Tag Archives: existentialism

“Grab a Word and Pull On It”

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I am taking a writing class from a local author who is very talented and accomplished. The experience of offering my written thoughts to face-to-face feedback has been very, very helpful on a personal level and with the writing process itself. This teacher has helped me to “pay more attention” to what I am writing and how I am writing it,” and to “pay more attention to the prospective reader.” That is a subtle but very important shift in focus. Here I’m going to share my first effort in this class, after revisions made as a result of the feedback from the class and from my wife.
“Grab a word and pull on it. Grab a word and pull on it.” Hmm??? So to
make a poem, all you have to do is, “Grab a word and pull on it? Huh?” He
pondered about this for days but just had trouble wrapping his head around the
notion of “pulling” on a word. “Words just don’t get ‘pulled on’” he told himself.
“A word is a word is a word and that is the end of it.”

Now the notion of writing a poem sounded pretty cool but about the only thing
he could manage was, by his own admission simple teen age doggerel. So pretty soon he just forgot the idea and busied himself with his thirties and forties; though even then he was often teased with the notion of “grabbing a word and pulling on it.”

But then “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to” began to work their magic in his life and he began to “get it,” to “feel it” and found that poetry was worming its way into his heart. Sure enough, just as T. S. Eliot told him the week before, words do “break, slip, slide, perish, decay with imprecision, will not stay in place. He realized that this internal chaos that Eliot was describing was the subjective rush of words being “pulled on,” and torn apart, allowing them to burst and meaning begin to flow. “Sounds like an orgasm,” he thought.

However, this literary tumult he was experiencing went much deeper than mere
words. He often felt he was swimming in the aether, that he had lost his grounding, that nothing was certain any longer. He drew upon linguistics to facetiously describe his anxiety to some of his friends…those who might be familiar with Derrida…announcing with feigned desperation, “My signifier is floating. My signifier is floating. Help! Help!” Yes, subject-object distinctions were not as pronounced as they used to be as poetry had lured him into its murky, mysterious depths where only metaphor was to be found as an anchor; and with the metaphor the signifier is always apt to float away to points unknown.

 

“Eyes Wide Shut” opened!

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One of my favorite blogging friends is a beautiful young woman who has an equally beautiful little girl to whom she is obviously devoted.  (See http://hastywords.wordpress.com) She wrote this morning of the importance of “seeing” with feeling rather than merely with cold, brutal “cognition.”  And I’m still learning to “see” this way myself and, let me say, it is disconcerting to say the least.

 

Here are her thoughts:

 

You are missing the bigger picture if you are using only your eyes to see.

All of us, every single one of us, are more than what we appear to be. We are all beautiful and ugly in a million different ways in every second we breathe. When we are simply an image branded with likes and dislikes we make enemies of our friends. When we learn to see with our hearts we learn to make friends of our enemies. We are love and hate, we are perfectly imperfect, we are all strong and weak. We are all a story behind the picture that eyes alone can’t perceive.
I don’t like stereo typing but it happens, before you start slinging careless words remember stereotypes are meant for groups of people not to castrate individuals one at a time. None of us can be stereotyped…not one!

 

 

A Dalliance with Meaninglessness

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My “church” yesterday was a discussion-group with some other retired people who are associated with the local Unitarian church. The announced topic for this occasion was, “How to find meaning in your life.”

Well, let me explain. This group was comprised of highly educated and successful men and women who were “imports” to Taos, New Mexico from various parts of the country. So it didn’t take but a few minutes for “literallew” to stir and want to announce with resolution and ardor, “Back to the bible! God said it, I believe it, that settles it.” Of course I didn’t as I too do not look at life through the narrow prism of conservative thought and see…and feel…the ambiguity inherent in life. For an hour and a half we sincerely and honestly shared re our struggles for meaning through the course of our lives, struggles which continue today. Initially “literallew” did feel the leering glare of meaningless and want to revert to “well-worn words and ready phrases that build comfortable walls against the wilderness.” But as the discussion deepened, my spirits actually lifted as we wrestled in the morass of meaning/meaninglessness.

