Tag Archives: T.S. Eliot

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A few days I in this venue I made reference to a Muslim terrorist gunning down shoppers in a mall as he kneeled from time to time to pray. There is a similar demonstration of religious lunacy taking place in many states in my country where laws exempt parents from homicide or murder charges if their children die because their faith did not permit them to use medical care, relying instead on “faith healing.” To make it worse, in these states the legislatures turn a blind eye to this issue because to address it with the firm hand of the law would be to turn the conservative, bible-thumping electorate against them. Therefore, my charge of “lunacy” can also be applied to these legislatures as they stand by and allow children to die because they don’t have the courage to confront group insanity. (See: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/11/08/in-idaho-faith-healing-may-have-killed-more-children-than-we-ever-suspected/ and  http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/11/idaho-christian-faith-healers-12-kids-have-died-since-2011-and-nobodys-doing-anything-about-it/)

It seems like there is insanity in everyone’s religion. With everyone I meet, everything I read, everywhere I go I see people believing and doing stupid things because of their faith. And, yes, I fear that is the case with you also, my friend. Gosh, I’m the only one who is doing this faith “thingy” right and I wish the rest of you people would just wake up and listen to me. Or, as I often like to put it, “You know, I think you and I are the only ones who are right on this matter…and sometimes I have my doubts about you.”

Now, those who know me, or have read this blather very long know that I’m speaking in jest here. For, I see clearly that the lunacy I note in other people’s faith is very much here with me also. And, I don’t actually see “lunacy” everywhere; my point is merely that in our faith…and in the whole of our lives…lunacy abides and it is frightening to acknowledge it. Now to be fair, most of our “lunacy” does not merit that label and can best be described as not seeing things with the maturity we are capable of. This is because we tend to see things as we wish to and that self-serving dimension of our perspective, carried to an extreme will always be lunatic!

You might say “there is a fly in the ointment” in everything we do and this is especially critical in our value system; for our values are always sullied by this aforementioned self-interest. But the “true believer” is always incapable of considering this gut-level flaw and that is one reason why he is capable of such “true” belief.

But the real culprit in Idaho, the real “lunatic”, is the state legislature who see clearly that these “faith healers” are impoverished, poorly educated people and are permitting their faith to rule them even to the death of their own children. YET, these legislators will not intervene because of their moral and spiritual cowardice.

This stupidity…and I’m talking here of the legislators…is one of the reason that people like Bill Maher (and I love this guy!) so readily lampoon Christians for belief in their “imaginary friend.” Well, though I am a Christian, I agree with Bill Maher regarding this stupidity. Just because we have faith does not give us the freedom to be stupid and fail to consider the outside world and the relevance of our faith…or lack thereof…to this outside world. Mental illness is a reference problem and anytime when our field of reference becomes too private, a private self-referential system, we are in deep trouble. Paul Tillich called this an “empty world of self-relatedness” and that is always lunacy, regardless of the positive feed-back you might be getting from inside your echo chamber.

And, Christians need to be aware that to some degree even their faith is guilty of becoming an echo chamber and will inevitably do so from time to time. If our religious tradition, including recitation of dogma, becomes merely a form of “self-soothing” it is not any better than someone who “self-soothes” with a substance addiction. Our faith…even the one we are so “sure” about…can become a means of escaping reality rather than empowering us to deal with reality openly. This is what T. S. Eliot had in mind when he noted, “Human kind cannot bear very much reality.” This is why Eliot also noted the importance of coming to a point in our life when we find the courage to “live in the breakage, in the collapse of what was believed in as most certain, and therefore the fittest for renunciation.”

 

 

Be a Voice, not an Echo!

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I recently saw a quip on Facebook that grabbed me, “Be a voice, not an echo.” I feel I have spent most of my life merely echoing what I have been taught and what I have been rewarded for thinking and believing. I have dutifully mirrored back what “they” have wanted in the interest of the approbation that is always promised for this behavior.

