Tag Archives: Conrad Aiken

“Palimpsest: The Deceitful Portrait” by Conrad Aiken

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I chat via phone with a very gifted writer from New York City who lived here in Taos, New Mexico until about two years ago. This “confab” that we have bi-weekly is one of the most spiritually invigorating experiences I have in my life. She is writing an essay now on eidetic memory which brought to my tangentially-oriented mind the word “palimpsest.” And this, in turn, brought that same “tangentially-oriented” mind to the poet who introduced me to that term decades ago when I discovered the poet, Conrad Aiken.

A biographical note is in order. Aiken was born to a 1889 to a respected Savannah, Georgia physician and eye surgeon and his wife, the daughter of a prominent Massachusetts Unitarian minister. When he was eleven years of age, one morning he heard two gun shots ring out in his home and discovered that his father had shot his mother and then himself.. You can imagine the terror that gripped him. I share this anecdote because of a note that W.H. Auden made in a poem about William Butler Yeats, “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.” For that murder-suicide to have happened, you can only imagine the madness the reigned in Conrad’s household and certainly “hurt” Conrad into poetry also.

Here I wish to share a bit of an Aiken poem, followed by a link to the entire poem. It begins with how we “walk through many lives” and carry a bit of each of them with us as we constellate an identity. With the resulting synthesis we “see but the small bright circle of our consciousness, beyond which lies the dark this powerful poem, Aiken explores the intricacies of identity, the art of subterfuge inherent in daily life, the sadness, the narcissism, the disappointment, and the courage we find to carry on before the taunting of despair:

And, as it is with this, so too with all things.
The pages of our lives are blurred palimpsest:
New lines are wreathed on old lines half-erased,
And those on older still; and so forever.
The old shines through the new, and colors it.
What’s new? What’s old? All things have double meanings,—
All things return. I write a line with passion
(Or touch a woman’s hand, or plumb a doctrine)
Only to find the same thing, done before,—
Only to know the same thing comes to-morrow. . . .

If this poem speaks to you in the least, I encourage you to follow the link provided as it is a deeply moving poem from the heart of a poet full of very intense emotion with consummate skill is conveying his heart’s sentiments.

http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/conrad_aiken/poems/441

Further on How Truth Can Hide in Language

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Yesterday, I blogged about Hibah Shabkhez and an essay of hers about how truth can be hidden in language. This duplicity occurs in the depths of the heart when language is employed, by necessity, to blog out primitive, old-brain terror One writer, Nikos Kazantsakis had this in mind when he quipped the language is “but 26 toys soldiers that guard us from the rim of the abyss.” But, as the Bible teaches us, when we are a child we must “speak as a child” but as an adult we must “put away childish things” and speak as an adult. We must speak the Truth which always means we must realize that we speak as, “we see through a glass darkly.”

Here is another poet, W. R. Rodgers, grasping this same truth in the World WarTwo era:

WORDS (an excerpt)

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.

Our Existential, Perspectival Imprisonment

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There was an interesting and very revealing exchange this morning between Joy Reid (MSNBS) and an internet respondent.  Reid described the Republicans as a, “Racial and religious cult of personality.”  The internet response from a woman who obviously was a Republican quipped, “Sounds like the far left who can’t look past their own racial and cultural identity.”  This woman brought to the table a key dimension in our nation’s present drama, noting how “racial and cultural identity” shape our view of the world.  BUT, what she probably does not realize is that the “bias” she sees with Joy Reid and Democrats also is very relevant to her and the Republican Party.

