Tag Archives: TS Eliot

My Personal Struggle With the Ego

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I write about the ego a lot here and elsewhere.  Yes, I’m critical of its role in others but often admit it is very much a personal problem.  It always is if one is a human.  But only with the acquisition of the “ego integrity” I wrote about last time can one begin to recognize just how big a role it plays in his life.

When the ego is “hitting on all eight-cylinders” it is impenetrable.  I can remember pretty well in my youth when I was very insulated with a full panoply of the ego’s machinations, including hyper religiosity.  And religion is fertile ground for the ego as it offers a haven where one can be protected with the self-delusion that “the Spirit of God is leading me and therefore I see things correctly.  My judgment is sound.”  I well recall a moment when I was 18 years of age when this impenetrable religious veneer of mine was challenged in high school.  A girl I knew very well, and still know very well today, challenged the false piety I had just demonstrated in a school assembly.  I’ll never forget being taken aback, my “cage” rattled…but only briefly!  For the ego, when threatened is so adept at just sloughing off the criticism and retreating to the cacophony of internal reassurances, “No, this is not so.  This is a bit awkward, but just go away.  This is not so.”  And with that internal litany I resumed my performance art of a fundamentalist faith and fledgling ministry. But not for long!!!  In less than a year my tenuous, extremely impoverished identity would begin to submit to the “Divine threat” of Light and an adventure that continues now a half a century later.

My defensive retreat at age 18, essentially a “doubling down” inside an internal fortress is very human.  I continue this today, utilizing one of the many Divine adaptations available when the going gets too rough, relying on literature, music, philosophy, spiritual teachers, mantra’s and such.  Oh, I must not forget gardening, in season, and my marvelous canine son, Petey, two of the best “adaptations.” The God I believe in today gives us these adaptations, these “fig leaves” to cover up the existential nakedness when it becomes too much.

One source of my literary adaptations is the wisdom of poet T.S. Eliot who declared, “Human kind cannot bear very much reality.”  My country right now is getting an industrial-strength dose of “reality” that we’ve been avoiding, possibly since our beginning.  This reality is trying to tell us that something is amiss and now we must find the courage to let “reality” do its work, bringing to the table the harsh rebuke of Eliot, “Oh the shame of motives late revealed, and the awareness of things ill done and done to others harm which once we took for exercise of virtue”

The Imprisonment of Faith

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Cultic religion offers us occasional example of how a faith system can become bondage.  But, often this phenomenon of “cultism” can subtly creep into faith systems that aren’t readily described as cults.  A faith becomes cultic when he does not trust the spiritual presence that permeates this world we live in and resorts to power, manipulation, and emotional brutality to capture its children and to win converts.  The leaders of this type of faith will be firmly confident of the nobility of their motivations but the behavior of what they are doing will be apparent to anyone looking on from the outside.  One simple example is the infamous Westboro Baptist Church, which btw must have crawled back under the rock from which they came as I haven’t heard of them lately.

This morning a young woman who was raised in a fundamentalist Christian church and culture shared in Huffington Post about her captivity in a family that was involved in the “quiver full movement” which emphasizes the importance of parents producing many children.  This verse comes from the Old Testament where it is written that fathers whose “quiver is full” of many children will have “arrows” with which the world can be captured for Christ. This young woman, Cynthia Jeub, describes the emotional/spiritual brutality that she was subjected to in this family until her late teens when she finally had the courage to escape.

In a closely-knit family, or a closely-knit group, there will always be someone who escapes.  T.S. Eliot described this individual as the dysfunctional family’s “bird sent flying through the purgatorial fire” to find what I would call the redemptive Grace of God which the family had forbidden.  Eliot furthermore, described this individual as the family’s “unhappy consciousness” that has been assigned this torturous task.  For, in any family or group any individual who dares to “think out side of the box” will be venturing toward consciousness as those who spend their life confined to the “box” of group think will never be able to know the delight of exploring the mystery of being a conscious human being.  This brings to my mind the famous line from Martin Luther King, “Free at last, free at last.  Praise God, I’m free at last.”  While King was speaking of escaping from the bondage of racial oppression, Ms. Jeub is now writing about her escape from familial, cultural, and spiritual bondage.  Check the link out and then check her blog out. (http://cynthiajeub.com/}