But, due to my own internal “non-sense,” I realized I wasn’t feeling the approbation in the first place. And I saw that I had been guilty of this spiritual “offense” and am finding that I live less in an echo chamber now.  But notice I said “less.” We can never think with perfect clarity…unless we achieve deity; and if I ever have intimations of having done that I hope someone is nearby with a hypodermic of industrial strength Haldol!  We always live and think in a context and we always have a human tendency to interpret things to fit with our old-brain, ego-template of the world. When this understanding comes to us, we can back off more readily with our “certainties” and allow some doubt to filter in, making room for others. I love that line from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets about the need to “live in the breakage, in the collapse of what was believed in as most certain and therefore the fittest for renunciation.”

 

The “Gaze” Captures and Can Kill.

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The eye is powerful for it captures reality for us and the image it creates then becomes our “reality.” But the “reality” thus captured is only a snapshot and is not actually “reality.” Here is a short video clip which vividly illustrates the illusory nature of what our eyes capture. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xr6VawX2nr4)

Now the impact of this approach is not that the “snap shots” that we live by, which compose our reality, are unimportant. We can’t live and function without this composite snapshot we carry with us each day, a template through which we see the world. But this insight does help us to see that from time to time we can back off a bit with what we “think” we see and be less certain about making pronouncements about it. In other words, we can be a little more humble.

Technically, a further qualification is in order. The “eye” actually does nothing other than take the snap shot. It is the “heart” which takes this snap shot and interprets it and it is the heart which then concretizes that image and takes it for granted…or if I might lapse poetic a moment…”for granite.” Our interpretation of reality becomes ironclad and we stop seeing…and feeling…the nuances of life. This is tantamount to saying that we become “dead.”

And here are a couple of thoughtful observations about the power of vision:

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—         55
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?         60
  And how should I presume? (“The Love Song of J. Alfred Proofrock” by T. S. Eliot)

 

And then Luce Irigaray noted:

.more than other senses, the eye objectifies and masters. it sets at a distance, maintains the distance. in our culture, the predominance of the look over smell, taste, touch, hearing, has brought about an improverishment of bodily relations…the moment domin ates the look dominates, the body loses its materiality. (Marine Lover: Of Friedrich Nietzsche)

 

 

 

 

Letting the “Bud” of Life Blossom

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A friend of mine posted last week a quote from Anais Nin quote that has always really grabbed me, “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
This brought to my mind several other literary references to the “bud” of our life, referring to life at its earliest point when we had just taken that quantum leap from non-being into being. At that point we were the quintessence of vulnerability, a vulnerability that will always be present in our heart but one from which we are protected with the “fig leaf” of an ego. Then later in our adult life we have the task of loosening the pernicious grip of that ego to the point that some of that vulnerability can come to consciousness and invigorate an otherwise barren life. When that happens, what my spiritual tradition calls the “Spirit of God” begins to come forth and we find that we can engage in the “flow” of life, no longer tyrannized by subterranean fears of annihilation.  T.S. Eliot described this “bud” as, “that tender point from which life arose, that sweet force born of inner throes.” And in another poem he offered another relevant thought, seeing this “bud” as, “some infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing.”

But Shakespeare so brilliantly described this “bud” in his first sonnet and the peril of not allowing it to open and blossom, letting the essence of our life flow into the Void that we all live in, into the Great Round. In this context, the “blooming” he noted was in reference to some unknown friend who refused to get married and start a family. He described this friend as being unable to escape a narcissistic shell, accusing him of being “contracted to thine own brights eyes,” or seeing only what he saw…not able to see beyond the private world that he lived in. This is related to the Conrad Aiken line I quote so often, “We see only the small bright circle of our consciousness beyond which lies the darkness.”

Shakespeare believed that in getting married and having a family a person had the opportunity to let one’s tender “bud” break open and blossom into the unfolding of life, to participate in the “mundane” task of perpetuating the species. In one of his plays he described a character as being unable to “spend himself” and that consequently said he, “spills himself in fearing to be spilt.”

