Emily Dickinson was an Observer of Life, a “Prophet” of Sorts

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One of my favorite quips from Emily Dickinson is, “Life is over there. On a shelf.” Part of what makes this thought so captivating for me is that I still have buried in my heart a “literal” lew mind/heart which, when reading an observation like that wants to exclaim, “Why hell! That’s nuts! Life is not ‘over there’ and certainly not on a damn shelf.” That reflects the concrete-thinking that I spent the first two or maybe three decades of my life firmly ensconced in. But now I completely understand what Dickinson was noting and simultaneously revealing about herself. She was an “observer” of life; she paid attention to a life in which those around her were immersed to the point being oblivious of a “hidden” dimension that she captured with her poetry. Emily was alienated or detached, allowing her to grasp the human soul and put into words its machinations, those delightful as well as beastly. There is sense in which poets might be described as prophetic, not in the sense of being able to foretell the future but being aware of the implications of the present. She was aware, acutely aware. She saw that bookshelf in her room and in her heart conjoined that image with a feeling of separateness and loneliness in life.

This division of the soul is problematic without looking beneath the surface. Such a “division” makes one think of “schizo” as in schizophrenic. The difference is that a schizophrenic is definitely “divided” but is lacking that substrate of the soul which provides an underlying unity. Dickinson certainly felt the anxiety and despair that she conveys in her poetry. Who would not if they were more or less “cloistered” in their father’s attic for the whole of their life. But she found beneath the surface that “substrate” which anchored her and allowed her to offer the profound wisdom that blokes like myself can take comfort in. (Btw, I could easily spell substrate with a capital “S.”)

I close with a relevant bit of poetry from Matthew Arnold:

I’d like to close with a relevant quote from another 19th century, Matthew Arnold:

The poet, to whose mighty heart

Heaven doth a quicker pulse impart

Subdues that energy to scan

Not his own heart, but that of man.

Marilynne Robinson and the Importance of Need

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Marilynne Robinson’s novel, “Housekeeping” and the movie that resulted from it has really stuck with me. Robinson has a deep spiritual dimension to her life and work because she knows a lot about spiritual depths. One must in order to write like she does, and in order to gain the respect of someone like Barack Obama so that in his Presidency he flew to Des Moines, Iowa to interview her. That is right! For him, to interview her!

One line from “Housekeeping” grabbed me when I read it 25 years ago, and even today tugs at my soul, “Need can blossom into all the compensations it requires.” Need, or emptiness, is what makes us human and is what the Christian tradition has in mind with the doctrine of kenosis, the “self-emptying” of Jesus; this “self-emptying” means “to making nothing.” It is the knowledge, and experiencing of our Absence, that represents a developing familiarity with the innermost regions of our soul. Avoiding this neediness/emptiness is what our persona was designed to cover up until we could find the maturity to allow it to become porous a bit so that our innermost being could come to light. Shakespeare put it like this, “Within be rich, without be fed no more.”

Our materialist, consumer culture offers us a steady array of “stuff” to invest in, to “feed upon,” and avoid this redemptive inner core. And speaking from experience, religion can offer its own version of “stuff” when dogma and sterile ritual are relied on rather than doing the soul work which would allow this dogma and ritual to have a meaningful impact in one’s life.

Any Hope Here????

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It is really a grim moment in the history of my country. We really live in a “stupor”, that a reference to a W.H. poem which I will quote from in a moment. The stupor lies in the fact that we are now divided between two mind sets, “I am right” and “I am right.” An alternative would be, “There is a bit of right on either perspective and the goal would be to see how we can reconciliate our differences.” But the hope of that reconciliation has a significant obstruction—the leader of one side of this argument is the President of the United States and he has absolutely no capacity to equivocate on his stance of being right. If you want to have some fun, delve into two notions on google, “solipsism” and “aseity” both of which are relevant to deity and they are both relevant to Trump. The problem is that when these two terms become relevant to a mere mortal, the “deity” is intrinsically a “dark” deity and the results can only be catastrophic for the body politic. If you are conservative, and happened to have stumbled into this domain, do not dare google these two google terms.

Here is the poetic quote from an astute, spiritually astute poet, W.H. Auden:

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

“Negation and despair” besets us. Hopelessness. Do we dare show an “affirming flame” in this dark moment? Trump and his minions are but an epiphenomena, a passing shadow that will pass away, the “passing away” which we might not live long enough to witness. We can only hope. That is called, “Faith.”

