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Emily Dickinson’s Cloistered View of the World
I love Emily Dickinson. I love her cryptic, almost awkward use of words to describe the human predicament and reveal her own complicated, conflicted soul. She lived her life cloistered in her father’s attic, preferring the solace of her intricate verbal world over the “dog-and-pony-show” of her day. I identify myself with her cloistered view of the world but my “cloistering” has mercifully been metaphorical.
One of her poems that has always grabbed me was about attention, the tendency of our “soul” to fashion a world that it is comfortable with and then “close the valves of our attention like stone.” I love that image and can almost hear those valves “closing like stone.”
Here is the poem:
The Soul selects her own Society,
Then, shuts the door;
To her divine Majority
Present (or obtrude) no more.
Unmoved, she notes the Chariots
Pausing at her low gate.
Unmoved, an Emperor be kneeling upon her mat.
I’ve known her from an ample nation choose one
Then close the valves of her attention like stone.
I had often come up with the same observation about life but until I read this poem I could only offer “we believe what we want to believe”, not having the gift of poetic expression as Dickinson did. And, though this insight came with the price of “detachment,” I’m glad to have paid that price as it has helped me to remember to appreciate and value my perspective on life but to remember that everyone’s “valves of attention” creates unique viewpoints.
And in this poem note the soul’s response to her stately “visitor”. This soul, comfortable in its own private little world, turns its nose down at a visitor who should be graciously welcomed. It makes me think of Hamlet’s pining to escape his “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to” by “fleeing to a nutshell” where there he could be “king of infinite spaces.”
This poem reveals that Dickinson knew she lived detached in a private world and the body of her poetry suggests that she found a comfort there in her solitude. Emotional isolation can easily be a “private hell”….as it is when one is the “king of infinite spaces”…but the gods can afford comfort there if it happens to be one’s lot in life. And without Dickinson’s acceptance of her “lot in life”, our world would be deprived of her poetic riches.
When Social Media Harrassment Leads to Suicide
The New York Times reported today of a recent suicide by a lovely, intelligent 12-year old Florida girl who had been harassed for over a year via social media to the point where she no longer wished to live. I can remember being 12 years old and vividly recall how painful it was to feel that you were different than others or did not fit in with the social norm. Now, even at that time I was a neophyte “literarylew” so I did not fit-in and was socially uncomfortable, but I had adapted with an ego which allowed me to cope with the stresses and present an acceptable facade so that I escaped most of the social opprobrium that could have come my way. (Oh, if my friends there in “Smallville”, Arkansas had known what analytical chicanery was festering in my heart, they would have mercifully harassed me for thinking like that!)
Now most of us have found ourselves outside the pale of social approval before and can remember having this happen even at age 12. But, we did not kill ourselves and most of us did not even want to. Why would this precious young soul allow this social violence to get “to her” and cause her so much pain that she would take her life? Why not resort to the familiar bromide, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words (or social media) will never hurt me”?
Well, the inability to resort to that childish contrivance is the issue. Some people are more thin-skinned and when subjected to criticism, it pierces them into the depths of their soul to the point of excruciating shame and humiliation, a point at which any of us would contemplate suicide. Most of us have a membrane in our soul beyond which the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to” cannot penetrate. But others do not have this membrane; and still others have had this membrane violated as is the case with victims of trauma. Thus when hurt comes, “hurt” comes. It is not the notion or “idea” of hurt that visits, but it is the raw, unmediated subjective experience of “hurt” that invades the soul and makes the individual prefer death over the anguish of threatened annihilation. They know…and and I think they are correct…that when death has come, their torment by the threat of annihilation will be over. But what they have lost sight of in that horror is that there is hope available if they can find a helpful, loving hand that can guide them through the hell they are living in. They can suddenly realize that “this too shall pass” and that the very real hell they are being devoured by will loosen its grasp if they can only hang on and merely trust someone enough to allow them into that hell for a moment. (See concluding quotation from da Vinci.)
I’m so sorry for the loss of this lovely young girl. And I’m so sorry for the ugliness that constellated in her social group that brought them to the point where they were willing to treat her like that. And, I am sorry to have to admit that the same ugliness is in my heart and will always be as I will always be merely a human. But I’m very grateful that I have a bit of awareness of this dark side to my heart so that I’m less likely to unleash it as I used to do when I was younger.
O cities of the sea, I behold in you your citizens, women as well as men tightly bound with stout bonds around their arms and legs by folk who will not understand your language; and you will only be able to give vent to your griefs and sense of loss of liberty by making tearful complaints, and sighs, and lamentations one to another; for those who bind you will not understand your language nor will you understand them. Leonardo da Vinci, from “Of Children in Swaddling Clothes”. Just as Jaspers would note, da Vinci knew that we “have to take it where we find it.”
