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.

Brief Thought from this “Third Rock from the Sun”

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I write often about the infinite complexity of being human, dwelling on this “Third Rock from the Sun,” and witnessing and feeling the weight of fulfilling this Divinely-given task. Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, understands this better than I, and writes beautifully about it:

We become human in the act of finding a place to stand within the irreducibly difficult and mobile interweaving of diverse presentations of what is there for our minds, grasping that to know something in the world is not to arrive at a final structural scheme for it but to inhabit a process of discovery in which there is always more otherness to encounter, the otherness of new perspective and new requirements for “negotiation.” (from “The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language.)

Another Take on, “That Giant Sucking Sound”

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“That giant sucking sound” is often less intense than it is with Trumpism. That “sound” is just the noise that happens when an ego, individually or collectively, is ripe for a needed change. God is up to his mischief, trying to nudge us into changing our perspective about the whole of life, including ourselves. Sometimes Her nudging is not adequate and She will hit us up the side of the head with a bat such as ..this twin-headed pandemic, Trumpism and Covid-19.

As explained yesterday, that “sucking sound” is merely the void/Void trying to get us to recognize and respect that dimension of life which is beyond the pale of reason. That heart of us lies beyond the representational world that we take for granted, offering us darkness and light simultaneously. This was what Goethe recognized when he told us, “The heart has its beastly little treasures.” To word this less philosophically, this Divine intervention seeks to make us aware of the unconscious and give us some appreciation for its role in life. ‘Tis so much easier to deny this, cling to our illusions, and dismiss any challenge with a stock response such as, “He was just kidding” or “he was just joking,” or even a non sequitur like, “It was Obama’s fault!” Seriously, our unconscious has to “nudge” us lest She is forced to, “get Medieval on our ass.” For in that depth of our Being lies a potential which cannot emerge without “birth pangs.”

I’m Hearing, “That Giant Sucking Sound” This Morning!

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Step outside this morning and, if you listen carefully, you will hear that “giant sucking sound” of Trumpism and its abysmal ugliness returning to the void from which it emerged.  That experience, which inspired Edvard Munch to paint “The Scream” is a human tragedy. Donnie is just a little boy like I am, fumbling about on the “granite skirt” (W. H. Auden) of this lovely little speck of cosmic dust.  But, in his early childhood his soul suffered irreparable damage, leaving him without the ability to “play well with others” on the beautiful playground that we call home. He can’t handle the anguish of “I, too, will pass” as in the famous advice of an African-American radical from the 1960’s, “This too shall pass.” (I can’t remember his name.”)  I take hope in the astute wisdom of Voltaire, as the day breaks here in Taos, New Mexico, “Gentlemen, tend your own garden; or as” Eckhart Tolle put it more recently, “Be Here Now.”

“Oops!”

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Hannah Arendt’s work has emboldened me recently to “assail” reality, blessed with some dimension of her “internal dialogue”. Taking a critical stance toward reality is a dangerous endeavor as the attempt to “view” reality entails an assumption that one is separate from it.  That very assumption can easily lead to sheer madness as it implicitly gives one the temptation to think with delight, “Oh boy, I’ve got it!  Lay down world and take it! I’m special, having a word from ‘on high’ that you need to listen to.”  The imperious attitude that one has achieved objectivity is the very same peril that I’m so “arrogantly” hoping to not share here.

The alienation that I labor with always brings to mind the quip from Emily Dickinson, “Life is over there…on a shelf” as if it was a book or a curio on a shelf.  That “blessing/curse” gifted us with the brilliant poetry of Dickinson though I have achieved only a critical viewpoint that I share here occasionally. “Reality” is a set of assumptions and biases that we live by, a body of “givens” that is necessary to be able to wake up in the morning without the task of “making sense” of our world all over again.  When we awaken in the morning, the implicitly agreed upon worldview will still be with us and we will again be able to put our pants on one leg at a time.  BUT, as this “reality” unfolds over the passing of time, it accrues sinister notions that need to be addressed.  In my life, that has involved disavowing, for example, that women are to be submissive to their husbands, that persons of color are inferior to we honkies, and that my spiritual tradition did not have toxic dimensions.  When critical thinking begins to set in, it can leave one with a sense of having become unmoored.  It is frightening to have the insipid experience that, “I don’t see things as I was taught to see them.” But I am today coming to accept this “internal dialogue” that insists that I have something to offer…but only to “offer” and not a view point that I can wield like a hammer.  Remember the old adage, “Give a kid a hammer and everything is a nail?”

