Tag Archives: courage

“Rage, Rage, Against That Good Night”

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Poet Dylan Thomas suggest rage had its place. Shakespeare, in King Lear said, “Blunt not the heart, enrage it.” Sometimes anger does have a place in unleashing the dormant passions of unlived life. The following poem is by Lynn Emanuel in the pages of a recent copy of the New York Review of Books:

hello to the unimaginative and dim ways of my kin, hello
to the bad lot we are, to the women mean and plucked, and to the men

on the broken steps who beat down the roses with their hosings,
to the nights that rose black as an inked plate, into which an acid bit stars—

puckered, tight, hard, pale as a surgeon’s scars,
hello to all that vast, unconditional bad luck, to the sensible, the stuffy,

the ugly couture of the thrifty, to the limp of bad goods, of old
furniture, the repeated wince of the creaky rocker, and to the grandmothers

dying in its clutch, and hello to rage which like an axis can move the world.

A “Coronavirus” Has Struck Our Political Heart

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The coronavirus has struck our nation’s political heart.  I here am alluding to news from China that the physician who first attempted to alert his country to the presence of that virus, Wi Linliang, a 34 year old opthamologist, has now died of that virus.  When he first attempted to sound the alarm, he was told to stop and was detained for “rumor mongering” which, according to the Washington Post, is what happens in China with any news that threatens the social order.  In an autocratic political regime, fear abounds and any information that might create unrest is quashed…even if that “unrest” might be a temporary necessity.  An autocratic regime, or mindset, is just a two year old ego on steroids.

Mitt Romney mustered up the courage to warn the Republican Party, and the nation, of the “virus” of certainty which has found a voice in the person of donald j. trump. The problem with certainty of this ilk is that it is so rigid, based upon internal frailty and vulnerability, that it cannot allow any contrary thought.  In the history of this blog, I have likened it unto a group who might think that the moon is made out of cheese; once its members have invested heart and soul into that belief, they cannot be dissuaded. Any outside perspective that might deign to “intrude” will be disallowed, castigated and even attacked in favor of unexamined premises and preconceptions, regardless of how foolish or insane they might appear to others. This is because these “unexamined” premises and preconceptions are merely a house of cards, lacking any firm foundation in the “bowels” of the heart.  The more this cauldron of reptilian brain energy is confronted, the greater will be the venom and opprobrium that will be offered in response.  It does not have to be “reasonable”; it just has to be teeming with the vim and vinegar of certainty which will always be validating to those who lack existential, i.e. “spiritual” grounding.  And now the speciousness, the vacuity of the American soul has found a mouthpiece in the person of “the donald” who is the veritable “toy of some great pain.” (Ranier Rilke)  This “pain” is the anguish which spiritual teachers, such as Jesus, offered “the balm of Gilead” but not in the form of a “rational” palliative, but one in the form of faith.  This faith, however, is more than a rational construct and obsessive devotion to dogma, but something that springs from the depths of the heart.  And you cannot “think” your way into that mysterious dimension of life that drives us all; “faith” begins to blossom when you tap into that “Mystery.”

I will never forget that Mitt Romney moment.  He is deeply conservative and deeply religious; but in that moment his religiosity reached deeper into his heart than his political affiliation.  Conservatism is a vital dimension of any body politic; my country’s conservative voice is deeply frightened and has resorted to an autocrat to find its footing.  There must be other “Mitt Romneys” who will dig into their heart and find that courage to speak up if our country is to get out of this “two-year old ego mania” that we are now witnessing.

Poetry Sometimes Puts a Dollop of Grim on our Plate!

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EXSANGUINATIONS by Joyce Carol Oates

Life as it unspools
Ever more eludes
Examination
We wonder what is best—
Exsanguination in a rush
Or in a 1,000 small slashes.

Oates has the grim that poets often have. This poem makes me think of Shakespeare’s cryptic observation about, “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.” Poets do not have the filter that most people are equipped with…in a sense, “cursed” with…and therefore are skilled at bringing our attention to the underbelly of life as well as the sublime.