On the way home I mused with my wife about why this discussion had lifted my spirits. And it was readily apparent—I felt connection! I realized…and felt…that I was in the midst of other human beings who had, and still do, wrestle with the same doubts and fears that I do. And there is a “nakedness” that is apparent in moments like this but a very appropriate “nakedness,” simple acknowledgement of human doubts and fears. And it is this “nakedness” that ultimately unites us all. Beneath the surface of our “strutting and fretting,” beneath the veneer of civilization, we are vulnerable, fragile little boys and girls who hunger to know that we are not alone.

This discussion demonstrated “faith” as I now see and feel faith to be. Now certainly many of these people would not describe themselves as persons of faith and even more so, certainly not “Christian.” Faith is the word I wish to use to describe their courage to live their life purposefully when life often appears to her without purpose.

Here is a perspective on the matter from T. S. Eliot in his Four Quartets:

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.

Opening up the “Closed Canon”

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One of the bedrocks of the conservative faith of my youth was the “closed canon.” This meant that the Bible was the “final” word of God and must be taken completely and used as a rule book. This gave rise to a popular bromide, “God said it, believe it, that settles it.”  This mind set left no room for heart felt, intuitive interpretation of the scripture as the Bible was not seen as literature but as “fact.” This approach to “the Word” was static, allowing no dynamic flow of spirit to take place and preventing the Pauline “Word” which is “quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged 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.

This belief presents a Word which is only a word, a mere “object” and not a dynamic process. Furthermore, it reflects the belief in a static, objectified god who is not really a “God” but a mere “thing” among other “things.” This belief also reflects the materialistic drift of our culture for the past few hundred years in which mankind sees himself as separate and distinct from the world, not realizing that in this uncritical approach to his faith he is seeing and experiencing himself as separate and distinct from God. “God” is not a “thing”. I am not a “thing.” I am a process and even here, at this moment, I am merely discoursing about another “process” which I prefer to describe as a “Process.” As W. H. Auden noted, individually and collectively, we are but a “process in a process in a field that never closes.”

But, alas and alack, I suddenly find myself up to my halo in still another blasphemy—relativism! When you begin to see the Word of God as a dynamic process that can never be “closed”, you have opened Pandora’s box and various dimensions of “uncertainty” make their escape. The doubt, anxiety, and vulnerability that begins to seep into the heart explains why the certainty was so rigid. It kept the “demons” at bay. But, until these “demons” are released, they live in the hidden recesses of our heart and inevitably lead to projections onto the outside world. Our beliefs reveal as much about our own heart as anything else. When you see a “true believer”, you are face to face with a scared little child who is terrorized by the fragility of his little life. He has glommed onto dogma and can never let it go without experiencing some of that terror which predicates his existence in the world.

Emily Dickinson’s Cloistered View of the World

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I love Emily Dickinson. I love her cryptic, almost awkward use of words to describe the human predicament and reveal her own complicated, conflicted soul. She lived her life cloistered in her father’s attic, preferring the solace of her intricate verbal world over the “dog-and-pony-show” of her day. I identify myself with her cloistered view of the world but my “cloistering” has mercifully been metaphorical.

One of her poems that has always grabbed me was about attention, the tendency of our “soul” to fashion a world that it is comfortable with and then “close the valves of our attention like stone.” I love that image and can almost hear those valves “closing like stone.”

Here is the poem:

The Soul selects her own Society,
Then, shuts the door;
To her divine Majority
Present (or obtrude) no more.
Unmoved, she notes the Chariots
Pausing at her low gate.
Unmoved, an Emperor be kneeling upon her mat.
I’ve known her from an ample nation choose one
Then close the valves of her attention like stone.

