Category Archives: poetry

favorite poetry

Will the Madness Ever End?

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The White House intervened to prevent the U.S.S. McCain from being seen during the Trump visit to Japan.  The Wall Street Journal reported negotiations between the White House and the U. S. Navy to move this ship “out of sight” so that the President would not see it.  This is because of the rage that Trump has for this now deceased Senator who dared to be critical of him.  Trump denies having anything to do with this decision, of course. Trump may not have had anything to do with this silly decision…directly.  He does not need to as his handlers are completely in his thrall and automatically move to protect this two-year old child from anything that might make him uncomfortable or angry.  Can you imagine the time, energy, and expense that went into this decision-making process and negotiation between the White House and the Navy?  And they even bought a tarp to drape over the ship!

My concern here is not Trump.  He is but the symptom of the madness that is unfolding in our culture, a madness that is daily being aided and abetted by a supporting cast of handlers, aides, cabinet members, and Congress persons.  He has them in his grip and many of them do not have the “awareness” to know it.  Some of them are aware of this I suspect but are stymied by intimidation or black mail, and do not have the courage to speak out.

Trump’s two-year old narcissistic wound has been aided and abetted like this his whole life and he has always felt indomitable.  He still does!  And now he has what he sees as ultimate power, for he is the “duly elected” President of the United States!  Holding that office, to him and his supporting cast, is the ultimate validation of their beliefs and they support him steadfastly. BUT, the “hunger” of a frustrated and angry two-year old can never be satisfied unless an “adult in the room” will find the courage to set limits.  If the “parents” continue to indulge, a monster will be created and catastrophe will ensue.  In my clinical experience, this “catastrophe” often would find a “parent in the room” with my intervention which at times entailed hospitalization or juvenile court referral.  At times, this did not suffice and catastrophe did happen in the form of violence, often leading to incarceration.  The “acting out” of the two-year old, then running amok as a 16 year old, could not be contained other than by the strong arm of the law.  The phenomenon of a “brain-stem without arms and legs” in life is usually reined in by reality; but when “reality” allows it to occupy the Presidency, the peril for all is great.

Something About “Nothing”

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A friend noted decades ago that I often quipped and joked about negation.  That was the first moment I noticed this feature of my soul and realized just how it influenced the whole of my life.  Poet Anne Carson noted, “The poet is someone who feasts at the same table as other people. But at a certain point he feels a lack. He is provoked by a perception of absence within what others regard as a full and satisfactory present.”

However, I am not a poet.  I am, though steeped in poetry and have been since my mid-thirties when a friend gifted me a book of poems by W. H. Auden.  I think that poets have the ability and courage to dive into that “lack” buck naked, and come back with the gift of poetry.  I don’t think my lot in life is to get that naked, probably because of a lack of courage or the gods’ wisdom that I could not handle the vulnerability.  But the “lack” is present and I am growing more comfortable with it, finding that “chopping wood, carrying water” is effective in assuaging the soul’s experience of this emptiness.

This lack is now being presented to our entire culture in the person of our president.  He illustrates what happens when one sell’s his soul to distractions and is left with a gaping maw in his heart that seeks to destroy everything and everyone.  These distractions are what allow most people to have that “full and satisfactory present” mentioned by Carson above.  These “distractions” are a gift but when they become the soul focus in one’s life, or a culture’s life, a meaninglessness eventually finds expression.  Watch and listen to Trump and one can see meaninglessness and emptiness personified.

A Thoughtful Poem from Historian, William Irwin Thompson

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Am I more than I “know I am”? Historian, and former MIT professor, William Irwin Thompson thinks so and makes a powerful argument in his poem, “Four In the Morning.”  Thompson was just coming on the scene in history studies in the early 1980’s when I was doing graduate work in history at the University of Arkansas.  Thompson was an avant-garde historian, thinking out of the box and even “out side of the box that the box was in.”  The following poem demonstrates this “global” perspective on life, a view that could also be described as cosmic.

