Tag Archives: existentialism

“Lighten up” You Pain Mongerers!

8 Replies
And one trembles to be so understood and, at last, To understand, as if to know became The fatality of seeing things too well. -Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens was a fine poet and I do think he experienced the “pain” of seeing things to well and that probably it felt like a “fatality.” For, the gods have forbidden us to look at things to clearly, too well, as it does not look pretty. For example, each of us could die at any moment but neurologically we are wired to not obsess with that thought. If we did, we would have trouble functioning. So we live our hum-drum lives “assuming” that we are going to live forever, knowing in the back of our hearts that we won’t, but not worrying about the fact that the very next moment the grim-reaper could be knocking on our door.

But some do live portions of their life in very dangerous situations and have the knowledge that their life is on the line. Soldiers are one example but they are disciplined and trained to now allow that fear to predominate. Others are racked with serious illness that could take them at anytime. But many others are merely predisposed to see through to the grim of life, its intrinsic ugliness and ultimate “fatality”, and at times get overwhelmed and even on occasion decide to throw in the towel and borrow Shakespeare’s “bare bodkin”

But, to those people, I challenge them that they are taking themselves too seriously. Yes, they see that “fatality” dimension of life and it tears into their soul. But, they need to “give it a rest” from time to time even as they write about it or preach about it for it is only one perspective. That perspective can become all-consuming as the mind can readily perseverate on anything, certainly something like the ugliness of life, and that “bare bodkin” or Socrates’ “hemlock” might beckon. In those instances, I fear these people are often just taking themselves and their pain too personally. THERE IS ANOTHER WAY OF LOOKING AT IT! Often, “This too shall pass.” I strongly recommend that when life is looking overwhelming, try to utilize a simple cognitive-behavioral strategy and follow the advice from the movie, “The Life of Brian” and sing the little ditty, “Look on the bright side of life.” Make it a practice to look around you and focus…and feel…the beauty that is around you even in the midst of your pain.

Here is a picture I found that makes me think of myself with my wife when I have consumed with ponderous, boring thoughts about the heaviness of life:  I have just quoted  T. S. Eliot:  “Dark, dark, we all go into the dark, the vacant interstellar space…”  Note the look on her face.  She is pondering, “How in the hell did I ever get stuck with this morose loser?”

2be old bored couple pix

“Come Out Ye From Among Them and Be Ye Separate”

7 Replies

The biblical admonishment to “Come out from among them and be ye separate” and to be a “peculiar people” received strong emphasis in the church of my upbringing. And, looking back, God must have been proud of us for we certainly accomplished this, though with great (unconscious)  irony. We just had no idea how different we appeared, how “peculiar” we were! And, well….now, with hang-dog face and shamed faced…I have to admit, “Yep, I probably accomplished that more than the rest!”

There are so many anecdotes I could share to illustrate things we did to do maintain the illusion of this separateness. A common bromide was to never, “drink, smoke, chew, or go with the girls that do.” On the drinking part of that bromide, the onset of canned soft drinks in the ‘Sixties posed a problem as if we drank a soft drink in a can, it might appear to others that we were drinking a beer! One young adult I knew pointed out with pride that at office parties, he would drink a coke…from a bottle and with a straw…to make it clear to all parties that he was not imbibing.

This obsessive need to be the “peculiar people” of the Old Testament reflected a core identity problem . For, people who have a secure identity do not have to make a show of who they are in any respect to any dimension of life, certainly faith. They can merely “be” and have confidence that their “be-ing” in the world will suffice. These people of faith who are secure in their identity do not have to be ostentatious with their faith as it will not be a suit of clothes they wear, but merely be part and parcel of their life, a completely natural part of that life. They do not have to announce with word or deed, “Hey, world! I am a Christian, or Buddhist, or Hindu, or whatever!” Their faith is very personal and is not for the purpose of show.

Now a person of faith will certainly stand out in an important sense as their life will reflect values different than most people have. Their focus will not be on the ephemeral, but on Value itself. In our culture, they will not be so obsessed with “stuff” though they well might have plenty of “stuff.” The roots of their heart and soul will not be in mass culture. they will not subscribe to the adage, “He who has the most stuff at the end of the game wins.”

Shakespeare described this ostentatious faith as that of “hollow men” who have to “show their mettle…like horses hot at hand.” When I watch a televangelist or some smug, oily Christian who is “strutting his ‘Christian’ stuff”, I often pictures a team of wild horses pawing the air, shrieking to anyone interested in looking on, “Hey, lookee here! Lookee here! See me! A’int I pious?”

And T. S. Eliot wrote a powerful poem entitled, “Hollow Men.” Speaking of mankind as a whole, not just with respect to spirituality, he described shallow, empty, “hollow men…stuffed men leaning together, headpiece filled with straw.” His poem beautifully captures the futile emptiness of alienated lives bereft of any spiritual connection to self, others, the world, or God.