In the first sonnet, he chided his friend for feeding “thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel, making a famine where abundance lies, thyself thy foe, to the sweet self so cruel.” He saw this friend cowering within his bud, feeding himself with “self-substantial fuel” and not participating in life, not engaging in meaningful relationship, having “fled to a nutshell” where he could there safely be the “king of infinite spaces.” Shakespeare lamented this friend’s narcissism, seeing that he was his own worst enemy, to his “own sweet self so cruel.”

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.
Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content
And, tender churl, makest waste in niggarding.
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.
Now, speaking from experience, it is possible to find other ways to open that bud, that “tender point” without marriage or family. I utilized the Shakespearean sonnet merely to note one “contrivance” that life has afforded us to “die to our selves” and focus on a greater end. But, I will admit that, personally, getting married but not having children illustrated this “cowardly spirit” that Shakespeare had in mind. And perhaps that is why that late in life I am finding the vulnerability in which life appears to be flowing, my “bud” timidly and often half-hearterdly trying to open and blossom.

Nin vividly discovered the painful quandary of not letting that blossom come forth in some dimension of one’s life. The pain becomes so intense that we feel we are about to burst. The “einfall” (see a recent post on the subject) is so persistent that we cannot but surrender and find a symbolic death offering us the hope of resurrection. Jesus also grasped the importance of letting this bud die and then blossom, noting that unless a grain of wheat, “fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”

Life often appears to be merely about finding a meaningful way to slowly die, to artfully approach the end of our life and in the process leave something meaningful behind. Now I certainly do not think that life is a grim enterprise in which we morbidly focus on our brief span of life and ultimate death but that we do need to realize that death and life are always intertwined. And I am made to think of the wisdom of a very astute psychologist of several decades ago, Irvin Yalom, who noted that in his practice he had discovered that those who lived in fear of death were actually very fearful of being alive. But when unconscious fears rule our life, we cannot acknowledge our vulnerability and spend our lives glomming onto whatever contrivance our culture affords us in order to avoid that “tender point”, that bud from which life wants to emerge, that “bud” that Nin so pithily referenced.

 

 

“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.

 

Poetry is Dangerous!!!!

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Yes, it will wreak havoc on your life; so, if poetry beckons, just turn around and go the other way or at least give it a wide passage for if you let it come to close it will insinuate its way into your heart and then, katy-bar-the-door, your life is over! Your are a dead man….or, at least, the man (or woman) you think you are is going to die.

Let me explain. I was in my early thirties and had quit teaching school and was beginning Dante’s venture into a “dark forest.” And then a young man who purported to be a friend had the audacity to give me a copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets and the Collected Poetry of W.H. Auden and I was almost immediately on the road to perdition. To make it worse, about the same time I discovered T. S. Eliot and his “Four Quartets” where I learned that words were ephemeral, that words “break, slip, slide, decay with imprecision, will not stay in place….shrieking voices always assail them.” you deign to venture into words to the extent that suddenly you awaken and discover that you are knee-deep in…ahem…the Word!

And since that point in my life, poetry has continued to worm its way into the depths of my heart, relentlessly delving into the secret corridors of my inner most being where I have discovered that, just as the Apostle Paul said, it is “quick and powerful, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.” Wow! Wow, wow, wow! That poor friend had no idea what he was doing to “literallew”…but, on the other hand, perhaps he did. He was a very astute soul.

But, how can “poetry” do this? Well, “poetry” as such does nothing. But poetry is a process, a dynamic process which is an expression of life, and if it happens to present itself to a heart that is ready to discover “penetrable stuff,” magic can unfold.

Why was I so ready? Well, the first clue was my fury at literature in high school and those dear schoolmarm teachers who would deign to force me to answer the question, “What does that mean to you?” I reacted with mute anger, dutifully trotting out whatever I thought they wanted, not daring to tell them what was really on my heart, “It means just what it says!!!!” Certainly, I did “protest too much”; and, yes, Shakespeare was my worst nightmare at that time as he just would not speak plain English, and certainly not Arkansas redneck, “po white trash” English.”

But now I swim in poetry…though I cannot write even an inch of it! As my wife told me not long after I met her and was obsessively quoting poetry (ncluding Auden’s note re Yeats, “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry), “Mad Arkansas hurt you into other people’s poetry.” That was a veritable “word fitly spoken.”