FOUR IN THE MORNING

The universe is crawling with unseen life:
angels and djinn and spiritual guides.
Like the excess in a stagnant pond,
this abscess of the Absolute
is obscenely corpulent
in every nook and cranny,
armpit and crotch
of the Great Mother
of dark energy and dark matter
we do not see anymore
than the germs in our guts see us,
because they are not germs
but neurons of a larger brain
in which an I is only an organ,
or rather an artificially imposed
membrane drawn arbitrarily
amid a mass of interactive
molecular gates with ions
coming and going as they please
without a thought of me.
Savages knew this once
and could feel it like an itch
beyond the reach of scratch.
Christian missionaries called it animism
and tried to beat it out of them,
bringing brassieres to contain breasts,
and bibles to contain minds,
but nights when I cannot sleep,
I wake at something the clock
marks as three or four,
with my mind teeming and itching
with alien cosmologies
of journeys through other galaxies
and I wake, knowing more than I am.

“Four in the Morning” comes from his blog, “Meta-psychosis” and appears to be a descent into a maelstrom which could be taken for lunacy, other than for his ability to wrap a perspective around disparate verbal imagery and tie it all together to make his point; what would otherwise be closely akin to psychotic word-salad is a thoughtful, poetic look at the intricate complexity of the beautiful world we live in.  Thompson’s study of history, and the liberal arts, and science, allowed him to present this beautiful poetic essay about the process of life itself in which our individual life is seen as but a component dimension of the pulsating energy field that is life itself.  He makes a persuasive argument that we are “more” than we think that we are, driven by something akin to what Shakespeare had in mind when he noted, “There is a divinity that doeth shape our ends, rough hew them how we may.”

Ash Wednesday Thoughts: “Dust Balls” Are We.

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In my youth, Catholicism was the epitome of “them.”  It was a given that Catholics were not even Christian for they “believed in Mary.”  But as I’ve aged I have increasing respect for them, not unrelated to my discovery of a Franciscan priest in Albuquerque, NM, Richard Rohr.  I received via email yesterday an email from a blogging friend in Australia which included a powerful poem about “Ash Wednesday” which I will share at the end of this post.

I have faint memories of the term “Ash Wednesday” from my youth and young adulthood but these memories were tainted by the anti-Catholicism.   This brings to mind another blogging friend who I kidded with the label “Dust ball” in reference to her interest in “Mother Earth” and the biblical notion of us being “dust of the earth.”  For we are all “dust balls” bouncing around on this granite “dust ball” for a few decades with the innate, egoic tendency to take ourselves more seriously than we are.  This absence of humility fails to appreciate the emphasis that the Catholics offer with this Lent season event, symbolized with a smudge of ash on the forehead.

Humility is often confused with cravenness.  But this is related to what Carl Jung noted as two extremes of the same human egoic complex—ego inflation and ego deflation.  The “inflation” is taking our selves too seriously, but the “deflation” is not taking ourselves seriously enough, failing to respect the glory of just “being” here.  But in each instance the emphasis is on our “self” as in our ego.  The alternative would be true humility, “a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything.”  Human nature is prone to focus on what we know to be reality, always a self-serving endeavor, failing to recognize that this “knowing” usually excludes so many who lie beyond that culturally contrived pale.  Humility involves letting that “pale,” i.e. “boundary,” dissolve a bit so that we can include some of those that we have heretofore excluded.  Sounds a bit like Jesus, huh?

Blessing the Dust
A Blessing for Ash Wednesday

All those days
you felt like dust,
like dirt,
as if all you had to do
was turn your face
toward the wind
and be scattered
to the four corners

or swept away
by the smallest breath
as insubstantial—

Did you not know
what the Holy One
can do with dust?

This is the day
we freely say
we are scorched.

This is the hour
we are marked
by what has made it
through the burning.

This is the moment
we ask for the blessing
that lives within
the ancient ashes,
that makes its home
inside the soil of
this sacred earth.