I like to describe “reality” as a mere “dog-and-pony show” to which we are taught to subscribe.  Shakespeare described it with the cryptic observation that it was “a tale told by an idiot.” His insight makes me cringe at times when I recall the many times this has been the case with me, and inevitably still is! But the humility of this insight makes it easier for me to utter the famous wisdom of Senator Ted Cruz when I am wrong, “Oops!”

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.”

 

The Prophet Pogo is Speaking to Us!

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I’ve been banished to my “penalty box,” which is the sunroom of our house.  My precious doggie Petey has been banished also, and he is actually the reason for this “banishment.” An harpsichord tuner is arriving shortly and he will need quiet to pay his professionally keen “listening” skills to the tuning of this lovely instrument.  Petey would not permit this, having so much to say to any stranger with his raucous voice. And after all, this “penalty box” is one of my favorite places to set and watch the spring morning unfold, with Petey and I exploring philosophical intricacies!

“Limits” is on my mind so often with this pandemic that besets us.  And even this visit from the tuner brought this to mind when my wife reminded me, “gloves and face mask” when he arrives. This same precaution is relevant anywhere I go, even to Wal Mart where I patiently wait in line with others in queue to “get stuff.” And even there, the queue will be donned with the same PPE I now have at my side.

Having a religious upbringing, of which I’m so proud, my mind goes biblical at times like this. The gods are speaking to us collectively and sternly telling us, “Limits!” (But I prefer the simple term “God” even though I occasionally I will refer to them with the plural pronoun.) Any people will get wayward here and there and will need a lesson like this, painful and deadly thought it might be.  This god-sent “pestilence” is a message from “On High” that we need to look at ourselves closely…and I don’t mean look at “them” more closely unless we look at ourselves with equal intensity.  In the words of the prophet Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us!”

I just watched a promo on TV about History Channel’s new three-part movie about U.S. Grant.  The narrator pointed out that when Lee surrendered to him at Appomattox in April, 1864, it was a solemn occasion.  Grant did not “rub it in” to the vanquished South and his opposing general, U.S. Lee. There was no taunting or jeering as the diplomatic graciousness of Abraham Lincoln had filtered down to Grant and his troops. It was a grievous occasion and Grant knew that merriment from him or his troops was not called for.  I am reminded of a similar moment of graciousness to a defeated foe in the Spanish-American War of 1899 as a U.S. ship had blown a Spanish ship out of the water.  The American troops broke into raucous cheer, happy to see their hard and dangerous work had been successful as the Spanish ship, the Vizcaya, went down in flames.  The captain of the American ship, John Woodward Philip, chided his cheering troops with these famous words, “Don’t cheer boys.  The poor devils are dying.”

Our history offers us many examples of graciousness and respect in moments when our leaders could have responded differently. The humility needed in the moment requires deep-seated respect for boundaries, for the “other” even when our hearts are bursting with “the thrill of victory.” Those two events in our history reveal vividly the emotional/spiritual courage of leadership in a moment of crisis.  These men had boundaries.  I even remember a similar humility in the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1969 when, devastated with shame and humiliation he solemnly and graciously stepped into that helicopter, turned around and waved good-by , allowing Gerald Ford to take his place. Nixon was a broken man as our government had stepped in and firmly set a limit for that very fragile man, telling him, “That’s enough.”  May our leaders always be able to muster up the courage and demonstrate the dignity that is required of all leaders.

This is a moment in the history of mankind when we can dare to tell ourselves, “It is not just about me/”

“As a Man Thinketh, So Is He”

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I do not think that the Bible or any Holy Writ was given us to amuse ourselves “like a kitten given its own tail to tease.” (Goethe) And it certainly was not given to us to “make us Christian.”  The Bible is Holy Writ that has come our way to enable us to live more simply and honestly.  But our ego will have the tendency to take it and run with it, shaping it into one of those kittenish baubles.

Notions such as “ye shall be judged” by the words from your mouth was a simple instruction for us to self-reflect occasionally and pay attention to that “self-narrative” from which we speak and in some manner “speaks” us. It is very revealing. Such is the case here with my sporadic musings.  If you blog, or keep a journal, or are a professional writer, you really ought to peruse your work from time to time and self-reflect and, let your musings reveal your heart. Yes, this biblical admonition conveys the power of language and is related to the Christian belief that Jesus was “the Word made flesh.” There is a sense in which our very identity is simply “a word” enfleshed, a “word” that reveals the very intentions of our heart.  Yes, “as a man thinketh, so is he.”

For example, take a gander sometime at politicians and you will find their words say so much more than what they intend. This is vividly illustrated at this time when our world is terrified by this “pestilence” the gods have sent our way. No, I am not speaking of Trump here though, though  Trump and Trumpism are part of the same pestilence. And for even greater amusement, “take a gander” at preachers.