A caveat is in order.  Those confined to rigid veins of thought, those who are orchestrating this bondage, are not necessarily bad people.  They are people whose good, noble, spiritual intentions have been hijacked for the purpose of ego; and all of us have an ego. This is just the way it is. This is life.  It is easy to heap venom upon them, but we must realize this is how human culture operates.  My remarks here are to commend one individual who has been graced with the courage to break out of the fetters that imprisoned her and speak of what I like to call, “The Grace of God.”  See the Huffington Post article at the following link.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/cynthia-jeub-kids-by-the-dozen_n_5c798c1be4b0e5e313ca43e0

Trump is Getting “Pelosi’d”

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What does Trump to hide? The threat of “investigations” is now present.  The House of Representatives is now controlled by the Democrats and the comfort of the “swaddling clothes” the Republican-controlled Congress provided Trump is not there.  Trump is getting Pelosi’d.  Nancy Pelosi is now presenting the limits to Trump that a bedrock principle of our government, “separation of powers” gifted our nation with.  But people like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, and the rest of the Republican cabal, made a commitment to cover for Trump’s political, ethical, and moral excesses.  And, that damned “evangelical council” facilitated the cover of many evangelical Christians. (Yes, I’ve got an axe to grind with them for betraying rank-and-file evangelicals.)

Trump is the “word fitly spoken” for the Republican Party, the perfect articulation for their decades long effort to hide the racism, bitterness, jealousy, calumny, and deceit they live in denial of.  He has put on the table all that they never had the courage to acknowledge, demonstrating that human quality that none of us like to embrace, a penchant for being dishonest with ourselves. Trump has so much to hide and should fear these “investigations”; for two years he lived in the comfort of an enabling Republican-controlled Congress but now Reality has intervened and is now pecking away at the bubble of narcissism they live in.

None of us like “the Truth.”  We all live inside a persona but usually that façade is not such a self-imposed prison that we cannot handle those moments that come our way when we get exposed and have to utter the famous word of Rick Perry, “Oops!”  Brings to mind the wisdom of T.S. Eiiot, “Oh the shame of motives late revealed, of things ill done and done to others’ harm, which once you took for exercise of virtue.”

“The Moon is Made Out of Cheese”

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The following is a facetious reverie I utilize socially on occasion to illustrate the lunacy that we all wallow in occasionally.  Bear with me.  There is a point to it.

Wow, I woke up this morning and I suddenly realized that the moon is made out of cheese!  Furthermore, I knew that this insight was profound and relevant to the entire world so I immediately began to formulate a plan whereby I could spread this very important insight.

I started by canvassing my neighborhood and though many refused to open the door, some laughed at me, there were a handful of people who, knowing how special and gifted I was to begin with, immediately said, “Hey, you have a point there!  I’ve always had thoughts like that myself but didn’t have the courage to speak of them.”

So we began to meet regularly and started each meeting with an assessment of those in the neighborhood who had not “seen the light” and had so rudely refused the good news that we had brought.  We took great comfort in the realization that most people cannot handle the truth, stubbornly keep their minds and hearts in the darkness, and refuse to allow enlightenment to enter.  Often, as these meetings ended, we would be in tears as we lamented the fate of those who had stubbornly refused to acknowledge the truth that we offered.

I must make a long story short and summarize.  This initial group did grow and at some point our initial band of seven faithful souls expanded to twenty-three.  We formally organized and, of course, since I was the source of this inspiration I announced that I was the leader of the group…and also the treasurer…and that I was the final authority on some of the fine points about the moon being made out of cheese.

At this point, trouble started.  One gentleman brought up the question, “Well, what kind of cheese is it?”  I was a bit taken aback as I knew without a doubt that it was American cheese but another dared to suggest, “No, it is cheddar.”  Still another affirmed that it was American cheese but argued that it was Velveeta.  It took a lot of argument, and at times intense anger, but I managed to convince the second gentleman that the Velveeta notion was heresy and he agreed with me.  But the cheddar proponent was adamant about his viewpoint, and convinced three others he was right, and they separated from our group and focused on developing a belief system around the moon being made out of cheddar cheese.

