Tag Archives: e e cummings

Voting, Jonathan Haidt, and e e cummings

Leave a reply

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. 

e e cummings and individuation

Leave a reply

The poet, e e cummings declared, “To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.”
The world has a primary task, socio-culturally speaking, of homogenizing the “raw-material” of the human “matter” that comes its way as we daily “rattle the world for our babies.”  And yes, our babies are the precious coins that our piggy-banks always have stored up for us though we so often don’t treat them with the respect they are due.  But as our babies begin the task of becoming humanized they find the homogeneity pressure is overwhelming and so often they meekly succumb to the pressure and become mere automatons, following the dictates of the tribe into which they are born.

e e cummings demonstrated in his poetry…and I’m sure in the whole of his life…his determination to “rebel against the machine” and thus we witness the absence of punctuation, capitalization, and often the absence of simple linear thinking.  And I’m made to think of “Bartleby the Scrivener”, the fictional creation of Herman Melville in the 19th century, whose compulsive, “I would prefer not to,” was his standard response to the structured workplace of the burgeoning industrial revolution of his day.

Human life is the daily conflict between the twin poles of a demand to comply with “fitting in” and the equally important need to “individuate.”  A healthy society will call for both but so often an imbalance is seen in which the “fitting in” is so heavily emphasized that little or no room is left for individuation and the tribe is left with a nation of sheep. When that happens, the wisdom of Proverbs 29 is relevant, “Where there is no vision, the people perish” for vision is not possible when group-think (or group “vision”) tyrannizes.

Do Trailer Parks Cause Tornadoes?

2 Replies

I really miss David Letterman though his most able replacement, Stephen Colbert is brilliant!  Letterman was wry, bizarre, and even weird and in his early years even more so than later.  One quip from the early years has stuck with me because it put a dimension of reality on the table that I’d like to “cuss and discuss” today:  “Trailer parks cause tornadoes.”

He dropped this bizarre witticism probably 25 years ago when I was just beginning to stumble into some faint grasp of the time/space continuum and its offspring causation.  Even today I don’t “understand” it because time/space and cause/effect bring one right into the guts of life…if one dares to go there.  Or perhaps I should say, if one is foolish enough to go there!

And, like the whole of life, there is no “understanding” of it.  It is part of the mystery of life.  But my faint grasp of this phenomena has made me less apt to cast blame and more apt to see my own agency in my life, how that I have had choices where in the past I have thought I did not.  We live in a world of contingency and in any of these daily array of contingent moments we have choices.  Sometimes I make a good one.

Here is an e e cummings poem which is relevant, though the first stanza is beyond my grasp:

when god decided to invent
everything he took one
breath bigger than a circustent
and everything began

when man determined to destroy
himself he picked the was
of shall and finding only why
smashed it into because

 

ADDENDUM–I have diversified this literary effort of mine.  In this blog I plan to focus more on poetry and prose.  Below you will see two other blogs of mine relevant to spirituality and politics which have lain dormant for most of the past five years.  I hope some of you will check them out.  However, the boundaries will not be clear as my focus is very broad and my view of life is very eclectic/inclusive/broad-based.  Yes, at times too much so!

https://wordpress.com/posts/anerrantbaptistpreacher.wordpress.com

https://wordpress.com/posts/theonlytruthinpolitics.wordpress.com

e e cummings and His Struggle for Individuality

1 Reply

to be nobody but
yourself in a world
which is doing its best day and night to make you like
everybody else means to fight the hardest battle
which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.

I so love the poet e e cummings! He was so intrinsically rebellious, refusing even the givens of punctuation and syntax in the English language. He must have been a tough kid to teach in high school, and if he’d live in modern times would have merited the label “oppositional defiant disorder” and been referred to an overly compliant and rule-oriented mental health counselor for therapy!

But it is painful to be outside the comfort zone provided by our tribe. Carl Jung has described the process of escaping the clutches of the tribe as “individuation” and he said that the effort and the experience always includes a profound sense of loneliness.

The loneliness and alienation of poets is beautifully captured by Theodore Roethke in his poem, “Dolor.”:

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight,
All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paperclip, comma
Endless duplication of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.

 

 

 

 

Intense emotions and surrendering

10 Replies

E e Cummings said, “since feeling comes first, he who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you.” Adrienne Rich noted, “When we enter touch, we enter touch completely.”
These two poets knew a lot about intense emotion, intense feeling. They knew a whole lot more about it than I do which is the reason they write poetry and I can’t manage to do it. The best I can do is quote the poetry of others! When I met my wife, I was always quoting poetry everywhere I went, and at one point she quipped, “Mad Arkansas hurt you into other people’s poetry.” (She was alluding to a line from W. H. Auden about W. B Yeats, “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.”)
The following poem by Marriane Moore is about intense feeling also and she concludes that “he who feels strongly behaves.” So often intense feeling is associated with dissolute behavior and emotions run amok. And, that has its place. But, I do feel that “he who feels strongly (can) behave.”
And, another important point she makes, “in its surrendering, finds its continuing.” It is so important to surrender, to give up. And one of these days, perhaps, I will find the humility to accomplish this sublime task:
What is our innocence,
what is our guilt? All are
naked, none is safe. And whence
is courage: the unanswered question,
the resolute doubt, –
dumbly calling, deafly listening-that
in misfortune, even death,
encourages others
and in its defeat, stirs

the soul to be strong? He
sees deep and is glad, who
accedes to mortality
and in his imprisonment rises
upon himself as
the sea in a chasm, struggling to be
free and unable to be,
in its surrendering
finds its continuing.