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

Paean to the East from a Southern Cracker

5 Replies

The Eastern thinkers really speak to me. Those of ancient eons but those of today, including a handful of you I have met recently in the blog-o-sphere. You just don’t “think the right way.” You deign to look at the world differently. You look different. You sound different. How could that be? How could that have happened?

This world is just not as it was presented to me. It is not static but always intrinsically dynamic, always a “process in a process in a field that never closes.” ( W. H. Auden) It has taken me 61 years to get to this place where humility is teasing me, inviting me into its solace, and I’m absolutely loving it! Sure, I’m still kicking and screaming a bit but I’m gonna get there. And I think of the observation of W. B. Yeats when he “got there,”—Throughout all the lying days of my youth/I waved my leaves and flowers in the air./Now may I wither into the Truth.

Here is a wonderful poem by Bei Dao, a contemporary Chinese poet, with favorite stanza highlighted:
ANSWERS

Cruelty is the ID pass of the cruel,
honesty the grave stone of the honest.
Look, in the sky plated gold,
crooked reflections of all the dead float around.

The glacial epoch is over,
so why is there ice everywhere?
Good Hope was rounded a long time ago,
so where are these thousands of boats racing on the Dead Sea?

I came into this world
with only blank pages, rope and my fingers;
therefore, before final judgements are given,
I need to speak in all the voices of the defendants.

Just let me say, world,
I–don’t–believe!
If a thousand challengers are under your feet
count me as challenger one-thousand-and-one.

I don’t believe the sky is always blue;
I don’t believe it was thunder echoing;
I don’t believe all dreaming is false;
I don’t believe the dead cannot bring judgement.

If the sea is doomed someday to break its levees
my heart must flood with all the bitter waters.
If the land is destined to form the hills again,
let real human beings learn to choose the higher ground.

The latest, favorable turnings, the twinkling stars
studding the naked sky,
are pictographs five-thousand years old.
They are the eyes of the future staring at us now.

 

Meaning and Meaninglessness in Spirituality

8 Replies

Richard Rohr writes powerfully and eloquently about the need to live in the domain of “duality” and recognize the specific relevance of the notion in the realm of spirituality. We do “see through a glass darkly” as the Apostle Paul once noted because this world we live in, which we daily imbibe (usually without any conscious awareness) is made up of infinite complexity, teeming with paradox stemming from this “duality.” One simple example is merely a favorite notion of mine, “We are not what we know ourselves to be. We are much more than that.” But being mere mortals, clothed in flesh, we have had to carve for ourselves an identity fashioned from the ephemeral so that we can function in this beautiful world, a world which…ephemeral thought it might be…is God’s creation.

As we pursue this path which Rohr and others suggest, we must “wrestle with words and meanings” (T. S. Eliot) and thus we dive headfirst into this maelstrom of ambiguity, confusion, doubt, and fear. This is because, here in this land banished from conscious awareness by our “common-sense” day-to-day world, we discover “meaning” and learn that “meaning” inevitably taunts us with “meaninglessness.”

Let me explain why with a simple philosophical maneuver. Imagine a world in which everything was colored blue. In that world, “blue” would therefore not exist for “blue” has no meaning without its complement, “not-blue.” Asking someone to pay attention to “blue” would be like asking a fish to see water.

And the whole of language lies in a similar matrix. However, I must insist that I don’t spent a lot of time wondering about the meaning of most words that I use! If I did, I would soon be swallowed up by an abyss and cease to be functional! I thank the good Lord for this neurological gift as some are not so fortunate. But some words I do deign to explore…to name just a few…god, love, truth, and “right”… and most importantly, in my case, deign to explore the word “Lewis”, the origin of Literary “Lew”. With each of these terms, which I have deemed significant, their complement (including opposite) has to be considered in order for the words to have meaning.

Let me close with an excerpt from W. H. Auden about this treacherous journey. The “Star of Nativity” is speaking his Auden’s Christmas Oratorio:

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 lone
To find themselves immediately alone
With savage water or unfeeling stone,
In labyrinths where they must entertain
Confusion, cripples, tigers, thunder, pain.

Thoreau’s version of, “Ye Must be Born Again”

9 Replies

The first time literature spoke to me was in college when I was introduced to Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau voted with his feet that “modern” life was not accommodating to his soul, and so he retreated to the woods and sought authenticity, declaring, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

The notion of “not having lived” as one comes to the end of his life stunned me and did so because I saw its relevance to my life at age 21. And, I did not fully understand then why, but it immediately brought to my mind the famous words of Jesus, “What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul?” The “not having lived” of Thoreau and the “loss of soul” that Jesus spoke of were one and the same, but I could not really explain it at that point. The insight was intuitive.