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This is a test post, friends!
Forgive my ignorance b ut I’m trying to learn to post by email. I’m gonna see if this makes it to WP and if so, in what shape. Sorry for taking advantage of you.
A Van Gogh Observation about Christ
I think that Christians can learn a lot about their faith from people from outside of the fold, people who have not been “Christianized” into their faith much like a machine-line product. Those of us raised in a Christian culture have to be careful that our faith is not merely something that we have imbibed from the atmosphere of our life much like other parts of our identity—gender roles, political affiliation, affiliation with the “local sports team”, etc.
Now I am not at artist though I am married to one and have learned a lot from her as I have had to recognize and learn to live with someone who looks at the world differently than I do. She also brings a different perspective to my faith from time to time, not having been “Christianized” as I have been. And I receive weekly emails from another artist, Robert Genn, who also has interesting things to share about space which are often relevant to spirituality. Today I want to share with you an observation about Jesus made by Vincent Van Gogh which I found really interesting. He saw Jesus as an artist but an artist whose medium was the human spirit and life.
I can well understand that you were a trifle surprised to hear how little I liked the Bible, although I have often tried to study it more thoroughly. Only its kernel—Christ—seems to me, from an artistic point of view, to stand higher than, or at any rate to be somewhat different from Greek, Indian, Egyptian, and Persian antiquities, although these also stood on a very high plane. But, I repeat, this Christ is more of an artist than all artists—he worked in living spirits and bodies—he made men instead of statues.
(This quote shared by one of my favorite bloggers, a Quaker who lives in England, whose blog is titled, “Finding God in 365 Days”)
Neuroscience and God…Again!
Adam Gopnik, in the current edition of The New Yorker magazine, offers a review of a spate of recent books on neuroscience many of which appear to be having second thoughts on the notion of “matter over mind”, i.e. the idea that neurochemistry is the source of all thought and that any ideas such as a “god” might need some attention after all.
I am glad to see the discussion of the subject thought my strong impression is that “science” still holds sway as being the prevailing myth of the day. Of course, given my stubborn and unenlightened habitual way of thinking, I still childishly hold onto the notion of God. I can’t help it! “My neurochemistry makes me do it!” which is some version of “the devil made me do it” as I could never in a million years just declare that I choose to.
But facetiousness aside, I am certain that we are here and that we have carved out a “reality” fictitious thought it might be. And, sociologically and anthropologically, it is fictitious. Just ask Peter Berger. But we are here! It is easy for some people to get consumed with their explanation of how we got here and get so carried away with their pet theories that they actually have ill-will at those who feel differently. When I meet someone like this, I admit I toss them into the “ideologue” category and try to give them a wide berth, regardless of how noble and well-reasoned their argument is.
And, given the fact that we are here….or the “fantasy” that we are here if you want to get really far out…I feel it is very important what we do with our brief time “strutting and fretting” on this beautiful stage. Personally, I deem it important to speculate about questions such as the above but it is also important to live my life responsibly and meaningfully in my social context. And, how I go about this does have an impact on the world though, admittedly in my case, the extent is infinitesimal and what it is I will never really know.
For example, this verbal “stuff” that I’m going to toss out into the void in a moment with the punch of a button is important. The importance might be that I feel it was important. It might be that someone will appreciate it. It might be that second later I will read over it and suddenly in horror, tell myself, “Lewis, get a life!” and quit wasting my time. It might be that suddenly the whole world will happen to check in to “Literarylew” and as a result the Millenium will come tomorrow and suddenly I’ll be rich and famous, no longer merely a small clod of cholesterol in the mainstream of life! My point is that life is made up of little insignificant events and gestures and we have no idea what their result will be. Memories of my life are replete with nameless individuals whose small and insignificant gestures has made my life much more rewarding.
But it is important that each day we show up and report for duty. Or, given the approach of fall and the baseball playoffs, let me put it this way, “It is important that we step to the plate each day, bat in hand, look for a good pitch to hit, and then hammer it into the outfield hole. Oh, heck, let me get grandiose and conjecture, “It’s out of here. A homerun…”
Who knows? You never know.