I had often come up with the same observation about life but until I read this poem I could only offer “we believe what we want to believe”, not having the gift of poetic expression as Dickinson did. And, though this insight came with the price of “detachment,” I’m glad to have paid that price as it has helped me to remember to appreciate and value my perspective on life but to remember that everyone’s “valves of attention” creates unique viewpoints.

And in this poem note the soul’s response to her stately “visitor”. This soul, comfortable in its own private little world, turns its nose down at a visitor who should be graciously welcomed. It makes me think of Hamlet’s pining to escape his “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to” by “fleeing to a nutshell” where there he could be “king of infinite spaces.”

This poem reveals that Dickinson knew she lived detached in a private world and the body of her poetry suggests that she found a comfort there in her solitude. Emotional isolation can easily be a “private hell”….as it is when one is the “king of infinite spaces”…but the gods can afford comfort there if it happens to be one’s lot in life. And without Dickinson’s acceptance of her “lot in life”, our world would be deprived of her poetic riches.

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Lessons from Poetic Obscurity

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I’ve always been drawn to obscure poetry and obscure observations, some of which linger with me years before I begin to understand them. They “linger” there on the periphery of my consciousness for they have something to offer me when I’ve matured enough to let their truth sink in. I now have three poems to offer here which I have always found “obscure” but now I feel I am beginning to understand what the writer was seeing. I’m going to share them here and offer my perspective on what they mean.

AS BAD AS A MILE
By Philip Larkin

Watching the shied core
Striking the basket, skidding across the floor,
Show’s less and less of luck, and more and more
Of failure spreading back up the arm
Earlier and earlier, the unraised hand calm,
The apple unbitten in the palm.

I now see this Larkin poem as quite obvious. He was talking about mankind primordial before he had “bitten the apple” and fallen into the realm of time and space. Before we tasted that forbidden fruit, we were perfect, still living in the Uroboros, delighted in the Edenic delight of pure freedom. But the minute we succumbed to Eve’s charms (see, it’s always a woman, damn them!) we entered the realm of cause and effect, or time and space, and gained a formal introduction to failure. Now, this side of Eden, we never get it “right” but have it in our heart to try and have available stories of Grace which tell us each step along the way, “Hey, its ok. Hey, you are okay. Just keep on truckin’. You are forgiven. Something is underway that you can’t figure out with your finite mind.” Or, as T.S. Eliot said, “For us there is only the trying. The rest is none of our business.”

HOUSE
By E. L. Mayo
House
Vast and ambiguous
Which was before we were
Did you
Build yourself and then grow populous
By taking thought, or
Did someone leave a tap on long ago
In You
Which with its spatter
Affirms at the very least a householder
Who will return at the last if only to
Turn off the water.

This poem is about the very roots of our being, that subtle spirit of consciousness which is always there but always lies outside the grasp of our conscious mind. This is what we are when we are bereft of all the superficies of our existence and feel so very alone, comforted only by the intuitive knowledge that there is a “householder” who is the very ground of our being and that this “householder” is He Who unites us all ultimately.

Navigating by the Light of a Minor Planet

by Jessica Goodfellow

The trouble with belief in endlessness is
it requires a belief in beginninglessness.
Consider friction, entropy, perpetual motion.
And the trouble with holding to both is that
belief in endlessness requires a certain hope
while belief in beginninglessness ends in the absence of hope.
Or maybe it’s vice versa. Luckily,
belief in a thing is not the thing itself.
We can have the concept of origin, but no origin.
Here we are then: in a world where logic doesn’t function,
or else emotions can’t be trusted. Maybe both.
All known tools of navigation require an origin.
Otherwise, there is only endless relativity and then
what’s the point of navigation, in a space where
it’s hard to be lost, and even harder not to be?
Saying “I don’t want to be here” is not the same
as saying “I want to not be here.” It rains
and it rains and it rains the things I haven’t said.
By Jessica Goodfellow

No less a conservative Christian luminary than Dietrich Bonheoffer discoursed on the human dilemma of wanting to know and own his origin, to grasp it with his rational mind only to find that no one can “wrap his head around it.” Life is an incredible mystery and, though some of us find it amusing to wrestle with this mystery, ultimately we have to accept that mystery and recognize that we only “see through a glass darkly” and must busy ourselves with the Divinely “mundane” responsibilities of day to day life. Relativity is something one wrestles with if he pursues spiritual matters beyond the confines of his little ego. But, though we can “tippy-toe” in that bewildering world of doubt and despair…and some of us even take a swim in it from time to time…we have to come back to the only “real” that we know and act purposefully, knowing that we have an impact on this world.