Poetry is the Spirit of God at work, tearing words apart and allowing their hidden meaning to flow. Poetry is the word, broken….crucified, if you please…which allows its innermost depths to burgeon forth. This reminds me of a note by Gabriel Marcel, that words have meaning, or value, when they “burgeon forth into a region beyond themselves.” The literalist will not permit this as the “words” they use are concrete and will not be permitted to “break” and that is because the “ego” that they are will not be allowed to “break”…or, as Jesus taught, “die.”

 

Belated Easter Thoughts

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Easter Sunday always brings back pleasant memories though always tinged with sadness for so often my dear momma had to work. And then, in retrospect, there was the “hell fire and damnation” emphasis of the sermon and the obsessive, self-indulgent emphasis of the passion of Christ….recently vividly illustrated in the Mel Gibson movie. Oh, I believe in the “death, burial, and resurrection of Christ” but I’m now mature enough to venture into the work of hermeneutics and interpret it for myself. I now see the obsessive emphasis of Jesus’ suffering on the cross….because of our complicit presence in the “eating of the apple”…does not have to be taken literally and in fact, should not be. I would never minimize the suffering of Jesus as he was certainly, like “moi”, a human being (at least) and torture hurt. I do not like pain and would not have the courage to endure what he did when, according to American hymnology, “He could have called ten thousand angels, to destroy the world, and set him free.” Jesus knew that life involved pain and offered to us “the way of Cross” in which, per W. H. Auden, we must climb the rugged cross of the moment and let our illusions die.”

But, while Jesus was being tortured and humiliated on the cross, he uttered the incredible words, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.” My “guru”, Richard Rohr, in recent months explained that Jesus was saying, “Hey, they are not conscious. They do not know what they are doing. Forgive them.” Now I have been mistreated, misunderstood, and have “suffered” to some degree in my life. But my “sufferings” were always of the neurotic variety but I have yet to find the courage to offer the words to oblivion, “Father forgive them. For they know not what they did.” Why not? I certainly realize and understand that “they” were conscious and didn’t know what they were doing and their “mistreatment” of “moi” was so minimal, weighing so heavily on me only because I was a “highly sensitive person”, meaning
I was “thin-skinned” and vulnerable. So, why don’t I let the memories of “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to” just fade into oblivion? Well, I think that Shakespeare had the answer to his own question, suggesting that we would “prefer to cling to our present ills than fly to others that we know not of.” In other words, our present misery…or “discomfort”…is preferable than letting it go and deigning to encounter the mystery of life part of which will be “pain” of some sorts.

Twenty years ago a psychiatrist, Scott Peck, offered incredible wisdom in his book, “The Road Less Traveled.” In the opening chapter of that book he noted, “Neureosis is a substitute for legitimate suffering.” Neurosis is a maladaptive response to the difficulties of life, some of which are very intense.. Likewise, psychosis…or worse…is an even less adaptive to these same circumstances or perhaps even trauma. Now psychotics are not really capable of forgiving their malefactors. But neurotics are very capable. So, why not? Why do they cling to their pain? Why do “I” cling to my pain? Well, I have to follow my own reasoning and admit that I just don’t have the courage to abandon the neurotic structure that has comforted me all these years and in the primordial Absence that follows, dare to make a choice that can be
“Redemptive”,  not just for “moi” but for those that are nearest and dearest to me. In other words, do I dare to be “real” or, better yet, “Real.”  As T.S. Eliot asked “Do I dare disturb the universe?” It comes down to “getting over ourselves” which for some of us is industrial strength neurosis. Do we dare to escape the safe cacoon of our anguish and engage the rest of the world?

Nah, nah! Personally, I prefer my lofty thoughts and the smug satisfaction that I am in control. But then I, again today, avoid the redemptive power of the Resurrection which is always available in any spiritual tradition though expressed in different imagery.

Do I Dare Disturb the Universe?