This matter of perspective I have summarized as, “What you see is what you are.”  It is impossible to not let our background and very immature, even infantile, desires influence how we see the world.  BUT, it is possible to recognize…and experience…this existential quandary and thereby find a moment of “self” awareness which can make room for others, for difference.  Philosopher Paul Ricoeur put it this way, “It is impossible to have a perspective on your perspective without somehow escaping it.”  The core issue here is of the heart, a willingness to recognize…and experience…that all of us trapped in, “the small bright circle of our consciousness beyond which lies the dark.”  This “darkness” is described by some as a “gap,” the sudden ability to see that beyond our narrow little view of the world there are others who have their “own narrow little” and it needs respect just as does ours.  On this subject, which I emphasize so often here and in my day-to-day life, I think that this perspectival trap that is endemic to being human is relevant to the famous teaching of Jesus—to find our life we have to give it up; or, as I like to paraphrase, “Get over yourself.”  We are taught in my culture to be intoxicated with our ideas, our “thinking,” and fail to ever learn that, “the finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.”  The word is not a “thing”,  but a mere pointer to the “Thing”, aka in philosophy known as, “the Thing in itself.  Refusing to acknowledge this existential dilemma makes one an ideologue.

This is a “spiritual” matter that I’m addressing, but words like “spiritual” are so tarnished by present-day life that often it means only some “mind” set we are comfortable with.  And in dressing it up with words like “god” or the “holy spirit” we fail to recognize we are often only referring to a mind set which has no reference to anything other than the aforementioned quote by Conrad Aiken, “the small bright circle of our consciousness.”  I I am finding that words like “spiritual” and other “god-talk” rhetoric are often missing the “personal” dimension.  Making these words, and the whole of any Holy Writ, has value when we allow it to sink into the secret crevices of our heart where, per Emily Dickinson, “the meanings are.”  In Christian tradition this is relevant to the Apostle Paul who described this emotional/intellectual/spiritual quest involves being open to the “Spirit of God” which is “quick and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.”  Here I will provide the whole of the above referenced Emily Dickinson poem:

There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –
We can find no scar,
But internal difference –
Where the Meanings, are –

None may teach it – Any –
‘Tis the seal Despair –
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air –

When it comes, the Landscape listens –
Shadows – hold their breath –
When it goes, ’tis like the Distance
On the look of Death –

 

T.S. Eliot, George Eliot, Hope, and Despair

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Hope comes when we have lost hope.  “Loss” is the beginning of life, as in the teaching of Jesus…to paraphrase, “Find your life only in losing it.”  And that brings immediately to my mind the almost inscrutable Jacques Lacan who noted that nothing of any significance in life takes place without the experience of loss.  And the consummate summation of this wisdom is the words of Jesus on the cross, “Father, why hast Thou forsaken me?”

It is really hard to lose.  It is hard to lose even in a simple game of checkers, or chess, or a football game with our “local sports team” but even more so in an existential crisis when our soul and spirit are on the line, especially when our “soul and spirit” are infused with the immaturity of ego.  In those moments our ego demands that we “dig in” and cling to our self-deceptions, our “well-worn words and ready phrases that build comfortable walls against the wilderness” (Conrad Aiken).

The loss I am presenting here is the gateway to humility, that which T.S. Eliot described as, “a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything.”  This is particularly challenging for those of us who are “spiritually” inclined for it often involves realizing just how “the flesh” has dominated our spirituality which we then realize was intrinsically ersatz.  And, therein, I must plead, “Mea culpa.”

The anguish of this realization is here captured in a couple of quotations from George Eliot:

“But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.”  And elsewhere she noted, “There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.”

“Loss” Sure has its Value, Sez Naomi Shihab Nye

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Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.

(Naomi Shihab Nye)

Loss is a powerful issue in my life for reasons that are hard to pinpoint.  Many others have had to deal more tragically with the issue than I but something in the depths of my heart are quite familiar with it.  I think part of it was living on the margins of society in rural Arkansas in my youth but then practicing as a mental health clinicians for about twenty years, often dealing with tragically vulnerable adolescents and families also made its impact.

Loss is counter intuitive to what we are taught in our culture.  We live in a “get, get, get” world, or as a pastor from my youth put it, “get all you can, and can all you get.”  Our culture’s commercialism gives us an acquisitive orientation, dismissing the core of all great spiritual teachings that quality and depth in life is found in giving up the quest for “more.”

Two other poetic observations come to my mind, the first by Emily Dickinson who noted, “Renunciation is a piercing virtue, letting go of a presence for an expectation.”  This “presence” is often the very “way things are” at a particular moment in our life and losing this certainty can threaten us to the very core of our being.  When I entertain this vein of thought I always think of the wisdom of T.S. Eliot who noted the need to occasionally, “live in the breakage, in the collapse of what was believed in as most certain and therefore the fittest for renunciation.”