Thoreau recognized that modern life was increasingly alienated, that it increasingly cut man off from nature and from himself, turning him into a cog in an industrial apparatus. Thorough intuitively knew what we have come to witness more overtly, that Western civilization was producing a culture of consumers, people whose modus operandi was “consuming”, or “getting stuff.” (And, if he were alive today, he would marvel at how prescient he had been.!) Jesus too recognized that mankind in his day were overly invested in the “stuff” of the day, though rampant consumerism had not blighted human consciousness yet. But he recognized that mankind was missing the point, that they were guilty of the sin of “misplaced concreteness” even then taking for real that which was only ephemeral. When Jesus taught, “Ye must be born again” he was telling us, “Hey, there is another dimension of life that you need to tap into. What you see is not all that there is. You are not all that you know yourself to be. You are more than that mere concept.”

 

“The Silver Lining Playbook” and Mental Illness

Leave a reply

Oh I just love mental illness! How could I not, having been a “mental health counselor”. You see, many eons ago, human culture realized that they had a bunch of people on their hands who “just didn’t get it” and started calling them…for lack of a better term…”nuts.” So, they rounded them all up, tossed a ton of money their way, and said, “Go amuse yourselves.” (One might say, “Go pleasure yourselves!”) So, the “village idiots” congregated on the hinterland and shortly thereafter divided up between the “mental health providers” and the “mentally ill.” I fortunately managed to gain admission to the former group though I’m sure that some of my family and friends would beg to differ with me!

But, seriously, I find mental illness fascinating on so many levels. I’d like to discourse on the subject with regard to a recent movie, “The Silver Lining Playbook” starring Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper, and Robert DeNiro. Cooper has the lead role of “the crazy guy” who has just been released from a mental hospital back to his family which proves to be rife with dysfunction itself. (Who would have thunk it!) He is sure it is going to be different this time and has convinced his family, his father being played by Deniro. But problems start immediately. “The crazy guy” notes at one point that he has trouble “filtering” what he says and this is apparent early on when, shortly after an awkward greeting by his father, he discloses that his mother had told him only moments earlier that his father was a bookie. His mother was stunned. Deniro was stunned and angrily asked his wife, “How could you tell him that?” Well, she could tell him that because she had forgotten something she should have known from this first 30 years of “the crazy guys life”–he does not have this “filter” which allows him to use good judgment in what he says and does. He discloses inappropriately routinely. He behaves inappropriately routinely. His judgment is glaringly deficient in most social situations. He does not know how to “filter” and participate in a social moment with regards to the subtle social arrangements that are in play. He merely says what is on his mind. That, in this story, is a vivid illustration of mental illness—the inability to exercise judgment, control internal impulses, and behave appropriately. One could even say it is the inability to be insincere as the social façade that is day to day life is just that—a social façade designed for more or less smooth functioning of the group. But when someone like “the crazy guy” can’t fit smoothly into this façade, the whole enterprise is jeopardized and he will be labeled “crazy” as he should be.

But, in this movie “crazy guy” has met “crazy gal” (Jennifer Lawrence). They negotiate their craziness and the minute they start to “negotiate” with each other….as in “negotiate” with another individual…they are less crazy. And they learn to love each other, to respect each other, and in so doing probably…I would assume…learn to love and respect the rest of the human race.

And I close with a lovely snippet from an Edgar Simmons poem:

Proofrock has been maligned.
Hamlet should have waived revenge,
Walked with Ophelia domestic corridors,
Absorbing the tic, the bothersome twitch.

Viva la Difference!!!!

Leave a reply

I think most of the time we live our lives on automatic pilot, blithely be-bopping along listening to the tune of our prejudices and self-serving certainties. This is a problem individually and collectively. But occasionally, reality (or might I say “Reality”) intrudes and we are given pause. As W. H. Auden said, “O blessed be bleak exposure on whose sword we are pricked into coming alive.”

My dear friend, soul-mate, and sweet heart Emily Dickinson knew something about this exposure. In the following poem she poignantly and vividly describes a visitation of this always present Presence:

There’s a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons,
That oppresses, like the heft (or weight)
Of cathedral tunes.

Heavenly hurt it gives us;
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings are.

None may teach it anything,
‘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, ‘t is like the distance
On the look of death.

Difference is scary. In literature and philosophy there is a lot of discussion of “difference” and its meaning in our world culture. But difference is scary as hell as we naturally prefer to live in our comfortable, smug little world of certainty. I love the way Emily set this poem up with “There’s a certain slant of light…that oppresses, like the heft of cathedral tunes.” She then addresses the “heavenly hurt” that has been sent and though it leaves no “scars” it does leave the gut-wrenching phenomena of “difference” in our heart.

