Change Involves, “Mangled Guts Pretending.”

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How do people change?  I’ve always been curious about this issue for I knew very early in life that I needed to change.  Here are two pithy observations about this question, one from-13th century Persion mystic,Rumi and the other from a mere two decades by American playwright, Tony Kushner.

The Worm’s Waking

There is a worm addicted to eating grape leaves.

Suddenly, he wakes up,

call it Grace, whatever,

something wakes him, and he is no longer a worm.

He is the entire vineyard, and the orchard too,

the fruit, the trunks,

a growing wisdom and joy

that does not need to devour.

Kushner’s play “Angels in America offers a scene in which the internal tension of change is vividly put into words, presented here as a gut-wrenching experience involving a Divine encounter.  Fortunately, most of the time it is merely discomforting or stressful as people like myself do not have the brilliant, sensitive, artistic

temperament of people like Kushner.  Here is a quotation from one memorable scene:

Harper: In your experience of the world. How do people change?

Mormon Mother: Well it has something to do with God so it’s not very nice.

God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can’t even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It’s up to you to do the stitching. 

Harper: And then up you get. And walk around.

Mormon Mother: Just mangled guts pretending.

Harper: That’s how people change. 

December 10, 2020 Conservation

The socio/cultural/political morass which weighs down on us at this moment is very unnerving, even frightening matter; this is because it is a cosmic identity crosis, at least for one teeny-weeny little culture on this “Third Rock From the Sun.” It is teaching us so much about the ego, individually and collectively.

The development of our ego is a monumental event in our life. It is intrinsic to our ability to negotiate what the infant will discover as “reality”, a crisis in which twin poles of our Divinity war with each other. When our ego begins to come into existence, to come online, it struggles within its nascent existence as it loathes discovering its finitude. Only moments earlier, this very core of our being is enconsed in the womb of “no-thingsness” and is on the verge of making the decision to “fall” into this world of existants or remained in the comfortable, Edenic womb.

winnicott’s break down

Is The GOP “Kraken Up”?

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Sydney Powell, an attorney that was included recently in the fold of Trump’s “legal team” suddenly found herself “written out of the script” of the Trump Show, her conspiracy-theory orientation reaching an extreme that even the Kingdom of Trump could not handle.  At one-point last week she even avowed that she was privy the information that would devastate Joe Biden’s status as President Elect, describing this purported bomb shell as a “kraken.” 

I must commend her to being familiar with Scandinavian folklore, however, “Kraken” being a sea monster in its mythology that could suddenly emerge from the depths of the sea and wreak havoc on ships and their crew.  And I also give a nod to Sydney for utilizing metaphor as many of her kind are metaphorically challenged, being in a linear-thinking overdrive.  But after this “praise,” the woman is nuts! 

However, I do think that there is a “kraken” in the depths of Powell, and the Republican Party, and all political parties…and all humans.  One expression of this within the GOP is their intense fear of a “deep state” that is threatening to destroy them and is responsible for “rigging the election” against Trump.  This “kraken” is just one culture’s creation to express the human intuitive fear that there is a monster in the depths of our heart.  And in our current political morass, the Republicans demonstrate just how “human” they are as they respond with this internal terror by projecting it “out there.”  I remember noting this being illustrated by Republican Senator Ted Cruz who declared, “President Obama is out to destroy the Republican Party.”  It was obvious, even then, that the GOP had a self-destructive element in their depths with “creatures” such as the Tea Party. 

I admit that I have spent most of my life terrorized by the “kraken” in my own heart and obeyed the teachings of the culture of my youth and blamed “them”, whoever the “them” of the day was.  It is so frightening to contemplate the heart’s darkness which is why the gods were so gracious to offer us a persona, or “fig leaf”, to cover it up.  They intended for us eventually to find the humility to recognize its presence and begin the lifelong process of acknowledgement.  This is what Goethe had in mind with his observation, “The heart has its beastly little treasures.” My country is now having an opportunity to acknowledge its collective “beastliness”; our religious culture is having the same opportunity. 