My country is in grave peril right now.  Yes, the stock market is booming so all should be well.  Yeah, yeah, yeah!  But the very fabric of our being is now in question.  “Truth,” which admittedly is not cut and dried, is now becoming totally self-serving so that the primary rule for defining truth is that “I want it” and “people like me want it to.”  And this is a peril that faces the whole of our society, conservative and progressive. The issue is, “Can we see beyond our own nose? Can we, “see beyond the small bright circle of our consciousness, beyond which likes the darkness.” (Conrad Aiken) It is only in the darkness of allowing our certainties to be subject to questioning that the Grace of an always elusive Truth can whisper to us.  Otherwise, another Eliot observation is relevant, we will be, “united by the strife which divided them.”

Here are two other blogs that I publish.

https://anerrantbaptistpreacher.wordpress.com/

https://literarylew.wordpress.com/

https://theonlytruthinpolitics.wordpress.com/

Shakespeare on Narcissism, Commitment,and Marriage

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From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed’st thy light’st flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.
Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content
And, tender churl, makest waste in niggarding.
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.

Shakespeare’s first seventeen sonnets were addressed to an unknown friend who he felt was slow in pledging his troth.  This friend appeared to have problems making commitments, aka in modern terms a “commitment-phobe,” and I suspect Shakespeare knew something personally about this malady of the soul.

“But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes/Feed’st thy light’st flame with self-substantial fuel.”  Here Shakespeare vividly noted the problem of self-absorption, the narcissistic inability to contemplate that one is focused only on his own needs and wishes, devoid of the capacity to consider the reality of the other person.  This brings to my mind the wisdom of Conrad Aiken who observed that often, “we see only the small bright circle of our consciousness beyond which likes the darkness.”  And when this happens we deny ourselves the “fuel” that comes from engagement with difference, with “otherness”, opting for the comfort of sameness which will always legitimate our pre-conceptions the result of which is that we are then, “Making a famine where abundance lies, Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.”

Shakespeare knew something about modern object-relations theory, that we have something only when we lose it.  Or, to borrow from the lyrics of a Donovan 1960’s tune, “First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.”  In this sonnet Shakespeare put it this way, “Within thine own bud buriest thy content/And, tender churl, makest waste in niggarding.  Shakespeare knew that our heart, “that tender bud from which life arose, that sweet force born of inner throes” (T. S. Eliot)  was the source of the Infinite.  But he also knew that this infinite treasure was found only with a willingness to “lose” it, to spend it, and that holding on to it in a miserly fashion, i.e. “niggarding” it, would be to waste it.  Jesus had this in mind when he told us that we must lose our life in order to find it.  And I close with a relevant and poignant observation from Anais Nin had a poignant observation on this matter, “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”

Waging the War We Are

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“We wage the war we are.” This poetic quip by W. H. Auden is probably the quotation that I use most often in this venue and even in the whole of my life. And, this is no coincidence as I am realizing and experiencing that my life has been one “hell of a battlefield” all of my life. Only now am I finding the maturity and courage to dive into this fray and be a more “present” factor in my life.

This paragraph itself reflects this warfare as I posit the notion that there is an “I” which is only now willing to engage in this fray. That reflects a schizoid dimension of my psyche, a division in the soul that is present with all of us when we have the courage to acknowledge competing and conflicting voices in our heart. Simply stated, it is recognizing there we have a consciousness as well as an unconsciousness, a division that is very painful to acknowledge due to the pain of the chaos that this realization will lead us into. It makes us aware that we are always out of control is some way in that our conscious reality is more complicated than we think, that in some sense it is a contrivance we have ensconced ourselves in to deal with the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to” during our very brief sojourn on this lovely planet. Or, as Norman O. Brown put it decades ago, “Our ego is but a veil we have spun to hide the void.”