So let us be marked
not for sorrow.
And let us be marked
not for shame.
Let us be marked
not for false humility
or for thinking
we are less
than we are

but for claiming
what God can do
within the dust,
within the dirt,
within the stuff
of which the world
is made,
and the stars that blaze
in our bones,
and the galaxies that spiral
inside the smudge
we bear.

–Jan Richardson

T.S. Eliot, George Eliot, Hope, and Despair

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Hope comes when we have lost hope.  “Loss” is the beginning of life, as in the teaching of Jesus…to paraphrase, “Find your life only in losing it.”  And that brings immediately to my mind the almost inscrutable Jacques Lacan who noted that nothing of any significance in life takes place without the experience of loss.  And the consummate summation of this wisdom is the words of Jesus on the cross, “Father, why hast Thou forsaken me?”

It is really hard to lose.  It is hard to lose even in a simple game of checkers, or chess, or a football game with our “local sports team” but even more so in an existential crisis when our soul and spirit are on the line, especially when our “soul and spirit” are infused with the immaturity of ego.  In those moments our ego demands that we “dig in” and cling to our self-deceptions, our “well-worn words and ready phrases that build comfortable walls against the wilderness” (Conrad Aiken).

The loss I am presenting here is the gateway to humility, that which T.S. Eliot described as, “a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything.”  This is particularly challenging for those of us who are “spiritually” inclined for it often involves realizing just how “the flesh” has dominated our spirituality which we then realize was intrinsically ersatz.  And, therein, I must plead, “Mea culpa.”

The anguish of this realization is here captured in a couple of quotations from George Eliot:

“But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.”  And elsewhere she noted, “There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.”

“Self-Deception” is Not All That Bad!!! ‘Tis But Human.

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Terry Eagleton, in a review of Rita Felski’s book, “The Limits of Critique” in the London Review of Books (January 2017) noted, “The closest one can come to the truth is a knowledge of one’s self-deception.”  The observation of this literary critic is not unrelated to the observation of the Apostle Paul who noted, “We see through a glass darkly.”

This observation is personally relevant to me as I’m now realizing just how much I’ve lived my 66 years (67 tomorrow!) in self-deception.  But it is increasingly nice to understand that this is the human predicament and the lot of us all.  Therefore, when others who are so “stupidly” inured in their own little “bubble” appear on my radar, I am made to realize, “Hmm.  There am I, but by the Grace of God.  And, even with that Grace, ‘There am I.’”  It is not possible to escape the human dilemma that we view the world, including ourselves with a skewed vision, that we see the world, “through a glass darkly.”  This is the world from which Jean Paul Sartre noted, in his play, there is, “No Exit.”

It takes humility to accept this human fate.  But “humility” is so often a commodity that is rife with arrogance and pride.  I prefer the notion of “humility-ization” as the process in which we spend the rest of our lives being disabused of the certainties in which we have smugly been ensconced.

Vulnerability, Faith, and “Opiate of the Masses”

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Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, observed in his book, “The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language” that self-awareness is a very subtle and  often misunderstood phenomenon.  According to him, “Imagining that we have arrived at a satisfactory level of self understanding is clear indication that we have not in the least.”

Self-understanding is the process of becoming conscious.  And this is a task that we never finish completely though it is so comfortable to convince ourselves that it is.  The resulting certainty allows us to function in the smoothly-oiled social machinery of day to day life but only at the cost noted by W. H. Auden, “We have made for ourselves a life safer than we can bear.”  At some point in life we need to be able to challenge the smug certainties that we are ensconced in and tippy-toe into the risky domain of faith where we deal with the vulnerability that makes us human.  Otto Brown noted, “To be, is to be vulnerable” and until we have learned to live with some degree of vulnerability we have not become human. But use of this word “faith” is risky territory as it brings to mind religion and often there lies one of the most pernicious traps available to mankind.  For, “god” which often is the key figure in faith can often be merely another escape, a veritable opiate as in Karl Marx’s observation, “Religion is the opiate of the masses”

Fletcher Knebel Rises from the Dead!