The Value of a “Walter Mitty” Adventure In Life

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Pretense is very important.  Without it, we would not be human, for being human entails assuming a persona; and without one of “them there thingies” we would not have culture. We live in a beautiful world and imagination, and the respect for “pretense” that it offers can help us see the beauty even when the mundane or sordid stares at us.  It offers a very nice escape here and there. 

Here I want to share a poem by Grant Quackenbush that I just ran across from “Rattle,” a poetry blog that sends me a daily link: 
 
AMERICAN DREAM 
 
I like to pretend I’m a billionaire. 
It takes the edge off being broke. 
When I wake up in my shoebox room 
which I share with a family of rats 
(I hear them at night 
playing Scrabble in the walls) 
I say: I choose to live this way. I like rats. 
When I go to work and the boss 
tells me to move faster or I’m fired 
I think: I could buy this shitty company 
and sell it to China if I wanted. 
Lah di dah dee, trah lah lah. 
Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart, 
drove a 1979 Ford pickup. 
Henry Ford lived modestly in Michigan. 
Look Ma! I’m Henry Ford 
living modestly in Brooklyn! 
I’m wiping my ass with wads of cash! 
I’m the richest schmuck in America! 
And no one knows it but me. 

Voting, Jonathan Haidt, and e e cummings

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A couple days ago I blogged about the research of Jonathan Haidt which suggested that we vote more in accordance with our feelings than with reason.  Given my poetry-flooded mind and heart, I recalled a quip from e e cummings, “he who pays attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you.” I “felt” this was relevant but did not see how so I did note quote it in that post.  Now I understand. 

First, I should explain that cummings was such a recalcitrant that he would not comply with the simple rules of grammar like capitalization, punctuation, the spacialization of the page, and even “proper” use of words and images.  YET, in so doing his poetry conveyed profound wisdom and beauty to those whose mind/heart is “squishy” enough to be open to poetry.  But “wholly kissing” someone really pinged me, understanding that to kiss someone whole heartedly entails an ability to throw oneself into the intense passion of the moment so that he…in some sense…”forgets”… restraint, or concern for “syntax” or structure.  In other words, in that moment of passionate embrace, everything else is put aside. 

The feeling dimension of voting is important because it is very human.  But those who “wholly kiss” their candidate can easily lose respect for the “syntax” or structure and will be willing to overrule any and all other considerations in the election process.  The feeling function in their heart is so intense that they too closely identify with the candidate; in some sense they have melded with him so that he embodies the hidden desires and wishes of their heart.  They have pledged their heart to him, “lock, stock, and barrel” so that he knows he could tell them, “I could shoot someone in the middle of the street in Manhattan and my poll numbers would not fall.” 

This “feeling function,” (see Carl Jung) is a very important dimension of the human heart but can lead to catastrophe if it is not balanced by the “thinking function.”  But it is very easy to find oneself encumbered with tyrannical thinking patterns and motifs that are not subject to the internal dialogue that comes from employment of the feeling function. Thinking and feeling are not allowed to work in tandem, a cooperation which makes us a human and keeps us from becoming a mere ideologue. 

Jonathan Haidt Said Feeling, Not Reason, Drives Voting Choices

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In the morning news, I heard a member of the Justice Department of the State of Michigan explain the difference in perception and fact as it pertains to the Trumpian effort to overturn the recent vote in that state.  To paraphrase, “Perception is how a matter feels to you, fact is how a matter is taken by a consensually validated reality that you are part of.”  She argued that, yes, Republicans “feel” that there were voting irregularities there…and in many other states…but close scrutiny by these states, including Republican judges, has determined this is not the case. 