Now that realization will cause us to experience some “shakin’ in our booties!” That realization and experience in the depths of our heart will humble us which is necessary before “Life” can begin to flow through us. And “Life,”, which is intrinsically a “flow,” is scary if we dare to embrace it fully; for doing so will bring vulnerability into our life, a frailty which at times can become very intense. It is much easier to just avoid “Life” and toil lamely and banally through our “three score and ten,” on automatic pilot, basking in our unquestioned assumptions, speciously comfortable in in the “small bright circle of our consciousness beyond which likes the darkness.” (Conrad Aiken) I shared months ago my interpretation of a verse in Hebrews, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of a living God” to mean “It is a fearful thing to fall into ‘Life’” It is a “fearful thing” to come alive….one might even say “to be born again.” I kind of think this is what Jesus had in mind.

An after thought to offer is that this same “waging of the war we are” is also relevant to us as a social body, as a culture and even as a species. And I intend to “hold forth” on that matter next time.

 

 

NOV 15, 2014

 

“WAGING THE WAR WE ARE” AS A GROUP

 

  1. H. Auden’s observation, “We wage the war we are” also applies to human collectives. Carl Jung eloquently described the “collective unconscious,” one example seen often in mob psychology where otherwise law-abiding people can have subterranean demons stirred up to the point of violent behavior. And sociologists and anthropologists…and other social scientists…are adept at delineating how our connection with social groups influences our behavior much more than we ever would like to acknowledge. Psychologist ________ has very interesting recordings on YouTube and TedTalks in which he show evidence that my “firm conviction” to be a liberal Democrat is not without unconscious motivation just as Conservative Republicans are also driven by similar needs.

 

Even the species as a whole can be compared to an individual child, still early in development, struggling to integrate fragmented impulses into a working, harmonious whole. Just in my lifetime, with technological advances like computers and the internet, our world is so much “smaller,” so much more a “whole”, and we are so very near, yet so very far, to being able to come much closer to world peace and harmony than ever before. We have the means, but lack the will. And I recently came across someone who pointed out the “coincidence” that terrorism has emerged as a formless (i.e. “stateless”) expression of the violent dimensions of our collective unconscious. Jung would say that our collective unconscious is telling us that all of our accomplishments deriving from our conscious need for structure and organization, are finding their complement in the chaos of violence. It is as if our collective unconscious is reminding us, “Oh yes. Technology and progress is great. But it comes by sublimating repressed violent impulses and these violent impulses need to be given attention.” The goal is to continue to seek meaning and coherence in our world while simultaneously acknowledging and addressing the violent unconscious impulses that are within us all. And this can be done through sublimation such as with religion, literature, art and mythology. But I issue a caveat re religion—“Danger, danger Will Robinson.” For religion can easily become just another form of violence as we see so often today.

 

The Unity of All Things

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The earth is dying.  Having lost any connection with “an external point of reference,” we are doing as Shakespeare said we would do and “feeding even on the pith of life.”  The following story from Truthout.org reports that in the past fifty years half of the mammals on our planet have died out because of our failure to exercise good stewardship of little home.  http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/26536-why-the-web-of-life-is-dying

The problem is our failure to see the unity of all things.  For example, I was brought up in the Judeo-Christian tradition and quickly imbibed the assumption that “God” was “out there” and thus was separate and distinct from myself and this world.  I now see that this was a false paradigm arising from the biases of my culture, precisely that we are not part of nature but are Lords of the universe, destined to rule over our planet and exploit its resources.

But I admit that shifting paradigms from obstinate individualism to seeing the unity of all things is really frightening.  Boundaries have to loosen up and as they do so it often feels as if they are disappearing all together.  The resulting distress always induces an impulse to “hunker down” with preconceptions and biases, the “well-worn words and ready phrases that build comfortable walls against the wilderness.”  (Conrad Aiken)

However, the human soul has an intrinsic integrity that can handle the duress of wrenching existential transition.  We do have a center that can hold during the tumult but our ego always resists letting go and trusting that center, belying the deep distrust that we have in ourselves, in the world, and in God.  And this distrust is just the tip of the ice burg; for beneath its surface lurks profound darkness through which we can find the glimmer of light.