Jorie Graham Offers an “Incarnated Word”

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Jorie Graham is one of my favorite contemporary poets. In the following poem she exquisitely explores the vulnerability of human subjective experience, a dimension of experience which is often blocked in our Western world of compulsive linear thinking. This vein of thinking, described by Carl Jung as “directed thinking” is intentional with the intention being to comply with the expectations of the external world into which we have been born. Jorie writes from, and certainly lives from what Julia Kristeva describes as the “semiotic” dimension of human experience. This is the realm that W. H. Auden described as “flesh and mind” having been “delivered from mistrust.” I see this as an incarnated experience where one has found the power to speak freely from the heart with consideration for his/her context but not a slavish consideration. This is when truth and wisdom are presented to our world.

Self-Portrait: May I Touch You

Jorie Graham

here. May I touch your
name. Your
capital. May I
touch outcome, kindness, slur down my caresses to
throat, eyes, end of the tunnel. Come out. Now your name is changed. How do I reach
right name, right bandage – the character that you will be for now
in the dark, where there is need – is there still need? – can you be for this short time
singular? You need to be singular. There you are changing again. These words are
furrows. Now they are
arrows. Don’t touch where it says no. It says no everywhere. Where is the spot where you
are faking it. That spot. So well. Can you tell. Doesn’t work for you. What works for you.
The rouge you have applied to see who you would be for a while. You
change your mind. You change the shade. You recognise yourself for a while
then it grows old. The pupae in the mud grow old. They’ve slicked it smooth as skin with
perfect perforations. All entrances and exits. The only way, right way, the pupae morph
to their winged
stage and grow. They exit not to return. Those who laid them do not return. They
change from
unborn to being here now, 67 degrees under the eaves as they come out. I watch. Nothing
can change out here in the given. It is given and it is received. If ants find the pupae
they eat the nest through. Sometimes they get to live their life. I know you need to be
a significant player in
the creation of
your veri-
similitude. Abide abide. Do you do nude. Can I touch your apparition, your attitude,
multitude, your eternally misunderstood solitude – do you do adulthood, husbandhood,
motherhood – listen: sap in the dogwood – not like blood, crude, flood, lassitude – I want you
to come unglued – clad in nothing but blood – in it – dripping wet – appearing always re-
reappearing,
of course wearing your camouflage – whatever you currently identify as – clad in your
surface your newest reason – may I touch it – your phantom your place-
holder, undelivered, always in the birth canal, undiscovered – your personal claim on
the future, residue of all the choices you’ve made thus far, also the purchases, invoices, in
voice where your change resides, in vice where it settles – skin – a win win – the management
wishes to express concern – can I touch there where you appear in the mirror – where you lay
your simulacra down – lave the mercurial glass – bypass being – hardly a pingwhere you
boomerang – here you are back outside – ghost money –
do you not want to feel
the fierce tenacity of
the only body you can sacrifice – the place where it is indeed your
fault – there in the fault – no heartsearching? Me with my hands on the looking glass
where your life for the taking has risen, where you can shatter into your million pieces –
all appareled refusal. What are you a sample of today –
what people.

Langston Hughes, “A Dream Deferred”

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Poetry is disruptive. If it does not “disrupt” then it is not doing its job; non-disruptive poetry treads only in the shallow waters of the heart. But here is a poem that is from the depths of the heart and dives directly into my heart. It is very disruptive to me, “disruptive as hell” in a very real sense, for it shocks, threatens, and jars the myriad preconceptions in which I’ve spent my life. And one who spends his “three-score and ten” trapped in his preconceptions is living in a hell of some sorts. Hughes, like all poets, knew about dreams and the temptation to stifle them. Even more so, poets like Hughes who was a black man living in the 20^th century, knew the oppressive system of racism stifling the dreams of black men and women in America.

HARLEM BY LANGSTON HUGHES

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Belonging, Identity, and Toko-pa Turner

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I was a joiner in my youth and early adulthood. I was not a good one, able only to offer a half-hearted commitment to any opportunity I found to convince myself…and half-heartedly again, that I belonged, that I fit in. This intense, and often desperate attempt never sufficed. I now realize that the more one must “try” to fit in the more likely it is that the efforts themselves will be off-putting to others. If you feel that you do fit in, it is likely that you will do so, and that you will be so comfortable in this “chez nous” of yours that you will rarely, if ever, worry about “fitting in.”