Life is harsh. This harshness often bites us in the butt and the gods have equipped us with an infinitely resilient heart to cope…most of the time! Here I want to share an excerpt from William Wordsworth’s “Preludes” relevant to the beauty and Grace that is available in the context of human struggles:

DUST as we are, the immortal spirit grows
Like harmony in music; there is a dark
Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles
Discordant elements, makes them cling together
In one society. How strange that all 5
The terrors, pains, and early miseries,
Regrets, vexations, lassitudes interfused
Within my mind, should e’er have borne a part,
And that a needful part, in making up
The calm existence that is mine when I 10
Am worthy of myself! Praise to the end!
Thanks to the means which Nature deigned to employ;
Whether her fearless visitings, or those
That came with soft alarm, like hurtless light
Opening the peaceful clouds; or she may use 
Severer interventions, ministry
More palpable, as best might suit her aim.

Halloween Thought: Consciousness is Scary!!!

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As Hamlet is drawing his famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy to a close, he declares. “Thus conscience (i.e. consciousness) doeth make cowards of us all and the native hue of resolution is sicklie’d o’er with the pale cast of thought…”

Shakespeare knew that most people opt to never become conscious because it is just too painful.  He knew that regardless of out lot in life, be it immense pain or the mute pain of tedium, we would prefer to keep it that way, to “cling to these ills that we have than fly to others that we know not of.”  Each of us prefers seeing the world through a narrow little prism, a citadel of unquestioned premises.  We obstinately cling to our narrow world view, opting to not challenge the comfy set of premises in which we are ensconced.  The price tag for this comfort is that we never become conscious, never escape the herd mentality into which each of us is born;  for, as T.S. Eliot has put it, “Human kind cannot bear very much reality.”

Hamlet recognized that the “native hue of resolution”, or innate desire to exercise mature will in the world, is “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”  Shakespeare presented this tragic character as stymied by thought, given to “thinking too much” which gave him wisdom, “which, if quartered would be one part wisdom and three parts cowardice.”  Hamlet recognized that hiding beneath that “pale cast of thought”,  that myriad of sterile ideas, was merely cowardice.  He knew that all ideologues are merely cowards, not willing to challenge their basic assumptions and tippy-toe into “reality.”

But W. H. Auden has the most vivid poetic description of our innate preference for this escapism:

Heroic charity is rare;
Without it, what except despair
Can shape the hero who will dare
The desperate catabasis
Into the snarl of the abyss
That always lies just underneath
Our jolly picnic on the heath
Of the agreeable, where we bask,
Agreed on what we will not ask,
Bland, sunny, and adjusted by
The light of the accepted lie.

 

 

 

 

A Lesson from a Rabbit

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Becoming real means finding the courage to wade into the difficult dimensions of human experience, a courage which is usually the function of the wear and tear of daily life, the relentless oppression of those “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.”  Becoming real means you find the courage to tippy-toe…at least…into the “unreal” in that you find that what was once so certain is no longer certain, discovering only then an inner core which has always been present but unexplored due to your lack of courage. Becoming real is a liminal moment, approaching the boundaries of existence itself which is always humbling. Becoming real is finding what Paul Tillich described as “The Courage to Be” which always means flirtation with non-being, its presence announced by intense anxiety.  Norman Brown summed it up pithily decades ago, “To be is to be vulnerable.”

Here is a beautiful summary of this experience from the children’s classic, “The Velveteen Rabbit”:

What is real asked the Rabbit.. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get all loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”  (“The Velveteen Rabbit,” by Margery Williams. see http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/williams/rabbit/rabbit.html)

 

 

Trump, Romney, and Courage

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I am resurrecting this blog after a long hiatus.  I should explain that my past as a mental health professional will be reflected in my human emphasis to the political scene.  And the current campaign for the presidency of my country, the United States, provides so much fodder for this emphasis.  Yes, we are all individuals but we “individuals” always coalesce into groups which are very revealing about our individual…and often hidden…predilictions.

Today I’d like to focus on Mitt Romney and the courage he demonstrated yesterday.  He dared to attack current GOP front runner, Donald Trump, by suggesting that Trump has tax issue that could prove to be very problematic.  I do not think that Romney is stupid and he knew that Trump would fire back with venom and would point out the obvious that Romney himself appeared to have tax issues four years ago when he was the GOP nominee.  Well, of course Trump responded immediately with his “Tweet” obsession and castigated Romney as being “a dope,” as “awkward and goofy,” and “looked the fool” on his own tax issues in 2012.  Well, of course, Trump is right on target.  BUT, most politicians would confront Romney on these issues without being to rudely personal and personally insulting.  But Trump has consistently been completely without consideration of commonplace civilities in this campaign, revealing a nascent…well, maybe not so “nascent”… sociopathic disregard that most of us have to not undress someone that we oppose and even dislike.  This is because of a social contract, “I will not ‘undress’ you, if you will not undress me.”

