can happen.

(“Bright Conversations with Saint Ex” by Carl Sandburg)