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Knebel was a writer of popular political fiction during the Cold War of the 1950’s and 1960’s, novels such as “Fail Safe” and “Seven Days in May,” being made into popular movies.  Another novel which did not make it into the movies was entitled, “Is the President Stark Raving Mad.” However, nearly sixty years later someone…for reasons unknown (wink, wink), the novel is being re-released, certainly in part because of references made by Bob Woodward and Rachel Maddow.

Did you ever wonder what would happen if you were “stark raving mad”?  Would you know it and be able to tell someone, “I’m nuts.  Help me!” or would you refuse to acknowledge it.  It depends upon the degree of madness.  The closer one is to total madness, the less likely is he to ask for help as the ability to acknowledge any such infirmity is beyond the capacity of his feeble, fear-ridden ego.  Most of us deal with internal duress at some point in our lives…and times throughout our lives…and one might think of this as “madness” but not anywhere near deserving the label madness.  Life is difficult and at times the difficulties test our resources and our ability to make appropriate adaptation is challenged.  But we do it and never merit the label “mad” though often…perhaps, ”neurotic as hell.”  But those who are “stark raving mad” are so far beyond the pale that they are immune to any external feedback and will listen only to the feedback from their own internal haunts as well as those who have subscribed to the influence of these same haunts. Those who are under this influence have permitted this to happen because the haunts of the mad man, the “identified patient”, have resonated with some muted haunt in their own depths that they have surrendered to the siren call of this embodiment of madness that was before them.

Shakespeare offered pertinent wisdom on this matter, asking the question, “What is madness but to be nothing else but mad?”  Shakespeare here recognized the point made above, that we are all mad to some degree, and the problem would lie only with those who are “nothing else but mad.”  He realized that “madness” was only a problem when it consumed the individual to the point that his judgment was gravely impaired so that his choices put himself and/or others in danger.  Such an individual is out of touch with reality, relative to another observation by the Bard, “Madness in great one’s must not unwatched go.”

I hesitate to describe Trump as “a great one” but he does occupy a “great” office with immense power and influence in the entire world.  The evidence of his instability goes back decades, has become more prominent in recent decades as he became a more prominent public figure, and now is glaringly obvious as he occupies the office of the President. No, he is not “mad” for there is, at this point, “something else than mad” present.  But there is madness, “stark raving madness” roiling in the depths of his being, and it cannot but escalate as the Mueller investigation continues to close in on him.  “Acting out” always leads to conclusion, either humility and recognition of one’s excesses or an explosion of violence upon oneself, or others, or both.  The ugliness within must find expression.  We can run from it but it will always follow us until we address it or find a steady diet of “others” upon whom to project it.

I find it interesting that my country, the United States of America…the sole surviving superpower…has the ability to destroy the world but so far does not have within its heart the will or power to even “limit” this personification of its own avarice.  Like any individual, my country is powerless before its hidden, feared, subterranean depths which are now glaringly obvious to us all in this embodiment of our heart’s darkness.  Even his minions are aware of this but they are so “dug in” with his delusional system that they cannot admit it. This is the ‘will to self-destruction” which will relentlessly pursue its ends unless the gods, i.e. “God”, offers us a “deux ex machina” to resolve this mess.

Here is a list of my blogs.  I invite you to check out the other two sometime.

https://anerrantbaptistpreacher.wordpress.com/

https://literarylew.wordpress.com/

https://theonlytruthinpolitics.wordpress.com/

Woody Allen: “The Heart Wants What it Wants”

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Allen said this in response to criticism of his marriage to his step-daughter in 1997. He was very astute, perhaps more than he realized as the declaration merely meant, “I want what I want and I don’t have to explain it to anyone!”  He realized that marrying your own step-daughter was, at least…shall we say “awkward”; but, the desire of his heart prevailed.