Another Episode of “Waging the War we Are”
I have quoted Auden so often, most frequently his pithy little reminder that “We wage the war we are.” I know this is shocking to you who think I am a regular “Ozzie” of “Ozzie and Harriet” fame, but I like that notion because I am one hell of a battlefield! I always have been but have spent most of my life trying to avoid this internal battlefield but now I’m getting kind of brazen and appear to be telling the gods, “Ok, bring it on! Let’s see what you got. Hit me with your best shot!” My attitude is, “Well, might as well. Whatever is there is there and if we aren’t aware of it, it is living us, leaving us with the pathetic lot of being “the toy of some great pain.”
Here is a thought by Vincent Van Gogh who waged a similar battle, revealing his determination to toil onward with his life, to “keep going, keep going come what may” without any real guess as to where it may lead.
I must continue to follow the path I take now. If I do nothing, if I study nothing, if I cease searching, then, woe is me, I am lost. That is how I look at it — keep going, keep going come what may. But what is your final goal, you may ask. That goal will become clearer, will emerge slowly but surely, much as the rough draught turns into a sketch, and the sketch into a painting through the serious work done on it, through the elaboration of the original vague idea and through the consolidation of the first fleeting and passing thought.” (Recently posted in WP blog, “Finding God in 365 Days.”)
And then the haunting, grim observation of the always haunting and grim T. S. Eliot,
And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment.
(From “Little Gidding” in “The Four Quartets”)
“I Want to Know it All!”
I discovered another wonderful poem, this time on Krista Bennet’s blog, “On Being.” The author is Marie Howe who is the poet laureate of the state of New York:
MAGDALENE–THE SEVEN DEVILS
by Marie Howe
“Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven devils had been cast out” —Luke 8:2.
The first was that I was very busy.
The second — I was different from you: whatever happened to you could not happen to me, not like that.
The third — I worried.
The fourth – envy, disguised as compassion.
The fifth was that I refused to consider the quality of life of the aphid,
The aphid disgusted me. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
The mosquito too – its face. And the ant – its bifurcated body.
Ok the first was that I was so busy.
The second that I might make the wrong choice,
because I had decided to take that plane that day,
that flight, before noon, so as to arrive early
and, I shouldn’t have wanted that.
The third was that if I walked past the certain place on the street
the house would blow up.
The fourth was that I was made of guts and blood with a thin layer of skin
lightly thrown over the whole thing.
The fifth was that the dead seemed more alive to me than the living
The sixth — if I touched my right arm I had to touch my left arm, and if I touched the left arm a little harder than I’d first touched the right then I had to retouch the left and then touch the right again so it would be even.
The seventh — I knew I was breathing the expelled breath of everything that was alive and I couldn’t stand it,
I wanted a sieve, a mask, a, I hate this word – cheesecloth –
to breath through that would trap it — whatever was inside everyone else that
entered me when I breathed in
No. That was the first one.
The second was that I was so busy. I had no time. How had this happened? How had our lives gotten like this?
The third was that I couldn’t eat food if I really saw it – distinct, separate from me in a bowl or on a plate.
Ok. The first was that I could never get to the end of the list.
The second was that the laundry was never finally done.
The third was that no one knew me, although they thought they did.
And that if people thought of me as little as I thought of them then what was
love?
Someone using you as a co-ordinate to situate himself on earth.
The fourth was I didn’t belong to anyone. I wouldn’t allow myself to belong
to anyone.
Historians would assume my sin was sexual.
The fifth was that I knew none of us could ever know what we didn’t know.
The sixth was that I projected onto others what I myself was feeling.
The seventh was the way my mother looked when she was dying.
The sound she made — the gurgling sound — so loud we had to speak louder to hear each other over it.
And that I couldn’t stop hearing it–years later –
grocery shopping, crossing the street –
No, not the sound – it was her body’s hunger
finally evident.–what our mother had hidden all her life.
For months I dreamt of knucklebones and roots,
the slabs of sidewalk pushed up like crooked teeth by what grew underneath.
The underneath —that was the first devil. It was always with me.
And that I didn’t think you— if I told you – would understand any of this –
Once again I’m captivated by someone else who is haunted like me by the knowledge that there is something “out there” or, as she put it, “underneath,” that “none of us could ever know we didn’t know.” And suddenly I’m almost a child again and can see myself curling up on the kitchen floor, screaming at the top of my lungs to God, “Why not? Why not? I’m gonna hold my breath until you let me!” For, this is a childish impulse, probably not unrelated to that age-old quest for the “knowledge of good and evil” which got us all into this mess in the first place!
But, it won’t ever happen. We will not know it all, we will not wrap out head around this marvelous mystery that we are caught up in. Even in his death throes, Hamlet, reflecting Shakespeare’s penchant for wrapping his head around the whole of human experience, lamented that “things remaining thus unsaid will live behind me.” Hamlet had so much more to say but had run out of time. (And, he could have said more had he not been driven by that unconscious need to satisfy his incestuous need and vanquish the interloper to his desire, Claudius. But even then, not “all” of it could have been said for there is always “more” to be said, endlessly “more.”)