But who would ever opt for “hurt” of any kind, even “heavenly” hurt?!!!! To mature spiritually, however, we have to find the temerity…and Grace…to fore-go our own interests and need for comfort and allow “difference” to visit us. This visitation makes us acutely aware of our own mortality, of the ephemeral nature of the world we live in, and the connection we have with everyone else…and even with this lovely world itself.

 

Emily Dickinson and Loss of Perspective

1 Reply

Emily Dickinson was mad as a hatter and that is why she could leave us such a treasure trove of poetry. Now if she had been completely mad her poetry would have been incomprehensible and thus would not have merited the term “poetry.” But, in her case, she brings a different perspective on reality as do all good poets. She looked at things differently from her cloistered little room upstairs in her prominent father’s house.

Here she writes a poem about a boat that got pulled too far from the shore and its “perspective monitor” ( i.e. “observing ego”) was oblivious to the fact that “my little craft was lost.” I think Emily’s “little craft” got very near the edge often but it never completely got lost and thus she left us the aforementioned treasure trove of poetry.

‘Twas such a little—little boat
That toddled down the bay!
‘Twas such a gallant—gallant sea
That beckoned it away!

‘Twas such a greedy, greedy wave
That licked it from the Coast—
Nor ever guessed the stately sails
My little craft was lost!

Perspective is everything. That is all we have. If we lose sight of this fact, we have succumbed to the ministrations of those “greedy, greedy” waves. If we remember the fact that we only have a perspective, then we can echo the words of the Apostle Paul, “We see through a glass darkly.”  And someone else once noted, “We can’t have a perspective on our perspective without somehow escaping it.”

 

Embracing Internal Contradictions

Leave a reply

We are such complicated creatures, replete with hypocrisies, contradictions, dishonesties…and virtues! Add them all up and we are reduced to mere be-ing. We simply are. We have the gift of life and have that gift for just a brief moment. Yes, it often appears to be merely a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing” but even the author of that pithy observation (Shakespeare) reflects in the whole of his writing that our paltry efforts reflect value, quality.

The clinical term for this myriad of contradictions is “ambivalence.” Learning to acknowledge and even experience the torment of this ambivalence is one of the most critical lessons in life. It is always so tempting to not take this spiritual adventure and cling to the dogmas of our youth. But we yield to this temptation at the peril of our own soul.

Someone said…and it might have been Karl Jung…that one step toward maturity is when we can learn to tolerate in our heart these ambivalences, to embrace the presence of impulses and presences that are mutually exclusive. Read the following poem by May Sarton:

The Angels And The Furies

1
Have you not wounded yourself
And battered those you love
By sudden motions of evil
Black rage in the blood
When the soul premier danseur
Springs towards a murderous fall ?
The furies possess you.

2
Have you not surprised yourself
Sometimes by sudden motions
Or intimations of goodness
When the soul premier danseur
Perfectly poised
Could shower blessings
With a graceful turn of the head ?
The angels are there.

3
The angels, the furies
Are never far away
While we dance, we dance,
Trying to keep a balance,
To be perfectly human
(Not perfect, never perfect,
Never an end to growth and peril),
Able to bless and forgive
Ourselves.
This is what is asked of us.

4
It is the light that matters,
The light of understanding.
Who has ever reached it
Who has not met the furies again and again:
Who has reached it without
Those sudden acts of grace?

(This poem was shared weeks ago on the blog by Blue Eyed Ennis.)

Flat Earthers Live Today!

Leave a reply

Plato observed, “Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed by the masses.” And I agree whole heartedly though I might qualify what he meant by “shadows and lies.” Most people take reality to be merely what it appears to be, they take it as it was and is presented to them, and never deign to look beneath the surface. And, yes, one well might call this “shadows and lies” for at times it is not innocent, especially to those who bear the weight of this collective deception.

Adrienne Rich said something relevant, “Until we see the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot begin to know our self.” These “assumptions” are powerful and they are palpable, but only to the discerning eye. Asking someone to see them is like asking a fish to see water. For example, can’t you imagine how difficult it was for those men and women centuries ago who dared to posit the notion that the earth was not flat? Everyone knew the world was flat!

We have our own version of Flat Earthers today.

And Leonardo da Vinci had a thought which is relevant:

O cities of the sea, I behold in you your citizens, women as well as men tightly bound with stout bonds around their arms and legs by folk who will not understand your language; and you will only be able to give vent to your griefs and sense of loss of liberty by making tearful complaints, and sighs, and lamentations one to another; for those who bind you will not understand your language nor will you understand them. Leonardo da Vinci, from “Of Children in Swaddling Clothes”.