Listen to the hope offered recently by Anne Lamott, “Faith includes the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.”  And do note that she said “some” light not “Light” as the best we can ever do is to “see through a glass darkly” which is contrary to our human nature which wants to see things with certainty.

 

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In the Hands of an “Angry” God

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Is it a fearful thing to fall into the hands of a living God. Well, yes, according to the author of Hebrew 10:31 who some think was the Apostle Paul. But then I, as I am wont to do, must ask the question, “What does this mean?”

With this “literary license” that I employ here…as well as in real time very often…I take the liberty to suggest this interpretation, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the ‘hands’ of Life.” By this interpretation, I suggest that it is scary to suddenly become “alive” and to realize that until that point you have been largely “dead,” living life on automatic pilot. It is even scarier to suddenly realize that you spiritual life has been part of this “automatic pilot” , robot-like life in which everyday you basically asked of life to “wind me up and watch me be Christian” or whatever your spiritual persuasion may be. When this happens one is beginning to escape the clutches of the “letter of the law” that the Apostle Paul warned against.

And yes, life is scary. It is very frightening to suddenly realize, not just as an intellectual notion, but as a feeling in the depths of the heart what it means to be human. It is horrifying to suddenly no longer be able to hide behind/beneath the superficies of our existence….ideas, intense emotions, cultural contrivances (including “stuff”) and even out faith; for, in this moment of existential crisis we often have to embrace the superficiality of faith, realizing it has been “all about me.”

But though the pain can be intense, it can be a moment of redemption in which we discover the Grace that T. S. Eliot described as “a complete condition of simplicity costing not less than everything.” And Aesychlus’s reference to the “awful Grace of God” thousands of years ago reveals an ancient understanding of the ambiguity of an experience with our Source; for, there, standing naked before God (and often humankind) we can experience and embrace the Eternal juxtaposition of judgment and grace.

With a superficial reading of these thoughts it is easy to conclude that I see God as merely a label that we can apply to the life process itself and that, therefore, I don’t really believe in a God. Well, this is a complicated matter for I do believe in God but not in the “God” that I’ve hidden behind and escaped reality with most of my life. Here I am referring to a subjective experience that is available to all and when we get there we understand—cognitively, intuitively, and emotionally–that there is a transcendent dimension to live as well as an immanent one. Yes, God is “out there” in some sense but he is also “in here” in some sense which is what Paul had in mind with his declaration, “Nevertheless I live. Yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.”

Yes, it is complicated. But reality…that is life itself…a process so intrinsically complicated that to willfully simplify it so that it will fit into our preconceptions is very dishonest and…yes…very human. It is so much easier to avoid asking the essential questions of life that can lead is into the very depths of the human experience, that very same “condition of complete simplicity costing not less than everything,” referred to earlier.

Here is a closing note from my dear friend and brother, W. H. Auden, “O blessed be bleak exposure on his sword we are pricked into coming alive.” That “sword” comes from “out there” beyond the “small bright circle of our consciousness beyond which lies the darkness.” (Conrad Aiken)

The Ephemeral Nature of Words

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The beauty of words stems largely from their ephemeral nature. Conrad Aiken described words as “these squeaks of ours”. Poets spend their life contriving meaning out of these “squeaks”, a process which T. S. Eliot described as, “wrestling with words and meanings.

The poet is very aware of this ephemerality of language. They know firsthand how flimsy the conjunction between a simple mere sound…a “word”…and subjective experience can be; and always is when any particular word is first formed. Carl Sandburg described this as “the moment of doom when the word is formed.” (See full poem in posting of 10/28/12 ) And listen to Eliot describe his experience:

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them.
(Four Quartets)

And I love Archibald MacLeish likening this poetic moment to “the flight of birds flung from the branches where they sleep”:

Bewildered with the broken tongue
of wakened angels in our sleep
then lost the music that was sung
and lost the light time cannot keep!
There is a moment when we lie
Bewildered, wakened out of sleep,
when light and sound and all reply:
that moment time must tame and keep.
That moment like a flight of birds
flung from the branches where they sleep,
the poet with a beat of words
flings into time for time to keep.