Tag Archives: alienation

A Few More Thoughts About My Ignorance

After confessing my “ignorance” yesterday, I must qualify this declaration to some degree. I know a lot of “stuff” as the result of being, in some sense, only an “observer” in life and not an “experiencer.” Just as my sweet-heart Emily Dickinson quipped over her version of this character flaw, “Life is over there…on a shelf.” I have read voraciously in my life, having discovered in my first days in elementary school that words offered so much to my frightened and lonely soul. I have a modest library today, though impressive in its character; but each volume has passed the “smell test” and found lodging in my heart.

Yes, I am one damn smart “son of a gun!” I was so smart that my daddy called me, “Son”…to use an old joke from the 60’s! Recently I decided that all of this wisdom and erudition was so valuable that I put it all in a paper bag, took it down to McDonalds, and tried to buy a Senior cup of coffee. “Oh yes,” they said, “we’ll take the bag of your verbosity…but the coffee will still cost you a dollar!” I took my cup of coffee, turned to find a table where I would open my copy of G. W. F. Hegel’s “On Art, Religion, and Philosophy: Introduction to the Realm of Absolute Spirit.” But as I made my turn, I could not help but notice that the cashier took that paper bag of my brilliance and dropped it into a trash can! Facetiousness and self-deprecation aside, I recognize that I am intelligent and erudite. But as noted yesterday, all of this leaves me profoundly “ignorant” in a very important respect; for words are but “pointers”; or as the Buddhists have told us, “The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.” The great Catholic scholar and author, Thomas Aquinas, in his early fifties after having gone through a mystical experience didn’t write another thing the rest of his life, noting, “It was all straw.”

This vein of wisdom began to seep into my heart in my mid-thirties, burrowing gently but determinedly into my thick skull when the pain of alienation was setting in and poetry began to find a place in my heart. This “still small voice” was at first a simple murmur but in the past three decades it has become a loud voice, providing the view point through which I approach my world, seeing metaphor where I had before only seen “fact.” Yes, “the letter kills, but the spirit maketh alive.” I close with the words of the brilliant Irish poet, William Butler Yeats who sums it up for me, “Throughout all the lying days of my youth, I waved my leaves and flowers in the sun. Now may I wither into the Truth.”

“Oops!”

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

2 Replies

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.

Belonging, Identity, and Toko-pa Turner

3 Replies

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

The Deadly Elixir of Group Think’s Certainty

1 Reply

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.”

Maria Popova on “Outsiderdom”

3 Replies

Decades ago I read a book entitled, “The Outsiders” by Colin Wilson, an unlettered but very erudite gentleman who spent his life “thinking outside of the box.” At the conclusion of this post I provide a link to an essay from Brain Pickings about William Blake and Ludwig von Beethoven who spent their life in what Maria Popova described as “Outsiderdom.” These two men made significant contributions to human history but their life story was complicated, to say the least, and existential loneliness abounded for the whole of their life. Beethoven was isolated by blindness but also by social awkwardness, so he battled the anguish of alienation as he developed his musical genius. But Blake was more of a rebel, balking at convention and then finally “turning his back to the citadel of convention.”

Standing apart from the herd is excruciatingly painful. Some people, such as Blake and Mozart, lived with it from their youth and adjusted adequately though with great pain. Some do not experience it in their life at all, others during times of crisis or tragedy, and others after some neurological “shock.” This loss is extremely traumatic as one is suddenly bereft of all the trappings of his identity and suddenly starkly “alone,” like King Lear on the heath, where he stood naked and, “pelted by this pitiless storm.”

But loss, and the sting of existential solitude can be redemptive. Jacques Lacan has noted that “nothing of any value comes into being without the experience of loss.” Emily Dickinson suggested that is hope found in this void, writing, “Renunciation is a piercing virtue, the letting go of a presence for an expectation.” Dickinson knew that most men and women are comforted with a cloak or “presence” of culturally provided accoutrements. She was stating that in this profound loss she had found hope

Culture is predicated upon avoiding all existential anguish. Loneliness is one of the most painful experiences and we have been given the comfort of contrivance to avoid it. I call this contrivance our God-given “fig leaf” as it hides our nakedness. And these “contrivances” are useful but not when one spends his whole life immersed in them, pulling them tightly around him to keep from being exposed. This thought always comes to my mind in this Christmas season as I watch American culture gorge itself on “stuff”, naively assuming that this “stuff” will suffice. If you think it works, just look at Donald Trump.

Carl Jung has been a guiding force in the past three years of my life as I’ve participated in a reading group of his work and often come across his wisdom about the importance of loneliness in the quest for individuation, aka “authenticity.” Here are a few samples of his wisdom on the subject.

The highest and most decisive experience of all . . . is to be alone with . . . [one’s] own self, or whatever else one chooses to call the objectivity of the psyche. The patient must be alone if he is to find out what it is that supports him when he can no longer support himself. Only this experience can give him an indestructible foundation. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12, par. 32.

