Tag Archives: Philosophy of Mind

Emily Dickinson and Loss of Perspective

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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.”

 

Action vs Reaction?

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Here is a marvelous poem by a contemporary theologian who understands “working out your own salvation with fear and trembling,” describing it as creating “a clearing in the dense forest of our life…” This is such a powerful image as most of our lives are often such a “dense forest” and creating any space in that wilderness is challenging.

Do not try to save
the whole world
or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create
a clearing
in the dense forest
of your life
and wait there
patiently,
until the song
that is yours alone to sing
falls into your open cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know
how to give yourself
to this world so worthy of rescue.
(Martha Postlethwaite)

And the notion of “waiting for our song” brought to mind the wisdom of William Butler Yeats:

O God, guard me from those thoughts
Men think in the mind alone.
He who sings a lasting song
Must think in the marrow bone.

(note:  Postlethwaite poem was cited by Blue Eyed Ennis blog recently.)

Reason has its Limits!

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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.”

 

Our Debt to the Poets

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The poet, to whose mighty heart Heaven doth a quicker pulse impart,

Subdues that energy to scan Not his own course, but that of man.

Matthew Arnold here describes what I love about poets. They have such tremendous insight, not only about their own heart, but about the human condition. For if you understand one human heart, you pretty well have a grasp over the rest of them. Yes, a poet’s heart bears the burden of a “quicker pulse” and he/she uses words to subdue that energy and translate it into meaningful, verbal form. Most of us lost that “quicker pulse” early in our life as our heart became organized into the “right” way of perceiving and understanding the world. We must depend on the poets…and other artists…to teach us about other ways of looking at the world.

Perspective and meta-cognition

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JUST AT DARK
By Marilyn Dorf
the young doe
every night
gazes long at our window pondering
perhaps
the glow of our lamp this moon fallen down
in her pasture

Now we have no idea what animals think but it is interesting to speculate how life appears to them. This interesting poem in the Christian Science Monitor brings to the subject of perspective to my mind…and perhaps will shake me out of my long doldrum in publishing here in WP.
I read somewhere years ago…I think it was the philosopher Ricoeur…that “it is impossible to have a perspective on our perspective without somehow escaping it.” This meta-cognition was an incredible development in human consciousness. “Homo sapiens sapiens” a friend noted months ago, “Man knows that he knows.”
We are incredible creatures, just like the deer, the birds, the squirrels, and the rest of the animal kingdom. But this meta-cognition appears to set us apart in some way, allowing us to create culture but with the price tag of awareness of our own mortality.

Wanta go to heaven?

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In my conservative upbringing, I was taught that the story of Adam and Eve was about creation and “the fall.”  I was taught that when Adam succumbed to the temptation of Eve’s offering of the forbidden fruit (i.e., the apple), we as a species were plunged into sin, we had “fallen” into sin.

I now see that story as a myth and a very compelling and rich myth.  It is the story of how we did indeed fall from grace but only in the sense that it was the fall from a primordial unity with nature into the realm of consciousness—from raw, unmediated, instinctual experience into the realm of conscious, cognitive, rational reality.  And this event in our psychic development is very much related to the advent of language.  This event can be thought of as a fall from the pre-conscious into the realm of the verbal.  Even Aesychlus noted, circa 500 b.c. noted how that Zeus had “banished us thought-ward”.

Karl Jung taught that before the advent of language, the child dwells in a state of unity with his/her mother.  The mother’s world and that of her child are tightly intertwined until the process of differentation leads them to that radical juncture in the process of separation—language. (That world of unity is sometimes thought of and conceptualized as the ouroborus, symbolized by the snake eating its own tail.)  Furthermore, I have read of speculation that those children with speech impediments have been overly enmeshed with their mothers and have not formed clear and separate boundaries.

And, yes, “sin” is relevant to this situation.  Human experience is that of a sinner in that we sense on some level that we “come from out there” or at least somewhere else.  It is a sense of being separate from our source.  We are cut off from our source and cannot go back.  Our longing for heaven is the yearning for that Edenic state of one-ness with nature, primordial unity.  On some unconscious level we recall “heaven” where all was well with the world, nothing ever went wrong, all of our needs were met.  And, as conscious adults we subscribe to the belief that after death, we return to that wonderful state

More “loss”

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Renunciation -- is a piercing Virtue --
The letting go
A Presence -- for an Expectation --

Emily Dickinson was a very complicated and very troubled woman.  But as she wrestled with her demons, she found words available as a solace and skillfully articulated her anguish.

In the above poem, she was wrestling with loss and risking a descent into madness.  “Renunciation” was the term she chose for rejecting the “common sense” world she lived and breathed in—a “presence”.  This “presence” can be thought of as her egoic consciousness (see Eckhart Tolle), a bit of fiction she had subscribed to which plugged her into that “common sense” world.  Norman O. Brown once noted, “The ego is a veil we spin to hide the void.”  Emily’s “veil” was precarious at best.

In another one of her poems she described this loss of egoic consciousness as “a funeral in my brain.”  And then she concluded the poem with the lines:

And then a plank in reason, broke,
And I dropped down and down–
And hit a world at every plunge,
And finished knowing–then—

Note that she “hit a world at every plunge.”  So, even though the demons of madness were besetting her, she found a world at every step and then “finished knowing—then.  Her ego survived the descent.