But I’ve almost totally given up in this futile quest of fitting in and am finding peace as a result. To borrow a term from Anna Burns’ Booker-Prize winning novel from last year, “The Milkman,” I am from beyond the pale and thus, in her terms, a “beyond the paler.” And I’m happy that this full awareness did not dawn on me until the 7^th decade of my life as now I have the maturity to not be intoxicated with the intrinsic alienation of this lot in life. I know whole-heartedly and appreciatively that those “within the pale” are the backbone of this “reality” we live within. Arrogance is a readily available to all of us, certainly those that lie beyond this pale and harbor some deep-seated wish that we didn’t. Arrogance just belies a failure to appreciate that the only thing that any of us have, beyond or within the pale, is “being here.”; this is relevant to the imperative of Ram Dass decades ago, “Be here now.” We are present in this mysterious maelstrom that we know as reality and it is important that we realize that this is true for all of us. We have only “being here now” so briefly, and that is the commonality that we all share. Regardless of how much we vehemently disagree or even loathe anyone in our life, they share with us this humble quality of being simply an entity that is nothing more than a “being” like the rest of us. It is in this simple, but Infinite Presence that we can find the unity which can point us in the direction of living together in harmony. Here in this Sacred Space we stand naked together, unadorned by all of the pretenses, dogmas, adornments, accomplishments, and chicaneries that have given us the illusion of our separateness.

Here I share a quote from a writer I discovered last year, Toko-Pa Turner which sums up these thoughts so beautifully:

Our longing for community and purpose is so powerful that it can drive us to join groups, relationships, or systems of belief that, to our diminished or divided self, give the false impression of belonging. But places of false belonging grant us conditional membership, requiring us to cut parts of ourselves off in order to fit in. While false belonging can be useful and instructive for a time, the soul becomes restless when it reaches a glass ceiling, a restriction that prevents us from advancing. We may shrink back from this limitation for a time, but as we grow into our truth, the invisible boundary closes in on us and our devotion to the group mind weakens. Your rebellion is a sign of health. It is the way of nature to shatter and reconstitute. Anything or anyone who denies your impulse to grow must either be revolutionized or relinquished.
― Toko-pa Turner, Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home

Sometimes God is known as Eddy

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This is one of the best blogs I’ve ever run across! This woman is a gifted soul. Please check her out.

Short visits with an honest God

Mom with both looking up (2)

Sometimes God is known as Eddy, and he drives an older Oldsmobile. He dates an Asian lady who sells apples off her tree. Perfect crimson apples, cheap and crisp. Everyone admires their simplicity. The union of the holy and profane.

Sometimes God is known as Wonder. It’s lonely at the top, lonely on the edges, lonely in the alleys, lonely deep inside. But Wonder turns the tables and leaves a giant tip. Wonder drinks bad wine with relish and greets the coming storm. Wonder drops all pretense and bares its glistening soul.

Sometimes God is known as Bastard, parentage unknown. A conception so spectacular it must forever go unseen. Protested, but unseen. Tortured, but unseen. Orgasmic, but unseen. Left flailing in a dumpster, flushed in desperation, wrapped and suffocating in discarded plastic bags. So much blood. So much blood.

Sometimes God is known as Alpha, other times Omega. Still other…

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An African American Theologian Addresses Racism in Christianity

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I’ve often cited Fr. Richard Rohr in my blogging. He has been an important figure in my spiritual life for over ten years; and, having moved to New Mexico five years ago I have even had the honor of meeting him at his headquarters in Albuquerque. In his daily posts that I receive via email, he has introduced me this week to an African American theologian that I had not heard of before, Howard Thurman. Thurman lived through the horrendous racial turmoil of the 20^th century in my country, passing away in 1981.

In the excerpts Rohr has shared this week, I have become painfully aware of just how racism has haunted my life and how it has predicated my life in a very subtle fashion. Racism shaped my emotional/spiritual life when I was growing up in the 50’s and 60’s in the American South. It cemented into my heart and soul an “us-them” paradigm that I will never totally escape…though “awareness” is helping me mitigate its abysmal ugliness. The Thurman excerpt today helped me to see so clearly how racism was egregiously present in the spiritual tradition that I was born into, a spiritual tradition which nevertheless even today provides an Anchor in my life as I venture into the phase of life so beautifully captured by W. B. Yeats, “An aged man is a paltry thing. A tattered coat upon a stick.” (Though there is no “cane” in my life yet, and my coat is not “tattered”, I am living in the frailty of aging that Yeats had in mind.)