As a doctor it is my task to help the patient to cope with life. I cannot presume to pass judgment on his final decisions, because I know from experience that all coercion-be it suggestion, insinuation, or any other method of persuasion-ultimately proves to be nothing but an obstacle to the highest and most decisive experience of all, which is to be alone with his own self, or whatever else one chooses to call the objectivity of the psyche. The patient must be alone if he is to find out what it is that supports him when he can no longer support himself. Only this experience can give him an indestructible foundation. ~Carl Jung; Psychology and Alchemy; CW 12: Page 32.

As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know. Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 356.

(Link to Brain Pickings—https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/08/08/aldred-kazin-william-blake-beethoven/)

Embedded Thinking #3

Thoughts About Identity

3 Replies

Identity has always been a fascinating subject for me because, I now realize, I had such a hard time constructing one in my youth and maintaining a sense of identity through the course of my life. But I’ve always been blessed with some core sense of who I am, some basic center, which has allowed me to function well though often with self-doubt and insecurity.

A Spokane, Washington woman has just made the news with her parents exposing her duplicity of passing herself off as a black woman for years even though she is white. With her dark complexion and hair style, she has adopted “black-ness” for decades and achieved some prominence in the Afro-American community. (http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/rachel-dolezal-tried-really-hard-be-black-why?sc=fb)

This is just a fascinating story and I’m so curious about what motivated her to perpetuate this ruse when there was so much she could have done for the Afro-American cause as the intelligent Caucasian woman that she is. But she had some deep-seated need to be “black” and that this ruse has been exposed, I’m concerned for her. All of our identities are a pose in some sense and to have them suddenly torn from us, to be exposed, is to open us up to the nakedness that underlies our persona.

W. H. Auden had the following to say regarding the illusionary dimension of identity. In this poem a father is speaking to his young son:

I wish you first a sense of theater.
Only those who know illusion
And love it will go far.
Otherwise, we spend our lives in confusion
Of what to say and do with who we really are.

AFTER THOUGHT—A new development in this story answers all questions about this matter. The family now reports that Rachel had four adopted Afro-American siblings while growing up.

“The Closed Cab of Occupation”

3 Replies

THE CLOSED CAB OF OCCUPATION

W. H. Auden declared that “We drive through life in the closed cab of occupation.” Auden was, like myself, an alienated soul sentenced to life as an “observer” of life rather than a “participant.” But being an “observer” with the capacity to even “observe” himself, i.e. self-reflect, he realized that even his occupation of poet was a “closed cab” and he was fated to view life through the prison of metaphor. And I’m glad he accepted that imprisonment as his work has been a god-send to myself and to many others, though he suffered greatly under its torments.

My “occupation” from very early in my development has been to “observe” life rather than to experience it, a stance that eventually evolved into the “closed cab” of a diagnostician, a mental health counselor. In the comfortable confines of that self-imposed prison I could…and still can…categorize and label this beautiful mystery that we call life and keep myself insulated from its hoary depths which are often frightening. But, mercifully I have the gift that Auden had and can self-reflect somewhat even about my “self-reflection” and thus my clinical detachment is breaking down. Yes, the prison-bars are bending and with a “little bit of luck and a strong tail-wind” I’m gonna be able to slip between those bars at some point and come out to play for moment before that damn Grim Reaper has his way with me!

A recent phrase I stumbled across on a Paul Tillich Facebook page is someone’s observation that Tillich’s teachings had taught him “just how much I am embedded in my own thought.” This “embeddedness” is a critical dimension of life that is difficult to grasp; for, to grasp this nuance of life is to see and experience a schism in the depths of one’s heart and he/she begins to realize there is more to one’s “experience” that what can be “thought.” This insight can be the beginning of recognition of one’s “closed cab.”

I want to share with you the insight of John O’Donohue about this discovery:

Thought is one of the most powerful forces in the universe. The way you see things makes them the way they are. We never meet life innocently. We always take in life through the grid of thought we use. Our thoughts filter experience all the time…Even your meetings with yourself happen in and by means of thinking.

More often than not we have picked up the habits of thinking from those around us. These thought-habits are not yours; they can damage the way you see the world and make you doubt your own instinct and sense of life. When you become aware that your thinking has a life of its own, you will never make a prison of your own perception…In order to deconstruct the inner prison, the first step is to see that it is a prison. You can move in the direction of this discovery by reflecting on the places where your life feels limited and tight…”Heidegger said, ‘To recognize a frontier is already to have gone beyond it.’” (“Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong.”)

“Quintessence of Dust” We Are!!!

literary lew

prose/poetry/philosophy/religion

Tag Archives: alienation

A Few More Thoughts About My Ignorance

“Oops!”

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

Belonging, Identity, and Toko-pa Turner

The Deadly Elixir of Group Think’s Certainty

Maria Popova on “Outsiderdom”

Embedded Thinking #3

Thoughts About Identity

“The Closed Cab of Occupation”

“Quintessence of Dust” We Are!!!