 

Plucked by a Tulip????

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It was a lovely, cool spring morning in 1990 and I had just been married about 9 months. I was in our front yard and was greeted by a bounty of lovely tulip blossoms. I bent down to pluck one and as I did so, the notion fluttered through my mind, “Am I plucking or being plucked?” That was such a random, silly thought that just “happened” but it immediately caught my eye even before I knew about “mindfulness.” And it is no coincidence that this event happened shortly after my first and only marriage, each of us being in our mid thirties.

This was the beginning of the end for my rigid, “lost in the head”, concrete thinking though it would take another two decades and more for the process to get to the point where the “flow” of life would begin to take place in my heart. The boundary ambiguity noted in that observation flourished over those decades and I increasingly have become more adept at drawing less of a distinction between “me and thee.” Now I do draw distinctions; and failure to do so would be a serious problem for we do live in the “real” world where distinctions and ego-functioning is required. But I’m not trapped in the paradigm of “I’m over here” and “you are out there”; I’m more able to see my world, human and natural, in more inclusive terms.

Now, I must point out that “I” was plucking the damn tulip! But in so doing the beauty of the moment was toying with my heart, bringing to my mind and heart the notion of “being plucked.” There is such magnificent beauty in the world but we can’t see, and feel, this beauty unless we are able to let go of the rigid ego-identification which our culture always mandates. But the ego identification is so insidious that we can’t even see it without having already somehow escaped its clutches. This is relevant to an old philosophical bromide that I came across decades ago, “You can’t have a perspective on your perspective without somehow escaping it” ; or, “Asking someone to see his ‘self’ is like asking a fish to see water.” Or, even better yet, one of my Indian blog-o-sphere friends offered, “Someone who has fallen into a vat of marmalade can’t see anything but marmalade.” I liked his observation because it was new to me and registered dissonant at first, thus communicating to me effectively as I quickly mulled it over.

This drawing of distinction between “me and thee” is intrinsically a spiritual process. And I’m not even address “Spiritual” here though it is very relevant. I’m referring to “spiritual” as a human enterprise in the depths of the heart, a willingness to look inside which is an enterprise that our culture discourages. And if we deign to venture “there”, we will eventually end up wrestling with “God” in the realm of the “Spiritual.”

Being “Right” is a Pyrrhic Victory

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I’ve had a life-long battle with “being right.” It is certainly not unrelated to having been born and bred in “right-wing” social, political, and religious culture in the deep South of the United States where “rules” predominate. And it is always “rules” that makes one “right,” or allows him to think that he is. I think very early on I had a heart like most people but then I was offered a bargain, “Hey, you forgo that tumult in your heart where emotion and reason are doing battle, give in to reason and let it reign, and you will have the consolation of being ‘right.”’ So I spent the first two decades of my life assiduously striving to live according to the rules, failing to see just how closely this life-style approximated that of the Pharisees who Jesus upbraided so often. Since then, the “ruled” life has slowly given way to the burgeoning power of emotion, a process that received a boost in my mid-thirties when I discovered poetry. Now, nearly three decades later there is some indication that this warfare is getting closer to resolution as emotion and intellect are working much more in tandem than ever before. Now instead of using my intellect to rigidly carve up the world…and myself…I use this gift to seek common ground with others believing that there is a Unity that underlies this world of multiplicity.