Before reasoning begins to take place with a child, he lives in the realm of feeling. And, as W. H. Auden told us, “Feeling knows no discretion but its own.” Auden realized that if feeling was not balanced with reasoning, if the two human faculties did not work in tandem, we would find ourselves making choices based wholly on an unacknowledged (i.e. “unconscious”) feeling state

This brought to my mind the research of clinical psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, who found that feeling is more important than reason on matters like voting.  We vote, primarily, on the basis of how we feel not on the basis of sound reason.  But, “what is good for the goose is good for the gander” so this observation has to be relevant to any voting persuasion…and to the rest of life.  None of us are “objective” even if we passionately and boisterously offer up some bromide like, “God is leading me.”  We are complicated little critters, scurrying about on the granite skirts of our little planet and the humility of this cosmic “fate” is so frightening that we often prefer to take our grasp of reality as absolute and assign others to that vast category of “wrong.” This just is not so!!!  I know.  Because, I..being extraordinary and special, AM RIGHT!!!  (Hey, just kidding!) 

A “Too Much Wine” Discourse Here….

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I must admit it, I’ve had a glass of wine or two.  Maybe even three, given that the deputy sheriff just approached me from my perch in a lawn chair on the road in front of my house, telling me that reading my blog on a loudspeaker in this quiet neighborhood, clad only in a thong and fake arrow through my head suggested I should, “Take it inside.”  Ok, I will admit there was a 4th glass of wine! 

But with this disinhibition upon me, let me report I am furious with the Republican Party for their gross disrespect of their base in which I grew up in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s in the South.  They are totally out of control and are appealing to a base which is so readily amenable to their manipulation.  I grew up there, in a population which was susceptible to such manipulation, and I resent the disrespect to my people who are not stupid, nor ignorant, and can “understand” the political reality that is present if it is presented fairly and without manipulation. 

I am very angry, particularly at fundamentalist/evangelical Christians such as Franklin Graham and Robert Jeffress who prostitute themselves before the Trump Demon.  I still have a very strong spiritual dimension to my life, and it will never leave me, but what passes as “spiritual” in my culture is something that is profoundly “unspiritual” and abysmally evil.  This situation is best conveyed by Shakespeare who saw clearly through the religious hypocrisy of his day, noting,  

“Thou hast described 

A hot friend cooling. Ever note, Lucillius, 

When love begins to sicken and decay, 

It useth an enforcèd 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. 

“Hollow men” which T.S. Eliot described as straw men, “head piece filled with straw”, always must flaunt their piety.  That is because they lack it so sorely in their heart.  Yes, again, I admit I  have “been there and done that.”  The more guilt-ridden one is, the more he must prove how un-guilty he is, though Jesus taught that we are forgiven for being “guilty”…if we can only acknowledge it.  Jesus knew that we were all guilty. 

Let me confess as a former Christian, who is now more “Christian” than he has ever been…though don’t tell anybody about it, the label is so ignominious in our current time…and the label is totally unimportant to me now.  If anything, I have read the Sermon on the Mount and I am a “follower of the teachings of Jesus.” 

Let me publish this before I sober up!  And the bit about the street side reading of the blog and such was totally facetious!!! 

We Have A “Splinter in Our Brain” but Won’t Admit it.

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As individuals, things occasionally go awry. Our life tosses us a lemon and the making of lemonade out of it does not seem possible. We encounter loss, or a career setback, marital conflict, “acting out” children, or an illness and it seems like impending doom is near. Something akin to this was underway with Emily Dickinson when she coined that expression, “a splinter in our brain” which I use so often. In my clinical background I worked with clients who could be described as having one of those “splinters” wreaking havoc, or at least some distress in their life. They, or their parents, or the school, or the legal system noted something awry and referred them to me for counseling. But what would often stand in the way of any resolution was an unwillingness to acknowledge, “Houston, we have a problem here.” For, blaming someone else for our woes is a common human response; in some sense our culture teaches our children to resort to this avoidance mechanism.

“Houston,” my country “has a problem.” I could then immediately blame Trump and his disciples but I recognize he is but a symptom. Here I will not focus on the Republican Party, for which he is the mouthpiece of all they refuse to acknowledge; but, this can also be said about our entire country. Our country has allowed a “cancer to grow in the White House” just as in the Nixon era but we are stymied from a simple extirpation of the cancer. In the Nixon Watergate drama, it was Nixon’s own Republican Party who had the courage and patriotism to go to Nixon and tell him, “You gotta go.” There is no one in the GOP that has the courage to confront this tyrant though, and the GOP acts as a deterrent for any Democratic intervention. Consequently Trump is doing as his niece recently said he would do after losing the election, spending his time “breaking things.” That is a common response for any two-year old who is being denied any of his baubles, especially the comfort of thinking, “the world is my oyster.”