I have come face to face with bullies before, back on the playground on my youth and the “playground” of my adulthood.  They scared me.  I knew they saw my foibles and could readily strip me naked and would readily do so if I confronted them, for they had no limits.  “Civility” is a contrivance, yes a “falsity” that we agree upon, but occasionally a sociopath comes along who reveals just how specious that contrivance is.  It is scary to have witnessed just how readily this current slate of GOP candidates have cowered before this sociopath.

We are such scared little critters.  I confess, I am.  But I’m gaining courage in my old age and thus I am speaking out here in this cyber black hole which is the only format I really have.  This powerlessness is because of the powerlessness and cowardice that has charactized my life.  But, perhaps I am now “growing a pair.”

Tribute to My Dear Momma!

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Mother’s Day in my chlld hood always meant wearing a white rose to church, announcing to everyone that our mother was still living.  Wearing a red rose was what those would do if their mother had passed on.  (I might have the colours reversed.)  And the event was always successful in its purpose,  as it brought the attention of myself and my five sisters to how wonderful our mother was.

And, she still is today; for, she does live in our hearts even now and always will as her presence is etched deeply in our memories, even pre-conscious memories when she was the source of everything good.  And, even everything bad—I remember vividly crying obsessively, “Momma why’d ya do it, momma why’d ya do it, momma why’d ya do it” when I pulled a boiling cup of tea off the table and inflicted third degree burns on my four-year old chest and arm.  Of course, momma did not “do this” but at that age “cause and effect” are being burned into our hearts as this time-and-space continuum that we live in demands.  For, in a developing mind, if momma is responsible for everything good then it stands to the developing linear reason that she is responsible for everything bad!

But that occasion was one particular moment when momma employed such skill and good judgment, drawing on her memories of life on the farm in central Missouri and then covering my wrinkling skin with lard before she went out to tackle starting, and then driving, an old pick-up truck when she had not yet learned to drive.  But she figured out how use the hand-crank on that old jalopy, fire it up, and drive me and my younger sister and I to a neighbor’s house who would then drive us to a physician.  During the whole trip my refrain of “momma why’d ya do it” continued but she did not allow her own personal anguish to interfere with the task at hand and, with the help of a neighbor, got me to the doctor.

This is but one demonstration of what I call momma’s faith.  I don’t know what went on in her heart at the time, but I know that she often called upon the Lord to address difficulties in life and I’m sure she did on this occasion, even as she simultaneously called upon her inner resources. And she faced many, many crises when raising her six “needful things” and at times found it overwhelming.  But, even when seriously ill, she would rise up from the bed and “gird up her loins” and get the job done…and this is faith!  Now, she does not have my style of faith which includes the wisdom of various spiritual traditions and quotations of the likes of Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden.  And even today, sitting up there in the comfort of heaven, she will often smile and chuckle when I’m knee-deep in my ethereal faith and whisper to me, quoting Hamlet’s mother, “Oh, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown.”  But it has never even crossed my mind to dismiss her faith…or that of anyone else…knowing that faith is expressed in different ways through different people.  But I remember so clearly the courage she demonstrated in difficult situations and the affirmations of her faith and see so clearly the value and validity of a faith unlike that of “literarylew.”  She showed me so clearly that one dimension of faith is doing what needs to be done in one’s day to day life, an employment of the “Will of the Species” which is very much related to what my spiritual tradition calls “the Spirit of God.”

 

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Our Spiritual Search for Meaning

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During the impeachment preliminaries of President Clinton, his response to one difficult question was the famous, “It depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.” A lot of fun was had with that verbal finesse, but he was very right. The use of “is” is contextual and the nuances are important.

Words are ephemeral like the rest of reality and from time to time we have to “wrestle with words and meanings” as T. S. Eliot put it. For words become stale over time and lose their value, face value being taken at some point for what was once a powerful emotional and/or spiritual experience. It is simpler to not worry about “meaning” and take everything superficially and that can get you far in life but it doesn’t answer the gut-level issues that led Henry David Thoreau to declare in the mid 19th century, “Most men live lives of quiet desperation.”