This vulnerability is priceless. It helps me to learn from the daily emails…and the books…of Fr. Rohr and to appreciate the wisdom of “unknown” figures like Thurman. This Thurman wisdom offered today speaks volumes about my Christian tradition, pointing out the sinister manner in which innocent-minded and very good people can use the teachings of Jesus to bring a distorted version of Christianity into the world. And, of course, when one is so ensconced in a distorted view of any dimension of life, there is a deep-seated aversion for considering that “distortion” might be present. The ego wants it that way.

Here is Thurman’s wisdom from today’s Rohr email:

The burden of being black and the burden of being white is so heavy that it is rare in our society to experience oneself as a human being. It may be, I do not know, that to experience oneself as a human being is one with experiencing one’s fellows as human beings. Precisely what does it mean to experience oneself as a human being? In the first place, it means that the individual must have a sense of kinship to life that transcends and goes beyond the immediate kinship of family or the organic kinship that binds him ethnically or “racially” or nationally. He has to feel that he belongs to his total environment. He has a sense of being an essential part of the structural relationship that exists between him and all other men, and between him, all other men, and the total external environment. As a human being, then, he belongs to life and the whole kingdom of life that includes all that lives and perhaps, also, all that has ever lived. In other words, he sees himself as a part of a continuing, breathing, living existence. To be a human being, then, is to be essentially alive in a living world. . . .

If being Christian does not demand that all Christians love each other and thereby become deeply engaged in experiencing themselves as human beings, it would seem futile to expect that Christians as Christians would be concerned about the secular community in its gross practices of prejudice and discrimination. If a black Christian and white Christian, in encounter, cannot reach out to each other in mutual realization because of that which they are experiencing in common, then there should be no surprise that the Christian institution has been powerless in the presence of the color bar in society. Rather it has reflected the presence of the color bar within its own institutional life.

On the other hand, if Christians practice brotherhood among Christians, this would be one limited step in the direction of a new order among men. Think of what this would mean. Wherever one Christian met or dealt with another Christian, there would be a socially redemptive encounter. They would be like the Gulf Stream or the Japanese Current tempering and softening the climate in all directions. Indeed the Christian would be a leaven at all levels of the community and in public and private living. Of course, such a situation may lend itself to all kinds of exploitation and betrayals—but the Christian would be one of the bulwarks of integrity in human relations in an immoral society.

The Deadly Elixir of Group Think’s Certainty

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I just got a “like” from a blogger, one of which I am particular proud. For this man is one of the “godless heathen” that my Christian tradition eschews….a Muslim. I am pleased that a lot of the “hits” I get on this blog are from people of different spiritual traditions who see, who “grok” something in my blatherings that they find of value. For spirituality has the pitfall of evolving into a death-trap in which only those of “like mind”…and therefore, “like biases.” are accepted.

I had that comfort as a child; a “comfort” which was mitigated by the realization that, “Oh, there is something not right about this.” Somehow I knew from early on that the Grace of God, aka “the Grace” of the Universe, is inclusive and not ex-clusive. This intuitive understanding was present from the early days of my life and instilled into my heart a deep experience of alienation, that I did not belong. And I didn’t “belong” for “belonging” involved accepting unquestioned premises in which my young and innocent heart could not imbibe. This was the onset of alienation, from which can emerge complete madness as the pain of alienation initially elicits terror. It is this terror that elicits a demand for certainty, a “certainty” which group-think always offers.

I am learning the value of just “being here.” The ultimate purpose of life is not to find a place in a chaotic world that is often mad…and certainly is now in my country, at least; this ultimate purpose is to just be here. Ram Dass called it “being here now” and Eckhart Tolle more recently described it as, “The Power of Now.” “Being here” is, to borrow from T.S. Eliot, a “condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything.” Or as Janis Joplin put it so eloquently in the 1960’s, “Freedom’s just another name for nothing left to lose.”

Symbolic Communication and Susan K. Deri

literary lew

prose/poetry/philosophy/religion

Emily Dickinson was an Observer of Life, a “Prophet” of Sorts

Marilynne Robinson and the Importance of Need

Any Hope Here????

Jorie Graham Offers an “Incarnated Word”

Langston Hughes, “A Dream Deferred”

Belonging, Identity, and Toko-pa Turner

Sometimes God is known as Eddy

An African American Theologian Addresses Racism in Christianity

The Deadly Elixir of Group Think’s Certainty

Symbolic Communication and Susan K. Deri