This tragedy has helped me to realize that my country’s narcissism and arrogance is being put on display for the entire world. This is not to trash my beloved country, but simply to recognize the very human-ness of our history and the present-moment we are living out. We humans have a tendency to think “it is all about me” even if this arrogance might be camouflaged in religious piety, aka “hypocrisy.” It is very challenging to allow this truth to sink into one’s heart, especially if piety has been his modus operandi most of his life–“c’est moi,” I confess! I am currently reading Barak Obama’s marvelous new book, “The Promised Land” and he is very open in sharing about the dark side of his ascendency to the world stage. This is because he has the humility to permit “internal dialogue” with himself, that quality which Hannah Arendt in “Life of the Mind” explains was egregiously absent in people like Adolph Eichmann. This “internal dialogue” with oneself makes it possible to engage in dialogue with other people, even those with a different perspective on life, and seek common ground. A brickbat is thereby thrown at the tyranny of certainty. And those of us who have to confront one of those “splinters” in our brain will often live through the experience of “brickbatting.”

W. R. Rodgers and Rumi On Language

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Language is my forte.  To a fault, in some sense, “too much of a good thing” at times.  But I’ve learned that words can be hollow, merely formulaic to manipulate people into mirroring my performance-art of an inauthentic life.  The W. R. Rodgers poem excerpt I shared yesterday so elegantly described how language can decay and even die, becoming what is called a “dead language.”  And Rodgers singled out politicians in the cited poem, accusing them of falsifying language to accomplish selfish ends: 

Words are “now they are the life-like skins and screens 

Stretched skillfully on frames and formulae, 

To terrify or tame, cynical shows 

Meant only to deter or draw men on, 

The tricks and tags of every demagogue, 

Mere scarecrow proverbs, rhetorical decoys, 

Face-savers, salves, facades, the shields and shells 

Of shored decay behind which cave minds sleep 

And sprawl like gangsters behind bodyguards.” 

(PLEASE NOTE, AM HAVING TROUBLE WITH EDITOR; COULD NOT ITALICIZE ABOVE QUOTE)

This morning I discovered relevant wisdom from the 13th century Persian mystic Rumi who emphasized the importance of living a dual life, abiding in and respecting the “false” world that Rodgers had in mind and another where authentic moments are available here and there.  He described this “in-between” residence as a “small market between towns.”  He presents a solitude that one will find there, which the mystics and many artists are very familiar 

A small market between towns 

There’s a town where the soul is fed, where love hears truth and thrives, and another town that produces lies that degrade and starve love. Your voice is a small market set up between the two towns. Goods arrive from both directions, flimsy, fake items and honestly made, wholehearted tools and wares. Some travelers immediately know which is which. Some voices open a shop and spend sixty years cheating customers, gossiping when they leave, and flattering women to get their attention. Others weary of the marketplace altogether and rarely go there. 

Rumi 
Version by Coleman Barks, in “The Soul of Rumi” 
HarperCollins, 2001 

“Well Worn Words and Ready Phrases….

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…Build Comfortable Walls Against the Wilderness.” This quip from poet Conrad Aiken has captivated me for decades now as his work and that of other poets continue to erode my “comfortable walls.”

I was born into poetry but the hyper-conservative, linear-thinking community in which I found myself disallowed any consideration of a nuanced way of perceiving and organizing my world.  That is not to assign blame; if I had to assign blame, I would have to blame myself for lamely imbibing into the depths of my heart the world view and experience that was proffered me; I did not even try to find my own voice. I desperately felt the need to fit in, to belong, which is a very human “need.” But my desperation to obtain this belonging-ness probably created a sense of dis-ease with many of my classmates.  Decades later I would learn the label for this existential malaise was “alienation.” 