So he who strongly feels,
behaves. The very bird,
grown taller as he sings, steels
his form straight up. Though he is captive,
his mighty singing
says, satisfaction is a lowly
thing, how pure a thing is joy.
This is mortality,

Reason has its Limits!

Leave a reply

 

when god decided to invent
everything he took one
breath bigger than a circus tent
and everything began
when man determined to destroy
himself he picked the was
of shall and finding only why
smashed it into because (e e cummings)

 

This is another one of those poems that I cannot explain but completely love. It is so complicated and inexplicable. To some of you it will probably be nonsense. And it is about “non” sense in that it is about reality that lies beyond the grasp of reason. It is about reality that lies beyond the time-space (i.e. “cause-effect”) continuum.

And to take a quantum leap…as I am wont to do…it is about God for He lies beyond our paltry little world, our rational “dog-and-pony” show. And, yes, He was “made nigh by the blood of Christ” but that doesn’t mean we can apprehend Him with mere reason, with Christian (Biblical) syllogism. We apprehend Him only with faith which means we apprehend him in the context of a whole lot of doubt. We “have Him” only when we “don’t have Him”. This is to allude to the Zen koan from the ‘60’s, “First there was a mountain, then there was no mountain, then there was.” God is present only in his absence.

(AFTERTHOUGHT: Goethe noted, “They call it Reason, using light celestial, only to outdo the beasts in being bestial.”)

(COMIC AFTERTHOUGHT—Quip from David Letterman, re cause-effect, “Mobile home parks cause tornadoes.”

 

e e cummings and misplaced concreteness

Leave a reply

when god decided to invent
everything he took one
breath bigger than a circus tent
and everything began
when man determined to destroy
himself he picked the was
of shall and finding only why
smashed it into because.

I read this e e cummings poem 25 years ago and have had it in my memory ever since.  It is very complex and even beyond my comprehension on some level.  Yet, I love it and it sticks with me and this fact reveals that it has great truth for me. This poem speaks to me.
I will forego the first stanza as that is beyond me.  But the second stanza deals with mankind’s fallenness, his sinfulness, his bondage to the time-space continnum, and his inability/unwillingness to venture out of that domain into freedom.  The essence of this 2nd stanza is man’s inability/unwillingness to escape the cause-effect mind-set, very much related to the time-space continuum.  And cummings realized that as long as we live there, as long as we are rooted there, we ensconced in a world that will be destroyed as it is an ephemeral world.
I have read enough in quantum physics to understand that scientists see the cause-effect domain as something that is perceptual in nature.  In fact, they would say everything is perceptual.  Some loudly protest at this point, announcing with vehemence, “Oh no, they are nihilists, saying that nothing is real.!”  I don’t think that is necessarily the case and it is certainly not the case with me.  It is just that there is a Real beyond that which we take for “real” and that Real is known only by faith.  Those who mistake the common-place world, the everyday world, the physical world as “real’ are guilty of the sin of misplaced concreteness,“chasing the shade and letting the Real be.” (John Masefield)
I just can’t wrap my head around this, however.  I believe this, and know it intuitively, but cannot understand it completely.  But the very desire to “understand it completely” is the fallen mind at work, trying to grasp and own its own spiritual nature as if it is something we can objectively apprehend.  But our “spiritual nature” is something we are…one might say “Someone” we are…and not something that we can apprehend.
Now a caveat is very important.  I am not advocating rejection of the cause-effect world.  That would be lunacy and the attempt to do so would be even more lunatic.  I am suggesting that meaning and value is given this cause-effect world when we intuitive recognize and respect…and surrender to…the Real which lies beyond the grasp of our rational mind.  And, all we have to do is to learn our own ignorance and recognize the Intelligence that graces this void that we live in, an Intelligence that has visited us on occasion.
I close with an excerpt from “The Habit of Pefection” by Gerard Manley Hopkins:

ELECTED Silence, sing to me And beat upon my whorlèd ear, Pipe me to pastures still and be The music that I care to hear. Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb: 5 It is the shut, the curfew sent From there where all surrenders come Which only makes you eloquent. Be shellèd, eyes, with double dark And find the uncreated light: 10 This ruck and reel which you remark Coils, keeps, and teases simple sight.

Damn those human limitations!

Leave a reply

I really love e e cummings. He was just so damned contrary and here I am stuck in my plain-vanilla, humdrum life! It ain’t fair!  He didn’t even obey punctuation! How in the hell did he get by with that? His teachers must have wanted to beat his butt.

Here is one of my favorite of his poems:

WHEN GOD DECIDED TO INVENT

when god decided to invent
everything he took one
breath bigger than a circus tent
and everything began

when man determined to destroy
himself he picked the was
of shall and finding only why
smashed it into because

I really do not understand this poem. But it grabs me. The key to the poem is the limitation of the cause-and-effect world that we live in, a relic of that damned time-space continuum. And, I don’t understand that “continuum” either! Not consciously, anyway. But, I know that cummings realized the limitations that we live in and I know he must have found them very frustrating.

Ultimately, the only thing we have is “why” and that brings us face to face with the profound mystery of life. I’m made to think of Einstein’s observation that he had found that at the heart of everything was an “impenetrable mystery”, noting that this experience is what brought to his heart “religious sentiment.” I choose the term “God” but “my god”, how that term is abused.