The heart is easily misunderstood as we are taught by our culture to look at life superficially, including our own life…and even our “heart.”  I’m reminded of sermon fodder from my youth, “The heart is desperately wicked and deceitful above all things.  Who can know it?”  My adult interpretation of this verse from Jeremiah is, “The heart is really complicated, so much so that, ‘Who can know it?’  The complications of the heart include good and bad impulses, even ‘desperately wicked’ ones which this same heart will not allow us to be conscious of.”  But what we are not conscious of will manifest itself in our attitude and behavior though we will always “be human” and fail to acknowledge this.

On its deepest level, the heart is a rapacious monster wanting only what it wants.  Most of the time this black hole is assuaged by the process of symbolization, i.e. “sublimation”, so that instead of complete satisfaction of our wants we will settle for “some” of our wants which will allow us to live in a world populated by persons who have made the same bargain with the reptilian brain.  History has given us many examples of persons who could not accept this bargain, most of which are noted for acts of brutality which have led to imprisonment or execution.  This people have said with their behavior, “I want stuff and I will go to any end to get it.”  On the platform of world history, demagogues like Adolph Hitler come to mind.  He wanted power; he wanted to control the whole world, and would go to all ends to accomplish this goal.  Fortunately, humankind intervened and stopped him though not before millions of lives had been snuffed out by his rapacity.  England had a chance to set a limit in 1938 but the appeasement policy of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain demonstrated that people like Hitler cannot be reasoned with. Less than a year later Hitler brazenly disregarded his agreement with Chamberlain and marched into Czechoslovakia.

The heart is the wellspring of life.  It is the source of all the beauty that we see in humankind; but it is also the source of all the ugliness.  Poet Ranier Rilke noted this ambivalence, telling us, “The heart has its beastly little treasures.”  At times it is necessary to give attention to this “beastliness,” individually and collectively, to allow the beauty to find expression. But if the “ugliness” is not acknowledged, and addressed consciously, it will prevail usually under the guise of some “noble” announced intention.

“Good” and “Bad” Shame

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Theodore Roethke with his poem, “Dolour” capture so poignantly the prison that shame can create for us.  He captures the daily grind of routine, devoid of spontaneity and spirit, which Emerson had reference to when he bemoaned that, “Most men live lives of quiet desperation.”  For desperation is what ensues in spiritual deprivation, which always leads to addictions such as drugs, alcohol, ideology, (including religious ideology), and consumerism:

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight,
All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,
Endless duplication of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces. 

Healthy shame is necessary as it can nudge us into the tribe we are born into, teaching us to “make nice” in the interest of group coherence.  We then respect rules of decorum, civility, respect for each other, and even agreed upon ruses that have an important function in making the tribe cohere.  But toxic shame often steps in and these necessary “rules” are forced upon children, sometimes with subtle and often not so subtle brutality so that the whole tribe is force-marched toward some unknown end, driven only by the force of habit etched deeply in the old brain.

Toxic shame breeds a tribe/nation of automatons who are readily manipulated by the power structure which controls the reins of the economy and government. And in the modern world, particularly in present day America, we find ourselves enthralled by a demagogue who in less than two weeks could further squash dissent and allow him to continue his assault on traditional American values, including those that we like to describe as “Judeo-Christian.”  People who are shamed into submission lack the capacity for critical thought; critical thinking would evoke in their heart the experience that Rick Perry suffered in 2011 during a debate, an excruciating spasm of self-awareness, when he realized he had made an ass of himself and had to utter the famous word, “Oops.”  It is very hard to admit “oops” when you are shame-bound as you just cannot admit having made a mistake.  (Now how Rick Perry did it, I don’t have an explanation.  But it did speak well of him!)  We make asses of ourselves, much more often than we are willing to admit, and when it happens it is redemptive if we can say…perhaps, merely…”oops.”  Oh, if Trump could just learn this simple word!

Here is a list of my blogs.  I invite you to check out the other two sometime.

https://anerrantbaptistpreacher.wordpress.com/

https://literarylew.wordpress.com/

https://theonlytruthinpolitics.wordpress.com/