But in the mid-eighties, the breath of life breached my endungeoned heart when a friend gave me a copy of W. H. Auden poetry and I fell upon a copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets.  I have quoted Kafka on the resulting experience often before, citing his note that literature is like a pick-axe that “fractures the frozen sea within.”  And that “fracturing” of my soul was painful, and continues to be…and will always be…as the “einfall” of Carl Jung will often be. (Jung employed the German term for an irruption into a person’s psyche of what had been excluded.)

Language is not static…though static hearts can attempt to “static” it, or “staticize” it, and often succeed at least temporarily.  But poetry, or some visit from the arts, will often breach the walls of the stale prison of thinking inside a bubble, even if the bubble is inside one’s own head!  But when the bubble takes place in a group, the value of language itself is threatened as words will be used merely for perpetuating group think and the language itself will die spiritually. Here is a poem by an Irish poet, W. R. Rodgers that addresses this issue and poignantly notes the “death” that hides in a sterile language. 

WORDS (an excerpt) 

By W. R. Rodgers 

Once words were unthinking things, signaling 

Artlessly the heart’s secret screech or roar, 

Its foremost ardour or its farthest wish, 

Its actual ache or naked rancour. 

And once they were the gangways for anger, 

Overriding the minds qualms and quagmires. 

Wires that through weary miles of slow surmise 

Carried the feverish message of fact 

In their effortless core.  Once they were these, 

But now they are the life-like skins and screens 

Stretched skillfully on frames and formulae, 

To terrify or tame, cynical shows 

Meant only to deter or draw men on, 

The tricks and tags of every demagogue, 

Mere scarecrow proverbs, rhetorical decoys, 

Face-savers, salves, facades, the shields and shells 

Of shored decay behind which cave minds sleep 

And sprawl like gangsters behind bodyguards. 

Is T.S. Eliot correct, We Are “United by The Strife Which Divided Them” or Us?

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Election Day is nigh upon us and my country will have a chance to drive a stake into the heart of the darkness we opted for just four years ago.  If we succeed with this impaling, it will only be a mere stake and will not mean the darkness has been obliterated. For example, the real darkness is a bifurcation of our soul into an “us” vs. “them” view of life, “republicans” vs. “democrats” being only one articulation of this cosmic death spiral.  Should we Progressives win the election, the temptation will be to gloat in victory and allow a vindictiveness to prevail in our heart.  If so, we will be merely continuing what we have alleged the Conservatives have been doing, “us vs them-ing.”  We will continue, therefore, to live out the phenomenon T.S. Eliot noted in a dysfunctional family that he described as, “united by the strife which divided them.”  (See Eliot’s play, “The Family Reunion.”) 

We are currently so polarized that regardless of the election’s outcome that issue will continue.  However, I admit that if Trump is re-elected that polarization will only get worse as his emotional/spiritual impoverishment thrives on having someone, individually or collectively, to “them.”  But if Biden should win this election, we Progressives will have to avoid the “tee-hee” response, gleefully enjoying a triumph to the point of “rubbing defeat in the nose” of Conservatives.  If these two ends of the political spectrum continue to be unified only by this divisive spirit, healing of the breach will not take place and ugliness will continue to abound. 

People think differently; but regardless of how differently they “think,” it is still “thinking” that they do.  The challenge when we encounter someone who thinks differently than we do, and therefore sees the world through a different set of eyes, is to slow down that torrid certainty of ours…take a pause…and offer a moment of respect, possibly in the form of a “silence” of some sort.  This “silence” can be as simple as not responding with the first thought that comes to our mind, perhaps even letting that thought go completely, and simply asking the other party, “Tell me more?” No thought we have is so important that it cannot be put on hold for a bit, maybe even until another day with another person.  But in the heat of conflict, our heart is teeming with our arsenal of verbal responses, most of which have the main purpose only of putting the other person “in their place.”  We will then be able to get on our pony, ride into the sunset, blowing smoke triumphantly from our pistol.  Oh, how sweet it is to be “right”…but usually for no purpose other than ego aggrandizement!