And having those two dimensions of the heart working in tandem should be our goal. When “flesh and mind are delivered from mistrust” (Auden), we are witnessing something akin to the Spirit of God being present though the “Spirit of God” certainly needs more discussion than I choose to give it now. Reason, without the balance of emotion (or heart) is just an effort to stay in control, to tyrannize one’s own self and simultaneously try to tyrannize those around him. Therefore, Goethe was astute when he noted, “They call it Reason, using Light celestial, just to outdo the beasts in being bestial.”

Now occasionally the old demon of “being right” will surface again. Recently it teased me briefly and then I took the bait slipped into the “being right” mode. It was a veritable black hole for a while until I managed to right myself and escape its clutches. For, there is no end to “being right”. We have the Taliban as one example of this but we have similar expressions of the same dark force present in our own country. And, yes it got me recently. It will always be a temptation for it is so wonderful to “know” that you are right and to “set someone straight.”

I offered a snippet of Auden’s observation about this matter earlier. Now I will share the context:

If…like your father before you, come
Where thought accuses and feeling mocks,
Believe your pain: praise the scorching rocks
For their desiccation of your lust,
Thank the bitter treatment of the tide
For its dissolution of your pride,
That the whirlwind may arrange your will
And the deluge release it to find
The spring in the desert, the fruitful
Island in the sea, where flesh and mind
Are delivered from mistrust.
(W. H. Auden “The Sea and the Mirror)

 

The Courage to Be

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To be is to be vulnerable. To be is to live life on the edge, outside the comfort zone of those “well-worn words and ready phrases that build comfortable walls against the wilderness.” (Conrad Aiken) Theologian Paul Tillich wrote a marvelous book on this subject entitled, “The Courage to Be” in which he related this matter to Jahweh’s Old Testament declaration, “I am that I am” or “I am the Being One.” And it does take courage to venture into “be-ing” in our life and not merely living it on automatic pilot.

T. S. Eliot described this vulnerability as “an infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing.” Life is so fragile and we know this in the depth of our hearts but are mercifully spared too much awareness of this vulnerability. Eliot noted, “Human kind cannot bear too much reality.” And it is good that we know that we can’t and know how to find “fig leaves” to hide this nakedness most of the time. But it is so important to know that the “fig leaf” is there and to take it off occasionally and find that God will meet us there.

Boston Bombers and the Danger of “Big Thoughts”

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“Big Thoughts Have Got Us.” These words of the poet Gene Derwood come to my mind every time I hear of someone else getting carried away with his/her ideology and carrying it to the extreme of taking lives, their own and certainly those of others. I always remember the wisdom of Mike Dooley, “Thoughts are things. Choose the good ones.”

And they, thoughts, are “things” in that they carry weight and can lead us to actions that are not in our own best interest or in the best interest of others. And I am speaking from experience. Now it is easy to look at the ideology of the Boston Marathon bombers and say, “Oh, why did they ever think that and get carried away by it?” Well, that is a good question and there is lunacy in their thought system that is not present in the thought system of most of us. But all of us have “thoughts” and none of our “thoughts” are devoid of intent, noble though we may think them to be. For example, let me take the thought system of Christianity, a “thought system” which I subscribe to and do so ever more passionately. But the danger I face, and the danger that all Christians face, is that they take their “thoughts” as having ultimate value and fail to realize the emotional valence they have been given by our life experiences. Yes, most of us have “thought systems” which are relatively benign compared with the Boston bombers, but they are not totally benign. I, for one, am appalled to recall some of the things I have done and said under the guise of “the Spirit leading.” For, even with benign and even noble thoughts we can be brutal. Even with “Jesus Christ” we can seek to dominate, control, and brutalize other people.

Let me be more honest. I have had interchanges under this persona of “LiteraryLew” which I have had to confess to a few friends are mean-spirited, to put it mildly. And there will be more of that as I am a mere human, driven by passions which at times consume me. But, may I always be subject to Shakespeare’s “pauser reason” which will make me “meta” every now and then and seek to balance some of my verbal and emotional excess. For, with things we feel so strongly about we can be so brutal.