We always come back to limits. The heart of man has boundaries as a core issue and spends his lifetime learning to accept them, knowing in the depths of this heart that the ultimate “limit” will eventually prevail and he will return to the dust from which he was made. But until that moment we are hard-wired to “keep on truckin’” and the will to life often continues even after our conscious mind fades into oblivion. As bad as it might appear to be at times, we always prefer to “cling to these ills that we have than fly to others that we know not of.”
“Thoughts Are Things. Choose the Good Ones”
I receive an email each day from a New Age “guru” named Mike Dooley. I don’t always read his missive, but do check in from time to time as I find some of his observations very timely. And I love the quotation he concludes each email with, “Thoughts are things. Choose the good ones.” This pithy observation summarizes his central message, that our thoughts control us and that we do have control over our thoughts….or can have more control that we often think we do.
Here is his email of a few days ago:
Dominion over all things doesn’t come with age, spirituality, or even gratitude. In fact, it doesn’t come at all. You were born with it and you use it every moment of every day, whenever you say, “I will…I am…I have…” And for that matter, whenever you say, “It’s hard…I’m lost…I don’t know…” And he wittily concludes with, “Careful where you point that thing!”
The “thing” he is referring to is our mind, or better yet, our heart which makes the “decision” of which thoughts to pack into our quiver each day. Now this “packing” is usually an unconscious process but if we will slow down, pause, and pay attention to our heart we can begin to notice how certain thoughts and patterns of thoughts are predominating in our life, not all of which are productive, not all of which are even “nice” to others and even to ourselves.
The Bible tells us, “As a man thinketh, so is he.” Popular lore offers the bromide, “Our thoughts become us.” Shakespeare noted, “Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so.” And even Henry Ford had very astute wisdom on the note, tell us, “Whether you think you can, or think you can;t—either way you’re right.”
The Angst of Duality and Rumi
I feel like a broken record. Thinking back over my two years of blogging I realize there are certain themes that keep coming back, themes which are obviously very important to me, themes which one could even say haunt me. One of these themes is that life is not as it appears to be, that it is always something that is going on beneath the surface which must by design always elude us. It is kind of like a cat chasing its own tail; or better yet, the quest for it is like the mythological euroboric image of the snake trying to swallow its tail. I sometimes want to tell myself, “Hey! Stop this! Get a life! Get out there and make some money, watch a lot of reality TV, go ahead, drink that Kool-Aid.
And, spiritual lore in which I’m steeped even warns of the futility of spiritual obsession. For example, the Buddhist koan notes the lunacy of “riding an oxen, searching for an oxen,” the point being, “Hey, just quit trying! Don’t waste your effort. The thing you search for is already there. As W. H. Auden noted, “The Center that you cannot find is known to the unconscious mind. There is no need to despair for you are already there.”
From a clinical perspective, this quest can even be thought of as schizophrenic in nature and it is no accident that schizophrenics often have spiritual themes in their fantasies. The schizophrenic is trapped in a bifurcated world, not able to find his/her place in the “real” world and subjected to the torment of living in a hinterland, constantly buffeted by the daily torments that his “delusional” system presents to him.
So, let me demonstrate my venturing into another day of such mental machinations and share with you a beautiful poem by Rumi who too recognized the presence of this shadow world, insisting that it was the real one that we should give more respect to.
The Self We Share
Thirst is angry with water. Hunger bitter
with bread.
The cave wants nothing to do with the sun.
This is dumb, the self- defeating way
we’ve been.
A gold mine is calling us into its temple.
Instead, we bend and keep picking up rocks
from the ground.
Every thing has a shine like gold,
but we should turn to the source!
The origin is what we truly are. I add a little
vinegar to the honey I give.
The bite of scolding makes ecstasy more familiar.
But look, fish, you’re already in the ocean:
just swimming there makes you friends with
glory.
What are these grudges about? You are Benjamin.
Joseph has put a gold cup in your grain sack and
accused you of being a thief.
Now he draws you aside and says,
‘You are my brother. I
am a prayer. You’re the amen.’
We move in eternal regions, yet
worry about property here.
This is the prayer of each:
You are the source of my life.
You separate essence from mud.
You honor my soul. You bring rivers from the
mountain springs. You brighten my eyes.
The wine you offer takes me out of myself into
the self we share. Doing that is religion.
Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi
literary lew 