The quest for meaning is a spiritual enterprise and churches and spiritual traditions have offered guidance to men and women who have been on this quest. Recently Pope Francis described this as a “risky journey,” one that is not only a quest for God but also a search for one’s own personal identity. Francis understands that spirituality is not idle abstraction but something that involves our innermost being, something which will often challenge our most basic assumptions about ourselves and about life itself. Otherwise we often are pursuing what he called only a “caricature of God.” Here is a link to a report of his message:

http://americamagazine.org/issue/pope-santa-marta-courage-restless-heart

Relevant to this spiritual quest for meaning, here is one of my favorite excerpts of W. H. Auden’s poetry, taken from “A Christmas Oratorio.” Here the Star of the Nativity is speaking:

Beware. All those who follow me are led 
Onto that Glassy Mountain where are no 
Footholds for logic, to that Bridge of Dread 
Where knowledge but increases vertigo:
 Those who pursue me take a twisting lane
 To find themselves immediately alone
 With savage water or unfeeling stone,
In labyrinths where they must entertain
 Confusion, cripples, tigers, thunder, pain.

 

Another Episode of “Waging the War we Are”

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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”)

“Failing Boldly” Has a Place!

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Once again, one of you blog-o-sphere friends has issue a “word fitly spoken” to me. In fact, several of you did that today! Here I am sharing a post by The Journey Home (http://elizabethsjourneyhome.wordpress.com/) in which she describes the anguish and reward of “failing boldly.” I can so relate to her experience on the stage as a youth though I have never found the courage and humility to dive into the morass of my own subjective world as she did that day. (I shared with her a brief poem on the subject of failure by E.L. Mayo, “Failure is more important than success because it brings intelligence to light the bony structure of the universe.”

FAIL BOLDLY by Elizabeth

My first memory of failure is from Grade 9. I failed a Science test. I’ll never forget the shame I felt. Like I was stupid, unable to do anything well, an idiot. That’s how failure made me feel that first time.

I think I was always kind of afraid of being a failure. I think we all are.

I spent high school watching my step and setting unreachable goals. And hoping I’d never fail again.

Then, I started university. And they told me that I had to fail to pass.

I don’t remember when they said it — whether it was during orientation, in my first acting class, or when I went for my advising session. But I know I heard this strange and impossible quote: Fail Boldly time and time again throughout September, October, November, and December.

I didn’t get it. Failure wasn’t good. I’d spent my life striving for just the opposite and I couldn’t imagine why anyone else wouldn’t.

Maybe they meant that you just had to be able to admit your mistakes and show that you were humble. Maybe failing boldly was just being able to laugh at your self. Maybe it wasn’t really “failure.” Perhaps it was just an artsy phrase or a figure of speech, I convinced myself and continued to hope for perfection. Because I couldn’t comprehend why anyone would ever want to fail on purpose.

I didn’t get it. My first monologue mark in the beginning of second semester reflected that. And I hated my work, felt like a failure, and considered giving up. I just couldn’t really, flat on my face, fail boldly.

The rest of the semester unfolded in a weird, tearful mess of beauty and growth. And slowly, I learned. I began to undo, to understand, and to fail.

I can’t explain it completely. But I do remember when I willingly failed boldly for the first time.

It was the end of March. The day had been bright and spring like. I’d memorized and learned and cried over a monologue for weeks. And now I stood, a bit breathless, a bit tired, a bit nervous, after the group audition, in the middle of the stage. I was alone and absolutely vulnerable. Right there, I lay one of my greatest hopes out and put myself on the clothes’ line. And as I opened mouth and began the text, I lay everything I had down and just let it go.

I had that actor’s moment where you don’t feel memorized and the words just slide out of your tongue as if you’re saying it for the first time. I stopped thinking about my audience or how I looked. I let myself be, for a moment. I felt a strange peace in my soul and my stomach, instead of the butterflies that usually reside there. I think I let the Holy Spirit in and it felt like He carried me on His wings.

And I think I failed. Boldly.

And I realized that failing boldly isn’t really what I thought it was after all. Failing is allowing yourself to be human. Its giving yourself the freedom to live and breath and let yourself move. Failing boldly is finding rest and growing and trying again. Its submitting yourself to the gift of Jesus and letting him take control of your life and future. Failing boldly is about grace and peace and life.

I don’t know if this is really what my professors meant about failing boldly. But this is what I learned when I tried. And as I think about this coming year, I hope to stay in this state, to tumble a bit, and fall on my face and then get back up again.

I hope you’ll try it too — failing boldly isn’t so bad as we thought