My point here with this lunacy is, once again, “Don’t believe everything you think.”  Those who do, lacking the capacity to think critically, are subject to easily being influenced by a seductive and/or intimidating person.  Whatever our “pet” thoughts are, it does not hurt in the least to subject them to a bit of critical thinking.  I like T.S. Eliot’s observation on this note, encouraging us to, “live in the breakage, in the collapse of what was believed in as most certain and therefore the fittest for renunciation.”  “Pet” thoughts that have value can withstand this type of scrutiny and even flourish as a result.  This makes me think of something I read decades ago about how to make a poem, “Grab a word and pull on it.”  Grabbing a word or a thought and “pulling on it” with critical thinking can help ferret out the value…if any…if the thinking.  The less value in the vein of thought that grips one’s soul, the less likelihood that any critical thinking will be brought to bear upon it.

Each of us have passing thoughts.  That is good.  But we can be selective about which one’s we give any energy to and if it is something that tends to promote isolation, we might take pause.  We might ask, “Do I really believe this?”

Halloween Thought: Consciousness is Scary!!!

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As Hamlet is drawing his famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy to a close, he declares. “Thus conscience (i.e. consciousness) doeth make cowards of us all and the native hue of resolution is sicklie’d o’er with the pale cast of thought…”

Shakespeare knew that most people opt to never become conscious because it is just too painful.  He knew that regardless of out lot in life, be it immense pain or the mute pain of tedium, we would prefer to keep it that way, to “cling to these ills that we have than fly to others that we know not of.”  Each of us prefers seeing the world through a narrow little prism, a citadel of unquestioned premises.  We obstinately cling to our narrow world view, opting to not challenge the comfy set of premises in which we are ensconced.  The price tag for this comfort is that we never become conscious, never escape the herd mentality into which each of us is born;  for, as T.S. Eliot has put it, “Human kind cannot bear very much reality.”

Hamlet recognized that the “native hue of resolution”, or innate desire to exercise mature will in the world, is “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”  Shakespeare presented this tragic character as stymied by thought, given to “thinking too much” which gave him wisdom, “which, if quartered would be one part wisdom and three parts cowardice.”  Hamlet recognized that hiding beneath that “pale cast of thought”,  that myriad of sterile ideas, was merely cowardice.  He knew that all ideologues are merely cowards, not willing to challenge their basic assumptions and tippy-toe into “reality.”

But W. H. Auden has the most vivid poetic description of our innate preference for this escapism:

Heroic charity is rare;
Without it, what except despair
Can shape the hero who will dare
The desperate catabasis
Into the snarl of the abyss
That always lies just underneath
Our jolly picnic on the heath
Of the agreeable, where we bask,
Agreed on what we will not ask,
Bland, sunny, and adjusted by
The light of the accepted lie.

 

 

 

 

Wind Imagery and Transitoriness of Life

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T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets is one my my favorite poems of all time, It is a powerful statement of mankind’s existential plight and of hope in the midst this hopelessness. He grasped the transitory nature of life and used vivid imagery to convey this. For example, in one of the Quartets (Burnt Norton) he wrote of, “Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind which blows before and after time. It reminds me of a favorite scene in the movie, American Beauty, when two characters are silently watching a video of the wind silently buffeting a plastic bag, conveying the same message of Eliot’s line.

And on the same existential theme, here is a poem by E. L. Mayo:

THIS WIND

This is the wind that blows
Everything
Through and through.

I would not toss a kitten
Knowingly into a wind like this
But there’s no taking

Anything living
Out of the fury
Of this wind we breathe and ride upon.

I conclude with the context of the Eliot quotation above:

Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

 

“The sky is falling, the sky is falling,” said Chicken Little

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Chicken Little’s famous lamentation has surfaced again in the form of the Mayan apocalypse scheduled for today. And this lunacy has been going on for thousands of years. (See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/owen-egerton/11-other-times-the-world-_b_2332564.html)

Well, sooner or later, one of these ne’er-do’wells is going to be right as, according to physicists, the world is going to end at some point. And, there are certainly lunatics around today who could cause this to happen more immediately, given their crazed belief in Ultimate Truth, and a willingness to destroy the world to bring this Truth about…or at least wreak havoc on those of us who do not believe as they do.