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“Scare the world. be exactly what you say you are and tell the truth.” Someone posted this simple little admonishment on Facebook last week and it grabbed me, making me think of T. S. Eliot’s famous question, “Do I dare disturb the universe?” For, if I ever gain the courage to become authentic and act and speak out of that authenticity, I will “scare the world” and “disturb the universe.”

Now, the “world” and “universe” that I will startle will be very small for I am not a person of note; or, as I like to facetiously put it, I am merely a “small clod of cholesterol in the mainstream of life.” The first universe that I must disturb is the private one that I live in, that narrow prism through which I view the world which, if unexamined, is but a prison. And, if I can find the courage to experience the disturbance of “awareness” this cannot but have an impact on my thought, speech, behavior and consequently my little corner of the world.  (W. H. Auden noted, “O blessed be bleak Exposure on whose sword we are pricked into coming alive.”)

The key is awareness. The key is realizing that we “have eyes to see but see not” and “ears to hear but hear not” and if we ever understand that…in the depths of our heart, and do so with feeling, it will give us pause. For then we will understand that we will never be able to do anything but “see through a glass darkly.” And to see, and feel, this “darkly” dimension of our perspective field is very humbling and even frightening. It has been, and is, for me for I was taught that I could see things objectively.

Authenticity is a dangerous phenomena for the world as it mechanically, relentlessly grinds on day to day under the collective dictate of “the way things are.” The unexamined life is always driven by unquestioned assumptions which are merely those which we have imbibed from the little corner of the world in which we were born and have not dared to question. And as Adrienne Rich once noted, “We cannot begin to know who we are until we question the assumptions in which we are drenched.”

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.

Some Subtleties about Prayer

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In January when the Republican Party was still reeling from their unexpected loss to President Obama two months earlier, there was a lot of noise about ousting Senator John Boehner as Speaker of the House. But, according to a story in the Washington Post last week, several members of the House prayed the night before a critical vote on the issue and were “led” to spare Mr. Boehner. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/house-republicans-have-broken-into-fighting-factions/2013/06/03/7533e606-b8ff-11e2-92f3-f291801936b8_story_3.html)

Now, I’m always in favor of prayer in any circumstances, being it even ceremonial or perfunctory. I feel that any prayer is a venture to a field of reference outside of ourselves and is good. However, I am always given pause with public prayer, or public reports of prayer, and how “the Lord’ answered the prayers. For, I feel that often prayer is merely a request to get from On High what we want for our own selfish purposes. We pray intently and fervently for what we already want for motives which are often base; and then occasionally when we get a prayer answered we take great pleasure, announcing that “God intervened” through our humble petitions. Well, don’t forget that there is the phenomenon of a “blind pig finding a walnut every now and then.”

Sure, we should pray for what we need, we should make “our petitions known to God” but I think it is really important to remember that prayer can be an exercise in self-indulgence. To many Christians, or believers of any cut, view God as some concretely existing “Teddy Bear in the Sky” who waits for our beck and call, ready to give us exactly what we want, failing to recognize that many people at the same time might be praying with equal fervency for just the opposite. Some, of course do recognize this, but take comfort in the pious observation, “Yes, but then we are right with the Lord and so the Lord will listen to us”, implying that those who look differently on the issue are not “right with the Lord.” The implicit assumption belies an arrogance that makes me suspect that the prayer never gets beyond the halo of the pray-er.

I think at some point in our spiritual life we need to get beyond the point of seeing God at our beck and call, ready to “smite” those who disagree with us, ready to bring about our own purposes which, upon honest scrutiny, could often be seen as merely childish and selfish whims. At some point we need to get to the point where we sincerely conclude our prayers with, “Thy will be done,” and recognize that His will might be different than our own

Now, let me be honest. I’m holding forth about a group of conservative politicians with whom I certainly have a bone to pick. And, I think there is a degree of validity to my argument. However, I must admit that all of this discourse is merely revealing of what I recall my prayer life being about through most of my life. It has been really hard to “get over myself” and the process is not complete yet! We need to follow the advice of T. S. Eliot who noted that we must “Purify our motive in the Ground of our beseeching.”