Ultimately, we are all fearful of death and that is what this hysteria is about. We are going to die and it is a scary proposition that our ego cannot brook. We cannot accept our simple mortality and thus invent crazy belief systems to cling to so that this fear can be assuaged. And even tenable belief systems are often interpreted in such a way that they too are merely an escape from reality. And then we have these crazy episodic notions of how this end will come about so abruptly.

I like the approach that Jesus offered to the subject of mortality. To paraphrase, he said, “Yes, you are going to die. So, go ahead and die so that you can live.” And he did not attempt to camouflage our mortality but emphasized the presence of an Ultimate Reality that is always with us and to which we will return upon our death. And his teachings…and the teachings of the Christian tradition…contend that this Ultimate Reality can find expression in our contemporary mortal life if we are willing to undergo death now in a spiritual sense.

T.S. Eliot in his brilliant Four Quartets noted the importance of this symbolic death in our life and added, “And the time of death is every moment.” Or, to put in in Pauline terms, “I die daily.” Each day of our life there are little moments to die in the sense of humbling ourselves, accepting the limitations of reality and our limited grasp on reality, and making room for others and for the world at large. And, yes there are heroic individuals who often face death in a more literal sense. And at some point we will all face death in a literal sense and our ability to accept it at that moment will not be unrelated to how we have accepted the process of death in our day to day life, how we have accepted the bruises that our ego has been subjected to by “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.” (Shakespeare, Hamlet)

(A FACETIOUS CONCLUSION—It is tempting to start to daily proclaim myself that “the end is nigh, the end is nigh” as I just might be right at some point! Then wouldn’t that be so gratifying? Everyone would stand back in awe, saying, “Hey, Literary Lew got it right.”)

 

The Meaning of the Cross

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New Testament imagery is rich, particularly if one is willing to explore the imagery and interpret them in personal rather than doctrinaire terms. Let’s look briefly at the image of the Cross and its evocative power.

The Cross means different things to different people. For some it is merely an historical event which they interpret in terms of time and space; and that is fine for them. I prefer to take that dimension of the image and broaden it to include various layers of meaning, layers which are actually infinite as is the case with any meaningful symbol or myth.

For example, this morning over coffee my wife was perusing my blog and came across a recent reference to the Cross. She noted that in art it represents two divergent lines intersecting. This brought to my mind a line from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets where he presented the Christian image of the Cross as a “union of opposite spheres of existence.”

Here is the context of Eliot’s observation which I think reveals a profound grasp of the meaning of the Cross:

But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint –
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.
For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
Here the impossible union
Of spheres of existence is actual,
Here the past and future
Are conquered, and reconciled,
Where action were otherwise movement
Of that which is only moved
And has in it no source of movement –
Driven by daemonic, chthonic
Powers. And right action is freedom
From past and future also.
For most of us, this is the aim
Never here to be realised;

The Crucifixion, including not merely this cross but Jesus upon it, is a powerful metaphor of transformation, of death, burial, and resurrection. It is an image of a psychic transformation in which we are integrated on a new level, where (to borrow from my beloved W. H. Auden) “where flesh and mind are delivered from mistrust.” When this happens, the incarnation has occurred. But, as Eliot noted, for most of us we don’t fully get it and are reduced to the effort, to “prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.” But that is the miracle of Grace—it comes to us when we give up the struggle and find that is is present even in our feeble, immature, ego-ridden spiritual fumblings.  It comes to us, often piece-meal, only when we cease to struggle and start to relax, not just in the “arms of Jesus” but at the same time in our own body.  (I’ll let you know when I’ve worked that out! wink, wink)

To use a different, though relevant image, from Auden, “The Center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind. There is no need to despair for I am already there.”

Now at one time in my life, just the juxtaposition of “symbol and myth” and the New Testament was anathema. There was no room allowed for interpretation, for hermeneutics. The consequence of this rigidity is slavish devotion to the letter of the law and we all know what Paul said “the letter of the law” does.